The Guardian's Blog, page 98
October 28, 2014
Cultural shame: whats your worst bad literature day?
Frances culture minister has drawn fire for not knowing the latest Nobel prizewinners novels. But surely everybody has shameful reading memories
It is hard not to twitch with embarrassment at the plight of new French culture minister Fleur Pellerin, who was unable to name a novel by Frances recent Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano despite having enjoyed a wonderful lunch with him.
Perhaps, being charitable, it was one of those tip-of-the-tongue moments, when the words youre looking for slip out of your grasp. Weve all had them. Perhaps she has read all of Modianos oeuvre. But then she admits: Ive no problem in confessing that Ive not had any time to read for the past two years. I read a lot of notes, a lot of legislative texts, news, AFP stories, but I read very little, squirming when it was noted that a culture minister might, well, enjoy partaking of a novel or two here or there.
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Quiz: can you identify these classic horror books by their covers?
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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: hope youve all had a glorious week of happy reading? Lets take a look at what we were all sharing and talking about last week.
We had a couple of wonderful, meaty reviews, including Vogelmonades review of The Factory Girls by Leslie T Chang and AggieHs review of Kærlighed and The Blue Room by Hanne Ørstavik.
Sara Richards: [...] After much thought, The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. But there are so many books I truly love its like asking me to say which of my children is my favourite one.
tyorkshiretealass: The Child in Time [by Ian McEwan] is mine it was given to me by an English teacher when I was 14 and was one of the first adult books I read (we were given an extract of it in a practice exam paper and I wanted to keep going).
[...] Just yesterday there was an article in the Guardian about a violent act caused by Indias caste system. This brought to mind Mulk Raj Anands Untouchable which I have read twice and recommended to many people over the years. Today there is a Guardian article about solar farms which reminds me that I have McEwans Solar on my charity shops finds pile waiting to be read. I would be interested to hear of any other links between Guardian articles and literature this week.
Funny you should say that, the much talked-about essay written by Kathleen Hale about her experience stalking a reviewer reminded me a bit of McEwans Enduring Love, although the setting is quite different and hopefully Hale doesnt suffer from the same syndrome as the stalker in the novel. In another world, perhaps there would be a McEwan for every Guardian article.
Finally reading Small World, which I've owned for years, after finishing the first novel - Changing Places - last week.
Sent via GuardianWitness
By Vesca
20 October 2014, 19:29
Im currently reading Small World by David Lodge, which has been sitting on my shelves for ages unread Ive got no memory of buying it, but I must have done because its second hand and no-one else buys me second hand books.
Realistically if I hadnt read Changing Places last week and had some interest in seeing what happens next it would probably have sat unread forever. Its funny, but theres a sort of underlying grimness to the humour that Im not enjoying at all.
I finished Nick Daviess Hack Attack which leaves you open-mouthed with astonishment at the antics of the tabloid press, politicians (thats you Jeremy Hunt!) and (especially) the police. Its an excellent book and should be required reading for anyone ever tempted to use the phrase tin-foil hat in a CIF post.
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October 27, 2014
Filthy first pages: do they make you want to read on?
Christos Tsiolkas has opened his new short story collection with a bang. But is an explicit first page likely to turn off readers?
It takes a lot to shock the average reader these days, but Christos Tsiolkass collection of stories, Merciless Gods, has already raised a few eyebrows.
The collection, to be published on 1 November, is full of Tsiolkass trademark preoccupation with relationships, sex and family, but even regular readers of his work may find some of the prose a little too prurient for their tastes.
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George RR Martin: 'Drogon could never beat Smaug in a fight'
The Games of Thrones author gave an exuberant talk in New York about The World of Ice and Fire including whether his dragon could beat Tolkiens
The crowd waiting in line to hear George RR Martin chat about The World of Ice and Fire (both a book and his fictional universe) looked about what youd expect. The people here look a little lost, as if a cultural center on New Yorks Upper East Side were an exotic realm they would brave to hear their suspendered lodestar speak in person.
Some are in their 20s, others in their 40s and 50s. There are shirts with krakens. Genders look about equally represented, and there are a fair number of couples as well as small posses of pale young men chattering about the ethnicities of Westeros. They dont seem to notice that the World of Ice and Fire looks like model diversity compared to the demographics of this audience. But everyone is very excited.
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Baddies in books: Sauron, literatures ultimate source of evil
In the first of a new series on fictional villains, Sarah Crown argues that Tolkiens unseen Sauron from The Lord of the Rings is the most frightening and enduring
More baddies in books: Humbert Humbert, the most seductive villain in fictionA really bravura villain grabs you by the throat. From childhood bogeymen via the dastards and arch-nemeses of adolescence, all the way to adulthoods more nuanced sociopaths, schemers and political tyrants, theyre the grit that makes literary pearls, the dynamos who keep us reading and part of their appeal is their infinite variety: there are as many brands of evildoer as there are stars in the sky, fish in the ocean. Collectively, they adhere to a modified version of the Anna Karenina principle: all saints are alike; each sinner sins uniquely. How, then, are you supposed to pick a favourite?
