LIBERTY LONDON GIRL & THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME AT CHISWICK BOOK FESTIVAL

The Books That Built Me with Liberty London Girl 13th September 2014

On Saturday 13th September at 7pm, Sasha Wilkins, founder of LibertyLondonGirl.com, and I will be at the Chiswick Book Festival for a special Books That Built Me salon to celebrate the forthcoming launch of her first book, Friends Food Family.

I first came across Sasha when I had just begun to write Mrs Trefusis Takes A Taxi and Sasha's legendary blog was the, then anonymous, account of the ex-pat life of a British magazine editor, working, living, dining and dating in New York. Liberty London Girl became a synonym for smart, single, stylish and savvy - insights into the arcane world of fashion mixed with amusing anecdotes about the New York dating scene alongside musings and meditations about food and friends. Above all, it was Sasha's warm, wise and generous personality that made her a star in the brave new blogging firmament.

A little over six years later, the online world has evolved: Sasha has left the traditional world of magazine publishing and anonymous blogging behind to build a successful dotcom business in LibertyLondonGirl.com, with a powerful social media voice and readers in 139 countries world-wide. What's more, her love of bringing people together over food and good conversation has resulted into what promises to be a best-selling cookery book: small wonder You magazine has pounced on the exclusive serialisation rights (I think this starts a week Sunday). Sasha is living proof that following one's passions is the secret to success.

In those early days, when blogging was quite new, and twitter a minority interest, Sasha and I bonded over our love of books - a mutual, raging passion for Georgette Heyer, obsessive re-reading of I Captured the Castle, and so on. Her online support for Mrs Trefusis, and her subsequent actual Real Life friendship, is something I value very highly. It's also fair to say The Books That Built Me wouldn't exist without Sasha - the idea has its seeds in a long conversation she and I had on a wet and windy day in 2012  about the way books bring women together, and how childhood favourites sustain one in adult life.

Anyway, having watched Sasha's extraordinary trajectory from fashion editor of The Wall Street Journal-AKA-anonymous-blogger to a bonefide dotcommer and author of a brilliantly useful book, I'm absolutely delighted she's going to share her thoughts about her journey with the help of the books that have inspired her and informed her along the way.

Sasha Wilkins, of LibertyLondonGirl.com, talks about the books that have built her on 13th September at the Chiswick Book Festival. Tickets are available here and include a copy of Harper's Bazaar and entry into a prize draw to win fabulous treats from Nyetimber, Ralph Lauren and Le Creuset.

Also at the Chiswick Book Festival is previous Books That Built Me guest, Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, in his hugely entertaining one-man show, 'Read Y'self Fitter'.

Friends Food Family, by Sasha Wilkins is published on 25th September by Quadrille, priced £18.99

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ANDY MILLER

Andy Miller & I at The Club at Cafe Royal and his chosen 'Books That Built Me'

The last Books That Built Me salon with Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, went so delightfully well, I'm ashamed it's taken me so long to write the experience up. I have no excuse for my tardiness, other than reading Andy's book so rekindled my own  

 passion for books, I've have had my head stuck in a succession of novels ever since, some improving, some not so much.

Andy Miller's Books That Built Me took place, as ever, at The Club at Café Royal, which has welcomed the great and the good of London's literary set since Oscar Wilde was a regular in the Grill Room. In a lovely coincidence, I discovered Wilde (reputedly) wore Hammam Bouquet, the first scent created by Penhaligon's, who support The Books That Built Me and give the lovely fragrance libraries that guests get in their goodybags. I have a deeply superstitious side, and in the spirit of making a kind of burnt offering to the ghost of Oscar Wilde, willing him give the salon his benediction from the other side, Penhaligon's very kindly gave me Elixir candles to scent the room, a decadent contemporary take on Hammam Bouquet, all exotic spices, incense and old libraries with leather bound books.

The Year of Reading Dangerously is about a man whose life has been built of, and on, books. It's all about the beautiful truth every book lover understands: books not only have the power to open up the world, but they also have a magical ability to open up one's understanding of oneself. They heal and nourish, delight and entertain. Yet as every bibliophile will also understand, the acquisition of books is an addiction - ownership of these enchanted objects leads inevitably to a large pile of unread books reproaching one from one's bedside table - as Miller writes in The Year of Reading Dangerously, 

“Books, for instance. I had a lot of those. There they all were, on the shelves and on the floor, piled up by the bed and falling out of boxes. Moby-Dick, Possession, Remembrance of Things Past, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Psychotic Reactions and Carburettor Dung, a few Pevsners, that Jim Thompson omnibus, The Child in Time, Six more Ian McEwan novels or novellas, two volumes of is short stories…. These books did furnish the room, but they also got in the way. And there were too many I was aware I had not actually read. As Schopenhauer noted a hundred and fifty years ago, ‘It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them: but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.’

