The Guardian's Blog, page 10
April 25, 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 your thoughts on the shortlist for the Best Translated Book Award, the wonderful Marilynne Robinson, and learning life lessons from Haruki Murakami.
MsCarey has finished A Mixture of Frailties, the fabulous third volume of Robertson Davies’s Salterton Trilogy:
...and the world is therefore a little greyer all of a sudden. There’s no-one like Davies for sheer entertainment value whilst all the while probing deep questions about the divisions between the intellect and the spirit, the arts and the everyday, the individual and the herd.
As usual I am one part thrilled, one part bemused and one part disappointed. I am currently reading Mercè Rodoreda’s War, So Much War, one of the titles that did make the cut. She was a Catalan writer I have long wanted to read so this was the push needed. I have a friend who practically worships her.
One title that did not make the cut is a slim volume called Berlin by Slovenian poet/writer Aleš Šteger. Illustrated by the author’s own photos, this is a collection of 31 very short (2-3 page) single-paragraph stories that read almost like prose poems. He takes on the role of the flâneur, closely modeled on the work of Walter Benjamin and the pieces are excellent. He writes about a bookshop, visiting the zoo, imagining a museum of museum guards, an infestation of ladybugs and more. One of my favourite pieces is called “Flea Markets”. [Read the full comment here.]
It’s like a Biblical storm – for the longest time all you can see are distant flashes of lightning, but you know in your bones that the time will come when the world will crack open and hell will be revealed and it’ll look exactly like your own back yard.
And when you’ve finished all you’re left with is a question: what good does it do to forgive someone you love if they will not forgive themselves? Of Robinson’s Gilead Trilogy, Home is the hardest to handle – sort of like wearing sackcloth and ashes for 339 pages. But if you’re in the mood to be disturbed by an absolute master of her craft, read the book.
I was on holiday in Japan for the last fortnight, so my reading has had a Japanese theme. First, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the Hills. Having read three of his novels now, I think there is something about his style of storytelling that, whilst easy to read, does not move me. With this novel, alongside An Artist of the Floating World and Never Let Me Go, though the themes are interesting, I have been underwhelmed by their delivery and execution. I have a couple more of his books, but I don’t think I will be in any hurry to read them.
I also read Haruki Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore, without any previous Murakami experience. 100-200 pages before the end, I really started to struggle with the novel, not understanding the point of the story and not being able to see where it would end. However, by the time I finished it, I really developed a strong appreciation for the story and Murakami’s writing. I don’t think I grasped what he is trying to say in the novel, but I certainly took from it, in terms of not allowing your past to dictate your future, for example. I’m unsure as to whether I will read more of his work.
Continue reading...
Interview with a Bookstore: Housing Works Bookstore in New York
Welcome to the largest community-based AIDS service organization in the US – and a fantastic bookstore
Interview with a Bookstore from Literary Hub is part of the Guardian Books Network
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe’s opening is a bit of a mystery, but let’s say it opened, in our beloved Crosby Street location, in 1996. But the history of the bookstore goes back to the history of Housing Works, Inc, which was founded in 1993 by Charles King and Keith Cylar and other members of the groundbreaking AIDS activist group ACT UP. It was simple: if you had AIDS and you had no place to live, it was impossible to receive the lifesaving care that you needed. Today we are the largest community-based AIDS service organization in the country. We provide housing, primary care, job training, and legal help, to more than 20K homeless and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS.
As the story goes, in 1993, an angel investor approached Housing Works with a proposal: an investment in a second hand store of designer goods, stylishly presented and frequently rotated, sold at not rock-bottom but irresistible-bargain prices. The thrift shop swiftly opened and exceeding its three month financial goals within the first weeks.
Continue reading...Poem of the week: Jasper by Tony Conran
A wedding gift in verse, this is a warm celebration of art and craft, friendship and Welshness
Jasper
for John Jones the potter
Waxwork of a crag, a model of sea rock
In gleaming maroon –
Hear the waves break on it, see the fish fly
Under the moon!
