The Guardian's Blog, page 73
March 20, 2015
Pay with a poem: cafes around the world to exchange coffee for poetry
To mark World Poetry Day, more than a thousand coffee establishments around the world will use poetry as their currency this Saturday
Find out about the participating cafes in your area hereWhat is a poem worth? As authors around the world despair of making a living, a company based in Vienna has finally come up with a definitive answer: one cup of coffee.
Julius Meinl, a coffee-roasting company founded in 1862, is marking Unesco’s World Poetry Day with a promotion in 1,100 cafes, bars and restaurants across 23 countries mostly in continental Europe but including the UK, the US and Australia, offering a dose of caffeine to any customer who hands over one of their own poems.
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March 19, 2015
George RR Martin hints he might finish next Song of Ice and Fire book this year
Game of Thrones author announces that he will skip Comic-Con and World Fantasy Convention to write The Winds of Winter – unless he’s finished the sixth book in his fantasy series by then
So George RR Martin puts his shoulder to Dame Fortune’s wheel once more, spinning those of us tormented by the wait for the next volume of his Song of Ice and Fire series back up again to the giddy heights. Just when we had recovered from the news that we were not going to see book six this year, the man himself informs us that, well, there might just be a chance.
Writing on his blog, George RR Martin apologises that he won’t be attending the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga this autumn. Why? Because he’s working on The Winds of Winter.
Related: Game of Thrones: nudity and violence at the tower – spoiler-free review
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March 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
Read more Tips, links and suggestions blogsWelcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
It’s never too late to discover a great book. This week, electricgrapefruit read Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee for the first time:
It has gone right in near the top of my top ten. How have I got to 65 without reading this gem? It may be a writing style that has gone out of fashion but present day writers could learn a lot about capturing atmosphere in words from Laurie Lee.
It presents a very good overview over the historical development and current state of evolutionary psychology. [...] Wright’s book offers insights into human nature, and is fun to read (as far as anything concerning human nature can ever be fun). One of the delicacies of the book is that he illustrates principles of evolutionary psychology by using Darwin’s biography. That way we look at Darwin’s behaviour, marriage and family from the point of view of a Darwin-inspired psychology, which is quite amusing.
I am not sure what to think of this tale set in an extermination camp during the holocaust. Is it an entertainment or a serious attempt to reveal the banality of evil? Amis has been down this way before. Time’s Arrow was, to my mind at least, a better book which succeeded on many levels including the shock of the author’s idea.
The Zone of Interest tries too hard and in so doing manages to make me think that yet another cruelty or nastiness is about to be revealed, or even another banality. I don’t dislike the book but it slips and slides between ideas and narrators and Amis in the end fails to convince me. I am not at all sure that he truly understands the camp commander Doll, the man who is in love with his wife Thomsen and the Sonderkommando Szmul whose task it is to exhume and burn the bodies putrefying in their mass grave and fouling the local water with their “plopping, splatting and hissing.” [...]
Amis explains so much of what I read in the papers these days. When morality and humanity fail we should beware of what the outcome might be.
It was a horrible experience to read it. I cried a lot. I learned that Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons” who sent over 14,000 to death in the Hotel Terminus in Lyons, used new techniques of torture including sexually abusing prisoners with dogs. His defence, conducted by Jacques Verges, said that what Klaus did was no different than what the French did during the Vichy regime and the colonial government in Algeria.
As you read the book one cannot help but realise how devious, how disgusting the politicians were and that they have not changed: be it French, British, German or US [...] It is an interesting read and an eye opener.
