Tag: reading

This place will lend you books for free

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The Library Book
edited by Rebecca Gray

This collection of essays, musings and stories about public libraries has been compiled in support of the Reading Agency‘s library programmes. Which is definitely a cause I can get behind. They are all big names, from Zadie Smith to Alan Bennett to Susan Hill to Stephen Fry, but sadly the levels of enthusiasm and quality are a little variable.

I think part of the problem is that several of the essays cover the same ground: memories of the writer’s first library followed by a vociferous attack on the idea of closing any of them. Some writers are more practical, looking at how libraries and librarians can change with the times. Seth Godin makes a good case for the necessity of the librarian as gatekeeper of information. Bella Bathurst talks about libraries as places where people can mix, can make connections, can interact, whoever they are.

Other writers use fiction, including a very nice extract from China Miéville’s novel Un Lun Dun (though I can’t help think that’s cheating, when everyone else seems to have written their contribution specially). And I like that not all of the writers are novelists. There are also several journalists and, my personal favourite, Nicky Wire, whose piece is titled “If you tolerate this…” and discusses (among other things) the background behind that great Manic Street Preachers lyric “Libraries gave us power”.

This book is certainly a conversation-starter. Though my position on public libraries was never in dispute, I have learned more about the potential arguments against spending public money on them and gained many weapons in the arsenal against such attacks.

I love libraries. To me, these days, they share much in common with bookshops, in that I’m stepping into a room crammed full of books and I get to take some home with me. But then these days I can afford to buy enough books to keep up with how much I read. When I was a child I read so, so much more (and admittedly the books were smaller, generally) and neither I nor my parents could have afforded that without the local library. But libraries are about more than just reading. They are community centres. They are public access to the internet. They are free access to information. They are equal access to culture. They are great.

Published 2012 by Profile Books.

The Sunday Salon: All systems go

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The Sunday Salon

After last weekend‘s perfect mix of activity and downtime, it feels like life has switched up a gear. Evenings and weekends are full of plans, with many more things needing to be slotted in – when will I find time to read?

One thing I did this week was finally get my latest film processed. I took most of it on our holiday in Wales and I’m pleased with how some of the shots came out, though the scans don’t do them justice. We must find a way to display more photos in our house!

Look up

I haven’t been feeling 100% (it happens) so I have been tempted on getting home from work to just stare at the TV rather than read. Which makes sense when my brain is frazzled but the rest of the time I think reading actually makes me feel a lot better than even my favourite TV shows could. What about you – do you read when you feel unwell?

I also went to the zoo with Tim and a couple of friends. We go to the zoo a lot and always have a good time. Bristol Zoo is very good about breeding and conservation programmes and doesn’t have many large animals so I don’t feel animal lover guilt and can just enjoy the cute animals.

Baby turtles

The Sunday Salon: Day of chocolate

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The Sunday Salon

Ah, four-day weekend, piles of chocolate, plenty of time with my books. What could be better? Oh, and I threw in a bit more culture with a trip to the theatre just for good measure.

After spending Good Friday being thoroughly lazy reading and watching films, yesterday my Dad and brother came to visit and get me out of the house! We went to see the Bristol Old Vic’s excellent Pinter/Beckett double bill A Kind of Alaska/Krapp’s Last Tape. I didn’t know anything about either play but I figured with writers like those you can’t go wrong. Glad to say it was a brilliant show. Both plays are meditations on ageing, in different ways. Both had touches of humour but were overall contemplative pieces. The small cast (three in the first play, one in the second) was fantastic and the Old Vic’s little Studio space was ideally suited.

Yummy churros

Today, friends told me there was a chocolate fair being held in the city centre so we headed down there and enjoyed a few free samples before pigging out on churros and hot chocolate.

While we were in the area, we had a quick browse of the weekly books, arts and crafts market on the harbourside, where obviously I could not help myself buying a couple of books (really I am proud it was just two. I was sorely tempted to pick up handfuls of secondhand PG Wodehouse). My TBR will never get smaller, will it?

Browsing

And there’s still a day and a half stretching out before me with little to do other than read and sleep. Perfect.

The joy of reading

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The Complete Polysyllabic Spree
by Nick Hornby

This book looked and sounded like fun with a literary bent, which was exactly what I needed after a few non-absorbing reads in a row.

