The Guardian's Blog, page 142

Which books will never be on your shelves?

The missing pieces of a reading life can sometimes reveal more about literary taste than the books we choose to display

There's a particular pleasure to be had in browsing someone else's bookshelves – the smile of recognition when you spot a much-loved novel, the mild bemusement in finding an enthusiasm for an author you can't stand, the warm glow of discovering a taste in books that resembles your own. Gazing at the shelves of a new acquaintance, flicking through an old friend's stack of paperbacks, we feel a little closer, a little more connected. As Alan Bennett says, a person's bookshelf is as particular as their clothing, a personality "stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot". But what about the books that aren't there?

Sherlock Holmes famously solved the case of the missing racehorse Silver Blaze by noticing the "curious incident" of the dog that did absolutely nothing in the night-time, reasoning that the absence of a bark proved the horse's midnight visitor was "someone whom the dog knew well". Sometimes the books we choose not to read, the books we can't bear to finish, reveal our literary taste more powerfully than an armful of the ones we keep on our shelves.

Here's Jessa Crispin, explaining why she's no fan of Anna Kavan's Who Are You?, a 1963 novel she summarises as:

"Girl is in a bad marriage. He abuses her, rapes her. She stays. People try to help her. She stays. He is a bully and brute and has no personality other than Abusive Man. She is small and weak and helpless and men heroically want to save her but she can't be bothered to save herself. She also has no personality other than Wet Puddle.

"God, why is this an interesting story to tell? And why do we tell it over and over again? Which is not to say it doesn't happen, God knows I know that it happens. But without any psychological insight, without any momentum, without any interest in even writing a character, why tell that story again?"

It's not only boring, Crispin says, but poisonous. These "passive girls" who can't change their lives, who make excuses and "make their homes inside their trauma" are her "enemy". Crispin doesn't even want to talk about this book. "No! Let's rip the book into pieces and toss them out the window, let's not give [these passive characters] another moment's thought."

Crispin's copy of Who Are You? somehow managed to survive her reading of it, but this violent reaction to a bloodless heroine strongly reminded me of reading Madame Bovary many years ago and wishing she could just get a grip. She loves Léon, she loves Rodolphe, she dreams of running away from Charles, she gets bored, she hankers after embroidered collars and Algerian scarves and slips into financial disaster without ever looking it in the face. I couldn't stand it. Clearly the opportunities for changing your life in the ways Crispin suggests were very different for women in 19th-century provincial France, but I just couldn't see why Emma Bovary couldn't see what was going on.

I can't remember now if it was after despairing of that novel that I gave up on Anna Karenina – another missing piece in my literary collection. I couldn't make it past part two. But the books we never complete, the books we're never even going to pick up, are shadows of our reading lives which throw them into definition. Our literary identities are fragile vessels, surrounded by the vast sea of the unread. Every time we walk into a bookshop, every time we browse the library shelves, we leave behind many more books than we could ever pick up. With hundreds of thousands of new titles published each year, our tastes are sometimes defined as much by the books we'll never get around to reading as by those we proudly display.

FictionClassicsGustave FlaubertRichard Lea
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Are we already living in the technological singularity?

Science fiction's most radical vision of the future, with humanity redundant, is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy

The news has been turning into science fiction for a while now. TVs that watch the watcher, growing tiny kidneys, 3D printing, the car of tomorrow, Amazon's fleet of delivery drones – so many news stories now "sound like science fiction" that the term returns 1,290,000 search results on Google.

The pace of technological innovation is accelerating so quickly that it's possible to perform this test in reverse. Google an imaginary idea from science fiction and you'll almost certainly find scientists researching the possibility. Warp drive? The Multiverse? A space elevator to the stars? Maybe I can formulate this as Walter's law – "Any idea described in sci-fi will on a long enough timescale be made real by science."

The most radical prediction of science fiction is the technological singularity. As author and mathematician Vernor Vinge put it in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, "Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." Blimey. Sounds a bit serious.

Imagine a graph charting the growth in modern computing power. Place the mechanical calculator at one end and the Cray XE6 supercomputer, capable of analysing 240 full human genomes in 50 hours, at the other. Moore's law – that computing power doubles every 18 months – means that the curve of the graph grows exponentially steeper until it "spikes" upward.

