Tag Archives: Hamnet

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Judging Books By Their Covers

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There is much to be said for the  cover of a book.   We all know what lies within may, or may not,  bur well-written.  However,  when the two match up, cover and content, and in a good way, it is a joy not to be taken for granted. 

Here are some of my best loved books, in no particular order, that are as pretty as they are wonderful reads. In fact, sometimes I just go gather them up, together or on their own, to look upon their loveliness.  

In an English bookstore somewhere in Prague, maybe, or Krakow, I picked up “The Miniaturist” by Jessie Burton.  I needed something for the flight home, and the cover just compelled me.  I would describe it to you, but the book is long gone.  I gave it to my friend, Alice, to read.  She refuses to give it back, doesn’t even act sorry that she won’t return it. 

Talks about how it will hurt the book’s feelings and other such nonsense—although she actually believes this, I think—but trust me, the cover is beautiful and the story, set in a 1600s Amsterdam, is wonderful.  So much better than the mini-series. 

Jessie Burton has written a sequel, “The House of Fortune,” and I was so eager to get it I ordered it from London.  This cover is beautiful, too,  the end pages like elegant wallpaper and the text block and foot bands, too. I haven’t read it yet, so I keep it tucked out of sight for those times Alice visits. 

“The Essex Serpent” is another book with a beautiful, flowery and mysterious cover.  My pal, Silas, pulled it from the shelf when a bunch of us were book shopping, just to show me the cover. He said I didn’t have to buy it, he just wanted me to see it.  So, of course it came home with me and sits with my other chosen few, on a bookshelf all by themselves.  I’ve read it twice now, maybe three times, mostly to hold it in my hands.  A hardback book is as comforting as a blankie, all warm and the hefty, but not too heavy. Engaging the senses, the way it smells, the way it feels, the way the words make images in your head. 

Perhaps my favorite book is “Kristin Lavransdatter,” by Sigrid Undset.  This book is not so easy to hold, as it runs 1124 pages in the paperback edition.  But it is a trilogy, three novels in one, so I can forgive the length. The first of the books was written in 1920, and they follow the life of the title character from her adolescence into her adulthood. Set in 1300s Norway, it fascinating and yet relatable.

My friend, Charlene, recommended the book and she would never steer me wrong. I am so glad she told me about it.  Everyone I know who has read it loves it, and vicariously loves Charlene for the recommendation, too. 

Get the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition.  It is beautiful and is translated by the award-winning Tina Nunnally.  Oh, and Sigrid won the Nobel Prize in Literature for it, too.  This might be the one book I would recommend also in the Kindle edition, just because of the size of it.  But at least look at and admire the cover. 

The hardback edition, the one with the feather, is my favorite edition of “Hamnet,” by Maggie O’Farrell. It will break your heart—the cover and the book.  A fictionalized telling of Shakespeare’s family life, and his son, Hamnet is beautiful written, compelling and fascinating. It is really a story of the plague, but so much more. 

I needed a copy of “A Tale of Two Cities,” for my book group.  I settled on a copy from Penguin Classics for only one reason.  The cover is blanketed in knitting needles and yarn all done up.  Now, who could pass that up, when one of the most iconic images in literature is Madame Defarge sitting by the guillotine, knitting?  The print is minuscule, and I mean, fine print tiny, but I don’t care.  I upped the magnification on my cheaters and off I went.  

“A Tale of Two Cities” is hard on me, fine print notwithstanding.  But I like knowing it is there, on the shelf, with my other pretty books, and that any time I want I can take it down and pretend to read it. Or actually read it. We will both look good, however it goes. 

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Shakespeare’s Son

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If you are looking for a good book to read now that the kids are back in school and the garden is producing in a more manageable fashion, let me suggest to you one of my favorites of the summer, if not the year. 

“Hamnet,” by Maggie O’Farrell, is work of fiction, but linked to the most famous writer of all, William Shakespeare, although his name is never mentioned.  He is referred to as the Latin tutor, the husband, the father, and that is all. 

But we know. 

This is a sweeping book of small domestic intimacies.  We are at home with Shakespeare as a charming but distracted young man as he navigates the mine fields of a difficult and often cruel father. He meets Anne—Agnes, as she is referred to throughout the book, and it may in fact have been her name—a woman older and wise in the ways of nature, herbs, and falconry, and he is quite quickly a goner. 

But first, we meet their son, eleven-year old Hamnet, running down a flight of stairs. 

He is frantic, looking for his mother, his grandmother, anyone who can help him, for his twin sister, Judith, is sick. O’Farrell takes us through the streets and alleys of Stratford as we follow his running feet, and before we have turned the third page, we care about this child, his desperately ill sister, and before the chapter is done, we care about the family that enfolds them.  

We care because this is a fine novel of small things, the vagaries of marriage, the difficulty of in-laws, the joy and desperate love for children.  And it is a novel of the plague. 

It surprises us, even as we sense a creeping fear that things will not be well for the children in this family.  We have read the subtile of the book on the jacket cover:  “A novel of the plague.”  

But it surprises us all the same. 

O’Farrell moves around in time in a way that deepens and enriches both the story and the characters.  We are in Stratford in the late sixteenth century with Hamnet and his sister and family, and we are also given a supposing of Shakespeare and Agnes’ early meeting fifteen years earlier.  Again, much of this is imagining, but the reader senses much research went in to the writing of this book, and the author provides such a steady hand we willingly go along. 

All of this book is a delight to read, from the feel of the beautiful cover to the gorgeous use of language to the dramatic setting.  

And then there is the flea.

That flea takes us from a glassblower in Murano to the sickbed of a child in England, and it may be worth getting this book for that journey alone. The circuitous route, the happenstance of it all was fascinating and heartbreaking and something to wonder over. 

The story, of course, will have a sad end, and we know that going in.  But such tender writing, with such depth, gives us to know the writer cares about the reader as much as she has fallen in love with the characters. She writes as if she is wise and loving grandmother holding our hands while the heartbreaking truth of things unspool before us.  

Which makes this such a moving and satisfying read. 

It is a skillfully crafted book.  It is fiction, a broad imagining of events six hundred years ago, events in a family with what is now surely the most famous name in literary history.  As with all good fiction, though, it feels true and evokes in the reader emotions and memories and  curiosities to ponder long after the last leaf of the book is turned.