Doron's Book Blog

Books Bought: 30/1/12 - 28/2/12

The most cursive of data analysis will reveal several trends behind my past month of book buying: an awful lot of books on the history of London; a variety of kids’ books; several books on psychology and popular science; and a bunch of books by authors who just happened to be at London Jewish Book Week, 2012. There were also several from Jonathan Safran Foer, and two from different authors essentially called ‘Peace,’ (Shalom and Sholem). One unseen trend included books bought in second hand shops, but you weren’t to know that.

Perhaps most importantly of all, having written them all down, I can finally admit that maybe I have a problem. 56 books, (plus possibly one or two I forgot and/or didn’t write down in my ‘Books Bought’ list), in less than a month. That’s practically two a day. If I was reading three a day, it wouldn’t be so bad, but as it is an awful lot of these are destined for The Cupboard. There are, however, three mitigating factors.

Firstly: nine of them were presents bought for other people, (six of them for my two-year-old niece, explaining the kids’ book bias…although not all of them were for her, if I’m being honest. I love those Andy Stanton’s), and two of them were presents given to me.

Secondly: a dozen of them were bought due to the presence of their authors at the Jewish Book week which I managed to somehow become a volunteer for, (‘somehow’ probably involving offering to show up for several hours every day and do whatever was told of me for no financial remuneration bar a pasta salad on the last afternoon). This therefore goes back to my inexplicable addiction to collecting signed books, and explained why I shelled out £40 I can’t really afford on an art book after a particularly fascinating talk from Israeli designer Ron Arad. It was a great week for discovering new authors, (the hilariously dark Etgar Keret, the wonderfully irreverent Shalom Auslander), meeting legends, (Claude Lanzmann, friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, lover of Simone de Beauvoir and director of the nine-hour holocaust documentary ‘Shoah’), and for getting a signed copy of the stunning ‘Everything is Illuminated’ onto the ‘Signed Books’ shelf, where it ranks amongst my favourites.

Thirdly, (you really can learn a lot about my life from my book buying habits), I got a job giving guided tours of London, requiring me to pick up as many books on the history of my capital as possible in order to read them all in time for my test tour yesterday. Well, technically I didn’t have to buy them, I could have stood in bookshops and taken notes or photos on my iPhone, or even gone to the library to rent them, but that’s another blog entry for another time. I wanted them, so I bought them, generally at a string of second-hand shops across London itself.

I had planned to make this entry about second-hand shops, but given the length of the ‘books bought’ list to follow, (which is mainly for me to look back on with interest, I can’t imagine many of you will find it particularly interesting, but I may be wrong: feel free to leave a comment letting me know), I think that, too, will be another entry for another time. In the meantime, I am off for a holiday to New York, and since I won’t be reading much but London history books, I think the next few posts will be blog entries on events I saw and was asked to report on during the Book Week. Enjoy!

‘The Third Policeman,’ Flann O’Brien

‘Monkey,’ Wu Ch’eng-En

‘Predictably Irrational,’ Dan Ariely

‘Buy-ology,’ Martin Lindstrom

‘The Optimism Bias,’ Tali Sharot

‘The Unfolding of Language,’ Guy Deutscher

‘The Drunkard’s Walk,’ Leonard Mlodinow

‘Status Anxiety,’ Alain de Botton

‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,’ Alain de Botton

‘Under the Frog,’ Tibor Fischer

‘Voyage to the End of the Room,’ Tibor Fischer

‘Unpacking My Library: Writers and their books,’ edited by Leah Price

‘Among the Russians,’ Colin Thubron

‘Straw Dogs,’ John Gray

‘The Dilbert Principle,’ Scott Adams

‘Foreskin’s Lament,’ Shalom Auslander

‘The Spirit Level,’ Richard Williamson and Kate Pickett

‘Philosophy in the Boudoir,’ Marquis de Sade

‘Tevye the Dairyman/Mott the Cantor’s Son,’ Sholem Aleichem

‘The Miracle of Castel di Sangro,’ James McGinniss

‘Olivia’ and ‘Olivia Counts,’ Ian Falconer

‘Bear vs Shark,’ Chris Bachelder

‘The Collector Collector,’ Tibor Fischer

‘Baudolino,’ Umberto Eco

‘Outliers,’ Malcolm Gladwell

‘Eating Animals,’ Jonathan Safran Foer

‘London: A Biography,’ Peter Ackroyd

‘The Tudors: A very short introduction,’ John Guy

‘An Impartial History of London,’ John O’Farrell

‘Horrible Histories - Even More Terrible Tudors,’ Terry Deary

‘Ladybird Book of Kings and Queens: Book 2’

‘Everything is Illuminated,’ Jonathan Safran Foer

‘Tree of Codes,’ Jonathan Safran Foer

‘The Believer magazine, number 87, Feb.2012’

‘London: A Short History,’ A.N.Wilson

‘Horrible Histories - Stormin’ Normans,’ Terry Deary

‘Horrible Histories - Terrible Tudors,’ Terry Deary

‘Horrible Histories -Slimy Stuarts,’ Terry Deary

‘Eloise,’ Kay Thompson

‘Mr.Gum and the Biscuit Billionaire,’ Andy Stanton

‘The Monster at the End of the Book,’ Seseame Street

‘Missing Kissinger,’ Etgar Keret

‘The Imperfectionists,’ Tom Rathmann

‘The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,’ Richard.P.Feynman

‘Inverting the Pyramid: the history of football tactics,’ Jonathan Wilson

‘Ron Arad talks to Matthew Collings,’ Phaidon

‘The Patagonian Hare,’ Claude Lanzmann

‘Pantheon,’ Sam Bourne, (aka Jonathan Freedman)

‘The Book of Kings and Queens of England’

‘Horrible Histories - the Rotten Romans,’ Terry Deary

‘Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems,’ Allen Ginsberg

‘The Gunpowder Plot,’ Alan Haynes

‘Pudd’nhead Wilson/The Extraordinary Twins,’ Mark Twain

‘Khayelitsha: umlungu in a township,’ Steven Otter

‘Discoveries: the selected Sandman covers,’ Dave McKean

‘Trout Fishing in America,’ Richard Brautigan

I have a confession to make:

I couldn’t stand ‘On the Road.’

Jack Kerouak going from the east coast to the west and back again whilst not doing much and not describing it in a particularly interesting way put me off the entire Beat Generation. He also made me fear that I wasn’t a real Fan of Literature, as I thought you had to love Kerouak to fulfill that criteria.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to be steered back towards it by my recent literature guru, Tris, who kindly lent me one of his two copies of this 1960’s work to flit lightly through in the evenings I spent couch-surfing his corridor recently.

The language is plastic, (‘Trout Fishing in America’ is used as everything from a book title, to a name, to a building, to who knows quite what), and the ideas flow seamlessly from the mundanely descriptive to the suddenly, beautifully surreal. Often the final line of a prosaic, descriptive short chapter will send you jarringly into the universe of the poetic and timeless, something I don’t think Jack managed to do to me once in his entire cross-country ramble. And if you don’t like fishing, don’t worry: it is merely the backdrop to

The drunken ramblings, (of drunks at times, simply of the narrative at others), often comes within touching distance of making sense, sometimes even seeming logical on the surface: the entire novella is a kind of written chindogu, (the Japanese art of useless inventions). It will come as no surprise to any fans of cult English comedy show ‘The MIghty Boosh’ that bizarro comedian Noel Fielding quoted Brautigan as a favourite author and inspiration for his new comedy show.

So what’s it all about? I can’t begin to pretend to have any idea, as I suspect is true of most beat literature without taking several courses on counter-cultural literature at a major arts university, so I’ll let the author present himself in some of my favourite excerpts.

