The Guardian's Blog, page 97

November 4, 2014

Novembers Reading group: Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell

Orwells modern classic about totalitarianism is a perfect choice to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and to kick off the discussion weve got 10 copies to give away

George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-four has been pulled out of the hat for this months Reading group. For our month commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it may seem like a choice that is slightly from left-field. But as a book about totalitarianism that was published three years after Churchill made his famous iron curtain speech, its clearly relevant.

Harder to dispute is its status as a classic. It is tempting to label dissent in that regard a thoughtcrime not least because of how this book has influenced the way we talk and think. Meanwhile, Nineteen Eighty-four is also a neat choice for this months Reading group because it follows so smoothly from our discussion of Kafka. Nineteen Eighty-four was clearly influenced by the Czech writer and if any word is abused more often than Kafkaesque, its Orwellian.

Continue reading...






 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on November 04, 2014 04:02

Bookies name Helen Macdonald favourite to win Samuel Johnson prize

Macdonalds H Is for Hawk could become the first memoir after 15 years to win the prestigious prize

If the bookies are right, the Samuel Johnson prize looks set to go to a memoir for the first time, after 15 years. William Hill and Ladbrokes both have H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (pictured) as short-odds favourite, and they respectively rate Marion Couttss The Iceberg: A Memoir as second and third favourite. Has the authorial I gained respectability at last?

Dominated by history and biography since it was first awarded in 1999, to be a memoirist snubbed by this prize is to belong to a rather distinguished club, a salon des refuses,, as can be seen from the relevant titles honoured by other, less sniffy, awards over the same period. Lorna Sages Bad Blood, Diana Athills Somewhere Towards the End and Edmund de Waals The Hare with Amber Eyes (the last-named only longlisted for the Samuel Johnson) have won the Costa biography prize. Winners of the Orwell prize for political books have included Andrea Gilliess Keeper, Christopher Hitchenss Hitch-22 and Alan Johnsons This Boy.

Continue reading...






 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on November 04, 2014 03:01

November 3, 2014

Baddies in books: Medea, the magnificent monster

Euripides Medea is a woman of fabulous vengefulness, who murders her own children to wrest power from a faithless husband

Medea the monstrous kills her children to punish her faithless husband. As she-devils go, shes up there. No greater offence than the murder of ones own defenceless babies.

And yet.

Continue reading...






 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on November 03, 2014 23:45

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.

The pending arrival of winter set caminoamigo off on some comfort reading:

...because the winter will be long and I just want to spend some time on the French Riviera. That's OK, isn't it?

Sent via GuardianWitness

By caminoamigo

29 October 2014, 10:44

Im stunned at how good it is. Im feverishly turning the pages as I would a thriller. Just in case there is anyone out there more ignorant than I (difficult), I will add by way of explanation that the book is the account of the 18-year-old Leigh Fermors walk across Europe in 1933/4. An absolutely mesmerising description of landscape and its impact on the culture and history of Europe, it reinforces at every turn that there is no better way to explore than by foot. And Im not sure if there is a better companion than Leigh Fermor. [...] The result adds up to an erudite, funny, entertaining and extremely moving portrait of Europe between the wars.

I'm ashamed to say that it's my first Bainbridge but on the strength of this book set in Victorian Liverpool and the Crimean theatre of war it certainly won't be my last. An astonishing ability to portray the emotional workings of the human heart and what drives people to continue when faced with the most appalling horror and carnage.

Sent via GuardianWitness

By MajorWhipple

29 October 2014, 22:16

Very, very good indeed. Perfectly awful people depicted in a way that made their real depths of awfulness come clear. Those final chapters with the girl looking for a doctor, and then the revelation of who she is and before that all the rationalisations for everything that Anse gives were quite exceptional. I really cannot wait to read more Faulkner, but I need something cheerful now. Reading too much grimness in one go lessens its impact.

I suppose I dont mean just, say, being from Yorkshire and reading a novel set in a generic and general Yorkshire environment. I mean reading a book set in your immediate habitat, describing individual shops and houses, individual bends in the road even, all of which you know as well as your own living room... Ive just read finally Patrick Gales Notes From an Exhibition, set in Penzance and surrounds.

It was a curious experience. At first I found it faintly embarrassing; I would cringe a little at each mention of a local street name, though I dont for the life of me know why. I was also, naturally, hypersensitive to inaccuracy, barking blimpishly at the printed page : Queen Street, not Queens Street! And The cinema wasnt partitioned into three screens in the 1980s!

Continue reading...






 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on November 03, 2014 10:33

October 31, 2014

Poster poems: clouds

As changeable on the page as in the skies above, theyve inspired countless poets now share your poetic experiments in cloud-spotting

Living on the ocean-facing side of an island in the North Atlantic, you cant but be aware of the ever-changing skyscape. The clouds tend to dominate much of the days activity and mood, and even their names are evocative, mysterious and a touch poetic. Stratus, cumulus, cirrus: theyre like names of characters in some lost Greek drama.

Probably the best-known cloud in English poetry is Wordsworths lonely wanderer. In a typical example of Wordsworthian anthropocentricism, the cloud is not really a cloud at all it exists as a stand-in for the poet, who imposes his own supposed loneliness on it. I say supposed because, as Dorothy Wordsworths diary makes clear, Wordsworth wasnt actually alone when he saw the famous daffodils. But perhaps he felt lonely in her company.

