The Guardian's Blog, page 94

November 19, 2014

Never Can Say Goodbye: 'New York City is like the house from Poltergeist'

A group of writers met to discuss a new anthology about their collective love for the Big Apple … or was it something more ambivalent?

“Thank you for coming out on this cold night that makes you want to leave New York.” These were the words with which Sari Botton kicked off a reading of an anthology she edited hosted at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. With the book titled Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakeable Love for New York, one of the first truly freezing days of this season, writers gathered to share why they love the city.

Never Can Say Goodbye is the follow up to last year’s Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, another anthology inspired by Joan Didion’s classic essay. In the introduction for Never Can Say Goodbye, Botton said that editing the first collection had inspired some confusion in readers: did she hate New York? In fact, she said, she indisputably loves it, so much that when she returns for visits from her upstate home, she can’t see straight. Most of the writers who performed on Tuesday night would agree.

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Published on November 19, 2014 10:02

Which book marked your transition from child to adult?

Our readers have been discussing the key novels that helped them to progress from children’s to adult literature. Here are five examples they cited, from Animal Farm to Little Women. What are yours?

In a recent Tips, Links and Suggestions thread, reader judgeDAmNation asked a fascinating question:

For those of us who have been avid readers since childhood, what was the key book or books that helped make the transition from younger to adult fiction?

Reading Animal Farm at such a young age, I hold it responsible for a) instilling a lifelong love of all things Orwell, and b) securing the complete transfer of my love of reading from children’s/young adult books to more “grown up” literature. Along with Orwell, I would say the other key title for me was The Street Lawyer by John Grisham – my grandmother lent me a copy when I was 15, which led to me steadily working my way through more Grisham, Michael Crichton and others ...

Whenever I hear it mentioned I’m subject to an adrenaline rush and want to talk about it at length. I read it for the first time aged something like fourteen or fifteen and had exactly the same thoughts about it then as I have now which is that all politicians of all persuasions should be made to sit down and read it not less than once a year. The lessons in it are international, timeless and universal and there is scarcely a day when our newspapers do not report examples of the self serving political duplicity that is so perfectly shown to us in this gem of a book.

My “transition” novel would be The Old Man and The Sea by Hemingway. I was an average student with an English teacher who I didn’t like and who I felt didn’t like me, and then we read this. Probably the only time in my academic life where I can pinpoint a revelation in understanding to a single moment. My love of reading can be traced to here.

The Old Man and the Sea was definitely a “bridging” book for me. I probably first read it at about 11, and enjoyed it as an adventure about fishing (I loved all that stuff). I read it again when I was about 13, I think, on the brink of adult tastes. And then I know I read it a third time at 18 and regarded it as the point at which I “discovered style” ...

As far as I can remember it was a slow transition over several years, I know that by the time I was about 15 I had gone over from Robert Westall, Michael Morpurgo, and an awesome series by various authors called “Hauntings” (of which my read-again-and-again favourite was The Wooden Gun by Elisabeth Beresford of Wombles fame, but very un-Wombly this one), to a frantic fixation with Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald (a weird pairing, but there you go!)

Once I’d grown out of pony books, I launched straight into adult novels (there was no such thing as a “teenage” category then). And I read everything I could lay my hands on. [...] Two authors stand out, though. I discovered Tolkien at the age of about thirteen or fourteen, in my aunt’s bookshelves (where I’d also discovered Sergeanne Golon and Doreen Tovey – she’d had eclectic tastes too), and was completely hooked. I remember reading it at school, and one of the “Alpha girls” sneering – “You mean a fairy tale for grown ups?” When reading it became de rigeur a year or so later, I felt rather smug.

The other author was Dorothy Dunnett. I read the first of the Lymond Chronicles at the age of thirteen, and became a devotee, even though, at that stage, I didn’t understand half of it. If you’ve never tried them, do. As one of my fellow enthusiasts once said, her books are an acquired taste, but if you do acquire it, you have it for life.

The first was The Child in Time [by Ian McEwan] – we read the pivotal scene as part of a mock exam and I mentioned to my English teacher that I’d really enjoyed it and wanted to read the rest of it. The next day she brought her copy in for me and I devoured it within days. Mrs Green, in the unlikely event you’re reading this – thank you.

The real transition book for me though was The Catcher in the Rye – I read it the summer before I turned 16 and it was one of the first moments where I really felt that a book had “spoken” to me, in that teenage “nobody understands me” phase. I read it again a year later ahead of it potentially being a course book at A-level and, whilst I still appreciated it as a novel, I just didn’t connect with it in the same way. I think that was the point I knew I’d crossed over.

That was the first non series, non childish book that I read. It made me want to be Jo (the first time I ever wished to be a literary character), it made me want to write and it made me want to read more.

Stephen King was also a big influence for me. I started reading his stuff at aged 11, after transitioning from the more YA Point Horror and Christopher Pike books.

