366days, 366books

February 29 - The Crucible, by Arthur Miller

2012-02-29T00:00:00.000Z

A girl is accused during the Salem Witch Trials (based on an engraving by Howard Pyle).

The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. February 29, 1692 is often seen as the start of the trials, as on that date the first arrest warrants were issued.

More than 200 people were accused of witchcraft - over 20 of these would be executed.

Since then, the story of the trials has become synonymous with paranoia and injustice, and has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, and false accusations.

Perhaps the most famous example of the tale’s use in popular culture is Arthur Miller’s 1952 play The Crucible, which is a dramatization of the trials, meant as an allegory of McCarthyism, when the US Government blacklisted accused communists.

The trials are an absolutely fascinating story from history, and Miller’s is one of the great pieces of 20th century art - quite a combo.

February 28 - The Jungle, By Upton Sinclair

2012-02-28T00:00:00.000Z

One of my favourite books, the very important and very influential The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, was first published on this date, February 28, in 1906.

I'll use some blurb as I’m desperate to turn in for the night!

Sinclair wrote the novel with the intention of portraying the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion of the book pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early 20th century, and the book is now often interpreted and taught as a journalist's exposure of the poor health conditions in this industry. The novel depicts in harsh tones poverty, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness prevalent among the working class, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted corruption on the part of those in power. Sinclair's observations of the state of turn-of-the-twentieth-century labour were placed front and centre for the American public to see, suggesting that something needed to be changed to get rid of American wage slavery.

The novel was first published in serial form in 1905 in the socialist Appeal to Reason. It was based on undercover work done in 1904: Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information while working incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards at the behest of the magazine's publishers. He then started looking for a publisher who would be willing to print it in book form. After five rejections by publishers who found it too shocking for publication, he funded the first printing himself. A shortened version of the novel was published by Doubleday, Page & Company on February 28, 1906 and has been in print ever since.

February 27 - This Unimportant Morning, by Lawrence Durrell

2012-02-27T00:00:00.000Z

Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell was born 100years ago today.

For book of the day, I nearly went for his most famous work, The Alexandria Quartet - a book I’ve kinda wanted to read for some time, but which I’ve always managed to put off starting (for me, it looks interesting, but rather daunting in size, style, and subject).

Instead, I’ll leave you for today with one of his poems.

This Unimportant Morning

This unimportant morning
Something goes singing where
The capes turn over on their sides
And the warm Adriatic rides
Her blue and sun washing
At the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs.

Day rings in the higher airs
Pure with cicadas, and slowing
Like a pulse to smoke from farms,

Extinguished in the exhausted earth,
Unclenching like a fist and going.

Trees fume, cool, pour - and overflowing
Unstretch the feathers of birds and shake
Carpets from windows, brush with dew
The up-and-doing: and young lovers now
Their little resurrections make.

And now lightly to kiss all whom sleep
Stitched up - and wake, my darling, wake.
The impatient Boatman has been waiting
Under the house, his long oars folded up
Like wings in waiting on the darkling lake.

And for those of you that want more Durrell, the Durrell 2012 website is good and has info on centenary-related events.

February 26 - The Book of Illusions, by Paul Auster

2012-02-26T00:00:00.000Z

Tonight is Oscar night. I’ve already done a post about the current book-to-award-winning-film trend. So, instead, today I’m thinking about books that revolve around film, in one way or another.

For book of the day, I’m picking The Book of Illusions, by one of my favourite authors, Paul Auster. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read, and one that has film running through its veins. This is no surprise really, as Auster clearly knows and loves film a great deal. This interest comes across in the style and content of his books. Auster also has a number of film credits in his CV, both as a writer and as a director.

A little blurb on The Book of Illusions, a book I’d recommend to anyone (although, if you only read one Auster book, it has to be the magnificent and very strange New York Trilogy):

"After losing his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in grief. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann, and remembers how to laugh... Zimmer's obsession with Mann drives him to publish a study of his work; whereupon he receives a letter postmarked New Mexico, supposedly written by Mann's wife, and inviting him to visit the great Mann himself. Can Hector Mann be alive?"