Alain de Botton webchat – post your questions now
The philosopher is back with a new novel, The Course of Love, and will join us to answer your questions in a live webchat from 1pm BST on Wednesday 27 April
10.17am BST
From the way we work to the way we love, Alain de Botton has considered the big questions in hit pop-philosophy books such as Status Anxiety and The Art of Travel. Recently, he has considered religious faith (Religion for Atheists), the era of 24-hour rolling news (The News: A User’s Manual), and How to Think More About Sex – the latter published by his adult education venture, The School of Life.
De Botton began his writing career in 1993 with Essays in Love, using fiction to think about affairs of the heart. It’s a an approach he returns to with his new novel, The Course of Love, exploring the ups, downs, children and affairs of a modern couple.
Continue reading...April 21, 2016
Food in books: (not) blue soup from Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Kate Young muses on the pleasures of friendship and explains how to make the soup from Bridget Jones’s Diary – without it turning blue
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
This will be the menu:
Velouté of Celery (v. simple and cheap when have made stock)
Bridget Jones’ Diary, Helen Fielding
Continue reading...April 20, 2016
Why I chose an African publisher over a western one
In my experience, African publishers are more savvy and look outside cliched representations of the continent’s writers – we need more of them
In recent years, African writers have gained prominence on the world stage; some have won prestigious prizes, while others have signed lucrative book deals and sold to multiple markets. However, Africans are not prominent, almost to the point of invisibility, in the ownership of production. The gatekeepers of African writing remain firmly rooted in the west – African publishers typically must buy, rather than sell, the rights to books, even those that are marketed to the rest of the world as African stories.
Related: Reading the globe at the London book fair – books podcast
Related: Elnathan John: ‘I want to show that things are never simple’
Continue reading...Please write here: your best book inscriptions
News of a possible Jane Austen first edition that found its way to a pile of junk in South Carolina has reminded me of my own serendipitous secondhand finds – and the odd magic of strangers’ inscriptions
Have you found a great inscription? Share its picture – and story – hereThere’s little better than a good secondhand bookshop, and once within its hallowed walls, there’s little that is more fun than stumbling across a great old inscription. So thanks to MobyLives for alerting me to this – a possible first edition of Persuasion from 1818, awarded in May 1900 as a school prize to one Lillian M Flood, whose descendants are now being traced by an enterprising high-school teacher.
Flood – no relation, as far as I’m aware (although wouldn’t that be great) – was a student at Ayer High School in Massachusetts. The copy of Persuasion was found in a box of “junk” in a garage by one Alice B Bantle of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, the Boston Globe reports, with the curly-lettered inscription: “Prize speaking, Ayer High School, May 17 1900, First prize, Lillian M Flood”.
Related: The secret histories of secondhand books
Continue reading...April 19, 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 re-readings of Dickens, Agatha Christie and grief memoirs.
NZBarry recommended Helen MacDonald’s celebrated memoir H Is for Hawk, in which MacDonald deals with the death of her father by learning to train a goshawk:
I was slightly trepidatious going in, for two reasons. The first is that I’ve seen quite a lot by and about her over the past year (she was actually right here in my home town a year ago), and Helen strikes me as someone I’d like a lot. So it would be a bit of a disaster if I didn’t end up liking the book. Second, I pressed it upon my book club, and was worried they wouldn’t like it either. Luckily, with one exception, we all loved it – I can’t remember the last time my book club spent so long talking about the actual book we had decided to read.
It is not the funniest of books, for obvious reasons, so when there was the occasional flash of humour, it really had an impact. I liked the very personal nature of the writing, as Helen talked about her dad (which had most of is in tears at various stages), about [the goshawk] Mabel and their burgeoning relationship (including a a fair amount of playfulness) and about her reflections on killing and other topics. Because it was so personal, it had quite a pull on my emotions – I was so drawn into her narrative there were several times that I kind of wished I could have been there in her time of need. (This was the reason for the one person in the book club not liking the book – she just didn’t want to know, but liked Mabel).
