The Guardian's Blog, page 99
October 21, 2014
Night at the bookshop: Waterstones stages a sleepover after a tourist got trapped in the store
After an American tourist got locked in to one of their bookshops, Waterstones are inviting volunteers for a sleepover. Here are ten short books you could read in an evening but what would you do if you could spend the night in a bookshop? Let us know in the comments below
Wandering around bookshops has its dangers. One minute youre browsing; the next thing you know, youre locked in for the night. Thats the situation a Texan tourist, David Willis, found himself in last week, in a London Waterstones. He took it in good humour, at least, sending this out on Instagram:
Hi @Waterstones I've been locked inside of your Trafalgar Square bookstore for 2 hours now. Please let me out.
How it all began: The initial panic. @Waterstones @DWill_ #freethewaterstones1 #waterstonestexan pic.twitter.com/UTzV9Y5HRM
I'm free
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A childs eye view of death: the power of picture books to explain
Death and bereavement are difficult facts for parents to teach small children, made harder still if they are grieving themselves. But many authors have found elegant ways to start the process
Dealing with death, in picture books and early readers, is a challenge for parents and publishers alike. Theres often a knee-jerk feeling of revulsion to contend with Thats a bit dark, or Surely theyre too young for that? the readerly equivalent of the sign against the evil eye.
But toddlers and pre-schoolers are likely to encounter some form of loss, even in their early lives whether in animal form, or when a grandparent or even a parent dies. For a choked-up, grieving adult, or for one who wants to prepare a child for lifes only inevitability, a well chosen book can speak volumes.
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Reading group: searching for meaning in Kafka
Writing so slippery is hard to define - but it leads us to a chilling truth about ourselves
All month, the Reading group has been hunting for meaning in Kafka. This isnt an unusual thing to do. Oceans of ink have been spilled on the same subject over the years.
But it is possibly a daft thing to do. As plenty of commenters below the line have pointed out, the defining qualities of Kafkas writing include: uncertainty, confusion, obscurity, elusive truths, concealed falsehoods, hidden meanings, meaningless revelations. Now that Ive written that, I even worry that applying the words defining qualities to writing so elusive, changeable and slippery may be inappropriate.
Kafka is writing about our living in a world that is too vast and complex for us to understand by any means at all, religion, science, maths, art, or psychology (and in which the functioning of our very minds are also beyond our comprehension) our ideas of a transcendental order of any kind, which we often believe supply an uber justification and order to this world, are even more incomprehensible because the transcendental order is absolutely incomprehensible to us. Eg why in the world does God kill so many babies, if God is the transcendental supreme? It just cant make sense, but we have to live through it all anyway, and it is far from simple. The darkness in our minds and our social orders, literal, moral, or whatever else are still there and have to be lived through with varying degrees of awareness and sensitivity by all of us. We can make all sorts of choices, but cant change the basic situation.
Whether he wanted to be one or not, Kafka is a great artist: he cant solve the problem, but he can write about it brilliantly if necessarily obscurely. I think the basic premise that his writings are formatted as nightmares is correct. That makes the nightmarishness a literary quality, but it also corresponds to the way things really are, to our inner experience that just wont stay inner. Kafka has Gregor Samsa awake into the nightmare, the way Joseph K does in The Trial, because the nightmare is what is real. Humans have been able to act like the Samsa family, positive and hopeful about life, but humanity has never been able to quite shake the feeling that this is just not quite all real, even if we cant seem to wake up (to use the dream/nightmare metaphor). Kafka as an artist has perfectly expressed this in a particularly dark and forceful manner. The Samsa family will go on, will be happy or unhappy, Grete get married and have kids, Mama and Papa will be proud grandparents, and none will have a thought about nightmarishness, not even after their experiences. But Gregor he is the Kafka reader in the family.