“My own theory is that everyone wants to write novels, but those who discover they don’t have the requisite imagination find suitable subjects and become writers of non-fiction and those who discover they can’t do that either become journalists. Expecting no plaudits, only brickbats here, I believe people do, not what they would like to do, but what they can do and still remain part of a career to which they once aspired.” —conedison
“I would, partly, disagree with you full-stop. Glancing over my shoulder and running my eye along the shelf I can see: Nicolas Bouvier, Bruce Chatwin, Kathleen Jamie, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, to name but a few. Not one of them could be described as purveying prosaic prose. All of them are serious stylists whose prose outpaces that of any number of moderately well-regarded novelists. All of them are decidedly “literary” in tone and in intent. All of them are writers of nonfiction.” —TimHannigan
She took her cheque demurely and made a brief speech, in which she spoke for all those readers who never travel without a novel on bus, tube or train, picking up each morning where they left off the night before and showing no relief at the end of a book, only anxiety to get lost in yet another novel.
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Sherlock’s swansong: the ideal Holmes expedition | Sarah Perry
I am lately returned from a pilgrimage, bearing bloodied knees and a holy relic; my destination was a place of love and sacrifice that’s lived long in my heart. No Lourdes for me, though: I went to the Reichenbach Falls.
Lifelong Holmes devotees view the current Sherlockian fad with exasperated pride. On the one hand, any Holmes is better than none. On the other, the BBC’s Sherlock left me speechless with indignation: that Conan Doyle’s (almost) unfailingly courteous, just and asexual Holmes was reduced to a drunken, rude, sentimental sociopath had me calling for the reinstatement of the blasphemy laws.
The BBC's Sherlock left me speechless with indignation
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Books without swearwords? There’s an app for that
A new e-reader allows users to replace offensive words with more palatable alternatives, with settings ranging from ‘clean’ to ‘squeaky clean’
Do you like your books as they come, clean, or squeaky clean? Because there’s now an app that will let you state your preference, remove profanities from the text of your ebook, and replace them with “clean” alternatives.
Clean Reader – “the only e-reader that gives you the power to hide swear words” – sells more than a million ebooks from its online book store. Its app allows users to search the text, and “put a non-transparent ‘highlight’” over anything potentially offensive. The blanked-out word is replaced, when it is tapped, with one judged suitably safe. So in a passage from its online demonstration – “‘Don’t tempt me, you little bastard,’ growled Vyder” – bastard becomes jerk. In a slice of a David Baldacci novel, “Pick up your damn game, Bobby”, becomes “Pick up your darn game, Bobby”.
“Pick up your damn game, Bobby”, becomes “Pick up your darn game, Bobby”
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March 13, 2015
'Mum, me and our Discworld tattoos': readers' tributes to Terry Pratchett
Hundreds of tributes from readers have poured in for the author of the Discworld series – here is a selection, from stories of lifechanging reads to memes in honour of the writer and his letters to fans
Add your own via GuardianWitness
If life is about making a positive impact in the lives of others, Terry Pratchett’s was exceptional, for all that it ended too soon. Here are some of the tributes, memories and anecdotes our readers shared to honour the writer. You can read more or add your own on this thread and on GuardianWitness.
It’s fair to say that Sarah and I might not be married were it not for Terry Pratchett’s books
From religious cult to Small Gods
The reason I’m an English teacher
When you are a teenager and life feels a bit rubbish ...
He made me pick up books for the first time and then made me realise that I wanted to write them too
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Judging a book by its title: when books don’t live up to their names
There are no wolves in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and no expectant mothers in Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow. From the misleading to the curious, Moira Remond looks at strange names in literature
As debates swirl around the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird prequel, it’s easy to forget the strangeness of those familiar titles. But misleading, mysterious and downright secretive titles are nothing new.
Sometimes, an author is overtaken by time. When John Williams’s Stoner became a cult classic in 2013, many readers thought they were picking up something like William Burroughs’s Junkie. But Williams’s protagonist, William Stoner, is completely drug-free and living out a low-key life on a university campus in the US midwest. The use of “stoner” to refer to a marijuana user seems to have developed in the 1970s; Williams published his book in 1965.
Related: Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
The King of the Badgers is one of Uncle’s best friends and neighbours, but he was away arranging a loan from a foreign banker.
