A springboard into the next labyrinthine burrow…

This is a place for me to hold forth on matters both serious and silly. You are invited to participate.

Daylight saving allowed an extra hour of reading in the evening, should I have needed it (which I did), for in recent weeks there has been much harvesting of quotations, scribbling of notes and affixing of sticky tabs to anything that looks remotely interesting – including the dog, much to her astonishment (well, she will keep sprawling all over my stationery when I’m reading in bed).

Reading thematically has been more of a thing than usual this year, as has reading seasonally and taking lengthy notes in various journals to help keep me on course. All greatly satisfying to this obsessive scribbler.

Reading, Doing and Thinking: An Amalgamation

“I wonder if you sometimes get that sudden, intense feeling that you are on the verge of discovering something very important, and that all it would take is a bit more effort on your part to understand something fundamental that transforms, simplifies and explains everything. It could be a really fine picture if only one made that little effort – or is the phenomenon just a result of the brain being tired and getting jammed for a while?”
– Tove’s letter to Atos Wirtanen (20.08.43)
Letters From Tove

The last but one lazy lit pick on my bedside table (after finally completing Letters from Tove) was Olivier Norek’s The Winter Warriors – part of my ongoing Reading Around Tove project – which I intended to explore over a number of weeks but was so gripped by the narrative that I gobbled it up in just a few nights.

The slow book now simmering on my nighthobstand is (yet another) agreeably fat biography – this time by Tuula Karjalainen, a Finnish art historian and art critic who was, for a period, director of the Helsinki Art Museum. Often described as the ‘definitive Tove Jansson biography’, Work and Love was first published in 2013 and subsequently translated into English the following year by David McDuff. I intend to take this one at a leisurely pace.

I’ve lately been reading brief texts – novellas, short stories, essay collections and so forth – between the frequently tubby tomes connected with my Tove Trove project, which is leading me to indulge in a wide variety of genres and authors. Some of these literary intermezzos have been more satisfying than others, but it helps at present not to commit to anything too rich or overfilling between courses.

“I am trying to decide what you need to know about Finn before we start. I don’t know if I will be able to get you to see her the way I saw her. I worry that if I cannot make you fall in love with her inexplicably, inexorably, and immediately, the way I did, then you will not be experiencing this book the way I hope you will.”
– Chloé Caldwell
Women

I generally report back on the books that I’ve most enjoyed, but given its popularity with many gay women, I thought I would include one that, for me, turned out to be pretty meh!

Passed between friends, often battered and coming apart at the seams, Chloé Caldwell’s Women was for years notoriously difficult to find. So few copies were printed that the author generally lugged them around the countryside, selling a handful here and there at literary events – which meant that, for a good few years, scarcely any were in circulation. 

It is, essentially, the story of a young woman who leaves her rural home for the city, where she meets – and promptly falls for – another woman for the first time in her life. Nineteen years her senior, this cocky, butch character is already in a long‑term relationship (not that this inhibits her in any noticeable way), and the two embark on an intense affair that turns toxic within only a few months. Love (if love it is) rapidly curdles into animosity, and it is soon over, bar the recriminations. 

Sadly, I was rather underwhelmed. As a weather‑beaten Brit of a certain age, I’m probably not its ideal reader: I was already in my late forties when it first appeared in 2014, and I suppose its New York City vernacular may have posed a cultural barrier – though this isn’t usually an issue. Reading it now, in 2026, I found the whole experience thoroughly dispiriting. The characters struck me as gratingly narcissistic and the central relationship was far from appealing (to my mind, at least). In truth, I’m relieved I didn’t encounter this book when I was young and impressionable; I might well have made haste and got me to a nunnery.

I am, of course, being a tad unfair. The book was – and remains – immensely popular with American lesbians (and no doubt others too, though it was never mentioned in my circles). It’s widely regarded as a cult classic, but I stumbled across it only because it was recently republished, after which reviews seemed to spring up everywhere. 

It reminds me in some ways of the original L Word series, which, despite being a bit silly at times, I quite enjoyed when it first aired around 2005 – partly because there was nothing else like it on television at the time, but also because it was wry and self‑knowing, qualities I felt were missing from Women. I’ve no doubt plenty of readers will disagree with this assessment, but as with most things in life, it’s a matter of taste. So, apologies if you are one of them (pun not intended), I simply couldn’t relate to it, and it wasn’t for me. 

“Love has always been the chief business of my life, the only thing I have thought—no, felt—supremely worth while, and I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by others.”
– Dorothy Strachey
Olivia
 

Far more to my taste was a 1949 novella by Strachey clanswoman Dorothy, whose married name was Bussy (1865–1960) – sister of the more famous Lytton and daughter of suffragist Jane. Olivia, her slim but spirited book, is, as Italian-American writer André Aciman says in his clarifying introduction to my 2020 Penguin Classics edition, “one of those very rare French novels that happens to have been written in English.” It would seem the French “have an easy name for this particular kind of novel—roman d’analyse [or analytical novel]—while the English don’t really have one, other than the clumsy term psychological novel.” 

Loosely based on the author’s teenage recollections of attending a private finishing school for girls, Les Ruches, near Fontainebleau in the metropolitan area of Paris (and published discreetly under the pseudonym Olivia), her nuanced but intense lesbian story – in which neither the protagonist nor her charismatic teacher, Mademoiselle Julie, is able to abandon herself to their mutual passion – is, as Aciman puts it, “as merciless as La Fayette’s novel or Jean Racine’s plays.” Their desire must be resisted – their impulses “couched and oblique,” though they are seldom lost on each other. 

