The Guardian's Blog, page 43
September 29, 2015
Happy National Coffee day – 10 great coffee quotes from literature
Never mind if you’re a latte, an espresso or a cappuccino type, today is the chance to forget your differences and join national celebrations in the UK, US, Australia and beyond. Here are some of our top caffeinated quotes from books. Let us know yours in the comments
Take it from someone who recently underwent an excruciating coffee detox, this drink is worth celebrating. While scientists argue about whether it’s good or bad for us, and how many cups we should drink a day, we’ve been looking into the proud literary history of the black stuff.
This 1 October has been designated the first International Coffee Day, as decided by the International Coffee Organisation, which describes it as an occasion both to celebrate the drink and “support the millions of farmers whose livelihoods depend on the aromatic crop”. However, many areas, including most English-speaking countries, have their own celebratory days today. Confusing as that may be, go here if you’re interested in finding out more about related events around the world.
I’d rather take coffee than compliments just now. ― from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self. ― Thud! by Terry Pratchett. Recommended by DMU Bookshop.
I went out the kitchen to make coffee – yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life blood of tired men. ― from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
She poured the coffee, which was so strong it practically snarled as it came out of the pot, and then sat down herself, taking the small cat on to her knee. ― from The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks. Recommended by MrsC
Good. Coffee is good for you. It’s the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave. ― from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.― from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
‘Well, one can die after all: it is but dying; and in the next world, thank God! there is no drinking of coffee, and consequently no – waiting for it.’ Sometimes he would rise from his chair, open the door, and cry out with a feeble querulousness – ‘Coffee! coffee!’ ― from Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers by Thomas De Quincey [about Immanuel Kant]
That’s something that annoys the hell out of me – I mean if somebody says the coffee’s all ready and it isn’t. – from The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.
DECEMBER 16. I’m sick for real. Rosario is making me stay in bed. Before she left for work she went out to borrow a thermos from a neighbour and she left me half a litre of coffee. Also four aspirin. I have a fever. I’ve started and finished two poems.” The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Continue reading...
October's Reading Group: Victory by Joseph Conrad
Over the coming month, we’ll be poring over the great modernist’s challenging yet compelling novel – 100 years after it was first published; and we have five copies to give away … so get posting in the comments below
This month on the Reading Group, we’re looking at Joseph Conrad’s Victory, 100 years after the great modernist’s novel was first published.
The final word of the book, Conrad said in an author’s note that appeared with the first edition, was written on 29 May 1914. “And that last word was the single word of the title.” By the time the book came to be published, that word had taken on an unexpected resonance. “Those were the times of peace,” wrote Conrad of the period when he was finishing the book. By the time it was published in 1915, Europe was at war. Conrad said that he agonised over his title as a result, worrying that Victory might fall “under the suspicion of commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the book had something to do with the war”. Conrad also worried that his chief villain, a thuggish hotelier named Schomberg, had “the psychology of a Teuton”. He pointed out that he too came from the time of peace, as “an old member of my company” who first appeared in Lord Jim, back in 1899.
Michael Palin: 'Squeezing 10 years into a book is like being a sculptor'
Whittling away 80% of a decade’s events is cruel but holidays, meals and train journeys all had to be jettisoned in the creation of the Python veteran’s latest memoir, Travelling to Work
My experience with the publication of my two previous volumes of diaries – The Python Years and Halfway to Hollywood, had prepared me for the task of squeezing 10 manically busy years into a single volume. The process is, I imagine, a bit like the challenge a sculptor faces. To chip away at an amorphous block until a shape is gradually revealed. I saw great chunks of the decade fall to the floor as some 80% of the block was whittled away. Ion Trewin, the much-missed doyen of diary editing, was once again my wise adviser on choice of material. Family holidays were jettisoned in their entirety; there’s something about hot days, beaches and mosquito bites which just doesn’t travel.
Business meetings, unless they involved something like a snake coming in through the window, were early casualties, as were joyful, but repetitive, train journeys. Equally joyful descriptions of meals and drinks had to be pared back in case they gave the impression that I lived in a restaurant and occasionally went home to change my shirt. Little curiosities, long forgotten, are among the greatest pleasures of an edit. The window cleaner who has vertigo and can only clean the ground floor, the Manchester hotel manager who attributed his wife’s non-appearance at a meal with me to “an attack of the vomits”.
