The Guardian's Blog, page 220

Open thread: Which books did you read aged 12?

The symmetry of today's date - 12.12.12 - inspired a trip down memory lane to the books we were reading at that age

The passing of the 12th minute of the 12th hour of the 12th day in the 12th month of 2012 prompted a discussion on the books desk about the significance of the number 12 - and being a bookish bunch, the conversation inevitably turned to what we reading at that age.

I was reading The Time Traveler's Wife, which shocked some of those working around me, who read it in their 30s. I'm going to take this reaction to mean that I have represented myself in a mature and sophisticated manner with the air of someone who doesn't still reread Harry Potter for fun.

The passage of years alters the course of memory lane. For myself, it's short and I can recall with relative ease what I was reading, for others it's a struggle but they get there in the end, and some can't remember at all. Gone With The Wind was mentioned by not one, but two people, and another has fond memories of devouring Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock.

We all represent different generations of reading, but we all also have something in common – the same steely determination to read a proper, "grown up", book. I never thought I was the kind of child who couldn't wait to be older but when it came to books, I grew up very quickly.

I've reread The Time Traveller's Wife since, with such different eyes from those of my 12-year-old self. I didn't understand half of the sexual references, or if I did, I hastily turned the pages at the naked bits. I'm not sure if I really understood the intricacies of the plot but I still enjoyed reading it because it was something different, and all the more fun for being illicit - like sneaking into a certificate 12 film at the cinema at the age of 11 or being in school at night time.

Which books did you read when you were 12? Let us know below, or tweet us @guardianbooks.

FictionAudrey Niffenegger
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What makes funny man Michael Rosen overwhelmingly melancholy

Michael Rosen's Sad Book, written after the death of his son, deals with spiritual darkness - but its devastating conclusion is also curiously uplifting

I was having dinner with friends when someone first passed me Michael Rosen's Sad Book. "But don't look at it now if you don't want to cry," she said.

I thought she was joking. Besides, I'm not a crier. And I loved the cover. The man on it looked distraught all right, but there was a funny little scrawny Quentin Blake dog and an upturned bin. It seemed to me that there would be just as many light moments as dark ones. So I started reading.

Within moments, as I remember it now, the chatter around the table, the warming laughter and chinking glasses, disappeared. Sad Book is instantly overwhelming.

It starts with a very funny Quentin Blake picture of Michael Rosen, pulling a very funny grin, on his very funny face. Of course, you have to smile too, until you read the words:

"This is me being sad.

Maybe you think I'm being happy in this picture.

Really, I'm being sad but pretending I'm happy.

I'm doing that because I think people won't

like me if I'm being sad."

Ouch. It doesn't get any easier when you learn what makes Rosen most sad. His son Eddie died when he was 18. "I loved him very, very much," Rosen says, "but he died anyway."

In the rest of the book Rosen explains how he copes – or doesn't cope – when he is in that "deep dark" place and feels sad. It's a deeply personal insight; but also universal. We feel sad with and for Rosen, and by extension with and for Quentin Blake, who has given the book such heartrending illustrations.

Rosen and Blake feeling sad? To know that it's these two in such misery adds special poignance. These two are bringers of joy. And not just any joy: they make children laugh. It's as unsettling as it would be to see Animal make a cameo in The Seventh Seal – or death stalking the Muppets. And yet, it's true. Here they are expressing terrible pain. It's heartbreaking.

I didn't cry though; not until I got to the last page. I was thinking I must have an especially tough hide, when I turned to that final image, and, damn it, found myself snatching my breath, turning away from the dinner table, and – through a film of tears – looking round the room for something to distract my attention and stop me from tipping all the way over into helpless blubbing.

It is the most devastating conclusion. Harder than Sophie's Choice, Of Mice And Men, Bambi or Watership Down. To say too much would spoil the surprise. No, wrong word: the shock. Suffice to say that it is an image of shattering despair. But also – and this is the real beauty of this precious book – curiously uplifting. Sad Book doesn't hide the darkness. It doesn't try to pretend that suffering and sadness are easy to bear. But it does at least show that it's okay to feel bad sometimes. We all do it – and so none of us is ever entirely alone. There's always some light, even if it's a single, lonely candle. Sad Book is a book I'd recommend to anyone. Or almost anyone. I've bought a copy for my daughter. But I don't know if I can bear to show it to her yet.

