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Thoughts on ideology

June 24, 2013

“Democracy is an experiment the goal of which is to keep the experiment going. The purpose of democracy is to enable people to live democratically. That’s it. Democracy is not a means to something else; there is no higher good that we’re trying as a society to attain. When we compromise with democracy in order to achieve some other purpose, even when the purpose is to defend democracy, then we are in danger of losing it.”

This quote from Louis Menand in the New Yorker (Mar 4, 2013, p71) really got me thinking. It’s such a basic point and one that should be blindingly obvious, yet I’d hazard it’s a subtlety that’s often lost on politicians.

The piece in the New Yorker, incidentally, was a review of a book about the New Deal. Menand was arguing that Franklin Roosevelt’s success as a politician was rooted in his being “a political pragmatist, someone who is less interested in the ideological provenance of a policy than in its effectiveness” – which sounds like a good thing to me. But it must be pretty rare to rise to the top in politics without a strong ideology, right?

I don’t pretend to know enough about politics or philosophy to be able to say more myself, but I like what Menand has to say.

It’s that time again! Literary Giveaway Blog Hop (22–26 June)

June 22, 2013June 27, 2013 75 Comments

**This giveaway is now closed. The winner will be announced shortly.**

Hello lovely people who might want to win a free book! I am offering up a choice from my favourite books of recent years:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

I genuinely loved all three books and look forward to sharing one of them with a lucky winner. Just leave a comment saying which book you want for a chance to win.

This competition is open to anyone from 22 to 26 June 2013.

This blog hop is run by Judith of Leeswammes. To find out more check out the blog hop announcement. And do take some time to visit some of the other participants, listed below.

Linky list:

Sunday Salon: the week of awesome

June 16, 2013 5 Comments

The Sunday Salon

I have been looking forward to this week for a long time, and though life threw a bit of a spanner in the works it still turned out pretty great.

The thing is that we had tickets to not one but two awesome events and our dear friends H and G were throwing a big party for their wedding anniversary. We were pretty excited. Then at the last minute Tim had to go away on a work trip Monday to Friday, missing the first two evenings of fun and being pretty jetlagged for the last one. However, I still got to have all the fun, just with a teensy bit of guilt about Tim missing out.

But what were these amazing events we had tickets to? Well, Thursday night I went to the first UK performance of Hugh Laurie and the Copper Bottom Band. Who were brilliant. Here is a terrible photo I took from up in the gods of the Colston Hall.

Copper Bottom Band

This group are possibly the most amazingly talented musicians I have ever seen perform. Hugh Laurie plays piano, sings (though not for all the songs) and acts as band leader. Which he of course does with humour and grace and loveliness. I had such a wonderful night. And I really badly want to go to New Orleans and hang out in jazz bars now.

Then Friday night I went to the first event on Neil Gaiman’s promotional tour for his new book The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which actually comes out next week but attendees were able to buy the book early. It was held in Bath, hosted by Topping & Co Bookshop, although I can see why it wasn’t held in the bookshop itself as there were I’d guess a couple of thousand people there. Neil Gaiman has a lot of adoring fans. Understandably. He was charming, funny, intelligent and interesting, as you might expect, and clearly an old pro at this kind of thing. I don’t have any photos from the event itself (my friend T took some photos that she said I could have copies of but we have yet to co-ordinate on that) but here is what I came away with:

I should add that we queued for two and a quarter hours for our brief meeting with Neil and narrowly missed our train home, so had to get a taxi but that just added to the adventure! And the queuing was fine because we had this great new book to read… My brother (who I gave Tim’s ticket to), T and I were all about halfway through the book by the time we got to the front of the queue and then a very nice lady offered us chocolate by way of apology for the long wait!

(I realise that I haven’t really said anything much about the interview Neil gave, mostly because I am rubbish and didn’t take any notes, but I will roll what I do remember into my review of the book. And if you want to know more, Gav of Gav Reads actually did take notes and blogged about the evening over here.)

And that was just the start of the weekend. I then headed to London, met up with Tim, very briefly checked out the new Alan Turing exhibition at the Science Museum, then went to H and G’s party, which was brilliant but I think I shall choose not to share any photos of drunken me on here. Suffice to say there was a lot of fun and then there were hangovers.

So…what have you all been up to?