This is a compilation of Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns that he wrote for the literary magazine Believer from 2003 to 2006. Hornby is funny and the magazine had a policy of positivity so the result is a real delight to read.

Hornby’s novels probably fall into the more readable end of literary fiction so it is perhaps no surprise that that is where his own reading tastes lie. He loves Dickens but has little patience for the vaguer, plotless end of literary fiction so to keep in line with the Believer‘s no-negativity clause he creates the mythical Polysyllabic Spree, the “twelve [or 100, or 64, depending on the column] rather eerie young men and women…all dressed in white robes and smiling maniacally” who he claims berate him for any bad reviews, which makes for some hilarity.

But most of the pleasure comes from Hornby’s frank discussions of how he chooses what he reads, how life intrudes on his reading, and sharing his great joy in reading what he wants to read. He despairs of literary snobbery, of those who look down on others for reading Dan Brown or Mills & Boon. He wisely and wittily describes his reads, mostly biographies, comedy and history. He is open about the sources of his books – his publisher, friends and family send him proof copies, but he is also an insatiable book buyer, frequenting book shops, new and used, whenever he can.

Believer is published by McSweeney’s, so a lot of the names involved are writers who are familiar to me – Vendela Vida, for instance – and, brilliantly, the internet tells me that Hornby’s column was recently reinstated. I might just have to become a subscriber!

First published by Viking 2006.

2011 in numbers

This was my first full year of book blogging so I thought I’d take a look over what I’ve done.

According to Goodreads I have read 101 books this year (my aim was 100, so yay!) but I have only published 77 reviews, so goodness knows what happened there (actually, I do have a backlog of 10 or so reviews that I am saving to fill the gaps when I start the new year with a couple of big chunksters). Of those 77, one was an audio book and one was a “novelette”.

But what was the gender breakdown? Of the books reviewed, 42 were by men and 35 by women (actually, two were multi-author collections so I have taken the gender of the editor in those cases). As I mentioned here, 44% of books are written by women so my 45% of reviews being of books by women just about scrapes in there.

How international was my reading? It would take some research to figure out where every author lives/lived but a quick count of translations read shows just 13. That doesn’t include foreign (by which I mean non-US, non-UK) authors writing in English, such as Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. But it’s still something to work on.

All of which I find fascinating and I think I might just start a spreadsheet for the new year (which I’ve seen a few other book bloggers do). I can include nationality, gender and language of author, plus maybe gender of main character? Anything else?

Most importantly, I have enjoyed the majority of the books I have read and look forward to another year of blogging about my reads. Happy New Year everyone!

Still fighting

I am a bit behind on my reading (and indeed everything else) thanks to a nasty bout of food poisoning this week. I’m recovering now but still feeling a tad fragile, like this butterfly.

Still fighting

I’m in Devon for some recuperating with a good friend and the sea air and a giant stack of books. Hopefully I’ll return feeling healthier.

Simple pleasures, elegantly phrased

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid
by Virginia Woolf

This collection of essays in the Penguin Great Ideas series were originally published between 1925 and 1942 (a few being from a posthumous collection). I think I am growing to prefer Woolf’s essays to her fiction, which is probably some kind of heresy in a literature graduate, but these are truly beautiful pieces of writing.

The majority of these essays are about books, though there are a couple about the pleasures of walking in London, plus the titular essay which is literally what it says, though of course in Woolf’s inimitable style, full of imagination and passion and ideals. Woolf writes about how men are by nature inclined to war, and how women must help them to rise above such base instinct. Her politics creep in as she wonders whether, with more women in government and other high positions, there would be any war.

It is interesting to read an essay from the 1920s or 1930s pondering whether the fiction of the time stands up to the classics of the past, seeing what names are mentioned and whether they mean anything to me now, so many years later. Woolf suggests what will last will be “a few poems by Mr Yeats, by Mr Davies, by Mr de la Mere” (Yeats and de la Mere, yes, but Davies? I’m not sure who she means) and “Mr Lawrence, of course, has moments of greatness but hours of something very different” (assuming she means D H Lawrence then that is indeed one critics continue to argue over the “greatness” of) and “Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster”, which may be my favourite opinion of that book!

