The Guardian's Blog, page 146

Haruki Murakami and the writerly art of local insults

The Norwegian Wood author can generally rely on a besotted readership. But now he's joined a long tradition of authors' site-specific smears

Haruki Murakami, one of the world's most respected and popular writers, is well-used to extreme reactions when he releases new work. Last year in Japan, when Colourless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage went on sale with an initial print run of 500,000 (one copy for every 250 people in his native country), thousands of people queued overnight, showing a dedication that puts even iPhone mania in the shade. His books sell in the millions. Everything from the cover art, to the blurb, to (especially) the title is dissected in great detail. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone wonders aloud why he hasn't yet been given the Nobel prize. Or, everyone except the judges of the bad sex award and the New York Times's Janet Maslin. So by this stage the 65-year-old novelist probably thought he'd seen it all – until the townsfolk of Nakatonbetsu in Japan demanded that he apologise for insulting their honour.

The offence, it seems, is that the novelist appeared to suggest Nakatonbetsu's residents throw cigarettes from car windows. This was a mistake becase, as Shuichi Takai, head of the local assembly's secretariat, told AFP, nothing could be further from the truth: "In early spring, the town people gather of their own will in a clean-up operation to collect litter on roads. We also work hard to prevent wildfires as 90% of our town is covered with mountain forests. It is never a town where people litter with cigarettes every day. We want to know why the name of a real town had to be used like that."

The offending passage appeared in the writer's new short story, Drive My Car – Men Without Women when a character observes a woman throwing a cigarette from a car window and thinks to himself: "Probably this is something everyone in Nakatonbetsu commonly does."

I know.

Shocking.

It's yet to be known whether Murakami intends to apologise for the fact that residents have chosen to take such offence. But if he doesn't, the outraged burghers can at least take consolation from the fact that they have now become part of a rich and noble tradition. Writers have been insulting towns since the days the authors of the Bible smote the reputation of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Going back 2,000 years, the poet Ovid would have landed in even worse trouble after Augustus exiled him to Tomis, had the locals been half so touchy as those in Nakatonbetsu. "This is a place – damn it," wrote Ovid, "that no fortunate man should visit." He complained that he had to eat pieces of frozen wine, that he had to live among Barbarians, that "ven when there is there is peace, everyone's terrified of another war and nobody bothers to do any ploughing … the soil here is lifeless, abandoned in stark neglect. There are no grapes, no fruits. There isn't even any paper. All you can see are naked, empty plains; leafless, treeless." He called the book he based on his experience there Tristia.

Closer to home, one William Shakespeare had a good line in complaining about blasted heaths and stews of corruption. His vision of Pontefract as a place of pain, fear, suffering, humiliation and death remains relevant to this day. I imagine most people who know the town well simply nod in agreement when they hear the lines:

Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison,
Fatal and ominous to noble peers!
Within the guilty closure of thy walls
Richard the second here was hack'd to death;
And, for more slander to thy dismal seat,
We give thee up our guiltless blood to drink

Mind you, Pontefract did have a poetic defender. John Betjeman was a fan of the local licorice fields, which he said "gave off the sweetest smells". But that's one of the teddy-clutching poet's lesser-known works. More famous, of course, are the words: "Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn't fit for humans now."

Nearby Reading has also come in for a good bit of stick, labelled "as pit of shame" by Oscar Wilde and "a carbuncle on the Thames" by Jerome K Jerome. Talking of the Thames, meanwhile, mention must go to TS Eliot watching the dead flow over London Bridge, his vision of London as an "unreal city" full of slim-bellied rats, its waters clogged with cigarette ends and empty bottles.

That London, rightly enough, has come in for endless stick as "the Great Wen". Possibly the only writer who loved it was Dr Johnson - although he himself had good form when it came to disliking other cities. Brighton, he found "dull", and dubbed "The World's End", a sentiment reciprocated by Graham Greene who dedicated an entire novel to hating it .

Elsewhere, there's Bill Bryson's glorious summary of poor old Bradford whose "role in life", he says, "is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison". And who could forget Martin Newell on the Yorkshire city's neighbour? "I'll tell you once and I'll tell you briefly, I don't want to go to Keighley."

Finally, insults to local pride don't have to be so blunt. One of my favourite's is Philip Larkin's gentle destruction of the town he called home for most of his life: "I wish I could think of just one nice thing I could tell you about Hull, oh yes … it's very nice and flat for cycling."

