The Guardian's Blog, page 20
February 10, 2016
Bawling for books: which titles make you cry?
Which books have you welling up, weeping or wailing? Now’s your chance to share it with others, and tell us why they moved you
On the Culture desk we have talked about the films that have had us tearing up, and the songs we’ve sniffed along to (which prompted the ever excellent headline “tracks of our tears”). After recent hit A Little Life got readers wondering how their bodies could produce so many tears, it’s now time for books. Which titles have made you cry? Readers of the Tips, links and suggestions community shared some of theirs recently, as did our Twitter followers. Let us know yours in the comments, and we’ll publish a selection on the Guardian site.
A Christmas Carol [by Charles Dickens] makes me blub more each time I read it – plus I’ve admitted before to shedding a small tear for Harold Biffen in New Grub Street [by George Gissing]... –judgeDAmNation
The Narrow Road to the Deep North [by Richard Flanagan] had me flinching and weeping, I knew what I was getting into .... but it did help me come to a closer understanding to my father and the men of his generation. [...] My mum couldn’t face it. The POW section of the book was terrible, truly terrible but what was most upsetting for me was the return to home and families. Heartbreaking. For all that I’m grateful it was written ... just something I needed to read. –magmillar
@GuardianBooks I cried so much reading Madeline Miller's 'The Song of Achilles' that I looked like I'd just fought in the Trojan War myself
@GuardianBooks Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes pic.twitter.com/qfo4w84M5K
@GuardianBooks 'Dance with a Poor Man's Daughter' by Pamela Jooste had me in bits near the end. Also 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy.
@GuardianBooks The Road Cormac McCarthy totally destroyed me as did #alittlelife
@GuardianBooks Time Traveller's Wife, after I finished it on the train I ran home locked myself in a room and waited for the tears to come
@GuardianBooks Cry The Beloved Country, Alan Paton. Cried at beautiful descriptions, cried for the men that lose their sons, cried for SA
@GuardianBooks Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
@GuardianBooks Can't send a pic of my rather battered copy since I'm commuting, but Watership Down makes me cry every time.
@GuardianBooks A Monster Calls, by @Patrick_Ness. Floods of tears, every time.
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February 9, 2016
Translation Tuesday: A Little Love Story by Ödön von Horváth
A translated tale of desire and nostalgia by Hungarian playwright and novelist Ödön von Horváth, who was killed by a falling tree branch in 1938
By Ödön von Horváth and Linda Baker for for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
How quiet it is in autumn, a strange and unearthly quiet.
Everything is just as it always was, it seems nothing has changed. Neither the marsh nor the farmland, not the fir trees on the hills, not the lake. Nothing. Only that summer’s gone. October’s end. And already late in the afternoon.
The fact of the matter was, I wanted every girl I saw, I wanted to possess her
'You’re good in the sack,' I answered, and my own crassness pleased me
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Can Homer's Iliad speak across the centuries?
Three millennia after its composition, there are many obstacles to understanding this pillar of western literature – but the effort is worth it
When I first read Homer, I did not experience the same sublime ecstasy as Keats. No wild surmise for me! Instead, I experienced mild disappointment, considerable confusion and strong annoyance.
That all changed - but for now, let’s focus on the negative. The poem is challenging. I understand why people are so keen to evangelise this incredible artistic achievement, but I also worry that the praise we are all so keen to heap on the poem does few favours to people tackling the Iliad for the first time. People who have been told to expect the ultimate poetic experience – and discover instead a world of hurt.
Related: New translation of the Iliad by Caroline Alexander – extract
"There’s delicious irony in the fact that men so wrapped up in their own reputations can be so silly"
Related: Embarking on an epic: Homer's Iliad for February's Reading group
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February 8, 2016
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
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including great Great American Novelists, fantastic short stories to read out loud and odes to music in written form.
SydneyH has finished The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner:
The first thing I’ll say is that Stegner can write. I like him more than Pynchon, Delillo, Roth, any number of reputable American novelists. His first person is a bit like VS Naipaul’s in the sense that it is gentle and elegant, but he searches for brilliant metaphors in a way that I think isn’t present in Naipaul’s work. The novel isn’t what you would expect. If you have heard of Stegner being described as a major Western American writer, it might surprise you that a significant part of the novel is set in Denmark. I don’t want to say too much about it, because it would spoil the experience for people who are planning to read it. I’ll just say that I’m planning to read more by him – he may become my go-to writer this year, which John Banville was about this time last year – and I’ll leave you with a sentence I was taken with. Joe Allston’s experience of revisiting old memories is “a little like taking the top off the jar and letting the tarantula out”.
Sometimes my wife and I read to each other. Tonight was The Music Teacher by John Cheever.
Pure and simple, an absolute master of his craft, Cheever takes you to the edge of the cliff and when he pushes you over and down into the dark, dark void you willingly succumb because his gift as a writer is so quietly overwhelming. Yes, there are other great short story writers, but there is none better. I believe The Stories of John Cheever is the only book to have ever won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. If you don’t have this book in your collection you are missing something very special.
