Kate Gardner | Nose in a book

February reading round-up

March 1, 2015March 25, 2015

I finally feel that I’m in the swing of reading this year. February was a good month. I discovered Bidisha thanks to an English PEN event on refugees, I had a very lovely Valentine’s weekend with Tim in London and I finally got to see Kate Tempest live. I also found plenty of time for reading.

I also started contributing to Redhead Reads, a micro newsletter published daily by Beulah Devaney, a fab feminist writer I first discovered through For Books’ Sake. So that’s pretty exciting.

However, while I went to lots of fun events and read lots of books, I didn’t read any great books. I miss that feeling, the feeling of a great read that pulls you in and won’t let you go. There must be plenty of them on my TBR, I just keep picking out the wrong ones!

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Ted Hughes: a Tribute

February 28, 2015March 25, 2015 2 Comments

Ted Hughes March 1993 — (CC-BY-SA Breakingthings)

Bath Literature Festival
The Forum, Bath, 28 February

I confess that I mostly chose this event to go to because it included Kate Tempest and I keep missing her Bristol shows. But I also like Ted Hughes’ poetry and was interested in what a tribute to him would be like. The answer? A bit uneven and yet also staid. But Kate was really good.

The audience had been expecting Melvyn Bragg and Jonathan Dimbleby, which perhaps explains the make-up of the crowd (largely older than me, and very white upper middle class, but then it was Bath) – they actually groaned when the panel change was announced. Personally I bought my ticket after this change was made. It might have been enough to put me off even the chance to see Kate Tempest. I know Bragg and Dimbleby are supposed to be beloved national icons but I find them very dull.

The event was hosted by Bel Mooney, a writer who co-founded the festival 20 years ago, which was when she first met Ted Hughes, who opened that year’s festival in the Forum, the same venue hosting his tribute. She spoke warmly of him as a man and as a writer, hitting all the right notes of celebration and admiration.

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Bristol Women’s Literature Festival is back!

February 27, 2015March 25, 2015

On 14–15 March, Bristol’s Watershed will be home to a celebration of women’s writing, with a series of events covering everything from the overlooked women writers of the Renaissance to the brightest and the best of today’s up and coming literary stars.

The festival was founded by feminist writer Siân Norris “to celebrate the work of women writers in a literary scene that is all too often dominated by male voices”.

It all kicks off with a screening of Paris was a Woman, a 1996 documentary film about the amazing women of the 1920s Paris literary scene including my beloved Colette, followed by an audience discussion chaired by Norris.

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You’re a son of a gun, Sammy

February 25, 2015March 25, 2015 2 Comments

The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett

I’ve been meaning to read this for years. As a fan of Raymond Chandler I figured I should read the original gritty noir American detective, so I was pleased when my book club picked this for one of our “classic” reads. I was late to the book club discussion but I think we all felt the same way: this is worth reading but not as good as Chandler!

I guess I was hoping for that luscious purple prose that Chandler is such an expert at – it’s ridiculous and yet in a way beautiful. Hammett has none of that. Which isn’t to say this is badly written, it’s just a bit plainer, but still very entertaining and with moments of beauty.

The story centres on San Francisco private detective Sam Spade. He’s cynical, a womaniser, good at depriving villains of their weapons and on first-name terms with most local police, the DA and the DA’s secretary. And he sees a lot of his lawyer. The plot begins on page one, with a new client arriving in his office. Miss Wonderly wants Spade and his partner to follow a man for her, a simple enough job that predictably is neither as simple or as safe as it should have been. The maltese falcon of the title takes a while to come into play and is an appropriately mysterious unusual object around which to centre a plot that brings together a variety of criminals.

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Comic books short reviews

February 23, 2015March 25, 2015

The thing about comic books in series is that’s kinda hard to say that much about them after volume one, so here’s some brief thoughts on comics I’ve read lately.

Modesty Blaise: The Grim Joker
by Peter O’Donnell (writer) and Enric Badia Romero (artist)

I’ve jumped in my reading of Modesty Blaise from strips from the early 1970s to those of the early 1990s and it shows. While the stories themselves are still very gung-ho pseudo Bond adventures and they still look quite 1960s, the gender politics and subject matter have moved on. Modesty is no longer the only capable female on the block, though there are still gratuitous scenes of her nearly or fully naked at least once in every storyline. This volume collects three stories: one is about amnesia and the bond between Modesty and her best friend/right-hand man Willie Garvin; one is about two very different treasure hunts that collide; and one is about a series of murders that Modesty and Willie decide to risk their lives to solve. The dialogue can be clunky and the plots a little predictable, but these stories remain enormously fun, with a great sense of style.

“Willie hits the water and finds with some surprise that he is still alive. But on the surface the river pounds with furious speed between the canyon walls. For over a mile Willie is swept down-river, unable to do more than stay afloat…he fends off the menacing rocks and tumbling debris, but at last the current hurls a heavy log at him—and on the other side of the world, where it is night, Modesty wakes abruptly.”

