The Guardian's Blog, page 132
May 1, 2014
International prize for Arabic fiction turns to Iraq
Iraqi novelist Ahmed Saadawi has won the Arab world's most prestigious prize, the International prize for Arabic fiction, beating five other writers from around the Arab world.
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April 30, 2014
The Bad Grammar awards are prize stupidity
It's a big night on Thursday at the Idler Academy, which hosts its second annual Bad Grammar awards. The founder Tom Hodgkinson promises "a thrilling X-factor for pedants".
This year's judges Jeremy Paxman, restaurateur Rowley Leigh and the Guardian's own Hadley Freeman will be assessing a shortlist that includes Tesco (for their "most tastiest" orange juice and a fewer/less confusion), the cafe chain Apostrophe, for the apostrophe in its slogan ("Great taste on it's way"), and shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt, teased in the House of Commons by Michael Gove for misusing a semicolon and committing the sin of tautology.
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April 29, 2014
English language offenders: show us examples of bad grammar
Spotted any misuses of language by people and institutions who should know better? Share your photos via GuardianWitness
Grammatical mistakes crop up everywhere and are always a subject of lively discussion among our readers. Be it the Bad Grammar awards, the shortlist for which includes offenders such as the NHS, Tesco and Tristam Hunt, or the over-enthusiastic use of 'literally', any grammar-related subjects always spark passionate conversations.
With that in mind, we pass the judgment over to you: we want to see examples of poor grammar you have encountered. And as we know that typos and mistakes are hard to avoid ahem we want to focus not on easy targets but on "people and institutions who should know better", as the Bad Grammar awards put it.
The BFG needs careful handling, Mr Spielberg
News broke over the weekend that Steven Spielberg is set to direct a film of The BFG. It'll be the story's second adaptation; in 1989 it was made into an animated TV film. This one will be live action, say reports; the script will be by ET scriptwriter Melissa Mathison, and it's due to come out in 2016.
I'm in two minds about the news. The BFG is such a huge part of my childhood reading; of the masses and acres of books I roared through, it stands out as one of the few titles of which I remember whole chunks, even today, almost verbatim. The thought of frobscottle still enchants me delumptious, with its downwards-whizzing bubbles, and its taste of raspberries and vanilla. "'Whenever I is feeling a bit scrotty,' the BFG said, 'a few gollops of frobscottle is always making me hopscotchy again.'"
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Seafaring stories with very different destinations
You know how it is with buses wait forever and then three come along at once? Well, the same thing happened to me last year, only with books. I had just published my first. It is an ethnography about seafarers: that is to say, it is a detailed account of the life of seafarers based on observational and interview research. It was published as I was in my 14th year at the Seafarers International Research Centre studying seafarers and the wider shipping industry. The book took a long time to research, involving five voyages (on two tankers, two refrigerated ships, and a rusty bulk carrier), time spent in north Germany with unemployed transmigrant seafarers, and time in India with seafarers' wives, and it took a long time to write. It was a long time, too, from the date the manuscript was submitted to the book's appearance on the shelf.
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Pelicans are back: readers' old copies - in pictures
In light of the relaunching of Penguin's famous blue-spined non-fiction books, we turned to Twitter to ask for photos of your treasured old copies. Here is our old-school gallery with a selection of your dated but always erudite Pelicans
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April 28, 2014
Reading Scribd's international reader survey
Apparently, the Germans are the world's fastest readers. That's according to an "internationval infographic" from Scribd, which has analysed (an unspecified amount of) data from the site's "growing international community" to come up with various intriguing facts.
So Germans are speediest, followed by the Dutch, the Spanish, the Swedes and the Malaysians. America comes in 14th place in terms of reading speed, according to Scribd. No word on where the UK fits in, but I'm hoping we squeak into the top 10.
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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 week's blog. Here's a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
The Easter break has led several on great book binges. For instance, Catherine Raynor has had a fruitful holiday, with a reading rate of almost a book a day:
Day six of the holiday: book four of six underway; there may be a shopping trip required before day 16!
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24 April 2014, 5:34
And disagreed over the correct use of the semi-colon. There's only one book to settle the argument!
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By Chris James
23 April 2014, 7:08
About halfway through Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh. What a jewel of a novel this is: it seethes with the heat, anger and violence of a peculiar Indian summer, but there is a crystalline quality in the prose that makes for very agreeable reading.
If the second half of the book is as good as the first, this may receive a coveted place on my favourites list.
Shipwreck book Rescue of the Bounty by Tougias: As a sailor, I love all books about being on the sea, even those that end badly! I feel we all can learn from others' mistakes, and this author (Tougias) has a good track record for telling such stories. In Rescue of the Bounty, he crosses from individual captains' mistakes to the phenomena of group think, in which the whole crew of this big wooden ship (from Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty and Pirates of the Caribbean movies) doesn't question the decision to attempt sailing around a massive hurricane that they all knew about. It ends in disaster, but with a thrilling birds-eye view from the rescue copters.