Michael RosenQuentin BlakeAutobiography and memoirPoetrySam Jordison
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Fantasy author Scott Lynch shows he's a gentleman, not a bastard

The creator of The Lies of Locke Lamora lays into a reader calling him out over the women in his PC pirate brigade

In all the whirl of investigating self-publishing, I'd forgotten that I read my first originally self-published novel years ago. It was Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora. Lynch had been posting parts of his novel on his blog and Simon Spanton, editor at Gollancz, spotted them and liked them, and signed him up. I had to interview Lynch for The Bookseller (as ever, I was the sole fantasy fan on the staff), and I read the novel and absolutely loved it.

It's set in the Venice-esque world of Camorr, and follows the adventures of Locke Lamora and his band of thieves, the Gentleman Bastards. I found it funny, dark and thrilling, passed it on to tons of people, enjoyed the followup Red Seas Under Red Skies, and am – along with many others – eagerly awaiting the third, The Republic of Thieves (there have been a number of delays).

Anyway, I'm rambling on about Lynch because I was reminded again how much I like him by a pointer from the (always excellent) MobyLives blog. Criticised by a reader for including characters who are "unrealistic stereotypes of political correctness" – the reader objected in particular to the character Zamira, a middle-aged pirate mother – Lynch went to town.

The reader wrote: "Real sea pirates could not be controlled by women, they were vicous rapists [sic] and murderers and I am sorry to say it was a man's world. It is unrealistic wish-fulfilment for you and your readers to have so many female pirates, especially if you want to be politically correct about it!"

"First, I will pretend that your last sentence makes sense because it will save us all time," responded Lynch. "Second, now you're pissing me off. You know what? Yeah, Zamira Drakasha, middle-aged pirate mother of two, is a wish-fulfilment fantasy. I realised this as she was evolving on the page, and you know what? I fucking embrace it. Why shouldn't middle-aged mothers get a wish-fulfilment character, you sad little bigot? Everyone else does. HL Mencken once wrote that, 'Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.' I can't think of anyone to whom that applies more than my own mom, and the mothers on my friends list, with the incredible demands on time and spirit they face in their efforts to raise their kids, preserve their families, and save their own identity/sanity into the bargain.

"Shit yes, Zamira Drakasha, leaping across the gap between burning ships with twin sabers in hand to kick in some fucking heads and sail off into the sunset with her toddlers in her arms and a hold full of plundered goods, is a wish-fulfilment fantasy from hell. I offer her up on a silver platter with a fucking bow on top; I hope she amuses and delights. In my fictional world, opportunities for butt-kicking do not cease merely because one isn't a beautiful teenager or a muscle-wrapped font of testosterone. In my fictional universe, the main characters are a fat ugly guy and a skinny forgettable guy, with a supporting cast that includes 'SBF, 41, non-smoker, two children, buccaneer of no fixed abode, seeks unescorted merchant for light boarding, heavy plunder'. You don't like it? Don't buy my books. Get your own fictional universe. Your cabbage-water vision of worldbuilding bores me to tears."

Hurrah! Bring on The Republic of Thieves, and in the meantime I'm going to dig out my crumbling old proof of The Lies of Locke Lamora.

FantasyFictionEqualityGenderWomenAlison Flood
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Darkness in literature: Kathleen Jamie's Darkness and Light

This December, our seasonal reading series will concentrate on the theme of darkness in literature, beginning with a poet's search for 'starry dark' and solstice light

During the long days of summer, it's easy to forget the dark. The slow, dissolving twilights and bright mornings have it on the run; by midsummer, you can go to bed at 10pm and wake at 6am and miss it completely. But at this time of year, when the northern hemisphere nights are pressing up against the window and we're filling our houses with lamps and fires and Christmas decorations to beat back the blackness, it's a different story. Daylight in December is pale and fleeting; by midwinter's day, we're spending two-thirds of our life in the dark. And as the nights draw in, the metaphors come flooding back, too: darkness as absence, darkness as challenge, darkness as threat. The metaphysical struggle between good and evil, dark and light – which Christianity codifies as the birth of Jesus, the light that "shineth in darkness" – is enacted daily.