Brautigan on making alcohol-induced plans to start a flea circus:

“Then they decided that the fleas that lived on Siamese cats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas that lived on just ordinary alley cats. It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas…”

Brautigan on fishing between two graveyards:

“Only the poverty of the dead bothered me…”

Brautigan on a bookstore owner:

The owner of the bookstore came up to me and put his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘Would you like to get laid?’ His voice was very kind.

‘No,’ I said.

‘You’re wrong,’ he said..”

Brautigan on subsequently reaching orgasm with the female stranger stopped outside the bookstore by the bookstore owner:

“It was like the eternal 59th second when it becomes a minute and then looks kind of sheepish..”

(the single best post-coital simile I have ever heard).

Brautigan on camping:

“The sheep lulled themselves into senseless sleep, one following the other like the banners of a lost army…”

(‘Why senseless sleep? What is senseful sleep to sheep? Or even to humans?)

Brautigan on seasonal work:

“There were always half-a-dozen bums, but sometimes they had different faces…”

Brautigan on a flat white rock which reminds him of a white cat he had seen in his childhood:

“The cat had fallen or been thrown off a high wooden sidewalk…The fall had not appreciably helped the thickness of the cat…”

Brautigan on a Commie-hating surgeon’s search for a new home:

“We were leaving in the afternoon for Lake Josephus located at the edge of the Idaho Wilderness, and he was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind…”

Brautigan on suburban housewives:

“One spring day she had me ascend to the attic and clean up some boxes of stuff and throw out some stuff and put some stuff back into its imaginary proper place…”

(That ‘imaginary’ being an example of the single word Brautigan can throw into the mundane to make it magical)

Brautigan on nature: the entire late chapter on buying a ‘used trout stream.’

“We’re selling it by the foot length. You can buy as little or as much as you want or you can buy all we’ve got left…We’re selling the waterfalls separately, of course…The insects we’re giving away free…”

And finally, Brautigan on where we end up:

“It took me all my life to get here…”

Beautifully put, and true of each and every one of us, every second of our lives.

“The Marquise of O-,” Heinrich von Kleist

The day before I flew to Israel on a month’s holiday, I had a terrible dilemma: had I packed too many books, (not a common concern for me, but my bags were already sagging a little, and Easyjet are not the over-packer’s friend), or not enough, (an ever-present fear). There appeared before me in a charity shop a slim tome which seemed to answer my concerns: only 50p, under 100 pages and weighing practically nothing, but ringing some sort of bell as being an erotic masterpiece.

It was only when I was two-thirds of the way through these three short stories, with not even a nipple in sight, that I realised I was reading the opposite of an erotic novel: an early 19th-century tale of upper class society that doesn’t even dare use the word ‘sex.’ (I had, of course, somehow confused ‘The Marquise of O-’ with ‘The Story of O,’ far less wholesome fare). However, within the confines of 19th century mores, the main story is amusingly risque: as the introduction puts it, it is “…a love story that has at its heart a rape.”

The novella begins with the announcement that the (supposedly real) Marquise of O-:

“…a lady of excellent reputation and mother of several well-bred children, had the following announcement published in the newspapers: that she had, without knowing the cause, come to find herself in an interesting condition…”

and wishes the father to make himself known. I found this a hilarious and cheeky opening, from the implicit upper-class criticism of the Marquise having an unspecified ‘several’ children, to the Virgin’esque euphemism, and I read on viewing the entire, bizarre story with an ironic eye. (Can eyes be ironic? I’m going to say yes, until proven otherwise). People are constantly fainting, banishing people, and swinging from noble sentiments to blind fury in response to the mysterious (and never explained) pregnancy. Not what I was expecting, but a chance to read something I would otherwise never have even picked up, probably, and an enjoyable hour’s read.

The two short stories which accompany it in this Hesperus Press edition, (a press dedicated to bringing “…unjustly neglected or simply little-known authors” to a wider readership, all in editions of around 100 pages), are far darker and reveal an equally Voltairian view of society, far from the best of all possible worlds.

The first, ‘The Earthquake in Chile,’ (reminiscent of the earlier Lisbon earthquake which, ironically, led to a lot of Voltaire’s pessimistic leanings), is an initially sweet, simple tale of two lovers, separated by imprisonment and under the death penalty for continuing an affair in a convent. They are freed from captivity and fortuitously united thanks to the chaos wrought by Nature, but in a tense finale, after what seemed an idyllic new pastoral world being formed, the pair are unmasked by worshipers on Church grounds and clubbed to death for their sins, (along with their protector’s sister-in-law in a case of mistaken identity, and his infant son, mistaken for their bastard offspring, “…whirled…in the air…and dashed…against a pillar of the church).

As you can imagine, a group of Christians murdering all and sundry at a mass to celebrate survival from an earthquake seems to reflect a certain level of religious skepticism on von Kleist’s part, a theme presented subtly earlier in the tale when he says of the proposed capital punishment that:

“…the the pious daughters of the city invited their girlfriends to witness this spectacle that was about to be offered to divine vengeance,”

a blood-thirsty condemnation which could just as easily be applied to more recent periods in history, and possibly even modern-day America, as 19th century Prussia.

To finish off this increasingly morbid compilation, Kleist presents us with ‘The Foundling,’ a disease-ridden tale of an altruistic man who adopts a contagious beggar boy through pity. Taken home with him, the boy proceeds to infect the man’s son, who dies, and eventually inherits his fortune and business before deceptively bedding his wife in a life driven by lust, deception and revenge. A far from fairy-tale ending culminates with the perfidious law-courts awarding the man’s fortune to the mischievous magpie, a day after his wife had died from the shame of her seduction, and so naturally he visited his ward and “…smashed his brains against the wall.” But only after the “double blow” of losing his empire, not the day before after losing his beloved second wife, it must be noted.

Social commentary, even when 200 years old, can be beautifully biting.

‘What Good Are the Arts?’ John Carey

Sometimes I read books for fun; sometimes I read books because friends tell me to; sometimes I read books to learn about things I don’t know; sometimes I read books so I don’t forget how to read books; and sometimes I just read books because I want to feel clever.

Reading an Oxford emeritus Professor of English Literature discuss the status of art? Three guesses which category that falls under, and the first two don’t count.

What good are the arts? is a question I have been (rhetorically) asking myself for years, feeling that the answer had something to do with man (and woman and child, for that matter), not being able to live by bread alone, that all we really need to survive is some food, water and shelter, but that ‘art’ in all its forms is required to nudge us over the edge from ‘surviving’ to ‘living.’ I was hoping to get some answers from an author and critic I didn’t really know, but who I had a sneaking suspicion was very, very clever. (I had, in fact, thought that he might be the Archbishop of somewhere, for some unknown reason).

I was disappointed.

It is, to be fair, a broad remit, asking one man to explain and justify all of art in a 270-page paperback, but I was expecting something a little deeper and more scholarly. Instead, Carey presents a very personal view in two parts: the first, promoting the view that art is whatever anyone thinks is art; the second, less a case of “What good are the arts?” as “How good are the arts!” Or more exactly “How good is literature!”

Part One:

In the first half of the book, Carey spends five chapters essentially refuting the common belief that some art is better than or higher than other art, some people smarter than others, some things more valuable than others, with reference to everything from Damien Hirst’s shark to Duchamp’s urinals. Lots of psychologists, philosophers and theories are presented to explain why we enjoy certain things, and interesting thought experiments abound.

Since opinions change from place to place and from time to time, Carey concludes, relativism is the only way to view art: a TV reality show has as much importance to its fans as The Nutcracker Suite does to its aficionados, and Charles Darwin, we are told, later in life found Shakespeare to be “…so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.” If nobody can agree on what good art is, or even simply what art is in itself, then everything can be art.

