The Guardian's Blog, page 95
November 14, 2014
Love letters to libraries: share your tribute to your favourite
From places to go for kindly advice to havens of hush, libraries play a special role in cultural life. With councils up and down the country sharpening the axe, Book Week Scotland has launched a campaign to get readers to write love letters to their favourite temple of reading. Wherever you are in the world, share your memories with us
Only this week, the city of Liverpool cancelled the closure 11 of its 18 libraries following protests and a love letter by 500 writers, actors, artists, musicians, illustrators and educators. Its no secret that libraries are in danger not just in the UK, where hundreds face closure, but all over the world, as the digitalisation of reading and media pushes them down the the priority lists of many councils.
Its a perfect moment, then, for Book Week Scotland to launch a campaign asking readers to send love letters to their favourite library, where they will be displayed. Many high-profile authors have also joined the campaign, and their letters will be published exclusively in the Guardian.
Without libraries we have no past and no future. Ray Bradbury
A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them. Mark Twain
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one but no one at all can tell you what to read and when and how. Doris Lessing
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. Jorge Luis Borges
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man. TS Eliot
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure. Virginia Woolf
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library. Albert Einstein
Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation. Walter Cronkite
I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, Ill be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me. Maya Angelou
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. Saul Bellow
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November 13, 2014
Baddies in books: Long John Silver – a pirate Ronald Reagan
The brutal Treasure Island villain has a realistic charm and charisma that could have made him an all too plausible politician
More Baddies in books - from Sauron to Humbert Humbert
The sea captain whose arrival at the inn opens Treasure Island is a man whose ferocity and lack of inhibition cows the whole village: a scarred and filthy alcoholic who drinks rum all evening with a naked cutlass on the table in front of him. Yet he is haunted by the fear of Blind Pew, who is one of the most economically described figures of fear in English fiction:
“He was plainly blind, for he tapped before him with a stick and wore a great green shade over his eyes and nose; and he was hunched, as if with age and weakness, and wore a huge old tattered sea-cloak with a hood that made him appear positively deformed.”
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Baddies in books: Long John Silver a pirate Ronald Reagan
The brutal Treasure Island villain has a realistic charm and charisma that could have made him an all too plausible politician
More Baddies in books - from Sauron to Humbert Humbert
The sea captain whose arrival at the inn opens Treasure Island is a man whose ferocity and lack of inhibition cows the whole village: a scarred and filthy alcoholic who drinks rum all evening with a naked cutlass on the table in front of him. Yet he is haunted by the fear of Blind Pew, who is one of the most economically described figures of fear in English fiction:
He was plainly blind, for he tapped before him with a stick and wore a great green shade over his eyes and nose; and he was hunched, as if with age and weakness, and wore a huge old tattered sea-cloak with a hood that made him appear positively deformed.
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November 12, 2014
Day of the Imprisoned Writer: Nelson Aguilera
Luisa Valenzuelas open letter to a writer sentenced to jail in Paraguay for allegedly plagiarising a novel
News: Leading authors mount international protest to defend persecuted colleagues
Dear Nelson Aguilera,
I want to extend to you my complete support as well as that of many of my colleagues. Your trial is reminiscent of a witch hunt, far removed from all literary debate. Along with the experts, I believe that there has been absolutely no plagiarism, but rather a similar approach to topics that are in the public domain. And since time is the subject of your book, let us imagine HG Wells former president of PEN International passing judgment on María Eugenia Garay [who brought the case of plagiarism against Aguilera]; as if intertextuality werent often part of literary creation.
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Jane Austen's day out - video
A film bringing a statue of the novelist to life is drawing in the virtual crowds
Fierce divisions have broken out among the Guardian books team as to whether this video, bringing a statue of Jane Austen to life, is delightful or naff. Either way, it has amassed quite a following since it was launched on Facebook by Baths Jane Austen Centre on Monday. It certainly raises the profile of the two cast members, Martin Salter, whose day job is meeting and greeting tourists at the centre, and tour guide Lauren Thompson, whose day out as Jane takes her through the Georgian streets of the heritage city and beyond. What the statue makes of its makeover is unknown.
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Isaac Asimovs Foundation novels: are they really filmable?
News comes from the Wrap that Jonathan Nolan, brother to Christopher and co-writer of hit film Interstellar, has a new project in hand: a television series for HBO and Warner Brothers TV of nothing less than Isaac Asimovs Foundation series.
