The Guardian's Blog, page 141

Poster poems: Trees

The storms may batter them, but resilient trees inspire fairy tales, myths, horror stories and even philosophy. And hopefully, you

The most visible result of the high winds we celebrated in last month's challenge is the large number of uprooted, knocked down, and generally damaged trees lying around the place. We even lost Ireland's contender for European Tree of the Year, a 200-year-old giant grey poplar that stood in the grounds of Birr Castle, County Offaly. There's something about the sight of a prematurely-fallen tree that tugs on the heartstrings, perhaps because we've lived in such close interdependency with forests and orchards for so long. It's a sense of loss that drives Charlotte Mew's poem The Trees are Down.

Trees have been putting down roots in poetry for centuries – the great world tree Yggdrasil is planted right at the heart of the Icelandic Poetic Edda. This ash is the conduit between the nine worlds of Norse mythology, standing at the core of the old Scandinavian cosmology. As befits a tree, it is the source of life's vitality, feeding a host of animals without any apparent diminution of its own powers. The Scandinavian reverence for the forest may also be responsible for giving us the Christmas tree. Be that as it may, the Yuletide fir has a magic all its own, far removed from the dark world of Odin and Thor. EE Cummings' poem beginning "little tree" captures the sense of childhood wonder before the tree better than any other poem I know.

In Ireland, trees are often treated with a special reverence, thanks to folk traditions that associate them with the world of the fairies, a diminished version of the old, pagan Gods. These beliefs are frequently conflated with later Christian practices, so that the country is dotted with fairy or holy trees that nobody would consider felling for fear of possible supernatural consequences. In her poem The Fairy Tree, Temple Lane captures the essence of these folk traditions. A setting of the poem was one of the most popular songs in Irish tenor John McCormack's repertoire.

The turning of a human into a tree at the behest of some irate god or other is a common theme in classical mythology, with the story of how Daphne became a laurel being the most well-known example. Australian poet Richard James Allen adds an original twist to the tale in a poem called, quite simply, Tree.

In Renaissance England, the greenwood was a somewhat more benign environment, a sylvan utopia where life was good and peace reigned supreme. It's a recurring theme in Elizabethan poetry, but few captured it more succinctly than Shakespeare in As You Like it, a play set in the Forest of Arden and especially in the song Under the Greenwood Tree.

Well, our trees have certainly suffered enough "winter and rough weather" this year, but spring is here, more or less, and the first buds are showing on the branches of the survivors. As William Carlos Williams puts it, "the profound change/has come upon them". Trees are nothing if not resilient creatures and it takes more than a bit of a breeze to knock them off their stride.

Of all the poets who have written about trees, few lived with them as much as inveterate walker, climber and woodsman Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth doesn't write about the forest so much as enter into specific individual trees and his oaks, plums, fir and redwoods are not just the furniture of his Toward an Organic Philosophy; they are the joists and beams that hold the edifice together and give it its unity.

And so, this month's challenge is to compose poems in honour of trees: mythical or real; magical or ordinary; forest, jungle or garden, it's all the same. Please share your arboreal odes here.

Trees and forestsPoetryBilly Mills
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Want to read quicker? There's an app for that

Spritz uses text streaming technology to impove your reading speed – but will it really get you through Atlas Shrugged?

Last month, I messed around with a site that told me I read at 889 words per minute. I didn't believe it; I might be fast, but I'm not that fast. However, a new app is promising I could get faster, provided I'm prepared to get "spritzing".

Here's how it works. When we're reading normal text, claims the team behind Spritz, a Boston-based startup focused on text streaming technology that launched at last month's Mobile World Congress, "the eye seeks a certain point within the word, which we call the optimal recognition point, or ORP. After your eyes find the ORP, your brain starts to process the meaning of the word that you're viewing". Your eyes then move to find the next ORP.

Apparently, "when reading, only around 20% of your time is spent processing content. The remaining 80% is spent physically moving your eyes from word to word and scanning for the next ORP".

The Spritz app gives you text with the ORP at the point where you're already looking, so you can read without moving your eyes. In "stealth" development for three years, it's intended for use not only with email and social media, but also digital books. "Atlas Shrugged in a day? You betcha. We are currently working with some pretty big players in this field," says the app's website.

You can try spritzing at spritzinc.com. At 600 words a minute I can, indeed, keep up. But I'm still nowhere near Dan Holloway, who, astonishingly, told us last month that "for a couple of years [I] was reading anything up to 10 books and journals a day". His technique is quite different from Spritz's, though: "If I'm speed reading, I always use a 'guide', be it a pen or my finger, to inscribe shapes on the page (usually a lazy 'S' shape with two curves) to guide my eyes," he wrote on my blog.