That spike is the singularity. And for decades now, science fiction authors and assorted types of futurist have been trying to predict what a post-singularity world would look like. Ray Kurzweil has been preaching future utopia for decades and in The Singularity Is Near (2005) made concrete predications about the arrival of machine intelligence, predictions he adapted in his recent interview with the Guardian to claim that machines would outsmart men by 2029.

Today as director of engineering at Google, Kurzweil is developing concrete policy based on those predictions. He is using the tech giant's vast resources to buy up leading players in robotics and artificial intelligence. Will Google's robot army soon be fighting Amazon's drone airforce for dominance of the future? It may sound like science fiction, but people with immense resources are treating the singularity as something very real.

The most successful exploration of the singularity to date remains Accelerando by Charles Stross, a linked series of nine stories, first collected in 2005. Accelerando follows three generations of one family through a speculative history of the 21st century. But while its predictions of technology are compelling, it's Stross's unwavering vision of the human cost of these technologies that sets the work apart from more blithely utopian visions.

Stross begins by rooting the reader in a relatively familiar near future. In the character of "venture altruist" Manfred Macx we encounter an augmented human intelligence, whose interface with computers allows him to outsmart the brutal capitalist reality that Stross depicts. But it's a temporary triumph of the human spirit, as Stross takes us in to a post-singularity reality where humans survive only as resources to be exploited by the super-intelligences that have eclipsed us.

Stross's fellow SF author Ken Macleod began the dissection of the singularity as a political vision when he popularised its renaming as "The Rapture of the Nerds". The singularity has gained a quasi-religious status among transhumanists – those who believe technology can end human causes of human suffering such as poverty, disease and ultimately even death itself. But as Macleod explains in his essay The Ends of Humanity, this utopian vision comes worryingly close to the far-right excesses of fascism and the Nazi vision of a master race.

There's nothing new in the argument that technology can be co-opted for unsavoury purposes. It's the same argument we have when protestors highlight inhuman working conditions on iPhone production lines at Foxcon. Or when historians remind us of IBM's role in computing the Holocaust. The same argument was laid out by Karl Marx when he demanded that the workers should own the means of production, or by the Luddites when they smashed the machines that were disrupting their industry. How do we relate as humans to machines of our own creation when they threaten our humanity?

In this sense at least we are already living in the singularity, and have been living in it since early humans first wielded tools and made fire. The question is not whether the singularity will arrive – it seems certain technological progress will continue – but whether we can continue to nurture human value in the face of inhuman forces. If the imagined visions of science fiction continue to conform to Walter's law, we need to keep human life front and centre in the equation.

Science fictionFictionFantasyComputingDamien Walter
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Translating the dangers faced by an author under threat

It was hard enough to translate a novel set in Equatorial Guinea, but with Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel facing arrest the lack of information takes on a more sinister tone

The internet has made the translator's job infinitely easier. No longer must we spend hours in dusty libraries, sifting through piles of reference books like archaeologists. We can consult online dictionaries, search for words in different contexts, find slang in forums; we can Google-image unknown objects, even Google-earth the location of a story. Yet translate something from a country like Equatorial Guinea and things aren't quite so easy.

There is no reliable news outlet in Equatorial Guinea: the government is one of the most corrupt and brutal in the world and independent journalism of all kinds is repressed. President Obiang and his cronies are very rich, but Guineans remain poor: most people don't have access to computers; those who do, have their internet activity monitored and censored.

The situation is even more extreme on Annobón Island. Put Annobón into Google Maps and you get a crude outline of a green blob – you have to click out 10 times before the west coast of Africa even comes into view. There is no online island newspaper, no blogosphere. There are hardly any photos.

Annóbon is the setting for By Night The Mountain Burns, a novel by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel I translated for And Other Stories, which is due to be published this year. It tells the story of life on an island cut off from the rest of the world, starved of food and knowledge (Annobón became isolated and ostracised following a regime change in Equatorial Guinea). So it was perhaps appropriate for the translator not to have access to everything at the click of a button.

This lack of online information took on a more sinister tone a few days ago, when news reached me that the Equatorial Guinean government was planning to arrest Ávila Laurel. I immediately logged on and... where to turn?

