The Guardian's Blog, page 21

Food in books: potato pancake from The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg

The meal from this Swedish novel makes Kate Young reflect on the journeys her ancestors embarked on for a better life in the ‘New World’ – and her own

By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network

Kristina had baked a potato pancake which she divided among husband, children, and brother-in-law; as yet she would not open the butter tub.

The Emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg

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Published on February 04, 2016 08:30

#CoverKidsBooks should have read up more on children's literature

A new campaign for greater coverage of this literature is well-meaning, but its exclusive focus on print is out of tune with the younger generation

In the wake of Frances Hardinge’s Costa win and the news that sales of children’s books account for more than 30% of the book buying market, a campaign has been launched by children’s author SF Said to increase their media coverage. Great!

#CoverKidsBooks launched this week with what it calls “the facts”: that children’s books enjoy just 3% of the media coverage of books, despite that 30% market share.

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Published on February 04, 2016 00:00

The best books-and-music pairings

Listening to music and reading not only can go together, but can make fantastic partners and intensify both experiences. Here are your favourite pairings – with couples like Stephen King and Petshop Boys, sci-fi and Aphex Twin or Atwood and Beach House

The best background music for reading: your choices Literary Mixtape series: Alexander Chee finds a heroine – with Beyoncé’s help

If you don’t think it’s possible or appropriate to read and listen to music at the same time, look away now. We recently covered the best background music to read to. Here are your recommendations for specific book-song pairings that not only go well together but, you argue, even enhance the reading experience.

@GuardianBooks @harukimurakami with any of the music he mentions in his novels. Listened to Sinfonietta by Janacek while reading IQ84. :-)

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Published on February 03, 2016 08:45

Literary Mixtape: Alexander Chee finds a heroine – with Beyoncé's help

When writing his novel set in the Second Empire in France, Alexander Chee found that a mix of Beyoncé, Azealia Banks and The Knife set the right mood for a story about ‘confident, bold, hilarious and sexy’ women of the era

By Alexander Chee for Literary Mixtapes by Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network

The best books and music pairings: your recommendations The Queen of the Night came out on 2 February. Get a copy here

We’ve asked some of our favorite authors to make us a mixtape. This month’s installment is from Alexander Chee, whose new novel, Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) comes out this week. It’s a novel about “one woman’s rise from pioneer girl to circus rider to courtesan to world-renowned diva in 19th Century Paris,” so yes, Chee’s mixtape includes a healthy dose of both Beyoncé and The Runaways. Put on your headphones, turn up the volume, and read on.

– The editors at Electric Literature

I wanted to forget the weak cinema courtesans I had seen and to try and imagine the women I was sure had existed

For summoning the air of beauty that knows itself, knows what it can make men and women do, there’s little better

I watched the video to cast a spell on myself – and I decided it was the spell I wanted to cast over the whole novel

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Published on February 03, 2016 08:45

Translation Tuesday: The Princess by Alit Karp

A cook’s chance encounter with a young Swedish princess sets the scene for this short story, translated from Hebrew

By Alit Karp and Ilana Kurshan for Translation Tuesdays byAsymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

By the time Nils Holgersson turned forty-eight, he already lived very far north, in Jokkmokk, the capital of Swedish Lapland, which could only with the utmost pretension be called a capital city, since it was no more than a small, remote village upon which, as Tacitus wrote, the sun never shone in the winter and never set in the summer. He worked as a custodian at the only local high school, which had three classes for each grade and a dormitory so that students who lived as far as 100, 200 or even 1000 kilometers away would have a place to stay. The school menu was standard for Sweden: mashed potatoes with butter and strips of bacon on Mondays, fried fish and potatoes on Tuesdays, pea soup and pancakes with jelly on Wednesdays, tuna salad on a roll on Thursdays, and noodles with ground beef on Fridays, which was the children’s favorite. He knew all this from his wife, Maria, who was the cook in the school where he worked as the custodian.