Anyway, spritzing is quite fun, and it seems to work. But the issue for me, which I think would stop me using it to read books, is the level of concentration it requires. You can't look away from the screen for a second, or you'd be utterly at sea. It's the only way I'd ever read Atlas Shrugged, though: strapped down, Clockwork Orange-style, in front of a spritzing book. The horror! The horror!

AppsAlison Flood
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Baileys Women's prize for fiction – longlist predictions

As the judges prepare to reveal their longlist, there's time for a final look at the tipped authors – and a chance to recommend our own

The 20 titles shortlisted for the Baileys Women's prize for fiction – the award formerly known as the Orange – will be revealed tomorrow, so it's time to make our predictions. "158 titles to discuss with 4 brilliant judges. What will we choose?" tweeted judge Helen Fraser yesterday. What, indeed?

From a glance at the literary blogs, some titles are mentioned as potential contenders again and again. Mrs Hemingway, by Naomi Wood. Americanah, by former Orange prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud. The Booker-winning The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.

At Farm Lane Books, blogger Jackie says it's been "an amazing year for female writers", and tips Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird and Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things, among others. At The Writes of Women, they're tipping Mr Loverman by Bernadine Evaristo, Eimear McBride's Folio-shortlisted A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Helen Dunmore's The Lie, Helen Walsh's The Lemon Grove and Jill Dawson's The Tell-Tale Heart.

A Case for Books throws in Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, Louise Erdrich's The Round House, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers and Evie Wyld's All the Birds, Singing.

Checking out Twitter would have you believe that Louise Doughty's Apple Tree Yard and Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings should also be in the running. (Yes, definitely, to the Doughty; haven't read The Interestings).

At the Huffington Post, they're hoping that more "commercial" fiction will get a look in this year, and that, with the rebrand, the award won't be "something purely for the broadsheet elite" – that it'll be repositioned, "(like the drink it's now named after) as something warm and inclusive, something feelgood and enjoyable". Authors cited include Lisa Jewell, Natalie Young, Adele Parks and Rowan Coleman.

My hope? That the judges notice the Australian author Chloe Hooper's scarily intense The Engagement, in which an English architect begins a relationship with an Australian cattle magnate. So far, so Mills & Boon, but it quickly spirals into nightmare, as Liese, the architect, finds herself locked in Alexander the cattle man's remote, dark, suffocating house. Hooper was shortlisted for the Orange for her debut, A Child's Book of True Crime; The Engagement is her second novel. And it is a fine, literary thriller; cold, at times almost nauseatingly disturbing.

There's a fantastic section where Liese walks through a dark hallway in Alexander's mansion, trying the closed doors, a scream waiting in her throat. She finds a room, preserved from the past, "a scene trapped in amber". Very Bluebeard. Even the food Alexander cooks takes on an air of menace, the kidneys "soft and firm and dense and pissy". And there's something off about the beauty of the bush. "We'd just driven over the rise and seen the mountains. It was as though a backdrop had fallen, perhaps the wrong one," Liese tells us. The birdsong is dissonant. "White cockatoos clung to these branches and the air was filled with their dinning: a killing sound like nothing I'd heard before."

It's hard not to love an author who can write like this: "Cold surged through me – I had invited him into my most private room. Once there, he'd taken my fantasy and bent it out of shape. Bent it until, by the thinnest, finest chance, I found I'd slid somewhere dank, unknown. I was inside the room in his head and he had locked the door."

So, The Engagement: my bet. How about you? We've got a day to come up with our predictions before judges Caitlin Moran, Mary Beard, Helen Fraser, Denise Mina and Sophie Raworth announce their own picks for the £30,000 award's longlist.

Women's prize for fictionFictionAwards and prizesChloe HooperDonna TarttHelen DunmoreEleanor CattonChimamanda Ngozi AdichieClaire MessudJhumpa LahiriCaitlin MoranMary BeardAlison Flood
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World Book Day: The 10 best teen reads

From The Hunger Games to Jane Eyre the World Book Day list of top teen tomes is full of books to inspire teen readers. But what have they missed off?

As the sixth What Kids Are Reading report bemoans a tendency among secondary school students to read books that are too easy – suggesting that teachers and librarians aren't pushing challenging titles strongly enough to older kids – the organisers of World Book Day have announced a list that might serve as a corrective, or at least a useful source of ideas. The Writes of Passage list of popular books for young adults, voted for by 7,000 people across the UK, features a top 10 of books to help "shape and inspire" teenagers, and give them the empathic tools and words to handle some of the challenges of adolescence. The complete list of 50 features books to "help you understand you", "change the way you think" and "make you cry", as well as thrill, transport and scare you. And it's quite substantial.

