The Guardian's Blog, page 74

Terry Pratchett in quotes: 15 of the best

As the literary world mourns the death of the Discworld creator, here are some of his most inspiring and memorable quotes. Add your favourites in the comments

Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, dies aged 66
Share your tributes and memories here

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues. —from Moving Pictures

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time. —from Hogfather

Related: Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, dies aged 66

I’d rather be a rising ape than a falling angel. —from the Guardian Book Club

It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing it. —from the foreword to The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, by David Pringle

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it. – from Monstrous Regiment

It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done. – from A Hat Full of Sky

There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.

Related: Terry Pratchett: leave your tributes and memories

The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story. – from The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.

Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to. - from Snuff

I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.

So much universe, and so little time.

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Confessions of a creative writing teacher spark internet backlash: what is your experience?

When a former creative writing tutor wrote an article criticising his students, all hell broke loose. Why did this particular piece hit such a chord with the writing community? We spoke to an ex-student from the same school – and want to hear your views

What’s your experience of creative writing programs? Share it in the form at the bottom of the piece

Writer Ryan Boudinot caused a furore last week with an essay laying into creative writing courses. He had recently quit teaching on an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program in the US, and felt that gave him the freedom to spell out a few home truths. His essay for The Stranger magazine provoked internet outrage, including Twitter attacks and defences, blog posts against the piece and open letters asking the magazine to pull it.

“The vast majority of my students were hardworking, thoughtful people devoted to improving their craft despite having nothing interesting to express and no interesting way to express it,” he wrote. Though his piece was blunt and cruel at times, it wasn’t exactly news: creative writing programmes have been analysed – and criticised – to exhaustion. Indeed, they recently became the butt of Lena Dunham’s comedy, when she depicted the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop in a less-than-flattering light in her TV show Girls.

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Was 1925 really the best year for literature?

The BBC Culture website has chosen 1925 as “the greatest year for books ever”. Hemingway’s debut, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and The Great Gatsby certainly made for a glorious twelve months. But do you agree? And what other literary years could give 1925 a run for its money?

It was a very good year. Ernest Hemingway took his first literary steps with the collection of short stories In Our Time; Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway; and F Scott Fitzgerald brought out The Great Gatsby. All that happened in 1925, as did the publication of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.

BBC Culture, the BBC’s international arts website, has designated 1925 as the “greatest year” in the history of literature, in a piece by author and journalist Jane Ciabattari. But how to determine something like this? This was how she did it:

First, by searching for a cluster of landmark books: debut books or major masterpieces published that year. Next, by evaluating their lasting impact: do these books continue to enthral readers and explore our human dilemmas and joys in memorable ways? And then by asking: did the books published in this year alter the course of literature? Did they influence literary form or content, or introduce key stylistic innovations?

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George RR Martin is right - Station Eleven was one of the best books of 2014

Backing it for the Hugo awards, Game of Thrones author praises Emily St John Mandel’s ‘wonderfully elegiac’ dystopia. I entirely agree

It’s been quite a week for Emily St John Mandel and her thoughtful, unforgettable dystopian novel Station Eleven. She’s been longlisted for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, alongside some of the best authors writing today. She’s been shortlisted for the prestigious Pen/Faulkner award , which called her book a “devastating portrait of the future”.

And now she’s had a public show of support from no less a figure than George RR Martin, who threw his weight behind Station Eleven as his pick for the Hugo best novel award. The Hugos are America’s top science fiction prize; nominees and winners are voted for by members of the World Science Fiction Society, so support from Martin is a big deal.

Related: Literary dystopias with Emily St John Mandel and Clemens J Setz – podcast

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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

Read more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

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

TimHannigan has been enjoying the Costa Book of the Year-winning H is for Hawk:

It deserves all the prizes and acclaim it’s been getting. I’d put off reading it because I’d got a bit grumpy about how bandwagonish “nature writing” had become, but it’s something quite different – and some very, very fine writing.

A few chapters still to go, so I’ll say more anon, but here’s a wee taster of her writing, from the moment when she picks up her hawk in a car park at a ferry port. There were two birds, and she was meant to have the second one:

So we opened the other box, which was meant to hold the larger, older bird. And dear God, it did. Everything about this second hawk was different. She came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack. She was smokier and darker and much, much bigger, and instead of twittering, she wailed; great, awful gouts of sound like a thing in pain.