February 25 - The Secret Speech, by Tom Rob Smith

2012-02-25T00:00:00.000Z

On the Personality Cult and its Consequences was a speech, critical of Joseph Stalin, made on February 25, 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It is more commonly known as the Secret Speech.

In the speech, Khrushchev was highly critical of actions taken by the regime of Joseph Stalin, and the cult of personality that Stalin had created for himself during rule.

The speech was a landmark moment in Russia’s 20th century. “The secret speech that changed world history”, as the Guardian says. Some claims even say that the speech, and its criticisms of Stalin, caused such shock to the audience that some of those present suffered heart attacks, and others later committed suicide.

The Secret Speech is the title and centrepiece for a book by Tom Rob Smith. Smith has three books that deal with twentieth century Russia, particularly looking at the impact of Stalin’s rule. The Secret Speech uses the story of hero, and former secret-policeman, Leo Stepanovich Demidov to explore the internal conflict that citizens felt under Stalin's reign, and to act as a microcosm for the country's social revolution.

Not as good, and certainly not as well received, as Smith’s earlier Child 44, this is still worth seeking out for anyone that wants a breathless read into mid-century Russia.

February 24 - The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi

2012-02-24T00:00:00.000Z

Today sees the start of an interesting looking two-day conference at the University of Roehampton on the work of Hanif Kureishi.

Hanif is a writer who has always interested me, as his work really engages with the big issues of the day. His regular themes include race, immigration, class, politics, rebellion and sexuality.

His screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette is perhaps his most famous work, but as book of the day I’ll go for The Buddha of Suburbia, which won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. The Buddha of Suburbia is said to be very autobiographical. It follows the teenager Karim who is desperate to escape suburbia and search out new experiences in 1970s London.

A great read, and a great way of finding out about a certain time and a certain place in England’s history.

For some further info on Hanif and the conference, I’ll steal a little blurb:

“Hanif Kureishi is one of the most exciting and provocative writers of his generation. He has written across many different genres and is a key, and often controversial, critic of our contemporary culture; recently claiming that ‘We’re all mixed-race now.’ This conference presents a unique opportunity to reflect on the significance of Kureishi’s achievements, bringing together the foremost Kureishi scholars, critics working on modern and contemporary fiction and Hanif Kureishi himself.”

February 23 - The White Guard, by Mikhail Bulgakov

2012-02-23T00:00:00.000Z

Today it is Defender of the Fatherland Day - a rather coolly named holiday observed in Russia and many other countries of the former Soviet Union.

The holiday marks the date in 1918 during the Russian Civil War when the first mass draft into the Red Army occurred. The holiday was originally named Red Army Day, but the title changed following the fall of the Soviet Union. The holiday celebrates people who are serving in, or have served, the Russian Armed Forces.

Unsurprisingly, there is a long list of war-themed Russian literature. The book I’ll settle on for today is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard.

Set in Ukraine, beginning in late 1918, the novel concerns the fate of the Turbin family as the various armies of the Russian Civil War fight over the city of Kiev. The book is very different in feel to his most famous work The Master and Margarita, but it stands up as a classic in its own right. Worth searching out…when looking for your second Bulgakov read.

February 22 - Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

2012-02-22T00:00:00.000Z

I was struggling for a historical date-related post today, so I’ve decided to make this the first of what I expect will become a weekly round-up of the most interesting things I’ve recently come across on bookblogs and sites.

I’ll start by encouraging others to join me in Infinite Zombies’s upcoming Gravity’s Rainbow read-a-long. I’ve really liked a few of Pynchon’s books, but this one has proved just too dense and difficult for me. Hopefully, this group-read, with helping hands and a WTF? Section, will guide me through the epic.

I’m insanely jealous about A Penguin A Week’s holiday touring around Europe’s bookshops searching out old Penguins - 170 new ones bought by the time I wrote this.