In Darkness and Light, the thoughtful, beautiful opening essay to her 2005 collection Findings, Kathleen Jamie considers both the metaphors that darkness furnishes, and darkness itself: "dark as natural phenomenon, rather than as a cover for all that's wicked". It's midwinter, and in the midst of all the usual seasonal pother, Jamie skips out and takes the ferry north from Aberdeen to Orkney. She's in search of two things: "real, natural, starry dark" and, in the neolithic burial mound of Maes Howe, a beam of solstice sunlight that, if conditions are right, will creep through the darkness and illuminate the tomb, as it has done every midwinter for 5,000 years.

In the event, she finds neither. Even at sea, where Jamie had been "secretly hoping for a moment where there was no human light … wholesome, unbanished darkness" there's always a light somewhere: coastal towns on the port side, oil rigs to starboard. And Maes Howe itself is a complex anticlimax. Not only does the sun neglect to perform, but the tomb is filled with surveyors, mapping the walls with lasers to check the progress of worrying cracks. When Jamie emerges from the entrance tunnel she finds that "inside was bright as a tube train, and the effect was brutal … At once a man's voice said, 'Sorry, I'll switch it off,' but the moment was lost." Darkness and light, Jamie shows us, aren't really locked in a dialectic at all, particularly not since the industrial revolution. Maes Howe, sunk in the dark for countless generations, is these days being held up to the light. Try as we might, we'll never experience darkness in the way its builders did.

But if Jamie admits to a throb of disappointment, there's no ersatz nostalgia here for a state that no one born in the 20th century has ever known. This isn't a lament for the oppositions that electricity's stolen from us; she's far too sensible and interested for that. "My ventures into light and dark had been ill-starred," she says. "I'd had no dramatic dark, neither at sea nor in the tomb, and no resurrecting beam of sunlight. But lasers are light, aren't they? Intensified, organised light. I'd come to Maes Howe at solstice, hoping for neolithic technology; what I'd found was the technology of the 21st century. Here were skilled people passing light over these same stones, still making measurements by light and time."

I first read this essay in high summer, when Findings was published, and was astonished at how effectively it conjured the atmosphere of midwinter. Physical dark, thick and limiting, with curtained windows and Christmas lights gleaming against it: this was what I came away with. But I've read it many times since, and with each rereading I take greater satisfaction in the way Jamie responds to the subtleties and gradations of a duality that appears at first glance to be black and white. "For five thousand years we have used darkness as the metaphor of our mortality," she says, towards the end. "We have not banished death, but we have banished the dark. We have light, we have oilfields and electricity and lasers. And by the light we have made, we can see that there are, metaphorically speaking, cracks … We look about the world, by the light we have made, and realise it's all vulnerable, and all worth saving, and no one can do it but us."

Five thousand years on from the construction of Maes Howe we still have darkness, we still have light, and the two of them still fit together, hand in glove. But in the hands of Kathleen Jamie, the metaphors they offer slip and slide and grow in complexity. If you're looking for a read to get you in the spirit of midwinter, this is it.

FictionPoetryKathleen JamieSarah Crown
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The Literature Prize secures a sponsor

The UK's most high-minded literary prize has announced a sponsorship deal to support an annual £40,000 award. But who is stumping up the cash?

So the UK's shiniest new prize for literature – the … er … Literature Prize – has found a sponsor. Anyone who's ever cried themselves to sleep over the death of contemporary culture, the depredations of modern life and the triumph of the market over Art – otherwise known as the Booker prize – can rejoice. The future of a literary prize which is "endorsed by writers of international stature", judged by a panel "drawn annually from a body of writers, critics and academics immersed in the world of literature", and whose "sole criterion" is "excellence", is now assured.

The inaugural award will be handed down in March 2014, with the lucky winner taking home £40,000 – £10k less than the Booker, of course, but as the lady says, it's not about the money, now, is it …

Except … Perhaps I'm too much a child of Maggie Thatcher, or maybe I'm just not focused enough on "the very highest level of artistic achievement", but I'd kind of like to know which particular devil the Literature Prize has supped with. Is it global finance, environmental mongers of doom or – whisper it – Amazon? According to the press release we'll have to wait until February to find out, but that seems a little far off. After Peter Stothard's steady chairmanship of the 2012 Man Booker prize and Hilary Mantel's double win, maybe the work of the Literature Prize has been done already.