Continue reading...






 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 31, 2014 06:26

October 30, 2014

Baddies in books: Captain Ahab, the obsessive, revenge-driven nihilist

Herman Melvilles baleful creation is the most dangerous of villains, foreshadowing the dictators of the 20th century
Sauron: literatures ultimate source of evil
Humbert Humbert: the most seductive villain in fiction

The villain in Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick isnt the monstrous White Whale, but the man that wants to kill him: Captain Ahab. Melville withholds Ahabs appearance for well over 100 pages of his novel. At first he is only a name, then a sailors story, then a brooding but unseen presence, shut up in his cabin, as the Pequod sets sail from Nantucket on Christmas Day and strikes south for the whaling grounds of the Pacific. The Pequods shareholders are hoping for a great profit, but Ahab is only interested in a single whale among the multitudes: Moby Dick.

Ahab is an enigma whose larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. What can we say we know about him? That he is a grey-headed, ungodly old man. He has eyes like powder pans. His crew say he never sleeps, only tosses in bed. Dough-Boy the steward tells Ishmael that every morning: He always finds the old mans hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied in knots, and Ahabs pillow hot to the touch, as though a baked brick had been on it. He has a scar, too, a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish, running from head to toe. None of the crew knows where he got it, but they all know how he lost his leg. In the Pacific, a year before the events Ishmael describes in the novel, Ahab found himself surrounded by the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, all churning in the white curds of the whales direful wrath. Moby Dick took Ahabs leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field, and now the captain uses a peg leg carved from whalebone.

Continue reading...






 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 30, 2014 07:59

Bring up the bodies: digging up the dead in literature

You dont need zombies or ghosts to chill the blood. Moira Redmond digs up some of literatures most gruesome graveyard scenes

However depressing the thud of earth on the coffin-lid may be, it is music compared to the rattle of gravel and thump of spades which heralds a premature and unreverend resurrection

Thats from Dorothy L Sayerss 1921 Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, as she describes the gruesome exhumation of a man who may have been murdered. The corpse is carried from the grave to the cemetery potting-shed in the middle of the night, so that a doctor can explore the entrails.

Old Nate Birge was chewing on a splinter of wood and watching the moon come up lazily out of the old cemetery in which nine of his daughters were lying, only two of whom were dead.

Continue reading...






 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 30, 2014 07:01

October 29, 2014

True histories: the renaissance of Arab Jews in Arabic novels

From Ali Bader to Mohammad al-Ahmed, Middle Eastern writers have brought Arab Jews back into Arabic literature

For decades, Arab Jews went missing from Arabic films and novels. This loud absence followed the Jewish exodus from Cairo, Damascus and other cities around the region. Before the second world war, Jews had seemed an eternal part of the Arab cultural fabric. In the early 20th century, Baghdads Jews had made up one-third of the citys population, and were prominent in the arts, commerce and city administration.

Things changed drastically in June 1941, when the riotous Farhud pogrom killed around 180 of Baghdads Jews and wounded closer to 1,000. Over the next decades, as the citys Jewish residents emigrated or were driven out, they also disappeared from Iraqi narratives. But when acclaimed Iraqi novelist Ali Bader was searching for the origins of contemporary violence in Baghdad in his 2008 novel The Tobacco Keeper, he circled back to the Farhud massacres. From there, he depicted the citys vibrant early-20th-century Jewish population.

Continue reading...






 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 29, 2014 09:18

Baddies in books: Humbert Humbert, the most seductive villain in fiction

The scariest beast in Nabokovs Lolita isnt the perverted Jimmy Savile figure Quilty, but the evasive, smug Humbert

More baddies in books: Sauron, literatures ultimate source of evil

To what extent are literary villains changed by history? Its a question that is never more sharply posed than by that most slippery of fictional monsters, Humbert Humbert. I first encountered him by torchlight when I was not much older than Lolita. In my 1970s boarding school, he shared a space beneath the mattress with John Clelands Fanny Hill two classic novels that connected with adolescent fantasy in ways that couldnt be exposed to the light of day, even though both books had been purloined from perfectly respectable adult bookshelves.

For a 1970s teenager, Lolita was glamorously erotic. I know I wasnt alone in fantasising about what it might be like to be a gum-popping nymphet, whisked away on a road trip by a handsome literary sophisticate. I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder, Humbert tells us. Moreover, I am said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush.

Continue reading...






 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 29, 2014 00:00

October 28, 2014

Award for the Australian books that fly under the radar

A Melbourne book chain has established an award for new writers. Martin Shaw explains why the award exists and the novels awarded this year

With Richard Flanagans Man Booker Prize win, the last couple of weeks have obviously been glory days for Australian literature. But its also a reminder of the importance of literary prizes in our publishing ecosystem. The Booker is an enormous fillip for Flanagan, perhaps doubling Australian sales of his book from the reported 60 000 copies before the prize to doubtless over 100K before the year is out and boosted fortunes of his international editions.

Even a prize shortlisting can be enormously valuable to an authors profile. After being shortlisted for not just the Miles Franklin, but also the Commonwealth Book award and the Prime Ministers Literary awards as well, Romy Ashs sublime Floundering gained a considerable readerly following during 2013.

Continue reading...
 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 28, 2014 20:47

The Guardian's Blog

The Guardian
The Guardian isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.
Follow The Guardian's blog with rss.