For some reason, this is turning out to be a year when I read more short story collections. Not something planned, but, very enjoyable. This week, I am loving Saadat Hasan Manto’s Bombay Stories. This is the translation by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad. Most of the stories are quickly-told and some are definitely of their time. But, in all of them, what shines through is Manto’s love for the Bombay that he eventually had to leave behind. It is a Bombay that only exists in fleeting glimpses in the Mumbai of today ... You have to look hard to find it even if you’re from the place. But, when you read stories like these, you know how and where to start looking. And, that’s something, isn’t it?

A big fan of Nick Hornby and I've been looking forward to reading this one.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By TaymazValley

2 March 2015, 16:14

When most of us go out to a movie or play, whether we like what we’re seeing or not, we stay until the end. Both endeavours are experienced in public forums. But reading a book is a private enterprise. If disenchanted, we’re free to close that book and walk away at any time. My question is, in the privacy of your abode, how bad does a book have to be before you say: Enough? Or do you treat the reading of a book similarly to John Humphries asking a question ... I’ve started so I’ll finish? :-)

Are there are any books that people have enjoyed reading but still not finished for whatever reason? I remember enjoying On The Road at the age of about 15/16 (presumably the best time to read it), but for some reason I put it to one side and never came back to it. Likewise I never completed Wild Swans by Jung Chang, although the reason then was because my mother lent the copy I was reading to someone she worked with, who then flew back to China with it; she bought me a replacement copy, but by the time I got it I no longer felt the urge to pick it up ...

The teenage nobel peace prize winner's book is essential reading for both women & girls everywhere, AND anyone who wants to understand the complexities of the conflict in Pakistan.

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By EveMaria

7 March 2015, 23:41

I finished The Sound and the Fury and it was quite excellent. Almost, almost, catharsis. There was a hint of it when Jason was talking to the police and was powerless after being built up as evil. Not actual catharsis, really, because that wouldn’t suit the fiction – but just the hint that sometimes, life is not what the undeserving want it to be. A wonderful book.

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Books about San Francisco: readers' picks

From yuppies to Harvey Milk via Jack London, here is your essential reading list for San Francisco travels – real or imaginary. These are some of our readers’ favourite books about the west coast cradle of bohemia, tech and groundbreaking literature

Reading American cities: books about San Francisco

Some things can only happen in San Francisco. Few cities combine the magnetism of “start-up” entrepreneurship with being the perfect place for outsiders and seekers – and the literature set in the city reflects the creativity, convulsions and freedom that have shaped it. Whether you’re looking for a reading list to prepare, or accompany, a visit to San Francisco, or you’re simply in the mood to be driven to it through literature, look no further. Last week, San Francisco writer Anisse Gross took us through the fascinating literary history of the city where people emigrated to pursue not the American dream, but the dream of the west, “the limits of self‐expression and identity”. Do check her blog, with essential recommendations ranging from the Beats to Tales of the City – and here is what Guardian readers had to add. If your favourite is missing, please let us know in the comments.

John notes the late September showers

Have tinged the blond hills round the bay

I have never considered myself a candidate. I have always considered myself part of a movement, part of a candidacy. I considered the movement the candidate.

Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us’es, the us’es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone.

Okay fella, I’ve gone all day and haven’t thought of you once … then it just comes over me like a chill … remember the little things, like your voice so tough but pudding underneath and the way the tip of your tongue sticks out when you concentrate on things like tying a shoe or jacking a shot …

I seen that wanting to love, struggling for it, is more real than just loving. It’s deeper, stronger, more honest. The other’s too easy and cheap. For cheap, easy people … Our kind has to suffer.

Mostly focused on Berkeley and Oakland, the East Bay gets less attention. Jack London and Gertrude Stein are natives, as well as Credence Clearwater Revival (although they’re actually from El Cerrito – a suburb of Berkeley). Stein referred to Oakland: “There is no there there.” People have been ignoring it ever since. It’s now attracting newcomers, as hipsters are priced out of San Francisco by Googlebus millionaires – a west coast Brooklyn perhaps.

Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life – feeding on to it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream – struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.

This strength John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength. It is real strength … But it is manufactured out of the sources of strength, and it must ultimately be paid for, and with interest.