There has been a lot of Dickens around recently, tying in with his 200th birthday. I can’t say I know his work well, but it’s very interesting reading about the influence he has had on literature. WinstonsDad did a nice little post about his influence here.

Pretty much everything on the Favorwire website is worth looking at. As someone who’s not particularly romantic and who always likes to read a contrary opinion, I liked their Valentine’s Day list of books that will change the way you think about love. I’ll take one of their books as my book of the day (I hope that's relevant enough to today, for you!). As Flavorwire say,

There are countless novels about love that are sure to shake you up, but in our opinion, none of them beats Madame Bovary. Where romance and restlessness and ambition and vanity and ennui combine, there is Emma Bovary — a character who’s unforgivable, courageous, immoderate, empathetic, and just downright pathetic at the same time. Flaubert’s gorgeous, sparklingly clear prose make it impossible not to identify with one of literature’s most famous adulterers, while at the same time despising her for the havoc she wreaks on her family. (We recommend Lydia Davis’ 2010 translation.)

I’d love to see these “Rare 19th Century books containing photos of habitual criminals that are among archives being restored in north Wales.” Old photos are so much better than new ones, I think!

February 21 - The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, by John Cheever

2012-02-21T00:00:00.001Z

On February 21, 1925, the first edition of The New Yorker was published, under the stewardship of Harold Ross. It would be hard to exaggerate the impact and influence the magazine would go on to have on the US literary scene.

Amongst much other work, the magazine has showcased investigative journalism (such as John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Seymour Hirsch’s piece on Abu Ghraib), whimsy (such as James Thurber), film criticism (most famously Pauline Kael), and sports writing.

But perhaps the short story is the literary offering most closely associated with the magazine, particularly the stories of mid-century realist authors such as Irwin Shaw, Salinger, O’Hara, Updike and Cheever.

As my book of the day, I’ll pick the short story collection The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, made up of 16 of Cheever’s stories for the New Yorker. It includes Cheever’s most famous, and very odd, short story The Swimmer. I’m a big fan of Cheever, and I’d recommend this collection, or any of his others, to anyone.

First issue's cover with dandy Eustace Tilley, created by Rea Irvin. The image, or a variation of it, appears on the cover of The New Yorker with every anniversary issue.

February 20 - Gonzo: a Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson, by Will Bingley

2012-02-20T00:00:00.000Z

On February 20, 2005, Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide by gunshot. I must admit, I’m not a massive fan of his work (it’s all just a bit too over-the-top and pleased with itself, for me), but it would be wrong to ignore the huge influence his Gonzo style has had on journalism, and popular culture in general. I am a fan of graphic novel publishers SelfMadeHero, so rather than choosing one of his books, I’ll mark this date by recommending Gonzo: a Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson, by Will Bingley. A little of the book’s blurb reads:

The great American iconoclast, the great American outlaw, the great American hedonist. However you choose to view him, Thompson remains the high water mark for social commentators worldwide, and a truly fearless champion of individual liberties. This is his story.

A great read for fans of Thompson, and for those just wanting to understand his influence and appeal.

February 19 - Mysteries, by Knut Hamsun

2012-02-19T00:00:00.001Z

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun died sixty years ago today.

Hamsun is considered to be "one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years". He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, influencing authors including Thomas Mann, Kafka, Maxim Gorky, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller and Hermann Hesse.

Isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun "the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun". Ernest Hemingway stated that "Hamsun taught me to write". Charles Bukowski called him the greatest writer to have ever lived.

Alongside such names, I humbly place myself as another big fan of Hamsun’s work (if not him), particularly his most famous novel Hunger, a quite stunning book about a young writer's descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty. I think I’ll save that book for a longer post later in the year.

So, for my book of the day, I’ll go for his Modernist novel Mysteries, in which a small Norwegian coastal town is shaken by the arrival of eccentric stranger who proceeds to shock, bewilder, and beguile its bourgeoisie inhabitants with his bizarre behaviour, feverish rants, and uncompromising self-revelations. A great read.