There are several essays here in a slim little volume; each one short and self-contained. Woolf has a point to make but occasionally seems to change her mind halfway through, before concluding that the original question in fact has no clearcut answer. She is concise, intelligent and informed but her prose is still beautiful:

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit…?”

I do not always agree with Woolf’s arguments or conclusions. For instance, in “The art of biography” she states that biography was a late-18th century invention (wrong! though there was a major resurgence in the form at that time) and that it is a mistake to combine facts with fiction or speculation (I actually think this can lead to some remarkable writing, as long as it is made plain to the reader that it isn’t a straightforward history). But she argues her case so well that I don’t mind disagreeing.

The collection ends with “How should one read a book?”, in which Woolf says that there is no simple answer to that question, and then goes on to talk around the subject in what is, more than anything, a treatise on the joy of reading. I was intrigued by her comment about reading poetry, because I know a lot of avid readers avoid it – “the time to read poetry [is] when we are almost able to write it”. She talks about judging a book after having read it, whether we should be kind or harsh, and how the reader’s emotional response signifies a difference between them and the critic:

“Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics…to decide the question of the book’s absolute value for us? Yet how impossible!…there is always a demon in us who whispers ‘I hate, I love’, and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate…”

I will definitely be looking out for more Woolf essay collections. Any recommendations?

This selection first published in 2009 by Penguin Books.

Comfort reading

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Crumpets and milk

One of my strongest sensory memories is the smell/taste of buttered crumpets, which takes me back to being very young (primary school) and sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen eating a snack while listening to an audiobook on cassette. My favourite audiobook was The Secret Garden and, even now, certain words (“wuthering” and “daffydowndilly” come to mind) can only be said in the voices I remember from that tape, with their Yorkshire lilt.

The Secret Garden

I don’t own a cassette player anymore, but I do still have that cassette because I couldn’t bear to throw it away. Thankfully I have the actual book too, for times when I really need comfort in my reading. (Like now – can you tell I’m feeling a bit lupusy? Yes, it’s a word.)

One likes to read

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The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett

This is a brilliantly funny, astute, thought-provoking book that is sadly small enough to read in one short sitting. I immediately added a whole bunch of Bennett books to my wishlist (any advice on which to read next appreciated).

The “uncommon reader” of the title is the Queen, who has never had much time for reading, but on bumping into a travelling library in the grounds of Buckingham Palace takes out a book, initially to be polite. Politeness turns to genuine interest, tempered by a keen awareness that she doesn’t know much about books besides having met most of their authors. So she promotes kitchen hand Norman, the library van’s only regular customer, to be her amanuensis and literary adviser. As her passion for reading grows, she becomes distracted from, and then bored by, her royal duties, and her staff conspire to cure her of this bad habit.

The first half of this book is acutely observed, laugh-out-loud funny, with the character of the Queen being charming, intelligent and completely believable. There is absolutely no doubt that this is Queen Elizabeth II and not some nameless dateless monarch. From the corgis to the extended family to the list of prime ministers she has worked with, this is undoubtedly our very own Queen. And Bennett has made her initially very likeable:

“‘Do you know,’ she said one evening as they were reading in her study, ‘do you know the area in which one would truly excel?’
‘No, ma’am?’
‘The pub quiz. One has been everywhere and though one might have difficulty with pop music and some sport, when it comes to the capital of Zimbabwe, say, or the principal exports of New South Wales, I have all that at my fingertips.’
‘And I could do the pop,’ said Norman.
‘Yes,’ said the Queen. ‘We would make a good team. Ah well. The road not travelled.'”

In the second half of the book, the tone shifts a little. The emphasis is a little less overtly comedic and more seriously looks at how reading can change a person, both in perhaps obvious ways such as informing and widening horizons, and in less obvious ways – increased observation of details, reduced tolerance for the status quo, an appearance of being constantly distracted – that in some people might not be a problem, in fact might be welcomed, but in the Queen are seen as troublesome and even dangerous.

I was a little sad about the reduced comedy but still greatly entertained and impressed by how smartly Bennett envisaged this scenario and how various people might react. The denouement is fantastic, though I’ll admit it did change my mind about making this book the topic of any conversation I may ever get to have with the actual real-life Queen.

First published in 2006 in the London Review of Books.
Published as a book by Faber in 2007.