The Guardian's Blog, page 120

Books about town: find London's literary benches and share your photos

London has become a literary playground: a project by the National Literacy Trust has scattered 50 book-shaped benches across the capital for the whole summer, each dedicated to an iconic London-related author or character. Will you help us find them?

Find the benches and share your photos via GuardianWitnessWho should be number 51? Nominate your favourite icon

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.

One of the treats of Tips, Links and Suggestions is when it sparks a critical debate between readers who respect each other enough to respectfully disagree - as it did this week over Nathan Filer's Costa first novel award-winner, The Shock of the Fall. MsCarey kicked it off:

I'm reading and not enjoying The Shock of the Fall. There are good things here but the main conceit (as I understand it) that the 19 year old narrator has sat down and written the book I'm reading doesn't convince me at all. It's far too fluent and deliberately crafted. I want to engage with the narrator and instead I feel manipulated by the text.

I was expecting a fairly lightweight book. It was darker and more caustic than I expected. I wonder if "expect" is the key word for me there? When I approach a book with high expectations, especially if its been hyped in the press, minor flaws seem major. When I approach a book blindly or with neutral expectations, I focus on the happy surprises within.

Like your good self, I dislike being manipulated by the text. I didnt feel that with The Shock of The Fall. Filer convinced me from page one. I think Im generally an unsentimental reader, but there were definitely motions of liquid in my eye at times. (Especially when grannies or aunts were involved.)

Nearly through Auster's Leviathan a reread more powerful than ever. A very tall story but told with unerring conviction and an almost relentless narrative drive he does seem to have a genuine uninhibited talent which makes the mediocre seem even more mediocre than it usually does.

My 2nd hand copy was printed in 1974. I believe a new edition has recently been released. Published by Puffin, my book would have cost 40p back in the day. Bought as our latest Reading Group choice I think it cost me a couple of quid.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By pipkinface

23 June 2014, 20:34

It's a dense book a meandering, oppressive book that really suits a blindingly hot summer day to get a sense of the sheer thirst and desperation that pervades it. The prose wanders at times aimlessly, and as absurd as this may sound in so doing communicates how broken the Consul is. He is a pathetic drunk deluding himself that he is not, and the book lays plain his faulty logic by which he does delude himself. A common subject when talking about books is how you can "relate to" the characters - Under the Volcano absolutely defies this. Your way of "relating to" the Consul is seeing how he lies to himself, how he is trapped in a self-destructive addiction.

I have been re-cataloguing my library on LibraryThing and can report that I have read around 52% of the 1,500 odd books that I own. I wanted to get a hold on this statistic to help me regulate my book-buying habit, which so easily outstrips the rate at which I could possible read. How do others control the habit? And if you maintain a library what is a reasonable percentage of books read to books owned?

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Shakespeare blamed for skin conditions' stigma. A poxy idea?

A new report suggests distaste for dermatological problems might have been kept alive by their moral colouring in his plays

It is the sort of headline that makes you do a double take: "Shakespeare accused of causing misery to people with skin conditions," says the Independent; "Is Shakespeare to blame for our skin worries? Insults about sores, boils and moles may be behind lasting stigma, claims study", adds the Daily Mail.

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July's Reading group: Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee

Commenter Tinsley Collins recently wrote that this book absolutely must be read for its joyful comedy and 'landmine of language'. She's right so let's do it this month

Last week marked the centenary of Laurie Lee's birth. That's reason enough for revisiting Cider With Rosie. Heck, waking up in the morning is motivation enough for re-opening this wonderful book. But the thing that most persuaded us at Guardian HQ to discuss Laurie Lee this month on the Reading group was actually a reader comment on our Tips, Links and Suggestions blog. I'll paste it in full here, so you can see why. Tinsley Collins wrote:

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Mach and mascarpone: testing how vocabulary is gendered

A survey has shown an 'awesomely sexist' discrepancy between the English words understood by different genders

Also on the site: Why women like explicit crime fiction

Do you know what decoupage is? Tresses, taffeta, and mascarpone? Then you're statistically more likely to be female. If you're more confident identifying a golem, a paladin, or a scimitar, then you're more likely to be a man. That's according to research from the Center for Reading Research at the University of Ghent, highlighted by MobyLives, which analysed the results of half a million vocabulary surveys, and found that "some words are better known to men than to women and the other way around". And the words? Well, as MobyLives put it, "our vocabularies are awesomely sexist".