Facebook was my only option: the Apoyo a Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel page was set up in 2011 in support of the author's hunger strike, but has evolved to become a catch-all news and activism page for anyone interested in Equatorial Guinea. There were a number of posts about the government's statement, that in light of plans for an "illegal" demonstration, all activists were to be rounded up by the police. Ávila Laurel had been one of six signatories of a letter asking for permission to stage a sit-in at Ewaiso E'pola square, to protest against police brutality. Many messages on the site advised Ávila Laurel to go into immediate hiding.

He didn't. He can be stubborn at the best of times, never mind the worst, and he refused to be bullied into going underground when he'd done nothing wrong. What he did do was start sending regular text messages to friends abroad, to let them know he was still safe, and he reached out to me and to David Shook, the California-based poet who has translated his poetry.

It's the translator's job to translate a book's words, but of course you also have to translate cultures. You become a bridge between author and publisher, for they will not typically speak one another's language. You become informed about the author's country and circumstances, and you become well acquainted with the author, especially if you've had to ask him a lot of questions for your translation. You become a source of hope in times of crisis, and although you haven't asked for the responsibility, and you maybe find it daunting, you respond as best you can, because you've also become the author's friend.

FictionAfricaCensorship
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Amtrak offers writers' residencies on US trains

Uninterrupted creativity and window-gazing - what an appealing idea. Celebrate your favourite literary train journeys below

What an appealing idea: US rail company Amtrak has begun offering writers residencies on trains, after the author Alexander Chee expressed a wistful longing to write on trains in a recent interview. The writer Jessica Gross tweeted her approval, "because it would allow for uninterrupted creativity and window-gazing", and Amtrak picked up on the idea; Gross has now travelled to Chicago and back, writing about her journey for the Paris Review, and Chee is due to take his own journey later this year. More trips – free, or as low-cost as possible – will follow, Amtrak told The Wire. The eventual goal, said Julia Quinn, social media director for Amtrak, is to "engage with writers several times a month".

What's so great about writing on a train? "I've always been a claustrophile, and I think that explains some of the appeal – the train is bounded, compartmentalised, and cosily small, like a carrel in a college library. Everything has its place," writes Gross in the Paris Review. "The journey is bounded, too: I know when it will end. Train time is found time. My main job is to be transported; any reading or writing is extracurricular. The looming pressure of expectation dissolves. And the movement of a train conjures the ultimate sense of protection – being a baby, rocked in a bassinet."

At MobyLives, Emma Aylor has it that "though there's a kinetic excitement to the setting out, there's also something to the coming home. Taking Amtrak's Northeast Regional from my temporary home in New York to my family home in Virginia last summer, I experienced the reverse of my trip north. Where I had been jittery with anticipation, I was, southbound, a little weepy, watching more and more magnolias pass as I came closer to home. I wrote, and it wasn't any good, but the experience was all."

Here in the UK, in 2012 crime author Julia Crouch was a writer in residence between London and Harrogate, penning the short story Strangeness on a Train, and saying that "working onboard the train seemed like being in a bubble of concentration as I moved through time and space, only being distracted when eavesdropping on the dramas of my fellow passengers as swaths of the countryside flashed past the windows, which were useful distractions".

I am half-minded to ditch my responsibilities and hop on board a train myself. Sadly, it's not to be – but in honour of Amtrak's move, I shall content myself with remembering some of my favourite train journeys in literature, from Blaine the deadly riddling Mono train in Stephen King's Dark Tower books ("Blaine is a pain, and that is the truth"), to – of course – Murder on the Orient Express. If you've literary train journeys of your own to cite, then please, do join me on board.

United StatesAlison Flood
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Choose March's Reading group book: Philip K Dick

The 'Shakespeare of science fiction' continues to inspire writers, film-makers and musicians. Which of his books should we pick?

This month, in response to requests from readers, we're going to look at Philip K Dick. The man Roberto Bolaño described as "Thoreau plus the death of the American dream". The man Frederic Jameson called "The Shakespeare of Science Fiction". The man the New York Times said was "(arguably) the most influential sci-fi writer of the last half century".

That last 'arguably' will, no doubt, provide fertile ground for discussion. More than 20 years after his death, Dick's work is still inspiring plenty of other authors, numerous film directors and quite a few songwriters. Yet there remains a sense that he was never able to make the most of his talent. Far fewer people talk about the quality of his prose than recount how he spent many of his best years grinding out pulp fiction at a tremendous rate while hoovering up amphetamines – not to mention battling paranoia and mental instability. In fact, plenty would call him a hack. So it will be fascinating to see how things will play out as we dig into his work.