Awards and prizesRichard Lea
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Lena Dunham's leaked book treatment: what have we learned?

Details of the book proposal that earned the Girls writer an advance of more than $3.5m have surfaced. So what can we expect from the 26-year-old's first offering?

Step aside Oliver Sacks, come down from your transcendental meditation mat Shirley Maclaine, there's a new self-help guru in town. Yes, Gawker leaked the 66-page treatment for Lena Dunham's self-help book, Not That Kind Of Girl, the rights of which were infamously sold to Random House for more than $3.5m. The publisher is presumably shelling out mega bucks because Dunham, thanks to Girls (the TV show she writes and directs), has become an emissary from Generation Z, polarising and transfixing in equal measure with her painfully acute observations of twentysomething behaviour. The details of her debut suggest Dunham's book will be about "dieting, about dressing, about friendship and the two existential crises I had before the age of 20". But before Miley Cyrus and Dakota Fanning start arm-wrestling over the film rights, what everyday life-lessons can be gleaned from a book filled with references to "my mother's psychic" and "my Irish nanny"? Here's a handy run down …

Virginity is overrated

Despite accidentally breaking her hymen crawling over a fence in search of a stray cat, Lena stayed true to her vow to stay a virgin until university. She lost it to a nondescript guy called Jonah, who dressed "like a middle-aged lesbian". The sex wasn't great; he was too scared to orgasm. She concludes that it wasn't really worth it. "It's amazing how permanent virginity feels, and then how suddenly inconsequential."

Live for the moment (but make a short film about that moment)

A childhood interest in mortality became a full-on obsession when she had unprotected sex with a boyfriend with questionable sexual hygiene (he "wiped his penis on his own curtain"). Life is about living in the moment, she concludes, after shooting a short film about her own death. "I held a massive funeral, heard everyone speak on the topic of me, then jumped out of my casket at the end and yelled 'Surprise!'" she writes of the plot.

Problems with eating? See your mother's nutritionist!

Pre-puberty Lena was happy with her sylph-like body despite subsisting on a diet that included "my Irish nanny's shepherd's pie". Her teen years were problematic and she attempted to stave off weight gain by becoming a vegan via some not-very-fun-sounding almond-flour agave cupcakes. After a spell as a not very good bulimic (she failed to puke up "even one lousy pecan"), her mother's nutritionist finally sorts her problems out.

Self respect is all in your head

Despite having "the nicest dad in the world" Lena rebelled, seeking out a variety of ill-advised partners. These included inconsiderate Republicans and cynical foodies whose role-play involved "pretending you're a hooker while deciding which Steely Dan record to put on". All because she thought she wasn't good enough, before realising that "being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment".

• A correction to this article was made on 10 December 2012 at 15:50. The original incorrectly referred to Oliver Sachs instead of Oliver Sacks. This has now been amended.

GirlsTelevisionPriya Elan
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Ebooks may yet save hardback books

Why condemn populist ebooks when they sit so comfortably alongside the 'elite' of high quality hardbacks?

One of the most fascinating, and durable, tensions in the world of books is the dialectic of the mass vs. the elite. You can frame this in so many ways: Wilbur Smith vs. Book Slam short story annual" Too Much Too Young. This beautifully produced hardback, signed by its authors, including David Nicholls, Marina Lewycka and Jackie Kay, follows Book
Slam's first volume, One for The Trouble. Like the debut volume it collects specially commissioned works from household names as well as rising stars, and presents it in a highly traditional print format (though audio and digital
editions will follow).

This is all the more remarkable because Book Slam, founded by Patrick Neate, and now a fixture on the British literary scene as a showcase for the very best, and liveliest, contemporary storytelling, began as a distinctly "alternative"
gig. Book Slam, in the words of Hari Kunzru, "has almost single-handedly dragged the London literary scene into the 21st century."

So it's very telling that this new phenomenon should promote its stars with the kind of traditional volume that would be familiar to Dr Johnson, William Shakespeare, or even Caxton himself.