By now, the residents of Hull are well-used to such mockery . So far as I know, they have never asked for apology. Instead, they've turned the tables on their detractors and come out fighting as a UK city of culture, cognisant of everything art has thrown at them and eager and able to throw it right back. Maybe Nakatonbetsu should take a leaf from their book.

Haruki MurakamiFictionPhilip LarkinJohn BetjemanTS EliotJapanGraham GreeneSam Jordison
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The 10 worst couples in literature

JK Rowling has said she regrets her decision to matchmake Ron and Hermione – we look at other fictional couples better off apart

Earlier this week, JK Rowling revealed she regrets her decision to write Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger into a relationship. The Harry Potter author told Wonderland magazine that one of the world's most famous literary pairings would have ended up in relationship counselling.

Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger in the film adaptations of the books, echoed her comments, telling the Sunday Times: "I think there are fans out there who know that too and who wonder whether Ron would have really been able to make her happy."

So, in light of JK Rowling outing the bookish Hermione and the prankster Ron as a mismatched union, we look at 10 other awkward pairings in literature, from hidden exes in the attic, to ill-judged office affairs.

Warning: possible spoilers ahead.

Heathcliff and Catherine (Wuthering Heights)

They are one of the best-loved literary couples, and one of the worst. Catherine and Heathcliff's relationship can only be described as mutually destructive and abusive – and deserving of a session or two on a Relate sofa. You know a pairing is on the rocks when they spend most of their time trying to hurt the other in the most malevolent means possible (like ruining their offspring). It's the kind of obsessive love that prioritises control over a person and loses sight of the individual's happiness. They are basically a version of Sid and Nancy on the moors.

Romeo and Juliet (Romeo and Juliet)

Romeo and Juliet may well be one of the most irritating, self-absorbed couples to have ever graced the stage. If they were around today, they would be lovesick sixth formers writing each other bad haikus and snogging on sticky nightclub floors, while bullying their mates into covering for them. On the one hand, the whole love-at-first-sight thing is kind of cute, but on the other, you can imagine them sending naked Snapchats to each other when Romeo was banished from Verona.

Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil (Les Liaisons dangereuses)

The ultimate twisted and sadistic literary relationship. The scheming pair get their comeuppance (of sorts) when all of their philandering ends in heartbreak and tears, death and, er, smallpox. The two lovers seduce and manipulate their way through a whole host of vulnerable characters, and in the end nobody gets to have a happy ending. Probably would have been for the best if these two never met, to be honest.

Frank and April Wheeler (Revolutionary Road)

The Wheelers are one of the most nuanced and well-drawn couples in mid-20th century American literature. Richard Yates's ambitious surburbanite spouses dream of escaping dullsville Conneticut, but their optimistic visions of the future are crushed by the realisation that a white-picket fence can act as a cage, and an animal kept in captivity all its life can get cold feet about suddenly being released into the great outdoors. In the end, the Wheelers only help to hold each other back, each blaming the other for the continuity of the mundane.

Tom and Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby)

Apart from the fact we are all rooting for Jay Gatsby and Daisy to get together, it is quite clear that Tom and Daisy are a horrid pairing from the very beginning of Fitzgerald's masterpiece. They treat each other like dirt and have no respect for one another, not to mention both are adulterers. They are the perfect example of an awful marriage. In a way, they are well matched because they deserve each other, in all of their selfishness, greed and arrogance.

Marius and Cosette (Les Misérables)

It's not that there's anything wrong with Cosette, but I think we all agree Marius should have gone with Éponine. I mean, the girl literally took a bullet for him, while in the same moment handing him a letter from her love rival. She is basically the nicest person ever.

Edward Rochester and Bertha Mason (Jane Eyre)

Poor Bertha Antoinetta Mason, the archetypal "madwoman in the attic". While we don't get to see much of Bertha in Jane Eyre, except for the conditions of her loft-based incarceration, Jean Rhys gives us a glimpse into the young Bertha's betrothal to Rochester in her prequel novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Bertha, then known as Antoinette Cosway, is wedded to Rochester in the Caribbean, though the couple barely know each other. Surprise surprise, these two never really hit it off and probably should have realised that en route to the aisle before the whole thing, literally, went up in flames.

