The Guardian's Blog, page 103

Not the Booker prize shortlist: a long look at Donna Tartts The Goldfinch

Tartt is a wonderful writer, but her third novel is deeply flawed: cliched, absurd and far, far too long

Sam Jordison reviews the rest of the Not the Booker prize shortlist

Donna Tartt is a wonderful writer. Look at how she arrived in 1992: The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

The Secret History more than lived up to the promise of that opening. It was a glorious combination of intrigue, in-crowd appeal, mystery and wrong-footing cheek. It was intelligent, fresh and a compulsive page-turner. It turned Tartt into a star and sold truckloads of copies, as did her next book, The Little Friend. After only three novels, she is one of the 100 most influential people in the world, according to Time Magazine.

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David Mitchell or Martin Amis: who is the bitter writer?

One of the narrators in David Mitchells The Bone Clocks is a dead ringer for Martin Amis. Should we believe the author when he insists that the character is just an unflattering self-portrait?

David Mitchells The Bone Clocks has become one of the talking points of the literary year, and not just because this widely-tipped novel somehow didnt make it on to the Booker shortlist.

One of the most animated conversations revolves around Crispin Hershey, the fading wild child of British letters who narrates the rumbustiously satirical fourth section. Is he or is he not Martin Amis?

... its me. Its a really ungrounded, megalomaniac me, with all my worst aspects. [Hershey] says things that I have too much tact to say. Its the monster in the mirror If it is an association it is subconscious. I know I cant have the last word on how Im interpreted but I will have the last word on what I meant.

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Banned Books Week quiz: which titles made censors hot under the collar?

This week we're celebrating the freedom to read, with Banned Books Week. But can you tell which titles raised the censors' ire? Take a look at our visual clues to answer our challenging quiz

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Future bright for childrens books as industry names plot next chapter

A mood of optimism marked the Bookseller Childrens Conference, with sales up 10% and editors pronouncing themselves keen to experiment and push the digital envelope

The Purcell Room on Londons South Bank was awash with positivity on Thursday, as the Bookseller Childrens Conference celebrated a section of the books industry where everything is rosy. If current trends continue, said the magazines charts and data analyst, John Lewis, this year is set to become the best year for childrens books since records began. Sales in childrens and YA publishing are up 10% in 2014 an extraordinary performance against the backdrop of a market that is down 2% overall. And its not just about new titles. The backlist is making a particularly strong showing in both picture books and childrens fiction, with five of the current top 10 bestselling picture books dating from pre-2011 including Judith Kerrs 46-year-old classic The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

Adding to the sense of celebration, Bookseller childrens editor Charlotte Eyre and publisher Nigel Roby also announced the launch of the Bookseller YA book prize, for which any young adult titles by authors living in the UK or Ireland and published in 2014 will be eligible. (Full disclosure: Ive been asked to be one of the judges, and have been emitting a thin, gleeful squeal ever since.)

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Chicago in books: readers' picks

From mid-century poverty to contemporary love stories via an account of the 1893 Worlds Fair, here is a roundup of readers top Chicago literature. Add your own thoughts below the line

Reading American cities: Chicago in books
What cities or places would you like to see covered next? Tell us in the comments

Its a city of gangsters, a cradle of the blues, but if you want to explore Chicago theres no better place to start than with its literature. The Windy City shaped the imagination of writers from Ernest Hemingway to Saul Bellow, from Philip Roth to Philip K Dick. Charlotte Jones laid out a few key coordinates when she described Chicago as the unexpected cultural centre of European modernism and asked you to tell us your favourite books about Chicago. Weve assembled the best recommendations, but feel free to keep on adding the books which capture the spirit of Chicago in the comments section below.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed ... It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.

No matter how gritty the milieu, stories set in New York City always seem to have a touch of glamour about them, albeit often out of reach or illusory. Chicago seems to inspire more consistently tough-minded tales. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T Farrell is a great novel sequence set in the lower-class Irish-Catholic community in the 1920s and 30s.

He had come to America, haven of peace and liberty, and it, too, was joining the slaughter, fighting for the big capitalists. There was no peace for men, only murder, cruelty, brutality.

