The Guardian's Blog, page 136
April 10, 2014
Books set in Hull can be as gritty as any Nordic noir. So why the snobbery?
Hull is the only city on Earth where I have pulled my car over to take a picture of a skyline so exquisite I was willing to risk death to stare at it.
The lights of the city flickered like the embers of a dying fire; a necklace of gold weaving through the harp strings of the great bridge that stitches Yorkshire to Lincolnshire. The Humber estuary reflected back a fiery sun and a shotgun-blast of crows and seagulls whirled above of the distant rooftops of the great Victorian buildings. The masts of the pleasure craft that bobbed in the marina disappeared into a purple sky; stirred by a breeze redolent with the mixed scents of sea-spray, crushed fruit and diesel oil.
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Which books make you feel stupid?
This blog post, "On the Perils of Feeling Dumb While Reading", struck a shame-inducing chord with me this morning. The author, Swapna Krishna, talks about how "you pick up a book you've been looking forward to, a 'smart' book that everyone and their mother has loved, settle down with it, start reading, and You hate it. Or maybe you don't hate it, but you certainly don't love it like everyone else seems to. And you can't help but ask yourself, 'Is it me? Am I just not smart enough for this book?'"
Krishna talks about books by Neil Gaiman and China Mieville as inducing this feeling; commenters on the article addGillian Flynn's Gone Girl, and George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.
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April 9, 2014
Men: let us know about female characters you admire
As part of a campaign to challenge the targeting of children's books to boys or girls, we want to see boys breaking the clichés and reading about girl characters or men telling us which female characters they admired as kids
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The fight to stop book publishers from labelling books as gender-specific is on. The Let Books Be Books campaign, launched recently to coincide with International Women's Day, was met with instant success: over 2,000 signatures in one day, authors such as the former children's laureate Anne Fine joining in and publisher Usborne stating that they will "discontinue publication of titles" such as the pink Girl's Activity Book and the blue, robot-themed Boys' Activity Book.
However strong public opinion may be, colouring books which are marketed specifically for boys or girls still sell three times as many copies as books without any sexual categorisation, said the owner of Buster Books in our previous piece. The campaign was launched by the same group of parents who are pushing retailers to cut down on sexism in toys.
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April 8, 2014
Shakespeare's The Tempest: to be read or watched? That is the question
I discovered the following in my Penguin edition of The Tempest: "He is the greatest of poets, but he is essentially a dramatic poet. Though his plays have much to offer readers, they exist fully only in the performance."
That's a quote from Stanley Wells, the general editor of the entire Penguin Shakespeare series, which I'm assuming appears in every Penguin Shakespeare out there at the moment, and is a pretty brave thing for a man who is supposed to be selling books to say. The implication is that you're better off spending time and money on a performance. A sentiment that has also cropped up in the comments on this month's Reading Group articles.
There is a problem here. Shakespeare's plays are for seeing in performance. Reading them, even for an experienced performer, is heavy going. To read any play with a large cast, it's hard to keep track of who is who and their relationships with each other. Harder still to remember who is in the scene and not saying much. Some people say you can improve things with a chess board and named pieces and lots of different voices. Reading a play aloud in an upstairs pub room would be even better but not what we have here.
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
'Tis new to thee.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Fiction's fantasy dinner dates
In last week's Tips Links and Suggestions the conversation turned to an old party game: fantasy dinner companions. fat_hamster started it by proposing a night out with Game of Thrones' Tyrion Lanister, while conedison preferred Augustus McCrae, from Larry McMurtry's 1986 Pulitzer-winner Lonesome Dove, "because he's Sir Lancelot in spurs with a great sense of humour."
The conversation that followed was so delightful that we're going to leave it in dialogue form:
Tim Hannigan: I think for me its the same answer I give to pretty much every "which fictional character..." question - Yossarian...
fat_hamster: "Catch 22. Can I join you? Well, me and Tyrion.
conedison:
"I, too, love Yossarian, but as a dinner companion I fear breaking bread with him might well be a mournful affair.
fat_hamster: "A dinner party with Yossarion, Tyrion and Augustus would be worth having."
Trevor Edward Walder: "Rose Mary Duck from John Masters Bhowani Junction. Why? Because for some reason I'm captivated by mixed race/Muslim female second-line characters in JM's books. She in a lot of ways was the original for all of them.
fat_hamster: "Oh good, a lady, it was about to get a bit laddish. She better not mind Tyrion's table manners."
conedison: "If Rose Mary Duck is the character who became Victoria Jones in the movie version (Ava Gardner), she is more than welcome."
April 7, 2014
Flesh-crawling page-turners: the books bound in human skin
It is inscribed with the disturbing information that "the bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632".
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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, which featured a brilliant conversation about fictional dinner guests stay tuned for a follow-up on that later and a heavy historical theme.
