Book World

Stop What You're Doing and Read This!

Don't miss BBC Radio 4's current Book of the Week: Stop What You're Doing and Read This, a series of essays by leading writers on the importance, mystery and magic of reading.  You can listen again to episodes here.  

So far Michael Rosen has talked about the experience of his father reading Great Expectations aloud on holiday and how books wove themselves into his daily life to the extent that he began to think of the characters as part of his family.  

Jeanette Winterson's essay is my favourite so far - reading in bed a book about the Cairngorm mountains she talks of the mystical experience of reading - a door from one place to another, with her ususal passion and intellect.

And Tim Parks has a fascinating essay on mindful reading.  How words construct selves and how reading whilst aware of our own responses can make us know ourselves.  'Life is too short for a bad book or the right book at the wrong time' he says.  

There are two more to come in the series; I have already listened to these three twice each (they are a modest 15 minutes long).  A reminder that Radio 4 alone justifies the BBC's licence fee.

 

'Tis the year's midnight

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day

BY JOHN DONNE

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

         The sun is spent, and now his flasks

         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

                The world's whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

         For I am every dead thing,

         In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

                For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

         I, by Love's limbec, am the grave

         Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood

                Have we two wept, and so

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow

To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else; and often absences

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)

Of the first nothing the elixir grown;

         Were I a man, that I were one

         I needs must know; I should prefer,

                If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,

And love; all, all some properties invest;

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun

         At this time to the Goat is run

         To fetch new lust, and give it you,

                Enjoy your summer all;

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this

Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

 

Paris for the weekend

I'm hopping on the train to Paris for a long weekend.

Packing: Hemingway's A Movable Feast and Alan Jacobs's The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. 

It will be bliss. 

 

The Lovers by Vendela Vida

I purchased this on Kindle after reading the Guardian's double page spread on the author, not, if I am honest, because the book sounded irresistible but because she was clearly a notable contemporary writer (witness the double spread) and because the ebook was only 99p (I never said I wasn't shallow.)

Reading it was a disappointment. The genre of 'older woman taking a journey after the death of a long-term spouse' is a dreary one at best and this narrative is aimless and peppered with inconsequential encounters that never quite achieve anything for the characters or indeed interest (this) reader.  A scene early in the book where the protagonist Yvonne takes a walk to the beach, orders and doesn't eat an ice cream and then walks back to her sterile holiday rental house had me right back in my novel writing class hearing the tutor telling us that every page of a novel must be interesting: either the events or the style or the atmosphere.  Vendela must have missed that class.

Another inherent pitfall of the 'dead loved one' genre is that much of it is composed of memories of the dead loved one, so that we are either in the realm of being told or in the realm of the protagonist buttonholing passers by conveniently provided for this purpose (and no other) by the author who are then forced to stand glassy eyed until the protagonist and author have finished their Ancient Mariner moment. 

The blurb by Zoe Heller calls it a 'moving meditation on love and a page-turning adventure', a description that actually had me double checking that the correct book had been beamed to my Kindle.  Still, I have usefully reminded myself that this is a genre I don't enjoy and should avoid in future.

 

Digressive non-fiction with lots of musing on reading and writing

After devouring Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks I have re-awakened my hunger for a certain type of non-fiction.

The key elements in books of this sort for me are: intelligent clear prose, lots of digressions about reading and writing, often to do with solitude or the puzzle of writing 'true' history or biography, forays into psychology or philosophy and an author who often appears in the work or discusses its creation even if the work is not billed as memoir.

Here’s my list of all-time favourites in the un-genre.  

James Hamilton-Paterson: Playing with Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island.  I blogged about the book here, and although bits of it were not to my taste, the passages about living alone in the forest were so good that it earns its place on this list.

Alix Kates Shulman: Drinking the Rain. Frustratingly, I cannot find that I have ever blogged about this one, despite having read it twice during the lifetime of this blog.  I love the account of the author leaving her life in New York to go live alone in a cabin on a beach on an island off the Maine coast.  It is self sufficiency and nature with a dash of divorce and re-discovery of self thrown in. Her subsequent book To Love What Is is also excellent, but very different in subject matter, dealing with the enormous changes to her life when her (new) husband suffers a fall and is left brain damaged with little or no memory.

W G Sebald: The Rings of Saturn. Blogged about here, here and here.