Edward Cullen and Bella Swan (Twilight)

I think this one is pretty obvious. Edward is a vampire. He's a vampire. That is never going to be an easy ride. Nobody would put that on their Tinder profile.

Anna Karenina and Alexei Vronsky (Anna Karenina)

OK, so the sex was exciting and it was one of the great love affairs, but Anna and Vronsky would have had life a lot easier if they had just stuck to their marital partners – Anna especially. Of course it was the right decision to leave the dull Karenin for the passionate Vronsky, but Anna also wouldn't have been banished to a country house and ostracised from society before ending up under a train if she had remained faithful. Swings and roundabouts.

Bridget Jones and Daniel Cleaver (Bridget Jones' Diary)

If Bridget and Mark Darcy were the perfect couple, then Bridget and Cleaver were the opposite. He was arrogant, obnoxious and chauvinistic, and she couldn't resist the lure of the bad boy (or rather the arrogant, obnoxious, chauvinistic boy). Beginning as an archetypal flirtation between employee and smarmy boss, Cleaver ended up fathering Bridget's baby at the end of the first run of Helen Fielding's Independent column. The pantomime villain to Darcy's dashing hero, Cleaver was immortalised as an open-collared, smug, smirking Hugh Grant in the 2001 feature film.

Harry PotterRelationshipsJK RowlingClassicsHannah Jane Parkinson
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How many books do you read at once?

Whether you are faithful to a single book, serially monogamous or prefer to play the field - now's your chance to share your reading habits

A brief survey of the short story, part 55: Edgar Allan Poe

He's no prose stylist, but the psychological territory mapped by his tales set a fictional compass still in wide use

"I cannot think of any other author", said Harold Bloom of Edgar Allan Poe, "who writes so abominably, and yet is so clearly destined to go on being canonical." But for each writer who has disparaged him, from Henry James to Yeats, Lawrence to Auden, there is an array of works that bear his influence: stories and novels not only by horror specialists like HP Lovecraft and Stephen King, or by writers of detective fiction such as Arthur Conan Doyle, but by Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Edith Wharton, Thomas Mann, TS Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, Borges, Eudora Welty, Nabokov and Bolaño. Like the obsessions that so often lead to the annihilation of Poe's narrators, his influence cannot be escaped.

When Poe began writing stories in earnest in the early 1830s, the gothic genre, by far the most popular in the periodicals of the day, was, in artistic terms, distinctly hackneyed. Responding to sniffy charges of "Germanism", in the preface to his first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Poe averred that "terror is not of Germany, but of the soul", and one of the primary reasons for the longevity of his stories lies with their ability to present stock scenarios (live burial, the doppelgänger, possession) in ways that tap into far more profound wells of horror than most gothic authors – or horror writers generally – locate. These atmospheres transcend his sometimes turgid prose, and the finales described as the "campy, floozy 'Boo!' business at the end", by offering destabilising visions of madness, obsessive love, cruelty and endemic menace.

Ever since Marie Bonaparte's pioneering study from a Freudian perspective, published in 1934 (which, wrote Richard Wilbur, "though absurd in all the expected ways … comes up with many constants of imagery and narrative pattern"), Poe's works have often been considered proto-psychological. As Benjamin F Fisher notes, this way of reading them "finds excellent symbols in the spiralling staircases and downward spirals into ocean depths or mouldering sub-cellars of ruinous mansions and abbeys" they abound in. Similarly, while individual stories might take place in London (The Man of the Crowd), off the coast of Norway (Descent Into the Maelström), or a "chain of wild and dreary hills that lie westward and southward of Charlottesville" (A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, the only story Poe set in his native Virginia), the vagueness of many of the settings reinforces the sense that it is really internal, psychic landscapes they are describing.

This idea is underlined by Poe's repeated presentation of buildings as metaphors for the human mind. In The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), his most controlled, concentrated story, he describes a rotting mansion with a crack running through it. Likewise the incestuous Usher twins, Roderick and Madeline, are two halves of a divided self that, once separated, disintegrates. In William Wilson (1839), Poe's superb take on the doppelgänger myth, the boarding school where the narrator and his uncanny double Wilson first encounter one another has "no end to its windings – to its incomprehensible subdivisions". Just as the two boys seem to represent the competing natures of a single psyche, so within the school building it is "difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two storeys one happened to be". Hidden away like an unpleasant notion, Wilson rooms in one of the "many little nooks or recesses" that entail "the odds and ends of the structure". The gap here between Poe's fiction and later theories of repression, or the narrator's "wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn" and the Freudian unconscious, is irresistibly narrow.

