The Guardian's Blog, page 106

The best mixtapes in fiction

Have you ever wanted to listen to a song mentioned in a novel? Now you can enjoy fictional mixtapes, as authors have begun creating their characters playlists for their readers to listen to

The Guardian is hosting two events with David Nicholls, the author of One Day, in Manchester 1 October and Edinburgh 2 OctoberDavid Nicholls: Six Songs of Me list

It may not be the most obvious reaction, granted, but my first thought when hearing news that David Nicholls had written Us, his follow-up to his bestselling novel One Day, wasnt about his knack for unputdownability or his enviable ability to write novels that cry out to be adapted into blockbuster movies. No my first thought was: Ooh, I wonder if itll have a good mixtape.

Inspired by the compilation tapes his character Emma Morley makes for Dexter Mayhew in One Day, author Nicholls decided to put together a full playlist of the mixtapes, imagining what other tracks Emma (who has far better taste than Dexter) would have included.

Youve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention and then youve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you cant have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you cant have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless youve done the whole thing in pairs and... oh, there are loads of rules.

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The Samuel Johnson prize: a judge's notes

Drawing up a longlist for the 2014 award has been more fun than I expected, revealing an amazing variety of brilliance

In pictures: A guide to the 2014 longlist

These days prizes sell books more than reviews, so booksellers tell me. They influence bookshop displays and undecided buyers. Now that longlists have come into fashion more writers can feel happy, at least for a few weeks, and each judge is sure of giving a boost to their particular favourites which may well include titles heartily disliked by some of their fellow judges.

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Poster poems: Sappho

The passionate words of Sappho have been reinterpreted with each modern age; now it is your turn pen new versions of her musings on moonlight and death

With International Translation Day fast approaching, it's time for us to return to this most interesting of literary crafts. I say return because we already had a Poster Poems translation challenge a little over four years ago, but while that was a general invitation to post translations of your own choosing, this time I was thinking of something a little more specific.

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Gore Vidal's Thieves Fall Out should have died a quiet death

This pulp novel, rushed out under a pseudonym in 1953 and picked up for rerelease in 2015, is a third-rate work that my friend Gore would have preferred to languish in obscurity

In the early 50s, Gore Vidal found himself short of cash. There were days, indeed, when he wasn't sure where the next bottle of champagne might come from. For a start, his "real" novels, published under his name, had been failing to find an audience big enough to support his high living. (He had recently moved into a stately home on the Hudson River called Edgewater, not Rhinebeck in New York.) So he turned to pulp fiction of various kinds.

Vidal was a fast writer, capable of spinning out a mystery or piece of pulp fiction in a few weeks, often using a Dictaphone. In 1953 he published Thieves Fall Out, written under the pseudonym of Cameron Kay (Kay was his grandmother's maiden name, and Cameron Kay was, in fact, Gore's great uncle, an attorney general in Texas). A paperback publisher brought out the book in 1953, and it quickly faded. For years, this book was known only to Vidal scholars and true fans, many of whom possess the frail paperback. Now a house called Hard Case Crime in New York will bring out a new edition, and it has stirred some backlash.

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Jenny Diski applies angry eloquence to inoperable cancer diagnosis

'I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing,' says author in bravura first instalment of cancer memoirs

The author Jenny Diski, in a bravura essay for the London Review of Books, has laid out the details of her inoperable cancer diagnosis, writing: "Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing."

In the first instalment from her new memoir "a fucking cancer diary? Another fucking cancer diary" the novelist writes of how, when told about her cancer, she made a reference to Breaking Bad ("we'd better get cooking the meth") before feeling a "flood of embarrassment, much more powerful than alarm or fear, that engulfed and mortified me at finding myself set firmly on that particular well-travelled road I was faced with the prospect of a rather lengthy (in one view) public/private performance by which to be excruciated."

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Going back to off-to-school books

This sub-genre of children's unlikely academic adventures has real charm. What were your favourite reading lessons?

