The Guardian's Blog, page 221

Live webchat: Colm Tóibín

The author will be here on Monday 10 December from 12-1pm to take part in a live Q&A as part of the Room for London project. Post your questions now

High above the Thames, beached on the roof of the South Bank centre, sits the Room for London. For four days every month for the last year, writers and artists invited by Artangel, have taken it in turns to spend time in the small one-bedroomed residence, to write about the space and London.

This month the boat welcomes Colm Tóibín aboard. Colm will be the last writer in residence and to mark the end of the project as well as his time in the boat, he'll be joining us and chatting to us live and answering your questions on Monday 10 December, 12-1pm.

You can ask Colm Tóibín any writing or Room for London-based question you like. Perhaps you'd like to ask him about one of his novels, or maybe you'd like to quiz him about his collection of essays New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families. Maybe you'd like to know if the solitude of the boat is conducive to his writing. Maybe you'd just like to know what he can see out of the window. Whatever your question, post it in the thread below now and come back on Monday lunchtime to join the conversation.

Colm TóibínArtangelA Room for LondonHannah Freeman
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Open thread: recommend your favourite short stories and poetry collections

Tell us which mini masterpieces you'd choose to calm Christmas nerves

'Tis the season to be stressy - and while the pages of Bleak House or Middlemarch might seem the ideal refuge, it's hard for most of us to square such long-form escapism with the clamour of the Christmas to-do list.

Enter the short story and perfectly formed poetry collection: manageable morsels that can be consumed in under an hour, but still provide a welcome break from the hustle and bustle.

If you're desperately lacking that festive feel, turn to Carol Anne Duffy's book-length poem, Another Night Before Christmas, a modernisation of the Victorian classic. Or if you fancy a Dickensian Christmas, why not try some of his short stories such as "A Christmas Tree" in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings. They are a wonderfully descriptive reminder of an age when a turkey on the table was all a family needed.

If you would prefer to forget about Christmas altogether, why not turn to Oscar Wilde's short stories, ranging from the melancholic "The Nightingale and the Rose" to humorous social critiques, such as "The Model Millionaire". If, on the other hand, you're minded for a piquant corrective to the surfeit of seasonal riches, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories will serve you up with a Beauty and the Beast and Puss in Boots a full seven leagues from the local pantomime dame.

If poetry is your preferred retreat, it's always safe to turn to a master. Seamus Heaney's selection of Wordsworth poems gives you two for one. And you can't go wrong with Shakespeare's sonnets: Penguin's clothbound classic version of the sonnets and A Lover's Complaint – with its beautiful cover art – could double as a comforter for you, and an emergency gift for that friend who also needs cheering through the season of tat and hollow merriment.

Which short stories or poetry collections would you recommend to counter the Christmas chaos?

Short storiesPoetryOscar WildeSeamus HeaneyWilliam ShakespeareAngela CarterCarol Ann DuffyBest booksBest bookshopsFiction
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E-readers reading your reading: A serious invasion of privacy?

A new report shows that almost all such devices monitor users' activity. This doesn't really bother me, but should I be more worried?

In the light of a feature I wrote this summer, about how our e-readers can track our reading habits – complete, I'm ashamed to say, with the obligatory Orwell references – I thought I'd point anyone who's interested in the direction of this new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It's the organisation's latest guide to e-reader privacy policies, including Amazon's Kindle, Kobo and Sony, and it finds that "in nearly all cases, reading ebooks means giving up more privacy than browsing through a physical bookstore or library, or reading a paper book in your own home".

There's a handy chart, detailing privacy policies for nine different e-reading options; my own choice, the Kobo, "seems to have the capability to keep track of book searches because it indicates that it shares those searches with third parties", while the Kindle "logs data on products viewed and/or searched for on the device, and associates info with Amazon account".

