The Guardian's Blog, page 151

Who is the greatest American novelist? 8: Sinclair Lewis v Wallace Stegner

You nominated the contenders – now reader Matthew Spencer pits Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry against Stegner's The Spectator Bird

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Who is the best American novelist: 7. Willa Cather v F Scott Fitzgerald

You nominated the contenders – now reader Matthew Spencer pits Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop against Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned

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Brendon Chase: the thrill of escaping into the wild

B.B's novel of young runaway boys turning feral in the countryside is filled with sensual detail, and a love for the natural world – while never forgetting it's an adventure story too

My recipe for the perfect Christmas comfort read is when you discover by chance a book from childhood and devour it in a single sitting. It is best digested if it is a great escape (what good book isn't?), rich in sensory delights, with a powerful sense of the changing seasons.

Serendipity is important – a comfort read is far more thrilling if you pick it up, half-remembered, from the bookshelves of your old family home at Christmas – but if I was planning ahead, I would choose Brendon Chase by B.B.

Its setup sounds like a bad Enid Blyton: three brothers, forced to divide their time between their neurotic aunt (who has never understood boys) and their boring boarding school, run away and live in a forest in south-east England for a year.

It was published in 1944 when Blyton-esque adventures were de rigueur but this rollickingly authentic children's novel is a world away from hackneyed old Enid. The boys, Big John, Little John and Robin, are inspired by Thoreau's Life in the Woods, which was clearly also an inspiration for B.B, the pen-name of Denys Watkins-Pitchford. He was an author, illustrator and polymath who is enjoying a mini-revival today with the recent publication of a new compilation from his long life of writing.

All children (and adults) fantasise about slipping the shackles of boring authority. As an 11-year-old, I aspired to living like these "outlaws", in a hollow oak tree, with rabbit furs for clothes. But, as B.B relates, reality quickly hits home: how, exactly, can the boys really live in a forest? Gradually, they teach themselves how to survive. It isn't pretty – they fish, they steal a rifle and shoot a wild pig and rustle songbird's eggs to eat. Robin even climbs an enormous tree to rob an egg belonging to a honey buzzard (the bird is down to a few dozen pairs in Britain, probably because of boys like Robin) – but the book is full of realistic ingenuity and a joyous embrace of the wild world.

Brendon Chase is also a proper page-turner, thanks to the constant risk that the boys will be found by the determined (and slightly hackneyed) Sergeant Bunting, the eccentric, butterfly-collecting Reverend Whiting or the menacing figure of Sir William Bary, who hopes to give "those rascals" a "taste of me huntin' crop".

Like comfort eating, a comfort read must be a constant sensory delight and it is here that Brendon Chase really excels. Almost every page has a treat for the senses – wood smoke, the discovery of a an iridescent purple emperor butterfly, or wild swimming. And through the inadvertent, ecstatic discoveries of the grownups chasing the boys, B.B shows how adults can rediscover these pleasures too.

Even the hapless Sergeant Bunting can't resist a skinny-dip in a mysterious forest pond: "He passed through a cloud of midges, he smelt the rare leafy tang of the woodland water. He skirted the lily beds – once or twice feeling the sinister snaky coils of their roots against his kicking legs. He turned on his back and floated like an upturned chubby boat, staring into the summer blue."

Call me a traditionalist but any good Christmas comfort read must really feature snow as well, and Brendon Chase closes with the boys confronted by the beauty and hardship of a cold, silent forest. The "keen lung-shrivelling aroma" of snow gives off a tint of blue: "The dense thickets and brakes were purple-black... the mystery of the trees was increased."

It is the perfect setting for the happy-sad denouement of a book that makes you glow inside.

Historical fiction (children and teens)Children and teenagersFictionAdventure (children and teens)Science and naturePatrick Barkham
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Christmas Day by Paul Durcan: delicate, courteous, cordial

Reader Claire McAlpine finds kindness and forgiveness in a book-length poem set on 'the feast of St Loneliness'

This book-length poem is the antithesis of traditional Christmas cheer and will appeal to those who seek an escape from the kitsch and glitz of seasonal madness or who remember spending Christmas Day alone.

Yet this illuminating work has been my comforting read for the festive season since I heard Durcan reading it aloud, returning to his 49-year-old self to recall a Christmas day he would have spent alone, were it not for the generosity of his bachelor friend Frank and the company of reawakened memories that had slumbered all year, but which now come at him in abundance, littering the pages of his book like twinkling Christmas decorations.

His inviting me out of the blue
Was a shock to the system.
I expected him to say
'If I don't see you before Christmas Day,
I'll see you after Christmas Day.'

The poem begins and ends with the biblical verse from Isaiah 62:4

No longer are you to be named 'Forsaken',
nor your land 'Abandoned',
but you shall be called 'My Delight'
and your land 'The Wedded'.

Like bookends on a shelf, the repetition of the verse creates a frame within which the poem sits, revealing in a self-mocking, humorous way, the habits of a lifetime that have brought a father-of-two to this point in his life.

He speaks of ingrained habits, like not being able to pass a church without blessing himself or to endure aircraft take-off and landings without making the sign of the cross. As he listens to Christmas Mass on the radio in the comfort of his bed, sipping his coffee and mumbling the familiar refrains, he wonders how people might spend this day in parts of the world he has visited.

Objects that lie within reach encourage his reminiscences, reminding him of his travels, his father, past lovers: they include worry beads from the Arab quarter in Jerusalem, his father's rosary beads and book, his sole inheritance from the man who "died demented, alone and palely raving". He recalls a woman from Bulgaria, others from Brazil and the South Island of New Zealand, and a nun living in Rome.

Every year I travel far away
In search of the Abominable Snowman -
That is to say, The Abominable Woman.
Why? Why the Abominable Woman?
Because she is all

That is delicate, courteous, cordial.
I have caught glimpses of her
In Jerusalem, Dunedin, Rio de Janeiro,
But only once in ten years
Have I actually met her –

We submit to the humorous, melancholic phrases that speak of being alone yet carry no sadness; they uplift in a quiet way. The poet's observations spill words onto the page and infuse in him an appreciation for the small details in life that are shared with the reader; he looks through the windows of others both physically and metaphorically, experiencing not envy but admiration.

Christmas is the Feast of St Loneliness.
I street-walk at night
Looking in the windows
Of other people's houses
Assessing their Christmas decorations,
Marking them out of ten.

While some read to forget, others read to remember - the former in search of escape, the latter seeking comfort in the familiar. It is a rare volume that can satisfy both. As someone who rarely indulges the fleeting inclination to reread, I find myself breaking my own rule for Paul Durcan, retrieving this entertaining, subversive conversation between two men from the shelf every year.

Christmas Day is a poem that has fun remembering, and carries with it an air of confession, sitting within that biblical verse denoting forgiveness. It is a gift Durcan bestows upon himself, and one from which he benefits as he narrates. It reminds us that humour, generosity and compassion are antidotes to isolation and despair and that reaching out to a friend with an invitation at this time of year can inspire exceptional results.

Poetry
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25. Wards of the City of London

We end our festive countdown – extracted from Barnaby Rogerson's Book of Numbers – with the wards of London

The wards are: Aldersgate, Aldgate, Bassishaw, Billingsgate, Bishopsgate, Bread Street, Bridge and Bridge Without, Broad Street, Candlewick, Castle Baynard, Cheap, Coleman Street, Cordwainer, Cornhill, Cripplegate, Dowgate, Farringdon Within, Farringdon Without, Langbourn, Lime Street, Portsoken, Queenhithe, Tower, Vintry, Walbrook.

There have been 25 wards of the City of London for the last 1,000 years. They occasionally get bumped up by a subdivision, or down by an amalgamation, but happily we are set on 25 at the moment.

In ancient days these wards allowed for a mosaic of parish-like administration, little self-governing communities with their own assemblies (wardmote), wells, local markets, cemeteries, systems of public order (three elected beadles), and charities presided over by an alderman who formed a sort of senate of London, the Court of Aldermen. From this court, the separate system of livery companies (trade guilds) elected a Lord Mayor, replaced every year to soften any authoritarian tendencies.

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson

Reference and languagesLondonBarnaby Rogerson
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Writing in the Dark by Richard Caddel: a quiet contemplation of night

Written at night on a backlit handheld screen, Caddel's final collection of poems is infused with a love of the world

Sometime in the late 1990s, the poet Richard Caddel got his hands on a PDA – a Psion handheld mobile with a backlit screen – and started to make notes for poems on it at night. He wrote them in the garden of his Durham home and another garden in Japan. The poems that resulted from this experiment form the 2003 collection, Writing in the Dark.

These poems are, naturally enough, full of the sights and sounds of night-time – the moon, stars and planets form one thread of imagery that runs through the collection; the songs of nocturnal birds another, along with those other sounds of darkness – traffic, water, trains, hedge crickets and the laughter of girls in the lane behind the house. A third strand consists of images of breath and breathing, the fine thread of life itself.

These poems draw our attention to small things – weeds, flowers, a short sequence devoted to bees and another to snails – and these details are held up to us not as examples of their kind, but as individual things, "each / to its own / line". It is an attention infused with love, both personal love for a wife and daughter and also a love of the world that demands and is nourished by that attention.

It is also a perception made all the more acute by the dual darkness in which these poems took shape. The darkness that Caddel was writing in was not only literal, it was also metaphorical. In 1999, he was diagnosed with leukaemia. The book was edited by his wife, Ann, and published less than a year after his death on 1 April 2003. This other darkness surfaces from time to time, but lightly as in these lines from a poem called Distiller:

Snuff this
Dark varnish liquid, life.
We love it. Let it go.

You might be beginning to wonder what any of this has to do with comfort reading. To be honest, I'm not much given to the idea of turning to books for comfort; I prefer them to challenge me, to force me to think new thoughts or grapple with new information. However, I can find comfort in the fact that language and poetry can help a human being to make some kind of quiet sense of their own impending mortality. It's not that the poems in Writing in the Dark are in any real sense quietist; they are actively engaged with the world, as I hope I have made clear. Neither do they depend on any of the conventional consolations of religion. Caddel's faith, or as much of it as we need to know, is given in a few short lines:

Breathe easy
under star music.
What you believe
is true.

And what these poems believe is that life persists. The book ends with the one poem from the Psion experiment that remained unfinished, Nocturnall, dedicated to Caddel's wife and daughter. In this poem, he twice quotes Pound's "What thou lovest well remains", but in this new context the phrase is drained of its rhetorical baggage and becomes a simple statement of human faith. Love endures; if ever a book could provide comfort, it is a book that enacts this belief. Writing in the Dark does.

PoetryBilly Mills
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Who is the greatest American novelist? 6: Thomas Pynchon v Carson McCullers

You nominated the contenders – now reader Matthew Spencer pits Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 against McCullers' The Member of the Wedding

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24. Twenty-four angulas make a forearm ...

With one day to go, our festive advent calendar – extracted from Barnaby Rogerson's Book of Numbers – takes on a universal unit of measurement

Twenty-four angulas make one hasta, which is one of the universal measurement units of mankind – the length of a forearm measured out to the extended middle finger. The hasta is a unit of measurement devised by the Harappan (the most ancient of India's urban civilisations along the Indus) and akin to the cubit used in Sumeria (the most ancient urban culture of Iraq) and ancient Egypt.

It seems that the basic Harappan unit was formed from the width of eight barley grains placed side by side, which was found to be equal to a finger's width (roughly 1.76cm). Twelve of these finger widths/barley rows made an angula, while a dhanus (the length of a bow) was assessed as 108 of these finger width/barley rows. Anything with "108" in it was deemed to be very propitious in India and the east, and so it was a favourite unit in which to design a citadel or a wall.

