The Guardian's Blog, page 83
January 19, 2015
Poem of the week: Access Visit by Rory Waterman
An awkward outing with a separated father is recalled – and lived again – in this delicate sonnet, finds Carol Rumens
Access Visit
Your afternoon pint; my Britvic pineapple juice;
a bag of prawn cocktail gaping in the middle.
The lounge at the Wig & Mitre was Daddy’s choice.
And then, at six, my taxi home; a cuddle
before I left you waving at the corner,
bound for my mother, our monthly weekend over.
And she would always seem a little warmer
Than when I’d left, and I’d be slightly colder.
How could I know what an alcoholic was?
The Wig & Mitre’s now Widow Cullen’s Well.
The snugs have been pulled out, the walls made bare;
but the place still has the same sweet, musty smell,
And I’m going in for a drink again because
I know I’ll find a part of us in there.
January 16, 2015
Bestselling account of heavenly journey crashes to earth
Publisher withdraws six-year-old’s account of his voyage to heaven after author admits he made it up
Whichever way you read it, this is a little shocking: the publishers of a bestselling account of a six-year-old’s journey to heaven – there and back – have decided to pull the book, the Washington Post reports. Written by Alex Malarkey (apt surname) with his father Kevin, The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven has won many readers with its account of his experience of “miracles, angels and life beyond this world” following an awful car crash that put him in a coma for two months and left him paralysed.
But five years later Alex has stunned readers with the revelation that – get this – he was lying. “I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention,” he announced on the excellently-named Pulpit and Pen blog. His mother Beth – now divorced from his father – has been saying much the same thing for more than a year without attracting much attention.
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Creation writing: is sci-fi a 21st-century religion?
Ever since mankind began to count, the uncountable stars have been filling us with awe. But the splendour revealed by a cloudless night reveals only a fraction of the universe’s truly awe-inspiring scale. The Hubble space telescope reveals a tiny smudge in the sky such as Andromeda to be a galaxy vaster than our own, teeming with a trillion stars, one of a hundred million other galaxies spread across the heavens.
Science today shows us a very different universe than the clockwork model imagined by Isaac Newton in his description of gravity. Jules Verne could imagine shooting a rocket from the Earth to the moon in 1865, but could not have imagined the vastness even of our solar system’s Kuiper belt. It was only when Edwin Hubble identified the first star beyond the Milky Way, and only when the telescope that bore his name photographed 3,000 galaxies in a single patch of “empty” space, that the human eye could glimpse the near infinite depths of space.
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The six hottest African romance novels for 2015
Brittle Paper picks six stories from a new romance publisher that it believes is set to get the continent’s hearts racing this year
Step aside Mills and Boon there’s a new romance publisher in town. Ankara Press who are “bringing African romance fiction into the bedrooms, offices and hearts of women the world over”.
May I interest you in a beautiful story by Ola Awonubi + published by @ankarapress? 'Love's Persuasion' -You may cry: http://t.co/O1mrCbyIuF
Really like the branding and covers for @ankarapress titles. Great to see romantic fiction about African women.
4* for sweet romance story FINDING LOVE AGAIN by @ChiomaIwunze http://t.co/U2YzG1xxQy published by @ankarapress
Cant sleep. In bed reading Elevator Kiss. What do I think of it? Marvelous! *in bridget jones' voice.* @jeremyweate pic.twitter.com/XKz2ReQAqT
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January 15, 2015
Mark Zuckerberg’s book club opens with a disappointing first chapter
What could possibly go wrong with a book club boasting 250,000 members? First they have to show up
The first meeting of Mark Zuckerberg’s much-trumpeted online book club had quite a wind behind it. The Facebook founder’s realisation that books could be “very intellectually fulfilling … in a deeper way than most media today”, caused a wave of excitement as he announced plans to read a book a fortnight, encouraging us all to read along with his selections.