Janet Malcolm: Reading Chekhov: a Critical Journey, In the Freud Archives and The Silent Woman. Respectively, a journey to visit some of the places Chekhov lived, a feud in the Freud society and the problems of writing biographies of Sylvia Plath while her literary estate was controlled by her former husband Ted Hughes.  I like Janet Malcolm a lot and see that she has a new book out Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial which I should track down.  The only one of her books I haven't got on with was Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice though even as I type that I feel the itch to give it another go. 

A J A Symons: The Quest for Corvo. I discovered this one, I think, through an essay by A S Byatt who contributes the foreword to this strange and delightfully unclassifiable volume.  I have the most vivid memory of reading it on a plane coming in to land at Venice, and the charm of the book and the wonder of Venice are inextricably linked.  It is one of those wonderful books in which an author describes the detective work, the coincidences, the patterns helping and thwarting him in the attempt to write the life of a strange and bizarre forgotten author.

Anne Fadiman: At Large and at Small and Ex Libris.  Two volumes of essays, the latter more literary than the first, but both delightful and delightfully written.

Diana Souhami Selkirk's Island.  Yes, we have a recurring desert island theme running through this post and here is the mother of all desert islands: the site of Selkirk's shipwreck that probably inspired Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe.  Diana Souhami is another reliably good writer of non-fiction and I have my eye on her Coconut Chaos: Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea  which I haven't read yet and which loosely concerns a trip to the island where some of the Bounty mutineers were abandoned.

I haven't yet read, but have high hopes for, Michael Holroyd's loose quasi-biographical trilogy of Basil Street Blues, Mosaic and A Book of Secrets.

I am also eagerly awaiting Rachel Cusk's divorce memoir.  I heard her read an excerpt (included in the Granta edition The F Word) and it was outstandingly good.

So, dear readers, can you add to the un-genre?  All suggestions avidly awaited.

Teach Us How to Sit Still by Tim Parks

I have just finished reading a book of my favourite unclassifiable type: strands of memoir, musings on reading and writing, seemingly meandering but actually fiercely but unobtrusively organised.  I love these books so much and find them so hard to find because they turn up in so many different book categories.  How does one search for a plotless meandering book on a topic that one is not yet interested in?  So I have to wait for them to find me.  And, thanks to the Kindle, this one did.  Tim Parks’ Teach Us How to Sit Still was advertised on a poster on the underground  and something in the blurb from Will Self made me want to read it and as soon as the tube train rattled into the air of the upper reaches of the Northern line I had it in my hands.

On the face of it this is an unlikely book for a woman to like as the first section is given over to a detailed account of the author’s struggles with ‘men’s problems' ie his prostate and the problems of peeing and not peeing.  To my surprise, it made interesting reading; possibly because I had the selfishly comfortable sensation of thinking that at least it wasn’t going to happen to me, but also because Parks is a good writer and editor: he knows just how much detail to put in, when to veer off topic for an interesting digression and when to go up close into places that made even me go ‘ouch’. 

But what elevates the interest is the author’s deeper instincts about what the illness is, or means, and his investigations into certain images and ideas that recur to him and seem linked in mysterious ways to his pain, particularly Velazquez's painting The Waterseller of Seville in which the glass of clear water with a black fig in the bottom seems to represent a solution to his problem, if only he could decipher it. He mulls over the relationship of illness to writing in a satisfyingly deft way.

Medical diagnosis seems not to explain his symptoms, the internet predictably drowns him in a babble of conflicting stories but through a chance reference to a self help book he discovers the benefit of relaxation, then shiatsu then meditation.  That then is the ostensible subject matter announced in the subtitle 'A sceptic's search for health and healing', but in these sort of books the destination is much less important than the journey, the musings, the asides and chance connections made.  He discusses the relationship of mind to body which in turn becomes the relationship of words to consciousness and the problem of how or whether it is possible to to experience life unmediated by them.

 “Everything had to be lived through language, or it wasn’t lived at all; to the point that I hadn’t really seen a painting …. Until I had thought about it, or better still written about it… Then I possessed it.” Like tourists who experience a holiday through their photos  “What mattered was not the experience itself, but the experience described.”  

Being a writer, translator and teacher he tests his experience against literary models and as he comes uncomfortably close to thinking that he will have to give up writing in order to heal himself he circles round the writing of Robert Walser, J M Coetzee and Samuel Beckett and the conundrum of not wanting to write about oneself (or at all) but being compelled to do so whilst seeking ways not to.  And his references are so apt and interesting that once again I feel myself nudged towards that day when I will get over my terror and actually read Beckett.

