Fun bookish stuff

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book-map

I was looking for a book recommendations tool online and found some excellent stuff. The Lovereading Google Maps Book Mash-up and the Mappit Global Book Map are both user-generated maps of book settings. The content varies widely but they’re both fun to explore and could be useful if you fancy recreating my recent attempts to list authors from my home town and region.

However, what I was really looking for was a place to type in the names of authors I know a friend likes and get recommendations of similar authors. And that’s just what the Gnooks Map of Literature is. I have had a lot of fun playing with this. Again, it’s user-generated so there are some spelling errors (which you can fix if you see them) but the more people who contribute, the better the data that comes out of it, so do go have a look at the Suggestions tool to help build the Gnod database.

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Pink Mist

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Bristol Old Vic
19 February 2016

One of my Christmas presents from Tim was tickets to the play Pink Mist at Bristol Old Vic, which I knew nothing about except that it’s all in verse and was first performed last year. So it’s modern and experimental but in other ways classical, harking back even as far as ancient Greek theatre. Because this is the story of three young men – boys, really, the main character Arthur corrects himself – who go to war.

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There were silences as murmurous as sound

beautiful-damnedThe Beautiful and Damned
by F Scott Fitzgerald

I love the way Fitzgerald writes, but his books sure are depressing. This book lives up to the title and to its reputation as Fitzgerald’s most pessimistic work. I started the book wondering why it’s so long since I last read Fitzgerald but by the end I’d decided long breaks in-between are necessary for my sanity.

It is the story of Anthony and Gloria. They are the young and the beautiful, the idle rich. Anthony is expecting to inherit billions on the death of his grandfather, so he spends his allowance frivolously on himself, his friends, girls. Gloria dates eligible bachelor after eligible bachelor, sometimes even getting engaged, but never staying with one man for long enough to fall in love. They of course fall for each other, but is it really love or is it a shared appreciation for the same carefree lifestyle?

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My literary heritage: Forest of Dean

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Mr blue sky

Last week I blogged about authors from my home town of Coleford. But when people ask where I’m from I don’t say Coleford, I say the wider district of the Forest of Dean. Yes, that’s partly because they’re more likely to have heard of it, but not much more likely. I identify with the lakes and woodland of the Forest more than being from a small town. Living in a city now, I miss trees; I don’t miss those same old four pubs and no shops being open after 5 pm. The Forest of Dean is truly beautiful and while it has an industrial past, these days the economy is mostly tourism and leisure, so I can see why writers might move there. Here are some Forest writers to add to the list from Coleford.

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Recent reads: winter

Work has been crazy busy and while I have been able to find time to read, I have not been keeping notes or thinking about writing reviews while I read. So here’s some very brief thoughts.

Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty islands I have not visited and never will
by Judith Schalansky
translated from German by Christine Lo

atlas of remote islands

This might just be the most beautiful book ever made. Judith Schalansky was raised in East Germany, and in her early childhood it looked like she would never be able to travel, so maps and atlases held a fascination for her. She has created the most gorgeous object here – every detail is considered, functional, exquisite – typography, art, infographic, end papers, edging.

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My literary heritage: Coleford

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Inspired by Louise of Lone Star on a Lark I have been researching authors from my home town. I’ve looked before at books set in Bristol, but this is my adopted home, not where my roots are. So what about my original home of Coleford, Gloucestershire?

Men of Iron and Steel

Now, Coleford is a pretty small place, a country market town of 8000 people, and a good third of those have arrived during my lifetime, so you might not expect there to be many authors with links to it. But, partly thanks to a local literary culture cultivated by the (now sadly closed) Forest Bookshop, Coleford is a bit of a writers’ hotspot.

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We find ourselves through the process of escaping

reasons-to-stay-aliveReasons to Stay Alive
by Matt Haig

I had come across some very smart, funny, insightful blog posts by Haig that had put him on my to-read list, so when I saw that he was going to be at Toppings bookshop in Bath, I suggested to Tim that he might want to buy me tickets to the event. I am a helpful gift-receiver that way.

This book is a few things at once – it’s part memoir, part essay, part self-help – with depression as its subject. Haig said that the reader he had in mind was himself aged 25 having his first terrifying experience of depression and anxiety. So the chapters are short, the factual bits are never condescending, the literary quotes on the topic are accessible; it’s all very readable.

But most importantly, the trajectory of the book is upward. There is no “before” – the story starts at Haig’s rock bottom, aged 25 and not understanding at all what was happening to him. From there it is largely, though not entirely, chronological so that we end with Haig’s current state, which is that of course he still has depression but he has lots of ways to deal with it, he knows the bad times pass, and he is even thankful in some ways for having depression – for one, it made him a writer.

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January reading round-up

Correggio by Corrado Ricci, 1896.
Correggio by Corrado Ricci, 1896.

It’s been a pretty eclectic month, reading-wise. There’s been short stories, novels, poetry, work in translation, graphic-novel memoir and more non-fiction of very different kinds. Which I think is an excellent start for a new year.

I did break my book-buying rule very slightly last week, but as Tim bought me tickets to see author Matt Haig as a Christmas present it would have been rude not to buy the book! Haig was a great speaker – warm, funny, intelligent and honest – and I’ve added his older books to my wishlist. I’ve already read the book he was speaking about, Reasons to Stay Alive, and thought it completely brilliant. (Review will follow soon.) And I’ve been to bookshops no less than four times, so only buying one book for myself is frankly amazing, if I do say so myself.

In book-relatedness, I have watched the films of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (great, possibly better than the book, though equally hard to follow to begin with); Push (which is fun if ridiculous and has a comic-book mini-series prequel); and Limitless (pretty good despite the annoying premise and based on the book The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn).

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Lovers communicate not inside sentences but between them

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post-birthday-worldThe Post-Birthday World
by Lionel Shriver

I have to try very hard to separate the prose of this book from its politics – and those of its author – because I quite liked the book but it was decidedly tainted for me by the occasional political comment. There was one short section of what can only be described as lies about the NHS that got me so mad I very seriously considered stopping reading then and there, despite it being more than 400 pages in.

Politics aside, this is an enjoyable enough, reasonably well written story that kept me interested and got me looking at my own life through a new filter, which is generally a good sign. I don’t find its central conceit as mindblowingly original as those reviewers quoted on the cover (it is, after all, straight out of Sliding Doors, a film I’ve watched many many times) but it is done well and I like that Shriver didn’t make obvious choices but kept it subtle.

Irina and Lawrence are an American ex-pat couple living a comfortable, if bland, life together in London. After nine years, and now in their 40s, they are very much set in their ways and their future seems obvious. But one night, Irina finds herself unexpectedly attracted to another man almost the opposite of Lawrence. Whether or not she kisses Ramsey is the question on which the rest of the book turns – because both answers are given, with two stories told from that point on.

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Slang depends entirely upon its adoption by the ignorant

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american languageThe American Language
by H L Mencken

I have had some interesting conversations in recent weeks when I told people I was a reading a book from 1919 about American English. I know that it’s an odd choice of reading matter. It’s because I was looking for older titles from the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge on Project Gutenberg, which didn’t have either of the Mencken titles on the list but did have a dozen others, including this one. I didn’t expect to read more than the first chapter or so, but found it strangely enticing.

This is a difficult book to categorise. It’s part reference book, part textbook, part history, part sociology. Mencken combines his own knowledge of etymology and philology with a huge array of sources in order to cover the rather large question of how the American language evolved into its then-current state.

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