John, you are a bit wimpish in your approach to the 'borrowed' Keats. I have in mind a service provided by cat-burglars who, for a small fee, will break into houses and retrieve mis-borrowed books. For an additional fee they could also spot rare and interesting books on the borrowers' shelves that you might like to have.
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By Joaker
24 April 2014, 3:23
In answer to 'what book gets stolen or borrowed forever?', I could probably list three or four LPs that I've had to replace a few times over the years. But only one book stands out and that is O'Brian's Master and Commander.
I always keep a copy ready to lend. For some reason, although most people have said that they loved it, I rarely get it back, and always replace it with a £1 copy from the market for the next time someone wants to read it.
Re-reading my all time top 4 books. All as good as I remember them.
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By EveMaria
23 April 2014, 23:01
I'm flying through as in I started it yesterday and will finish it today Bad News, the second part in Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series. I enjoyed the first in the series very much, but would still say this second part is a substantial improvement.
I finished Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which I thought was very, very good indeed. Perhaps a spot uneven, but still very moving, and funny and in particular very thoughtful, emotionally. You can really see how he influenced William Saroyan My Name is Aram, one of my favourite books ever, in particular bears huge similarities. I do prefer it to Anderson, however.
There are probably no compliments left to be paid to Bring up the Bodies, which I've just finished. I'm still walking in Cromwell's world, if still alive - what a bloodbath! But there's little to beat this novel for un-put-down-ability despite its requirement for close and slow reading. But wonderful humour too. It's a chunky novel but I'm also a big short story fan and look at this site, based in Canada, most days: http://commuterlit.com/2013/04/thursday-longing/
A stunning portrayal of a once well off family in the throes of madness brought on by the pervasive threat of poverty in 1940's Barcelona, narrated by Andrea, a niece who comes to spend a year with her relatives, expecting anything but that which unfolds. Intense, beautiful, extraordinary, spellbinding.
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By RedBirdFlies
27 April 2014, 13:09
About fifty pages into The Grapes of Wrath. Very good so far.
Only 50 pages in? I'm jealous. I had to read it in high school (a mere half-century ago) and was enormously uplifted by Steinbeck's paean to the resilience of the human spirit. Immediately following, I had to read Lord of The Flies and was stunned by Golding's warning of the human savagery simmering just beneath that oh so fragile hymen of civility. After absorbing these two magnificent novels I remember thinking, Boy, are we ever a mixed-up bunch of coconuts.
Just one book this week.
"Sahib" by Richard Holmes. For all those fans of Kipling, John Masters and Frank Richards. The British soldier in India prior to World War One in all his foul-mouthed glory. Neville Chamberlain (not the PM) is frequently quoted as of course are Kipling and Richards.
I'm left with a question. Did anyone write a history of the "John Company's Regiments?"
I just finished You Should Have Known. It was wonderful. The author has captured a slice of Manhattanites, some of whom I had observed years ago as a young mother. The geography is wonderful. It is a mystery of sorts: missing person.
I've just finished Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question. I began by laughing - sometimes out loud. But by the time I got to the end, I simply felt ground down, as if I had been hit over the head repeatedly by a large hard foam mallet with the word 'Jewish' emblazoned on it. To be fair, this pretty much approximates the way I imagine its characters feeling. Ultimately I think that, while offering absolutely no answers to its never quite articulated 'question' (how could it do either?), this novel was paradoxically too didactic for me. I preferred Kalooki Nights.
@GuardianBooks: a request, if I may? Please make it policy to always name the translator in a review.
There are over 3000 written languages. Most of us only understand one or two of them. Without translators, all the books in all the other languages would not exist for us. We need translators. We need to give them credit. They go unmentioned too often.
@GuardianBooks No1. Ladies Detective series as part of my 52 books in 52 weeks challenge!
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Poem of the week: The Work by Niall Campbell
Niall Campbell's first full-length collection, Moontide, published last week by Bloodaxe, reveals an un-showy craftsman, feet firmly on good local ground, even as his imagination takes off. Campbell is not given to self-conscious pronouncements about poetry, which is perhaps why, when he ventures into that territory in this week's poem, The Work, the result is gently, wittily illuminating.
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Edward St Aubyn joins the grand tradition of literary revenge
Literature about literature is booming. The early months of 2014 alone have seen novels depicting Thomas Hardy (by Christopher Nicholson), Mr and Mrs Hemingway (Naomi Wood), Nuala O'Faolain (Hugo Hamilton), Baudelaire (James MacManus), the Blakes and the Mandelstams (David Park), Conan Doyle (Valerie Martin) and EM Forster (Damon Galgut). John Banville produced a homage to Raymond Chandler, Val McDermid an affectionate update of Jane Austen.
Among the highest profile titles have been a memoir-like "novel" about the life of a novelist (Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Death in the Family), and a novel about a novelist researching a biography of a novelist, generally assumed to be based on VS Naipaul (Hanif Kureishi's The Last Word).
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