According to the Wrap, Nolan has been quietly developing the project for the last several months, although he let slip his admiration for the work in a recent IndieWire interview. Asked which was the one piece of science fiction you truly love that people dont know enough about, he named, swearily, the Foundation books.
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Stephen Fry narrates foul-mouthed paean to children's dinnertime - video
The bedtime book for frazzled parents is followed by a venture into the jungle of family dinnertime
The book that dare not speak its name gets a followup this week, with the publication of a sequel to the sleeper hit of 2011, Go the F*ck To Sleep.
The tongue-in-cheek bedtime book for parents was picked up by UK publisher Canongate after soaring to the top of Amazons bestseller chart a month before it was due to be published by the small US press Akashic Books.
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November 11, 2014
Day of the Imprisoned Writer: Azimjon Askarov
News: Leading authors mount international protest to defend persecuted colleagues
Dear Azimjon,
Youre in jail; I am not. That fact remains, and it rankles. The question as to why has a simple answer: I am lucky, and you are brave. My luck is that I live in a country that, broadly speaking, respects the rights of its citizens. How you got to be so brave escapes me. Would I so unflinchingly report on police corruption, as you did? I would like to believe that I would, and that others would stand in solidarity with me should I get into trouble.
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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
Welcome to this weeks blog. Heres a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
A very interesting question as to how we consume books was raised by conedison:
While watching a film or play I believe that if you find yourself complimenting the acting, directing, writing etc, this actually means the film/play isnt really working for you. I think the ultimate compliment is subjectivity to be so caught up in the story that its component parts go, for the time being, unnoticed. But is it the same while reading a book? Is the ultimate compliment subjectivity? After all, a film/play only takes a few, consecutive hours of our time while reading a novel requires a much more considerable investment. We start a book. We stop when the tube or train stops at our station. Hours pass. We return to reading on the way back home, then stop, then start again, perhaps in bed just before sleep. We repeat this process many times. In other words, we have many hours in between to evaluate what weve been reading. And through this inevitable evaluation do we not distance ourselves emotionally? Can we ever truly submerge our critical sense and just go with the flow?
Our dining table, clear for a change. I am about to sit down and begin.
Sent via GuardianWitness
By Jeremy Simms
4 November 2014, 12:33
Jeg er voksen, men det glemmer jeg når jeg vågner så brat.
I am grown up, but I forget that when I awake with a start.
I wish I knew nothing of Under The Skin before I started reading it. I havent seen the film but heard a lot about it and through that, I knew a little bit and while it didnt ruin any of it, I really would have liked to have been surprised by the developments because this book is fantastic. I wont say anything lest I spoil anything for anybody else but Michel Fabers prose is absolutely gorgeous, reminding me of a more sinister Fitzgerald and that makes the plot developments all the more intense. One thing I do wonder though is why is it that Scottish people are always written in dialect? You never get that with any other part of the UK but they always have tae talk laik tha, yken?
Im having my usual problem with non-fiction, fascinated whilst reading and promptly forgetting everything when I close the book. I could spend an unlimited amount of time with the Davies book though, splendid vistas lie in every direction.
Had this sitting on my shelf for nearly a decade glaring at me. At least I thought it was glaring at me. Turns out it had something in its eye, possibly a wayward snowflake, and it was instead just waiting patiently for me to find the right moment. A joy of a book - its dedication to W.G.Sebald makes perfect sense now. Not to everyone's taste but certainly to mine.
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By MajorWhipple
6 November 2014, 14:37
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Do you really know what Orwellian means?
The millions of people using the term seem confident that they know and use it with equal confidence to signify often diametrically opposed meanings
Read more on this months book
This time a month ago on the Reading group, we were hunting for the meaning of Kafkaesque. We were marvelling at its many applications and at just how often - and with how many subtle and not so subtle variations the term is used and abused. But now that George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four is our subject, I realise that musing over the meaning of Kafkaesque is little more than wandering in the foothills. It is a diversion for amateurs. It is a dipping of toes into shallow waters compared to the deep black plunge that is attempting to define Orwellian.
This is a word that no less an organ than the New York Times has declared the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer Its more common than Kafkaesque, Hemingwayesque and Dickensian put together. It even noses out the rival political reproach Machiavellian, which had a 500-year head start.
Books such as Milovan Djilas the New Class and George Orwells Animal Farm and 1984 became clandestine bestsellers, for they depicted in minute detail the communist methodology of taking over a nation. These three books did more to open the eyes of the blind, including mine, than any other form of expression.
1984 is no such thing. It is about communist totalitarianism.
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