So long, Lee. Give our regards to the Kaiser. And tell him theres a few boys on 58th Street wholl throw a party for him if hell drop around.

They served the rich, and tried to think that they were rich.

3. The Time Travelers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2003)

Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.

Outside its a perfect spring night. We stand on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, and Henry takes my hand, and I look at him, and I raise our joined hands and Henry twirls me around and soon were dancing down Belle Plaine Avenue, no music but the sound of cars whooshing by and our own laughter, and the smell of cherry blossoms that fall like snow on the sidewalk as we dance underneath the tress.

Beneatha: You didnt tell us what Alaiyo means ... For all I know, you might be calling me Little Idiot or something.

Asagai: It means ... It means One for Whom Bread Food Is Not Enough.

At times it will seem that nothing changes at all ... and then again ... the sudden dramatic events which make history leap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred.

Something always told me I wasnt no rich white woman.

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing happens. That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that.

Chicago is not the most corrupt of cities. The state of New Jersey has a couple. Need we mention Nevada? Chicago, though, is the Big Daddy. Not more corrupt, just more theatrical, more colorful in its shadiness.

They would sit and talk and tell us their hard luck story. Whether it was true or not, we never questioned it. Its very important you learn people as people are.

Ill never forget that Depression Easter Sunday. Our son was four years old. I bought ten or fifteen cents worth of eggs. You didnt get too many eggs for that. But we were down.

It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.

I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.

Place has always been important to me, and one thing todays Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.

Many do not know that chicago is not an English word but rather Algonquian, one of several languages that Native Americans spoke. In that language chicago meant strong smell.

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sisters address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money.

A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoiter the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and subject the proper penitent, groveling at a womans slipper.

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Think of a poem: what poetry do you know by heart?

A Cambridge University survey, set to launch on National Poetry Day on 2 October, aims to find out what poetry is stored in our nations collective memory and why

What poem do you know by heart? Share a video of yourself reciting it

According to Molesworth, there is only one piece of peotry in the english language. Its Tennysons The Brook, and Geoffrey Willans schoolboy recites, delightfully: i come from haunts of coot and hern / i make a sudden sally / and-er-hem-er-hem-the fern / to bicker down a valley. Even advanced english masters set The Brook they sa it is quaint dated gejeune etc but really they are all in leag with parents who can all recite it. And do if given half a chance, Molesworth tells us.

I love the thought of scads of parents declaiming men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever. Because, and Ive said it before, poetry by heart isnt something Im great at. Since I made that admission four years ago, Ive committed a few more to memory, starting small, with some William Carlos Williams, red wheelbarrows and plums, having a baby and drinking down Plaths Youre, trying to expand my Gerard Manley Hopkins repertoire beyond Spring and Fall. Small, horribly small, but definite, steps.

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The brilliance of Richard Brautigan

Fairytale meets beat meets counterculture: bursting with colour, humour and imagery, Brautigans virtuoso prose is rooted in his rural past and thats what draws me in

Over the years, Ive lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament. Its also influenced the qualities I seek in literature, as both reader and writer. In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense. There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy. This was no doubt empathetic deficiency on my part. I wouldnt say it was lack of imagination if anything, roaming around moors and waterways solo can lead to an excessive amount of making things up, a bizarreness of mind. I suppose what I wanted to discover was writing that served these functions, and I was in danger of quitting books.

Around this age I first read Richard Brautigan. When I learned that he was from the Pacific Northwest an equally wet, rustic, upper corner of America the coordinates struck me as significant, I sensed a geographical cousin. True enough: this formative territory is carried within his work, not as romantic vastification, but a sort of regional echo, possession of an underlying spirit. Though Brautigan moved to California, wrote about California, and Californias hip, sexy, psychedelic tropes become superimposed on his writing, beneath the berserker elements there remains trickling sadness, a wide-open loneliness, psychological rain. Such sensibility might partly be personal or social the poverty of his youth and, later, mental illness. But its roots are perhaps Oregonian. In his collection of short fiction, Revenge of the Lawn, Brautigan describes the Pacific Northwest as, a haunted land, where nature dances the minuet with people and danced with me in those old bygone days. The stories set in this territory, about hunting and fishing, childhood play and damp weather, display a kind of sobriety and straightness that the San Francisco tales often dont; the narrator is an isolated self, on a bridge, up a river, hitchhiking home in a soaked coat. Though these pieces arent necessarily bound by conventional physics or literary laws, something earnest and real rises to the surface in them, like trout in the authors lost forest streams.