These books became the focus of a need to do something. They were a reproach – wasted money, squandered time, muddled priorities. I shall make a list I thought. It will name the books I am most ashamed not to have read – difficult ones, classics, a few outstanding entries in the deceitful Miller library – and then I shall read them.”

And so he did, as you'll discover if you read his book. But for the Books That Built Me, Andy and I talked about books he had already read and loved: here are the six Books That Built Andy Miller.

1.Moominpappa at Sea

“One afternoon at the end of August, Moominpappa was walking about in his garden feeling at a loss. He had no idea what to do with himself, because it seemed everything there was to be done had already been done or was being done by somebody else” Andy says Moominpappa perfectly describes his existential angst, his innate Eyore-ishness, what one of his favourite writers, Douglas Adams, calls 'the long dark teatime of the soul'. It's "a chronicle of a mid-life crisis foretold, for readers of nine and over.” I say, Andy Miller is a lot cheerier than he believes himself to be.

2. Absolute Beginners

"Absolute Beginners gave me an exit strategy, a teenage identity I could relate and aspire to. In the process, it liberated and liberalised me – awaked in me the nervous excitement of being young, on the brink, in the same way that great pop music does." 

3. The Whitsun Weddings

I wondered if Andy had chosen The Whitsun Weddings because Larkin is another self-confessed pessimist, like Moominpappa and Andy Miller. Perhaps there's some truth in that. Andy read Larkin's Arundel Tomb - and talked about how its most famous line 'what will survive of us is love' was entirely misinterpreted by Julian Barnes in A History of The World in Ten and a Half Chapters. Bold but fair, I thought.

4. A Rebours (Against Nature)

Oh, Andy Miller, mon semblable, mon frère....how fabulous to discover someone else who's actually read this marvellous book. Against Nature is a now rather obscure late nineteenth century novel about Des Esseintes, a world-weary, filthy rich, fin-du-siecle French aristocrat who leaves town for an isolated country house where he can indulge in a kaleidoscope of extreme sensual experiences – he has a black feast in which everything is ....black, he fills his house with symbolist art, he grows a garden of poisonous plants, he spends days trying to make the perfect perfume – he has exhausting sex with a lady athlete called Miss Urania – and there’s the tortoise, of course, which he encrusts with astonishing precious jewels so it can crawl exquisitely over his carpet. It expires under the weight of its beauty, logical conclusion of an aesthete's life.


Andy says it's one of the funniest books he's ever read, I say it's one of the most tragic: the truth is somewhere in between.

5. Anna Karenina 
Andy describes Anna Karenina as the perfect union of art and entertainment. I'm ashamed to admit that I'd owned a copy of Anna Karenina for nearly thirty years without ever having read it, thinking it might be enormously hard work. It isn't. I read it whilst swotting for Andy's Books That Built Me and it's every bit as miraculous as he says it is, gripping and nourishing in equal measure.

6. Tigers are Better Looking
Jean Rhys will be known to most only for her Jane Eyre prequel, The Wide Sargasso Sea, read by Andy during his reading odyssey for TYoRD - there's something immensely satisfying about discovering an author you love and then going on to read everything else they've written too.

Andy and I talking about Against Nature - in honour of the famous tortoise passage, I'm wearing Livyora's beautiful Tartarucha earrings, smoky quartz surrounded by diamonds in the shape of a tortoise

Like Andy Miller, I seemed also to have ..."forgotten the parquet floor, the boy sitting in the back seat, or stretched out on his bed on a summer’s day, lost and found in a good book… So far the List of Betterment had offered me glimpses of something bigger and better. It was up to me to keep looking for it, to push reality aside until I relocated the magic of reading." - hosting Andy's The Books That Built Me helped me completely relocate the magic of reading: for this, and for being such a marvellous and entertaining guest, I owe him quite a debt.

Guests went home with a goodybag containing a copy of Andy Miller's The Year of Reading Dangerously, a copy of Harper's Bazaar, a Penhaligon's Scent Library and a delicious bar of Prestat chocolate. 