At this stage, I would argue that PKD wrote at least one bona fide classic and that his ideas were so impressive in books such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that it almost (almost!) wouldn't have mattered how well he expressed them. But that's a debate we can have later in the month – assuming we go for an explicitly ideas-based SF book. Otherwise, it might also be worth exploring the lesser known, but still intriguing earthbound version of Philip K Dick. The first PKD book I read was The Broken Bubble, which I remember as a gritty examination of marital strife in 1950s San Francisco (albeit with a naked girl rolling around in a giant plastic bubble).

Dick also wrote plenty of books as notable for their down and dirty realism as their flights of fancy – not to mention their glorious titles. Who wouldn't want to read a book called The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike or The Confessions of a Crap Artist? There are 44 novels to choose from, not to mention dozens of short story collections, and numerous biographies and books inspired by this astonishing writer.

As usual, nominations will be drawn out of a hat. However, if you have a favourite Philip K Dick novel do vote for it, as the more people suggest a title the more likely it is to be picked. All other suggestions for discussion topics, as well as opinions and ideas about PKD's legacy and film adaptations we might enjoy, will also be gratefully received.

Philip K DickScience fictionFictionSam Jordison
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Why the LRB should stop cooking up excuses over lack of women reviewers

US editors have taken on board shocking statistics on gender inequality in the literary press. So why are UK publications, such as the London Review of Books, complacent?

A week after publishing 'The Public Voice of Women', Mary Beard's lecture on the silencing of women throughout history, the London Review of Books issued a pre-emptive defence of their own editorial policy on women contributors. The statement went out on an episode of Radio 4's Open Book in which presenter Mariella Frostrup asked why women writers are reviewed less, and write fewer reviews, than their male counterparts. The LRB declined to participate in the discussion but issued, in Frostrup's words, "a rather lengthy statement".

This statement (transcribed for her website by Viv Groskop) rallied against those who monitor the sex of writers and reviewers in the literary press: "Counting is a feminist weapon. 'How many women are on the board?' 'How many women are in Parliament?' 'How many women are in the LRB this fortnight?' Over the history of the LRB 82% of the articles have been written by men and 18% by women. None of the editors – count them, four men and five women – are proud of that. We need to do better."

They stressed that the imbalance between men and women in the LRB was "down to more than editorial whim". "Women send fewer pitches to the LRB. They often prefer not to write critically about other women. They are under-represented among historians of the second world war, particle physicists and macro economists."

The section of the statement that most enraged listeners, however, was a quote from an interview given by editor Mary-Kay Wilmers to PN Review on this same subject back in 2001. "I think women find it difficult to do their jobs, look after their children, cook dinner and write pieces. They just can't get it all done. And men can. Because they have fewer, quite different responsibilities. And they're not so newly arrived in the country. They're not so frightened of asserting themselves. And they're not so anxious to please. They're going to write their pieces and to hell with the rest. And I don't think women think that way."

As a publication with a dearth of women reviewers, it's not surprising that the LRB was asked to take part in the Open Book discussion. Perhaps the reason they were a bit quick on the draw is that it was also almost time for their annual social media thrashing. Since 2011, the American organisation VIDA has been monitoring the ratio of men to women writers in the literary press. Along with the Atlantic, Granta, the TLS, the New York Review of Books and many others, their selection always includes the LRB and, frankly, it always comes off terribly. (The British broadsheet books pages also do badly, as shown in this Guardian graphic from 2013.)

Why? According to the LRB, "it's not a pathetic excuse to say that the world is still sexist and that the feminist revolution is hopelessly incomplete. You can see evidence of this everywhere from the pay gap to rape conviction rates and a thousand things that are more important than the proportion of women who write book reviews". Which would be a fair point, if it wasn't for the fact that their editors are paid to make people writing book reviews a priority. Suggesting that women are reviewed less and write fewer reviews because of endemic structural sexism ignores the LRB's – and other publications – role within this sexist system. Fortunately, the VIDA stats have made books pages take a closer look at their commissioning policies.