Want a Jane Austen quote delivered to you every day? There's an app for that
A new app developed by Bath’s Jane Austen Centre promises to make your day a little better by delivering one quote a day
Whose quotes would you like to receive every day? Tell us in the comments“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” Good advice for a bad day at the office, perhaps? Jane Austen’s tetchy words to her sister Cassandra are among many quotable lines that seem just as applicable to the modern world as to the society Austen inhabited more than two hundred years ago.
With that in mind, the Jane Austen Centre in Bath has produced an app providing a daily dose of Austen wisdom, which can be custom-timed to land on your phone whenever you like – “when you have your morning coffee or when you’re on the bus going home”. The Jane Austen Daily Quote app is available now in both major app stores.
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. —from Emma (1815)
Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. — from Pride and Prejudice (1813)
For what do we live, but to make sport of our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? — from Pride and Prejudice (1813)
There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them. — from Mansfield Park (1814)
How quick come the reasons for approving what we like! — from Persuasion (1817)
Continue reading...
September 28, 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 summery and autumnal fiction, new and old, and readers wondering whether one can read too much for their own good.
fingerlakeswanderer is reading Lauren Groff’s National Book Award-nominated Fates and Furies:
I’ve been reading the new novel by Lauren Groff, who previously wrote The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia. I loved Monsters, and was so-so about Arcadia, so it’s a bit of a gamble, but so far, Fates and Furies has kept my interest. I know that Groff can write, so that’s not the issue. For me, determining whether I like the book is going to have to do with whether I think the characters are worth getting to know and whether the situation they’re in makes sense. So far, her male protagonist, Lotto (a nickname) has a whole bunch of back story, while his new wife, Muriel, has little. Since I’m more interested in her, I hope Groff turns her attention to why Muriel marries Lotto. It’s a relationship of “chalk and cheese,” so it will be a good exercise to see whether she can make something unique out of a trope about opposites attracting.
Anyone who has just delighted in the BBC adaptation of Cider with Rosie might like to head straight for their nearest library and borrow As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and continue the poetic journey of this talented, open-minded and gentle young man. It is the favorite book of my life and I will be reading it again this week. I have lost count of the number of times I have read it.
I first read it at 16, the age of protagonist Holden Caulfield, and hated it. The character was a little too close to home for my teenage perception - I saw too much of myself in him, which made me acutely uncomfortable. At age 65 I see him from a different perspective. I now see even more of my adolescent self in Caulfield, but my heart goes out to him in his pain and confusion. I wish I could reassure him that yes, growing up is painful, but it all works out in the end. Emotional.
It is a truly excellent novel, a masterpiece. I dread picking it up and when I do, I can’t put it down. In between searing scenes depicting the horror of navigating life at the Auschwitz concentration camp, it conveys the desperate legacy of that experience by way of a damaging love affair, and the young male narrator’s own love for Sophie and his own need to write his book, and get laid. It is a thick, detailed book that does all the things authors aren’t allowed to do any more - the chapters are very, very long, the detail is intricate and amazing (how on earth could an American author have researched so much about the atmosphere and milieu of Polish universities before Google?) and the novel shifts between first person narrative to third person where Sophie relates her story to the narrator. But what bowls me over is how well the author knows his characters here. Sophie is depicted so intimately, so accurately that you can truly understand why she would end up where she is, you can understand how her life becomes a perpetual act of forgetting.
The days of no technology appeal to me when I become absurdly busy and need to smell the falling leaves and crisp air
When Autumn ushers in, I reread the childhood classics of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The days of no technology and living off the land appeal to me when I become absurdly busy and need to stop to smell the falling leaves and crisp air.
Is there such a thing as literary overkill? Is it possible to read so much so constantly that we lose the real flavour of what we’re reading? Would space between reads be beneficial? With time in between would we approach our next book in a more receptive frame of mind?
Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks email
Continue reading...