Mlle Julie introduces her protégé to great literature, galleries and fine cuisine, and the young woman is spellbound, but while the tale is relatively short and simple, there are complications within – subtler and more treacherous than one might imagine: conflicted feelings, misplaced loyalties and a creeping mistrustfulness all flourish in this confining environment, leading, before too long, to tragedy. What remains, however, long after the final page, is the soft ache of a love held too tightly in silence.

“The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.”
– Anne Fadiman
‘Never Do That to a Book’
Ex Libris

I also slotted in, between Tovian tomes, an amusing little volume of bibliophilic essays by the invariably entertaining Anne Fadiman. First published in 1998, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader has been nestled between two brickbusters on my books‑about‑books shelf for a fair few years, awaiting its moment in the spotlight – and sure enough, cometh the hour, cometh the agreeably undemanding collection, filled with anecdotes about secondhand bookshops, composing sonnets, the author’s prescriptivist but unintentionally comical family, an “odd shelf” of mysterious works whose subject matter is completely unrelated to anything else in her library and the discovery of a “long‑winded twenty‑nine‑page book” by 19^th‑century British Prime Minister William Gladstone. 

My personal favourite is the piece titled ‘The Catalogical Imperative’, in which Anne admits she is prepared to read just about anything when a book isn’t available to her. At various times she has settled for a Nordstrom catalogue, the Yellow Pages, a set of Water Pik instructions and a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual. She blames this on “circumstances”, addiction withdrawal and a panicky, craving‑type feeling. To my mind, it’s perfectly reasonable behaviour – especially in those pre‑digital‑device dark ages. As a teenager, I once sat in a car for over an hour reading an Are You Sitting Comfortably? A Guide to Better Bowel Habits booklet I’d picked up for my Nan at the doctor’s surgery. 

“Not everyone likes used books. The smears, smudges, underlinings, and ossified toast scintillae left by their previous owners may strike daintier readers as a little icky, like secondhand underwear.”
– Anne Fadiman
‘Secondhand Prose’

I have been known on occasion to grumble about never winning anything – usually when parting with money for raffle tickets or buying the weekly lottery for Mrs Jotter – however, I will henceforth hush my mouth, because I won a rather lovely book in April from the official Moomin site. The prize? A copy of the new 80th‑anniversary edition of Comet in Moominland – a brand‑new translation by Sarah Death based on the definitive Swedish text, as revised by Tove Jansson in 1968 and published for the first time in English. In the package, along with the book, I found a Comet‑inspired postcard with a congratulatory message and two matching bookmarks. With hindsight, I would have held back the post in which I shared my thoughts about this title earlier in the year… but no matter. It was a delightful surprise. 

“A person can find anything if he takes the time, that is, if he can afford to look. And while he’s looking, he’s free, and he finds things he never expected.”
– Tove Jansson
(The Summer Book) 

Reliving my youth among the vinyl at Dragon Records, Belfast

Last month I took a short break in Belfast with Mrs J and friends, chiefly to meet up with my half‑sister and her wife who had travelled over from Canada to see family in Dublin before setting out to tour the island – but also because I had never before been to Northern Ireland. When I was younger, during the height of the Troubles, it simply wasn’t somewhere you went on holiday. Then time went on, as it does, and we always had somewhere else to go, so this gave us the push we needed to finally visit what is a culturally and historically rich city.

We had a lively and enlightening few days visiting the Titanic exhibition and touring the Shankill Road area in and old-fashioned black cab – both profoundly insightful experiences in their own ways (especially the latter). Since Mrs J is something of A Game of Thrones fanatic (she’s rewatched the series umpteen times), we went to the official visitor centre in Banbridge. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I found the experience utterly enthralling. So much effort went into the making of each episode, there were thousands of highly talented people involved at every stage. We were there for several hours and still didn’t get to see everything as we had a bus to catch back into the city. However, if Mrs J has her way, we’ll be returning at some point. 

Dig me a hole and make it snappy!

Finally, out of curiosity and because I’ve been rattling on for some time about the number of rabbit holes I’ve fallen into recently (could it be I need a bigger run?), I enquired of Google: “What is the deepest burrowing animal in the world?” The answer surprised me somewhat, I must say, but in case you are interested, I will divulge whodugit in order of 3 to 1.

In third place came the Australian earthworm (Digaster longmani), which, I’m informed, can dig up to 6.5 feet below ground. In second place, was the Yellow-spotted monitor (Varanus panoptes) – a monitor lizard found in northern and western regions of Australia and southern New Guinea, which digs complex tunnels about 8.5 feet below the surface to lay eggs. And in first place, the undisputed champion of subterranean excavation is the Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) – an African freshwater beastie known a) for its ferocity and b) for creating dens that can reach a depth of up to 40 feet.

So, there you have it. All things considered, I will probably stick with bunny and badger burrows for the time being – although, I’ve heard the pangolin is a rather handy digger. Do you suppose I am likely to find one on the JCB website? Hmm, maybe I’ll have the tiniest peep at the Dark Web. 🤔

Why not let me know what you’ve been doing with your days, or better still, compile your own Three Things-type post.

Categories: Three Things

Tags: #ThreeThings., Andre Aciman, Anne Fadiman, Belfast, Bibliophilic Essays, Chloé Caldwell, David McDuff, Dorothy Bussy, Dorothy Strachey, George R. R. Martin, Lesbian Fiction, LGB Fiction, LGB Literature, Moomin, Olivier Norek, Reading Around Tove, Titanic, Tove Jansson, Tove Trove, Tuula Karjalainen