The chapter on whether art makes us better is interesting for its look at what it means to be better, and raises a fundamental art vs. bread question when Carey questions the logic of expensive art galleries and institutions in a world where so many people die from lack of food or clean water. However, he soon counters that argument with the lengthy section on the benefits of art in society, (especially prisons and schools), since:

“…a number of factors in modern life generate feelings of powerlessness, so that people resort to violence as a way of asserting their signifcance.”

Violence, drug addiction, depression and other mental disorders are all by-products of modern life which can, it seems, be mediated by the self-validating rewards of art.

Part Two:

The second part of the book consists of Carey bizarrely promoting literature as the bestest of all arts: a contradictory stance not as he had just spent most of his book explaining why the judgement of all art is purely personal, (he clearly opens Part Two by explaining that everything that follows is merely his opinion, an attempt to talk people into his own love of lit), but because of a lack of internal logic. Art, we are told, is better the more “indistinct” it is, allowing the reader to employ their imagination and fully engage with the work at hand, (the epitome for Carey seeming to be the nonsense poetry of Lear and Lewis Carroll, and the simile and metaphor of Shakespeare). However, conceptual art is subsequently dismissed as being too abstract, and music as not being descriptive enough.

But, when taken just as a well-read man enjoying sharing his favourite authors and passages, Carey presents a pleasant meander through the written ages, and I got to read some beautiful poetry. (I need to read more poetry. I like poetry. I want to like poetry. I read Stephen Fry’s wonderful book on how to enjoy it last year, regularly buy books of and on poetry, yet never seem to choose them over the literature and non-fiction in The Cupboard). Here Carey introduced me to W.H.Auden’s beautiful, short, ‘indistinct’ poem ‘Lullaby’:

“Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

Time and fever burns away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral:

But in my arms til break of day

Let the living creature lie,

Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful.”

.

Carey has a cute theory that literature is better than other arts as it is the only one you can truly internalise:

“Of course, we can hum tunes, or play them over inside our heads, but it is not the same as going to a performance…But learn a poem by heart, and you have it for ever…It is yours…The equivalent would be lugging The Kiss home from the Musée Rodin, or strolling out of the Frick with Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at her Music...

Once its words are lodged in your mind, they are indistinguishable from the way you think…”

He also has a theory that a consistent, unifying theme of English literature is an “…antagonism to pride, grandeur, self-esteem and celebrity,” which is either disproved by a quick glance at the celebrity-stacked bookshelves of any local W.H.Smith’s, or a valid way of classifying this rash of celebrity literature outside the realms of ‘real’ literature, (something which, despite Part 1’s claims for universality of art, I believe most of us innately feel to be a valid distinction).

I finish this entry with a beautiful turn of phrase Carey uses when warning readers at the start of Part Two that these are merely his views, and not a universal truth of art, (since: “We cannot talk of truth and falsehood except where proof is available, and where proof is available persuasion is not needed.”):

“Like all criticism of art or literature, my judgements are camouflaged autobiography, arising from a lifetime’s encounters with words and people that are mostly far too complicated for me to unravel.”

‘…a lifetime’s encounter with words and people…’ If that’s not a perfect epigram for my blog, or even for my life, then I don’t know what is.

“You’re a Bad Man, Mr.Gum,” Andy Stanton

A friend of mine in Japan, shortly after having her first baby and shortly before I decided to rejoin the real world, asked me one of the sweetest questions I have ever been asked:

“How can I get my baby to read like you do?”

I didn’t know the answer, and still don’t, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of it had to do with my parents encouraging me to catch the book bug early in life. Kids’ books played a massive role in my life growing up, from being enrolled in school book clubs to being allowed to read at the dinner table, (where each member of my family was ensconced behind their own personalised reading material, be it newspaper, magazine, sci-fi novel or comic).

It is only in recent years that I have gravitated back towards children’s literature, and I’m still not sure why. At times, I tell myself it is research in case I ever decide to try my hand at writing a kids’ book myself; at times it is because the line between ‘children’s’ literature and ‘adult’ literature, (it is a literature law that these two terms must be employed between quotation marks, even when using them in speech, to indicate that you’d be foolish to try to categorically categorise them), is blurred to a crisp; but mainly it is probably because I am still just a big kid.

At last year’s Hay-on-Wye Literature Festival I was therefore just as excited at meeting some of my favourite authors for the youth audience, (wow, this gets convoluted: can we just agree that we all know ‘kid’s’ literature isn’t just for kids, and use the term? Thanks), as I was to rub shoulders with some of the more distinguished guests. It was also a chance to find new authors, and after an hour watching Andy Stanton entertain a room-full of mini people and their equally amused parents and guardians, I had found one I wasn’t in a hurry to let go of.

Apple, in an attempt to promote the use of iBooks on their magical machines, had been distributing free copies of five eBooks to Hay attendees, and it was therefore through a screen rather than a page that I first discovered Stanton’s phenomenally successful Mr.Gum series with the hilarious ‘Mr.Gum and the Goblins.’ The raggedy, playful illustrations, by David Tazzyman, transported me in a madeleine-like flash to my Dahl-reading days and the scribblings of the legendary Quentin Blake, and the story…well, the story…

I have a second, signed book from the 8-strong series, ‘Mr.Gum and the Dancing Bear,’ (it didn’t seem right to ask Andy to sign my iPad screen…), but with a 2-year-old niece visiting in a few months, I couldn’t resist picking up the first in the series when I saw it, sitting teasingly on a shelf in a charity shop on one of my strolls this week, (especially at 99p, approximately $1.50 for our transexualatlantic readers, or a third of what I had minutes earlier spent on a caramel frappuccino). She can chew and dribble on these pages all she wants: I know I have.

So, what’s it all about? Silliness, mainly, with a subtle undercurrent of the subversion of literary traditions and genres, to keep parents happy. Don Quixote for the under-10’s, in other words. Like a child with a room full of bunny rabbits, Stanton clearly loves words, and loves playing with them: the stories contain characters with caricatured Dickensian names like ‘Mrs.Lovely’ and ‘Nathaniel Surname,’ and he just lets his imagination and his linguistic sense of fun run wild whilst charting the bizarre antics of the villainous, bearded Mr.Gum, his cohort in nastiness Billy William the Third, (butcher), and their run-ins with the various nice folk of Lamonic Bibber.

At times he really makes you stop and think about all of the clichés we use and read every day, twisting language and giving it a nasty Chinese burn until it admits that it didn’t really mean what it had just said:

“He did a sort of bouncing run and in no time at all he was over it. Well, obviously not in no time at all, of course it took some time. But not much…”

But most of the time, he is just mixing registers and confounding expectations in a most Milliganly way, causing me to laugh out loud far more often than I would have expected in a widely spaced, large-print, 160 page book, (not including the Secret Bonus Story which definitely isn’t at the end of the book).

“At last Jake came to the spiky fence that surrounded Mr.Gum’s dirty house. It might have kept other dogs out. But Jake was one of those magnificent beasts who know not fear nor hesitation nor how to scramble eggs properly…”

“Mr.Gum hardly noticed the walk home, mainly because he took a taxi…”

There is even time for a thinly-veiled dig at Dan Brownesque cliff-hanger literature when Chapter 6 ends thuswardly:

“…this chapter ends with me not telling you that Polly was sitting outside the cottage of Friday O’Leary…And with me not telling you that he is one of the heroes of this tale. Ha ha, I am keeping that information to myself and you will have to wait till chapter 7 to find it out. That is what is known as suspense.”