Sunglasses make the world quieter and safer, as if you are viewing things behind smoked windows fronting your skull-house: you are inside and the world is outside, and the world cannot see into you; mirror sunglasses double the armor.

For we all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can we shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously.

They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done. —All Tomorrow’s Parties

You could buy a burrito there, a lottery ticket, batteries, tests for various diseases. You could do voice-mail, e-mail, send faxes. It had occurred to Laney that this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn’t even imagine wanting. —Idoru

I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.

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Fay Weldon has misread 'non-literary'ebook readers

The novelist has advised writers to publish easier, event-driven versions of their books for impatient digital audiences. Has she lost the plot?

I learned something this morning. I have learned that because I use an e-reader, I prefer a certain type of book: not too complicated or contemplative, and driven by plot. That’s according to Fay Weldon, at least, who suggested to the Bath Literature festival this week that “writers should ‘abandon literary dignity’ and write page-turning versions of their thoughtful masterpieces for the ebook audience,” the Independent reports.

“Writers have to write now for a world where readers are busy, on the move and have little time for contemplation and reflection. The writer has to focus on writing better, cutting to the chase and doing more of the readers’ contemplative work for them,” Weldon added.

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Readers' favourite books by women

From Joan Didion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, our readers have been sharing their favourite books by female authors. Ahead of International Women’s Day, here’s our celebration of life-changing, beautiful and inspiring stories by women

As International Women’s Day approaches, we’re focusing on women writers. Help us to celebrate women’s literary achievements by adding your favourite books written by women in the comments below – as well as the story of how it earned a place on your shelves.

The White Album by Joan Didion. Made her one of my favourite living writers and essay collections one of my favourite literary genres. —DJMC

A Wrinkle In Time (series) by Madeleine L’Engle – I loved these books when I was younger, they were well-developed, unique, quasi-science based concepts that I found fascinating. —Jennifer Myers

I adore everything by Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood, among others, but for personal impact, I have to go with The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin. It forever shaped what I think and feel about love, faith and justice. —davidloy

The Children of Violence series by Doris Lessing. Hard to summarise how this opened my eyes to a different world. One of the very few fiction books that have ever left me with something other than “what was that about?” —JohnChanin

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson – All of her early books have affected me a lot and I’d probably rate Sexing the Cherry as my favourite, but I think it was the sheer power of Written on the Body which made the greatest impression on me. As a young twentysomething I was drawn to its all-consuming intensity, its fevered portrayal of love, loss and rage, as well as the androgenity of the narrator which gave it a timeless universality. —nilpferd

@GuardianBooks obviously "mémoires du jeune fille rangée", first autobiographical novel by Simone de Beauvoir.

@GuardianBooks Herta Müller, staggeringly good writer. The Appointment is probably my favourite of hers

@GuardianBooks #IWD2015 : The Shipping News by Annie Proulx pic.twitter.com/JaDlHGGfWY

Patricia Highsmith – I read the Ripliad – the name given to the five novels where the character Tom Ripley appears – last year (finishing the final book earlier this year) and experienced a joy and commitment to the story that I haven’t experienced since my teenage years reading John Grisham and Michael Crichton in my parents’ back garden.

Have to go with Daphne Du Maurier as well – the short stories are brilliant, and there are images from Jamaica Inn that still stick in my mind’s eye like a bad dream... —judgeDAmNation

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book Americanah has moved me like no other in recent memory. I would describe it as transformational because it provided an insight into the reality of what it means to be a young, ambitious, highly intelligent, sometimes single black woman in contemporary America. It’s an honest book about race, identity and the constant longing and nostalgia one feels for this metaphorical place called home. I was also moved by the story because it touchingly describes the loving relationship between the two central characters, showcasing that neither space nor time can erase love. We usually go back to the same desires and preferences we had as 15-year-olds, and Americanah captures this sentiment. Moreover, it is a transformational book because it portrays Nigeria as a place that is mythical, marvellous, chaotic and slightly dangerous, yet also wildly fascinating, with a magnetic power to attract its brightest emigrés back to its shores. Reading this has made me realise that some of the most powerful narratives in contemporary fiction have been written by young, highly educated female African writers, who are tired of the old clichés frequently bandied around about Africa. Ngozi Adichie is a new, powerful and incredibly talented voice; her novel Americanah is the expression of a different African tale, of a continent and its people that have many more magnetic stories to tell, as well as critiques to raise about the so-called enlightened West. —beograd