The book reminded me of Sebald (in a good way and without being derivative) and was the perfect companion on a long journey on an old fashioned train across a very dull part of Poland. It did however show me the limitations of making notes via the Kindle: so hard to navigate around them later, not a patch on the Moleskine.

 

Concentrate on content and let the format take care of itself

So, as predicted, I did buy a Kindle.  We had an uneasy stand off for a week or two: I downloaded cheap or free classics, a dozen trial first chapters and I somewhat regretted its greyness and ugliness.  We did not like each other, the Kindle and I.  And then I accidentally got hooked on a giant doorstopper of a book, a positive housebrick, in a week in which I was travelling a lot and carrying other things which left no room for the housebrick.  But I needed to read the housebrick.  So I choked back my inner puritan (‘But you’ve got the hardback free from the library already! Why pay £6.99 for something you already have, can’t lend to a friend or re-sell?’)  and lo! the housebrick was a feather and I read it everywhere, not noticing that there was housebrick in my hands, not noticing that I had just changed my life forever.

Next I bought the expensive Penguin e-book of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady causing the inner puritan almost fatal blood pressure issues (‘You already have the paperback version! It’s not heavy! You could get a free version of this!’) because I wanted the Penguin notes and introduction but not the slightly depressing yellowed pages of the old paperback.  Suddenly, I realised that without the distraction of paper, the attempt not to break the spine, the awkward flipping from a page on one side of the volume to the other, and with only bite size pieces of unparagraphed Jamesian prose, the reading experience was totally immersive.  It was a pure reading experience that swallowed me up as I haven’t been swallowed since reading as a child.  It is the opposite of the scattering of attention that I thought might come from too much choice.

Now the Kindle and I love each other.  We are never separated.  I have read seven novels on it in just over three weeks. I took the Kindle on holiday but hedged my bets with three actual books as back up.  I didn’t touch the books.  I downloaded the Saturday papers in less than a minute for 99p each.  I finished Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child and immediately downloaded and read The Line of Beauty.  I am reading more now than I have in years.

I am but a humble reader and have no idea if e-books will kill or save publishing.  The Financial Times has a very good article on the state of play and Sam Leith at the Guardian also has an interesting take on the issue (and which deserves a far less dull title than Is This the End for Books?) 

If my experience is typical, this is just the beginning of a new, initially painful perhaps, but ultimately exciting change of format for written creativity.  My thirteen year old twin daughters used to be voracious readers until their attention was diverted to Blackberry status updates, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube all the shallow stuff that we old folks bemoan.  I could get them to the library at holiday time only because their mobile phone contracts didn’t include foreign roaming.  This year, in my evangelism, I bought them Kindles, registered them all to my account so that we could share all the books we each downloaded and I watched them read.  And read.  And read even in preference to switching on their laptops when we got home.  They are very, very comfortable with reading on screens and, presented electronically rather than on paper, they were gripped by fiction once more.  They and their generation are the future for publishing if it wants to have one.   Concentrate on excellent content and let the format take care of itself.

 

 

Florence is heaven for notebook addicts

Home...

Though it is always a deep joy to be home, still, I can't help wishing that the two weeks in Tuscany could have been two months.  Yes, Chiantishire is a cliche for the English, but cliches are only over-worked truths and Tuscany is truly beautiful.

(Above a view towards the medieval hill village of San Gimignano).

From the sublime to the .... very different

So how does one follow the experience of being deeply moved by Henry James?  Nothing in the house seemed up to the job and I wasn't even sure that I wanted to dilute the aftermath with more James.

So, something very different was called for.  Graphic novels!  (Though in my head they are still comics and all the more fun for it).  It makes my list of recent reading look a touch schizophrenic: Henry James, Shakespeare, Caitlin Moran's laugh out loud feminist memoir How to Be a Woman (and more on that later), then The Walking Dead, Y: The Last Man, and The Unwritten.

Yes, I have many readerly personalities.  I love reading.  And sometimes it's good to look in unexpected places.  I am sure that Shakespeare read everything he could get his hands on.  He might even have been tickled by the plot possibilities of zombies; a plague that has killed all the men in the world and the troubles of a man who may not actually exist but has come out of a book.

Henry James, I suspect, would have been less tickled.

(Graphic novel recommendations gleaned from another reader of many personalities.)