The Guardian's Blog, page 76

Wimpy Kid and the odd charms of children’s misfit lit

Tales of the misadventures of awkward boys, led by Jeff Kinney’s hapless hero, have an admirable power to win over reluctant readers

When it comes to heroes in children’s literature, I’ve always had a sneaking weakness for fantasy’s chosen ones. I’m gripped by boys or girls with latent magic, outstanding talent, or simply qualities of innate persistence and courage that set them above the rest – those who seem entirely ordinary, but are concealing great prowess unknown to everyone, including themselves. Harry Potter, in short, is right up my alley.

The “middle-school misfit” is the antithesis of my favourite fantasy protagonists; an unlikely real-world sub-hero, concealing no great prowess whatsoever. Often American, invariably male, he tends to the comically-shaped and socially inept. He isn’t an out-and-out geek or an untouchable, but he’s undoubtedly outside the charmed circle of the cool kids, bumbling haplessly along in the midstream. What is it about this funny little oddity that compels readers – especially boys – to devour him in their droves?

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Weird words: Diagram's oddest book titles of the year 2015 – in pictures

From an illustrated experiment in talking with strangers to a look at the private parts of birds and bees, some of the nominees for the wackiest title of the year

Divorcing a Real Witch makes Diagram’s ‘oddest book title of the year’ shortlist – the full list of nominees Continue reading...

Reading American cities: books about San Francisco

Younger and smaller than most great American cities, San Francisco has a rich cultural heritage. Anisse Gross picks out the literary landmarks of this west coastal city, from its first newspaper chroniclers to the Beats and beyond

What are your favourite books set in or about San Francisco? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll feature them in next week’s readers’ list

I started sketching out this post at the counter of a bar overlooking the San Francisco Bay, where ships flocked and docked during the Gold Rush of 1849, transforming the city from a peaceful place of fewer than a thousand people into a melee of wild‐eyed prospectors and raucous opportunism.

It’s true that people have often come to this place in a search of wealth, but many have also come to escape or reinvent themselves. No matter the purpose, it seems everyone comes to San Francisco on the heels of a whisper, with a sense of possibility. With a surface area of only about 49 square miles, it is is both younger and smaller than most American cities, yet it holds claims to some of America’s most important literature.

Many of the best observations about this city are from authors who were passing through, like Oscar Wilde

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Why all writers are vain

I’ve met, interviewed and shared stages with many authors over the years, and seen all too many signs of pride and oversensitivity to criticism. There is an inherent egotism in believing your voice matters – but that’s no reason not to put pen to paper

Many years ago, when I had just started writing books about philosophy, I got talking to two of my newly acquired peers. I asked one what he was currently working on, which as conversational gambits go is about as original as asking a novelist where she gets her ideas from. Having heard his answer, I perhaps tactlessly noted that quite a lot of books had recently appeared on this subject. “Yes,” he said, “but I really do think mine will be the best.”

“Really?” I asked, perhaps too incredulously.

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Why writing doesn't have to be a lonely struggle

Tough love life? Write a nicer one. Feeling old? Write yourself young… Authors Helen Grant and Lydia Syson explain why the writer’s life need not be miserable

Being an author is the most desirable job in Britain, according to a YouGov poll. Not so, responded Tim Lott. Writers are driven by demons, he wrote, the work is unimaginably hard – as complex as brain surgery, apparently – not to mention solitary, and fraught with rejection and professional envy. The meagre consolation is the “small legacy” we may leave behind us when we go. It’s a dismal prospect - enough to have us weeping over our keyboards, while taking nips from a bottle of absinthe.

Related: You think writing’s a dream job? It’s more like a horror film

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”

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Teen novelists: the perils and positives of publishing early

Helena Coggan is only 15, and yet her debut novel has all the assurance of a writer in mid-stride. If young writers can overcome the stare of the blank page – and take care with characterisation – they can stand as an inspiration to all

Helena Coggan’s debut, The Catalyst, is an accomplished first novel: a fantasy-dystopia featuring strong characterisation and sophisticated world-building. The plot might be somewhat event-saturated, especially towards the end, but to me, the book has the assurance of a writer in mid-stride, rather than the occasional fumbles and missteps of a first attempt. This would be unusual in most debut novels; in a 15-year-old’s, it’s nearly unparalleled.

This is not to say that teenagers can’t or shouldn’t write. Young writers can be both prolific and self-critical – and story-sharing sites such as Wattpad and Movellas make it easy to invite outside scrutiny. Many teenagers start out wearing fan-fiction water-wings, before plunging into the creation of characters and settings from scratch. But few of even the most popular teen authors are ready to make the leap into the exposed format of the traditionally published book.

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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.