Coming soon: Literary Giveaway Blog Hop (22–26 June)

June 8, 2013

It’s that time again! Judith of Leeswammes’ Blog is hosting the Literary Giveaway Blog Hop and for the third time, I am joining in the fun. On 22–26 June, book bloggers will be giving away literary books to their readers. Which is pretty awesome.

If you want to join in the giveaway, you can sign up over at Leeswammes’ Blog. If you just want to try to win some books then check back in on 22 June to see what’s on offer!

May reading round-up

May 31, 2013May 31, 2013 2 Comments

It doesn’t feel like it’s been my best reading month, but on the plus side I made it back to book club for the first time in ages and, particularly this week, I’ve had a lot of bookish conversations at work. With holiday season beginning there’s been much discussion of books to read on holiday – trashy or classic? Engrossing and involving or light and fluffy? I think we largely agreed that we avoid anything depressing but other than that tastes were pretty varied.

There was also this crazy news story today about the A-level English class who found out two weeks before their exam that they have been studying the wrong book – they’ve been studying Dracula but the exam will be on Frankenstein. This led to a fascinating conversation with an American colleague about the different texts we read for school at that age and I am completely jealous of the special project she got to do at the end of high school – choose any author and write a special report on them, based on as much biographical material (letters, diaries etc as well as memoir or biography) as can be found. I would have loved to do that; in fact I quite fancy doing it now!

But back to that news story, I do feel for those schoolkids. While two weeks may be long enough to read Frankenstein, I really found when I did my A-levels that spending a month or so studying it in detail really helped me to understand and even love the story. I still have my copy of the book from back then, full of all my study notes, some of which are more insightful than others! But I love it as a book that’s truly personal to me and whenever I pick it up I resolve to start annotating some of the books I read, but somehow I never do. Do you annotate books at all? Even just underline favourite quotes?

Anyway, back to the business at hand, what I have read this month…

Books read

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (review here)

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff (review here)

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson (review here)

The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion (review here)

Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi (review here)

A Stainless Steel Rat is Born by Harry Harrison

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

Short stories read

“Disguised” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“The colonel says I love you” by Sergei Dovlatov (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“Chef’s house” by Raymond Carver (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“The jockey” by Carson McCullers (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“The reverse bug” by Lore Segal (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“How to talk to girls at parties” by Neil Gaiman (free ebook as promo for his new novel)

“The swimmer” by John Cheever (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“Gomez Palacio” by Roberto Bolano (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

Moral panic and popular culture

May 22, 2013

*Lady Reading in an Interior* by Marguerite Gérard (c. 1795).

A while back Tim sent me a link to a research paper by sociologist Ana Vogrinčič that draws a line from the vilification of novels (and their readers) in the 18th century to the vilification of popular culture, particularly television, today. Then I read a blog post (which I can’t find now, sorry!) that asked about the books we happily talk about and the books we hide away, comparing that with the TV shows we discuss and those we don’t admit to being regular viewers of. Which got me thinking…

Moral media panics about popular culture are nothing new (as Vogrinčič’s paper shows) and by their very nature are later proved unfounded (at least on a general, wide scale; there will always be individual examples that can be dug up and repeated ad infinitum). The novel has over the last century gone from being considered low-brow and even damaging to health (yes, really) to being considered one of, if not the, best form of culture to be consumed in large quantities. In fact these days we worry about people not reading. (I’m not talking about literacy here, which is a separate matter, just about people who are capable of reading making the decision to pick up a book for leisure.)

This may be a really obvious link to draw but I found it fascinating:

“People did not stop reading novels. Nor did moral panic in any way weaken novel-writing or the distribution of novels – just as, two centuries later, it did not prevent people from watching television. On the contrary, the success of the genre and the campaign against it run parallel. And readers seem to have gone along with it…People genuinely believed that novels were harmful, but they were at once convinced that they themselves could not be affected. Or they just did not apply the threat to their own individual readings. It was (is!) the same with watching television.”

Right now, I think we’re starting to see the wane of the panic over television, though I wouldn’t call it just yet. Just as certain types of novel were vilified far longer than others (romance, especially) certain types of TV show continue to draw ire (reality TV being the obvious example) while other types, such as drama or documentary, have gone from acceptable to commendable – cultural aficionados will eagerly discuss whether The Wire or The Sopranos is the greatest TV show ever made while denying having seen a single frame of any soap opera (I’ve lost count of how often I hear someone defend their knowledge of a soap by saying “My partner/housemate/kid watches it so I’m in the room when it’s on but I don’t watch it really.”).