Laughs, giggles, chuckles, guffaws, some fun with literature, fiction and fonts, and all within the space of less than an hour (or so, how am I supposed to know how fast you read?). Dan Brown vs Andy Stanton? Don’t make me laugh. Or rather: do…

Dear Readers,

This blog began in an (I’ll admit it) fairly random and rambling fashion. Although still plagued with an overabundance of parentheses, colons (full and semi) and asides, things have calmed down somewhat into a regular, one-book-review-per-entry format.

But I like to keep you on your toes.

I originally pictured this blog being a forum for me to write anything and everything I could think of about books, and so from time to time I will throw in the occasional unfocused entry. One regular post, inspired by the man and the column which inspired this entire blog palaver, will be: Books Bought.

Nick Hornby’s monthly column in The Believer magazine begins each month with a list of all of the books he has bought that month, ranging from one, (usually a Dickens), to a fairly long and often eclectic list. But when I say ‘fairly long’ I am, as someone who can go out for a fifteen minute walk and somehow come back with half a dozen paperbacks, using the term more or less ironically. Sometimes even I don’t know where they’ve come from.

As such, after I returned from a month-long holiday I decided to keep a ‘Books Bought’ diary, and present it here, with annotated explanations, for your delectation. However, given my purchasing proclivities, I decided to limit it to a week, rather than the embarrassingly long entry which a month’s worth would provide.

So here, for the week beginning January 18th, 2012, is my first week of

BOOKS BOUGHT:

‘Don’t Read This Book if You’re Stupid,’ Tibor Fischer

‘Madame Bovary,’ Gustave Flaubert

‘Solar,’ Ian McEwan

McSweeney’s 39

The Believer magazine, Issue 68, January 2012

‘Scouting for Boys,’ Robert Baden Powell

‘The Warden,’ Anthony Trollope

‘Atonement,’ Ian McEwan

‘The Ask and the Answer,’ Patrick Ness

‘Alice In Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass,’ Lewis Carroll

‘The Dark Tourist,’ Dom Joly

‘You’re a Bad Man Mr.Gum,’ Andy Stanton

‘Heart of a Dog,’ Mikhail Bulgakov

‘A.A.Gill is Away,’ A.A.Gill

‘Confessions of a Conjuror,’ Derren Brown

Penguin Publishing ‘Great Ideas’ box set, (from Seneca to George Orwell)

About an average shopping week for me, I think, which gives you a fair idea of why, when I get around to reading maybe three or four books a week in a good seven days, The Cupboard is growing in volume rather than losing book weight.

Any thoughts? Have you read (m)any? Looking forward to any of the reviews to come? As of today I have read only four of them, and two of them not in the past few years, (I bought the McEwan to finish off a three for the price of two offer, and the Alice books because I found them in a nice, new Vintage double edition for a pound in a charity shop, and couldn’t remember if I even owned them, two of my favourite ever books. It turns out that yes, of course I did, but still…) 

The Believer review you have hopefully already ingested and enjoyed in a previous blog post, and the Mr.Gum review is coming up next in a few days. As for the rest, half of them are already relegated to The Boxes at the back of my cupboard. I hadn’t even heard of Trollope, (the other book which made up the ridiculous buy-one-get-two-free offer which landed me the beautiful and highly racist Boy Scout handbook); Mme.Bovary is one of those classics which always seems to come off second best to more modern fare when choosing the next tome to read; and the A.A.Gill and Dom Joly books are fascinating-looking travel writing which I doubt will be read anytime soon, but which I bought because:

a) I have written a book of travel writing, and my agent friend told me that the best way to write better travel writing was to read more travel writing;

b) I love Joly’s TV comedy show, ‘Trigger Happy TV,’ and can imagine his writing being extremely entertaining, and Gill seems to be one of those extremely respected journalists about whom people write things like “He cannot write a bad sentence,” and;

c) Whilst the Joly was just a standard paperback, the Gill was a beautiful, sleek hardback copy which will go the distance in the Back Cupboard.

(I should probably explain here the three levels of book storage which make up the library which is my bedroom: Firstly, The Cupboard, full of the most pressing, soon-to-be-read books; then The Boxes, themselves divided into a Front Box, which contains the books ready to be promoted to The Cupboard when space permits, and the Back Boxes, which contain books I haven’t read and which, given what lies ahead of them in the Front Box, The Cupboard and shops the length and breadth of the world, are going to struggle merely to make it to the Front Box; and finally the Back Cupboard, wherein reside an even split of books I have read but don’t feel like releasing back into the wild, and books I may not have read but which are too beautiful (and usually large), to be merely left to rot in The Boxes. There are further subdivisions and annexes, from the Signed Book Shelf to the Downstairs Shelves, but you can’t give all of your secrets away, can you?).

As for the others:

‘The Ask and the Answer’ is the second in a trilogy I have been after since I read the first one a year ago, and finally found rather randomly for sale for 20p in my local library, (why the second volume and neither of the others I’m not sure, although it raises a whole new blog entry on why I would buy a fairly grubby copy of a book I’m probably not going to want to keep when I could just read it from free from the library! Stay tuned…);

the Bulgakov, (author of the wonderful ‘The Master and Margarita’), was purchased after seeing a rather good National Theatre play on his life last month with my parents, as part of the series of plays broadcast live to cinemas across the world;

the Derren Brown, one of my favourite illusionist, was a truly ridiculous find, as I’d just wandered into a high street discount book shop wondering if they had it, and of course they didn’t. Until I walked past a worker, unpacking an entire box of them at the front door;

and the Penguin box set of gorgeous, miniature editions of twenty of the greatest literary and philosophical minds of all time is something which will look amazing on the shelf, and which I hope to be able to polish off, one by one…although it was very unkindly pointed out to me that it is only the first 20 of 100 volumes.

So, that was a sneak peak into my book-shopping, matieral-choosing and brain-thinking habits. How do you choose yours?

‘The Believer’ magazine, Issue 68, January 2012

There is only one, minor drawback to walking the streets whilst ingesting the wonders in each monthly copy of The Believer: a fear that strangers seeing me with it will, clocking the giant title, presume that I am some sort of fundamentalist believer: in Mormonism, Scientology or whichever incident it was that Jehova was apparently a Witness too.

In a sense, I am: discovering an early copy whilst browsing in a jaw-droppingly wonderful second-hand bookstoreshop in San Francisco a few years ago, I was unable to resist shelling out the few dollars for it after reading the name of half a dozen of my favourite authors blaring out at me from the cover. An annual subscription soon followed, (including postage fees to the UK or Japan, which cost more than the magazine itself), and when I discovered that it was produced by McSweeney’s, whose quarterly short story compilation I had recently become equally addicted to, this was soon joined by their daily updated iPhone app, Small Chair; their new sports quarterly, Grantland; and pretty much anything with the McSweeney’s logo on the spine, (including an annual subscription to their Book Club, monthly books winging across the Atlantic, hot off the presses). In short, I am a fundamentalist Believer in good, new, alternative literature and journalism, and the Believer fulfills this spiritual craving in me everytime it comes, shrink-wrapped, through my letter-box.

Every month, in around 88 pages, editor Dave Eggers, (he of the geniusly titled ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, and other works of staggering genius), manages to fill my head with things I never knew I wanted to know, from the most ridiculous spectrum of subjects. One page I will be reading a fifteen page article on the origin of sofas, the next the true story of someone who decided to wander lost in the mountains for weeks, topped off with a philosophical/neuroligcal look into whether all of our decisions are pre-determined, or whether we in face have free choice. Occasionally pretentious, often roaringly funny, invariably thought-provoking, I love The Believer more than I used to love The Beano comic, Look In, Smash Hits, and 90 Minutes football magazine combined. Which, for anyone who knew me back when I wore holes in school trousers, is a lot.

To give you the general idea, I thought I would go through this month’s copy, section by section: a dissection of a literary creature, as it were, but beware: I am passionate about this magazine, (as I hope you have guessed by now), and when I am passionate, I write.