Poe's genius in William Wilson is to tell the story not of a good protagonist bedevilled by an evil twin, but of a corrupt man tormented by a vision of his better self. How like our own internal lives, haunted by the better decisions and kinder acts of our ideal selves. As Poe's biographer Kenneth Silverman points out, doubling is a recurring feature of Poe's work, from the Usher twins and William Wilson to the sleuth C Auguste Dupin and his arch enemy in The Purloined Letter, Minister D–. The occluded name invites the possibility – never distant in Poe – that Dupin's adversary is in fact an alternate version of himself.

Poe's three Dupin stories, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter, created the template for detective fiction that Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie would use for their most famous creations, Conan Doyle saying of Poe's detective stories that "each is a root from which a whole literature has developed". Dupin is a man, in Peter Thoms's phrase, with the "ability to read the mysterious space of the city". He is a decipherer of symbols, and it is this ability that Borges – who cites Poe throughout his work – transplants into Erik Lönrott, a detective who considers himself "a pure thinker, an Auguste Dupin", whose murder investigation revolves around the secret name of the Hebrew god.

Lönrott's quest turns out to be a dead end, the case an elaborate trap. Unlike the Dupin of The Purloined Letter, he cannot outwit his criminal counterpart. Jacques Lacan made much of the fact that in Poe's story every character is driven to act by a letter (or "signifier") whose contents are unknown, and the blankness of the purloined letter is just one of many significant absences to be found in Poe's work. Why, in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, were the two victims rearranging the contents of an iron chest at three in the morning? In The Cask of Amontillado, what is the insult for which Montresor enacts his hideous revenge on Fortunato? What is the incomprehensible horror the narrator neglects to describe in The Pit and the Pendulum? These, like the uncertainty of setting discussed earlier, almost goad readers to supply their own meaning. "Poe believed", writes Louise J Kaplan, "that truly imaginative literature locates its deepest meaning in an undercurrent. The surfaces of his tales are always deceptions", requiring effort to "detect the embedded secrets". There is also another possibility: that these absences bid the reader to supply their own meaning, to interact with and map their own guilt, urges and frustrations onto the stories.

Two of Poe's most famous stories, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat (both 1843), revolve around the same absence: the motive for the murders they describe. "I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him", the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart tells us, while death in The Black Cat arrives suddenly and unexpectedly, apparently as much a surprise to the murderous narrator as to us ("I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain"). Both stories are monologues, both describe maniacal states, and both contain passages of unusually blunt prose, as striking as a folk tale's: "The night waned; I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs".

The echoes of these distinctive, reliably unreliable voices, which foreshadow the stream-of-consciousness technique, can be heard, as shouts or whispers, in works by authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nabokov, Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño. In his Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories, Bolaño writes: "The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read", and his By Night in Chile can be considered a homage. The book is a novel-length monologue by a right-wing priest, Father Urrutia Lacroix, who is also the pseudonymous literary critic H Ibacache. It is a supposed confession, the rant of a man haunted by his former self, and over the course of the book Urrutia proves as slippery as Poe's earlier creations, while his narrative contains the distinctly gothic vision of a husband torturing political prisoners in the basement while his wife entertains guests upstairs. Like Poe's central works, Bolaño's novel enacts the battle of the divided self, placing us on a steep pathway descending from surface respectability into darker drives and longings.

Next: Clarice Lispector

Edgar Allan PoeShort storiesFictionRoberto BolañoArthur Conan DoyleChris Power
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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

Guardian readersClaire Armitstead

February's Reading group: Junky by William S Burroughs

This month, our look at the avant-garde legend will be based on his more or less conventional autobiographical novel

This month's Reading Group choice is Junky by William S Burroughs. As requested, the titles were chosen out of a beret, and on the whole, I think it's made a good choice. Certainly as an introduction to this unique figure we couldn't have done better.

Junky – as I remember it, anyway – is to Burroughs' later work as Pablo Picasso's early art school paintings are to his cubist masterpieces. It's a good demonstration of conventional skill that shows how well he honed his craft before blowing apart all the rules. Or, at least, as conventional as it can be, considering it's an unflinching confessional narrative about guzzling powerful drugs written in 1957. While I'm detonating my own metaphor, I suppose I could also ask if it's right to compare Burroughs to a genius like Picasso. Is Burroughs going to be remembered as an impressive artist, or just a highly unusual and fascinating man?