Andy Miller's solo show 'Read Y'self Fitter', a ten step programme to cure yourself of bad reading habits (like not reading at all) is at the Chiswick Book Festival on Saturday 13th September. Tickets on sale now.
The Books That Built Me is also coming to the Chiswick Book Festival in a special salon with Sacha Wilkins of LibertyLondonGirl.com, in advance of the launch of her gorgeous book Food Friends Family:  tickets will be on sale next week.

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME: JULY 1ST: ANDY MILLER, THE YEAR OF READING DANGEROUSLY

'High Fidelity for bookworms' The Telegraph

The next Books That Built Me Salon will be on 1st July at 18.30 with Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.  

Infinitely more than 'High Fidelity for bookworms', catchy as that Telegraph pull-quote is, The Year of Reading Dangerously is an irreverent, witty and inspiring memoir in which Andy Miller, editor, writer and former bookseller, sets out to read the books he's claimed to have read, but never has. He prescribes himself a 'List of Betterment' of thirteen books, which soon swells to fifty-two, and creates a heroically methodical approach to getting through them - fifty pages a day, one word in front of the other, a sensible discipline designed to get one to the end of books which are far from readerly - Beckett's The Unnameables, The Communist Manifesto, The Ragged Trousered Philanthopists - as well as those which have a more conventional narrative pull - Anna Karenin, Middlemarch, for example. 

What I love about The Year of Reading Dangerously is that it's a thoughtful, engaging meditation on the nourishing pleasures of really great books, yet it's no Leavisite canon. It's true that what we might call classics form the backbone of the List of Betterment, but Miller's reading is eclectic and unashamedly no-brow: he explores Tolstoy and Austen in the same breath as Judith Kerr and Douglas Adams, and, in one of the book's triumphant set-pieces, there's a deftly written and vastly entertaining comparative reading of Moby Dick and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. 

The sub-title of The Year of Reading Dangerously is 'how fifty great books saved my life': one might argue that 'life-saving' is going a little far, but it's certainly life-changing: contained in its three hundred or so pages is its own complex and powerful theory of bibliotherapy. Good books come with the promise of metamorphosis, but in A Year of Reading Dangerously, it's not only books that have the power to change one, but the action of reading itself that effects the transformation. 

Inspired by The Year of Reading Dangerously, I've begun Anna Karenin, one of the many books whose presence on my bookshelf implies, quite wrongly, that I've read it already. Three days and one hundred and fifty pages in (see, sticking to the formula works), I'm already in thrall to what Miller describes as a book with "the perfect balance of art and entertainment - no, not a balance, a union of the two". For prompting me to read this extraordinary book, and his own, I'm very much looking forward to discussing with Andy Miller the Books That Built him. 

The Books That Built Me. 1st July, 18.30 to 20.30 at The Club at Café Royal. Tickets include a pre-event cocktail reception, a signed copy of the hardback edition, a copy of Harper's Bazaar and a Penhaligon's gift. 

By way of an addendum, I must confess that I have been at various points in my life an incorrigible liar about the books that I've read - I even wrote several excellent essays at university on books with which I had a less than intimate relationship, armed only with the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and a cursory flick through the first and last hundred pages. I'm no slouch when it comes to reading, but I have managed to convince myself, and others, that I have read more widely than I have: here are a few I'll readily admit to (yes, yes I know, great works of fiction in Playmobil - I was once bored in charge of  a tiny Trefusis Minor and these tableaux were the result)....

I've read the first fifty pages of the first book of A La Récherche du Temps Perdu, yet I can talk very intensely and, I feel, convincingly, about hawthorn, madeleines, memory, the kiss not given, Odette, Baron du Charlus etc etc. Here is Proust reading a copy of his own book and eating a giant madeleine in his famous cork-lined room.

Paradise Lost. Despite Milton being the subject of one of my greatest friend's books (Milton's Angels by Professor Joad Raymond), I've read the good bit with Satan in it and that's it. Do I need to read it? Probably. Am I dogged by guilt about not having read it? Definitely.

Julius Caesar. I can quote quite a lot of it. Not sure I feel I must read, rather than watch, Shakespeare, but you know, Et tu, Brute.....

Actually, I jolly well have read Beowulf. I've read it on several occasions and in several translations - the one to read is the blissful Seamus Heaney, rich and delicious with Heaney's ear for cadence and his love of the  'word hoard'.