The Guardian's Blog, page 13
April 4, 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.
Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter
So I have been reading the third novel in the series, Some Hope. It’s quite awful to be back there, actually; Melrose’s world is populated almost entirely by selfish, spiteful, sad upper-class people and dwells –maliciously and sarcastically – on all of the horrible, pointless, trivial things they do to each other, and say to each other, and think about each other.
This is a world I do not come from and so I find there’s an element of “social voyeurism” in reading St Aubyn, it’s just that it’s in a really rubbish way — like being a voyeur but without any of the disturbing pleasure that’s supposed to go with it.
Roger Angell is now in his 90s, and this book's title essay (the best American essay of 2015) is a rumination on his life as he lives it now. A fiction editor at the New Yorker, he writes about everything from V.S. Pritchett to the 4th of July in rural Maine. He may be the best baseball writer we've ever had (he's the only writer in both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters). Here is the first sentence of his remembrance of Earl Weaver, the long-time manager of the Baltimore Orioles: "Earl Weaver, the banty, umpire-contentious, Hall of Fame manager of the Orioles, was the best naked talker I ever heard." (And he did mean "naked.")
Sent via GuardianWitness
By Blifil48
2 April 2016, 15:01
At first I thought it was just an exercise in decadence, but it turned out to be a cracker of a book. It’s a historical novel set in Carthage during the Mercenary War, a generation before Hannibal terrorised the Romans. Essentially, it follows the siege of Carthage by an army of soldiers who weren’t paid for their previous defence of the city. I don’t think the style is as good as in Madame Bovary, but it is a much more interesting plot. I’m likely to read more of Flaubert’s texts in the near future.
... and I have to say it is a very strange book. I’m not entirely certain what to think of it. I thought the first section was wonderful in its a evocation of time and space - solid but also dreamlike - it had an immediacy, yet also the melancholy of looking back to a lost time. But the remaining two parts I found very weird and surreal. I’m a bit baffled by the narrator too, François Seurel, who was oddly passive, and difficult to read. I felt very ambivalent about him in the end. He seems to end up with nothing, while everyone else had some kind of resolution, although they seemingly have the ability to extract nourishment and a living from fresh air ... still, I enjoyed it. Just very odd. It put me in mind of films like The Royal Tenenbaums.
This morning I finished Sunset Park which is superb: a wonderfully detailed look at a group of people drawn together almost at random and the effects of both that and years that they have lived separately before. It might be the first Auster novel I have read, somewhere I have his The New York Trilogy which I think I may have read but too long ago to remember anything now.
Continue reading...
Poem of the week: The Dogs by Sam Buchan-Watts
This technically ambitious poem may suggest a variety of readings, but it gives vivid, singular life to its subject
The Dogs
My most cherished photographs
transformed overnight into those of dogs:
big horny dogs in their ripest years
hogging the frame for themselves.
April 2, 2016
How spring has blossomed in literature
Bawdy, boozy, brainy Latin poems by minstrels, rebel monks and scholars, best known as the lyrics to Carl Orff’s cantata; the first sequence evokes nature in spring, when “Flora reigns” and from the forest “the chorus of maidens / already promises a thousand joys. Ah!” Dream on, student poet.
Continue reading...
April 1, 2016
Frank Miller's fascist Dark Knight is a very modern archetype
Miller presents Gotham through the ugly lens of a billionaire’s delusional, messianic fantasy – his Bruce Wayne is not so different to Donald Trump
I have a long relationship with The Dark Knight Returns. I first read it in 1990, four years after it came out as a mini-series. I had always hated the silly Batman TV show and I had yawned my way through the stuffy movie version starring Michael Keaton the year before. But Frank Miller’s uber-dark graphic novel reimagining of the Batman mythos captured my 13-year-old imagination. I read it a dozen times and sang its praises to everyone I knew. Eventually, one of my comic-reading friends agreed that he liked it, but made the killer criticism: “Damo, he’s turned Batman into a fascist.”
There’s no doubt Frank Miller is a virtuoso graphic storyteller. A decade after retiring as Batman, the 55-year-old Bruce Wayne returns to the streets, but he’s not that interested in fighting crime. Obsessed by the corruption of the human soul, the caped crusader morphs into a modern messiah. Miller even has Batman “die” at the hands of Superman, so that Wayne can be resurrected as the leader of a new religion.
It’s not much of a leap from Miller’s masked strongman to Donald Trump’s bid for presidency.
Related: Transmetropolitan: the 90s comic that's bang up-to-date on Donald Trump
Continue reading...
Poster poems: nursery rhymes
The rhythms and imagery of childhood verses have inspired poets from Robert Louis Stevenson to Elizabeth Bishop. Now it’s your turn
For most of us, our first exposure to the joys of verse was when we listened to parents or teachers reciting nursery rhymes and learned to repeat them ourselves. The pleasure in rhyme, rhythm, image and repetition that kids derive from these poems is sometimes lost as we grow older, but for most of us it never fully goes away; it morphs into a delight in song, or indeed poetry.
Given the hold they can have over our imaginations, it’s hardly surprising many poets have drawn on nursery rhymes as a source of inspiration. Sometimes this results in a poem that is closely based on a particular rhyme, in other instances it can be more to do with a general tone.
Continue reading...