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Night Safari: Love in the Natural World

February 21, 2015March 25, 2015

Natural History Museum, London
Monday 16 February 2015

Our Valentine’s long weekend in London was largely built around Tim managing to get tickets for the Natural History Museum‘s special Valentine’s tie-in evening event. I almost didn’t care what the event was, I was so excited by the prospect of being in the museum at night, sharing it with only 50 or so people. If you’ve ever seen the ridiculous queues to get into the Natural History Museum, particularly on a weekend or school holiday (which this last week was for most of England) you’ll understand why that was exciting.

But it was also a cool event in itself: three short lectures from NHM scientists about “romance” in the natural world (there was also a “passion” option with three different scientists, which I’m guessing concentrated more on sex but let’s face it, both options were mostly about sex).

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It became frightening to step back onto firm ground

February 17, 2015March 25, 2015

Getting the Picture
by Sarah Salway

When new publisher Dean Street Press offered up any of their books for review, I picked this one partly because the synopsis sounded good but mostly because they had a quote from Neil Gaiman on the cover. Not the greatest reason but I think it worked out.

The book opens with Maureen accompanying her model friend Pat to a photographer’s studio. Maureen is married with a young child and the photographer, Martin, specialises in nude portraits – tasteful ones, but nudes all the same – so Maureen is nervous to be there but undeniably attracted to Martin. Cut to 40 years later and Martin is moving into a retirement home. He writes a letter to Maureen to tell her that he picked the same home that her husband George is in, because he wants to finally understand why she went back to her husband after their affair ended.

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Politics are what brought us together, in this room

February 10, 2015March 25, 2015

Asylum and Exile: the Hidden Voices of London
by Bidisha

I picked this book up at its launch in London last week after hearing a few samples from it read aloud. It’s a short, jauntily written memoir that is deceptive in the power of what it has to say.

Bidisha is a British author, journalist and broadcaster who in 2011 started to run creative writing workshops for asylum seekers and other migrants in London, organised by English PEN. She quickly realised that most people who turned up for the class were not interested in becoming writers – they were there to improve their English or to spend some time with people in a similar situation or even to receive the free tea, cake and £8 travel subsidy provided by the charity. But she also found that didn’t matter because she discovered amazing people and had her preconceptions of refugees challenged.

“On the board, I draw a sun with a smiling face and rays and all its clichés flowing out from it: warmth, light, shininess, redness, yellowness and gold, nourishment, hope and life and growth, tanning and health, sunset and sunrise. These are all banned.
A woman with a canny face, gleaming jet skin and matte black eyes chuckles as she prepares to read hers out. Grandly, emphatically: ‘I miss the African sun because it made me sweat out all my African fat.’
Clapping, laughter and loud agreement from everyone.”

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Sunday Salon: So much stuff

February 8, 2015March 25, 2015 7 Comments

The Sunday Salon

It’s been a busy week, full of bookish stuff, plus friends and family, and that work thing, so I am too tired for our weekly pub quiz and instead am sat at home watching junk TV instead of reading any of the many piles of unread books lying around. I should probably feel bad about this but I don’t.

On Tuesday I went to London and I tried really hard not to go to any bookshops while I was there after last week’s book buying. I avoided all the bookshops I know and love and instead went to the British Library to visit the Lines in the Ice exhibition (one of their smaller exhibitions but still really interesting – lots of old maps, which I love). Thankfully the place was so swarming with people visiting the Magna Carta that I didn’t even consider visiting their giftshop, which is basically a bookshop. But then when I was searching for the toilets in Kings Cross Station I stumbled across a tiny but lovely branch of the US book chain Watermark Books next door to the Harry Potter Shop. Of course, I couldn’t walk into a new bookshop find without buying anything, but I picked a couple of smaller books in the hopes of actually squeezing in reading them!

bookshop buys

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A gleam of light in the impenetrable mystery

February 5, 2015March 25, 2015 1 Comment

The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
translated from French by Katherine Woods

This is my first read for Classics Club and it may have been an odd place to start, or maybe a very good place. I’m not sure. It certainly wasn’t the book I expected and yet, thinking about it, I really should have known exactly how it would be.

First of all, it’s a children’s book, which I knew, but so many adults rave about it that I suppose I thought it wouldn’t read quite so very much like one. Also, it was written in the 1940s and has the moralising tone to suit, though it’s an unusual set of morals that it’s selling.

The story is wonderful, by which I mean both that it’s lovely and that it’s full of wonder. A young pilot crashes his plane in the Sahara Desert and there meets and befriends an alien who has travelled to many worlds. The alien, the little prince of the title, tells the pilot about his home world and his travels and the life lessons he has learned.

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