The World War I anniversary is prompting many of our readers to read on the subject, as a lot of this week's GuardianWitness submissions prove. For instance:
I've just started reading Goddamn This War! from the excellent Jaques Tardi. The comic gives an enthralling and horrifying view of life in the trenches from the perspective of a French soldier. Tardi's artwork is superb.
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By Matt Rice
7 April 2014, 3:05
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3 April 2014, 17:22
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By kisunssi
3 April 2014, 19:47
Decided to get a copy of Lanark when I heard about the referendum. I remembered being told about Gray's political persuasion after watching Under The Skin. Something is calling me toward Scottish dystopia. Not sure whose side I'm on at the moment but it's a fascinating read and oddly fitting parallel to current events.
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4 April 2014, 6:19
An amazing book full of reflexions and hard critiques on our current societies. Absolutely worth reading!
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3 April 2014, 23:33
Being of somewhat mature years I'm frequently taken aback by what now comes into the history category, and have been known to rummage for the smelling salts when a TV series set in the 60s (1960s for god's sake) is described as period drama.
I give thanks that I've never had to face the tragedy, complications, challenges and privations of life during the second world war, or in Stalin's USSR.
I love Hilary Mantel's vision of Tudor England and enjoyed both Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies.
As it is the centenary year of WW1 I would say that Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy comes very high on the list of books about that war and is a book that I go back to from time to time.
Fiction and some non fiction (Just Kids) in an ever growing pile fed by London's bookshops and the library (It's my Carrie Bradshaw thing)
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4 April 2014, 13:45
I read about 7 books at a time. About 1/2 of my reading is virtual in ebook format, very handy to carry around. However nothing beats a real book!
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By Susan Sedlak
3 April 2014, 15:46
Unusually the bedside table sees two volumes set aside with markers still protruding. But I'll return and finish them when the time, and the frame of mind is right.
Jose Saramago is a new one for me, with a writing style that reminds of the very enjoyable Terry Darlington. But we are in different times, Portuguese poverty. I'll finish Raised From The Ground one day.
And if I get bogged down I'll look at some pictures.
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By TimmRanson
3 April 2014, 16:00
Quarantine. Jim Crace.
(SnowyJohn, in particular).
I feel pretty similar. I thought some of the writing was tremendous, but it felt like an exercise at times. An exercise in various things: writing an ensemble of characters, delivering a convincing evocation of the period, nature writing, dealing with the Gospels in a convincingly naturalistic way and he pulls it all off. It was just that for some reason I felt like the end result was less than the sum of its parts. Maybe thats because its so daring, though? I circled the phrase Jesus thought at the beginning of one of the earlier chapters, because its such a jarring phrase to read when were used to that being almost a taboo to deal with.
Interesting, and memorable, and thoughtful, but a tease of a book too (this probably stems a bit from the question of the narrator's emotional investment or opinion being absent, which fat_hamster raised). Is that a bad thing? I dont know.
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4 April 2014, 10:49
Went to see, Noah, this afternoon and while I've not read anything else by this particular Author, as usual, the Book was better than the Movie.
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Baileys shortlist 2014: which writers will make the cut?
Baileys longlist - in pictures and reviews
The shortlist for the 2014 Baileys prize will be announced tonight - so who do you think deserves to be on it?
After the flutterings and flusterings provoked by the opening up of the Man Booker prize to Americans for the first time, how many of the eight US shortlistees will make the final six? Do you think any of the four shortlisted British novels will get to the next stage? Might Booker-winning Eleanor Catton be in for the double with her gold-prospecting epic The Luminaries, or will Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie continue the global ascendancy that last month won her the US National Book Critics Circle award?
Here's a refresher of the writers and books in the running:
Ten Korean writers on a country sawn in half
After two years of political hot potatoes first China and then Turkey this year's "market focus" country presents a different challenge to the London Book Fair, which runs this week: who wants to read books from Korea? The choice of name could be dismissed as opportunistically misleading: Korea is two countries, but the 10 writers who will be at the book fair are all from the south.
We're desperate to hear the inside story of North Korea because it is the stuff of nightmares, locked in unending cold war, complete with nuclear bombs aimed at unknown targets. We have no access to the first-hand stories of its citizens, so we rely on western writers, whether of novels, such as Adam Johnson's Pulitzer prizewinning The Orphan Master's Son, or of journalism. Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea won the 2010 Samuel Johnson prize, while John Sweeney was more recently accused of putting a group of London students at risk by joining them incognito to research his book, North Korea Undercover.
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April 4, 2014
Dostoevsky's many screen readings
Richard Ayoade's film of Dostoevsky's novella The Double, starring Jesse Eisenberg, has just been released. Can the man from The IT Crowd measure up? Not to the Russian novelist, but to the illustrious directors who've previously had a stab at filming his work
Raskolnikow (Robert Wiene, 1923)
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