While his work is revered, Hamsun’s support for Hitler and the Nazis means that he is impossible to like, and he remains a much contested figure. As one biographer put it “We can’t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years ... That’s our Hamsun trauma. He’s a ghost that won’t stay in the grave.”

If you’re ever in Norway, I suggest the magnificent looking Hamsun Centre may be a good place to visit. I’m certainly keen to go if I ever get the chance. The Guardian did a good piece on it here.

February 18 - Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

2012-02-18T00:00:00.001Z

February 18, 1975, was the date of Chinua Achebe’s infamous lecture at the University of Massachusetts in which he called Joseph Conrad “a bloody racist” and asserted that Heart of Darkness dehumanises Africans. For Achebe, in the book, Africa is rendered as "the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization", "a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest."

This was one of the most important literary criticisms made in the twentieth century. It opened up huge debates that still rage today about the merit of the book, representation, author versus narrator, literary versus political merit, Conrad’s legacy, what an author’s responsibilities are, and, in a wider sense, how a book should be read and judged.

I admit, I feel a little unsure on my ground on all this. I absolutely love much of Conrad’s work (Under Western Eyes would make my top 10 books ever), and I think Heart of Darkness is itself a book about myth and unreliable storytelling. However, I’d like to think I’m aware enough to realise the harm that can come from representations such as those found in the book. And I’d certainly agree that Conrad’s book (whether the author or the narrator) is guilty of lazy, harmful stereotyping that was all too common in his day.

Achebe’s lecture is perhaps most useful not as a way of judging Conrad’s worth, but as a way of reading books. Achebe’s lecture teaches us that books can, and should, be viewed not just on their literary merit, but on what that book represents - what it offers a political and social culture, if that makes sense.

Achebe himself explains better, saying that Conrad was not himself responsible for the xenophobic “image of Africa” that appears in Heart of Darkness, but that his novel continues to perpetuate the damaging stereotypes of black people by its inclusion in the literary canon of Western Society.

Achebe says: “I never said at any point that you should stop attaching artistic merit to Heart of Darkness; if you want to you can. There are all kinds of sophisticated readings of Heart of Darkness, and there are some people who will not be persuaded there is anything wrong with it. But all that I'm really demanding, I'm not simply putting it, I'm demanding that my reading stand beside these other readings... Although he's writing good sentences, he's also writing about a people, and their life. And he says about these people that they are rudimentary souls... The Africans are the rudimentaries, and then on top are the good whites. Now I don't accept that, as a basis for... As a basis for anything.”

February 17 - War and Peace, by Tolstoy

2012-02-17T00:00:00.000Z

The first edition of Newsweek: Feb 17, 1933.

Newsweek's number 1 book of all time

The hugely influential US magazine Newsweek was first published on this date, February 17, in 1933.

In June 2009, Newsweek published its much-talked-about-in-bookblog-land Meta-List of the Top 100 Books of all time. The list was compiled by crunching together a whole load of other lists with the aim of making it a little more objective than the usual Best-Ofs.

I do love looking at lists like this, even if, obviously, the whole idea of them is a little ridiculous, so I'm using today's date as a tenous link to post it up here. Below is the list Newsweek came up with, and I’ll make its unsurprising number one my book of the day.

I won’t embarrass myself by telling you how many I haven’t read. And I won’t embarrass myself by telling you how many of them I haven’t even heard of.

Newsweek top 100, with some Newsweek commentary on it here.