This may not be a short blog entry…

Front Cover: There were no problems with the banner title this month as the opening article, on erasure, (the literary act, not the 80’s pop group), naturally meant that the giant BELIEVER had been whited out, (a bold ploy for a magazine to eradicate its own name). It seems that The Believer’s cover structure, unaltered monthly but for a striking new colour scheme each issue, has become iconic enough to no longer need mere words.

That article comes immediately after the ever-patchy letters page, (occasionally interesting, often just a forum for readers to show that they are as clever the contributors), and is fascinating. I learned that the most recent Jonathan Safran Foer book, (his favourite novel, shorn and sheared of words and sentences to create a whole new work), which I regularly reach the brink of buying at bookshops, was far from a new phenomena.

Next: One of The Believer’s regular columns follows, Daniel Handler’s ‘What the Swedes Read’ in which he reads one work from one Nobel Literature Prize winner and reviews it, an idea so simple and sweeping that it makes me wish I’d thought of it, (even more so as I have never even heard of any of the authors so far, let alone read any of them). This month’s author, Carl Spitteler, (Switzerland; prize: 1919), revolved more around the difficulty of getting hold of any of his works in English than the actual chosen book.

Then: One of The Believer’s specialties, an out-of-the-blue article on something fascinating, obscure, and yet which left me wondering how I’d never heard of it before: the rise and fall of Polari, the sixties slang of gay British men. Full of jaw-dropping revelations, (that the commonly used English term for something not very good, ‘naff’, is in fact a Polari word for a heterosexual, an insult taken back by its targets, or that it features in places I really should have seen it before, from Morrissey album titles to entire subtitled scenes in ‘Velvet Goldmine’); fascinating history, (Polari apparently being an amalgam of argots from carnie folk, actors, criminals, Italian street performers, (hence its name, from ‘parlare’), and even “…traces of Romani, Yiddish, and Lingua Franca, the common tongue of Mediterranean ports.” Oi vey!); and linguistic debate, (is it a language? an anti-language? a creole? merely a lexicon?). It even has room for literary beauty, quoting in full a song from Polari’s immediate predecessor, the theatre and circus slang Parlyaree, the tale of a busker avoiding his landlord which is beautiful even without translation:

Nantee dinarlee: The omee of the carsey

Says due bion peroney, manjaree on the cross

We’ll all have to scarper the jetty in the morning,

Before the bonee omee of the carsey shakes his doss.

Sedaratives follows, a page-and-a-half monthly raspberry to Agony Aunt advice columns, with a guest writer invited to playfully, insultingly, sarcastically, or sometimes downright abusively reply to readers’ (invariably ironic) concerns. This month, Beth Littleford, actress and early Daily Show correspondent, earned a 6/10 for me.

Next up: a thought-provoking piece by an LA Times columnist on the rise of ‘comment culture’ due to the ability of the masses to take offence at anything and everything someone may wish to say in cyberspace, (the tone of her piece, lamenting the degradation of ‘expert (or at least informed) opinion’ was ironically highlighted by a T-shirt I saw in the street later the same day: “Democracy: the ability of two idiots to out-vote a genius…”). I often enjoy reading comments on blogs/video sites almost as much as I enjoy the pieces themselves, but it’s true that the speed with which debate and common sense so often evaporate into abuse is shocking, and makes me happy that (for now, at least…), only nice people read this blog.

A poem follows: these can be a bit hit and miss, but given the scope for pretentiousness they are generally surprisingly good and accessible, this one being very enjoyable.

Then another regular, “Musin’s and Thinkin’s,” a faux (at least, I hope it’s faux), “stroll down folksy byways”, an always amusing, nonsensical, surreal page-long ramble by an Uncle Jed Clampett Hillbilly-style character.

Next: ‘The Process,’ a newish feature “…in which an artist discusses making a particular work,” this month focusing on a gorgeous owl photo collage created solely from mesmering, expanding circles by artist Fred Tomaselli. Short and surprisingly interesting.

To follow: the regular double-page helping of cartoons, a real mixed bag of nonsense, beautiful nonsense, art, rubbish, morals, scatology and bizareness. Don’t expect punchlines: Peanuts this ain’t.

The ‘Reviews’ section comes next: for me, this is always the section I am most afraid of getting through, when reviewers with a lot to prove comment on works most people have never heard of, from limited edition poetry collections to books whose authors have been dead for decades. This month fell on the disappointing side of the divide, although a recent remit to broaden the reviews to include art installations and other non-paper-based arts saved the reviews with a report on a small North Hampshire town which had a series of pianos deposited on its Main Street one summer day for people to play, guerilla artfare carried out by British artist Luke Jerram. Lovely stuff.

A double-page spread each month is given over to some lucky graphic designers to present some usually esoteric information in an intriguingly beautiful manner. (I’d never realised before how many regular features there are in The Believer, partly due to the diversity within those features and partly due to the length and breadth of the other articles). All that said, however, this month’s was a disappointingly prosaic chart of “…Top 8 seriously anguished soul singers.”

Next: four pages of doodlings from some guy and the friends he goes skiing with every year. Seriously. I never said everything in the magazine was always good, did I?

Then: one of my least favourite sections, a “Real Life Rock Top Ten: A monthly column of everyday culture and found objects.” Deadpan, often obtuse, full of stuff which, half the time, I can’t even tell whether it’s describing a book, film, song, newspaper article, or conversation overheard in a Brooklyn Bar. This month, I could at least spot a Tony Bennett and Amy Winehouse duet, which sounds intriguing.

Anyway, it doesn’t take long to get through this double-page spread, due to an interesting typographical detail: each month, the first half of the magazine sees the pages densely laid out in three columns of print, (which can make it feel almost like a slog sometimes with less engaging articles), before at the midpoint the pages shift to an easy-reading two column format, the point at which I know I have shifted gears to a swift, slick read through to the end, and the start of the four-week wait for the next fix.

The pages in the right hand getting scarcer and scarcer, we proceed with a writer I’ve never heard of, Laird Hunt,  ‘in conversation’ with another writer I’ve never heard of, Harry Matthews, producing a not uninteresting , if sometimes pretentious back and forth which manages to both diss my beloved ‘Candide’ and praise my beloved ‘Pale Fire’ all in the space of a few lines.

And so to the home stretch, (I’m impressed you’re still with me. If you’re not still with me, I’m less impressed), and the article which first caught my eye in that San Francisco store all those years ago, and which I savour at the end of each reading like Robinson Crusoe would savour the last few bars of battery on his iPhone before it ran out: Nick Hornby’s on-again, off-again, thankfully on-right-now regular feature, the perfectly titled, (and perfectly written), ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading.’

Good enough to spawn three highly recommended compilations, Hornby’s column is deceptively simple: it starts with a list of ‘Books Bought’; then a column of ‘Books Read,’ (often having as little to do with one another as a Boeing 747 has to do with a platypus); and goes on to explain with wit, passion and an incredibly accessible style why he’d bought what he bought, and read what he’d read, how good it was, and why he didn’t have time to read more, (usually involving kids, football, or the bothersome necessity of occasionally working).

I once spent practically an entire year reading more or less only the recommendations from these pages, invariably wonderful choices. Through Nick Hornby I have discovered (or, sometimes, rediscovered), entire new authors, (from Jonathan Coe to David Almond), and fantastic single books, (from Joshua Ferris’s Office-in-a-book ‘Then We Came to the End’ to pre-movie days ‘Blind Side.’)

And then the feast is over, leaving only the bones to chew on: biographies of contributors; a teaser of next month’s contents; the end of a ‘micro-interview’ spread throughout the gaps in the magazine, (this month: Betty Cohen, “…a psychic medium and ordained Spritualist minister…”), and the postcards which are no longer required as bookmarks magazinemarks. Postcards which are, for me, the epitome of The Believer ethos: stylish, arty, and something that, for some unknown reason, you want to keep and store for a very, very long time.