The other obvious example of a media panic is computer games, though I think (hope) that one too peaked a few years back and people are starting to acknowledge that games can be works of art/culture. I’m not a gamer myself but Tim is and I have spent many an hour watching him play games with carefully crafted plots and beautiful visuals. And even the games that look rubbish/have little or no plot are harmless fun and have some benefits (cognitive reasoning, stimulation of imagination, etc) just as reading “trashy” books is harmless and can have benefits (improved vocabulary, stimulation of imagination, etc). I read many a Sweet Valley High and Mills & Boon in my teens and it did me no harm that I’m aware of!

I’m struggling to see any benefit to watching reality TV, though, so maybe my argument falls apart a little at the edges. But it’s a topic I find really interesting so if you’ve spotted an article or podcast about this please let me know.

What do you think about moral panics over popular culture? Do you think it’s the same thing as cultural snobbery (high-brow versus low-brow) or are they two different but sometimes overlapping things?

You can read the research paper for yourself in the bilingual Croatian and English journal Media Research, though the poor copy editing (at least in the English version; I can’t speak for the Croatian) makes it a bit of a tough read in places.

Ana Vogrinčič 2008 The novel-reading panic in 18th century England: an outline of an early moral media panic Medijska Istraživanja 14 (2) 103–124
• web version
• PDF version

But seriously, lupus sucks

May 12, 2013

World Lupus Day

Please forgive me for being a bit introspective today, but I seem to have lupus on the mind. More than usual, that is. Not only did I completely forget that Friday was World Lupus Day (a date that I have marked every year since 2006, when I was diagnosed), but I just finished reading a book with a character who has lupus (review to follow).

It’s inescapable, lupus is my Big Bad. Yes, I did just compare my illness to an extra evil character in Buffy. It’s my prerogative. Also, it’s quite a good analogy – the lurking evil, waiting to strike when least expected, capable of much worse than it’s made me suffer so far. I can almost picture the sneaky demon enjoying the little irritations it plants for me every day while biding its time to do something much worse.

There may not be any “much worse” for me. Maybe I’ll carry on as I am now for the rest of my life, struggling a little but basically okay. If I’m lucky, the worst lupus has in store for me is the fear of what it is capable of (it’s a long scary list, I won’t repeat it here). Here’s hoping.

But it’s not just the more serious symptoms of lupus that scare me, it’s also the knowledge that it will probably never go away (a small number of patients go into long-term or even permanent remission from symptoms) that is pretty darned frightening. Perhaps that’s the wrong word, but it’s more than irritating or upsetting, it’s…well, a bunch of swears would most eloquently express it, I’d say.

One consequence of having a chronic illness is that you blame everything on it. It’s an easy excuse for all those things you put off or don’t do at all. I mean, obviously some stuff in my life is in fact caused by lupus. And most of the time it’s fine, whatever, everyone has their crap to deal with, I know that. It can just be so frustrating, the gap between what I feel that I am capable of and what I actually achieve, all those evenings I’d planned to write a short story or pick out curtains for the spare room or 101 other long-neglected tasks or hobbies, and instead I get home from work and find that emptying the dishwasher uses up the last dregs of my energy.

But then, doesn’t everyone feel like that? Maybe not the chronic fatigue part, but certainly the not getting round to stuff, the not achieving stuff. I was a teensy bit overambitious when I was young, I expected a lot from myself. And there’s always someone to compare yourself to who seems to be doing it better. Hard to avoid that one, it’s basic human nature.

This has all been a bit rambly and I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. I’m feeling sorry for myself and now I need to snap out of it and get back to being basically happy and frankly lucky to have the life that I have.

So…books, they’re nice, right?

Sunday Salon: Keeping busy

May 5, 2013 5 Comments

The Sunday Salon

I feel like I have done a lot of stuff in the last fortnight, possibly because today has been busy and isn’t over yet! But looking through my recent photos I actually do have some things to tell you all about.

Last Saturday I met up with my dear and lovely friend H in London and we went to the Natural History Museum, then to a super tasty meal at organic vegetarian Italian restaurant Amico Bio. However, I almost didn’t get to enjoy the meal because I managed to catch a touch of sunstroke despite it being only 15 °C with skies looking like this:

Last Sunday H and her husband introduced me to world of British basketball, which is not something I ever expected to be saying, but it was actually a lot of fun. It was the BBL Play-offs Final so there was a lot of spectacle and fun around the match itself. If all basketball is like that I am a total convert.