No children had been born to them. They accepted this as their lot in life and did not ask questions, neither of the doctors nor of their own parents, who were still alive when children remained a possibility. Sometimes Nils would amuse himself with the notion that if he had a son, he would teach him how to hold a hammer, how to drive in screws, and how to chop down trees. Most of the time, however, he did not torture himself with such pointless musings.

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Published on February 02, 2016 08:30

Finnegans Wake: a musical reading sounds out a cryptic text

An online project has set James Joyce’s infamously difficult novel to 17 songs – thereby making its meaning clearer, it claims. And you can take part

Listen to a taster playlist of the book set to music below

Is Finnegans Wake the most difficult novel ever written? With 60 different languages featured in it, a plot with multiple layers, impossibly varied interpretations and a complex “multifractal structure” recently discovered by mathematicians, James Joyce’s classic novel is at best challenging – even more so than Ulysses. Coinciding with the Irish author’s 134th birthday, a group of academics is launching Waywords and Meansigns, a project that sets the entire book to music, unabridged, with musicians and readers collaborating.

It’s all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud

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Published on February 02, 2016 04:44

Embarking on an epic: Homer's Iliad for February's Reading group

The motherlode of western literature has kept readers and translators busy for 3,000 years. Now it’s our turn

This month on the Reading group – deep breath – we’re going for the big one: the Iliad. The ur-text of the western canon. The beginning of everything.

If you’ve read Homer’s epic poem, you’ll have a good idea about why it’s been the bedrock of our literary tradition for so long. But if you haven’t, be prepared to be surprised.

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Published on February 02, 2016 02:00

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

Are you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooksScroll down for our favourite literary linksRead more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, with fantastic letter collections (a recurring theme lately), magic thrillers and very easily readable – one reader assures us – two-thousand-page trilogies.

NatashaFatale earned all our admiration by finishing Anatoly Rybakov’s Stalin trilogy, “which is basically a single 1800-page novel. That sounds daunting but it isn’t at all”:

Yevtushenko said of one the books that it reads like a detective story, and that’s exactly right. Not in that it’s a mystery – how could it be? – but in that it moves like a very good one. It fairly races along. So if you could see yourself reading six good mysteries in a row ...

I stayed lucky with Peter Brown’s The Ransom of the Soul. It simply never occurred to me before how much early Christianity had in common with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Could have used an editor in a couple of places; the defects are minor but the writing would be near-perfect if they’d been caught, so I grumble.

I have always steered clear of Steinbeck, however, for my book club, I am reading ‘East of Eden’. Just love it. Only half way through, but what a book! The writing about the human condition speaks to me in many ways. My favourite characters so far are Samuel and Lee. Philosophers and boy, do they think! PS. Never seen the film and I don’t want to.

Don’t ask me why. I just felt like I needed some of that kind of no-nonnsense advice to start 2016. He writes in epigrams mostly, which can get tiring. And, when he starts railing against the luxury of bathroom fixtures, it does get a bit much. But, for the most part, a lot of what he says is good advice for any age. You take what applies to you. I did enjoy, very much, what he had to say about friendship – a very different concept to how we approach it these days. And, I wondered how he would have responded to social media friendships – they would have faced a rant worse than bathroom fixtures, I think.

Her protagonist, Zinzi December, is one of the “animalled” who live in the eponymous slum – this means that she did something bad enough in her past to be mysteriously tethered with a psychic connection to an animal for the rest of her life (in her case, a sloth). This is a thriller with magic, and great fun to read. While the narrative itself is sometimes choppy and left me slightly stranded at times, trying to figure out what exactly was going on and how we suddenly got here, the characters and settings and scenarios are fantastically drawn.

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Published on February 01, 2016 10:12

A bad year for men at the book awards

Frances Hardinge’s Costa success tops off a great year for female authors as diversity rules at the book awards

Whereas next month’s Oscars are expected to see a procession of white heterosexual men collecting statuettes as 2015’s films are feted, not one has been spotted on a podium picking up a major British award for fiction or poetry in a year when diversity, for once, ruled. As well as concluding the 2015 literary prize season, Frances Hardinge’s success (see interview, page 15) this week in winning the Costa book of the year award confirmed its status as a bad one for men.