On the longer list are plenty of writers who are surely grown-up by anyone's standards, including Emily Brontë, Anthony Burgess, F Scott Fitzgerald and Alice Walker. The top 10 includes another Brontë (Charlotte), Harper Lee and George Orwell, and more young-adult stalwarts such as Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins and John Green. There's a broad mixture of genre and theme – from JRR Tolkien's high-fantasy elves and orcs to the poignant contemporary realism of Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower. There's also dystopia, classic and contemporary – 1984 and The Hunger Games – and plenty of heartbreak, whether in The Diary of a Young Girl, To Kill a Mockingbird or Green's The Fault in Our Stars.

The top 10 is also particularly heavy on books that have been made into films: all but one have already graced the big screen, or are shortly to do so, testifying to the cinematic contribution to a book's success (a bestselling title is made into a film, and then acquires more readers from people who see the film first). Even James Bowen's A Streetcat Named Bob, perhaps the most surprising top 10 inclusion, might also make the leap – following a sustained spell on the bestseller lists, Bowen's agent has been in talks about a possible adaptation. The heartening story of Bob, the cat who helped straighten out the homeless busker he adopted, is one of the more recently published books on the list as it was only released in 2012. Bowen's clear, unsensational account of becoming slowly visible again after homelessness erased him from most people's view packs serious claws beneath the fluffy fur.

Some might be surprised, too, to see JK Rowling on a top 10 for teens. For me, the Harry Potter books are definitely more middle-grade fiction than young adult, but they're something of a special case, becoming more challenging and progressively darker throughout the series as Harry and his cohort grow up. And they've undoubtedly done an enormous amount to draw readers in, young and old, to some degree mitigating the notion that books are just for geeks (or kids). Despite the plethora of escapist fantasy trappings, Rowling poses some knotty questions about standing up to authority, challenging social norms and sacrificing everything for an ideal: all preoccupations close to the hearts of most teen readers.

As a confirmed orc-hater, I would have swapped The Lord of The Rings for another title from the longer list – perhaps Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses, or RJ Palacio's Wonder. And the inclusion of Twilight in the top 50, in the category of books that teach you about love, gives me a colossal case of the heebie-jeebies (I'd like to see a special category for it: examples of what not to wish for). But the list is thought-provoking, wide-ranging, and should provide anyone who wants one with a title that'll suit their situation or their mood.

What do you think are the most glaring omissions? Which are your top teen tomes?

Top 10 books

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
5. 1984 by George Orwell
6. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
7. A Streetcat Named Bob by James Bowen
8. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
9. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Top 50 books that will …

Change the way you think
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman
Wonder by RJ Palacio
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Help you understand you
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
The Outsiders by SE Hinton

Make you cry
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
Before I Die by Jenny Downham
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

Make you laugh
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend
Geek Girl by Holly Smale
Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
Angus, Thongs and Full-frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison

Scare you
1984 by George Orwell
Lord Loss by Darren Shan
The Rats by James Herbert
The Shining by Stephen King
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Teach you about love
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Forever by Judy Blume
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Thrill you
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Gone by Michael Grant
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Transport you
Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

World Book DayChildren and teenagersLiteracyImogen Russell Williams
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning's five best poems

Google is prompting browsers across the land to discover a brilliant Victorian poet. Here's a very brief primer on a bold and brilliant talent

A Google doodle brings Elizabeth Browning to mind this morning on what would have been her 208th birthday. She was an extraordinary woman who fiercely opposed the slavery on which her family's fortune was founded, while struggling with lifelong illness. She was incredibly well-read, though according to her husband and fellow-poet Robert Browning she was "self-taught in almost every respect", and became the first female poet ever to be considered for poet laureate – though Tennyson was chosen to follow Wordsworth instead. But what about the poems? Her work has, arguably, endured better than that of her husband ("Home Thoughts from Abroad" and its "gaudy melon-flower" excepted). Here are a few to get you started:

"How Do I Love Thee?" (Sonnet 43) is probably Barrett Browning's most famous poem today. The victim of a thousand wedding readings, it is part of her Sonnets from the Portuguese cycle, and was written during her courtship with Robert Browning.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight F
or the ends of being and ideal grace."