According to VIDA's figures for 2013, released this week, the Paris Review of Books achieved 50/50 coverage of men and women in 2013 – that's up from a measly 20% women v 80% men in 2012. The New York Times Book Review has managed a similar improvement and smaller publications are following suit or, in the case of Tin House, leading the way when it comes to gender equality. Tin House were one of the earliest publications to take the VIDA stats on board and attempt to effect radical change via a proactive editorial policy.

Last year the New York Times Book Review's new editor Pamela Paul pledged to feature "a diversity of author backgrounds and ideologies and arguments, a diversity of genre, a diversity of subject matter" in the Review. In 2013 she published 725 women and 894 men, with men only slightly dominating at 55%. Even those publications which have a good track record are making gender equality a priority. Poetry magazine has had a consistently good balance between women and men but their new editor, Don Share, has used the #readwomen2014 trend to encourage diversity among his readers and editors.

In the UK, however, editorial teams are still burying their heads in the sand. Attempts to shift the blame to women writers, structural sexism, tradition and so on stand in stark contrast to their US counterparts. It's not surprising that the LRB is feeling defensive in the face of constant criticism, but by not appearing on Open Book they were able to make their trademark claims about the limited nature of female reviewers without having to respond to incredulity from others on the panel.

Yesterday, VIDA announced that the LRB used 43 female book reviewers, as opposed to 195 male, in 2013. On Twitter the LRB was busy broadcasting a barrage of links to content featuring women writers, as if a 100% women-dominated Twitter feed could make up for a 78% male-dominated magazine. Clearly they're sick of being criticised for their inability to support women writers, but it's unclear what else the London Review of Books can do before they start actually addressing the problem.

• Beulah Devaney is the features editor at For Books' Sake, a literary webzine which promotes and celebrates writing by women

London Review of BooksLiterary criticismEqualityGenderFeminismBeulah Maud Devaney
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 28: The Dark Tower III - The Waste Lands

King's high fantasy series comes into its own in the third volume, appropriating a wealth of literary references for its own designs

The first two parts of the Dark Tower series are rather different. One is quiet, focused yet fractured; the other is more sprawling, introducing monsters and parallel worlds and multiple personalities. King realised that himself, later retconning some of the content to bring the first part – the amazing Gunslinger – into line with later books. The series was written over a 30-year period, and is still going, in dribs and drabs. I assume that when he started writing it, King wasn't entirely sure what form it was ultimately going to take. I suspect that The Waste Lands, book 3 in the series, was the point where the bigger picture started to reveal itself to King – because that's certainly where it all starts happening for his Constant Readers.

The Waste Lands takes its title from TS Eliot's poem of nearly the same name: a major work of modernism, disjointed in its voices, which looks at society through historical and mythical allusions. Referencing it so directly is perhaps the first indication readers were given of King's intentions in the creation of his fantastical world: while this is not our world, the connections and links to it are strong, albeit wholly fractured. This would be a theme that King would carry through the rest of the series, dipping in and out of our reality, of the myths and stories that we tell.

Another thing that's shared by both texts is the debt that they owe to their influences. Sources and references abound in both, with Eliot taking in Homer, Spenser, Chaucer, Conrad, Milton, Huxley: the sum of what made him a writer, spilling out through his own words. The same is true for King. Take Shardik, the cyborg bear that the ka-tet come across in the early part of the book. He's named for a fantasy novel by Richard Adams; and characters think of rabbits when they encounter him, bringing to mind Adams' most famous work, Watership Down. But the presence of the bear also owes a debt to Tolkien; and in his cyborg construction, there are nods to Caidin, to Dick, to Ellison. King takes anything he fancies for his new creations, allowing them to step beyond their origins.

That's demonstrated ably by Blaine the Mono. In The Waste Lands, Roland and the ka-tet travel to Lud, a city that was once beautiful and advanced, but has since been ruined by war. It's not hospitable, and after some shenanigans – involving Jake being kidnapped, and Roland having to rescue him – they find The Cradle of Lud, a monorail station that houses Blaine. Blaine is a highly intelligent AI-driven monorail whose intelligence has degraded over time, giving him a slightly split personality. Blaine forces the ka-tet to beat him in a riddle completion before he'll help them. You've read this before, in The Hobbit – we've already seen Beorn, and we've now met Gollum. Split personality, degraded from years of solitude; riddles; an offer of help; and, just like Gollum, Blaine simply is not trustworthy. (We know this because Blaine's appearance is foreshadowed by a book that Jake brings with him, the story of Charlie the Choo Choo, a train who had a smile that "couldn't be trusted". King loves his foreshadowing, and he's never more blunt with it than in this series.) But Blaine is not just a stand-in for Gollum: he's a reference point, an idea taken and pushed further, broken and bent to fit King's means.