His invitation to his 31 million followers on Facebook duly prompted huge demand for his first choice, Moisés Naím’s The End of Power, seeing it zoom up Amazon’s charts and sell out double quick. The New York Post hurrahed: “Move Over Oprah”, and it even made an impression in these more cautious quarters. Wired magazine was a little more circumspect, suggesting he might have a way to go before commanding the full “Oprah effect” and automatically turning any book he recommends into a massive bestseller. “Zuckerberg still has a long way to go, but with more than 31 million followers at his fingertips, the young CEO has a decent shot at filling her shoes.”
Among the 137 ‘questions’ that followed: several requests for a pirated PDF of the book, a conspiracy theory involving Saudi social media and the price of oil and a photo of a Maltese wearing a frilly dress, along with many more on-topic, but still fairly stupid, questions.
Children’s reading shows simultaneous rise and decline. How can that add up?
Are children reading less – or more? I’m confused. If less, then what happened to the 854,262 copies of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars that were snapped up last year in the UK, according to Nielsen BookScan, or the 481,662 copies of David Walliams’s Awful Auntie? If more, then what’s with all the doom-mongering?
A mischievous friend of mine once hatched a theory about Jeffrey Archer’s sales figures which could only be proved by the discovery in years to come of millions of copies of Cain and Abel mouldering away in remote warehouses. Clearly, for Messrs Green and Walliams, one would have to come up with a different scenario – cobwebbed towers of virgin ‘Aunties glaring balefully from the back of toy cupboards across the land, perhaps?
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January 13, 2015
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled: unanswered questions
With a dreamlike lack of obvious logic, this is not an easy read, but its enigmas are absorbingly difficult – and funny, writes Sam Jordison
• Join a Guardian Live interview with Ishiguro on March 8
The Unconsoled is a difficult, perplexing and uniquely challenging book. I’m struggling. Not because I don’t admire or enjoy it; perhaps by the end I may even agree with those who think it’s a masterpiece. There are scenes relating to the narrator Ryder’s small family (if indeed they are his family) that I’ve found almost unbearably poignant. There are also moments of exquisite comedy. To give an early example, I adored the deadpan way in which Ryder complains about a Miss Stratmann failing to give him a copy of his mysterious schedule (“the fault was hers”) and then, just a few lines later, without passing comment, starts talking of his recent plane journey in which he was “making careful study” of that same schedule.
Impressive as these moments are, this book is also so demanding that I haven’t made much headway. I can almost agree with the Reading group contributor who declared “this was a chore” – so long as I can also slip in the goody-two-shoes proviso that some chores are rather enjoyable.
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Baddies in books: Sylvia Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End
A very stylish sadist, her sustained campaign to ruin her husband is inventively malign but all too believable
Has there ever been a more toxic marriage than the one at the centre of Ford Madox Ford’s four-volume Parade’s End? The disastrous relationship between Christopher and Sylvia Tietjens is hard to take for the reader, let alone the two principals themselves. Unfortunately, Christopher – the most brilliant man in England and the last true gentleman, if you believe Ford – holds the calamitous view that: “No one but a blackguard would ever submit a woman to the ordeal of divorce.”
Sylvia is Roman Catholic, and though hardly holding to the tenets of her own religion (or any other), she will not contemplate divorce herself. (This changes late on in the books, with a complex legal move, but even her own lawyer “knew that Sylvia’s aim was not divorce but the casting of all possible obloquy on Christopher.”)
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January 12, 2015
A brief survey of the short story: Robert Aickman
The lending history of my ex-library copy of The Attempted Rescue, one of two volumes of autobiography produced by the British horror writer Robert Aickman, tells a story of declining interest spanning 60 years. The book was checked out 13 times between 1966 and 1970, but just once in 1971, and once again in ‘72. After that it was ignored until 1981, the year of its author’s death, then ignored again for a further 22 years. As in Aickman’s own work, the dates tell their story by implication. Ultimately, it is up to us to discern the meaning that lies in the blank spaces between each blurred stamp.