That's something that we'll hopefully be able to talk about over the course of the month. It will almost certainly be worth discussing how Junky led onto the later works, so I will dig out my copy of Naked Lunch too. And there's also Junky's position within the wider spectrum of drug narratives. A great deal of interesting material, in other words, and I'd also welcome further ideas and suggestions for potential topics.

But the first thing to do is get reading.

I'm pleased to say that we have 10 copies to give away to the first readers in the UK to post "I want a copy please", alongside a nice comment relevant to the book. And if you're lucky enough to get in your request in quick enough, don't forget to email laura.kemp@theguardian.com. (Ginny is away for a couple of months!) as we can't track you down ourselves. Be nice to her too.

For those who don't get to ther freebies in time we also have a 30% discount in the Guardian bookstore.

FictionAutobiography and memoirBiographyWilliam BurroughsSam Jordison
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Poem of the week: Engram by Ahren Warner

A droll, sophisticated take on first poetic inspiration – including some very adult reflections on its nature

Alert to subtle linguistic nuance, a witty and wide-ranging Francophile, Ahren Warner has a claim to be the "poet's poet" of his generation. Even in apparently domestic and personal guise, he's a writer whose work conveys voluptuous but intelligent delight in language and technique. This week's poem, Engram, is no exception.

Warner has recently published his second collection, Pretty, with its panoply of cunningly interlocked sequences, but the poem I've chosen, in introductory spirit, comes from his equally elegant and eloquent first collection, Confer.

Warner's humour is subtle, often sardonic. Here, embedded rather than overt, the joke's on the solemn self-regard so often found in the "child-discovers-he's-a-poet" genre. Unlike Seamus Heaney (one of the genre's more effective practitioners) Warner, or his speaker, finds his "Personal Helicon" not in deep, dark nature but in bath-water. Inspired but un-glamourised, the 10-year-old poet, newly undressed, scurries on an undignified errand ("bare-arsed and dangling") to find pen-and-paper before he plunges into the bubbles.

Foreshadowing the pen-and-paper reference of line 11 is an odd but pleasurable metaphor in line three. "Graphite" implies "pencil" – one which the speaker imagines aquaplaning as it writes across wet paper. The opening comparison (signalled by "As … ") splices images rather than startling us, Muldoon-style, with a similarity of opposites. The "wrinkled skin of milk over-boiled" (potent engram from the yuk-childhood-memory kitty) visually resembles "the sludge of moistening bath balls", and "the pucker of wet paper … /summons up bubble-bath". Messy textures and bubbly noises are relished in dense consonants and the repeated vowel sounds of "sludge", "pucker", "summons", "bubble."

A near-rhyme with "aquaplane", "faux-clementine" suggests both the synthetically fruity smell, and the aspirational aesthetic precision of bath-time product-branding. This aroma is not that of an orange or a satsuma, but a clementine. In the fourth couplet the speaker seems to challenge the conventional notion of the self-shaping significance of memory. In recalling simple colour ("I remember the red") and the feel of the fabric ("the nap") he takes us back to an early, pre-literate stage of perception. What have such basic sensuous memories to do with the poet's complex constructions of bath-time and inspiration? Perhaps quite a lot.

There's further pleasure to be had, it seems, in the ephemerality of the boy's new poem. Penned, not pencilled, its words succumb to water-damage and soap-slime: "each letter bleeding// to a smutch or shadow". Despite the "bleeding", it's as if the young poet's interest in observing process, and finding the words to describe it, had overcome his possessiveness towards his work.

Flirting in the first two couplets with the possibility of end-rhymes, the poem abandons that possibility in favour of the lighter nudge of internal rhyme: "red" /"shed", "this" / "kiss." How easy it would have been to re-install end-rhyme in the last couplet. The decision to embed the rhyme and pair end-words with little in common ("this" and "name") is a clever one; missing the rhyme, we almost enact the memory-failure.