March 30, 2016
14 hour days, marketing and dealing with snobbery: my life as a self-published bestseller
I’ve sold 2m copies of my five novels, but I am still not considered a ‘serious’ author because I self-publish
Ros Barber: ‘For me, traditional publishing means poverty. But self-publish? No way.’Last week I looked at the complex set of spreadsheets I use to track my ebook sales and gave a whoop of delight: I had just sold my two-millionth book, something I would never in my wildest dreams have considered possible just over four years ago, particularly as the vast majority of those sales were achieved through self-publishing. Initially my most ambitious target had been to sell a thousand copies.
It’s been quite a journey, and all the more exciting for being so totally unexpected. There is no point denying that I became self-published because I wasn’t able to interest an agent in my first book. I had originally written Only the Innocent for my own benefit and pleasure, but I was encouraged by family to give publishing a go. I contacted 12 literary agents, and they weren’t all negative. At least two said they enjoyed the book, but it wasn’t the type of story publishers were looking for.
Many people believe that if the writing was good, the author would be offered a traditional publishing deal
Related: For me, traditional publishing means poverty. But self-publish? No way
Related: I didn't want to resort to self-publishing, but it's an exhilarating change
Continue reading...
March 29, 2016
Luke Wright: 'I wanted my story to work on the page and the stage'
The author explains how a theatre director helped him take What I Learned from Johnny Bevan – an epic poem about a middle-class journalist who falls under the spell of a working-class poet – all the way to Edinburgh
I consider What I Learned from Johnny Bevan an epic poem. I can say that here, this newspaper being the refuge of broad-minded, artistic types who won’t balk at such grandiloquence. But for the last year I’ve been describing it to most people as a “play” to save the frayed nerves of Britain’s regional theatre managers. “An epic poem, eh? That sounds really … long.”
Related: Edinburgh festival review: What I Learned from Johnny Bevan – powerfully poetic storytelling
Related: Political poetry with Luke Wright and Hollie McNish – books podcast
Continue reading...
March 28, 2016
Interview with a Bookstore: London's Lutyens and Rubinstein
Two friends opened a shop that only sold the books they loved to read: sixteen years later, they’re a staple of Notting Hill. The women behind Lutyens and Rubinstein talk regulars, snow flurries and their favourite bookshops
Interview with a Bookstore from Literary Hub is part of the Guardian Books Network
Sarah Lutyens and Felicity Rubinstein have been running their eponymous literary agency since 1993. By 2009, they had been talking – not entirely seriously – about opening a bookshop for some time. Changes in the industry, and in particular in the trade meant that the kind of books that are the backbone of their agency were finding less and less space in bookshops. Publishers were voraciously looking for the kind of books that fit into the Waterstones 2-for-3 offering, and the supermarkets had gone into selling paperbacks in a big way. Lutyens and Rubinstein’s magical thinking was that a shop that exclusively sold the kind of books they and their friends love to read might actually fill a gap in the market. From the moment its doors opened seven years ago, Lutyens & Rubinstein has enjoyed an ever-expanding band of loyal customers, in spite of the rise of Amazon and the Kindle.
Continue reading...
March 25, 2016
Why James Patterson’s fiction factory is lining up the ‘shots’
The prolific American novelist is to engage more readers with ‘BookShots’ – cheap, concise page-turners that can be read in one sitting
The fiction factory run by the hyperprolific American novelist James Patterson is to increase productivity, he revealed this week. The extra titles, two to four a month, will be cheap page-turners labelled BookShots, all under 150 pages and so readable in one go. “You can race through these – they’re like reading movies,” he said.
While a mixture of evangelical motives (getting non-readers reading again) and commercial ones (flogging books to them) are discernible in the initiative, its most compelling aspect is the call to revert to the principles set out by Edgar Allan Poe in a much-quoted 1846 essay on fiction composition, including rigorous plotting and not being “too long to be read at one sitting” (otherwise “unity of impression” – above all, narrative tension – is lost).
Continue reading...
How self-published novel Jalan Jalan took flight with an Asian publisher
Mike Stoner couldn’t find a publisher for his story of an expat’s dark days in Indonesia – until he looked east
As soon as I read Mike Stoner’s self-published novel, Jalan Jalan, I had a feeling that it ought to be able to find a commercial publisher. The book was the last winner of the Guardian’s self-published book of the month, which picked seven books from open submissions between June and December 2014 and reviewed them on the site. I followed the series from the start, but Jalan Jalan was the first entry to really catch my attention. The tale follows a heartbroken young Brit through Indonesia, where he finds himself embroiled in a murky world at the bottom of the expat barrel after accepting a teaching job at a dodgy language school after a five-minute telephone interview.
Josh Lacey called it an “involving tale of self-transformation, and a welcome blast of heat and spice”. It’s all that and more; a curious blend of Alex Garland and Nick Hornby with a ghost thrown in for good measure. It has some memorable drug- and alcohol-fuelled set pieces, lots of very funny dialogue, and lashings of tropical atmosphere. But it also has a more complex, moving and rather magical core. The protagonist – whose name is not revealed until the final chapter – is haunted by memories of his dead girlfriend, and as the book progresses it becomes clear that there is more going on here than mere misadventure in a foreign land.
Continue reading...
The Guardian's Blog
- The Guardian's profile
- 9 followers