This is information that I'm glad I know, but about which I'm afraid I can't get all that exercised. To be honest, anyone looking at what I bookmark and make notes on would be totally bemused – I often am, myself, when I look back. I feel there are bigger things to worry about than whether Kobo knows what page of Fifty Shades (no, not really) I'm currently on, or if the Amazon lot are astonished to see that not only has my husband got all the paper editions of the George RR Martin books, but he's just bought them all as ebooks as well as they were "too heavy to carry to work". And if, in the sheer deluge of books out there, it means these companies can better point me towards things I might like, then I'm not complaining. (At the moment Amazon is recommending I buy five books I can actually see, at this second, on my shelves, and which I'm sure I've already bought from them. Yes, I liked them - but it seems a bit of a waste… )

But anyway. Useful information from the EFF, which we should all be armed with, whatever we want to do with it. Here it is again. Have a read - and let me know if you think I should be more fussed …

EbooksE-readersGadgetsKindleSonyAlison Flood
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Book dedications: Lost love

Not perhaps where you'd expect to find a heartfelt declaration of love, but the last in this series strikes an appropriately fond note

This is a relatively new addition to the collection, but has already been fast-tracked into my All Time Personal Top Ten (fact fans). It's a perfect combination of evocative title, sentimental inscription, and the fact that the book has been picked up in a secondhand shop, giving the whole a nicely bitter-sweet ambiguity.

And, therefore, I thought it would be a most fitting entry on which to end this series. But though the series is ending on the Guardian, I'll continue to update my own blog on a weekly basis (with a mini-series of Christmas Specials coming up over the next few weeks). And I'm currently exhibiting some of my favourite finds in Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London. The exhibition is running until next Thursday, 13 December, in the Jazz Café on the first floor. Here endeth the plugging. (And the series. Thanks for reading!)

Wayne Gooderham
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Tips, links and suggestions: Our review list and the books you are reading today

Your weekly space to tell us what you're reading and what you'd like to see covered on the books site, plus our review list

Last week's book talk was as wide ranging as ever, and included Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, Alonso Cueto's The Blue Hour, Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans and even Trials and Triumphs of Les Dawson by Louis Barfe. Here's what people thought of their choices:

mattyjl9:

I'm about 1/3 into my first Hardy novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and so far it is excellent, and I loath to submit to other actions such as sleep and put the thing down!
Hardy has been a blank spot for me, having never read Tess et al., so if all are as engaging as this, then I can see a spending spree heading my way..

GetOver99:

I am reading the book that allegedly corrupts Dorian Gray, Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I think it was frustratedArtist that recommended it.

It has been quite hard going. There have been whole chapters dedicated to subjects such as which latin literature, between the 3rd and 10th century, he has in his study.

There is next to no plot. I am half-way and the only thing I can recall happening is the main (and pretty much the only character) going to the dentist to have his tooth out.

But, that really isn't the point of the book. His idea is that nature is no more, everything can be created through artificial means. He has lived a hedonistic lifestyle and has now retreated to the country to study art and literature.

He really goes to town with his descriptions and maybe a bit too much. I shall continue....

Richardpierce:

I have taken an unusual, for me, excursion into the realm of biography to read Trials and Triumphs of Les Dawson by Louis Barfe, which I am finding evocative and involving. Dawson, for me, has always been one of Britain's finest and most under-rated comedians, and Barfe gives him due credit for unusual intelligence and talent, both as a comic and a straight actor. It's a credit to Barfe that Dawson leaps out of the pages very much alive, and, perhaps not strangely given the times we live in, exceptionally relevant, still.

Do tell us what you are reading this week, either as a comment in the thread below, or by uploading a photo to our What are you reading today? Flickr group. Thanks to dboorer67 for uploading the above photo of his/her book of The Impossible Dead.

Here's what we're reading and writing about this week, subject to last minute changes. There's quite a lot of history on the list this week.

Non-fiction

• Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson
• Savage Storm: Britain on the Brink in the Age of Napoleon by David Andress
• Through the Eye of a Needle by Peter Brown
• Britain Begins by Barry Cunliffe
• Raffles by Victoria Glendinning
• Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine by Yang Jisheng

Fiction

• Havisham by Ronald Frame
• Dominion by CJ Sansom
• Deadman Dance by Kim Scott

• My First Wife by Jakob Wassermann

Children's

• The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson

I leave you with this question posed by creatureadam:

why isn't EL James on the bad sex nominee list? Ought to be the bad sex equivalent of a Schindler's List - and win all the bad sex award categories going.

