Category: Hanff Helene

A selection of 2024 favourites

30th December 2024 / / 0 Comments

2024 was another year when, for whatever reason, I just didn’t click with reading in general as much as I would have liked. There’s no point dwelling on it, I just hope this will turn around next year. In the meantime, I have picked out the following four highlights from the reading year:

Leonard Cohen: a Novel (2024), by Jeffrey Lewis

An aspiring songwriter named Leonard Cohen writes to his more famous namesake, and we learn of an intense relationship that ended in ambiguous circumstances. This is a novel of a life haunted by possibility: what if Leonard could step out of the celebrity’s shadow? What else could have happened in that relationship? Other realities, just out of reach. 

Weasels in the Attic (2012-4) by Hiroko Oyamada
Translated from Japanese by David Boyd (2022)

This is the shortest book I read in 2024 – a collection of three stories – but it certainly carried its weight. Each story centres on a meal which acts as the focus for broader currents at play. For example, a tale told over dinner about weasels in the house points to deeper problems in a couple’s relationship. I found these stories to open out more the further I went in. 

84, Charing Cross Road (1970) by Helene Hanff

Collected correspondence between American writer Hanff and the staff of a London bookshop. It suggests that Hanff could be spiky but also generous, and there’s an obvious warmth in her relationship with the shop. This book felt like a fascinating glimpse into an older world, with an unexpected echo of the future in a comment about buying books without leaving the typewriter. 

Mary and the Rabbit Dream (2024) by Noémi Kiss-Deáki

If I were to choose a favourite book of 2024, I think this would be it. Mary Toft was a real-life 18th century figure who (for a time) was believed to have given birth to rabbits. In the novel, this is a scheme devised by Mary’s mother-in-law that gets beyond her control. What I like most is how the prose itself embodies the forces holding the characters in place, and enables Mary eventually to find a voice. 

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So, there was 2024. You can find my highlights of previous years here:

2023, 2022. 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009.

You can also find me on social media at Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and X/Twitter. I wish you well for 2025!

#1970Club: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

17th October 2024 / / 10 Comments

Twice a year, Kaggsy and Simon host themed ‘club’ weeks dedicated to books from a particular year. Joining in has long been on my to-do list, and this week finally I’ve managed it, with the 1970 Club. 

84, Charing Cross Road was the address of a London second-hand bookshop, Marks and Company. The book of the same name is a collection of correspondence between the shop and Helene Hanff, a writer who lived in New York. The letters begin prosaically enough in 1949, with a note from Hanff accompanying an order, and a formal reply from the manager, Frank Doel. But, over the years, this blossoms into far more. 

Hanff’s voice in her letters is often spiky and forthright, and I can imagine the British bookshop staff finding it disconcerting. For example, here Hanff writes in 1950, wondering where her books are:

you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don’t belong to me, some day they’ll find out i did it and take my library card away. 

I have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will get over there and find you have died of Inertia. 

As that second sentence suggests, though, Hanff was also often generous, sending the shop parcels of food and other supplies at a time when rationing was still on in Britain. Hanff’s evident warmth gains a response in kind: Frank’s letters become less formal, and Helene also hears from other shop staff, and even Frank’s family. 

Hanff’s correspondence with Marks and Co. lasts for twenty years, until Frank Doel’s sudden death. Reading the book now feels to me like a glimpse into an older way of selling and relating to books that, for better or worse, has now gone. There was one line of Hanff’s from 1950, though, which struck me as an unexpected echo of the future:

Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books when I can buy clean, beautiful ones from you without leaving the typewriter?

I don’t know if Helene Hanff could have imagined how we’d be buying books fifty or more years in the future, but there’s a familiar impulse behind that comment all the same.

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