The Guardian's Blog
June 28, 2016
Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of Pierced by the Sun by Laura Esquivel
From the award-winning author of Like Water for Chocolate comes a new tale of murder and redemption – read an extract
By Laura Esquivel and Jordi Castells for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
She could spend long hours dedicated to this work and show no signs of fatigue. Ironing brought her peace. It was her favorite form of therapy and she turned to it daily, even after a long day of work. Lupita’s passion for ironing had been handed down to her by her mother, Doña Trini, who had washed and ironed other people’s clothes for a living her whole life. Lupita would invariably repeat the ritual learned from her sacrosanct mother, which began with the spraying of the garments. Modern-day steam irons do not require an article of clothing to be moist, but for Lupita there was no other way to iron. She considered it sacrilegious to skip this step.
That night when she got home, she immediately headed to the ironing board and began to spray the garments. Her hands trembled like a hungover alcoholic’s, which made the spraying that much easier. It was imperative that she concentrate on something other than the murder of Licenciado Arturo Larreaga—the delegado of her district, Iztapalapa—which she had witnessed just a few hours earlier.
Ironing was an act of annihilation in which wrinkles would die and give way to order
Related: Translation Tuesday: Life in the Court of Matane by Eric Dupont – extract
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Game of Thrones: how will Winds of Winter regain the suspense stolen by the show?
For those reading George RR Martin’s fantasy series, HBO’s dramatisation has been thrilling – but now it’s ahead of the books, it will be hard work to surprise us
Spoiler alert: this blog assumes you’ve seen episode ten of Game of Thrones season six . Do not read on unless you have
Another year, another season of Game of Thrones on television. If only the books arrived at such a steady pace. The first book in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones, came out 20 years ago this September. The succeeding volumes have each taken five years or so to produce, to the ire of fans. “People yell at you and say: ‘We want the next book right away.’ They’re like babies,” Stephen King said to Martin in a public interview last week. I don’t mind settling for a new instalment every five years – they’re meaty, good to reread, and frankly, too damn time-consuming to pick up every 12 months.
But I must admit I was less happy when Martin announced in January that he had missed the deadline of 31 December 2015, which would have allowed book six, The Winds of Winter, to come out before the TV show embarked on storylines not yet reached in the books. The HBO series thus became a weird mishmash of new and old news, with the vast majority of events coming from book five, A Dance With Dragons, but with some sudden leaps into the unknown, possibly from The Winds of Winter – or even book seven, A Dream of Spring. In the books, Jon is still lying stabbed on the floor in the Black Keep, Cersei hasn’t gone all Godfather on King’s Landing yet, and Arya is still training with the Faceless Men – all of which is in the distant past now for the TV characters.
Certain characters in the books now feel dispensable – and no one wants to be dispensable in a George RR Martin novel
Related: Game of Thrones fans review season six: 'Misogyny has been replaced by breakneck storytelling'
Continue reading...June 27, 2016
Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including a sprawling historical novel, wonderful Wodehouse and a tip for how to strategically leave a book in a public place for others to enjoy.
paulburns had a good reading experience, thanks to a recommendation on TLS:
Yesterday I finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. In a word, magnificent, and, as I suspected, just that little edge better than Crytptomonicon. Its a novel in three parts. The first part tells the story of the early years of the Royal Society... Part two takes us to Vienna under siege by the Turks, mercantile Amsterdam and the Court of Louis XIV. Part three considers the protagonists’ adventures up to 1688 or so concurrently, bringing them all together and tearing them apart, with tales of science, espionage and derring-do.
Finished re-reading Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse - the usual amiable nincompoops, plucky heroines, stern aunts, false identities, jewellery theft and pigs are all present, correct and accounted for, but it was a forceful reminder that no one can turn those ingredients into an art form quite the way Wodehouse does.
To me, a good Wodehouse has always been somewhere between comfort food and a sublimely performed ballet (to thoroughly mix my metaphors) - you may know what you’re getting and what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t make it any less wonderful.
Some previous guest had left behind a David Lodge book: A Man of Parts. A gripping read about the life of H.G. Wells. I never realised he was such a bed-hopper. An eye-opener. I shall now look up more about his life and works.
There’s a website devoted to leaving books for others to find -www.bookcrossing.com... You do have to consider what book to leave where, though. And definitely none where they would be binned by the cleaners.