War and Peace by Tolstoy
1984 by Orwell
Ulysses by Joyce
Lolita by Nabokov
The Sound and The Fury by Faulkner
Invisible Man by Ellison
To The Lighthouse by Woolf
The Illiad and the Odyssey by Homer
Pride and Prejudice by Austen
Divine Comedy by Alighieri
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Gulliver's Travels by Swift
Middlemarch by Eliot
Things Fall Abart by Achebe
The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
Gone with the Wind by Mitchell
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez
The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
Catch-22 by Heller
Beloved by Morrison
The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck
Midnight's Children by Rushdie
Brave New World by Huxley
Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf
Native Son by Wright
Democracy in America by Tocqueville
On the Origin of Species by Darwin
The Histories by Herodotus
The Social Contract by Rousseau
Das Kapital by Marx
The Prince by Machiavelli
Confessions by St. Augustine
Leviathan by Hobbes
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien
Winnie-the-Pooh by Milne
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by Lewis
A Passage to India by Forster
On the Road by Kerouac
To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee
The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version
A Clockwork Orange by Burgess
Light in August by Faulkner
The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois
Wide Sargasso Sea by Rhys
Madame Bovary by Flaubert
Paradise Lost by Milton
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
Hamlet by Shakespeare
King Lear by Shakespeare
Othello by Shakespeare
Sonnets by Shakespeare
Leaves of Grass by Whitman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain
Kim by Kipling
Frankenstein by Shelley
Song of Soloman by Morrison
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Kesey
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway
Slaugherhouse-Five by Vonnegut
Animal Farm by Orwell
Lord of the Flies by Golding
In Cold Blood by Capote
The Golden Notebook by Lessing
Remembrance of Things Past by Proust
The Big Sleep by Chandler
As I Lay Dying by Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway
I, Claudius by Graves
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by McCullers
Sons and Lovers by Lawrence
All the King's Men by Warren
Go Tell it on the Mountain by Warren
Charlotte's Web by White
Heart of Darkness by Conrad
Night by Wiesel
Rabbit, Run by Updike
The Age of Innocence by Wharton
Portney's Complaint by Roth
An American Tragedy by Dreiser
The Day of the Locust by West
Tropic of Cancer by Miller
The Maltese Falcon by Hammett
His Dark Materials by Pullman
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Cather
The Interpretation of Dreams by Freud
The Education of Henry Adams by Adams
Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
The Varieties of Religious Experience by James
Brideshead Revisted by Waugh
Silent Spring by Carson
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by Keynes
Lord Jim by Conrad
Goodbye to All That by Graves
The Affluent Society by Galbraith
The Wind in the Willows by Grahame
The Autobiograhy of Malcom X
Eminent Victorians by Strachey
The Color Purple by Walker
The Second World War by Churchill

February 16 - Castro, by Reinhard Kleist

2012-02-16T00:00:00.000Z

On this date, February 16, in 1959, Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro became the country's youngest ever premier. At the age of 32, he was sworn in as Prime Minister in the Cabinet Room of the Presidential Palace in Havana.

Castro had led the resistance against the seven-year military rule of President Batista. Castro commanded the 26 July Army, a guerrilla force that drove the old regime into exile on New Year's Day of that year. But February 16 was the first time he assumed the official leadership and its duties within the new government.

The remarkable story of Castro is brought to life in this comic book by the always-excellent SelfMadeHero. It shows the glory and the horror seen during Castro’s rise and subsequent leadership. Strikingly drawn, with excellent writing, and good personal stories within the big one of Cuba, this is a great way to learn your history.

February 15 - Saturday, by Ian McEwan

2012-02-15T00:00:00.000Z

Saturday is set in London, over one day, Saturday, 15 February 2003, when 1million people marched in protest against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Now, I’m generally a big fan of Ian McEwan's work. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Ian McEwan was one of the authors that got me reading.

However, and I know I’m sounding a total stereotype here, I’m really struggling with some of his most recent work, particularly Saturday and Solar. His writing is, for me, always very clean, very readable and the use of language is always mightily impressive. But I think the smug tone, characterisation and the plotting in those two books leave an awful lot to be desired. And the comedy in Solar is just plain embarrassing.

Saturday got its plaudits, but it also received a hell of a lashing from some quarters. The comments on this Guardian blog post about the worst books of the decade had some excellent McEwan bashing. I do like to read a good bit of hate.

One comment, by Stuart Evers, reads:

In a shit -soaked field of its own is Saturday by Ian McEwan.

It has it all: smug, self-satisfied and completely unrealistic characters, tediously over-written "research", plot holes you could drive both Branson's spaceship and his ego through, quasi political noodling (isn't it lucky that the central character knows an Iraqi?) and an ending so ludicrous it's hard not to be personally affronted. Oh and a squash match! A bloody squash match!