‘The Thought Gang,’ Tibor Fischer

Well, it always looked likely to happen. Day 23 of a 31 day trip and I’m already on the last of the nine books I brought with me, (even including a bonus one so small subsequently only lasted a couple of hours). Oh well, more time to get these reviews written, and maybe even a few bonus posts on the many and varied joys (And tribulations), of reading. But for now…

I have gotten into a pattern recently of finishing a non-fiction book and treating myself to a nice bit of fiction. (In case that makes me sound anti-fact in any way, let me quickly point out that I then polish off a fiction book in order to treat myself to a bit of non-fiction. I guess I’m kind of lucky that way. Optimistic, some might say). 

Whilst browsing through a dire and largely water-stained selection of second-hand books in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, over the Summer, my eye had caught on the name Tibor Fischer. It took me a few minutes of flicking through the paperback to remember that I’d been to a talk by him at the Hay Festival and that he had been shortlisted for the Booker prize once and had won all sorts of Best Young Novelist awards. On impulse, despite The Cupboard back home creaking with unread tomes, I bought ‘The Thought Gang,’ his second of several dysfunctional novels.

I turned out to be strolling the streets and stalking the cafes of Tel Aviv with a 300-page exercise in style reminiscent of Queneau or Perec, fitting considering most of the action takes place in France. Having recently read an excellent book on codes, I knew that something was up when Fischer had used words beginning with ‘z’ a dozen times in the first few pages alone, or approximately 11.5 times more than was statistically likely. By the end of the story, (of an ageing, alcoholic philandering philosophy professor with an allergy to work who fleas a post-blackout situation of police-involving proportions and subsequently teams up with a hapless, limb-limited failed robber to form a more successful and surreal bank-robbing team operating across the waters in France), I still had no idea why this ‘z’ obsession, and I didn’t care. I just loved the book.

What was there for me not to love? This nonsensical adventure contained all of the things I appreciate in a good read: non-secretarial -sequiturial linguistic acrobatics, reminiscent of one of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut; philosophy for beginners, (and advanceders); plots that arrive unexplained, from nowhere, before disappearing again with equal disdain for standard story-telling tradition; larger-than-life protagonists, more stereotypes than characters; tongue-in-cheek self-referential post-modernism; even a football match, for crying out loud. Danes, a seance gone awry, verbs, scathing wit, Greek, and a double-bracketed sentence at one point. Perfection.

Among other things, ‘The Thought Gang’ provided me with a constant flow of turns of phrase, (turn of phrases? turns of phrases? cute lines?!), and twisted ideas which would have warranted a place in my old quote book, and will instead be dutifully archived here:.

“Suddenly I smelt broken nose…”.

“I didn’t want her to find out that, like most men, I’m a life support system for a phallus…”.

“…your closest friends are the ones it takes you longest to discover you don’t like…”.

“…(a forehead, as someone once remarked, that has conquered its way to my neck)…”

“Sitting down, what was most striking was the booklessness of his table and no volumes were visible or perceptibleabout his person or down by his side. He would carry three volumes at a time, over a thousand pages on his person; the book in his hand had been so customary it had seemed like an evolutionary innovation. I remembered him saying that one of his greatest fears was a free consciousness and no text to plunge it into…”

Reefer Madness: and other tales from the American underground’, Eric Schlosser

‘Checkmate’, Malorie Blackman

When I have to fly somewhere, I like to take a single book with me which I know will last me more or less exactly the duration of the journey to my first destination: the walk to the train station, the train ride to whichever London or surrounding airport had the cheapest online fare, the two hours before check-in, the length of the flight, (minus time for a good movie or, on the occasions I’m unlucky enough to be on on one of those thankfully rarer and rarer planes without a decent, setback mounted entertainment systems, an episode or two of a good show on my iPad…this flight, West Wing, season 3, in case you were wondering), and the train/bus/taxi/tuktuk ride to wherever i am going. It gives me a sense of accomplishment, driving somewhere knowing I’ve finished an entire book, (possibly at the expense of some scenery and interaction with locals, sadly), and a feeling of pride at getting the calculations right, not leaving myself with nothing to read for an hour or with too much of a book to polish off. Starting a new page in a new place, literally.

It was therefore a stroke of luck from the Book Gods that, the week before departing for my four week stay in israel, I stumbled upon the last in a trilogy of ‘Young Adult’ books I’d been reading this year whose 500 hard-backed pages I estimated at being perfect for the purpose, (and being in hardback, possibly able to garner me a few extra shekels in exchange at a Tel Aviv book stand).

I had been a fan of young adult books back when I was, brace yourselves, a Young Adult, (a time when i don’t think that was even a recognised literary label), but it seems recently the boundaries have blurred thanks largely to the crossover power of Harry and co. I read and enjoyed the sex-free secondary-school serialized septet as much as the next overgrown teenager, (less as the series progressed, admittedly, as the focus spread from amusing, self-contained, slightly formulaic plots to overblown, overly-metaphorical, slightly rambling symbols of Growing Up), and the explosion of popularity and promotion in this section of the literary market had pointed me to other similar, dare I say better examples of the genre, including: Philip Pullman’s stunning His Dark Materials trilogy, (criminally misrepresented by the highly average movie adaption which seems destined to remain 67% unfinished), Philip Ness’s Chaos Walking tales, (yet to be finished, and therefore soon to be reviewed), and the Northern grit and beauty of David Almond, especially the gorgeous Skellig, (pointed my way, as so many printed gems have been over the years, by Nick Hornby in his monthly Believer magazine article on what he is (and, ipso fact, by definition, you and i should be) reading).

I began the Noughts and Crosses trilogy after a recommendation from the ever reliable A.Friend, and the abundance of their availability in charity shops across the land made them easily accessible. The first was enjoyable, the second darker, and the third more of the same. The concept was simple but intriguing: a world where blacks are a ruling minority, looking down on and oppressing the lighter-skinned, ‘crosses’ and ‘noughts’ respectively. Not so subtle, but for young readers a chance to consider the arbitrary nature of racism and segregation.

This final installment stretches a little too far plot-wise, with some gaping plot holes, (a 13 year-old who can’t keep a secret for thirty seconds on one page being expected to keep the biggest one of her life for five years the next page?), with a hurried ending, but it continues to be as theme-packed as its two previous incarnations: the reader is asked to consider not just a world filled with racism and segregation, but also the limits of freedom-fighting and its boundary with terrorism, cancer, alcoholism, emotional manipulation and the role of education, the latter a reoccurring theme through different protagonists throughout the series.

The continued technique of chapters alternating between the viewpoints of two different, usually antithetical characters allows the wonderfully named Blackman to play with language when reporting through the eyes of her youngest characters, (“Nana Jasmine called it her drawing room, which made it sound like it should’ve been more fun than it was…”), but I found myself wondering if i was out of touch with The Kids of today or she was: do 13 year-olds really go out to drink coffees to chat, or have dinner dates? I also cringed at every chance taken to include poetry or the creation of emotionally raw song lyrics, (far too often for my liking), but then again, I’m not a teenage girl, (some of you reading may be shocked to hear).

One extract appealed to me in particular, and earned itself a tiny post-it note, calling me back to it when I began writing this blog entry:

   ”A recent friend of mine I met in hospital buys paperbacks and tears out each page as he finishes reading it, so that when he next opens the book it’ll always be on the right page. Seems to me my life is a lot like that…”

Not just a beautiful metaphor for a life lived, (“…now my book has so few pages ahead and a yawning gap behind…”), but a shocking idea to be included within printed pages, almost an incitement to literary euthanasia, shocking to someone like me who reveres books so much I can’t even write in text books in pen, who uses book-covers to keep his paperback pages pristine, who would rather fold pocket aces than fold the corners of a page.