Unbelievably, it's somehow September, and time for a new school year again. It's many, many years since I started my last year of school, but I feel like marking the occasion, regardless. I don't have school-age kids, so I can't join in the parade of off-to-school photos on Facebook, and, thank God, I don't yet have to prepare rucksacks and book bags, name-label gym kit and fill lunchboxes. So, instead, it's time for a re-read of schoolday classics.

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Reading group: Choose a Scottish book for September

It's possible you've seen the country in the news of late, so we have an obvious focus for this month but which book?

Scotland, for obvious reasons, is a big subject this month. Some of those reasons are fairly painful. In spite of all the ambient hot air, this remains a fascinating moment in UK history. Who could grow entirely tired of such an impressive expression of democracy in action? Who could grow tired of Scotland? This country that is so beautiful, so full of ideas, so rich in history, so full of friends and so much a part of the identity of every citizen of the UK

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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

Hello, and welcome to this weeks rather belated blog. pabloelbrujo inspired an interesting discussion when he mused that an Oxford World Classics edition of Alexandre Dumas Twenty Years After had more more explanatory notes than he felt were needed. How important do you think it is to have explanatory notes and how detailed should they be, also do you think that you might be missing out if you dont read them? he asked.

frustratedartist replied:

I think increasingly people are reading classics without any explanatory notes, and looking things up on the Internet where necessary. All those public domain classics that are free on sites like Project Gutenberg, all those collections of classics for Kindle (All of Balzac in one volume for 2 pounds, that kind of thing) - none of them have any explanatory notes. Latin quotations, obscure historical references, unusual words- its almost as easy to google them as to flip to the back of the book.

Unlike printed dictionaries it doesnt just tell us what a word means now, but it can tell us how a word was used when the author was writing. When Zola uses the word chauffeur, he means a man shovelling coal on a steam engine, When Proust uses it he means a personal driver.

All right, just one more : I took this one along so that, together with the brine, the paling grey cells might receive a boostPlus, dont forget the myriad classics available free onlineYou take all of them along with your computer.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By ElQuixote

31 August 2014, 17:54

Got Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon) the other day for a train journey read (mostly because I really enjoyed The Yiddish Policemens Union). Nearly finished it now, but I wish I wasnt. I havent so thoroughly enjoyed a novel in a long, long, time. Funny, beautifully written, sad... pretty close to a perfect read. Kudos, Mr Chabon.

Ive not long finished The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks. A family business who sell the highly successful board and PC game Empire! fight off a takeover bid from an American company.

Being Iain Banks this is just a side plot to much more twisted realities. Having said that, I did have to wait a bit too long for the real madness to kick off.

Finished Summertime by Coetzee - a weird and wonderful novel/memoir/biography which ought not to be so compelling but somehow is due to the matchless elegance of the style and the multi-layered view of the self - the written self, the real self etc. Now on Him With His Foot in His Mouth by Saul Bellow - amazing outpouring of thought and language - like Dickens on Speed!

Ive been doing some lazy one-thingleads-to-another reading. Susan Hill to Virginia Woolf and Helene Hanff 84 Charing Cross Road (which Ive read before) and Qs Legacy (which I havent). I skipped The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street and was amused to find the author herself had been appalled when she read it back to herself. I dont remember it being that bad - but I dont think itll bear rereading.

The same could be said for the Susan Hill. There is a point in Howards End is on the Landing where the writer wonders whether Iris Murdoch will stand the test of time. A dangerous question to pose, because of course the reader immediately asks the question of Susan Hills books, and as far as the ones Ive read are concerned, the answer is a resounding no.

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Washington DC in books: readers' picks

Family dramas, political intrigues, multiculturalism, and much more. From Ralph Ellison to Norah Ephron, if youre planning a visit to the US capital, heres your reading sorted as suggested by our readers. Add your suggestions below the line

Politics, and awesome political power, as well as the trappings of a mighty capital city, are unsurprisingly a defining characteristic of Washingtons literature. But there is a lot more than monuments, official buildings and museums: its varied neighbourhoods and diversity of cultures make a fascinating mix, a side often forgotten but not less worth visiting. DC-based literature is, in fact, not particularly urban, wrote Charlotte Jones in her blogpost, where she offers really interesting reads for DC-bound travellers. Here is what you had to add. Is your favourite missing? Let us know below the line.