After his death (from cancer, which he elected to treat homoeopathically), Aickman’s books were largely neglected. Like one of the abandoned houses or secluded dells of his fiction, they became places rarely visited, lying far from the thoroughfares of mainstream popularity. In recent years more attention has been paid to him, and much of his work has been reprinted, but aficionados must have found it hard to resist the selfish wish that he stay mostly forgotten: so many of his stories hinge on characters straying into, or being unwittingly drawn towards, mysterious spaces beyond everyday reality, that obscurity has suited him very well.
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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 blogsWelcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Lina Sagaral Reyes is re-reading Joan Didion’s Democracy:
I exhumed Didion’s Democracy, today and began re-reading it from its last page, where, Didion writes on the third paragraph: “ A year ago when I was in London the Guardian ran a piece about Southeast Asian refugees, and Inez was quoted...” Published in 1984, I bought this hardbound copy in 1998 for P75 (barely GBP1) from a bookshop called Bookshop.
Lila’s a novel immersed in Christian theology. I’ve always believed that if someone’s religion makes them a better, more decent human being, then their faith is of great value, but if it doesn’t, then it’s worthless. Does Marilynne Robinson’s Christianity make her a better person? I don’t know. What I do know is that she’s written a beautiful novel with a particular gift for paring her words down to their emotional essence.
Lila ostensibly takes place in 1940s Iowa, but I so often felt that Robinson’s characters were inhabiting an 1880s world. There was almost nothing 20th century about their lives. The only thing that actually bothered me, though, was the book’s sequential nature. I found Robinson’s use of intermittent flashbacks diminished the force of her narrative. Once Lila finds sanctuary, looking back at her harsh past no longer retains the same dread, the same power ... How could it? No matter. Marilynne Robinson is a magnificent stylist whose sentences often carry the force of blows to your heart.
In the days before 25th December I found myself craving a chunky piece of fiction that would have me turning pages, but wouldn’t make me feel like I’d binged on junk food. I’m getting towards the bottom of the John le Carré barrel, but that was where I immediately thought to turn. Happily and fortuitously, however, my mum pressed a book on me that had been pressed on her by a friend, and it did the job perfectly …
I had never heard of Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, despite the fact it was made into a movie. But it was really good – a kind of mash-up of the best in American fiction, from courtroom drama and police procedural to frontier epic, and with a peculiar hint of long-form narrative journalism a la In Cold Blood. And then, within all that, some intense journeys into human emotion. Oh, and did I mention the very fine prose? A great Christmas read.
It has plot, character, landscape, religion, dystopia and funny little aliens. But what I loved most of all was the sheer storytelling skill. It’s hard to explain the sense I had that Faber was revealing his tale word by word and ensuring that I was being given each word at precisely the right moment. It’s a wonderful book.
@GuardianBooks These! Well, maybe not ALL these... pic.twitter.com/rEmqntBkJV
The narrative suffers from severe structural flaws which, to my mind, prevent it from becoming the masterpiece hailed by the Booker judges. The POW scenes of Australian soldiers slaving on the Burma Railway are stark, harrowing and brilliantly evoked. If Flanagan had made the soldiers’ experiences on “the Line” the sole, or major, focus of his narrative, it would have been a much better novel. Instead, we are treated to cliché-ridden middle/old-age male angst, an insipid romance subplot (it is no surprise that one scene was up for the Bad Sex in Fiction award), melodramatic set pieces (some of which hinge on unlikely coincidences) and a prose style in love with its own grandiloquence. To top it off, plot threads are tied up much too quickly and neatly at the end, by which time I hardly bothered with the book or its characters anyway. So you can probably guess which book turned out to be my biggest disappointment in reading of 2014.
Not so long ago I delighted in writing regularly to family and friends. You remember letters, pen applied to paper or those art cards many of us stationery obsessives accumulate. They were overtaken by chatty, informative emails, often to different recipients, making full use of cut and paste, excising baffling references to Auntie Gertie or Uncle Bill that would reveal that the communications weren’t quite so personal as they first appeared.
Now. Now. Pen, paper, cards, all cast aside, information for family and friends of many years fails to make it to the the keypad. I hover over this site, trawling for ever more books to add to the TBR. More, more, give me more. Is there a cure? I fear not.
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