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Summer voyages: Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

Whether you're getting away or chained to your desk over the summer, we look at novels that will transport you

The getaway season may be upon us but not everyone is lucky enough to get away, so to level things up a bit we'll be running blogs over the next couple of weeks on the literature of journeys: those books that will transport you, whether you're chained to your desk, sunning yourself on the sierra, or stuck in a queue at the airport.

My own choice isn't the sunniest read, but it points up the ironies of travel in a world in which one person's tourist resort is another's detention camp.

At the centre of Michelle de Kretser's fine novel, which has just won Australia's Miles Franklin award, are two characters from very different backgrounds, travelling for very different reasons. Laura is an Australian, who arrives in London to discover a country she already knows: "She looked at a bridge, and what she saw wasn't balustrade and arch but the embodiment of a sonnet. As for the monuments, they were iconic from tea towels. Then came a red-purple tree, magisterial in a park. Laura had never seen another like it and she recognised it at once – copper beeches were always turning up in novels. That was what it meant to be Australian: you came to London for the first time and discovered what you already knew."

As Laura acquires unlimited license to roam by landing a job with a guidebook publisher (the source of some trenchant comedy on the evasions of the tourist industry), Ravi is propelled by an appalling act of political carnage to leave his native Sri Lanka for the life of a refugee. In Australia, "the beaches, couched between headlands and devoid of coconut palms, didn't correspond at all to Ravi's notion of a coast".

He is patronised by do-gooders, interrogated by bureaucrats and consigned to wash dishes in an old people's home. Cut off from his home and his family, he becomes the embodiment of an old schoolteacher's belief that history is only a byproduct of geography. "It was vanity that led men to overestimate the force of history … for history was a human affair. But 'Geography is destiny. It is old. It is iron.'"

Part of de Kretser's point seems to be that the privileged travellers of the affluent West share a travel heritage, a way of looking and of describing that makes the world seem navigable and knowable: its horrors and injustices comfortably accommodated with the solipsism of the individual traveller. Returning from a stay with an impoverished Goan family, Laura resolves to send them presents to thank them and to improve their lot. She never does, because she is always distracted by more recent adventures. In the end they are just one more faraway thing that once happened to her.

There is a cost to this, as the increasingly listless Laura discovers. Ravi is also listless, though in his case not through choice but because of its absence. Others rescue him, debate his right to remain, give him jobs and then "release" him from them. Cut off from his country, his home and his family, he is also cut off from control of his own story.

Underlying the project of this uncompromising novel is the question of how such different stories can be brought into a single narrative. De Kretser's answer is that they can't, and that this is the central paradox of our globalised world. Laura and Ravi may find themselves staying in the same city, might even fleetingly make friends, but they will always be on different trajectories. The geographical accidents of their birth have set them on irreconcilable orbits which can only be halted if history and geography collide. Will that ever happen? Yes, implies de Kretser, it has and it will. The ecological event with which she ends the novel is a coup de theatre which offers an apocalyptic glimpse of the point where all journeys – and all stories – end.

Not a cheering novel, then, but a necessary one.

Tomorrow, Robert McCrum on Three Men in a Boat.

Summer readingFictionClaire Armitstead
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Poem of the week: Elegy by Sidney Keyes

Candid and unsentimental, the teenage poet's tribute to his departed grandfather is striking in its originality

Sidney Keyes was a few weeks old when his mother died of peritonitis, and his father, Captain Reginald Keyes, returned with the child to his own father's house. SKK, commemorated in this week's poem "Elegy", was the poet's paternal grandfather, also named Sidney. The boy wrote the poem in July, 1938, when he was only 16.

Born in 1922, he was the same age as Philip Larkin, and both were Oxford undergraduates at the same time. Larkin was wary of him, partly because of his own exclusion from the anthology Eight Oxford Poets, which Keyes and Michael Meyer produced in 1941. There were aesthetic differences too, of course. Keyes objected to WH Auden, and said so in his Introduction. For Larkin, Auden led the way. The Yeatsian strain in Keyes was an influence Larkin himself would struggle to resist.

Besides Yeats, Keyes admired the English and German Romantics, especially Rilke. Yet, he once said he wished he had been born in the 19th century, so he could have been "a good pastoral poet, instead of an uncomfortable metaphysical poet without roots". Who knows what kind of poet he might have become, given time. He was sternly self-critical and readily admitted there was "a vaguely bogus atmosphere" in his early poems. Perhaps he would have rejected symbolism in favour of realism, or consolidated them more successfully. But he was killed in Tunisia just before his 21st birthday, in April 1943 – the month in which, the poem claims, his Grandfather Keyes had died. April, 1942, was also the month Sidney joined the army.