George Pelecanoss books are a great social history of Washington DC. The novels are in the crime section but Pelecanos himself calls them modern westerns. Dont read them expecting whodunnits, the glory of them is in the sparkling dialogue of the hard-bitten characters and the fantastic sense of time and place the author creates. Mind you, we should expect nothing else from one of the writers of The Wire and Treme.

Soon it began to drizzle for the second time that night. The drops grew heavier and became visible in the headlights of the cars. It was said by some of the police on the scene that God was crying for the girl in the garden. To others, it was only rain.

A Washington homily fit the situation: That which must be done eventually is best done immediately.

Stephen Carter does a good job of explaining DC on the grass-roots level. For instance, his debut novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, delineated the differences between the upper-crust African American community of DCs Gold Coast and the middle-class African American community of Northeast, and how the twain shall never meet, even within the same family. [Also by the same author,] I had a lot of fun with his The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln because he went into such geographic detail describing DC in 1867, and he made it so easy to compare it to todays city. He produces pretty good thrillers in the process.

Fidelity in a sad marriage can fairly be described as an act of faith.

You draw a line, Talcott. Put the past on one side, the future on the other, and decide which side you want to live on. Then stick to your decision.

Fifty years after its publication and astounding success (102 weeks on the bestseller list, and the Pulitzer prize for fiction), Allen Drurys novel ­remains the definitive Washington tale. Anyone who tries to write a political novel must ­admire the way Drury crafted a huge story (616 pages) with a prodigious cast, and packed narrative pull into a plot in which (aside from a few fade-to-black couplings and a heart-piercing suicide) the entire drama builds to The Yeas and Nays have been ordered

Son, this is a Washington, DC kind of lie. Its when the other person knows youre lying, and also knows you know he knows.

Its set primarily in Washington DC in the 1950s, where an African American church congregation from the state of Georgia has come urgently seeking an audience with a member of the US Senate from a northern state. (...) In one memorable scene, the leader of the Georgia delegation meditates at the Lincoln Memorial, in the manner of Roger Wilkinss Jeffersons Pillow.

Words of Emancipation didnt arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.

I believe that education is not only the most important societal problem but the most interesting.

When I first met him, he had a recurrent nightmare that Henry Kissinger was chasing him with a knife, and I said it was really his father, and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and I said it was his father and he said it was Henry Kissinger, and this went on for months until he started going to the Central American shrinkette, who said Henry Kissinger was really his younger sister.

You can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

It tells the story of growing up in Washington and the bordering suburb of Silver Spring during McCarthyism, when his father was suspected, with some plausibility, of being a communist. Lots of nitty-gritty about the streets of DC at the time, about the working-class Jewish community, about moving out of the working class, and about what its like to find the FBI spied on your bar mitzvah.

I remember another aphorism of my fathers, one that he used to say whenever we passed someone pissing openly in the street: add color to life when you can.

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Cut it out, Ian McEwan: there are plenty of great long novels

The author says only a few 'earn their length' and he reads them itching to edit. But I can think of plenty of terrific giant stories can't you?

Ian McEwan, who has just published a very short new book, The Children Act, has said that "very few really long novels earn their length", and "my fingers are always twitching for a blue pencil". It's the Americans McEwan appears mainly to be blaming for this our friends on the other side of the Atlantic "still pursue the notion of a great American novel and it has to be a real brick of an object", he says so he may well be thinking of Donna Tartt's latest, The Goldfinch, which stretches to a whopping 880 pages in paperback. Or could it be Eleanor Catton, his fellow Booker prize winner, whose The Luminaries weighs in at 848 pages?

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