Novelist John Banville also had a good go, quoted as saying that Saturday is a the sort of thing that a committee directed to produce a 'novel of our time' would write, the politics were "banal"; the tone arrogant, self-satisfied and incompetent; the characters cardboard cut-outs.

I think I’m generally positive about books on my blog, but, after reading about the excellent Omnivore's literary criticism Hatchet Job of the Year Award, today I couldn’t resist providing a platform for a bit of bile.

February 14 - Lolita, by Nabokov

2012-02-14T00:00:00.001Z

"I was 19. He was 30. I’m not sure he thought this gift through"

It’s Valentine’s Day, so today I’m pointing you towards the very cool website thebookstheygaveme. On the site, contributors "reflect on books given to us by lovers, and the entries meditate on the way the reading material we exchange with current paramours and ex-flames affects and shapes the relationship.”

These aren’t always particularly romantic. One of the entries simply reads “I was 19. He was 30. I’m not sure he thought this gift through.” The book was Nabokov’s Lolita.

It's a book I like a lot, and I like that post, so while I should probably be going for something a little nicer, I think that’ll do as my book of the day.

For further ideas on inappropriate presents, Flavorwire has a fun list of Books you definitely shouldn’t give to your Valentine.

I hope you forgive me for the rather unromantic post today. I’m probably just a little bitter, as today my girlfriend is 200miles away and I’ll be spending Valentine’s Night out in the cold watching Cardiff City versus Peterborough. Romantic, no?

February 13 - Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

2012-02-13T00:00:00.001Z

“I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen…But not many words about Dresden came to my mind…” writes Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. You see, Kurt had been a Prisoner of War in Dresden during the bombings.

However, Kurt did manage to write his novel about The Bombing of Dresden - the World War 2 bombing campaign by the Allied forces which began on this date, February 13, in 1945, and continued for two days.

The bombings lead to a huge number of casualties. Many military historians see the extremity of the bombings as unjustified - as a horror that is covered over by the glory of the Allied Forces’ victory.

As Kurt says:

"The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.”

Slaughterhouse Five is an absolute classic. Kurt’s most famous book - a classic of absolute gold if read as an entry into the bombings, and war in general. And a classic even if read as pure fiction. I love it. Read it.

February 12 - Drive, by James Sallis

2012-02-12T00:00:00.000Z

It’s the British Film Awards tonight. The nominees are full of films that were books first - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Drive, Hugo, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, War horse, Harry Potter, Jane Eyre, Tintin, Moneyball, and We need to talk about Kevin being the ones immediately apparent to me.

The Guardian recently did a little piece about "a recent pattern in which the Oscar lists have consistently and gratifyingly affirmed cinema's dependence on literature".

There’s probably a more extended essay to be written on this book-to-award-winning-film trend, but I’m afraid to say I haven‘t written it for today's post…

A lot of people get very precious when their favourite books are turned into films. I don’t belong to that category. I’m always quite happy to slate the film of a favourite book and then sit in the smug never-as-good-as-the-book corner, even if I think it’s a little ridiculous to do serious book/film comparisons.

I enjoyed the film Drive, one of tonight’s nominees, and I now plan to read the novel by James Sallis, the American crime writer, poet and musician.

Put very simply, the story follows a Hollywood stunt performer who moonlights as a getaway driver, and who gets into all kinds of scrapes. The film was very cinematic, relying heavily on its thumping soundtrack, and with the main characters not doing a great deal of talking, so I’ll be interested to see how closely the film follows the book.

Seeing the world through books has done two nice essays about the book and the film that I’d encourage you to read. Bookslut has reviewed the book here.

February 11- A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carre

2012-02-11T00:00:00.000Z

On February 11, 1956, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, former high-ranking members of the British Foreign Office who had disappeared from England in 1951, re-emerged to speak at a Moscow press conference, confirming to the world that they had previously been operating in Britain as Russian spies.