The use of barley as the ultimate foundation stone of measurement appears to be another universal element (alongside the forearm, the foot and the breadth of a finger), so that, for instance, you will find it underwriting the system of measurements used by the Vikings. But there has always been room for financial manipulation and speculation, especially from the great rival of barley, the slightly lighter wheat seed. Four wheat seeds equal three of barley, which are themselves considered to be on par with the seed from a carob tree.

Tomorrow: the 25 wards of the city of London

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson

Reference and languagesAgricultureIndiaIraqAnatomy and physiologyBarnaby Rogerson
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Who is the greatest American novelist? 5: Philip Roth v Richard Ford

You nominated the contenders – now reader Matthew Spencer pits Roth's The Human Stain against Ford's Independence Day

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Emil and the Detectives, by Erich Kästner: an adventure for the child in us all

The story of Kästner's schoolboy sleuth throws a lasting light on Germany in the 1920s, before the darkness fell

My comfort reads are mostly children's books. The point, surely, is that to soothe a book should be welcoming, simple, not requiring great effort. Also, I expect a comfort read to reconnect me with the joy of reading – so I go back to the books that, as a child, gave me the greatest pleasure.

There are several I have reread as an adult. And, now as a parent, I have read some out loud to my sons on summer holidays: Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, and – best of all – the archetypal children's crime novel, Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner.

I still have my childhood copy, a Puffin with a bright yellow cover and a colourised version of one of the wonderfully expressive cartoons by Walter Trier that punctuate the book. The cover illustration shows a young, skinny lad in a smart suit, with a suitcase and a bunch of flowers, being presented to a scruffy but friendly gang of boys in shorts and workers' caps.

"To Paul, With love, from, Helen & Mark xx" is inscribed on the title page in my older brother's beautifully neat handwriting. From the publication date I guess Mark must have bought it for my ninth birthday, which means he would have just turned 13, and he thoughtfully added our little sister's name to make it a joint present. She'd only have been six and so unable to fund a gift of her own. Even one priced 20p.

I often wonder what made him select it from the bookshop shelves, with its foreign author and hero's names, rather than another Biggles or a Willard Price adventure, which I was consuming at the time. But I expect the blurb on the back cover did its job: "A thrilling story of a robbery, and the tracking and exposing of the thief – with Emil himself as both victim and detective." Who could resist that?

The story begins amid the bustle of a country hairdresser's shop, where Emil's mum is preparing to send him alone, by train, to stay with his Grandma in Berlin for the summer holiday. She gives him a large sum in an envelope – 160 marks in the original, £7 in my 1972 copy – to give his grandmother when he gets there. The horse tram that takes him to the station reminds the reader that Emil is a simple country boy heading into the unknown of the big city. On the train, a strange, dapper gent in a bowler hat, Mr Grundeis, mocks his naivety. Emil anxiously guards the wad of money he has pinned in his jacket pocket. The motion of the train lulls him into sleep… and when he wakes with a start after the train halts at its penultimate stop, the cash and the man have gone!

This is the point at which Kastner injects his particular genius into the story and endears himself to generations of children to come. Emil does not go to the police, he does not continue tearfully on to meet his relatives at the final stop, but jumps off and follows the bowler-hatted man. He spies on Grundeis, and gradually the gang of boys – ordinary, rough and ready, working-class boys who inhabit that quarter of Berlin – spot Emil, and rope themselves in to an elaborate plot to unmask the thief (while taking care not to get into trouble with their parents).

The action unfolds at an exciting pace, and the dialogue paints a bright picture of Berlin and German society in the 1920s, before it fell into darkness. The writing is never stale. The friendship Emil forges with the boys, and their spirit in tackling the crime, inspire the reader to believe that, even as small people in a big world, they can have a say in their destiny, and a shot at justice.

And I'm delighted that, as time goes on, I discover other grown-up boys and girls who loved this book – for instance, the people bringing it to the stage of the National Theatre as this year's Christmas family show. I hope it enthrals a fresh generation of young sleuths.

FictionChildren and teenagersPaul Simon
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