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Simply delightful, like a walk in the woods while meditating.
The Golden notebook by Doris Lessing. It made me realise how far we still had to go when I read it as a young woman in the early 80s.
Anything by Carson McCullers and Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Annie Proulx.
Colette, whose tender portraits of cats and lovers are magical.
...and May Sarton, whose diaries are proof that even a well-observed flower is a powerful reason for remaining alive. —artcrit

The Mill on the Floss and Romola by George Eliot. The former is as true as a well-cast bell about a girl’s life in the provincial England of the author’s time. The latter is in need of a cold-eyed editor to trim part-digested historical research and a lurching, over-burdened plot – but the profound and poised account of a woman’s love misplaced and a man’s selfish exploitation thereof is breathtaking.

Eliot wrote that writing Romola had aged her greatly, but she did us a fine service by it. —zuftawov943

I picked up a novel by Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975, not the actress) and went on to read all her 12 novels. All but the last two are engaging, in a quiet unsensational way. Perhaps the best is A Game of Hide and Seek. Taylor was reprinted by the admirable Virago in the 1980s and 1990s, but has rather lapsed back into oblivion. Men should read her. [...] There was no “side” to Taylor, no fakery, her tales are plausible and engaging. She could weave a novel out of nothing, as Haydn could compose a symphonic movement from a couple of bars of music. She lived a perfectly uneventful life, as the huge majority of us do, despite our desperate rage to become “celebs”. Chapeau, Mrs Taylor! Your books are not “important” — and bugger importance. As Kingsley Amis put it: “Importance isn’t important. Good writing is.” Amen to that. —Bloreheath

@GuardianBooks @lorettamilan "A Handmaid's Tale," @MargaretAtwood for its prescience and her fearlessness in engaging tropes and future

@GuardianBooks All of Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Caro Ramsay and Tana French. Also Patricia Highsmith, Anna Kavan, Djuna Barnes #IWD2015

@GuardianBooks Middlemarch, Persuasion, Wives + Daughters, Wuthering Heights, Adrian Mole, The Night Watch, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.

@GuardianBooks Austen; Lorrie Moore; Alison Monroe; Margaret Laurence; Antonya Nelson; Rose Tremain; George Eliot; Lore Segal.. Many more

@GuardianBooks To Kill A Mockingbird of course! #InternationalWomensDay

@GuardianBooks @lorettamilan Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - brilliant book and way ahead of its time!

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. A superb work of literary Modernism and as tough and fascinating a work on addiction as anything by Burroughs or Buckowski. —DJMC

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Poster poems: light

Poets have found a wide spectrum of meanings to this essential component of the world. Can you illuminate the subject with your own verse?

The world of modern physics is full of strange and glorious paradoxes. One of the most startling, because it deals with something we all experience, is the notion that light behaves as both wave and particle. Until recently it was believed that you could observe one or the other of these conditions, but not both simultaneously. However, now scientists have come up with a way of photographing both at once. As might be expected, this dual nature of light yields an image of eerie beauty.

For poets, too, light has long been possessed of contrasting significances. In Milton’s Sonnet 19 (traditionally known as On His Blindness, although the poet gave it no title), light stands for the poet’s life and, possibly, his sight, which he worries about having wasted in the eyes of his God. By way of contrast, Dante Gabriel Rossetti uses the image of sudden light as a way of expressing the deja vu-like realisation that an experience is being relived, that “we’ve been here before”. Rossetti’s light of love that renews our lives is somewhat more carnal than Milton’s wish to please the divine.

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Are these the best book-to-film adaptations?

A survey of 3,000 fans found Harry Potter and James Bond the UK’s favourite big-screen books. Help us come up with a less mainstream list

Debates about film versions of books are nearly as old as cinema itself. Movies can be a delightful reminder of great literature – but they can also ruin it, fixing beloved characters in gruesome shapes. Either way, the talk about them is unlikely to stop – and a new survey, coinciding with World Book Day in the UK, has canvassed 3,000 UK fans of all ages for their favourites.

It turns out that if you crunch the preferences of 1,000 kids and 2,000 adults, what comes out is a very mainstream list of franchises, mixing Bridget Jones and the Harry Potter saga with classics such as The Shawshank Redemption and questionable blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code.

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