In my case, it comes down in part, at least to first contact. Assuming were among the lucky ones, our initial encounter with evil with the idea that there are those out there who, given the chance, would do us harm takes place in the realm of fiction. Fairytales with their murder, bestiality, suicide, rape, incest and cannibalism are the obvious jumping-off point. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim deemed their unflinching portrayal of wickedness essential to our education a necessary corrective to the dominant culture [that] wishes to pretend, particularly to children, that the dark side of man does not exist. Certainly, those tangled-wood images of wolves got up as grandmothers and witches in sugar-coated houses retain a disproportionate power to disturb. For me, though, despite a protracted phase during which I hid my Ladybird Sleeping Beauty at bedtime in case the witch climbed out to get me, the baddie who informed my vision of evil the one against whom all subsequent horrors would be measured didnt figure on the cover of a fairytale book. His defining feature is that we never lay eyes on him.
a contrivance of the Enemy ... They say in my land that he can govern the storms in the Mountains of Shadow that stand upon the borders of Mordor. He has strange powers and many allies.
His arm has grown long indeed, said Gimli, if he can draw snow down from the North to trouble us here three hundred leagues away.
His arm has grown long, said Gandalf.
October 24, 2014
Reading group: choose a book to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall in November
Its a quarter of a century since the Berlin Wall came down so how best to explore that divided world in fiction?
Twenty-five years ago, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the world changed. You dont need me to tell you how much difference that quarter-century has made but nor is it necessarily easy to understand the changes it has wrought. As that momentous event recedes into the past, its getting harder for us to understand the previous world order. One good way to make that imaginative leap is to read a novel making the wall an excellent subject for the Reading group.
Weve been to Berlin already but there are still hundreds of novels about the city to choose from. The cold war is almost a literary genre in itself. It would be tremendous to look at anything by writers such as Ian Fleming, John le Carré and why not Tom Clancy. (Or almost anything. Weve already covered Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.) Meanwhile, the fall of the Wall was, of course, an event with global implications. It might be just as interesting to look at novels from the wider world imbued with cold-war paranoia and horror. Not least because that enables us to extend the remit to classics such as Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49, Kurt Vonneguts Cats Cradle, Graham Greenes Our Man in Havana and even Don DeLillos mighty Underworld. And then there are the voices from across the divide, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky ...
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William Hill Sports Book of the Year: 25 years of runners and riders
When we start the process of reading for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, we sometimes have only five or six books already entered. It is like the early stages of the racing season, when every horse just might be a Derby winner, according to its owner, trainer and jockey, but as each one appears on a racecourse it has to be judged against the other contenders and either eliminated from, or promoted up, the list of potential champions.
Then we have to worry about making sure every eligible book is entered. One would think that after more than quarter of a century as the richest sports book prize in the world, wed be at the forefront of every publishers mind, with every author desperate to send their work to us. Youd be staggered how hard we have to work sometimes to have a specific book entered. This year there was a particular, high-profile title we were desperate to put in front of our judges, but it took us over six months to get hold of it from the publisher.
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Is Michel Faber really leaving the novel behind?
The author says The Book of Strange New Things will be his final novel, but Im yearning for a change of heart
What sad news, in so many ways. Michel Faber, for me one of the most interesting authors out there today, has said that his new novel, the mesmerising The Book of Strange New Things described as astonishing and deeply affecting by M John Harrison, is probably going to be his last.
In comments made this week in an event at Waterstones and reported by The Bookseller, Faber said: I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write. I think Ive reached the limit. The novel, he added, says goodbye to a lot of things: to Eva [Fabers wife of 26 years, who died this year of cancer], and that Prospero/Tempest thing of goodbye to novel-writing.
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Transrealism: the first major literary movement of the 21st century?
Its not science fiction, its not realism, but hovers in the unsettling zone in between. From Philip K Dick to Stephen King, Damien Walter takes a tour through transrealism, the emerging genre aiming to kill off consensus reality
A Scanner Darkly is one of Philip K Dicks most famous but also most divisive novels. Written in 1973 but not published until 1977, it marks the boundary between PKDs mid-career novels that were clearly works of science fiction, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and his late-career work that had arguably left that genre behind. Like VALIS and The Divine Invasion that followed it, A Scanner Darkly was two stories collided into one a roughly science-fictional premise built around a mind-destroying drug, and a grittily realistic autobiographical depiction of PKDs time living among drug addicts.
It is also, in the thinking of writer, critic and mathematician Rudy Rucker, the first work of a literary movement he would name transrealism in his 1983 essay A Transrealist Manifesto. Three decades later, Ruckers essay has as much relevance to contemporary literature as ever. But while Rucker was writing at a time when science fiction and mainstream literature appeared starkly divided, today the two are increasingly hard to separate. It seems that here in the early 21st century, the literary movement Rucker called for is finally reaching its fruition.
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