Apocalypse Weird brings authors and fans a shared world of pain
Writing can be hard – not hard like mining diamonds in Zimbabwe or making cheap clothes for westerners in Bangladesh, of course, but anyone in the 21st-century knowledge economy who wants to write a novel must have some kind of masochistic streak. Word processors have taken some of the strain out of editing and publishing, but there’s no app to automate the hard slog of getting 100,000 words down on paper in something resembling a coherent narrative. And the work doesn’t stop there for SFF writers, who have to construct an entire fictional world to support their stories.
Enter the Apocalypse Weird, stage right. If any group of authors can find a way to collaborate on telling stories it’s those rebellious indie authors, authors who have already broken all the rules of publishing by stealing the ebook market out from under the industry. While writers may not be able to collaborate on individual books, they can work together to create the fictional “shared world” those books happen within, the world of Apocalypse Weird.
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March 12, 2015
Terry Pratchett: leave your tributes and memories
What is it that sums up the unique imagination of the storytelling magician who built a world on the back of a turtle? What did the Discworld author mean to you? Leave your thoughts, stories and recollections here – you can share them in the comments or send us your pictures and videos via GuardianWitness
Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, dies aged 66Terry Pratchett in quotes: 15 of the bestThe announcement of Terry Pratchett’s death on Thursday brought tributes flooding in from all over the world. “I feel like I’ve lost a wise and vaguely disreputable uncle and I am the poorer for it,” said thismighthurt. “So sad. His books brought me so much joy, and his writings were part of my journey from conservative to liberal,” shared inquisitormedina. “Thanks Terry for many many hours of pleasure. Thanks for the laughter and the insight into what it means to be human, and all those moments of wonder,” wrote frustratedartist.
Here is a place for your tributes, memories and anecdotes. Are there life stories that you associate with his work? Does one of his books have a special resonance for you? Share your stories and tributes in the thread below. Or, if you prefer to do so in the form of pictures or videos – of your books, artworks, even costumes or special moments – you can share them via GuardianWitness, by clicking on the blue “Contribute” buttons at the top and the bottom of the piece.
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Reading American cities: Los Angeles in books
Whether hymning it as the City of Angels or writing it off as La La Land, thousands of authors have pictured Los Angeles in prose. Kate Gale defends its romantic appeal and recommends the essential literary companions for a trip to this West Coast metropolis, from tales of eccentric architecture to the darkest LA noir
What are your favourite books set in or about LA? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll feature them in next week’s readers’ list
Call them siren songs ... The stories of Los Angeles make people want to come here. “Los Angeles is like the rest of the country, but more so,” in the words of journalist and author Patt Morrison. The Southern California dream is like the American dream, but better. Not simply wife, kids, yard, but palm trees, oranges in winter, beaches and more sin, drugs and fun than the rest of the country can imagine. It has glorious sunshine and apocalyptic events, fires, floods, earthquakes, riots. People move to California to reinvent themselves. That clichéd dream is perfectly reflected in Carolyn See’s Golden Days, which also follows a tradition of California phonies like Aimee Semple McPherson: it features a lunatic with followers and then nuclear apocalypse.
There are many Los Angeles in literature – and all feel vaguely familiar thanks to countless celluloid adaptations. Hollywood itself is, no doubt, the setting for much of the town’s literature. LA stories like F Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Love of the Last Tycoon place films as a major character in the city, a backdrop for everything. Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, set in the Great Depression era, describes piles of houses with a strange mixture of architecture from everywhere, as if a child God were playing with stacking toys between the freeways. One of its minor characters, Homer Simpson – which inspired the Simpsons TV character – walks out into what he thinks is a mob but turns out to be people in a film. And that is the essence of all LA stories: nothing is as it seems. The beach, the house, the hair, the intangible wealth, nothing is real.
I’ve always liked the idea that Los Angeles writers think they’re making up a new language
There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.
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