Although in reality Kafkas own sisters did encounter the nightmare, murdered in the gas chambers by the Nazi regime, which I doubt Kafka would ever have foreseen. But he did want to say that the social and/or transcendental order could break down in anyones life (eg Gregor) from one moment to the next, and the nightmares irrupt into ones life at any time.
The traveller reflected: intervening in other peoples affairs is always fraught with risks. He wasnt a citizen of the penal colony, or the state to which it belonged. If he wanted to condemn this execution, or even to seek to obstruct it, he laid himself open to an objection: youre a stranger, what do you know?
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There was once a campaign for good limericks
Thanks to Neil Gaiman for pointing me towards this site, where I have whiled away much of the morning. Well, how could I not? Its the OEDILF (the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form), and its currently looking for submissions on words beginning with the letters Aa- through Fo.
Our goal is to write at least one limerick for each meaning of each and every word in the English language, say its founders. Our best limericks will clearly define their words in a humorous or interesting way, although some may provide more entertainment than definition, or vice versa.
Here we have a concise demonstration
Of unnecessary versification,
Just written to mock
This project: its floc-
cinaucinihilipilification.
October 20, 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 weeks blog. Heres a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
conedison asked an excellent question:
If you could erase from your memory just one, favourite book from any time in your life, then be handed it fresh and new, which book would you choose to read again for the first time? (My wife chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but said shed require a time machine so she could go back and read it again for the first time ... as a child.)
Im reading Dan Simmons Endymion. I read Hyperion last year, and just finished Fall of Hyperion, so am going to finish the series off before starting something else. Very interesting and enjoyable books. They are long, the sci in sci-fi is sometimes a bit hard and there is so, so much going on but I would recommend them.
by Patrick McCabe. picked up from a charity book stall at the GP surgery. Almost got a Grisham but am now so glad I didn't
Sent via GuardianWitness
By gordonfrank
17 October 2014, 4:12
Continuing my exploitation of my continued employment in a bookshop, I have now moved on to Roy Keanes new book. He is a character that any novelist would be delighted to come up with so I bet Roddy Doyle was delighted to get the gig ghost writing this one. Keane is a walking contradiction and Doyle seems to get that. His writing style is a little too chatty at times though, resulting in unflatteringly (to Mr. Keane) clunky sentences such as one that contained two supposes within about ten words. Nevertheless, I should imagine the enjoyment one gets from reading it will be exactly as predicted before picking it up, which for me is rather a lot.
I just finished reading the latest novel of a writer whose previous works I devoured and loved, and this one felt like a break-up. Not in a please dont leave me way, more in a what happened to us? way. I fell out of love and I thought we could make it work but it just no longer does it for me and Im utterly disappointed. As with all break-ups, Im going to go bury myself in my bed, eat an indecent amount of chocolate and probably end up in a karaoke bar. Ah, literature.
Im currently reading Javier Marias The Infatuations well, I dont know whether reading is the right word. Some books, although brilliant, are hard to come back to, you know you are going to have to work hard to enjoy them properly yes, Im looking at you, Book Four of À la recherche, you may smirk but Ill be back. Ill crack Prousts monster no matter how long it takes! while others glide down like a twenty year malt. I find Javier Marias writing in this latter category.
I can understand that he is an acquired taste. Long, long sentences wander off to discuss whether the word just used was exactly the right one to describe what the sentence was trying to describe. Not much happens and what does happen which can be highly dramatic is sucked inexorably into the hypnotic web of text.
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October 18, 2014
The joys of judging the Man Booker prize
The books are read, the winner is chosen, the speeches are made, the party is over. I knew I would feel a little sad, and I do. The Man Booker prize has already had more than its share of controversy this year: first over changing the rules to allow any author writing in English to enter, a phrase that has been widely interpreted to mean "Americans". As an American myself, I don't find the prospect of Americans joining things especially horrifying. I have always thought nationality a strange eligibility requirement for literary prizes: readers don't care what passport an author holds. That's literature's entire point: it lets us traverse boundaries.
