The Guardian's Blog, page 67

Finnegans Wake – the book the web was invented for

James Joyce’s difficult masterpiece has baffled readers for over seven decades, but music, reading-aloud and digital technologies are opening up rich new interpretations

Ninety years ago this month, the fourth edition of Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review came out. It featured the first new work to be published by James Joyce since Ulysses in 1922. The modestly titled, eight-page piece, From Work in Progress was the beginning of a project that was to be, if anything, even more scandalous and divisive than its predecessor.

In the 15 years between this first fleeting appearance and the eventual publication of Finnegans Wake on 4 May, 1939, Joyce’s book was to alienate long-time supporters such as Ezra Pound and attract a younger generation of writers, critics and publishers, including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon and Stuart Gilbert.

There is an annotated version online that led me to think that the book is like an early iteration of hypertext

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May’s Reading group: the novels of Terry Pratchett

To celebrate the life of this much-loved writer, we will be looking at the first book in the Discworld series, plus one other – the choice is yours

This month on the Reading group, we’re going to celebrate the life of Terry Pratchett the best way we can: by enjoying his novels. The only difficulty is deciding which of his books to look at. Pratchett wrote roughly two books a year for 30 years, and many of them are dearly beloved.

The obvious starting place is his first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic. I’m going to read that over the next few days and I hope you’ll join me. It will be fascinating to discuss it here and see the foundations of what would become Terry Pratchett’s monument.

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Baddies in books: Mickey Sabbath, Philip Roth's supernova of sin

The antihero of Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theatre blinds us with his astonishing misogyny, his exponential misanthropy, his audacious nihilism - and yet he makes us care

Readers are strangely proprietorial about the depraved Mickey Sabbath, the hero, anti-hero and villain of Philip Roth’s 1995 tour de force, Sabbath’s Theatre. Just what he does to deserve this affection over the course of 450 bile-filled pages is hard to fathom. He virtually defines that bête noire of creative writing courses, the unsympathetic character, and to discover such a monstrous creation on the page is a shock. Yet it is also a sweetly subversive experience - and this perhaps partially explains his appeal.

Here is a baddie with scale, mythical in his magnification. And yet he is no Pilate or Iago, merely a sad old man with a hard-on, raging against the dying of the light. Just as with Macbeth, the more flagrant Sabbath’s transgressions, the more we are dazzled by his outrageous glare. He’s a supernova of sin, or a Roman candle, at the very least, blazing away in Roth’s virtuoso paragraphs; blinding us with his astonishing misogyny, his exponential misanthropy, his audacious nihilism. How does Roth pull it off? (The expression is apt.) Or more accurately, how does he pull it off and still make us care?

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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

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Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week:

lulamae has been catching up with CJ Sansom:

Highly unlikely to get near a Booker Prize but I’m reading Lamentation, the sixth of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake mysteries. He’s a historian so it’s all well researched and has a hunchbacked (an important fact) and principled lawyer at its main character. The stories began with the dissolution of the monasteries (Dissolution) with Shardlake working for Cromwell and has moved on to Henry 8 near death. Lighter than Wolf Hall but equally enjoyable and with much the same cast. Very hard to put down...

“A Place Called Winter” by Patrick Gale: Brilliant novel, brilliant writer.

Words explode into the air, leaving behind velocity rings worthy of your favorite Pikachu.

A fuller review here: http://ihath.com/?p=2353

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By ihath

21 April 2015, 17:08

Cries of outrage will no doubt follow my next sentence. I’ve tried to read two of John Lanchester’s novels, and gave up on both. There. Said it. I know he has a devoted following.

On holiday a couple of years ago I got a third of the way through Capital and threw in the towel. First few chapters thought I’d settled down to a good read. But then, but then. Enjoyable though it was iniitially it began to feel formulaic and stereotypical. Gave it to a friend. Big fan. She loved it.