Holiday reading will consist of the last two-hundred odd pages of The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson, Sherston’s Progress by Siegfried Sassoon (a lot shorter than I was expecting it to be), and probably We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
Continue reading...Has Ann Patchett picked the best 75 books of the past 75 years?
She and her bookshop’s staff have assembled a great, inclusive list. As with all lists, there are annoying omissions – but I’m not sure I could have done better
The Guardian’s 100 best novels written in EnglishI love Ann Patchett, both because of the brilliance of State of Wonder and because she has an independent bookshop. And I love lists of books, both because they give me new reading ideas and because they awaken my competitiveness over how many I’ve read. So a list of books compiled by Patchett and her team of booksellers? Just the thing to cheer me up a little.
There are parameters, of course – Patchett et al have chosen 75 books from the last 75 years, to celebrate Parade magazine’s 75th anniversary, and only those written in English, “because if we opened it up to the world we would miss plenty of gems out of sheer ignorance and wind up with a lot more than 75 books”.
Related: A life in writing: Ann Patchett
Related: The best British novel of all time: have international critics found it?
Continue reading...Poem of the week: Repeat This by Rod Mengham
With its inventive play of ambiguity and grammatical shifts, this uneasy piece seems all too apt for our changing times
Repeat This
You have lost it was my fault but there’s more
I live close to the tramlines the phrases heat up.
Too late in the journey a torch endues me with
Related: Poem of the week: Tourists by Ruth Bidgood
Continue reading...June 25, 2016
Abiola Oni announced as winner of the BAME Short Story prize
Nigerian-born author from London wins £1,000 award for warm and clinical vision of dystopia
Reading the entries to the Guardian and 4th Estate BAME Short Story prize confirms what I knew all along: that there are some very talented writers of colour out there. And for whatever reason, they’re not finding representation, getting publishing deals or winning prizes. Which is why an award like this is so necessary.
Like the other judges – BuzzFeed’s Bim Adewunmi; Waterstones’ head of books, Melissa Cox; writer Bernardine Evaristo; 4th Estate editor Anna Kelly; and Guardian women’s editor Nosheen Iqbal, I was looking for one thing: new, fresh and exciting voices. And boy, did we find them.
Continue reading...June 24, 2016
Flash Friday: 3 Stories of God by Joy Williams
In our last instalment of Flash Friday, we offer Joy Williams’s excellent tryptich from her 99 Stories of God – where titles come at the end. It’s been a fun ride with the excellent Tin House. Until next time!
The child wanted to name the rabbit Actually, and could not be dissuaded from this.
It was the first time one of our pets was named after an adverb.
It made us uncomfortable. We thought it to be bad luck.
But no ill befell any of us nor did any ill befall the people who visited our home.
Everything proceeded beautifully, in fact, until Actually died.
June 23, 2016
Food in books: gravlax on rye from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Kate Young muses on the joys of morning markets and makes a Swedish favourite from Stieg Larsson’s popular crime novel
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
Then he made himself lunch, which consisted of coffee and open sandwiches, and sat in the garden, where he was typing up the notes of his conversation with Pastor Falk. When that was done, he raised his eyes to the church.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
Related: Food in books: the Yuk Hwe (Korean beef tartar) in The Vegetarian
Continue reading...Condensed, or just dense? The apps that turn books into 15-minute reads
Many readers will recoil from these radically boiled-down versions of titles like A Brief History of Time. Me too, until I started reading them
Is this reading or “reading”? An app called Joosr, which aims to help users read a book in 20 minutes, has just been launched in the UK. Initially, this horrified me. I ranted that we had lost our ability to concentrate, that authors’ words are sacred. But then I looked at what the app was actually doing and realised it could be a good idea.
The app has more than 100 nonfiction books in a radically condensed format available on a subscription. Think self-help bestsellers like Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning and dense science texts like A Brief History of Time (sorry Dr Hawking, I did try). With the first type of book, readers can pick out useful tips without wading through pages of case studies; with the latter, a briefer version might be the only way to get information to stick.
Continue reading...June 21, 2016
Translation Tuesday: Next, a poem by Jing Xianghai
Still largely unknown to western readers, Jing Xianghai is the best-selling Taiwanese poet of his generation, combining comedy with heroic pathos
By Jing Xianghai and Lee Yew Leong for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
Jing Xianghai, a psychiatrist by day, is the best-selling Taiwanese poet of his generation. The following poem is taken from his collection Nobita (pronounced Da Xiong in Chinese).
*****
Related: Translation Tuesday: The Cities, a poem by Marie Silkeberg
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