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Published on November 19, 2014 07:43

YouGov Profiles: like books? You must have a cat

… unless you like Martin Amis, in which case you’re a dog man, according to a fascinating ‘audience segmentation tool’ for marketing departments

If you’re a reader of Hilary Mantel, you’re likely to be a woman aged 60 or above, live in London and work in education, and have a disposable income of more than £1,000 a month. Your favourite food will be Vichysoisse soup, you’ll enjoy going to the theatre, and you’ll have a cat. Recognise yourself there?

Fans of Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, are women aged 25-39 from central Scotland, left-wing, work in information technology, and have less than £125 spare every month. They’ll read the Guardian, watch Big Bang Theory and Doctor Who on TV, and probably have a cat. No surprises there, perhaps.

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Published on November 19, 2014 07:18

Iain Banks’s Culture lives on

SF magazine Strange Horizons has just published some unseen interviews with the late and much-missed author. It’s great to hear his maverick wit again

If the death of Iain Banks last summer left a giant, Culture-shaped hole in your life, it is really worth sampling these hugely detailed and lengthy interviews with the late, great man. Conducted by Jude Roberts for her PhD in 2010, the interviews have just been published by the excellent speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons, as part of a funding drive that has raised more than $15,000 (£9,500) to pay for the magazine’s 15th year of publication.

“The full, strident, and often playful answers he gives here are entirely characteristic of his writing and persona more generally,” says Roberts; and it’s true, many of Banks’s answers are a joy.

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Published on November 19, 2014 05:09

November 18, 2014

Nineteen Eighty-four: bad good or good bad fiction?

You don’t need to be Will Self to find fault with Orwell’s novel. But are its huge faults also essential to its virtues?

George Orwell is “the supreme mediocrity”. His texts are “lacklustre”. He plays to “the dull and cack-handed gallery”. Nineteen Eighty-four is overrun with “obvious didacticism”. He has “little originality”.

But don’t shoot me! I’m just the messenger. Those quotes – as fans of internet flame wars will already know – come courtesy of Will Self, who slaughtered one of our most sacred cows on Radio 4’s A Point of View in August.

During the last 50 years there has been a whole series of writers – some of them are still writing – whom it is quite impossible to call ‘good’ by any strictly literary standard, but who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste.”

Perhaps it even … gains something from the clumsy long-winded manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection, and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up.”

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Published on November 18, 2014 09:19

Baddies in books: Hannibal Lecter, magnetic and unhinged

Cannibal psychopath he may be, but Lecter feeds our hungry fantasies of being singled out by a hyperintelligent outsider

• From Mrs Danvers to General Woundwort: Baddies in books

In the novel Hannibal, a now world-weary and disgraced Clarice Starling is sent by corrupt FBI officials on the fool’s errand of attempting to trace the whereabouts of literature’s most famous cannibal. As part of that process, she interviews Mrs Rosenkranz, a guest at the most infamous of Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalistic banquets, who tells her that Lecter “made a girl’s fur crackle”.

Those words are not a little disturbing, but it’s hard to deny that Lecter has a magnetism greater than that of most other villains – just look at all the fan fiction he has inspired. When I was on Mastermind, a few years ago, I took “the Hannibal Lecter novels” as my specialist subject. John Humphrys asked “is Hannibal Lecter the Huggy Bear of criminals?”

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Published on November 18, 2014 07:14

November 17, 2014

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

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

EnidColeslaw was reading Here and Now, the book that compiles the correspondence between Paul Auster and JM Coetzee over the course of three years:

Enjoyed a few days off in London to re-visit my favourite bookshops (wait, isn’t that what tourism is all about?) and bought a few books I had been meaning to read, especially Here and Now, and A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. I’m well aware that this is ludicrous, but despite French being my native language, I’ve only read Barthes in English so far, thanks (or because of?) a well-stocked bookshop in the Bloomsbury area which has more Barthes on its shelves than any of the bookshops in my neighbourhood, ahem.

The Auster and Coetzee correspondence is interesting and sometimes amusing, but not an endless string of thought-provoking discussions. There was a certain stiffness in their exchanges, probably due to the fact that they somehow knew that the letters would end up being published. Lots of baseball talk too, which I assume is... normal for Auster, being American? Maybe less so for Coetzee, although he is much more scrupulous in his analyses of matches and scores, and more generally focused in each of his letters, where Auster tends to drift from a subject to the other without much of a transition.

I always feel quite melancholy and nostalgic in November so when re-reading Tove Jansson's haunting, lyrical tale i empathise with Moominpappa's feelings of something missing.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By LucyRM

11 November 2014, 18:11

Reading Animal Farm at such a young age, I hold it responsible for a) instilling a lifelong love of all things Orwell, and b) securing the complete transfer of my love of reading from children’s/young adult books to more “grown up” literature. This has reminded me of the question I was going to post this week, which is this: for those of us who have been avid readers since childhood, what was the key book or books that helped make the transition from younger to adult fiction?