Here goes, with the numbers in brackets being the percentage of men who knew the word, and women. These are the 12 words with the largest difference in favour of men: codec (88, 48), solenoid (87, 54), golem (89, 56), mach (93, 63), humvee (88, 58), claymore (87, 58), scimitar (86, 58), kevlar (93, 65), paladin (93, 66), bolshevism (85, 60), biped (86, 61), dreadnought (90, 66). These are the 12 words with the largest difference in favour of women: taffeta (48, 87), tresses (61, 93), bottlebrush (58, 89), flouncy (55, 86), mascarpone (60, 90), decoupage (56, 86), progesterone (63, 92), wisteria (61, 89), taupe (66, 93), flouncing (67, 94), peony (70, 96), bodice (71, 96).

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Women's appetite for explicit crime fiction is no mystery

Brutally detailed murder stories appeal to female readers both for the real anxieties they tap into, and for their metaphorical resonances

At this year's Theakstons Old Peculier crime writing festival in Harrogate, roughly 80% of the audience (and half the 80 or so authors appearing) will be women. We will also make up around 80% of those signing up for writing workshops where aspiring crime writers learn their craft. Though only a third of published authors in almost all genres are women and media outlets scandalously persist in reviewing disproportionately more books by men, women have long made up the majority of adult readers and, increasingly, both as readers and writers, we are turning to crime.

Women love crime fiction, and not just in its cosy, sanitised, Midsomer Murders version. The trend towards ever-more explicit accounts of murder, rape and torture in crime novels, often involving a female victim, is led not by men but by women. Why?

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Guardian first book award 2014: add your nomination

One of the titles on the longlist for this year's prize for literary debuts is up to readers. Please nominate the best new work you've read in the last 12 months

The cupboards are full to bursting, the judges mopping their brows as they start to fill nine slots on the 2014 Guardian first book award longlist from the publishers' nominations. But now it's your chance to help us find the 10th, as we throw the doors wide for readers to tell us about this year's most exciting debut.

Last year saw a triumph for poetry, as Claire Trévien's Shipwrecked House was voted on to the 2013 longlist . She followed in the footsteps of Sarah Jackson, whose collection Pelt was longlisted in 2012, and Juan Pablo Villalobos, whose novel Down the Rabbit Hole was the first readers' selection back in 2011.

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Poem of the week: A Birthmother's Catechism by Carrie Etter

In a haunting refrain of imagined questions and answers, a mother speculates how her son, adopted as a baby, feels about the parent he has never known

Imagined Sons by Carrie Etter consists of a title sequence of prose poems, framed and interspersed by 10 poems shaped in the call-response form of the catechism. This week's poem is the third of these, and shares their common title A Birthmother's Catechism.

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Add your titles to the list of literary might have-beens

Would we still be reading A Story of Two Cities, or The Small House on the Prairie? Give us your titles that didn't quite make it into the literary canon

The quicksilver nature of literary success makes it all too tempting to think about what might have been. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens recounts a quirky version of this bookish fantasy which he devised with Salman Rushdie.

Salman began to evolve and improvise a new word game, this time of book titles that had almost but not quite made it to acceptance by publishers: The Big Gatsby, A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, Good Expectations, Mr Zhivago, Two Days in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

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Landmarks of summer literature

John Dugdale rounds up a selection of summer reads to celebrate the arrival of the season

Summer literature doesn't stop with Sonnet 18, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Le Grand Meaulnes, Ulysses, The Great Gatsby and Whitsun Weddings. Here are a few more sun-drenched pages to mark this week's arrival of the season.

Alexander Pope, Summer Second Pastoral (1735)
Source of the "where'er you walk" lines that Handel turned into the accompaniment for many a bride's entrance.

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