Here's another love poem from the Portuguese cycle, too, 14. According to the Poetry Foundation, the title Sonnets from the Portuguese was selected the Brownings "in order to make it appear that the poems had no biographical significance … as if they were translations". The public weren't fooled. "A writer in Fraser's magazine immediately appreciated their distinctive quality: 'From the Portuguese they may be: but their life and earnestness must prove Mrs Browning either to be the most perfect of all known translators, or to have quickened with her own spirit the framework of another's thought, and then modestly declined the honour which was really her own'."

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say,
"I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,— "

Barrett Browning's long narrative poem Aurora Leigh is the story of the eponymous heroine's life, and is, according to its author, "the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered". Virginia Woolf called it "a masterpiece in embryo". It opens:

"OF writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will write now for mine,–
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is."

The Cry of the Children is the poet's look at the lives of children working in mines and factories, and a moving condemnation of child labour. "Even though Barrett was a bookish, sheltered, upper middle-class unmarried woman far removed from the scenes she was describing, she gives evidence here of her passionate concern for human rights," says the Poetry Foundation.

"For oh," say the children, "we are weary,
      And we cannot run or leap —
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
      To drop down in them and sleep."

A Musical Instrument uses the goat-god Pan to look at the two-fold nature of art.

"WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan,
   Down in the reeds by the river ?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
   With the dragon-fly on the river."

PoetryGoogle doodleInternetSearch enginesAlison Flood
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Top 10 books about Alaska

From Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild to Jack London's White Fang, discover Brian Payton's favourite books about the land of big dreams and harsh realities

What is Alaska? Rugged homeland of resilient Native Americans, former Russian colony, site of the only battle of the second world war to take place on US soil … wait a minute, second world war battlefield? Believe it. The blind spot most of us have about Alaska is nearly as vast as its geography – it's about seven times the size of the UK. In 1943, one of the toughest and least-known American battles of the war took place in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Discovering this little-known historical fact compelled me to study Alaska's remarkable history and eventually write my second novel, a tale of wartime survival and devotion, The Wind is Not a River.

Alaska is a place at the very limits of the American drive to "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country" – the exhortation made famous by the 19th-century author Horace Greeley. Greeley's advice soon came to be understood in the popular culture as: "Go West, young man, and find your fame and your fortune." Alaska is a place apart from the contiguous United States, and it shares more in common with Canada's Yukon territory and British Columbia. It is a place of big dreams and harsh realities, astounding landscape, curious politics (including a long-standing independence party), midnight summer sun, and shockingly brief winter days. Alaska also offers the increasingly rare opportunity to live in close proximity to vast tracts of wilderness. The following shortlist includes books I discovered while living (briefly) in Alaska, and through gathering research for my novel. This collection of fiction, nonfiction, and verse has found a permanent home on my bookshelf.

1. Coming Into the Country by John McPhee

This book, more than any other I have read, accurately reflected back to me the stark realities and wide-ranging possibilities facing Alaska near the close of the 20th century, while offering insight into what the state might become. McPhee is a grand master of narrative nonfiction. Required reading for anyone who wants to know about the grand themes and petty politics of the largest state in the US.

2. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

A bestselling book and critically acclaimed movie, Into the Wild tells the tale of one young man's search for meaning in wilderness that ends in an abandoned bus in Alaska. The book is about so much more than the state itself. It's also about what people bring to Alaska – disaffection, idealism, the search for reinvention and redemption – that ends up being swallowed by one of the wildest places in North America.

3. Where the Sea Breaks its Back by Corey Ford

This is an extraordinary and compelling account of a 1741-1742 Russian expedition. Ford vividly recounts the story of naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller's voyage to the Aleutian Islands and what would eventually become the colony of Russian America. Wonderful writing and gripping tales of the Russian discovery of the new world.

4. Travels in Alaska by John Muir

The Scottish-American naturalist and explorer showed up in Alaska 138 years after Steller, just a dozen years after the US purchased Alaska from the cash-strapped Russians for about two pennies per acre. This insightful, enthusiastic and closely observed travelogue offers description and language as grandiose as the place itself. "To the lover of pure wildness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world … it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed."

5. Songs of a Sourdough by Robert Service

Service, a British-Canadian poet and writer, was known as "the bard of the Yukon". OK, so it's not Alaska proper, but the state and Canada's Yukon territory are kissing cousins, and share much in the way of folklore and culture. And most prospectors had to travel through Alaska to get to the Klondike goldfields. Service wrote colourful and compulsively entertaining verse about gold rush life in the north. Alaskans try and claim him as their own. As a graduate of Robert Service High School in Anchorage, Alaska, I made a point of memorising Service's The Cremation of Sam McGee. I still have several verses rolling around inside my head.

