The Guardian's Blog, page 29

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde – fairytales for all ages

Kicking off a season of blogs about the books we most want to press on others, this is a book that will dazzle children and intrigue adults

“It is the duty of every father to write fairytales for his children,” pronounced Oscar Wilde, while acknowledging that “the mind of the child is a great mystery”. Asked by his small son what he dreamed about, Wilde ran through a phantasmagoria of imaginary creatures: “dragons with gold and silver scales … eagles with eyes made of out diamonds”. When he asked his son the same question, Cyril responded: “Pigs.” It’s an anecdote that brilliantly illustrates why reading books with children is such unpredictable fun – and why I’ve chosen this fairytale collection to kick off a seasonal series of blogs about books to share.

According to Wilde’s younger boy, Vyvyan, father and sons were united in their love of one story in this book, The Selfish Giant, though the brothers were puzzled as to why it brought tears to Oscar’s eyes when he read it to them. But what of the four other tales, most of which are best known today through adaptations for opera and ballet?

Continue reading...

Flash fiction: Husband

A one-sentence tale of emotional manipulation via post by American writer Deb Olin Unferth – part of our series of original fiction curated with Tin House

By Deb Olin Unferth for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network

If you should have an ex-husband, who first writes, then doesn’t write, then writes to the point of absurdity, then refuses to write, refuses to receive correspondence from you, refuses to acknowledge you in any way, denies you exist, then writes again, angrily this time, then less angrily, then angrily again, then leaves off writing altogether, not without a final declaration – he has compromised himself by writing to you, you should not expect to hear from him – and if each time you are taken in by this, are at the very edge by his either not writing or writing, are poised on the side of a cliff, waiting to see, wanting to know, which is it: will he not write? will he write? until a little time passes without his writing, and you slowly take a step back, and a little more time passes, and you take another step back from the cliff that you thought would surely claim your life, and another step, and a few more, until you find you are on a path walking the other way.

Continue reading...

Thneed-to-know: what's the formula for Dr Seuss's funniest lines?

A Canadian professor thinks he has found the necessary maths to explain why Dr Seuss is so funny – it’s all to do with entropy – but please add your own favourites

Children’s books: 10 great Dr Seuss quotes

When it comes to reading to small children, there is nothing better than a picture book that rhymes. And when it comes to picture books that rhyme, there is nothing better than Dr Seuss.

We have scads of his titles in our house, but at the moment How the Grinch Stole Christmas is the book of choice. We read it most nights. We enact it frequently (my younger daughter plays the role of little Cindy Lou Who beautifully, despite being unable to call her anything other than Cindy Woo-Hoo). The moments that invariably produce the most glee are the Grinch’s dastardly actions as he denudes the first little house on the square of Christmas paraphernalia. “He stuffed them in bags. Then the Grinch, very nimbly, / Stuffed all the bags, one by one, up the chimbley!” My kids are delighted – delighted! – by the idea of a chimbley. It gets them every time.

Related: 'Oh, the places you'll go!' The best Dr Seuss quotes

Continue reading...

Readers' top 10 best books of 2015

After authors and reviewers chose their favourite books of the year, it’s time to let Guardian readers speak – here are your most-beloved books of 2015

Best of culture in 2015: see this year’s cultural highlights, chosen by the Guardian’s writers and critics

It’s December, and you know what that means: best-of lists have been published and to-be-read piles have grown. Take your pick: authors’ favourites (here, curated by the Guardian Review; here, by The Observer) or critics’ picks genre by genre. But what about readers, you ask? Here is a selection of the excellent reviews they sent in for their favourite books of 2015.

They include some of the year’s most lauded fiction – like Marlon James’s powerful Man Booker winner about violence in 70s Jamaica –, some of the most anticipated, like Elena Ferrante’s conclusion to her Neapolitan series or Franzen’s return, and some of the most discussed, like Hanya Yanagihara’s mammoth A Little Life, a novel about friendship and the effects of child abuse, which has ignited heated debates among readers and critics. But our readers also vouch for extraordinary works of fantasy fiction, nature memoir and travel writing. Here are the notable books you most voted for, and why they’re worth reading – in your own words.

Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter

Continue reading...

Food in books: the pâté from The Secret History

An extravagant dinner in Donna Tartt’s novel takes Kate Young back to her first foray into cooking offal

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

Despite the vast amount we ate that afternoon – soups, lobsters, pâtés, mousses, an array appalling in variety and amount – we drank even more, three bottles of Tattinger on top of the cocktails, and brandy on top of that, so that, gradually, our table became the sole hub of convergence in the room, around which objects spun and blurred at a dizzying velocity.

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter

Continue reading...

Kermit the Frog and other terrors: the appeal of scary children's books

A Wisconsin woman wants kids kept away from the popular puppet’s ‘traumatic’ book about poverty, but children crave disturbing stories

We’d go to the library once a week when I was little. While my little sister always chose to take home Anthony Browne’s Gorilla, I would uneasily check to see if a certain title was there. Just looking at the cover frightened me almost too much to bear, but I couldn’t resist doing it. Actually taking it out to read would take months of steeling my courage.

The book was Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Dead Moon and Other Tales from East Anglia and the Fen Country, illustrated by Shirley Felts. The title story, in which the moon comes down one night to investigate the “things that live in the darkness”, was my object of terror. Looking at the front cover still makes me shudder. The moon, trapped. The witches. God. You can read a bit of it here – I still think it’s brilliant – and look at the front cover they used in the 80s, if you dare.

Continue reading...

Why Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books will be perfect for television

Kim Stanley Robinson’s series of novels about pioneering colonists of the Red Planet is being adapted for TV – this could actually be great news, says James Smythe

The quest to find television’s science fiction answer to Game of Thrones might have finally come to end: Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars trilogy is arrives on screens in 2017, reports Variety. With the first volume published to huge critical acclaim and massive sales in 1993, the three books – Red Mars, Green Mars (1994) and Blue Mars (1996) – have long been rumoured to be making the transition: the rights were once held by director James Cameron.

I first came across Robinson’s books when I was 14: I was on holiday, and somebody had left a copy of Red Mars in our hotel. I was reading books at a colossal rate, and when I ran out of Stephen Kings (an addiction well documented here), I turned to Robinson. Red Mars was the first “hard” science fiction novel – that is, sci-fi that deals with the science as much as the fiction – that I remember reading.

Related: Kim Stanley Robinson and Sheldon Solomon on exploration and death – books podcast

Continue reading...

Things we don't write: K Anis Ahmed on the murdered writers of Bangladesh

For Bangladeshi authors and bloggers, religious fanaticism is putting their security and freedom of speech at stake, in a level of repression only comparable to dictatorial regimes of the past. K Anis Ahmed explains what it means to be a writer in Bangladesh’s harrowing “new normal”

By K Anis Ahmed for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network

Things we don’t write about: The Prophet. The Quran. The mosque. The hijab. Indeed, anything to do with Islam that might offend anyone willing to kill. The problem is that we can never be certain what will offend them. The killing types are no longer visible, wizened old men who regularly announce where the red line lays. The mantle has passed onto teenagers wielding machetes, belonging to secret cliques, guided by international ideologies with vicious local consequences.

In a bewildering new trend, it is young rationalist bloggers in Bangladesh who have emerged as the primary target of Islamic extremists. How peculiar indeed, that killers espousing a retrograde vision of the world should be so obsessed with the most twenty-first century of media: the blog. Four bloggers have been hacked to death since the beginning of this year, and dozens more live in fear of becoming the next victim.

Four bloggers have been hacked to death this year, and dozens more live in fear of becoming the next victim

The space for freedom is rapidly reaching a level of constriction not seen since the days of the harshest military rule

As the bodies pile up, and society reacts with no sympathy, we are reminded that freedom is not something we inherit

Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter

Continue reading...

Translation Tuesday: On the River Boży Stok by Wioletta Greg

Wioletta Greg reflects on the decline of the peasant culture in the Polish countryside in this evocative short story

By Wioletta Greg and Anna Hyde for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

“In the beginning there was vast darkness./ Gardens of house mites blossomed within./ A river of light flew through these gardens./ Monsters of hay shifted.// In the beginning there was dense silence/ like inside poppy heads.” [1]

That’s how I imagined my beginnings in the stone house by the pond in Hektary in the village of Rzeniszów upon Boży Stok in the Jurassic Highlands, where I was born in February of nineteen seventy four, when the ice covered nearby ponds and cloth nappies froze stiff in the hall and in the attic. My Grandfather, Władysław Lubas – participant of the September Campaign, marksman of the 74th Infantry Regiment, stalag prisoner – was given three hectares of land during the Land Reform after the war. That was where he built a house of stone with brick corners, the house which looked a bit like a Polish country house. The right side of it – the dining room and two other rooms divided by a spacious hall – was the residential part, while the left side, with a separate entrance and a small window, was a barn. You could say that we lived together with the animals. In early Spring the rooms were filled with the smell of chopped yarrow for turkeys maturing in a cage under the table. A brooding duck sat under the ladder to the attic. Chickens, rabbits, dogs and cats wandered around the house. Up until the 1980s we used domestic appliances made by Grandfather. These were, amongst others: churns, pastry boards, rolling pins, wooden mixing bowls, pails held together by metal bands, stools and troughs. And since my Father’s hobby was taxidermy, there were stuffed martens, magpies and buzzards on the walls, while a stuffed rabbit in formal wear (in a top hat and with a cane) sat on a birch stump. There were beehives in the meadow by the apple trees.

Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter

Continue reading...

Andrea Levy's The Long Song for December's reading group

The British author’s prize-winning novel about a slave girl in 1830s Jamaica is popular with critics and readers alike

This month’s Reading group choice is The Long Song by Andrea Levy. It’s a fine book to come out of the hat, a novel that is popular with critics and readers alike, and it received numerous nominations from Reading group contributors.

Continue reading...