All six judges read 156 books submitted by 94 publishing imprints, and argued about them. That sentence makes this part sound rather breezy. For just over six months, I read a novel a day. Upon hearing this, many people remark wistfully that they wish they could spend their life reading novels. Anyone who longs for such a life has never tried it no matter how much you love books, and I yield to no one in that respect, reading all day every day is work, demanding not only mentally, but physically: for upwards of 12 hours a day, you are forced to remain stationary, which is really not very pleasant. (No, we don't get audiobooks, and I wouldn't want them if we did, because other people's voices are interpretive: it would skew my evaluation.) You also have to read books you don't like, because it isn't fair to throw them away; I came to think of this as the Middlemarch rule. I find the first 100 pages of Middlemarch really heavy going, and if I judged it on that basis only, I'd toss it aside. The rest of it, however, is one of the greatest novels in our tradition. So I kept reading, even the books I didn't like.
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October 17, 2014
How nylons changed literature
Stockings were once a marker of a characters class and aspirations. Then came the nylon revolution. Celebrate 75 years of sheer genius by sharing your highlights of hosiery in fiction
In his final Narnia book, The Last Battle, published in 1956, CS Lewis betrayed every teenage girl with the line: Oh Susan! Shes interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. With those words, Susan was gone, a lost cause, condemned by her legwear.
This month marks the 75th anniversary of the first limited production by DuPont of nylon stockings, and though Lewis has his fuddy duddy disdain for them, Im going to claim a bigger and better significance. Nylons (and later tights) meant the democratisation of womens legs. Until they became widely available in the 1940s, there had always been a sharp division between silk stockings and cheaper, more hard-wearing ones, made from cotton and lisle (respectable) or fake silk (dubious).
You must, for instance, spend a great deal of money on silk stockings, when for much less you could have got artificial silk or lisle thread. Why? Did not these meaner fabrics equally clothe the leg?
Just as were about to go on stage, I look down and see that one of my brand new rubber stockings has a rip in it, all the way from my knee up to my thigh. A roadie, seeing my distress, leaps to the rescue and tapes up the slash with a long strip of black gaffer tape. Looks quite cool.
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Five best writers' sheds in pictures
As JK Rowling gets planning permission to construct a summer house inspired by Hagrids hut, we round up five of the best writers sheds. Take a look inside the hideouts which have inspired writers from Virginia Woolf to Henry David Thoreau
October 16, 2014
And then the queen kissed the princess: fairytales get a modern makeover
Authors such as Neil Gaiman and Russell Brand are reinventing the fairytale with gangsta rats, werewolves and warrior queens
Neil Gaiman has just added a fairytale retelling, The Sleeper and the Spindle, to his list of books for younger readers. While earlier titles, such as Coraline and The Graveyard Book, feature strong fairy- and folktale elements, and false mothers, eerie seductresses, otherworlds and fell creatures abound throughout his work, this is the first time hes set his own stamp on a well-worn, classic story.
The Sleeper and the Spindle is actually two stories a sort-of Snow White meets an almost Sleeping Beauty and it features Greenaway-winning Chris Riddells characteristically detailed and heavy-browed illustrations, always just the right side of grotesque, in black and white picked out with gold. In Gaimans story, the kiss that awakens the slumbering princess is not from a prince princes remain firmly off stage, or dead in a thicket of roses but from a young queen, who rises on her wedding day and dons chain mail to ride to the rescue. Its not a love story, but a tale of courage, determination and disconcerting tragedy and terror.
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October 15, 2014
The best books on Argentina: start your reading here | Pushpinder Khaneka
Bruno Cadogan, a doctoral student in New York, is having trouble with his dissertation on Jorge Luis Borgess essays on the tango. He decides to travel to Buenos Aires in search of inspiration and a disabled, haemophiliac tango singer named Julio Martel rumoured to be even better than the legendary Carlos Gardel.
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