The Guardian's Blog, page 33
November 19, 2015
Food in books: Soup and rye bread from The Book Thief
Soup is regularly served in Markus Zusak’s novel of life in Nazi Germany. Below is a full-bodied broth inspired by the book, capable of spreading happiness in hard times
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
Welcome to the Guardian Books NetworkStrangely, one of Liesel’s favourite distractions was Frau Holtzapfel. The reading sessions included Wednesday now as well, and they’d finished the water-abridged version of The Whistler and were on to The Dream Carrier. The old woman sometimes made tea or gave Liesel some soup that was infinitely better than Mama’s. Less watery.
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
I have recently left the flat that has been my home for the past five years. It was tiny, the roof leaked for more than two years, and I lived in the living room. But it was home. The kitchen space (including a full-size fridge/freezer) made up for the absence of a door between my hob and my bed. And although they would essentially have to sit in my bedroom, I loved having people around for a meal. This will all happen again soon, of course, in my new Liverpudlian abode. In the meantime, however, I am jumping between people’s houses, dragging a suitcase full of my clothes, cake tins and as many books as I can carry. And reminiscing about the meals I made in my kitchen over the years.
Food in books: the soup and rye bread in The Book Thief
Soup is regularly served in Markus Zusak’s novel of life in Nazi Germany. Below is a full-bodied broth inspired by the book, capable of spreading happiness in hard times
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
Welcome to the Guardian Books Network
Strangely, one of Liesel’s favourite distractions was Frau Holtzapfel. The reading sessions included Wednesday now as well, and they’d finished the water-abridged version of The Whistler and were on to The Dream Carrier. The old woman sometimes made tea or gave Liesel some soup that was infinitely better than Mama’s. Less watery.
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
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Motifs, mottos and misfits shape the 2015 Costa award shortlists
A common thread runs through each of the five shortlists for this year’s Costa awards, but there’s always space for an outsider
Things We Have in Common is the title of Tasha Kavanagh’s Costa-nominated YA novel about a troubled teenager with a crush on a schoolmate, and who turns out to share more with a third character than she does with pretty Alice. Looking at the prize’s category shortlists announced this week, it’s almost as if the judges have taken it as their motto: to an unusual degree, each of the five lists is made up of books and authors with things in common. Yet in each, too, there is an equivalent of Kavanagh’s teen misfit.
Related: The Costa category shortlists 2015 – in pictures
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Faith: a plus-size superhero drawn from real life
Now starring in her own comic, Faith Herbert is a very real kind of fantasy protagonist – and a perfect role model
It may be something of a niche concern, but I do often fret that if the radioactive spider bites, I just wouldn’t look good in the primary-coloured skintight Lycra that convention dictates a superhero must wear. So it’s a breath of fresh air to see a new comic whose leading character is not only quite sensibly clothed, but also happens to be plus-size.
Faith, debuting in January from US publisher Valiant, features the teenager Faith Herbert, whose alter ego is the high-flying Zephyr. She’s been around in the Valiant universe for quite a while, but this is her first solo book. And as well as having a body shape more representative of many women than the pneumatic stick insects of comic book tradition, Faith is something of a geek too.
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'Tears of joy' is an emoji Charles Dickens would have relished
The emoji may be 2015’s word of the year, but where would the 19th-century master of tugging the heartstrings have reached for this 21st-century mixture of happiness and grief?
The Oxford English Dictionary’s choice of a tears of joy emoji as its word of the year had several Twitter commenters wondering how Charles Dickens, that bastion of the English literary castle, would react.
Oxford Dictionaries picks 'tears of joy' emoji as word of the year. English teachers search for 'Dickens spinning in grave’ emoji.
My son informs me, Mr. Copperfield, that you were quite devoted to him, and that when you met yesterday you made yourself known to him with .
… and never, while I live, shall I forget his going about to all the shops in the neighbourhood to change this treasure into sixpences, or his bringing them to my aunt arranged in the form of a heart upon a waiter, with and pride in his eyes.
When Arthur told her that she would soon ride in her own carriage through very different scenes, when all the familiar experiences would have vanished away, she looked frightened. But when he substituted her father for herself, and told her how he would ride in his carriage, and how great and grand he would be, her and innocent pride fell fast.
She clasped her little hands before her face. The gushing , and pride, and hope, and innocent affection, would not be restrained. Fresh from her full young heart they came to answer him.
He was charmed to see me, said he had been shedding delicious and sympathy at intervals for six weeks on my account, had never been so happy as in hearing of my progress, began to understand the mixture of good and evil in the world now, felt that he appreciated health the more when somebody else was ill, didn’t know but what it might be in the scheme of things that A should squint to make B happier in looking straight or that C should carry a wooden leg to make D better satisfied with his flesh and blood in a silk stocking.
Behold Mr and Mrs Boffin, beaming! Behold Mrs Boffin clapping her hands in an ecstasy, running to Bella with pouring down her comely face, and folding her to her breast, with the words: ‘My deary, deary, deary girl, that Noddy and me saw married and couldn’t wish joy to, or so much as speak to! My deary, deary, deary, wife of John and mother of his little child! My loving loving, bright bright, Pretty Pretty! Welcome to your house and home, my deary!’
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November 18, 2015
Guardian readers' comfort library
Jane Austen rubs shoulders with Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett sits next to Harry Potter in the great self-help archive assembled by our contributors
A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in a double retirement.”
Thus the young Jane Eyre escapes the double trial of her aunt’s scolding and “the drear November day”. Her escapism isn’t straightforward though, as her book of choice is Bewick’s History of British Birds which, between the bucolic engravings of robins and sea-fowl, features ghoulish scenes of hellfire and hangings.
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Boundaries of empathy and identity: Olufemi Terry On Cape Town and Coetzee’s long shadow
The Sierra Leone-born author reflects on finding himself strung between two very different literary poles in South Africa’s ‘sleepy city’
By Olufemi Terry for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network
In February 2008, a few days before I began my MA in creative writing, an administrator in University of Cape Town’s English department asked me if there were any particular writer I wished to have for my advisor. The one I had been originally assigned, an American, had been let go, apparently so that the department could make a quota hire. Rumor said a Zambian poet had been taken on but I never learned the truth of this, nor ever met the poet. It was an incident of significance: Apartheid was not yet fifteen years dead and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), South Africa’s affirmative action program, was a contentious issue in the worlds of sport, academia and business.
While inquiries went out to a novelist I admired, an interim advisor was named for me, a well-established Afrikaans-language writer who warned, on meeting me for the first time, that I should not expect much in the way of friendliness from Capetonians. He may have said something about Table Mountain having something to do with this, about nature exerting an influence on the temperament of locals but it may be a false memory.
‘Cape Town, as it seemed, promised something intermediate between New York and Nairobi’
'It seemed the mark of an excellent novel that it should piss off black and white alike in this fractured country'
Chimurenga was a refutation of Cape Town’s major tropes – romantic isolation, exceptionalism, sacred nature
'It was in Cape Town that the last vestige of New York went out of me'
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November 17, 2015
Nick Rennison: 'Platoons of the undead lurked in obscure books'
The anthologist talks us through some of the ghoulish discoveries he dug up from the archive for his collection of Victorian horror fiction
Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula was not the only vampire to haunt the late Victorian and Edwardian imagination. As I found when I undertook research for my anthology The Rivals of Dracula, he was but one of platoons of the undead who lurked in the pages of obscure books and magazines of the period. Work on my earlier anthology, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, had revealed the huge number of fictional detectives who sprang up in the wake of Conan Doyle’s success with his Baker Street sleuth. Now this new anthology demonstrates the era’s love of the supernatural and the ghoulish. There were fanged maidens, psychic vampires intent on destroying men’s souls, an undead Icelander who fights with one of the heroes of the sagas, a vampiric spirit that takes over the physical form of an Egyptian mummy – all waiting to be discovered.
One of the great pleasures of such research lies in the unearthing of half-forgotten writers who have lost much of whatever fame they once had. Augustus Hare, whose heyday was the 1890s, was a traveller, art lover and eccentric. Somerset Maugham, who knew him, described a visit to his country home during which the younger writer noticed that the wording of the prayers at morning worship for the servants was unfamiliar. “I’ve crossed out all the passages in glorification of God,” Hare explained. “God is certainly a gentleman and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face.” Like God, Hare was a gentleman but he was an impoverished one and he was obliged to churn out vast amounts of writing to keep himself in the style he wanted. He presents his supernatural tales as events that really happened to friends and acquaintances, although sceptics might like to note that The Vampire of Croglin Grange, the story I included in my anthology, bears a number of similarities to events in Varney the Vampire, a gore-filled penny dreadful of the 1840s.
Suddenly the scratching sound ceased, and a kind of pecking sound took its place. Then, in her agony, she became aware that the creature was unpicking the lead! The noise continued, and a diamond pane of glass fell into the room. Then a long bony finger of the creature came in and turned the handle of the window, and the window opened, and the creature came in; and it came across the room, and her terror was so great that she could not scream, and it came up to the bed, and it twisted its long, bony fingers into her hair, and it dragged her head over the side of the bed, and – it bit her violently in the throat.
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November 16, 2015
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 pictures from last week, including a discussion of post-Soviet literature, the lowdown on this year’s Man Booker international finalists and a whole heap of comfort reads (which suddenly seem more necessary in the light of the weekend’s terrible events in Paris).
RedBirdFlies has embarked on ambitious project to read the writers longlisted for this year’s International Booker
So after a book of non fiction essays Tales From the Heart and a fictional biography of her grandmother Victoire, My Mother’s Mother, I then went on to read Maryse Condé’s novel Segu, something of a minor classic of historical fiction set in the early 1800’s within the family of a nobleman, which follows the four sons as they leave Segu and encounter all manners of places, people, perceptions, faiths and practices outside those they are familiar with.
I also read Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat, which floored me and took a while to be about to gather my thoughts and write something about. A talented writer and thinker and a challenging read.
Having visited Spinalonga on holiday in Crete reading Victoria Hislop's novel based on its history as a leper colony is a chance to try to keep up my French. It's great that my local library has collections in 'Community Languages' including a good few shelves of French books.
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By tiojo
11 November 2015, 12:34
I have just ordered Ludmilla Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent. I’m quite excited about getting this book, as Ulitskaya will be the first of the post-Soviet novelists I’ve read.
But back to Soviet days - has anybody read work by Vassily AKsyonov? Recently I got intoGenerations of Winter and The Winter Hero? It’s a huge epic about a medical family surviving life in Stalinist Russia and quite compelling.
I first read ‘Arctic Summer’, his latest book about E.M. Forster’s ‘secret history’ and loved it. Such lyrical and truthful writing. Have since read two of his republished novels: ’Small Circle of Beings’ - basically about family in a very real hell on earth. A ‘difficult book - quite short, very condensed, but worth it. Also, have just finished Galgut’s ‘The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs’ - another ‘short book’- 142 pages, first published in 1991- shortly after the first free general elections were held in South West Africa.
As someone that has spent a great deal of time living on Sicily, this remains a fascinating account of the lives of fishermen in the early '50s at Scopello, north west Sicily. Still a beautiful place and on the edge of the fabulous Riserva dello Zingaro. Alongside this book, need to read 'Sicilian Lives' by the man known as the Gandhi of Sicily, Danilo Dolci, which covers similar subject material, but based on the other side of Golfo di Castellammare at Trappeto
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By Tacitus49
11 November 2015, 14:44
Completely absorbed I was happy to concur with the critics who described it as “Simply Magnificent”. Until, until.
Swept away initially by her exploration of the emotions of Lewis, a thirteen year old boy spending the summer in Paris who falls under the spell of a glamourous Russian novelist, I was convinced by her usual sure touch. All was as it should be, but then, but then. In the final section events took a different turn and I was unable, as one reviewer said, to be “beguiled by Rose Tremain into suspending disbelief”.
After an unusual October in reading terms, I decided to go back to my books a week ago or so. This time my choice dates from many years ago, particularly from the Archaic Greece.
This book contains around 470 fables which include a moral lesson. They show the goodness and the evil by which the human being is usually characterized. We can see that the current human behaviour is the same as before. We haven't evolved in this sense.
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By ID1541580
10 November 2015, 13:42
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Poem of the week: Calling Card by Tracey Herd
A eulogy for a young writer who died in a car accident aged 22, this bright poem refuses mourning to insist that her unfinished legacy will endure
Calling Card
(i.m. Marina Keegan, 1989-2012)
At the last party,
the punctual, the late arrivals,
the ones who never made it
are all one and the same.
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