That's how all of his allusions go in these books, even the ones to his own work: they're all part of the stew, and they all go towards making up the worlds that these novels take place in. Everything is fair game as a reference point. Here's where the main idea of the Dark Tower starts to form: all is story, and all is part of one whole. This idea is something that we – and King – will explore further as the series goes on.

There's a story in this novel – of course there is – but it is also the point at which the Dark Tower books stopped feeling like standalones. At the end of this volume, you're led straight into book four, which picks up the action exactly where this leaves off. But that's no bad thing. If you've made it this far into the Dark Tower series, you won't be stopping now. They're not for everybody – there's no neat bow to tie them up with, no monster in the cupboard to point to as the reason the books work – but they're supremely satisfying. For King's Constant Readers, though, it would be a long wait until the next Dark Tower book: Wizard and Glass wouldn't be published for another six years …

Next: You can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need. It's Needful Things!

Stephen KingHorrorFictionFantasyJames Smythe
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Again, again! Which kids' bedtime books are you happy to reread?

The Dora books stretch my accent skills to breaking point, while Thomas the Tank Engine is full of stifling moralism. But not all favourites are destined to be 'lost' down the back of the shelf

Last week on the books blog, Alison Flood confessed how easily books to read aloud set her weeping. But parental tears aren't the only problem when sharing books with the tinies: preschooler bedtime stories necessitate a lot of repetition, making a one-trick Scheherazade of every whey-faced, knackered parent. Sometimes, there's barely a moment to draw breath before the bath-fragrant little tyrant utters an imperious: "Again."

This is not too crushing if the book is an adult's favourite too – perhaps a hand-me-down copy, bearing one's own ancient crayon scribbles in the flyleaf – but some stories invariably induce a sense of rebellious dread. At bedtime, my limp-wristed wish to respect my child's choices is at perpetual low-grade war with my urge to leap in with a falsely bright, "How about this one?"

TV tie-ins are generally a recipe for dullness, cooked up by gleeful sadists who've never had to read them aloud. The Octonauts books – text-dense and full of unpronounceable names – are top of the pile I am always trying to mislay. Dora books make me paranoid about my terrible Spanish accent, and Thomas the Tank Engine is full of the Rev Awdry's stifling moralism: be a Really Useful Engine, or it's off to the smelter's yard with you. Their patriarchal smugness also annoys me – Sir Topham Hatt, aka the Fat Controller, is in charge of everything, and the Duke of Boxford strolls around in boater and blazer, probably subjugating the proletariat when he isn't day-tripping on his own private train.

So I often indulge in a bit of pre-bedtime bookshelf shuffling, displaying more favoured titles temptingly to the fore. I'll happily reread my old friends the Ahlbergs – Each Peach Pear Plum, Burglar Bill and the rest – for hours, especially now I've perfected a truly villainous accent for nefarious Billy, modelled on Oliver Reed's Bill Sykes ("Thass a nice tin of beans … I'll 'ave that."). Classic animals such as Spot, Mog and Gorilla usually please us both, as do the apple-cheeked adventures of Alfie and Annie Rose.

More contemporary picture books I can bear rereading on a nightly basis include Oliver Jeffers' The Day the Crayons Quit (although having to come up with a different voice for each of the 12 crayons, on pain of trenchant three-year-old criticism, is somewhat taxing). I also like anything by Polly Dunbar – her few yet eloquent words leave her warm and tender pictures to do the talking, sparing my vocal chords. The sparse, sinister watercolour richness of Tomi Ungerer's Fog Island is weirdly, transportingly addictive. And Maisy Mouse – a jaunty, competent little rodent who can drive a bus, bake gingerbread and go on holiday all by herself – packs a great deal of narrative satisfaction into mercifully brief stories.