Whatever influences the 16-year-old had absorbed, "Elegy" is remarkably free of imitative gestures. In fact, its originality is striking. The repetition, with slight variants, of the opening statement, "It is a year again", in the first line of the ensuing two stanzas, is forceful without being showily rhetorical, its simplicity all of a piece with the plain diction throughout. The rhyme-scheme (a,b,a,c,b,c) makes for a sturdy and cohesive stanza. There are confidently deployed half-rhymes (especially in stanza two) and some surprise pairings, such as "worms/ terms". Metrically, the poem is loose-limbed, resisting a heavy-stressed regularity that might have expressed the grandfather's character rather well, but which would have destroyed the fresh, insouciant tones of the grandson.

Dactylic rhythms in the first line, and picked up elsewhere, beat out a quietly emphatic tattoo. Before any expectations of a pentameter can be realised, the next line's four-beat stride stops sharply. As a metaphorical description of the death, this line is almost brutal. It might imply that walking out and slamming the door were habitual. But the third line, with its caesura before the last foot, complicates the grandfather's absence, extends his influence, and begins to restore his existence.

Keyes' images become increasingly daring: "Your brain/ Lives in the bank-book" … "your eyes look up/ Laughing from the carpet on the floor". Depersonalised intellect is expressed in wealth which outlives its owner; its power over the survivors clinched by laughter. The image of the eyes looking up from the carpet is almost surreal. Compare this line with the opening of a later poem, "The War Poet": "I am the man who looked for peace and found/ My own eyes barbed." These eyes, too, seem "barbed" – and multiple. Perhaps a pattern on an oriental carpet suggested a face and eyes, or perhaps Keyes was led simply by the association of the ground with the dead man's burial. Bizarre, faintly comic, faintly nightmarish, the images brilliantly reflect the grandfather's vivid, challenging presence. He has left the family "tangled" in his utterance, if blessed by his legacy, and he is still watching them. The assertion that "we still drink from your silver cup" returns to a more realistic mode, and hints at the pleasures of the rich inheritance.

The poem might almost be a prototype for Dylan Thomas's several great protest-poems against death and mourning. It's not Keyes' only treatment of the subject, either. One of his most anthologised poems imagines a magnificently resurrected, rocky-faced William Wordsworth. Both poems are defiant anti-elegies.

Here, forceful rhythms and stark imagery persist in stanza two. The grandfather is not merely buried: the ground is poured into his mouth. In hard, vigorous monosyllables the speaker insists the dead man still "drives" the family's thoughts "like the smart cobs of your youth". "Smart cobs" is a wonderful, brisk trot of a phrase. The equestrian simile turns an abstract idea into a strikingly concrete memory.

Entwined in the narrative of stanzas one and two are references to the grandfather's "words". Now the poet, confessing to the "delight" of making the poem, confirms his bigger, bolder ownership of language. Momentarily, a personal note is struck. Then the plural pronoun "we" is resumed for a final trio of impassioned pledges.

That the elegy, overall, is framed as a collective statement is another mark of its originality. The speaker is a proud heir who speaks publicly and authoritatively for the surviving family. There is a final handover of power to the dead man, and still his influence is not felt as oppressive. The young poet is a confident ally in the grandfather's defeat of "the swift departing years". Somehow a very English, as well as a very masculine poem, "Elegy" thrives on its youthful defiance, candour and lack of sentimentality.

Keyes would write more ambitious poems, some of them a little over-worked and florid compared with "Elegy". If he had only had as much time to mature as Larkin, perhaps he would have rediscovered this less literary style, and found nourishment in the plainer "roots" he thought he lacked.

Elegy
(In memoriam SKK)

April again, and it's a year again
Since you walked out and slammed the door
Leaving us tangled in your words. Your brain
Lives in the bank-book and your eyes look up
Laughing from the carpet on the floor:
And we still drink from your silver cup.

It is a year again since they poured
The dumb ground into your mouth:
And yet we know, by some recurring word
Or look caught unawares, that you still drive
Our thoughts like the smart cobs of your youth –
When you and the world were alive.

A year again, and we have fallen on bad times
Since they gave you to the worms.
I am ashamed to take delight in these rhymes
Without grief; but you need no tears.
We shall never forget nor escape you, nor make terms
With your enemies, the swift departing years.

PoetryPhilip LarkinWH AudenCarol Rumens
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Novels remain the best interactive media

Some predict traditional fiction will be superannuated by new technology. But it already uses better hard and software

There's a pervasive arrogance in the approach of technologists to books. Every new wave of technology arrives with its techno-prophets, assuring us we'll no longer have to deal with those fusty old book things and their tiresome words. In the future all novels will be interactive multimedia experiences.

The latest omen was the shining touch-screen of the iPad. Surely this would finally kill the dull old book dead? A wave of highly trumpeted interactive ebook apps appeared, followed by the rather less well-publicised losses of the app developers, who had invested in technology that added little or nothing to the reading experience.

In recent months, John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps and poor old Winnie the Pooh have been given the interactive treatment, but only became more not less dull than their non-interactive forbears. Maybe we, the readers, just aren't smart enough to see the value in interaction that is obvious to groups of twenty-something app developers.

As a culture we've bought in to the idea that these bits of silicon and glass designed in California and churned out of sweatshops in China are the absolute bees' knees. I make my regular pilgrimage to the Apple store like everyone else. But the persistent failure of the book to die in the face of technology suggests that not all is quite as it seems.

We're in the process of shifting the book from paper page to digital screen, but what we actually choose to read are still chunks of text, around 100,000 words long give or take, which start at the beginning and finish at the end. No branching interactive story lines. No embedded multimedia widgets. And definitely no chance for the reader to mess it up by doing something silly. Or worse, mundane.

Ah, but video games! Video games can throw us in to a 3D digital world where we can live out any story we want. But we already live in a sand-box reality that gives us infinite creative potential, and how much of a mess are most of us making of that? We end up trapped working in call centres in Croydon and manning the smithy in Skyrim.

So we turn to people whose imagination can shape something greater than our own – the writer. I truly believe everyone has a book in them, but very few people spend decades in lonely hard work learning to write it. Writers do. That's why they're sometimes a little cracked, like hermited monks brought down from the mountain to impart their wisdom to the masses.

Which might explain why there doesn't seem to be a single decent writer working in video games. Whenever I say thiss, people shout things like Mass Effect and Bioshock at me and I play them and they are about as well-written as an episode of Star Trek. Which isn't awful, but neither is it great. It's just functional.

Being a writer is much harder than being a coder. Because you are working with a language far more complex, nuanced and potentially powerful than Javascript. It's running on the hardware of the human brain, the product of evolution itself, and an operating system that makes iOS 7 look like a Casio calculator – human consciousness.

A book is an app written in the raw language of the mind that interfaces the reader with the powerful imagination of a great writer. That reader-writer relationship is interactive in the truest sense – the pure interaction of one imagination with another. But it's also hard work. You have to learn to read and you have to read a lot. It doesn't happen if you just sit and twiddle your thumbs, unlike video games.

All the bells and whistles of digital interactivity do is get in the way of the language. Stopping the reader to ask what they want to do is about as enhancing as barging invto a darkened cinema with a flashlight. When it comes to novels, the only job of an iPad is to provide a convenient platform to read on, then get the hell out of the way and let the language do its work.

FictionScience fictionAppsDamien Walter
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Oulipo: freeing literature by tightening its rules

By imposing multiple restrictions on the processes of writing, this group of French writers seek to find what literature might be, rather than what it is

You might think Raymond Queneau was guilty of a little overkill when he cured a bout of writer's block by writing One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, but this flipbook presentation of 10 sonnets did more than paper over a barren spell, it became the founding text of an experimental literary collective.

The 14 lines on each page are printed on individual strips, so that every line can be replaced by the corresponding one in any of the other poems. By the author's reckoning, it would take someone 190,258,751 years to go through all possible combinations. Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes is at once complete, always in the process of becoming (with a little help from the reader) and necessary (on its own combinatorial terms) – the signatures of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Potential Literature Workshop (OuLiPo) launched by Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960.

The Oulipo replayed literary modernity in ludic mode. It was, inter alia, an attempt to reconcile CP Snow's two cultures, an undertaking which was embodied by the workshop's co-founders: Queneau was a writer fascinated by science; Le Lionnais, a scientist fascinated by writing. In their own way, they were reprising the early Romantic ambition that "all art should become science, and all science art" (Friedrich Schlegel). Despite such lofty claims, the collective adopted a very pragmatic approach to fiction, which is rather unusual in France, where literature has preserved much of its mystique and creative writing programmes are almost unheard of. According to Daniel Levin Becker, Oulipians consider "literature in the conditional mood; not the imperative". They do not profess to know what literature should be, but attempt to uncover what it could be, either in theory or practice. In the early days, the emphasis was firmly on the former (i.e. "anoulipism" in Oulipospeak). When they were not scouring the great works of the past in search of proto-Oulipian procedures, the group members were busy establishing a lineage of "pre-emptive plagiarists" (Lewis Carroll, Raymond Roussel et al.). The invention and possible deployment of new writing constraints ("synthoulipism") soon became the main focal point, however, and under the aegis of Georges Perec (who joined in 1967) the production of ambitious new works took centre stage.

Oulipians are into literary bondage. Their fetish is predicated on the notion that writing is always constrained by something, be it simply time or language itself. The solution, in their view, is not to try, quixotically, to abolish constraints, but to acknowledge their presence, and embrace them proactively. For Queneau, "Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery". Italo Calvino (who was co-opted in 1973) concurred: "What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration or intuition is nothing other than finding the right road empirically". Choosing the "right road" from the outset, instead of stumbling upon it haphazardly, is the Oulipian way: once the Apollonian structure has been circumscribed, Dionysus can work his magic. "I set myself rules in order to be totally free," as Perec put it, echoing Queneau's earlier definition of Oulipians as "rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape".

As Gabriel Josipovici argues in Wha
t Ever Happened to Modernism?, modern literature was forged out of a refusal to submit to external constraints, with the novel a "new form in which the individual could express himself precisely by throwing off the shackles that bound him to his fathers and to tradition". The flipside of this emancipation of the writer (or privatisation of writing) was, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, isolation. No longer the mouthpiece of the Muses or society, novelists could only derive legitimacy from themselves. "Going back to the world of genres is not an option, any more than is a return to the world of the ancien régime," writes Josipovici. The Oulipo escapes the Romantic cul-de-sac of unfettered imagination (or its Surrealist avatar, chance) by reintroducing external constraints, which are self-imposed.

Whether or not constraints should be disclosed to the reader is a moot point. Harry Mathews refuses to do so, while Jacques Roubaud (another mathematician) argues that the constraint(s) should be the very subject matter of any truly Oulipian work. Some constraints are a trifle gimmicky, like Jacques Jouet's metro poems, or even Jean Lescure's N+7 procedure. Others are far more convincing, for example, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style in which the same anecdote is retold in 99 different ways. "The problem, when you see the constraint," Perec observed, is that you no longer see anything else. It is a testament to his prodigious talent that one of the first reviewers of A Void (1969) should have failed to notice that the novel does not contain the most common letter (e) in the French language. This lipogrammatic tour de force is particularly poignant because the missing e (pronounced "eux" – "them" – in French) refers to all those (including the author's parents) who went missing during the second world war.

For Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, the Romantic fragment "stands for itself and for that from which it has been detached," making it both finite and (theoretically) infinite. According to Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito, the Oulipian constraint serves a similar purpose: "The work which results may be 'complete' in itself, but it will also gesture at all the other work that could potentially be generated using that constraint". Exhaustion is the "necessary corollary" of potentiality, they continue. This is particularly true in the case of Perec, who, like an agoraphobic miniaturist, focuses on manageable, bite-sized chunks of reality, which he then tries to shoehorn into his books. He claimed that his ambition in Life: A User's Manual (1978) was "to exhaust not the world" but "a constituted fragment of the world". An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975) – his famous exploration of the "infra-ordinary" – involved spending three days on the Place Saint-Sulpice observing what happened when nothing happened.

One could argue that the failure of the Oulipian project is Perec's major theme. In one of the dreams in La Boutique obscure – recently translated for the first time – Perec discovers an edition of A Void in which the banned letter e keeps recurring. In Life: A User's Manual, Bartlebooth dies clutching the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, which turns out to be the wrong shape. The plot – based on an algorithm enabling the knight in a game of chess to touch every single square on the board once – enacts the novel's failure (there is a missing chapter corresponding to an unvisited basement). "The Winter Journey" (which Atlas Press is bringing out in a new edition) revolves around the discovery – and subsequent loss – of a book (the eponymous Winter Journey) proving that all the great modern poets were in fact plagiarists. Also, 53 Days – about an unfinished book left by a writer who disappears – was left unfinished by Perec, when he disappeared in 1982. The most famous Oulipian ― himself a crossword constructor – knew that literature was an unsolvable puzzle.

Some say that the Oulipo increasingly resembles a gathering of ageing cruciverbalists: it started off looking for "pre-emptive plagiarists" and is now largely concerned with archiving its glory days. In an age of N+7 Machines and ebooks, many of the Oulipo's algorithm-based experiments have lost their cutting edge. The recent revival of interest, in the English-speaking world, is due to translations of works by historic Oulipians, as well as Daniel Levin Becker's youthful transatlantic enthusiasm (he is the group's latest recruit). Perhaps it is a measure of the movement's success that these days some of the most interesting debates and experiments are taking place outside the narrow confines of the group. Take Multiples, for instance, which originated as a special issue of McSweeney's, edited by Adam Thirlwell, which Portobello is bringing out here next month. It is a typically Oulipian exercise in which 12 short stories are translated by 61 novelists into 18 different languages. Each story is translated into or out of English several times, until something new is found in translation.

FictionPoetryAndrew Gallix
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When readers become stalkers

The case of a reader attacking a crime writer at a book signing is just the latest in a string of incidents that could be out of a Stephen King novel

The peculiar ritual of the book signing – where authors surface into the public realm at a pre-announced time and venue, where the barrier of the page is briefly removed to allow writer/reader contact to become face-to-face – has plenty of potential for humiliation. Janice Galloway, for example, has written of someone who queued for over an hour to tell her that "he hated my stuff and … my fucking earrings as well". But the experience rarely gets as nasty as it did for Val McDermid at Sunderland University last December.

Disguised by a blond wig, trilby and glasses, Sandra Botham queued up after McDermid's talk, asked her to sign a copy of her 1994 non-fiction book about female PIs, A Suitable Job for a Woman, and dedicate it to "Michelin Man San", and then threw ink all over her. Botham had apparently held a grudge against McDermid for almost 20 years, having interpreted a passage in the book as a derogatory reference to her. She was convicted this week of common assault.

Another leading crime writer, Peter James, talked last year of a 10-year campaign by a stalker who appeared at his events around the UK. Between them, she sent lengthy emails "several times a day": one attached "a photograph of her Peter James shrine … flanked by candles, burning", while another (after he went blank when she turned up at a signing) was "a 10,000-word email beginning 'I've been your No 1 fan for years, I can't believe you don't remember my name'".

Other obsessives have confined themselves to emails or letters. Paul Lomax, who was convinced he and JK Rowling had met on a train before she wrote the Harry Potter books and had a special connection, was banned from contacting her in 2007 after bombarding her with letters, culminating in a death threat comparing her to the murdered playwright Joe Orton.

In the same year, Patricia Cornwell went to court to seek an injunction against her "cyberstalker", a writer called Leslie Sachs who had accused her online, inter alia, of plagiarism and antisemitism. More recently, James Lasdun devoted a book, Give Me Everything You Have, to being cyberstalked by someone he'd taught.

Writers have been the objects of stalking, one-off harassment or warped erotic pursuit since the beginnings of literary fame – Byron was stalked by his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer-Lytton by his estranged wife Rosina – but these ordeals seem to be becoming more common, partly, perhaps, because authors are on show more often (continuously, if on Twitter), and partly because the internet gives disturbed readers another, potentially unmediated way of connecting with them.

At any rate, ever since Stephen King's Misery – in which a nurse who calls herself a novelist's "No 1 fan" keeps him prisoner at her house – authors have been increasingly drawn to stalking or related behaviour as a theme: benign in the case of the eponymous hero of Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, but a creepy version of love in Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal, Philip Roth's The Humbling and Edward Cullen, troubling hero of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight trilogy.

When journalists (such as Rowling's Rita Skeeter) or biographers (as in Roth's Exit Ghost) appear in recent fiction, they almost invariably resemble stalkers. And few examples of the psychological thriller lack a menacing pursuer or harasser, whether their aim is murder, sex, ruining a reputation or just causing fear: the legacy of one of the currently hot genre's pioneers, Patricia Highsmith, who, as Susannah Clapp has noted, herself briefly stalked a love-object before becoming the "balladeer of stalking" in novels such as Strangers on a Train.

Crime fictionVal McDermidJK RowlingPatricia CornwellStephen KingIan McEwanPhilip RothStephenie Meyer
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Jane Austen is not that soothing | John Mullan

Suggestions that her fiction is an escape into a calmer, less crazy world miss the novels' stinging satire

Can the greatest fiction be medicine for the psyche? Paula Byrne, author of The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, told the Daily Telegraph this week that Austen's novels were prescribed to shell shock victims of the first world war. The claim was first made in a letter written to the Times Literary Supplement in 1984 by the clergyman Martin Jarrett-Kerr, who said that his former Oxford tutor HFB Brett-Smith had been employed by military hospitals to advise on reading matter for the war-wounded. "For the severely shell shocked he selected Jane Austen."

It is impossible not to speculate as to his reasons for thinking Austen the best solace for those who were severely traumatised. Dr Byrne said that if readers found Austen "a comfort" it might be because she described a world where "everyone knew their place". She suggested that "Austen was loved for the same reason audiences were fond of Downton Abbey". In a "crazy world", she provided regularity and social stability.

The notion that Austen's fiction might take you to a better place is an old one. Many will know Kipling's short story "The Janeites", describing the experiences of Humberstall, a soldier in the artillery on the western front, who finds that there is a secret society of men from all ranks who revere Austen's novels. Humberstall himself is converted, subsequently christening his guns by the names of some of her more horrible characters (Mr Collins, General Tilney and "The Lady Catherine de Bugg"). The terrors of war teach him that "there's no one to touch Jane when you're in a tight place".

But is it because she describes blessed order and conformity? Most of Austen's admirers regard her as the most unflinchingly satirical of all great novelists. The snobs and arrivistes of her England are remorselessly skewered; every aristocrat is a buffoon or a monster. Kipling's protagonist certainly notices all the bad behaviour revealed in Austen's novels. "Some'ow Jane put it down all so naked it made you ashamed." Perhaps Brett-Smith was thinking instead of the healing powers of great comedy and the deeper order of beautiful sentences. Comforting, but not comfortable.

Jane AustenFiction
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Literary clock - only a few minutes left to complete

Your time-quotes have been flooding in. But can anyone speak up for 11.08am? Help us to fill in the missing moments

We are nearly there. Your contributions have helped us fill almost everyone of the 1440 minute slots. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to our clock project. There are some fantastic books represented and there are some killer lines. A few of my favourites so far include:

A chutney-biting brigadier named Boyd-Boyd fixed an appointment on the 'phone with Oxted, at Hornborough Station, for the twelve thirty-two. He was to deliver the goods.

Taken from Extremely Entertaining Short Stories (One Thing Leads to Another) by Stacy Aumonier and submitted by AggieH.

I also like:

Jacobson died at 2.43 PM the next day after slashing his wrists with a razor blade in the second cubicle from the left in the men's washroom on the third floor.

taken Now: Zero by JG Ballard by karen_maine

And, perhaps a obvious choice, the excellent line from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

I have taken all the quotes and put them in the spreadsheets below. I've also included the times that we're still missing.

As you can see, on the hour, half hour and quarter of the hour are almost all there, but there are some big gaps, particularly many of the minutes between 18:00 and 20:00. Can you help fill these times or any of the other gaps, for that matter? Read anything that might just mention 14:56, 15:10 or 19:58?

For the tech people to be able to create the piece that will sit on the Edinburgh International festival site, they need time, which means that I have to hand this over to them on Monday 15 July. This means that if you'd like to take part, now's the time. If you don't really know where to start, crime and thriller books are very good at mentioning times, as are narratives that involve train travel; Agatha Christie's 4:50 from Paddington has offered us with some great quotes.

You can use the comment thread to leave your suggested quotes - as before please include the book title and author's name - or you can continue to fill the form that you'll find on my previous blog.

I'll try and keep this sheet updated so you can see the gaps that still need filling. So, who's got one for 11:08?

Edinburgh International Book FestivalHannah Freeman
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Left out: the authors who know disability from inside

Last week's recommended reading had a conspicuous, and worrying, absence of personal experience

I was disappointed to read Paul Wilson's top 10 books about disability – what a missed opportunity. One of the slogans of the disability rights movement is "Nothing About Us Without Us" - and there was very little "us" in last week's selection.

Since Aristotle, characters with disabilities have appeared in western drama and impairment has long been used in fiction as a metaphor for mortality, evil, pity – the human condition. However, few of the writers have been disabled themselves, and although I don't believe you have to experience something in order to write about it (I'm a female playwright who writes male characters), a selection that favours books written by non-disabled writers misses far too much.

Many depictions of disabled characters are outdated, incorrect, and far from the reality of living with a physical, sensory, or intellectual impairment. They are invariably rooted in social norms, defining (and often devaluing) the individual according to their medical diagnosis. Apart from the frustration of such limiting characterisation, and inaccuracies being peddled as truth, there is another, more sinister trend – the rising incidence of disability hate crime. Disabled investigative journalist Katherine Quarmby's eye-opening Scapegoat: Why We are Failing Disabled People is a timely study of the root causes of violent crime against people who are "different", a sobering wake-up to western society's ingrained prejudices and our limited definition of what is "normal".

Which is another good reason for exploring work written from within difference rather than outside it. Writers who embrace a disability identity, and the unique perspective their impairment or condition gives them, can radically change other worldviews, too. Anne Finger's Call Me Ahab (University of Nebraska Press) is a fantastic collection of stories, reinventing the lives of figures from art and literature we think we know: Vincent van Gogh holed up in a New York hotel, surviving on food stamps; Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo merging as one in a Hollywood flick …. It's a prose "crip" version of Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife with the same wit and verve, but it goes further, challenging how we understand and look at our own and other bodies.

Or how about Clare Allan's multi-award winning Poppy Shakespeare, brilliantly subverting notions of sanity as she terrifyingly dismantles our mental health system? Informed by her 10 years in a mental health unit, she explodes the myth of the madwoman in the attic, revealing how we are complicit in our society's social constructs. Such work is illuminating, making me perceive existence in a different way.

Characters with different perspectives have been fashionable for years, usually those with intellectual impairments, or who are on the spectrum. How extraordinary, then, to engage with such material, not from an outsider's imagined posturing, but from the embodied experience of being in a disabling world?