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Can you read a novel in three hours?

Speed-reading a Man-Booker-shortlisted novel with help from an app called Spritz was a thrilling ride that left me in agony

Last week, I decided to perform an experiment. At midday precisely, I sat on my couch to see if I could knock off a Man-Booker-shortlisted novel by teatime.

Thats not as easy as it sounds. The book I picked was To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris at 110,000 words or so, its not particularly lengthy, but given that the average adult reader clocks in at between 250 and 300 words per minute (according to a 2012 study), it would still take around six hours to finish. And thats without considering the weighty subject matter: a Manhattan dentist dealing with a crisis of faith after a religious group steals his identity. Clearly, demolishing it by three or four oclock was somewhat ambitious.

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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 weeks blog. Heres a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

We saw an interesting discussion of short books triggered by a comment by LeoToadstool about Wilma Stockenströms Expedition to the Baobab Tree. AggieH said:

The best short books are like a full-bodied spicy wine. They give you no choice but to drink slowly in small quantities over an extended period, each sip going to your head.

I thought Id fly through A Summer Affair (UK translator Ewald Osers; DK translators Eva Andersen & Jiri Lichtenstein). It took me a week. It got increasingly dark, intense and pleasantly unpleasant.

Two wonderful Very Short Books Ive read in the last couple of weeks have been Tim Wintons Lands Edge and Asko Sahlbergs The Brothers (trans. Emily and Fleur Jeremiah). The other nice thing about Very Short Books is you can add them to your TBR list without to much pain.

A collection of poems by physician and poet Amit Majmudar. Poems with a great variety of influence: historical, mythological, scientific, and religious alike.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By Alan Smith

16 September 2014, 21:26

Very funny. Interesting to read about life in Iceland in the 18th century. I hadnt realized the three parts had originally been published separately, though this explains the leaps from one character to another in different parts of the book.

Any recommendations for other Icelandic authors? Ive already read some books by Arnaldur Indriðason, but Im kind of tired of crime fiction at the moment.

Anyone else got their Christmas/New Year reads tucked away yet? I love the thrill of knowing theyre on top of mums cupboard out of the way. Lovely.

Its an absolute masterpiece, getting better and better as it goes on. The way the author plays with the medium, especially in the 2nd part, is a joy to behold.

Im really quite sad that its all over.

@GuardianBooks Nearly finished The Goldfinch but it's been a chore - unfortunately, I seem to be the only person left cold by it.

One of my kids was over for dinner last night and when he left I found two novels on my desk The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Adam Resurrected by Yoram Kaniuk. This surreptitious book deposit is a kind of literary sadism because my kids KNOW how high looms my TBR mountain they always seem desirous of turning my K2 into Everest.

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Alain-Fournier, The Great Gatsby and a party in Chiswick

A century after the death of the French author, his sole novel Le Grand Meaulnes is still inspiring writers. Yet few can owe him a greater or more curious literary debt than F Scott Fitzgerald

On 22 September 1914, Lieutenant Henri-Alban Fournier died when he and his company encountered a German patrol while reconnoitring in woods near Verdun. With few surviving witnesses and the mens bodies missing, what actually happened is murky. As the authors biographer Robert Gibson noted, Alain-Fournier (his pen name) seemed to have vanished, like his hero, at the end of his story [Le Grand Meaulnes], leaving no trace and many questions unanswered. Only in 1991, 77 years later, were 21 skeletons discovered; their leader (armed only with a pistol, and with no helmet) had been shot in the head in a firefight.

His death at 27, poignantly early in the war, consigned Alain-Fournier to the ranks of the novels one-hit-wonders, together with authors such as Emily Brontë, Harper Lee and JD Salinger. Although he had begun Colombe Blanchet, a Flaubert-like blend of romance and provincial life, when he enlisted, his only completed novel was Le Grand Meaulnes, published the previous year and a runnerup for the Prix Goncourt.

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