R042 has started reading The Sound and the Fury, his second Faulkner novel:

It’s every bit as good as As I Lay Dying. Faulkner can write, almost effortlessly, the nastiness of unpleasant people. His characters can be cruel to the extreme yet it is written believably, because it is written from the perspective of people who are being put down – children, the mentally ill, or in As I Lay Dying a pregnant woman in an age where that was not easy.

In Hansen’s Children, the young Montenegrin author Ognjen Spahic takes the fact that the last leper colony in Europe is located in south-western Romania where ageing lepers are living out their last years, and re-imagines a leprosarium with almost medieval qualities set against the backdrop of the final year of the reign of Ceausescu. (Hansen in the title is the scientist who discovered the bacillus responsible for leprosy.) Brutal, fantastical but with a satirical black humour the setting creates a vivid allegory for both the Romanian situation and the Balkan conflict that will soon follow. Bizarre but oddly moving.

At the beginning of 2015 I decided to face the reading of the biggest book I’ve got in my shelves. It’s so long that I’m still in progress after a month. This is actually a volume which joins the nine books on Sherlock Holmes. “Todo Sherlock Holmes” (“Whole S.H”) is the most remarkable Spanish version of the short stories and novels about the British detective. Absolutely entertaining and advisable.

All in all I’d rather be sticking pins in my eyes. I was so bored by page 46 that I did what I never do which was to read the last couple of pages. I was delighted to find that it turns out exactly as I expected and bolstered by smug self-righteousness I can now manage twenty pages a day and at some point it will all be over. I know my suffering is nothing compared to that of @Oranje14’s with The Savage Detectives but I really think reading any book you dislike intensely is a circle of hell all of its own.

Oh god... Can you imagine? The question is, would it be worse to be trapped on the proverbial desert island with a mountain of books [you really dislike], or with no books?

@GuardianBooks This week I'm reading #Kant, #Zola and #Schumpeter. pic.twitter.com/XMVnwpShv3

@guardian @GuardianBooks this week's read about the people who transport everything we use on a daily basis #maersk pic.twitter.com/Ui7FlfPbix

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

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Why the PEN competition for writers in prison is hard to resist as a judge

Judging competitions may be soul-consuming work, but this prize for UK prisoners has produced real talent

It’s the email that makes a writer’s heart sink, the one asking if you’re willing to judge a writing competition. Who has the time for such an arduous, soul-consuming, entirely unpaid job? But this request came from English PEN, and I love and admire PEN and the amazing work it does with dispossessed writers around the word. The kicker was that this was a writing competition open to all prisoners in the UK. Who can resist that as a creative writing cohort?

So I set some subjects: “A letter to myself”; “Anything might happen”. And the fat envelope arrived just before Christmas. (Wonderful news! This year had seen a huge increase in the number of entries. Up to 500!). Some of them were handwritten in teensy tiny handwriting (“please excuse the small paper, I don’t have access to more”). Much of the spelling was bad and some of the meanings were difficult to decipher. It’s worth saying that I’m not particularly interested in “good writing”. You can keep your pacey plot and poetic sentiments, your beautiful metaphor and elegant turn of phrase. But give me a voice that stops me in my tracks, or someone who makes me laugh with the sheer audacity of their thought processes, and I’ll smile for a month. By those criteria, it was an amazing competition.

I found the chimps that typed out the complete works of Shakespeare,

it was infinitely strange.

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Should biographers be on first-name terms with their subjects?

Robert Crawford’s use of ‘Tom’ in his new biography of TS Eliot has raised eyebrows – but he is not the first author to get so familiar. Here are 10 distinguished precedents

Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot has raised reviewers’ eyebrows by calling TS Eliot “Tom” throughout, a policy Crawford defends as reflecting a desire to portray a human being, rather than relate “the history of a monument”, and to see through the adult poet’s stiff public persona to the boy from St Louis ever present behind it.

Many object to this increasing tendency towards chumminess in literary biographies, and employing first names is a long way from becoming the orthodoxy (recent lives of the US giants Bellow, Cheever, Miller, Roth, Updike and Tennessee Williams all use their surnames, for example). But those in the given name camp can point to some distinguished precedents ...

Related: Martin Stannard on Muriel Spark, a girl of slender means

Which books would make today's list of 100 greatest children's novels?

Top authors and former poets laureate have been nominating their favourite children’s books – what would you add to a modern rollcall of classics ?

Two events this week have set me thinking about what makes a great children’s book and what a canonical list might look like in the early years of the 21st century. On Monday, as part of a widely appreciated feature on the rereading of children’s books, SF Said asked seven writers for the ones they liked to reread. The results were as follows:

Philip Pullman:
The Magic Pudding. Anything by Arthur Ransome. Tove Jansson’s Moomins.

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