It’s about the hardship of a family which runs a second-tier theme park, featuring 98 alligators, all named Seth, and a single brown bear, named Judy Garland. It has a combination of imagination and style which I think is unmatched in contemporary literature. The plot is unusual, and the prose is vibrant – what more could you ask for? Unfortunately, I found the ending very unsatisfying, which I can’t expand on for fear of spoiling it. I would still like to endorse it though. Consider this my Oprah-style sticker of approval.
I probably last read it thirty years ago. What I’m getting this time is the narrative voice; Pip, I imagine still young as he writes, horribly embarrassed and yet brutally honest about his young, naive, hopeful self. Just read Pip’s London breakfast with Joe Gargery and remembered when I’d be so ashamed of my dad (young and dashing then, but old and hopeless in my eyes) coming to pick me up from work...
I’m about a fifth of the way through Agatha Christie’s Autobiography. Someone complained a little while ago that there wasn’t any particular insight into how she wrote in it. I’m not sure I agree – but what there isn’t is anything useful for anyone else as she starts age 3 making up stories about being a kitten playing with other kittens, moves on to inventing a heap of girls to play piano and croquet with (her older brother and sister were at school so she was effectively an only child) and so on. If you don’t start out as a slightly shy day-dreamy child who didn’t go to school until you were 9 and don’t grow up to be a woman who walks home talking out loud to yourself you’re at an instant disadvantage if you want to be Agatha Christie.
There’s some great period detail in here, especially about her parents being “ruined” in that very odd well-off way which meant you rented the house out and lived in hotels abroad for a bit, and what the expectations were of girls of that class and time (marriage basically, you were trained to meet “the one” aka “your fate”). Mostly, though, I just like Agatha herself. She’s far too easy-going, and I really don’t agree with substantial amounts of what she says but she’s also extremely entertaining and thoroughly enjoying herself.
Continue reading...Translation Tuesday: excerpt of Filip Springer’s The History of a Disappearance
Springer’s collection of reportage about a Polish town that disappeared has recently been translated into English and won Asymptote’s annual translation contest
By Filip Springer and Sean Gasper Bye for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
For this and the next two Translation Tuesdays, we are thrilled to bring you the winners of our annual Close Approximations translation contest, judged by Margaret Jull Costa, Ottilie Mulzet, and Michael Hofmann. First up, Sean Gasper Bye’s translation from the Polish of Filip Springer’s nonfiction. Margaret chose Bye’s entry as the winner “because I found the subject matter totally gripping – it’s set in 1944, when the Soviet counteroffensive has reached the Vistula River – and the prose itself is satisfyingly dense, and it has what I look for in any good translation, a very convincing voice.”
–The editors at Asymptote
You don’t negotiate with a horde; with a horde you fight to your last breath
Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter
Continue reading...Translation Tuesday – excerpt of Filip Springer’s The History of a Disappearance
Springer’s collection of reportage about a Polish town that disappeared has recently been translated into English and won Asymptote’s annual translation contest
By Filip Springer and Sean Gasper Bye for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
For this and the next two Translation Tuesdays, we are thrilled to bring you the winners of our annual Close Approximations translation contest, judged by Margaret Jull Costa, Ottilie Mulzet, and Michael Hofmann. First up, Sean Gasper Bye’s translation from the Polish of Filip Springer’s nonfiction. Margaret chose Bye’s entry as the winner “because I found the subject matter totally gripping – it’s set in 1944, when the Soviet counteroffensive has reached the Vistula River – and the prose itself is satisfyingly dense, and it has what I look for in any good translation, a very convincing voice.”
–The editors at Asymptote
You don’t negotiate with a horde; with a horde you fight to your last breath
Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter
Continue reading...The Guardian's Blog
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