I’ve just abandoned The Left Hand of Darkness. I was delighted when ENMWombat recommended this last week as I’d been thinking of trying something by Ursula Le Guin but didn’t know where to start. I picked it up at the library this afternoon and was pleased to see that reassuring Virago green spine. But oh dear oh dear. I didn’t even get to the end of the first chapter. It just felt like being in an especially portentous episode of Star Trek. My apologies to ENMWombat. It just wasn’t for me.

I didn’t really like The Left Hand of Darkness but loved The Dispossessed.

The second book I've started reading this month, "Relatos del mar" ("Tales of the sea") is a compilation of real and fictional stories that explore how influential the sea has been in real history as well as in literature. The tales are set chronologically so as to the reader can notice how the stories which are told about this place have evolved with the passing of time.

We can find very different stories: from those related to slavery and plundering to others that show a bit of reflection on the sea and dangerous voyages due to the weather conditions. It's being interesting so far.

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By ID1541580

24 April 2015, 10:54

I have a question for anyone who has read some of both Patricia Highsmith’s non-Ripley novels and George Simenon’s romans dur. Are they similar in tone and / or subject matter? Do you think that Highsmith was mining a vein that Simenon pioneered?

I am not a fan of series detectives and have pretty much ignored Simenon, not realizing until recently that he had written a number of books that were not part of his Maigret series. Reading a description of these romans dur, as they seem to be called, they sounded similar to some of the Highsmith novels I’ve been enjoying recently, examining how a violent act intrudes upon and changes the lives of otherwise ordinary people, and sometimes reveals that, after all, they were not so ordinary to begin with.

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Poem of the Week: Aggression Diary by Annemarie Austin

The art here is in the omission, whereby the ordinary is made mysterious, its strangeness exposed, and at the heart we find an unspoken act of violence

Aggression Diary

They had become concerned about him and started
to keep an aggression diary.

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The Girl on the Train – and other express encounters in literature

Moira Redmond takes a journey through her favourite fiction written to the rhythm of the rails. Which train scenes make your heart beat faster?

The latest domestic thriller to grab attention, massive sales and a place at the top of the bestseller list is Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train – it’s a very English book, so it’s even more impressive that this debut novel has been hugely successful in the US as well.

There’s been much song and dance about it slipstreaming the success of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, but little about its debt to a long and venerable train trope in literature. The starting point is that a young woman gets the same train every day, and watches out for a house that backs on to the line. She imagines a life for the happy, good-looking couple in their garden, and looks for them obsessively twice a day, there and back. But what she sees begins to make her fear that something is going wrong. It’s a twisty thriller, with a lot going on – but who doesn’t feel a frisson at the thought of what you see out of a train window? From planes you see clouds, from boats you see seabirds, from cars everything streaks past too fast to notice. So plenty of authors have used that transitory moment of reflection on a train, when time seems to freeze as the landscape rushes by, to their advantage.

Who doesn’t feel a frisson at the thought of what you see out of a train window?

“It must be some curve if you can photograph the front part of the train from the back, it will look awfully dangerous.”

I pointed out to her that no one could possibly tell it had been taken from the back of the train. She looked at me pityingly. “I shall write underneath it. ‘Taken from the train. Engine going round a curve.’”

Related: The Girl on the Train: how Paula Hawkins wrote ‘the new Gone Girl’

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves …

Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much.

The train finally begins to slow and suddenly bright light floods the compartment. We can’t help it. Both Peeta and I run to the window to see what we’ve only seen on television, the Capitol, the ruling city of Panem. The cameras haven’t lied about its grandeur. If anything, they have not quite captured the magnificence of the glistening buildings in a rainbow of hues that tower into the air, the shiny cars that roll down the wide paved streets, the oddly dressed people with bizarre hair and painted faces who have never missed a meal … The people begin to point at us eagerly as they recognise a tribute train rolling into the city. I step away from the window, sickened by their excitement, knowing they can’t wait to watch us die.