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison (Ebury), Daniel Tammet's memoir Born on a Blue Day or almost anything written by Donna Williams will bring more clarity and revelation than any Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time ever could. Temple Grandin's extraordinary Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behaviour is a prime example of how radical this work can be. As professor of animal science at Colorado State University, she uses her autism to empathise with and understand how animals feel.

And there are so many more – "Cripple of poets" Jim Ferris's The Hospital Poems (Main Street Rag), Christopher Nolan's Dam-Burst of Dreams (Littlehampton Book Services), Terry Galloway's acerbic Mean Little Deaf Queer (Beacon Press), Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, and Michael Northern … I could go on and on. But what are the books which have opened your eyes?

FictionDisabilityKaite O'Reilly
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Abandonment issue: when do you give up on a book?

Too heavy going, too lightweight, just too long – what are the reasons to put a volume down?

We've all no doubt at some point in our reading lives found ourselves at the point where we realise that the book we're reading is not up to scratch. It doesn't matter whether it's a novel by an author we've always previously liked, a book foisted on us by an overzealous friend, or an intriguing debut we picked up because it had a great cover. Maybe there's a part of you that knows within a paragraph (or, worse, a sentence); perhaps it takes 50 pages, or a 100, before you start to ask yourself the question: is this a book that I should abandon?

According to a beguiling new infographic produced by Goodreads, we react to this question in a number of ways. If you're like me – and 38.1% of you are – you'll read on no matter what, since abandoning a book is tantamount to heresy. It doesn't matter if the book is bad, if the book is dull, if the book is so eye-bleedingly hard that every single word makes you painfully aware of what a bear of little brain you are – you'll go on reading until you're done (and when you're done you might treat yourself to a book you know you'll enjoy, maybe re-reading a favourite, in the hope that it cleanses your palate of the bad experience). The majority though, will quit a book after a chapter or, if you adopt the seemingly made-up rule suggested in the infographic, after a hundred pages minus your age.

What it is that makes a book abandonable? Well, obviously, there are those that are "difficult". Not for nothing is Ulysses amongst the most abandoned classics. I'm sure there's room on that shelf for Thomas Pynchon's V, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo's Ratner's Star as well (although as a person who never abandons a book, I take an obscure satisfaction in having finished all of them). But actually there's no shame in saying that a book is too difficult. Not only is it an acknowledgement of your own limitations, which in itself is a kind of wisdom, it's also a kind of challenge, an admission that a book is too much for me now but might not be in the future (it took me three swings at V before I finally made it all the way through).

Challenging reads are probably a small niche within the abandoned bookstacks . I'd hazard a guess that the main reason people abandon books is because life is too short. Again, those good people over at Goodreads have conducted a straw poll and the chart is currently topped b JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy and EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey. Whilst this demonstrates that the kind of readers who like to take part in straw polls have short memories, it also indicates quite well what kinds of books are most frequently cast aside: the books that disappoint (Rowling's earnest novel for adults is a little too far from the ice cream and ginger beer of Harry Potter for most readers) and those that you read simply because everyone else is reading them (I haven't succumbed to Fifty Shades of Grey myself but I've had enough people tell me it's as bad as Twilight to know I'm not missing anything).

Which I'm sure makes me sound like the worst kind of book snob – but we're all book snobs, whether we admit it or not. Choosing one book over another is a kind of snobbery. It's all about our choices. The sad thing is that those choices sometimes, possibly frequently, let us down. Whether we regularly abandon books or not, we all, from time to time, find ourselves lifting our heads from the book (or screen) we are reading, to gaze out of the window and sigh. This book wasn't what we hoped it would be. But then there's the hope, isn't there? That the next book – or the next book – or the next book – will be worth every bit of time we invest.

FictionPeter Wild
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To Kill a Mockingbird: too simple a moral tale?

Harper Lee's novel is very hard to fault, but some critics have wondered if its take on Southern racism isn't a little anodyne

After last month's encounter with DH Lawrence, it's a relief to come to a book that is as easy to like as it is to admire. Easy, in fact, to love. I fully understand why reading group contributor babytiger might give his son the middle name "Atticus" and why he describes To Kill A Mockingbird as "an insanely good book".

It was many years since I'd last read the novel when I took it up again, and all I really remembered was my affection from first time around, alongside a few sketchy memories of sunny Southern weather, childish games and a bug crawling out of someone's hair. But it didn't take long before I realised why I enjoyed it so much all those years ago. It took, in fact, two pages of pleasant reading and then the following:

"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the court-house sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then; a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sheltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

I'll buy that over every single description of Paul's ecstatic flower-sniffing in Sons and Lovers. I'll take it over the whole novel, in fact. To explain why is to try to explain magic. Sure, there's technical prowess in the imagery (how perfectly all that sagging and wilting leads up to the teacakes) and the choice language (notice they are "ladies", not women; look at the hiss and stick of the sibilance, and all those letter "g"s in the muddy second sentence). But really what matters is more ephemeral, an alchemy of mood and voice that has lulled millions over the last 50 years. So many millions, and with such delight that, Stephen Metcalf noted in Slate, the novel "has become an inescapable fact of America's civic religion". It's a book held in such reverence all over the English-speaking world as well as the USA that to criticise it is almost a form of blasphemy. That hasn't stopped Metcalf and a few other critics having a go, however.

The most famous attack came from that other great Southern US prose stylist, Flannery O'Connor. When the book was already selling truckloads in the early 1960s, she observed: "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are buying a children's book."

Ouch! Although, is that really something to worry about? Surely part of the appeal of To Kill A Mockingbird is its ease, its apparent simplicity and its delight in childhood adventure. Personally, I have no objection to reading any kind of children's book: so long as it's as good as this one.

More damaging are a series of attacks begun by Thomas Mallon in the New Yorker in 2006. Mallon went first for the voice that most people find so beguiling: "Lee's narration remains a patchwork, mixing an adult's and a child's perspective according to no logic other than the immediate exigencies of the plot." There isn't much defence here. When Scout is six, she often sounds as though she could be 16. When Lee does remember to relate events from knee-height, she often punctures the illusion by interjecting variations on the "as I look back on it now" formula into the text. The only real answer to Mallon here is to shrug the shoulders. If I stand far enough back from the text, I can see a few rough edges – but when I was reading, immersed in Scout's world and within the logic of the plot, I didn't care. If you fall for Scout, as most people have, you can forgive such lapses. You probably won't even notice them.

Mallon also claimed, in a lovely phrase, that the novel is "moral Ritalin". Lee has "allowed the war between good and evil to be … a simple matter". Atticus is a "plaster saint", and if there are shades of ambiguity, the book never persists in them: "Mr Underwood, a man who 'despises Negroes' but protects Atticus with a shotgun, is glimpsed a couple of times and then dropped." Here I can defend Lee. Even Atticus, delightfully good as he may be, has flaws. He allows Aunt Alexandra to override his better judgment, and he also occasionally employs the very hierarchical language that the novel sets out to criticise: "you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash." Of course, you might read that as a noble sentiment. It isn't wrong, cut and dried. But we should credit Lee with some ambiguity here.

Meanwhile, the more interesting moral complexity comes on the other side. The good people in Scout's world are very good – but even the worst are granted motive and treated with empathy. Atticus's frequent request that Scout picture herself in the shoes of her adversaries sometimes seems like hokey, homespun wisdom, but adds more complexity to the novel than Mallon grants it. We are even asked to understand why someone like Walter Cunningham might join a lynch mob. Harper Lee may draw a thick strong line between right and wrong, but she allows for the fact that people will wander either side of it. It isn't so "simple" as Mallon claims.

Meanwhile, back on the subject of Atticus's wisdom, Allen Barra in the Wall Street Journal followed Mallon up by calling out the great lawyer as "a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams". Atticus, he said, "speaks in snatches of dialogue that seem written to be quoted in high-school English papers".

He illustrated this with the following:
"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
"Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up is something I can't pretend to understand."
"If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view …"

Bad Atticus! Bad Harper Lee! Too eloquent by half. Winston Churchill had similar issues. Hamlet too might have been purpose-built to give sixth-formers something to spout back at examiners. But though Atticus may seem to state the obvious now, in 1930s, or 1960s, or even today's Alabama, plenty of people would surely find plenty of his statements, shall we say, difficult to stomach. This, after all, is a book that helped to change the world. That perhaps shouldn't change the way we view it as literature – but is testament to its power. Would To Kill A Mockingbird have mattered so much if it was badly written? Maybe. Anyone who's struggled through Uncle Tom's Cabin will know that awful writing can still strike a chord. But it surely helps that Harper Lee plays her readers so well.

Elsewhere … Regular readers of the Reading group will be pleased to see that it got a review. From Howard Jacobson! He rather disagrees with my assessment of Sons and Lovers. It's pretty thrilling reading.

• Also, if you'd like a shiny new edition of To Kill A Mockingbird, we've got some copies to give away. If you're a UK reader and would like one, post a comment with an "I want please" somewhere. The first 10 to make a claim will get a copy. But don't forget to email Ginny.Hooker@guardian.co.uk to claim yours – we can't track you down ourselves.

Harper LeeFictionSam Jordison
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