I had Monday off work so I treated myself to a trip to the British Library before heading back to Bristol. I went to the temporary crime fiction exhibition, which was fun but a bit small, and then spent hours browsing the Treasures of the British Library. That is one amazing room – First Folio Shakespeare, 1000-year-old manuscript of Beowulf, the Lindisfarne Gospels, two original copies of the Magna Carta, plus a bunch of gorgeous illuminated books from all over the world and author manuscripts from some of the greats from centuries ago up to the present day. Truly amazing. And free!

This weekend I’ve spent mostly cleaning and doing chores (including unloading three bookcases, moving them an inch to the left, and then reloading them – that was fun) but I also had a nice visit from my Mum. She came to run the Bristol 10k this morning, so earlier than I would usually be awake on a Sunday, I was out in the sunshine cheering on all the runners and trying to spot my Mum.

That picture doesn’t make clear how lovely and warm and sunny it is here today. Mum and I certainly made the most of my having a garden this weekend (though after last week I made sure I was wearing a hat and suncream).

And tomorrow’s a bank holiday! Is it a holiday weekend where you are? What are you up to (holiday or not)? Happy Sunday!

April reading round-up

April 30, 2013April 30, 2013

Although the number of books I finished this month looks pretty standard for me, most of them were pretty short and I read the bulk of Crime and Punishment in February and March, so actually it’s been a bit of a slow one. However, I did listen to a lot of short stories. I’m really enjoying this rediscovery of short stories.

Books read

Dead Air by Iain Banks (review here)

Claudine and Annie by Colette

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (read-a-long notes here)

The Books of Magic mini series by Neil Gaiman

Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (review here)

Dan Yack by Blaise Cendrars (review here)

Short stories

“The dinner party” by Joshua Ferris (New Yorker fiction podcast)

“Figures in the distance” by Jamaica Kincaid (New Yorker fiction podcast)

“Three people” by William Trevor (Guardian books podcast)

“The student’s wife” by Raymond Carver (Guardian books podcast)

“No sweetness here” by Ama Ata Aidoo (Guardian books podcast)

“The hunger artist” by Franz Kafka (Guardian books podcast)

“At Hiruharama” by Penelope Fitzgerald (Guardian books podcast)

“The Gospel According to Mark” by Jorge Luis Borges (New Yorker fiction podcast)

“Bullet in the brain” by Tobias Wolff (New Yorker fiction podcast)

“Canon Alberic’s scrapbook” by M R James (Guardian books podcast)

“A day” by William Trevor (New Yorker fiction podcast)

“The postmaster” by Rabindranath Tagore (Guardian books podcast)

“Notes from the house spirits” by Lucy Wood (Guardian books podcast)

The only other bookish thing I did this month was visit the British Library yesterday, of which more later this week. I don’t think I even ventured in a bookshop, although that’s probably best considering the size of the TBR!

Sunday Salon: Where does the time go?

April 21, 2013 5 Comments

The Sunday Salon

Three weekends ago I was patting myself on the back for having read four books in four days. Since then I have finished…drumroll please…one book. Granted, it was Crime and Punishment, but I started reading it in February so, err, yeah.

I have started reading two other books (Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt and The Books of Magic mini series by Neil Gaiman) and got another out from the library that I’m excited about (The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale) but I really feel I’ve had a bit of a fail on the finding/making time to read front. Do you ever have weeks or even months like that?

I have excuses of course. We’ve been doing some more work on the house (I know I’ve been saying that since we moved in three and a half years ago; it’s a project), which is time-consuming and only sometimes satisfying, but I keep going to look at the library (the room that’s nearest to being “finished”) and remind myself that it will be amazing when all of the house looks that good. Well, okay, it’ll never all look that good unless we line every room with books and I don’t have that many books. Not yet.

We’re also trying when possible to take advantage of the lovely spring weather that has finally arrived, especially if we can enjoy it with friends. Yesterday we took a boat trip around Bristol Harbour and then hung out in the park. After a few recent speed walks through the park en route to Screwfix it was nice to be the ones stopping and enjoying the park for once!

So I was wondering: what do you do if you notice you’re not getting much time to read? Do you try to change something in your routine to make time? Do you put it down to the book you’re reading not being gripping enough and switch to something else? Or do you just ride it out? Any advice appreciated, because I do not like this pattern!