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Reading American cities: books about Portland

Known as a vegan-friendly, coffee-obsessed, bike-riding haven, the Oregon city has only recently entered popular consciousness – mostly thanks to parodies of its hipsters. Jon Raymond explores the books that cast light on the best-kept secret of the Pacific Northwest

What are your favourite Portland books? Tell us in the comments and we’ll publish a selection in a readers’ list

Only recently did the city of Portland, Oregon acquire the status of an Idea in the world. The Idea came about quickly, emerging from a pallid ether almost fully formed. A few years ago, it was: Portland, a place where it rains? And then, suddenly: Portland! A progressive Eden of tall bikes, home-roasted coffee, and art-damaged college grads. The Decemberists! Pork sandwiches! In a word: Portlandia. For those who’ve been here awhile the change can be disorienting. This always seemed like a place people came to disappear; now they come here to be discovered?

The strongest resident magic emanates through our great forest sorceress, Ursula K LeGuin

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Ten ways to buy books without money

Donate blood, draw a portrait of yourself, quit smoking or smile to your neighbours: anything but money goes at the new DIY book fairs that are popping up in Europe and Latin America

What is a book worth? The answer to this question is, like most things, relative – as will be demonstrated over the next few weeks at a handful of locations in Spain, Latin America and the rest of Europe. A project called 1010 Ways to Buy Without Money will see stalls ‘selling’ books for a variety of prices, set either by the organisers or by the donors of the books. These might involve taking snacks to the office for colleagues, or creating a photo diary, drawing a self-portrait, or more practically, donating clothes, blood and even organs. The one thing they all have in common is they can’t involve the exchange of money.

The project started in Barcelona in 2011 when a group of creatively-minded people started reflecting on the monetisation of culture, prompted by the celebration of the International Day of the Book, on 23 April (the Unesco-designated date, not to be confused with the UK event of the same name). It’s a festivity that is hugely celebrated in the Catalan capital, making it the day in which the most books are sold all year. “Why had the ‘Day of the Book’ become the ‘Day of buying a book’?,” they asked themselves.

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World Book Night: how poetry helps reluctant readers take flight

This year, the annual event to promote reading is giving away an anthology of poems for the first time, and the response has been extraordinarily positive

“Is it mine? Can I keep it?” Kieran has just read a poem aloud in the foyer of St Mungo’s Broadway hostel for the homeless in London’s Covent Garden. Silence by Mourid Barghouti begins: “Silence said: / truth needs no eloquence.”

Why did he choose that one? “Because I like silence. There’s not enough of it.” Kieran, 24, has lived in the hostel for more than a year since a serious motorbike accident interrupted his working life as a mechanic. Soon, he hopes to leave, to find a job, a place of his own.

Related: Mass redistribution of words: World Book Night prepares for UK-wide book giveaway

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Pop-up events showcase rare literary treasures around the globe

This Thursday, antiquarian book fairs will spring up in locations the world over – from a woolshed in the Australian bush to the top of a Chicago skyscraper. Here is all you need to know, plus some of the rarest specimens you might bump into

Going to one of the fairs? Photograph and share your book finds here

There are all sorts of ways to promote reading. The latest arrives on Thursday, in the shape of “a Mexican wave starting the day in Australia and, as the sun goes, finishing the day in the United States”. The wave in question is one of pop-up antiquarian book fairs - stalls where passers-by will have the opportunity to buy rare books, prints, manuscripts and ephemera. The organisers, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, want you to think of it as “a mixture between bookish flash mob and speed dating for book lovers”.

The project will coincide with the Unesco-backed World Book Day – not to be confused with the UK’s celebration of the same name – and will see more than 25 pop-up fairs across the globe (plus a mobile one, in the form of a campervan selling books on the road from Salisbury to Oxford in the UK). You can find all the information here. Some that stand out at first glance are a woolshed in the Australian bush, a train station in the Netherlands, the top of a Chicago skyscyraper and a microbrewery in Portland, Oregon.

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