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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Better late than never - the Portico Prize 2012

Sorry, the Northerner has been a bit slow to bring you details of the 'Northern Booker' because of other duties, but there's something to be said for slowing journalism down. Here's Ed Glinert who was there

My money was on Val McDermid to become the first author to win the Portico Prize twice. This was not simply because she was sat on my table in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall, albeit separated by large swags of fruit and flowers, but because I was mightily impressed that the character Jacko Vance in her short-listed entry for the fiction prize, The Retribution, was based on Jimmy Savile and had been devised (for her earlier Wire in the Blood) at a time when so many of us thought that Savile was a harmless fruitcake.

So up stepped Alison Boyle of the Arts Council to announce that the fiction winner was… Sarah Hall who won for the second time running, this time with The Beautiful Indifference, short stories described as "dark, fierce and sensual" in the Guardian. Apparently Sarah had chosen for superstitious reasons not to prepare an acceptance speech, even though Val McDermid had modestly intimated that she though Sarah would win again.

Even Anthony Burgess didn't manage two wins. Actually the great curmudgeon, raised locally in Harpurhey and Miles Platting, moaned and moaned when he won in 1989 for Any Old Iron at the small size of the Portico cheque, then £1,500. He quipped that it would be "a good idea if the organisers could drum up a similar sum to the £20,000 of the Booker Prize". This is the man who had become so rich from writing a stack of novels, newspaper columns, reviews and assorted works that he had managed to elevate himself socially from dingy rooms above a newsagent's in Moss Side to Monaco.

Well the Portico Prize is now a five-figure sum thanks to the Arts Council which generously donated £10,000 for each of the two prizes – fiction and non-fiction.

The fiction judges included Arthur Bostrom, tall, grey and graceful; well certainly more graceful than when he played the lovable Officer Crabtree in 'Allo 'Allo. Amongst the judges in the non-fiction category was author and broadcaster Stuart Maconie, he of the impeccable music taste – he once played Sun Ra's "Saturn" on Radio 6 Music – and their choice for the Portico Prize 2012's best non-fiction work was Strands by Jean Sprackland. Strands is a series of meditations and ramblings prompted by walking on the wild beaches between Blackpool and Liverpool: a barnacled wreck visible in the water at one spot; shifting sands and sea change all around.

Like the previous non-fiction winner, our own Madeleine Bunting's The Plot: A Biography of My Father's English Acre, we have here a winner seriously influenced by the template for all peripatetic monologues: WG Sebald's Rings of Saturn. It's not hard to imagine Sebald, a former Manchester University lecturer with an international reputation at the time of his fatal car crash in Norwich in 2001, sat at the Portico Prizegiving, probably near the John Kay mural, with its quasi-religious overtones and satire of industry. Simon Armitage could be on one side and Joan Bakewell on the other. Both the latter were nominated this year; such is the A-list status of the prize.

But the biennial Portico is more than an awards ceremony. It's a meeting of Manchester's intellectuals and aesthetes, ingesting sumptuous food and bon mots in the finest of surroundings. John Ruskin once described the Great Hall, as the "finest Gothic apartment in Europe." Rightly so, with Alfred Waterhouse's design of a mediaeval banqueting hall decorated with 12 panels of Manchester and English history by Ford Madox Brown.

The evening was expertly organised – pre-match drinks, speeches, courses, awards, thanks – but there was a bit of a shock on arrival. Lloyd Street, at the side of the Town Hall was swarming with police on foot and motor bikes. It turned out that they were there to protect the Irish President, Michael D Higgins, who was on a state visit, but my first thoughts were that Greater Manchester Police were going to arrest Jacko Vance to help with their inquiries into Savilegate. Now that would have been a story worth telling.

Ed Glinert is an author and set up City Life, Manchester's listings magazine.

ManchesterGreater ManchesterSalfordLiverpoolLeedsNewcastleSheffieldHuddersfieldPrestonSunderlandVal McDermidFictionAnthony BurgessWG SebaldUniversity of ManchesterSimon ArmitageEd Glinert
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Fiction's boom years may be gone, but its story is far from over | Robert McCrum

The general excitement attending new novels during the 1980s has passed, but storytelling is on a roll

Thomas Keneally, celebrated for his Booker prize novel Schindler's Ark, which became the Oscar-winning movie Schindler's List, has a new book out, The Daughters of Mars, and has been over in the UK to promote it.

Kenneally, one of Australia's finest contemporary writers, is 77. Inevitably, the questions have turned to the past. With almost equal predictability, the veteran novelist has been sounding an elegiac note. In Sunday's Observer, he closed a Q&A about his life and work with "Fiction was king. Now it isn't."

He's right, of course. But also – profoundly – wrong.

Keneally's right to recall the palmy days of fiction, which happened to coincide with the moment when he was at the peak of his powers. In the English-speaking world of the 1980s (Schindler was published in 1982), fiction was indeed king, with poets and playwrights snapping at its heels.

Novelists were headline news. Waterstones was heaving with new fiction by a galaxy of brilliant young writers (Hanif Kureishi, Jeanette Winterson, Vikram Seth, Lorrie Moore and Michael Ondaatje among many others) mixed in with amazing translations (Kundera, Vargas Llosa, Márquez, Skvorecky). This fictional firework display was sustained by an explosion of hot money: big advances; movie deals; and global sales all contributed to an unprecedented boom in books that is now – definitively – over.

And now, where are we? On this day after the feast, new fiction might be no longer in its pomp, but it is far from dead. Indeed, from some points of view, it seems to be in excellent good health. Novels in all genres are selling as well as ever. Rumours of fiction's demise are surely exaggerated. Right now, at the end of the autumn book season, narrative is booming, and storytelling is on a roll. Consider the evidence.

First, there's the 2012 Booker prize. In advance of the final judging, plenty of commentators speculated about the innovative thrills of Will Self's Umbrella, and the dark power of Alison Moore's The Lighthouse. On the night, the panel recognised a virtuoso work of fiction, Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, her thrilling retelling of the downfall, trial, and death of Anne Boleyn. Here is a historical novel that satisfies highbrow critics and middle-brow readers alike. Fiction might not be king any more, but Mantel is certainly its queen.

Storytelling takes many forms, not just confined to fiction. The winner of the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize offers another example of raw narrative power. Everest will always exercise a spell over our imagination: it's a thriller and a killer. Wade Davis's clever and perceptive examination of the post-first world war impulses to Himalayan exploration Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest is a subtle account of a story many readers will have heard already. Just because it's not an original tale, doesn't mean that it cannot exercise its spell over the imagination.

Fiction has always been expressed in many guises, and novels now come in new and different formats. Last week, the Costa prize secured a little bit of extra coverage by shortlisting a graphic novel, Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart.

Shortly after that, the new chair of the next (2013) Booker prize, Robert Macfarlane declared his willingness to entertain graphic fiction on the Booker shortlist. Suddenly a lot of people are taking comic books very seriously indeed. If fiction is no longer king of the castle, it's certainly enjoying a vigorous life below stairs. Mr Keneally should take heart: there's life in the old dog yet.

FictionThomas KeneallyRobert McCrum
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Self-published stories: The Black Lake by David J Rodger | Alison Flood

Better editing could have upped the shock voltage of this tale of horror on an isolated Scottish island

Sorry for the slight delay in getting this blog to you – it was meant to be last week, but I found I needed to take a short break from self-published books after my last experience, so I've been palate-cleansing with some more traditional reading. Anyway, I bravely jumped back in on Thursday, and actually paid for my latest outing: David J Rodger's The Black Lake (subtitle: "Where only death survives").

Chosen because it was recommended by quite a few of you on the thread – and because it got a plug in SFX (although Rodger does/has worked there), The Black Lake is the sort of book that's usually right up my street. It's set in a future where the world has been ravaged by a deadly virus, where 70% of humanity has been wiped out and where the deadly "Infected" patrol the spaces between cities. I was expecting a zombie novel, but that's not what this is at all; it's actually the story of a meteorological expedition to a remote Scottish island, rooted deep in the Cthulhu mythos.

Quint Coyle – yes, that's really his name – and his colleagues are investigating the deadly new phenomenon of "storm curtains". This is a horror novel so things aren't going to work out well; the sea captain who takes them to the remote island has mysterious concerns about the trip, Quint almost immediately sees an "acutely sinister" figure on arriving, whose presence can't be explained, and then he finds a collection of books in an abandoned cabin filled with "interlocking circles, squiggly symbols and five pointed stars". Seriously, would you really stay? In that actual cabin? Anyway, things start to go wrong, and Quint ends up alone, fighting for his sanity as the weather – and worse – rage outside.

My main problem with The Black Lake was one that isn't Rodger's fault at all. I'd recently read Michelle Paver's Dark Matter, which follows many of the same plot points: scientific expedition to the Arctic, worried captain, abandoned cabin, our hero left alone in the Arctic night, scary ghost. Paver's book, beautifully written, genuinely terrified me. Rodger's didn't – although it must have gripped me to a certain extent, as at one point my cat jumped on my knee unexpectedly and I let out a small shriek.

My other issue is one that isn't, really, Rodger's fault either: he could have done with a good editor. He tells a fine story, but with an editor's smoothing and refining and shaping, The Black Lake could have been much better. Sometimes the grammar stutters, with oddly written sentences and strange tenses. Sometimes it's the phrasing – a character has "wide yet narrow eyes", which I can't quite get my head around; another gives a "self-depreciative chuckle", and we get to read an "incredibly evocative speech" that really isn't. And that's aside from the fact that it has a dreadful cover.

But those quibbles aside, The Black Lake was good fun: short, atmospheric and creepy. Having read tons of zombie novels, and horror novels, I'm surprised a publisher hasn't snapped this one up, as it could definitely hold its own alongside more traditionally published genre material. If I had the time, I wouldn't mind returning to check out some of Rodger's other novels, set in the Yellow Dawn world.

So what's next? The plan is that we'll be passing the self-publishing baton around the books desk, so you'll be hearing from someone else soon enough. And I'll be back at a later date, once I've dug out another novel that takes my fancy…

Self-publishingHorrorFictionAlison Flood
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Poem of the week: Musk-Ox by Jane Yeh

With careful observation animated by bright metaphor, this nature study is quite unafraid of anthropomorphism

This week's poem, "Musk-Ox", is from Jane Yeh's second collection, The Ninjas, recently published by Carcanet Press, and deservedly welcomed in a recent Guardian review by Aingeal Clare. Jane Yeh is an American poet based in London. Her voice, to my ear, has a distinctly English quality. Combining fantasy, melancholy, precision and gently-disturbing wit, it suggests at times how Lewis Carroll could have written, had he been a young 21st-century postmodernist.

While Yeh often enjoys letting the various characters in her poems do the talking, her venture, in "Musk-Ox," into third-person narration allows her a fuller focus on externals. This poem gives us the creature's impressively cumbersome, and very hairy physical presence. At first, it's as if he were being filmed on location. Later, although we never entirely lose the more realist view of him, the poem gradually switches over from wildlife documentary to a beautiful animated cartoon, one which allows the musk-ox to morph into the identity of his dreams – that of a salmon "… In the deep green/Water, flashing his iridescent scales".

The clustering of metaphor ("wall of fur", "dry waterfall", "oversized/Powder puff – ambulatory/ Moustache", "a minibus/ Made of hair…") suggests a technical device associated with the so-called Martian school of poets, who, in their turn, were influenced by the technique of ostranenie ("making strange") favoured by the Russian formalists. Yeh, like Craig Raine in his earlier work, favours sensible-looking quatrains, cracked apart with unpredictable, sometimes jolting, line-breaks. The images are not reinforced by the rhythm but consciously disrupted by it, in a further process of defamiliarisation,

Yeh's tone is generally more overtly affectionate, though, than that of the Martian poets. For them, the love was in the close looking and detailed description. Here, there is an added, quirky characterisation. This is where the Lewis Carroll effect comes in. Yeh's musk-ox increasingly seems to become naturalised to the human world. He longs, like so many of us, for a "svelter/ Silhouette". He absorbs our values, our judgments. The tufts of wool on his back are "jaunty", the pair of horns "gamely frames// His long, sad face". This musk-ox is stoical but not entirely happy in his skin. In real life, he'd belong to a herd: in the poem, he's almost existentially alone. And so he points to a hopelessly paradoxical human desire: to meld into conformity, to shine with special beauty.

One of the pleasures of this poem, and of many other animal poems by Yeh, is the guiltless, almost jubilant acceptance of its own anthropomorphism. That stance is also an honest one. How can any mere human begin to relate to the (more) natural world, let alone write vividly about it, without a degree of self-projection? No achieved poetic creature, from Christopher's Smart's cat Jeoffrey to Elizabeth Bishop's moose, is un-coloured by its human imaginer – and we should be grateful for, rather than scornful of, the fact.

One day, I feel certain, science will confirm that most animals possess enough signifier-processing ability to provide them with a rudimentary ability to think, and that they can feel a rich range of emotions. Until then, we have the poets – and, of course, ordinary pet-owners everywhere – to remind us of our kinship with those to whom we once supposed ourselves to be the divinely-ordained superiors.

Musk-Ox

His impassive side
Is an astounding wall of fur, a kind
Of dry waterfall
Formed of long strands of hair –

The unchecked growth
Of his copious wool hide
Swamps him entirely; somewhere under there
Are four unsightly legs

And hooves, but you wouldn't know it. Oversized
Powder puff – ambulatory
Moustache – through Arctic grassland
He onerously glides, his back

Festooned with jaunty tufts
Of wool. His prehistoric skull barely clears
The dense fur
Around it; a pair of drooping horns

Gamely frames
His long, sad face. If he could speak, he'd ask
For a svelter
Silhouette (or at least more

Lichens to graze on). Happiness comes
From enduring,
It seems. His tiny eyes rove over
The rich summer landscape. He lumbers

Up a crest like a minibus
Made of hair, patiently looking for
The next buffet
Of grasses. If he could choose, he'd

Be reborn
As a salmon – sleek as a torpedo
In the deep green
Water, flashing his iridescent scales.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson and Paul Harding are among the authors reviewed this week

Broadly speaking books are either discussed in terms of literary technique or subject matter - and this week's reviews fell predominantly into the former category. Interesting sentence formations and strange narrative structures were what excited our reviewers most.

The modernist classic Mrs Dalloway was revisited by Nickvirk, who welcomed the vivid and exciting writing. In her depiction of the human psyche and her critique of society and human interaction, Nickvirk notes that Woolf "pushes the boundaries of language, manipulating it to express the confused and erratic mind states of her characters." He adds that whilst today novels seem to have a "well planned plot with numerous twists and turns", in Mrs Dalloway "little happens". However, "what does happen is extraordinary and as a consequence the novel reverberates in the reader's mind long after they have finished reading."

Likewise, arivathsan considers Paul Harding's Tinkers to be "a brilliant novel, a piece of work that is likely to stick to the reader's memory for a long time." Chronicling the life of George Washington Crosby, an elderly man dying of cancer, through a series of disjointed, non-linear memories and hallucinations, Harding has created "a narration where the reader is left floating amidst the events and hallucinations".

AnnSkea, however, is disappointed by Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate, arguing that "this is not her usual and inventive style". She feels that Winterson has been constricted by writing a book specifically for Hammer's horror series.

Based on the 1612 Lancashire witch trials, the novella fictionalizes the lives of the 12 witches and two men who were charged with murder and burned. AnnSkea concedes that Winterson's "short, abrupt sentences" successfully depict the witches and their "sordid lives", but hopes she will soon return to her usual style.

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.

Jeanette WintersonVirginia Woolf
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