Orhan Pamuk: 'The novel is not dead'
Turkey’s Nobel laureate explains how he set out to write an epic of Istanbul in his latest novel, A Strangeness in My Mind – and why he’s confident the novel will survive in the age of box sets
The development of the novel is inextricably connected with the growth of modern cities, said Turkish Nobel laureate at a Guardian Live event to discuss his latest novel A Strangeness in My Mind.
Cities give rise to novels, and novels in turn mythologise and further the growth of cities, he said, explaining why his own work returns again and again to Istanbul, the city of his birth, as both the primary location of, and inspiration for, his fiction.
A novel works best if you rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it
Related: Innocence of Memories review - Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul rendered strange and beautiful
Continue reading...
Life Drawing by Robin Black; Euphoria by Lily King – love triangles that didn’t make the cut
When the Man Booker prize shortlist was announced earlier this month, all I could think about was this time last year, when I was judging the Folio prize. Specifically, all I could think about was the novels I’d had to let go. I don’t mean those that I tried, and failed, to get on our shortlist; I mean those that I knew would never make it even to the long list, but to which I felt strongly attached nevertheless. It was such an unexpectedly melancholy business.
Let me press a couple of these on you. The first is Life Drawing by the American writer Robin Black which I read in a single spellbound sitting. Augusta and Owen are a long-term couple who’ve moved to the country. Ostensibly, their new isolation will enable Gus to paint and Owen to write. In reality, however, they’re escaping an affair Owen had with one of Gus’s students. At first, all is calm, though too much remains unsaid. But then into the empty house next door moves Alison, whose subtly invasive presence will soon throw up the past again. Though it goes a little awry towards the end, I can’t think that I’ve read a more intense account of the unspoken intimacy that is as necessary to a long-established couple as the very air they breathe.
Continue reading...
Poem of the Week: The Words Collide by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
The Irish poet’s new collection includes the personal – and ultimately political – story of an ‘unletter’d woman’ of some other time dictating a lovely, mysterious and almost unguardedly sexual letter
The scribe objects. You can’t put it like that,
I can’t write that. But the client
is a tough small woman forty years old.
She insists. She needs her letter
to open out full of pleated revolving silk
and the soft lobes of her ears
where she flaunts those thin silver wires.
Related: The Boys of Bluehill by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin review – distinctive and rewarding
Related: Poem of the week: In His Other House by Jee Leong Koh
Continue reading...
September 26, 2015
Richard Flanagan on love, life and writing
Why a novel without structure is ‘a jellyfish pretending to be a shark’, and other secrets of the trade revealed by the Booker-winning author at a Guardian Live event on The Narrow Road to the Deep North
As extreme research goes, Richard Flanagan’s encounter with a former Japanese guard from the prison of war camp in which his father had been interned takes some beating. The encounter happened as he was working on his Man Booker prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the Tasmanian author revealed at a Guardian book club event in London this week.
“For no clear reason, I asked him to slap me, which was the principal form of punishment in the imperial Japanese army,” he said. On receiving the third blow, the whole room started to twist up and down and roll widely, and he thought he’d lost his mind. In fact, a 7.3 Richter-scale earthquake had hit Tokyo.
To me, story is a rhythm that takes you along, and narrative is like a water sprinkler throwing things up everywhere
...a novel without structure is a jellyfish pretending to be a shark.
Continue reading...
Walter Benjamin’s legacy, 75 years on
Like many a refugee in southern and central Europe today, Walter Benjamin was in flight from war and persecution 75 years ago, but was blocked at an intermediate border en route to the country chosen as his haven. He was part of a Jewish group which, hoping to escape occupied France, had hiked through a Pyrenean pass in autumn 1940 with a view to entering Franco’s Spain, crossing it to Portugal and then sailing to the US. However, in the words of Hannah Arendt, they arrived in the frontier village of Portbou “only to learn that Spain had closed the border that same day” and officials were not honouring American visas such as Benjamin’s. Faced with the prospect of returning to France and being handed over to the Nazis, he “took his own life” overnight on 26 September, whereupon the officials “allowed his companions to proceed to Portugal”.
Related: My hero: Walter Benjamin by Elif Shafak
Continue reading...
The Guardian's Blog
- The Guardian's profile
- 9 followers
