I’m an eclectic reader. I read most sorts and deliberately choose different levels of intensity. I used to tell my students that this is what  they should aim for too. No one can or should read, say, Walter Scott or James Joyce to the exclusion of everything else. How are you ever going to learn to read critically if you don’t read widely so that you can make comparisons? In this I differed completely from one colleague who told our students so often that they should be reading the essays of George Orwell instead of what she called “trash” that I secretly wondered if she’d ever read anything else … until she “confessed” that during school holidays she read nothing but John Grisham. Fine, but I wish she’d discussed that with the students too.

Anyway the romantic novels of Katie Fforde are what I turn to when I want a change from, say, Charlotte Bronte, Rudyard Kipling and Leo Tolstoy all of whose books I have featured here in the last month. Moreover, of course, I read plenty of books – a lot of detective fiction, biographies, young adult titles and more which don’t necessarily get into these blogs.

Fforde has been publishing her feel-good stories since 1995 and she’s admirably prolific. They’ve been coming at the average rate of one every nine or ten months for 28 years. They are undemanding but witty with lots of likeable characters: the literary equivalent of a really well made cup of tea. She’s particularly good at warm, supportive, female friendship. And Fforde’s books are full of food, gardens, pretty décor, lovely scenery, flowers and beautiful houses. Another characteristic is talented, competent  women succeeding – as chefs, gardeners, wedding arrangers and so forth – and I like that especially as they are often initially diffident people discovering their own potential.

She likes a traditional plot – and we all know there are only seven stories in the world. Fforde’s favourite is a version of rags-to-riches in which a woman is just establishing herself at something or somewhere when a rude/difficult/patronising/wealthy Mr Darcy type turns up and annoys her. Eventually he usually does something kind and unsolicited behind her back and she realises that she’s in love with him. This is so typical of Fforde that I now wait for him and smile. In her latest, One Enchanted Evening, his name is Justin – all motor cycle, leathers and aggression –  and he doesn’t believe women should work in professional kitchens but eventually …

One Enchanted Evening is not set in the present although Fforde never dates it precisely. Meg, the protagonist is helping to run a hotel in rural Dorset where black forest gateau and coronation chicken are the thing, the dessert trolley (remember those?) is an innovation, en suite bathrooms are unusual and the war seems to be only one generation back so we are, presumably in the 1960s. Although even then I can’t believe that the stage crew would have installed an actual curtain for an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 Meg has a group of friends (already familiar from other books because there is sometimes a tangential overlap) all of whom turn up to help in their different ways bringing their own joys and problems. In the hotel Meg meets Ambrosine an elderly lady who turns out to have quite a back story and they become close friends. She is beautifully done, as is Meg’s pretty, young (ish) mother, Louise and Susan, the ultra competent village woman who knows everyone and can get any sort of job done without fuss.

In short I loved it. I make absolutely no apology for enjoying light fiction along with everything else in my busy mix and I hope some of my former students are reading this, nodding and enjoying their own wide range reading.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Rice Without Rain by Minfong Ho

So the censors – sorry “sensitivity advisers” – have decreed that Roald Dahl’s Matilda can no longer read Rudyard Kipling. She has to read Jane Austen instead. Why on earth she can’t read both is beyond me but that’s not my point here. I doubt that Matilda was reading Kim or Stalky and Co anyway. I expect she was lapping up Kipling’s wonderful short stories or possibly Puck of Pook’s Hill.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in India which became the backdrop for much of his fiction. A highly successful writer, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 and eventually buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.  Decades later cakes and handbags were named after him. In 1995 a poll found that “If” was the most popular poem in England.

Of course he was a patriotic supporter of the British Empire and all it stood for.  Most people were – including, obviously, Queen Victoria,  nineteenth century prime ministers and, in the early decades of the twentieth century  millions of ordinary folk like my grandparents. Kipling was a man of his time – widely respected for his writing –  and attempts to cancel him retrospectively make no sense at all. Good art in all genres can stand proud on its own irrespective of what any picky inhabitant of the 21^st century may think about the creator.

The whole debacle sent me scuttling back to the delights of The Jungle Book (1895) and the Just So Stories (1912) The former, let’s not forget, is a book of short stories not a novel about Mowgli as Disney and many stage adaptations like to hint. The first three are about Mowgli. Thereafter we get the delights of “The White Seal”, “Toomai of the Elephants” and best of all, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.”

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a mongoose who takes charge of the bungalow garden during the Raj period. He despatches three snakes and saves the white human family. It’s a bit anthropomorphic. Animals don’t talk and cobras don’t plot revenge but it’s powerful and very exciting – especially when Rikki finally confronts Nagaina, the female cobra, in an outhouse bathroom. And along the way, as a child, I learned quite a lot about wildlife in an Indian garden. All fiction enhances general knowledge, as I frequently observe.

I would often read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” aloud to classes. It lasts just 40 minutes which is perfect for a single secondary school teaching period. Almost always I could sense attentive tension in the room as we neared the end.  On one occasion in the 1990s when I was teaching in a girls’ boarding school I read it to a Year 9 group. The next day a parallel group came in for their lesson and said: “That story you read the others yesterday – will you read it to us please?” They had actually been talking about it amongst themselves and away from the classroom! Music to a teacher’s ears. How can anyone want to “cancel” a writer who can do that?

And so to the Just So Stories. I first heard “How the First Letter Was Written” and “How The Alphabet Was Made” in primary school when an inspired student teacher read them to us. And soon found the others for myself. I’m particularly fond of “How the Leopard got his Spots” and “The Cat that Walked by Himself” but “The Elephant’s Child” is the real pearl.

Of course Kipling was a fine poet (“The Way through the Woods” and “Danny Deever” are, for example, splendid) and it shines through his prose.  “The Elephant’s Child” is almost more poetic than a poem with its oft repeated “great grey-green Limpopo river all set about with fever trees”. The crocodile has a “musky, tusky mouth”  and the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake has a “scalesome, flailsome tail”. It’s engagingly musical which is why any child you read it to will soon start chanting it with you.

Adults must have read it to me a lot when I was little because I can do an abridged amateur version of it from memory. Once, in a restaurant in central France when we’d travelled all day, our small children were very tired and the service was slow, I launched into “The Elephant’s Child” to distract them. After a few minutes I sensed that everything had gone quiet and my husband was grinning incredulously. I then realised that every single person in that busy restaurant was listening. Well, given that most of them were not English I doubt that is was my story telling ability which had caught their attention. It was the compulsive musicality of Kipling’s words which are catchy even if the language isn’t your own. How many other writers can you think of who could do that?

So please don’t let’s belittle Rudyard Kipling, Yes he’s a bit dated and quaint in places and he took colonialism for granted but my goodness, he was  a wordsmith who could tell a fine story.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: One Enchanted Evening by Katie Fforde