6. White Fang by Jack London

One of the most popular books by American writer Jack London also happens to be set in the Yukon during the time of the Klondike Gold Rush. The story follows the life story of a wolf-dog hybrid that finds its way from the chaos of famine and violence, in both the natural world and at the jagged edge of human society, to a kind of redemption in a life of domesticity in the care of one gentle man. Brutal and gripping.

7. The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians by Brian Garfield

There are numerous nonfiction accounts of the war in Alaska; first and foremost among those is Garfield's excellent – and compulsively readable – military history of what some call the "forgotten war." Richly detailed and deeply researched, it deserves a far wider audience.

8. Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir by Ray Hudson

A sensitive and insightful account of 28 years living in the Aleutian Islands from the perspective of an outsider. I believe the best reportage is the kind that involves a writer immersing himself or herself in a place, culture and time. These days, being still and letting the story reveal itself is difficult to accomplish and increasingly rare. Ray Hudson offers personal and enriching insight into Aleut culture in this fine memoir.

9. Call of the Wild by Jack London

A novella that preceded White Fang, London's Call of the Wild tells a similarly engrossing tale of sled dogs and men set in the Klondike. Unlike White Fang, with its ultimate redemption, Call of the Wild details a fall from a civilised to a primitive state. Influenced by both Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche, London's most famous work is rich in symbolism and imagery, a blend of allegory and fable about the "survival of the fittest". This classic and enduring tale of the mythic north secured London's place in the cannon of American literature.

10. Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban

The British-born journalist and novelist takes readers on an involving personal and physical journey through fascinating history and waterways to the state that bills itself as "the last frontier". So much about what Alaska really is can only be understood through what it takes to get there. Before the advent of regularly scheduled air service, what one had to do to reach this place profoundly affected its literature. Alaska was one of the last places in North America to be mapped and explored. As Raban well knows, the journey to Alaska can still be transformational.

• Read more top 10 books, as chosen by authors
• Brian Payton is the author of The Wind Is Not a River (Mantle/Pan Macmillan)

FictionAlaska
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It's not only adults who need comfort reading

A new report suggests that children aren't reading challenging enough books. But we all know that revisiting old favourites is a balm in difficult times

A new report into what children are reading at school shows a "marked downturn in difficulty of books at secondary transfer", it was revealed today. The books children are reading in year 7, according to the report What Kids Are Reading, include tons of Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid titles and David Almond's (wonderful) Skellig, along with Roald Dahl's The Twits and George's Marvellous Medicine. By year 7, says the study, which calculates the reading level of a book using software that measures the text's complexity, "students are reading at over a year below their chronological age".

According to the report's author, Professor Keith Topping, this is a "matter for alarm". According to Philip Pullman, speaking on Radio 4 on Wednesday, there's not much need for panic. "Isn't it only the natural thing to do? You go from being a big child in a small school to a very small child in a very big school. There's all sorts of new anxieties, new people to meet, thousands of new things to do – so isn't it natural you turn back to the things you felt safe with when you were younger? I remember doing that myself," said Pullman. "I am a bit puzzled why there's all this anxiety, that they're not reading for pleasure, that they're reading the wrong books. Well, no, it's not the wrong book. If the child is enjoying it, it's the right book."

Well, yes. Pullman's words cast me back to the worries of starting secondary school, and I vividly remember returning, once home, to the familiar worlds of Green Knowe and Kirrin Island, Redwall – oh, the late, lamented Brian Jacques – and The Borrowers. Ballet Shoes, White Boots, Apple Bough: I loved Noel Streatfeild, and it was comforting – more than that, it was wonderful – to be able to sink back into these much loved titles, regardless of the fact that I was starting to learn French and had my own locker and a packed lunch.

I asked children's writer Mal Peet what he thought. He identifies three reasons for the lack of challenge for younger readers. "Kids are often going through a reading programme that holds them back, and they get used to 'easy' reading. Also, teachers and librarians are quite properly keen to motivate kids to read, and sometimes fear to recommend books that pupils might find difficult in case it 'puts them off'. Publishers, for marketing reasons, are keen to slot books into fairly narrow market segments, and these 'genres' naturally aggregate linguistic levels (and indeed content) that are commercially viable - ie, safe.

"One of the most important by-products of our reading is that we expand, develop and refresh our grasp and use of language. That doesn't happen if everything we read is easy and already familiar. That's why challenging youngsters is vitally important. The trick is to write gripping or engaging stories in adventurous and ambitious prose. But it ain't easy. Nor should it be."

