The Guardian's Blog, page 117
July 18, 2014
A book for the beach: Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer | Sam Jordison
I quite like the idea of beaches. The idea. In the abstract, that sun and sea and rest all seem rather appealing. As I type this article, with the rain beating down outside and deadlines clamouring all around me, a seaside holiday seems like a fine plan. But I know that when I get there, I'll ruin it.
At first it will be great. I'll swim. I'll eat sandwiches. I'll swim again. I'll apply more suntan cream. And then? Ten minutes will have passed and there will be an entire day an entire week of enforced idleness before me. I will start worrying. I'll start to see time slipping away like sand through a glass. No, worse, like the sand that lies all around me. All of it wasted. Not even moving. Not even making as much of an impression on the world as its fellow sand that measures out the hours in egg timers and is at least useful as a metaphor for lost opportunity.
"Looking back it seems, on the one hand, hard to believe that I could have wasted so much time, could have exhausted myself so utterly, wondering when I was going to begin my study of DH Lawrence; on the other, it seems equally hard to believe that I ever started it, for the prospect of embarking on this study of Lawrence accelerated and intensified the psychological disarray it was meant to delay and alleviate."
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July 17, 2014
Our readers really do write in their books here are pictures as proof
When we asked if you wrote in your books, responses went from a heartfelt 'never!' to straightforward admissions of writing 'in ink'. Some of you hymned the dialogue on the page between writer and reader but only 'neatly in pencil' while others trusted in slips of paper. Here are some photos that show the pleasure some of you take in scribbling. If you think that's sacrilege, look away now
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A book for the beach: I Put a Spell on You by John Burnside
The requirement for summer reading used to be a vast, compelling book. Something to lose yourself in. Tolstoy, Conrad, Dostoevsky or Lewis Grassic Gibbon: these were the kinds of books which transported you to a different time and place. But my tastes have changed; family holidays don't offer the hours of uninterrupted reading. You can only do half an hour here or an hour there. Plus, I began to think what's the point of all that packing and travelling to some beautiful place only to then spend hours immersed in 19th-century Russia.
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Do you write in your books?
Marginalia from the 16th and 17th centuries are being studied and digitised, to reveal 'an unvarnished history of personal reading'. What traces of your literary past end up on other people's pages?
Web project allows modern readers to 'look over the shoulders' of Renaissance scholars
What do readers' notes in books add up to? According to a group of international scholars, a good deal: "Even when you pick up a student book in the library today, and it says 'rubbish', it tells you something," said Professor Lisa Jardine, director of CELL at University College London. "What you get is what it really means for a human being to read."
An international project is going to display the marginalia on more than 400 books from the 16th and 17th centuries, unveiling what Renaissance scholars thought and scribbled on the books they studied. A collaboration between Johns Hopkins University, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at UCL, and the Princeton University Library, the project has received a $488,000 grant to digitally recover, transcribe, translate and catalogue annotations that will show the ways in which these scholars advised kings, ambassadors and archbishops bringing them back to life, according to Jardine.
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July 16, 2014
A volume of Das Kapital becomes a $40,000 commodity fetish: what would Karl Marx have said?
One has to wonder what Karl Marx would make of news from Abebooks that it has scored a coup with the sale of a volume of Das Kapital for $40,000, its second-highest cyber-trade of the year so far.
Abe's blog celebration links the sale to the current, rather spectacular heights of the stock market: "On the day that the Dow Jones index closed at an all-time high of 17,068 points, [we] sold a first edition of Karl Marx's Das Kapital for $40,000." Yet investment in fetish-vessels of cash in the form of fine art, memorabilia, and antiques is very often the resort of rich capitalists anxious about falling markets. If equities are zooming up, rich folks generally leave their money "working for them".
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A Book for the Beach: Strands by Jean Sprackland
It is wonderful to read a book about beaches on the beach, although this is not for those who prefer to keep their heads in the sand. Jean Sprackland is a fine poet and her revelatory book, although scattered with poetry, is written in transparent, undeceived prose. It strikes a careful balance between marvelling at the shore (the estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool) and monitoring a terrifying fall from grace. It considers our modern spoiling of the waters and the cavalier way in which we take coastal wonders for granted as though confident the sea could never really suffer.
The book is, at every turn, minutely researched. There is an astonishing account of the leaking of anti-depressants: "Doctors issue 30m prescriptions a year for Prozac and other anti-depressants classed as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Fluoxetine, the active ingredient in these drugs, has been leaking into oceans and rivers for years, but the extraordinarily steep rise in prescription means that levels are rocketing." And then things get surreal as she describes a shrimp population in decline because, on anti-depressants, they become reckless, swimming into the sun and getting killed. All this will make readers step into the sea with firmly sealed lips.
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July 15, 2014
Cider With Rosie's truth is not always of the literal variety
At the end of the first chapter of Cider With Rosie there is a memorable description of 11 November 1918 in Slad and the end-of-war celebrations. There's a vivid image of a view through the window of the lamp-lit pub where "rose-coloured men, through rain-wet windows, seemed to bulge and break into flame. They breathed our smoke, drank fire from golden jars and I heard their great din with awe." There's a fight a man rises up and crushes a glass "like a nut between his hands" there's some funny dialogue and then, we learn, the schoolhouse chimney caught on fire:
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Literary hangovers: share your rude awakenings from fictional reveries
There are certain books I've finished and, looking up, have found the world to be a gloomier place for having done so. I was reminded, thanks to the novelist Harriet Evans on Twitter last week, of how The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden had exactly this effect on me. Her story of that "hot French August, [when] we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages" when the Grey children, left alone in a small French hotel while their mother is ill, fall into danger exerted such a powerful grip on me that I read it desperately, obsessively, and felt slightly ill when I emerged.
I am indebted, then, to the team at Epic Reads for dubbing this feeling the "book hangover", in a neat, funny little video. That's exactly what it is. The experience was good; the aftermath, not so much.
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A book for the beach: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Where would summer be without a series of reading blogs? This year's subject, "a book for the beach", might seem limiting, but there are as many sorts of beach holiday as there are books to enjoy on them. For someone who, like me, spends their working life reading in straight lines what's new, is it any good? holidays offer the luxury of reading in circles. It was just such a loop that brought me back to Wide Sargasso Sea, one of the great prequels of world literature.
It began a couple of years ago with Jenny Uglow's wonderful biography of the 18th-century engraver Thomas Bewick, whose History of British Birds is the book with which the 10-year-old Jane Eyre diverts herself behind the curtains at Gateshead Hall, until it is hurled at her head by her odious cousin.
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July 14, 2014
The best books on Haiti: start your reading here | Pushpinder Khaneka
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