The memories summoned in "Engram" gain significance by their association with the speaker's formative experience of himself as a young writer, suddenly excited by an idea, or perhaps simply by the idea of words. And this is what matters. The synechdoche implied in the term "first kiss" suggests that it's not the kiss but the person concerned who has proven forgettable. Perhaps another writerly process, that of turning away from world to word, is indicated. In the final couplet, the syntax becomes abrupt, almost curt, and the speaker's tone is difficult to ascertain. Is it triumphant, regretful, or coolly candid? Seeing the poem as a miniature research-lab rather than a garden of lost delights, I'd go for the latter.

Engram
As the wrinkled skin of milk over-boiled
conjures the sludge of moistening bath balls,

the pucker of wet paper – graphite's aquaplane –
summons up bubble bath, its faux-clementine.

And, though I know that a single memory
so often beacons through our infant clutter,

I'm surprised that (though only a decade ago)
I remember the red, the nap of the pyjamas

I shed for the bath; how urgent it seemed
to run bare-arsed and dangling

in search of a pen and the paper I'd hold
in muculent hands; each letter bleeding

to a smutch or shadow. I remember this.
I cannot remember my first kiss's name.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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I love The Great Gatsby – but remembering it is another story

Disaster! I thought I'd made some headway across the great sea of literature, but it turns out I can barely remember any details of those books – classic or not – I've already finished

I have come to a terrible and shaming realisation, and I'm going to share it with you. I love reading (wait, that's not the realisation). I read when I was at school and at university. Now I read for fun and for work. I read to relax and to widen my horizons and because I can't really think of much else I'd rather be doing. I've read a lot. My bookshelves bulge.

But it turns out I can remember almost nothing of what I've read.

I already knew that less "important" books slide out of my mind fairly rapidly: I can sometimes find myself well into a thriller or a piece of romantic fiction before I work out I've read it before and I know exactly whodunnit or who ends up with whom. But it turns out the classics I thought were a solid part of my reading CV are just as forgettable.

Knowledge of this immense stupidity was brought home to me at the weekend. We had friends staying. We were talking about books. Great. My friend had just read Catch-22. Great – I've read that, I thought. I said it was hilarious. And then I stopped. I literally could not remember a thing about the novel, other than that it is funny. There's a character called Major Major Major Major. And it's on an island … isn't it?

Momentary aberration? It wasn't. He'd also recently read Brave New World. I love that book, I thought. I love dystopian fiction, and I'd definitely cite it as one of my top dystopian reads. But could I remember anything about it? Here is what I could dredge up. There's a savage. There's a lighthouse. Something about eugenics.

Thinking about it, I was horrified to find that much of the classic literature I've read has been boiled down in my mind to a few scant details. War and Peace – I was so proud of finishing that one! But if I had to say something, anything, about it now … hmm. I mainly remember being confused by all the nicknames.

It gets worse the more I think about it. Tom Jones? Well, I could tell you there's a foundling. And it's by Henry Fielding. Important insights, for sure. The Great Gatsby? Boats beating against the current. Daisy. Death. The shame! It's only about 100 pages long.

This is a nightmare. There I was, thinking that I had made some headway across the great sea of literature, and it turns out I'd never left the shore. Not that I want to turn reading into a numbers game, but I thought I had ticked at least some of the great works off my list. And more great books are coming all the time.

Here's something I do remember: the autodidact in Sartre's Nausea, reading his way alphabetically through every book in the library. Please tell me that my reading life isn't equally hopeless … or at least that I'm not alone …

FictionClassicsF Scott FitzgeraldJoseph HellerAldous HuxleyMemoryAlison Flood
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Forget Iron Man-child – let's fight the white maleness of geek culture

Fantasy has become a sandbox for immature masculinity. What kinds of stories could we tell if our writers tackled the hard truths of male identity and privilege?

The coming year threatens to be another period of white, male heroism in geek culture. Another summer of superpowered men in the cinema. Another year with only 4% of video games having female lead characters. Another year where a list of 30 hotly anticipated fantasy novels lists only seven by women, and only one by a writer of colour, where a science fiction shortlist with two women out of five is greeted as some kind of victory.

Money is the bottom line in the uniform white maleness of geek culture. The entertainment conglomerates that produce most of this content fear the female geek because they might disturb the profit margins. Boys buy more toys. And so the evil eye of corporate marketing departments is fixed upon them.

Let's be clear, this isn't any better for young men than it is for those left out of the party. They've been fed an unremitting diet of adolescent power fantasies. Which in turn feeds in to the arrested development of many men today, who drag their adolescence out well in to their 20s, 30s or even 40s. It's not just boys buying these toys, it's grown men who should know better.