A joyful book, a little bit all over the map, but it reads as a romance to music and its power to transform. A little bit memoir, psychological treatise, cultural study, braggardly name dropping ode to music and music theory. As with David Byrne himself, the book seems to pull in myriad influences from the most unexpected of places, but again like the author, it gets synthesized into something unique. I would have preferred to hear more about his writing process or how he went from noodling to creating, but the digressions were almost as interesting. Byrne certainly has retained the open-mindedness that characterized his music, he halts at passing judgement where others fail to do so.
It does take quite a bit of getting into. It starts with two murders and a brutal beating, so I thought If it carries on like this then I’m not going to read much of it (it doesn’t - well, not entirely). It’s very dense and stylistically challenging to read but is more than worth the effort. I can fully understand the praise it’s got as it’s a dazzling and fearless rollercoaster ride through the street-life of Jamaica. I’m only just about two thirds of the way through but it’s already very high up on my list of favourite reads. Highly recommended!
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Poem of the week: Grey by Edwin Morgan
A meditation on the plain and ordinary aspects of life finds virtue in the unspectacular – but also provides some formal dazzle
Grey
What is the nub of such a plain grey day?
Does it have one? Does it have to have one?
If small is beautiful, is grey, is plain?
Or rather do we sense withdrawal, veiling,
a patch, a membrane, an eyelid hating light?
Does weather have some old remit to mock
the love of movement, colour, contrast –
primitives, all of us, that wilt and die
without some gorgeous dance or drizzle-dazzle.
Karin Slaughter: Libraries saved me, now they need rescuing
Books provide access to a better way of life, and for many, libraries are the only way they can get to them. That is why I am campaigning to save them and you should, too
My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don’t like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food. They put cardboard over empty windowpanes so the cold wouldn’t kill them.
Books did not exist here. When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you’ve just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes — those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.
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February 6, 2016
The Cambridge spy ring files that Whitehall won’t make public
Calls for release of cold war secrets grow, as the Foreign Office, MI6 and MI5 keep past mistakes under lock and key
Another biography of Guy Burgess. Readers and reviewers may be forgiven for wondering what more there is to say about the much investigated, albeit most enigmatic, member of the Cambridge spy ring.
Guy Burgess, the Spy Who Knew Everyone, by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert (Biteback) has just been published, less than five months after Andrew Lownie’s Stalin’s Englishman (Hodder & Stoughton).
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February 5, 2016
Flash Friday: Apocope by Adam Dalva
‘Who is a deathbed really for?’ A short story about observing the choices of a friend dying of cancer, our latest in a series of collaborations with Tin House magazine
By Adam Dalva for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network
A friend of mine died last month. We weren’t particularly close, but I liked her a lot – we’d have coffee near Union Square every so often and she’d talk about her budding music career and I’d talk about my long-gestating novel. I tend not to enjoy unifying conversations about art that include me. I admire the obvious external talents of actors and singers and basketball players more than the writer’s drudging isolation and, karaoke daydreams aside, I don’t crave the immediacy of reaction that performers chase. But my friend’s genuine enthusiasm for what she called “our craft” was infectious and I always got a creative jolt out of seeing her. She was too earnest, too well-liked, too attractive, to have ever generated evident self-consciousness.
A year ago, my friend found out that she had a really dire, painful kind of cancer. She spent the rest of her life enduring a sequence of atrocities—bone marrow transplants, hotel stays near the Mayo Clinic, experimental treatments that gave her a false sense of hope, multiple resuscitations. Hers was the kind of suffering that eventually pushes you into a null state somewhere beyond empathy. Gradually, I got used to the idea that she would soon disappear. Each text was a bit more valedictory; I was more relieved with every one of her email replies.
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Poster poems: Didactic verse
It’s not much practised, but there’s a strong tradition of how-to poems, from Virgil to Henry Reed. So this month it’s your turn to teach
The question of what poetry is for is one that has as many answers as it has people who try to answer it. For Ezra Pound, following the teachers of medieval oratory, the answer was ut moveat, ut doceat, ut delectate; that poetry should move, teach and delight. Most contemporary readers would probably have no issue with the first and third of these precepts, but the didactic use of poetry went somewhat out of fashion with the Romantic movement and is still not much valued by many readers.
Nevertheless, a genre of “how to” poems does exist, and poems of instruction – more or less literal – continue to be written. This didactic tradition dates back at least as far as Hesiod’s farming manual Works and Days, with its emphasis on the value of hard work. For Hesiod, labour is both inevitable and ethically desirable, being humanity’s greatest safeguard against unnecessary strife. The poem was a major influence on Virgil’s The Georgics, which similarly emphasises the importance of hard work. Indeed, Virgil goes so far as to suggest farming as a suitable employment for retired Roman soldiers, perhaps picking up on the earlier poet’s concern with containing violence through physical labour.
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February 4, 2016
The anchored terset: can you write a poem in three words?
A radically condensed form of poetry, using just three words, is being piloted for National Libraries Day.
Can
It
Last
?
It’s not often that I’m moved to verse, but it’s also not often that I hear of a
New
Poetic
Form
.
Firstly, an anchored terset may only be made of three words, and its unusual spelling is a nod to the terseness of short forms. Kennings and hyphenated words may be counted as one word for those wanting to experiment and stretch the form.
Whatever three-word combination a poet or writer comes up with, the second rule of the form is that the terset must be anchored by a full-stop on the fourth line (although again, those wanting to break the rules could employ other grammatical marks).
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