Kate Wilson, of the publisher Nosy Crow, agrees that old favourites have value. On Twitter this morning, she pointed to her own thoughts about "children choosing to read 'easy' books @ times of school transition", saying that it's something "to be celebrated", and picking out a host of books I'm now desperate to reread myself: The Little White Horse, The Secret Garden, Little House on the Prairie.

I may not be at school, but comfort reading, rereading and easy reading is something I've been doing rather a lot of lately. When I'm not reading for work purposes, I rarely have the energy to start something new. Instead, I'd rather return to something familiar, which – if I'm lucky, and it hasn't crossed my rereading path for a while – I'll probably have forgotten most of, so will be able to enjoy all over again.

In recent months, I've made my way back through all the Mary Stewarts I own (and have mourned the fact that she hasn't written more). I've returned to Georgette Heyer for the first time in years, and been delighted, again, by her Regency romances. And I've reread Needful Things and Gerald's Game by Stephen King to see how they measured up to my memories. (Not as good; I prefer It and Misery.)

In fact, the book on my bedside table right now is a reread: Robert C O'Brien's The Silver Crown. It was yanked off my bookshelf by a curious baby and I was instantly transported back to the world of 10-year-old Ellen, so I leapt back in yesterday evening. I'm not sure what that would put my reading age at, but I'd imagine, at 34, I'm being "seriously underchallenged". Ah well. The Silver Crown is just as good as I remember it being all those years ago, and I'm tired, so the age-appropriate stuff can wait.

Roald DahlPhilip PullmanAlison Flood
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A brief survey of the short story, part 56: Clarice Lispector

This darkly addictive Brazilian writer is more concerned with perceptions of objects than conventional plot structures

In The Apple in the Dark, the novel Clarice Lispector completed in 1956, she writes about a man "abashed in front of the white page". His task is "not to write down something that already existed but to create something that would then come to exist". This challenge is one all Lispector's work confronts as it cuts away, sentence by sentence, at conventional conceptions of reality. Again and again she and her characters – the latter often against their will – penetrate beyond the everyday into what she describes in one story as "stranger activity". Her vivid and mysterious bibliography is the fascinating record of this process.

In Brazil (her family, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms, emigrated from Ukraine in 1921 when she was still an infant), Clarice Lispector became that unusual combination: an avant-garde artist who is also a household name. Fame arrived in the 1960s, two decades after she published her first book and a decade before she died, aged 56, from ovarian cancer. She had no particular desire for fame, just as she had no particular desire to be identified as an experimental writer. She never understood why readers found her work opaque, while the fact that she consistently attempted new things in her writing was, for her, simply necessary to her aim: "In painting, as in music and literature, what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and more difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye."

The difficulty is plainly discernible, the delicacy less so. "Probing the way in which consciousness perceives objects," one of her translators writes, "Lispector creates a world of exciting and terrifying perceptions." This world does not exclude tenderness or humour, but it is often coloured by an existential horror; as a reader of The Buffalo reported, "the whole story seemed to be made of entrails". In Love (1952), a Rio de Janeiro housewife, Ana, is jolted from her complacency by a glimpse from a tram of a blind man chewing gum, the mechanical movement of his jaw making him "appear to smile then suddenly stop smiling, to smile and stop smiling". Ana flees the tram and takes refuge in the city's Botanical Garden, but the way she perceives the world has altered radically:

"And suddenly, uneasily, she felt she had fallen into a trap. In the Garden a secret labour was being done that she was starting to perceive. On the trees the fruits were black, sweet as honey. On the ground there were dry seeds full of circumvolutions, like little rotting brains. The bench was stained with purple juices. The waters rustled with intense softness. The luxurious legs of a spider were fastened to the tree trunk. The crudity of the world was restful. And death was not what we thought."

As those last lines suggest, Ana's nightmarish vision is not so easily characterised as nightmare alone. Lispector's relationship with religion was complex but she had a mystic's regard for any level of perception that transcended blinkered normality, no matter how dreadful the revelation. Epiphanies of the Joycean type are a constant throughout her shifting body of work, but they are unusually raw and vertiginous. In one story the narrator declares that she "suddenly saw the chasm of the world. What I saw was as anonymous as a belly split open for an intestinal operation"; elsewhere a woman breaks a tooth and "instead of going to the dentist, she threw herself out of the apartment window". Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser compares her to Kafka, in that her investigations often locate, in a spiritual sense, "locked doors, blocked passageways and generalised punishment". This moment-to-moment uncertainty makes reading her stories, in Caetano Veloso's description, "a dangerous adventure".

This sense of adventure applies not only to Lispector's concepts: it is endemic at the level of the sentence too. Paradoxes and sudden shifts lie in wait, and inattentive readers can rapidly lose their way. A story like The Hen and the Egg begins plainly enough – "In the morning I see the egg on the kitchen table" – but quickly spirals off into something like a prayer, a philosophical meditation, a language game and an absurdist monologue, flipping between grace, humour and unease. Moser draws a parallel between it and the "cubist portraits in words" attempted by Gertrude Stein. In The Fifth Story, another masterpiece, a woman prepares a mixture of sugar, flour and gypsum to kill the cockroaches that emerge in her apartment each night "like evil secrets" (cockroaches, a recurring symbol, appear even in Lispector's books for children). The story begins five times, the line "I was complaining about the cockroaches" becoming an embarkation point for a series of hypnotic and troubling explorations of death and morality.

The structure of The Fifth Story echoes Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In the Exordium, that book's opening section, Kierkegaard presents us with a man who tells himself the Old Testament story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac four times, each version changing the emphasis as a cubist painting might simultaneously present a face from multiple perspectives. The man is trying to understand the story, but the repetition suggests the failure of the attempt. For Zadie Smith this curious beginning to Kierkegaard's treatise is "a rehearsal: it lays out a series of rational explanations the better to demonstrate their poverty as explanations", and Lispector's narrator, too, is hunting a meaning that continues to elude her. When she views the "huge and brittle" dead cockroaches from her "frigid height as a human being", she is like a cruel god observing slaughtered innocents, her motives increasingly unknowable even to herself. "Using her experimental technique," writes K David Jackson, "Lispector has created another kind of labyrinth of stories, as in a hall of mirrors or a recurring dream full of the statues of death."

Labyrinths proliferate, both in Lispector's work and in critical responses to it. Her translator Giovanni Pontiero notes that "she is less interested in conventional plot structure than a labyrinth of perceptions". Blake Butler finds her sentences "wired with psychosis, fixated on some kind of understanding of the dark maze of every day". In the late story In Search of Dignity (1974), a woman becomes lost first in the endless corridors of the Maracanã stadium, and later in the suddenly unrecognisable streets of Rio. Lispector's fiction swarms with such moments of threatening intensity. The feminist theorist Hélène Cixous, who took up Lispector's work in the 1970s as a prime example of what she calls "écriture féminine", identifies "an intense worry" running through her work. In its blend of high tension and domestic settings (the most common Lispector character is the housewife) it recalls elements of Katherine Mansfield, whom Lispector adored, and Virginia Woolf, whom she read only after reviewers noted similarities between them.

In fact Lispector was often compared with writers – Woolf, Joyce, Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre – whom she then went on to read for the first time. The critics' attempts are understandable: the more singular a writer, the more they try to find comparisons that ensnare the work. But read enough Lispector and you realise she has a habit of slipping these nets; she both is and is not a feminist, a postmodernist, an absurdist, a mystic. Rather than find an existing style that suited her project, she embarked on an individual quest to locate, as she put it in her first novel, "the symbol of the thing in the thing itself": the word that doesn't merely gesture towards something, but becomes it. Twenty years later, in 1962, she told an audience at the University of Texas that "there are some young writers who are a bit over-intellectualised. It seems to me that they are not inspired by, shall we say, 'the thing itself', but by other literature, 'the thing already literalised'." In her writing she was prepared to dispatch with all else – even words themselves – to get at this essence:

"Since one feels obliged to write, let it be without obscuring the space between the lines with words … The word fishes for something that is not a word. And when that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be thrown away with relief."

Translations from the work are by Benjamin Moser, Giovanni Pontiero and Alexis Levitin.

Next: Jean Rhys

Short storiesFictionBrazilAmericasChris Power
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Poem of the week: Look for Me by Vladislav Khodasevich

Wracked with grief, this poem lets the poet's lost friend speak from beyond the inescapable finality that has separated them

This week's choice, Look for Me, is a translation by the poet Peter Daniels of Ищи меня by Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939). It's from the handsome, bilingual edition of Khodasevich's Selected Poems recently published by Angel Classics.

"… A modernist, but with a classical temperament" is how Daniels positions Khodasevich in the Preface, going on to quote David Bethea's comment on the Russian writer as "a transitional figure who stands to the modern lyric tradition as does Auden, mutatis mutandis, to that of England and America". Even more helpful a comparison might be WB Yeats, who was only 20 years older than Khodasevich, and also died in 1939. I wonder if Khodasevich (who left Russia in 1922 and finally settled in Paris) ever came upon the Irish poet's work. Like Yeats, Khodasevich resists the stylistic ferment of his age: he seems timeless.

One of the pleasures of this Selected is that Daniels's English versions avoid the impression of "light verse" which can sometimes result from a translator's adherence to formal prosody. Poet-translators not infrequently dodge this hazard by the innovation, known, ironically, as "imitation", which allows a radical re-casting of the original. Daniels finds a balance: he's certainly not out to recast Khodasevich in his own image, but he is concerned to find a contemporary English poetic idiom which combines both lyricism and gravitas with a certain modern "edginess".

Ищи меня has five beats to a line, except for the fourth. This, Khodasevich lengthens to an Alexandrine, or trimètre – perhaps to give him space to emphasise the speaker's movements as a kind of hide-and-seek. Daniels loses the Alexandrine, preferring consistency with the iambic pentameter. Otherwise, he retains the metre and ABAB rhyme-scheme of the original, and, in the second and third stanzas, the alternating feminine-masculine endings which are such a feature of Khodasevich's melodiousness. The "edginess" comes in where Daniels rhymes on a minor word in an enjambed sentence: "than" in the first stanza, "might" in the third. The Khodasevich line is more traditionally shaped. But Daniels is surely right to use a method that prioritises the rhyme-sound.

He works close to original word-meanings, too: any shifts are of the unavoidable variety. The noun "light " in the first line ("свет") is changed to "air" because the English word is later needed as an adjective, "lighter" – an awkward homonym. And it seems that "sunray" and "ray" are being used to fill a lexical gap in English: there's no single word to describe the reflection of the sun's light that the Russian word ("зайчик") suggests.

Look at Me is an intensely personal poem relating to the the suicide of Khodasevich's friend, Muni (Samuil Viktorovich Kissin) in March, 1916. Muni had saved Khodasevich from suicide in 1911, and the latter "reproached himself terribly for being unable to save his friend in return". The poem Lady expresses more directly Khodasevich's self-scourging guilt over Muni.

Look for Me filters the longing for connection with his dead friend obliquely, by making Muni himself the speaker. The monologue evokes a glimmering, edge-of-vision sense of his continuing but elusive presence – as "vanishing wings", "a sound, a breath, a sunray … ". While spring, of course, is the season of rebirth, the images of fire suggest that Muni's recovery for Khodaevich will be as painful as touching fire. The hands stretched into "the restless flame of day" in the second stanza are "trembling". Ultimately, if the dead man's presence is to be felt, it will be as tassels of fire at the poet's "quivering" finger-tips. Muni seems to plead for a return to life, but simultaneously demand a sacrifice from Khodasevich. There's an echo, perhaps, of Dante in Canto 27 of the Purgatorio, encouraged by Virgil to walk through fire as the necessary, cleansing prelude to attaining Paradise and reunion with Beatrice. However, the metaphysics are not Dante's. The longed-for meeting in Look for Me will be attained through an effort of imagination.

Khodasevich was a realist and a sceptic, even if some of his poems, like this one, reveal trace elements of the poetic movement that preceded him, Symbolism. Look for Me was written at a time of political turmoil, and perhaps its incipiently violent "flame" images and haunting sense of evanescence, connect it to a revolution which, for many writers of Khodasevich's generation, brought hope and dismay in rapid succession. But it also reminds us that love and grief are forces not to be extinguished by political events, and that the hardest battles in a warzone are not always the bloodiest.

Look for Me

Look for me in spring's transparent air.
I flit like vanishing wings, no heavier than
a sound, a breath, a sunray on the floor;
I'm lighter than that ray – it's there: I'm gone.

But we are friends for ever, undivided!
Listen: I'm here. Your hands can feel the way
to reach me with their living touch, extended
trembling into the restless flame of day.

Happen to close your eyelids, while you linger…
Make me one final effort, and you might
find at the nerve-ends of each quivering finger
brushes of secret fire as I ignite.

20 December 1917 – 3 January 1918

ИЩИ МЕНЯ

Ищи меня в сквозном весеннем свете.
Я весь — как взмах неощутимых крыл,
Я звук, я вздох, я зайчик на паркете,
Я легче зайчика: он — вот, он есть, я был.

Но, вечный друг, меж нами нет разлуки!
Услышь, я здесь. Касаются меня
Твои живые, трепетные руки,
Простертые в текучий пламень дня.

Помедли так. Закрой, как бы случайно,
Глаза. Еще одно усилье для меня —
И на концах дрожащих пальцев, тайно,
Быть может, вспыхну кисточкой огня.

20 декабря 1917 — 3 января 1918

Carol Rumens
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