Speaking of which, the author Paul S Kemp recently shared a valuable insight in to the values of "hypermasculine" fantasy. Meeting violence with violence. Occasional womanising. The Roman code of virtus. Kemp's reactionary outburst was made in response to the growing calls for more diversity in fantasy writing. But he seemed unwilling to discuss his opinions, doing the manly thing and switching the comments off when the inevitable takedowns of his odd philosophy began to appear.

What Kemp mistakes for "traditionally masculine values" are really the values of extended childhood. The white, male heroes of geek culture aren't men, but man-boys. Tony Stark is a cheeky little "billioniare playboy" with underdeveloped social skills who sits in his basement tinkering with his toys. He isn't Iron Man, he's Iron Man-child. These stories have to be told in fantasy, because the childish analogues of manhood they propound would never survive contact with adult reality.

There is a place for masculine stories. In fact, there is a desperate need for stories that tackle the hard truths of male identity. Offering advice for authors on the fundamentals of "writing the other", Daniel José Older called out writers who fail to even to write their own self.

"… what we don't see a lot is white people writing about the emotional, political, social experience of being white, the challenges and complexities of whiteness. We don't see many men writing about patriarchy, how it has damaged us, how we dance in and out of these impossible gender binaries in our daily lives."

As John Scalzi famously explained, Straight White Male is the lowest difficulty setting there is. I don't agree with the the metaphor entirely. Young white men often number among the most useless and deficient individuals in society, precisely because they have such a delusional sense of their own importance and entitlements. They've been raised to believe that one day they'll be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars (and superheroes), but they won't, and they're having a tantrum because of it.

How much more valuable could geek culture be if it represented all kinds of people equally? And what kinds of fantasy stories could we tell, even with white male heroes, if our writers truly engaged with the realities of power and privilege?

FantasyScience fictionComics and graphic novelsFictionSuperhero moviesScience fiction and fantasyGenderEqualityDamien Walter
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What might James Joyce have made of 21st-century Scottish independence?

Scotland's current political situation – with its parallels to Ireland's early-1900s Home Rule movement – would have held his attention

Sunday is tJames Joyce's birthday. It might have pleased him that Ireland are playing rugby against Scotland at the Aviva Stadium on Sunday 2 February, since he superstitiously considered the date lucky and went to great lengths to have his books Ulysses and Finnegans Wake printed and delivered to him on this date once he had completed them. Perhaps this does not augur well for Scotland's chances.

In any case, the current political situation in Scotland would certainly have held his attention. During his phase as an occasional journalist and lecturer in Trieste, Italy in the 1910s, Joyce discussed the contemporary Irish self-governance crisis in pieces such as Home Rule Comes of Age in 1907and The Home Rule Comet in 1910. As part of his lecture Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages, presented in Trieste in 1907, Joyce speculates on the fate of Ireland and of the greater "Celtic world":

Is this country destined some day to resume its ancient position as the Hellas of the north? Is the Celtic spirit, like the Slavic one (which it resembles in many respects), destined in the future to enrich the consciousness of civilization with new discoveries and institutions? Or is the Celtic world, the five Celtic nations, pressed by a stronger race to the edge of the continent – to the very last islands of Europe – doomed, after centuries of struggle, finally to fall headlong into the ocean?

Joyce's interest in – and feelings of affinity with – this wider Celtic world and its "Celtic spirit" is revealed by his interest in Scottish authors such as James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson, and his attraction to the philosophical idealism and scepticism of David Hume (whether or not we would class these writers as Celtic is irrelevant, since Joyce himself certainly did). Hogg and Stevenson provided blueprints for Joyce's exploration of a fractured psyche and nation in Finnegans Wake while Hume inspired Joyce's presentation of the Wake's dreamer trapped in his own mind, with only his remembered perceptions of the material world available to him.

The Wake is also saturated in the songs of Robert Burns and replete with allusions to Macpherson's Ossian poems and traces the ancient history of the Picts and Scots (a rare example of Irish colonialism) as well as the more recent Ulster Plantation (colonialism in the opposite direction). Furthermore, Scotland was the first foreign country the nomadic writer ever visited, taking a trip to Glasgow with his father in 1894. Joyce's feelings of empathy with the country he labels "poor sister Scotland" in the poem Gas from a Burner extended to him asking to be sent tartan ties in the 1930s and being photographed proudly sporting them.