By contrast, almost simultaneously, I received an email announcing Forty Years of Queen being released "as a stunning enhanced eBook." This, exulted the press release, will "will thrill anyone with an iPad."

To launch the first Queen eBook, apparently "the most advanced music eBook on the market", I was invited to come and watch Brian May "demo it", and "ask him all about it..."

Forty Years Of Queen is, I'm sure, a wonderful addition to the digital archive, but it's aimed at a mass market. It probably has only the most limited life as a book for a shelf, and will essentially appeal to Queen fans the world over, several hundred thousand, no doubt.

In the bad old days, it would have been a large format paperback. The e-revolution brings its many blessings in disguise.

EbooksRobert McCrum
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Poem of the week: Starfish by John Wedgwood Clarke

This ode to the mysterious sea creature is as a much heartfelt homage as it is a grisly lesson in marine biology

It may be the season of advent, but the "star of wonder" described in this week's poem – "Starfish" by John Wedgwood Clarke – is not directly related to the one in the popular Christmas carol. Asteroidea are not stars and not classified as fish, either: marine biologists prefer the term "sea star".

Nonetheless, the creature the poem photographs from such varied angles is truly awe-inspiring, so ingeniously adapted to its environment with its water-powered feet and cardiac stomach that it must count as a miracle (from the Latin, miraculum and mirari = to wonder at). It becomes more, not less, extraordinary, the more closely it's examined and understood. But the poem resists both over-explication and sentimentality. It reveals a starfish of both wonder and terror.

Wedgwood Clarke, whose chapbook, Sea Swim, was published earlier this year, is currently resident at the Centre for Environmental and Marine Science at the Scarborough campus of the University of Hull. "Starfish" is from a collection-in-progress, Aristotle's Lantern, reflecting the poet's fascination with aquatic zoology, and his interest in imaginative connections between the humanities and sciences.

This interest is evident in the combination of images in the poem. Its striking opening line, "Star of wonder, star of teeth", leads into a bizarre and dramatic litany, which will fuse accurate detail with descriptive and associative elements. The effect is a kind of double exposure: the starfish imagined by the untrained eye (which, for instance, sees ossicles as "teeth" and comes up with the metaphor of "zip-fastener undersides") and the starfish anatomised. That untrained eye seems to be connected to childhood, the childhood which has been "drowned in the sea", along with the child's excitement, perhaps, at finding his first starfish.

An important focus in the poem is digestion, metaphorical and literal. The starfish is already a specimen, a meal for the mind – "in a white tray, under the knife", in stanza two. In the next, we're told how the starfish feeds, its stomach emerging from its mouth when there is prey to be engulfed. At this point, if not before, the creature becomes almost horrific: "Star of guts that come out to devour/ Star without centre, brain all over." The plain language is raw and forceful. The Latin word, echinoderm, is avoided but suggested in the following line, and sounds fearsome in itself. This star is a killer: it has to be. With its strangely undifferentiated organs, it seems to threaten the more tidily compartmentalised organisms, such as ourselves.

Digestion is also a metaphor for the way we subject living creatures to processes of verbal classification. Perhaps turning a starfish into a poem is to devour it. For Wedgwood Clarke, the "star of wonder" is reduced by dissection ("star of cuts") and the labels which confirm its lifeless parts. But the poem finally reminds us that the starfish hasn't yielded every secret. The last line may allude to the pedicellariae – structures whose purpose is not fully understood – or it may hint at those proteins that still puzzle geneticists. We're in unclassified territory again, and the modern magi still have a long way to go as they journey towards enlightenment.

Starfish

Star of wonder, star of teeth,

Star of feet that breathe as they're squeezed,

Star with an eye at the end of each ray,

Star of zip-fastener undersides,

Star of childhood drowned in the sea,

Star in a white tray, under the knife,

Star of guts that come out to devour,

Star without centre, brain all over,

Star of Latin and death and spines,

Star of cuts slicing star from fish,

Star of labels digesting these innards

into star of wonder and function unknown.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Novels from Richard Russo and Diego Marani and a self-help book from Gary Markwick impress this week's reviewers

When it comes to books, the length to strength ratio is not always apparent until you've turned the last page.

An obvious point, perhaps, but one that Christopher Philip Howe makes eloquently in his review of New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani.