Which books are you willing to read over and over, and which ones do you sneakily shove down the back of the shelf?

Children's books: 7 and underChildren and teenagersComics and graphic novels (children and teens)Comics and graphic novelsChildrenParents and parentingFamilyImogen Russell Williams
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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

Claire ArmitsteadGuardian readers

Poem of the week: At Lunch in Les Deux Magots by Lorna Goodison

A relaxed blend of plain and heightened language, this poem sets a contemporary spring day against the ghosts of literary heroes

This week's poem celebrates an urban springtime, a meeting of "ripe lovers" in an iconic Paris café, and the literary life re-civilised for the 21st century. At Lunch in Les Deux Magots by Lorna Goodison comes from her new collection, Oracabessa. A poet blessedly free of anti-metropolitan snobbery, she values both the city and the parish in this more-than-literary travelogue. Oracabessa is the Jamaican seaside village where Columbus might have hoped to discover gold, and near which Bond girl Honey Ryder sang "a ditty no Jamaican ear ever heard// about underneath the mango tree … " (Note to Self).

It may represent Goodison's soul-landscape but it's not her final stop – and she concludes that "The city of gold/ is everywhere you have ever been".

Technically, what's most striking about At Lunch in Les Deux Magots is its mixture of registers. In the first stanza, the journalistic plainness of "this very celebrated Paris café" cohabits with the biblically-flavoured idiom, "my dearly beloved". In the second, a new expressive pitch occurs when "tart leaves tonic our wintered mouths". The use of "tonic" as a verb is particularly unexpected, and how much fresher it feels that the conventional "tone". But this is the only point in the poem where the diction is so obviously heightened.

The different names the speaker chooses when referring to James Baldwin indicate a similar flexibility of register, nuanced by the shifts and rifts of relationship. "James" is appropriate to the opening phase of the association between the two novelists, Baldwin and Richard Wright. When Goodison, a Baldwin fan who was overwhelmed by her first encounter with the incandescent prose of Go Tell It on the Mountain wants to introduce personal emotion into her portrayal of the writer with his "glorious frog prince profile" he's given the affectionate diminutive, "Jimmie". Then, in stanza six, standing back to recount some cold facts about his treatment of Wright, the speaker refers to him simply as "Baldwin."

The diction swerves again, twice, in the following stanza, with the sophisticated pun on "room" and the contrasting colloquialism, "stab up". What seems like a brief but fierce convulsion of anger at this juncture subsides to be followed by an offhanded, less judgmental conclusion: "One rough business this writing life."

The poem's moral and literary strength lies perhaps in this refusal by a writer to be over-impressed by other writers. Although she's sitting outside a café that's a literary landmark, and associated with the forging of selfhood for earlier generations of black writers, Goodison elevates simpler values (love, springtime) and adds a final toast to "the passing of old gods". These deities surely represent colonial domination in various forms. The phrase suggests the hope that the Oedipal patterns of history, literary and otherwise, might be replaced by more generous, feminine and fluid processes.

There's a sense of balance in the poem which perhaps reflects Goodison's own career choices. She writes memoir and short stories as well as poetry. She started out wanting to be a visual artist, and still paints her own book jackets. The poetic voice she has found is assimilative and relaxed, able to accommodate various registers from the prosaic to the metaphysical. It's in their combination that she achieves her own original and tonic effect.

At Lunch in Les Deux Magots

  For John Edward

Richard Wright and James Baldwin
ate in this very celebrated Paris café
where you and I my dearly beloved

hold these sidewalk streets in the sun
and order salads of spring greens;
tart leaves tonic our wintered mouths.

Here Richard bought a meal for James:
croque madame or croque monsieur
(Gallic cheese toast with ham or without)

Jimmy ate, and later he may even have –
here or elsewhere – sipped absinthe,
one cannot imagine that he did not;

he of the gorgeous frog prince profile
Toulouse-Lautrec would have fixed
on a poster in the age of belle époque.

Wright helped Baldwin to find a room
with room to wield the pen he used
to stab up the reputation of the older man

in an age-old pagan rite that demands
the son is duty bound to slay the father.
One rough business this writing life.

But love; this is Paris in late springtime,
the right season for ripe lovers like us.
Let us drink to the passing of old gods.

PoetryJames BaldwinCarol Rumens
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds