The Guardian's Blog, page 41
October 7, 2015
Super Thursday: the good, the bad and the doggone awful
Today more than 400 ‘big books’ are published in the hope of capturing the Christmas market. Which of the following will sell the most by 25 December?
How Super Thursday turned a publishing pile-up into a marketing triumph
With more than 400 titles due to be published today, the betting is on for the winner who will take all at the tills in the lucrative run-up to Christmas. Here are some of the hopefuls. Let us know who we’ve missed.
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An Egyptian classic of feminist fiction
Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero is an intense story of female oppression that still rings with euphoric liberation
This month, a 1975 novel by one of the most influential feminist thinkers in the Arab world is being republished. Finally! Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero is a classic example of a book being left out of the feminist literary canon because it is written by a non-white, non-western woman; and from the postcolonial literature canon because it is not written by a man.
Yet, although it comes from a region where women are presumed not to be as vociferous as their western counterparts, it is one of the 20th century’s most outspokenly radical books about female life, from all backgrounds, in all parts of the world.
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Who should win the Nobel prize in literature?
As the countdown begins to this year’s prize, we take a look at the most tipped authors. Are you rooting for old favourites Philip Roth or Haruki Murakami, or someone else entirely?
It’s that time of year again. With the Nobel prizes for medicine, chemistry and physics already announced, tomorrow is literature’s turn. We know the game: names such as Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami are perennials on the list – but we also know how famously difficult it is to predict, and how much the Swedish Academy loves to surprise and confound. Here are this year’s top ten tipped authors according to bookies Ladbrokes on Wednesday, with Belarusian journalist Svetlana Aleksijevitj leading the pack.
Take this as a starting point for discussion ... we want to know who you think should win (and why) in the comments.
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October 6, 2015
National Poetry Day 2015: dedicate a poem to someone you love
The mantra for this year’s National Poetry Day is ‘make like a poet’, so we’re challenging you to make a video of yourself reading out a poem for somebody you care about. We’ll publish the best of this collective celebration on the day
This is the week to “break with the tyranny of prose” and celebrate all things poetical, thanks to National Poetry Day. Ahead of this UK-wide celebration on Thursday 8 October, for which you can find the full programme here, we want to get you thinking, dreaming and acting like a poet.
We would love you to dedicate a poem to someone you care about. Please briefly explain who you are dedicating it to, and why, before you recite the poem. Other than that, surprise us: be as creative as you like. Simply record yourself, and share the video with us by clicking on the blue ‘Contribute’ button at the top and bottom of this page.
Related: Stephen Hawking demonstrates Relativity for National Poetry Day
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Why Stephen King's IT scares off film-makers
It’s a shame that Cary Fukunaga has pulled out of his planned adaptation – but it’s not surprising, given the challenges involved in doing justice to this landmark novel
Cary Fukunaga, the man responsible for directing the brilliant first season of True Detective, recently announced he has dropped out of directing a new film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel, IT, claiming creative differences with the studio, New Line, were to blame for him abandoning his two-film adaptation. “I was trying to make an unconventional horror film … They didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares,’’ he told Variety.
This isn’t the first time writers or directors have been signed to adapt King’s novel only to quit. Warner Bros was first to try and fail, hiring David Kajganich, a screenwriter whose credits include mediocre horror movies such as Joel Schumacher’s Blood Creek. This might look like a case of disaster averted, but Cary Fukunaga’s exit is a real blow. The director has both the talent and the appreciation of the source material to make a decent fist of adapting what is arguably Stephen King’s greatest work.
Steven Pinker: 'Many of the alleged rules of writing are actually superstitions'
Bad English has always been with us, but clarity and style are far more important than observing dusty usage diktats
People often ask me why I followed my 2011 book on the history of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, with a writing style manual. I like to say that after having written 800 pages on torture, rape, world war, and genocide, it was time to take on some really controversial topics like fused participles, dangling modifiers, and the serial comma.
It’s not much of an exaggeration. After two decades of writing popular books and articles about language, I’ve learned that people have strong opinions on the quality of writing today, with almost everyone finding it deplorable. I’ve also come to realise that people are confused about what exactly they should deplore. Outrage at mispunctuation gets blended with complaints about bureaucratese and academese, which are conflated with disgust at politicians’ evasions, which in turn are merged with umbrage at an endless list of solecisms, blunders, and peeves.
Related: Steven Pinker: 10 'grammar rules' it's OK to break (sometimes)
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October 5, 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 photos from last week, including glowing recommendations for pensive books, thoughts on the effects of decades of reading and our favourite literary links.
Victoria Naumova finished reading Andy Weir’s The Martian, the novel on which the current Ridley Scott movie is based.
I read it within two days, it’s very engaging, the language is simple, but fair enough – the narration isn’t supposed to be done by the novelist. The amount of research done by the author is quite amazing. I’ve also quite enjoyed the maths and calculations, I’m a bit like that myself, as counting and giving some order to this life by calculating numbers makes my days more balanced. Within those two days I grew to like the character and learnt a lot from his ordeals: how to stay optimistic because a little bit of thinking with a cool head, a bit of science (ok, a lot in this case but I’m not going to Mars yet, so I should be fine), a bit of a sense of humour and a potato will take you really far.
One of the many joys of having lived and read for six decades is that I rarely read any book or poem without discerning connections between what I am reading and other works of literature I have read. And so it is with the searing Raised from the Ground by José Saramago. I am currently halfway through it and have been thinking of Zola’s Germinal, which I read at university, and Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair [trilogy], which I devoured more recently. The horrific torture scene which I read this afternoon troubled me and brought to mind this poem by Wislawa Szymborska. This book is so political and so full of Saramago’s love for humankind that it also reminded me of another of Szymborska’s poems which is full of a similar wisdom.
This is not a flick – not a good pick for a commute, unless you travel far
If you like pensive books and exceptionally beautiful language, this is for you. It’s about a journey across the Himalayas and through the human soul. Matthiessen’s unreserved honesty touches the heart, and his eloquence takes the reader back to an era where refined descriptive language was more powerful in conveying impressions and experiences than digital images. This is not a flick – not a good pick for commute, unless you travel far; you will likely want to spend at least half an hour or more per sitting, uninterrupted, to fully enjoy the magic of this book.
It begins like an Oscar Wilde farce, set in a Rhine valley casino town (“Roulettenberg”). The General, mortgaged up to his eyeballs to the odious Count de Grieux, is waiting for his elderly aunt to die so he will inherit her money and be able to marry the dubious Mlle Blanche. The narrator meanwhile, employed by the General as a tutor to his children, is hopelessly in love with the General’s stepdaughter. One day the aunt shows up, unexpectedly healthy, and develops a taste for roulette… However, the second half charts the narrator’s descent into a compulsive gambling addiction, with all the attendant self-deception and swings between wild hope and despair. It describes the gambler’s state of mind very believably, and the pangs of infatuation. I enjoyed it. Also, there’s an interesting account in translator Hugh Aplin’s introduction of how he had to write it in one month and in the process met his second wife.
I don’t feel as if I’m reading descriptions of emotions, but rather, the emotions themselves
She assumes several narrative voices in the telling of her tale. At one point, she is the American woman writer, sitting alone in her blue room, sipping her Balvenie Scotch, observing the cliché that she is enacting, the one phrase that most associate with Woolf. She writes:
I am not Virginia Woolf. Do you know how many women can’t afford the room, or have no help, or scratch away at things in bars, buses, closets? I much prefer a different line of yours, anyway: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. Or this: Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
I know something about death.
And then she tells us. It’s earthy and honest. I don’t feel as if I’m reading descriptions of emotions, but rather, the emotions themselves. I’m well aware that the words are not there by magic, and yet, there’s a timeless quality to them that feels as if Yuknavitch has drilled into some underground fount of words that are at flow.
As a reader, I’m lost in the story. As a writer, I’m envious as hell.
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Not the Booker prize: your final judgment, please
There are seven good books to choose between this time, so you judges can start referring to ‘vintage years’ and ‘difficult decisions’ in your verdicts. Get voting!
Once again it’s time to vote for winner of the Not the Booker prize. Or almost time – first we need a quick recap of the books in the competition and the relevant rules.
My work is made harder this year, as there’s no opportunity to make jokes about the poor quality of any of the books on the list. There’s nothing as overblown and overlong as The Goldfinch, nothing as egregious as Cairo. Instead we have seven worthy titles, each offering an individual measure of ambition and interest. Which is rather dull to report on at this stage, but has made the last few months of reading an enjoyable and enriching process. Good old literature, eh?
Readers may vote for only one title at this stage – as before, changes of mind will be governed by clause four on indecision. A vote in support of one book at shortlist stage does not rule out a subsequent valid vote in support of a different book to win the Competition. Reviews may be written at any time before a vote is cast. Votes received on 12 October will not be counted.
Three readers will be selected by the Guardian to form a panel of judges from those readers who have made substantial contributions to the discussion of the shortlisted books. The process by which these readers are chosen is left studiously vague and is at the Guardian’s discretion. These judges undertake to read at least three of the six-book shortlist before the final judging meeting.
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Poem of the week: The Hinds by Kathleen Jamie
Written amid the ‘tremendous energy’ of Scotland’s independence campaign, this supple nature poem might be a livelier than usual image of nationhood
The Hinds
Walking in a waking dream
I watched nineteen deer
pour from ridge to glen-floor,
then each in turn leap,
leap the new-raised
peat-dark burn. This
was the distaff side;
hinds at their ease, alive
to lands held on long lease
in their animal minds,
and filing through a breach
in a never-mended dyke,
the herd flowed up over
heather-slopes to scree
where they stopped, and turned to stare,
the foremost with a queenly air
as though to say: Aren’t we
the bonniest companie?
Come to me,
you’ll be happy, but never go home.
The title of Kathleen Jamie’s lively new collection, The Bonniest Companie, published this week by Picador Poetry, is tucked away in The Hinds, third line from the end. As the poet’s note tells us, the words are an allusion to the Scottish Border Ballad, Tam Lin.
Make a date with Alison Lurie’s tales of adultery
At the Budleigh Salterton literary festival last month, I talked to Hilary Mantel about the books she holds most dear. On her list were Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, a marvellous novel from 1981 about an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family in which nothing is as it seems. She also told the audience of her fondness for the singular Ivy Compton-Burnett, in whose books Edwardian types behave badly at dinner, and for the funny campus romps of the American writer Alison Lurie.
Related: London has lost all its Ivy
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