Stay tuned for what else I read when I wasn’t rating each and every hummus outlet in Tel Aviv, finding out just how much energy pre-teen cousins can have at any time of the night or day, or marveling at how little it takes for an Israeli driver to lean on their horn…

We live in the digital age, a time of iPods and iPads, Kindles and Nooks and Kobos, bits and bites instead of paper and bindings, and being (just about) a child of the cyber-generation, I embrace the technology.

I collect Apple products like they’re going out of fashion. (They’re not). I download reading app’s and magazine app’s and newspaper app’s as if I’m going to have time to read them all. (I’m not. See previous post). I am not one of those who think the digital revolution will destroy the book industry. Many people will always love, some say fetishise, the feeling of paper between their fingers, the smell of newly printed books the iPad can’t (yet) provide, the thrill of turning the pages and ‘Eye-Ore‘ing the corners (as the Norwegians say) that digital programs attempt to reproduce because they have become so integral to our sense of just what it is to read a book. I read books on Kindle’s Whisper Sync program, download magazines to my Zinio app, read the freebies I can get on iBooks but, deep down, I am one of those paper-fetishisers.

Why?

1. Browsing an online bookstore will never, ever beat browsing a real one. From the grumpy clerks, to the haphazard layout, to the thrill of finding something you have been searching for in every bookshop across a continent, to finding things you never knew you were after, bookshop hunting is one of my favourite hobbies. There is something far too easy about typing the book you want into a search engine, (or, more likely, Amazon), and finding the book you want within seconds, and usually for next to nothing, (how on earth do those guys who sell books for a penny on amazon make a living? Is it the $32 they charge for shipping?…) Not only for books, I must say, at the risk of sounding like a grandparent: completing a Panini sticker album used to involve having to go out, meet other kids and, sometimes, physically remove the Norwich shield shiny from their grasping, sweaty hands.

2. As far as I can tell, you can’t lend digital books to friends, or pass them on when you’ve finished with them. Admittedly, I don’t do this nearly enough in real life, but I do sometimes, and it makes me feel damn good when I do. (Then again, I have a sneaking suspicion that with some new eBook readers or sites you may be able to pass digital books on to people, but it’s just not the same, is it?)

3. You can’t find new books for a couple of quid/bucks/shekels in the eBook stores, like you can in second-hand and charity shops across the land. After intensive research of thinking of an author, (Tom Clancy for some reason, not sure why, I’ve never even read him!), and looking up his latest book on Amazon, it turns out that the Kindle version of his book is even more expensive than the hardback version! With all the paper, ink and delivery being saved on the wonders of digital books, where is the logic in that?

(Although, having said all that, I’m pretty sure you can download eBooks illegally just like music and movies…not that I do either, of course…)

4. I can (and do) walk down the street holding a paperback, or lounge on the beach with one, (at the admittedly painful risk of knowing it may get sandy or even water-lapped). I wouldn’t do either with my iPad.

5. Finally, (for now, at least, this may well be a topic I come back to), I don’t know much about my future, from where I want to live to what I want to be doing to afford the place I’m going to be living in, but I do know that I want to own a library of my favourite books. Like one of my literary heroes, Neil Gaiman’s. Or any of the places at this gorgeous site, whose title pretty much says it all: bookshelfporn! As my parents will readily attest, I’m well on my way…

All of this goes some way to explaining why, when packing for the trip I am currently on, I not only packed an iPad and iPhone with enough storage capacity to hold thousands (?) of books, but also eight or nine paperbacks, from the last in a young adult trilogy I have been working my way through to non-fiction works on the American subculture or the search for spirituality in the Middle East, (all of which shall be reviewed here soon). Why do I waste the suitcase space and the back muscles on flesh-and-bone books? Because I love books. And that’s not going to change any time soon…

On an ideal holiday, I will read at least one book a day, preferably lounging on a beach, stretched in a hammock, or sat in a hot chocolate-fueled cafe. Recently, I have been doing my best to arrange my life so as to be on holiday as much as possible, and have been reading so much that the stacks of books in my bedroom are almost certainly against a dozen or more health and safety regulations. (Why I still insist on buying books will be tackled in another entry…)

Here is the problem: I have a very strong suspicion that I could never work another day in my life, read two books a day, live to a hundred, and still not read all of the books I want to. Or even get close.

Why?

Well, I have a cupboard full of books waiting to be read, a result of my book-buying addiction and inability to go on a 30minute stroll through pretty much any town without returning with half a dozen books, mainly from charity and second-hand shops, (another topic for another blog). There are probably about 300 in there, (seriously…I may take a photo of some of the stacks and cupboards sometime if you don’t believe me), which should mean that in my theoretical world, I could finish them in less than six months.

But it’s not that easy.

Firstly, the majority of the books in my To Read piles are the result of recommendations from friends and books from authors I have read and enjoyed from over the years: many of them are from the 1990’s or earlier, leaving a whole two decades of books and authors to be discovered, bought, piled…

Secondliest, each book I read throws up a spider’s web of other books to be explored: if I enjoy an author enough, I will want to read everything they have ever written, (I think I am close with Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, Richard Dawkins, Nick Hornby, Kurt Vonnegut; slightly less successful with Vladimir Nabakov, Leo Tolstoy, Jose Saramago, Ian McEwan). Or they will name-check sources, inspirations, favourite books and authors of their own which I will want to check out, and which may in turn lead me to new paths on this ever-expanding, ever-branching book diagram.

Thirdmost, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I am a sucker for lists: as soon as I finished university, having had enough of 17th century French plays and poetry, I went out and discovered that, as if to provide me with a framework for my near future, the book shop Waterstone’s had teamed up with BBC television and radio to instigate a vote of the 100 best books of the 20th century, most of which I had either never heard of or never read. That gave me a target, which I proceeded to eat away at for the next two years, discovering such great authors as Bulgakov, D.H Lawrence and E.M.Forster, and the joys of classics from Catch 22 to The Alexandria Quartet, 2001 - A Space Odyssey to Lucky Jim. But there are lists from other shops, from other countries, other years and other criteria to be worked through, not to mention the lists, like the Man Booker Prize and the one-offs like the Pulitzer and the Nobel, which are renewed annually.

And that leads to fourtherly, and the most serious of the problems: people keep writing books. Like Sisyphus pushing that rock, like King Cnut, (have to be careful how I type that), trying to hold back the tide of literature, every year that I spend catching up on classics I haven’t read, (and the books they lead me to), people insist on writing more books, making the web even bigger and webbier.

All of this is without mentioning magazines to be read, (I used to read nothing but magazines, but have recently limited myself to highlight stories of The Economist and flipping through my virtual subscription to National Geographic), websites and blogs to browse, news articles received or discovered online, oh, and life, of course…

And then there’s the question of why I have become so obsessed with buying and keeping my favourite books, if I am fairly sure that I will rarely have the time to read any of them twice, (who can read a book twice when there are so many amazing, unread books out there?)

And finally, the ultimate conundrum: how do real people, with jobs to go to and do and take home with them, and families and kids to be bathed and fed and read to and driven to football practice, how do these people find time to read a book a week, or a month, let alone a book a day? How will I if, as I strongly suspect, I have to get a job sometime (soon?), and possibly even a family and kids?…

Luckily, reading isn’t about the destination, but the journey, and reading is and hopefully always will be one of my favourite ways of traveling…

‘For Richer, For Poorer,’ Victoria Coren

After that last, mammoth blog, (thanks to all who read it, by the way, I hope you’ve all recovered now), I have decided to try to blog every time I finish a book, or as soon as possible thereafter if I am traveling/busy/too lazy to write straight away. Thus, my blog will be much easier to browse by book/author, (as I will make the book the title after this entry), and allow me to scribble various book- and reading-related ideas inbetween reviews, rather than being so exhausted after writing about the dozen books I’ve just finished that I don’t feel like it.