But while Scotland had a considerable impact on Joyce's work, the reverse is also true. Joyce's innovative modernist prose has provided an important precedent for writers in Scotland such as James Kelman and Alasdair Gray. However, his legacy in Scotland was especially significant to those connected with the Scottish Literary Renaissance. The increased political activity in Scotland in the first part of the 20th century was inextricably linked with this movement, an offshoot of modernism associated with writers such as Somhairle MacGill-Eain, Edwin Muir and Edwin Morgan.

In the 1920s the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, the main figure of the movement, helped to found the National Party of Scotland, forerunner for today's Scottish National Party. As was the case in many stateless European nations, cultural regeneration was seen as an essential precursor of, or replacement for, political autonomy. For example, the void left in Irish affairs by the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell (James Joyce and Alex Salmond's political hero) opened up a space for the renewed cultural activity of the Irish Revival. These days Joyce himself is read less by critics as an apolitical and cosmopolitan aesthete and more as a writer working with similar aims to the Revivalists.

MacDiarmid's literary debts to Joyce are reflected in the title of his massive book-length poem In Memoriam James Joyce, in which the poet addresses the now deceased Irishman and attempts to emulate his multilingual experimentation. The inebriated stream of consciousness of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1924) owes much to the interior monologues of Joyce's Ulysses. The Scottish Chapbook – a journal MacDiarmid edited – documents the poet's excitement at the publication of Ulysses, which he compares to a recently published Scots dictionary:

We have been enormously struck by the resemblance – the moral resemblance – between Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish language and James Joyce's Ulysses. A vis comica that has not yet been liberated lies bound by desuetude and misappreciation in the recesses of the Doric; and its potential uprising would be no less prodigious, uncontrollable, and utterly at variance with conventional morality than was Joyce's tremendous outpouring.

Here MacDiarmid links Joyce's artistic methods in Ulysses to his plans for a revival of the use of the Scots language in modern literature; something which he hoped would produce a liberating, counter-conventional effect in Scotland (emphasis was also placed on Gaelic in the Scottish Literary Renaissance). MacDiarmid's "potential uprising" of the Scots language – which he links to Joyce's literary modernism – is part of his programme for a transformed, renewed Scotland. The lines "Scots steel tempered wi' Irish fire / Is the weapon that I desire" nicely sums up MacDiarmid's influences and aspirations.

In short, MacDiarmid's Joycean aesthetic was part of an ideological programme aimed at cultural and political transformation in Scotland. As Margery McCulloch has noted, early 20th-century Scottish artistic resurgence was designed to revivify the entire national fabric: "What made this post-First World War literary revival movement unique among Scottish cultural movements was the belief of those involved that any regeneration in the nation's aesthetic culture could not be separated from revival in the nation's wider social, economic, and political life."

Arguably, such a revival is now finally under way with the arrival of devolution in 1999 and the advent of the approaching independence referendum. The historian Tom Nairn, in his seminal 1980s text The Break-Up of Britain, used some arrestingly Joycean imagery to describe a certain nonchalance regarding this delay in Scottish nationalist activity:

'[N]ationalism' in the fuller historical sense remained very weak – so weak that until the 1960s it was almost wholly resistant to even the modest organization of the SNP. In the present situation typically nationalist myths about the continuous and inevitable 'rise' of the latter are bound to be invented. For nationalism time is unimportant: in its nature-mythology the soul is always there anyway, slumbering in the people, and it is of no especial importance that McFinnegan opened his eyes one hundred and fifty years after everyone else. He had to get up some time, and what matters is the grandeur of the Wake.

Here Nairn evokes the figure of Finnegan in Finnegans Wake who has fallen from a ladder and is presumed dead. However – as in the character from the Irish-American folk song Finnegan's Wake – the hero is destined to be resurrected.

In a strange sequence of events, Joyce, who borrowed and learned much from Scottish literature and philosophy, had an important influence on the Scottish Literary Renaissance, a modernist cultural component of renewed Scottish nationalist activity which has – in the long run – developed into the present political scene in Scotland. Is the political situation in Scotland now roughly comparable to the Irish events which Joyce described in 1907, one hundred years before the election of the first nationalist government at Holyrood? Has Tom Nairn's nationalist McFinnegan begun to rouse himself after a long sleep?

James JoyceScottish independencePoetry
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