I’m reading Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. What a pleasant contrast to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch which I’ve just finished. Flanagan’s writing is spare and lyrical. Quite beautiful. I feel that I should be reading it slowly and savouring every word. Tartt throws everything in and had me yelling for an editor. Endless pages of long dialogue that I couldn’t actually hear anyone saying. Flanagan’s dialogue is brief and leaves me unsure about what I’m reading. But I feel I can relax and just wait to find out what he wants to tell me.

Whether it is the violence in Gaza, or two neighboring countries always at war with each other as is the case between India and Pakistan, or the perpetuation of violence by a state on its citizens, especially the students as in seen in Mexico and India, modern man is constantly fighting with seen / unseen and known / unknown enemy. What better time to pick up this book and try to understand what it means to be oneself, an individual with a myriad of identities forged by lineage, history and geopolitics of a region.

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By Asmita Das

10 November 2014, 9:01

Ooh, I do love this! A place I can discuss books outside of my immediate family (fiancee and 12 year old daughter). I confess I am a bit all over the place when it comes to finishing books and often read two or three books simultaneously. [You’ll find you’re not alone in this blog, then!] So I gave myself a pat on the back after finishing two this week.

The first was Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned, a delightful read full of humour (of the dark kind!) and demons. The story follows a recently deceased teen and her narrative of her experience of landing in hell. Although hell is well, hellish, I came away from this story with the notion that hell isn’t quite the polar opposite of heaven. I will of course seek out part two of this story, Doomed as soon as I can.

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Published on November 17, 2014 10:45

Readers love a good anti-hero – so why do they shun anti-heroines?

Monstrous men are more than welcome in serious fiction, but create an unlikeable female character and you’re in for trouble

When I was writing my novel Animals I knew I was creating female characters who were going against the grain. Drinking. Thinking. Wandering round cities at ungodly hours. Having philosophical crises. You know, like male characters do in what are more generally catalogued as tales of “the human condition”?

There have been eloquent points made over the last couple of years about the “likeability” of female characters – notably by Roxane Gay and Claire Messud. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, novelist Messud responded spectacularly to a question about whether she’d want to be friends with her latest narrator Nora, given that Nora’s outlook was “unbearably grim”. Messud said: “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert?” before reeling off a list of classic male anti-heroes and concluding: “We read to find life in, all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘is this a potential friend for me?’, but ‘is this character alive?’”

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Published on November 17, 2014 08:30

Moby-Dick marathon: 'It's the literary version of Shark Week'

Ignored on publication, Herman Melville’s novel now has a thriving community of enthusiasts, who gathered in New York to read it aloud

Even if you haven’t read Moby-Dick, you are most likely familiar with the generalities: the famous first line, “Call me Ishmael,” and Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest for the titular white sperm whale.

The narrative trajectory is relatively straightforward, but as essayist Michele Filgate pointed out: “The plot isn’t the only thing that matters.” There is far more than a whale of a tale contained in the 655-page novel, and it’s this that drives readers to embrace it.

Guys, I am minutes from reading one of the dirtiest spermiest sections of Moby Dick. What luck. #MDMNYC

YOU GUYS. I got to shout "Thar she blows! It's Moby Dick!" #MDMNYC

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Published on November 17, 2014 07:56

Poem of the week: The service sector by Lee Harwood

A comic portrait of a seaside town is undercut by unease about the economy that shrinks its residents to mere toys for business

A faintly comic spectre haunts the bright postcard-pastoral of this week’s poem, The service sector by Lee Harwood. The title gives us a clue, prepares us for possibilities of dodgy dealing. But, at first, manipulation is merely child’s play. Real estate? Well, there’s the doll’s house “set down by an unseen hand”, an instinctive aesthetic pleasure hinted in the matching of the little white house to the “brilliant white breakers” that contrast so picturesquely with “a peacock green sea”. The possibly sinister information, that the doll’s house is joining other “white buildings”, is delayed, then presented casually, a mere finishing touch to the decorative process. Toy-land urbanisation continues in the fifth couplet: the houses are now occupied by tiny, timid people, although the giant seems less likely to be a child at play. A shift to workaday realism ensues, with a tercet illustrating the traffic of industry (trucks) and people (cars). The dogs “obsessively” mark territory. There’s a soundtrack of busy sibilants.

“Time” at the beginning of the next stanza announces the pun on “minute”. The tiny people dress in tiny (“minute”) coats so as to enter the servitude of clock-time. The “matchbox car” cunningly echoes a famous toy brand, and the menace is heightened by the (authorial?) voice of warning: “Best not.”

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Published on November 17, 2014 02:09

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