In the past couple of years I have got into the habit of reading one fiction book followed by one non-fiction, in order to keep myself as well-balanced as…ummm…struggling for an analogy here…as a balance with nothing on it? Looking for something non-fictiony and light to get through in the days before I leave for a month winter-evading trip to Israel, I settled on this account of how Victoria Coren, (daughter of one of my childhood heroes, Alan Coren, who wrote a series about a junior sleuth called Arthur, which I’d forgotten about until I just looked him up), went from lonely, single Londoner to lonely, single, international poker celebrity after winning nearly $1m in a high profile tournament after years of playing for fun.

I began playing poker with friends firstly in Berlin irregularly, and then very regularly in Japan with a Tuesday night group which soon became one of the highlights of my week. There was banter,  tension, (even though we rarely played for particularly high stakes),  camaraderie, and stories, and Coren manages to recreate this atmosphere of belonging to a group (of outcasts and misfits, as she is the first to admit), as she progresses from games at home, to games at a local, to sponsorship for the novelty of seeing a female player resulting in games at international tournaments.

There are plenty of characters, and cute stories, (I loved the friend who would sing ‘Happy Birthday’ every time there was a power cut and the lights went out, and the honesty of the friend who tells her:

“Everything I have achieved has been through brains and charms alone. I haven’t achieved very much…”)

and you get an insight into the evolution of the game from shady Western origins, through shady back street dens, to crisp, internet-driven phenomenon, (and the etiquette changes which accompany these changes).

But for me, I most enjoyed the way each chapter ended with a deconstruction of the hands she was dealt, one by one, in the European Poker Tour she won in 2006: I play cards mainly for the thrill I get every time I see a new hand, and I was speeding through chapters to get to the next hand and see how it played out. In fact, I was reading those pages with my hand blocking the lines ahead to stop myself jumping ahead and seeing the cards which came, or the bets that were made. This is a habit I also have when I don’t know the score of a football match and want to read how it went on bbc, when I know I will want to cheat and read ahead, one of the drawbacks of the written word compared to movies and TV.

-Wednesday, 7/12/11

‘Post Office’, Charles Bukowski

The past week of reading has thrown up an enormous amounts of coincidences, many of which you will soon hear about, but one of the most surprising led to this choice.

I had gone to The Cupboard to decide what to read next, and to leave it out, fresh and ready for the next morning and a walk I was taking, (much like I used to lay out my school uniform the night before when I was nine years old, down to the socks un-popped and laid carefully over the bottoms of my grey school trousers). I had it down to either a collection of short stories by Donald Barthelme, (which writers I liked had kept name-checking), and the only Bukowski I own, (ditto plus my old friend Kelly who would never stop going on about him).

I settled on the Barthelme.

And then, under the ‘Further Reading/Other Options’ page at the back of the second Tim Key book, (I usually skim through these generally dull, business-only acknowledgements and ISBN/edition/legal fluff pages in the hopes of finding another ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ by Dave Eggers. If you haven’t read it, or didn’t find the DVD extras, check out the publisher’s page next time you’re in a bookshop/library/friend who owns the book’s house). Sure enough, the very first line was: “Anything by Bukowski.”

So, that settled that then.

I wandered the streets on the way to my appointment with this, his slim first novel. It was about as gritty, honest and offensive as I had been expecting, shades of Henry Miller’s tropics, like Kerouac with all of the boring traveling taken out and all of the sex, cruelty and bodily functions left in, (I can’t be the only one who found the ‘classic’ ‘On the Road’ one of the dullest books of all time? Can I?)

Hung on the frame of a man struggling to make a living, (read: enough to gamble, drink and whore), from a sadistic job as a postman, (why is it that the UK has the Royal MAIL, whilst the US has the National POST?), the fast-moving story veers from deep social criticism of cut-throat capitalism to sexist, mindless violence, (and marriage). Brutally funny at times, depressingly bleak most of the other times, I was really enjoying this beat throwback until a casual rape scene threw me and made me feel guilty for enjoying the attitude that had led there.

But the work scenes are honest and at times extremely funny, (his bluffs and small victories against superiors makes you wonder how America became a superpower in the 70s if this was even vaguely representative of the workers’ and bosses’s attitudes), and there are even moments of tenderness, although almost always undermined by a misogynistic, even misanthropic attitude which can never quite be kept down: on seeing his new-born daughter for the first time, you start to wonder if the lead character does have any feelings. The very next paragraph, he is commenting on the nurse’s figure.

Reading this did make me want to pick up one or two more, to see in which direction Bukowski’s writing went, but even more it made me want to see the movie they made of his life, ‘Factotum’ starring Matt Dillon as the’s fictional alter-ego Bukowski first created here. It also confirmed my initial and recently ever-strengthening conviction that I never want a job.

Favourite line: “I went to the bathroom and threw some water on my face, combed my hair. If I could only comb that face, I thought…”

-Thursday, 8/12/11

‘Pigeon English,’ Stephen Kellman

As mentioned briefly in my opening blog, I have a passion for lists. I make them, I read them, I consider ‘High Fidelity’ to be one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, (and one of the best cinematic adaptations to boot. That’s a great saying, ‘to boot.’ I don’t even want to know where it comes from, or what it really means. I love it unconditionally).

It will therefore come as little surprise that when people get together and make a list of the best half-dozen or so books produced in the Commonwealth, (if you don’t know what the Commonwealth is, don’t ask…well, don’t ask me at least, as I’m not 100% sure), and then choose one of them, and subsequently create a list of those winners over the past 40 years, I will probably want to read the winners on that list. Furthermore, if I happen to be (unfortunate enough to be?) in Britain in the weeks leading up to said announcement, I may well get caught up in the shortlist, too. This is what happened with this year’s Man Booker Prize, (previously less Manly, and more Bookish). When combined with the discovery of a ‘new’ bookshop, (new to me, at least: Hatchard’s appears to be the oldest bookshop in London…), which specialises in signed editions, (lists and autographs! My achilles foot!), the result was me picking up a couple of the five short-listed books for 2011, new authors both to me and to publishing, and the first one I decided to read was ‘Pigeon English,’ partly purchased due to its beautiful cover, in bright orange and red silhouette.

Inspired by a tragic and epoch-defining event in the UK in 2000 when a ten-year old Ghanian immigrant was murdered in London, the book begins as a standard, modernised reworking of many coming-of-age school-days tales, (reminding me most of ‘Black Swan Green’ by one of my favourite authors, David Mitchell). The youthful slang is easy to decode, recalling more strenuous readings of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Trainspotting’ as you get used to the novel used of the qualifier ‘even’ and the smattering of Ghanian vocabulary, and the black and white certainty of pre-teens who can preempt any argument with the simple conversation closer: “Everybody agrees.”

One interesting facet of the writing was that the book never slips into the sentimentality of ‘struggling-immigrant-in-London’ storyline which it could have done. This is due to the fact that Harri, the recently-arrived Ghanian protagonist, appears to fit in better than I would due to being a schoolboy, and all 11-year-old schoolboys seem to have the same concerns: being cool, having the right trainers, (sneakers, to all my transatlantic readers), not getting beaten up, and making anything worth doing if you’re doing it to win points, (a very similar theme being raised in a book I read two weeks ago when comedian Marcus Brigstocke admitted to getting his infant kids to do whatever he wanted merely by telling them he was timing them, and they had to beat the record time).