It "has an admirable simplicity ... its strength lies in its many layers," he writes. It is presented as a series of journal extracts written by Sampo, a man with no recollection of his language or identity. The novel follows Sampo's Finnish language-learning journey, while charting the isolation and despair that are tied to it.

The fact that the journals in the novel are edited and collated by a second man, Friari, adds another complexity, which "puts a distance between the reader and Sampo". Howe praises the novel, which was originally written in Italian, as a "masterful, subtle construction of personality and meaning."

For julian6, Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo is "an honest down-to-earth work", following the lives of those in an Upstate New York town, where "everyone knows everyone and characters are hopelessly set in their ways." julian6 notes that while some critics view the town as "cosy", in fact there is "a sense of darkness in these somewhat suffocated lives." Casual racism and violent child abuse recur through the novel. However, it is the "poignant truthfulness [that] remains as our lingering memory long after the last page has been turned."

Skipping over to non-fiction, Isabella found herself moving from her comfort zone and being pleasantly surprised by Gary Markwick's Now It Begins, which uses "ancient wisdom" to illustrate "the simple assertion that once you can let go of illusion and draw upon a deeper, universal source of motivation, then you will reconnect with your true purpose on earth."

"I usually get bored with those kind of books and give up after reading about 20 pages," admits Isabella, "but I must say Now it Begins was a different experience, I read it from cover to cover."

As ever, if we've mentioned your review in this article, please get in touch at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and we'll send you a treat from the cupboards. Thanks for all your reviews.

Fiction
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The Hobbit: A fan fights back

It's one thing to get your elves mixed up, but to make a mistake about JRR Tolkien's Arkenstone is to invoke the wrath of hobbit-lovers the world over

Sometimes, in furtherance of the greater good, we have to make personal sacrifices. Here's mine. I'm outing myself, today, as a Tolkien nerd; not just a fan (fans are 10-a-penny) but an honest-to-goodness full-on geek. The Lord of the Rings is my foundation text: my child-of-the-60s father read it to me when I was five (and to each of my three siblings thereafter); the only picture I have of myself at that age shows me in my bedroom with a map of Middle Earth on the wall in the background. I've read LOtR and The Hobbit more times than I can count, and have been known to while away the hours by testing my knowledge of the great man's oeuvre via Tolkien quizzes on Sporcle. I just took the one on characters by quotation, and got all the answers right. In half the allotted time.

And the reason I've chosen today to alienate/entertain the half of you who think it's all wafty, overblown nonsense? A piece that appeared in the Evening Standard this week. With the film of The Hobbit due out, the author and critic AN Wilson - a self-professed Tolkien standard-bearer, who calls him "the Englishman I admire more than any other" - took to the pages of the London paper to express his view that "the film of The Hobbit ... shot in 3D … will make any but the most bullet-headed viewer feel dizzy … maybe you'd be better off staying at home and reading the book". He goes on to summarise the novel thusly: Bilbo, he explains, "makes his perilous journey, over hill and under hill, through the caves of the dwarves and beyond the Kingdom of the Grey Elves to raid the dragon's hoard. At Arkenstone, the very heart of the mountain, Bilbo discovers Smaug and his treasure, gold-plated rings, silver-hafted axes and that most delicate of chain-mail, the elvish mithril".

Those of you who feel the same way I do will by now have spotted where I'm headed with this. As a fellow-devotee, it behoves me to correct Wilson on a couple of points. The Kingdom of the Grey Elves thing is borderline - he's referring, I assume, to the dwarves' and Bilbo's adventures in the halls of King Thranduil in Mirkwood. Drill deep into Tolkien's mythology and you can just about get away with calling them that (Thranduil is a Sindarin elf; the Sindar were also known as "the grey elves") but throughout The Hobbit they're referred to as the wood elves, and their kingdom the Woodland Realm. If Wilson can be excused as having been undone by his learning over that point, however, on the next, he's simply wrong. Arkenstone isn't a place, it's a jewel - the Arkenstone - also known as "the heart of the mountain" - and it's a big deal in the book, driving the action forward in the final chapters. Time for me to stop hiding my light under a bushel; such inaccuracies cannot be allowed to stand.

JRR TolkienFantasySarah Crown
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