The two, along with Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, were members of the so-called Cambridge Five - Russian spies who passed information to the Soviet Union during World War 2 and into the 1950s. The term Cambridge refers to the conversion of the group to communism during their education at Cambridge University.

This fascinating, and almost unbelievable, story has been used widely in fiction, both directly and as influence - (see wikipedia for a more thorough list than below).

Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, John Banville, Alan Moore, Frederick Forsyth, and Ian McEwan are just some of those that have work that owes something to the story. But, as my book of the day, I have to choose something by former spook John Le Carre, the master teller of spy stories set in and around this period. There are a number of his books that seem to owe something to the tale of the Cambridge 5 that I could go for today. I’ve settled on A Perfect Spy, a novel about the mental and moral dissolution of a high level secret agent, which is reportedly partly based on the life and career of Kim Philby. A great entry into this dark and murky world.

February 10 - Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping...by Boris Pasternak

2012-02-10T00:00:00.000Z

Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak was born on this date, February 10, in 1890. Boris’s writings are well suited to the aims of my blog, as his work was very much a product of its time and place, and the work has come to be a historical representation of that time and place. For example, many people’s thoughts of Russia in the 1910s and 1920s are framed by Doctor Zhivago (or at least the film version), which Boris started writing in the 1910s but did not actually complete until 1956.

For today, keeping up my efforts to read more poetry this year, I’ll choose his 1912 poem Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping...

I’ve included two versions taken from the web. The top one seems the more ‘official’, but I include the second as it’s always interesting to see different, very different, translations.

Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping...
　
Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping,
Of February, in sobs and ink,
Write poems, while the slush in thunder
Is burning in the black of spring.

Through clanking wheels, through church bells ringing
A hired cab will take you where
The town has ended, where the showers
Are louder still than ink and tears.

Where rooks, like charred pears, from the branches
In thousands break away, and sweep
Into the melting snow, instilling
Dry sadness into eyes that weep.

Beneath — the earth is black in puddles,
The wind with croaking screeches throbs,
And–the more randomly, the surer
Poems are forming out of sobs.

February. Take ink and weep,

write February as you’re sobbing,
while black Spring burns deep
through the slush and throbbing.
Take a cab. For a clutch of copecks,
through bell-towers’ and wheel noise,
go where the rain-storm’s din breaks,
greater than crying or ink employs.
Where rooks in thousands falling,
like charred pears from the skies,
drop down into puddles, bringing
cold grief to the depths of eyes.
Below, the black shows through,
and the wind’s furrowed with cries:
the more freely, the more truly
then, sobbing verse is realised.

February 9 - Painting People, by Lucian Freud

2012-02-09T00:00:00.000Z

The Lucian Freud Portraits exhibition opens today at the National Portrait Gallery.

I’m a big Freud fan, so I’ll be heading to the show as soon as I can. Art books really can be a thing of absolute beauty. Scouring second hand bookshops for nice copies is my new favourite hobby. Thames & Hudson and Taschen are two of the biggest names in art book publishing out there, and Flavorwire does a nice little job of pointing us towards others we should know.

For my book of the day, I’ll pick Painting People, produced to accompany Freud’s current exhibition.

February 8 - A Severed Head, by Iris Murdoch

2012-02-08T00:00:00.000Z

Iris Murdoch died on this date, February 8, in 1999.

I have a friend who lives in the middle of nowhere, who doesn’t get out much, and who doesn’t have the internet. This friend absolutely loves Iris Murdoch, so I often find myself with the job of scouring second hand bookshops in order to get my friend her fix. You see, there are a lot of Iris Murdoch books out there, not all easy to get hold of - and I’m not a big fan of internet shopping.

This little job always proves fun - I love poking around old bookshops and there are a lot of nice-looking Iris Murdoch editions out there, many old Penguin ones.

For today, I’ll pick A Severed Head, largely because I love the cover (even if I can’t look at it without thinking of Tracey Emin).

The book, published in 1961, is set in and around a group of well-educated people in London. British novelist William Sutcliffe has described it well, saying: "Of all the lots-of-people-screwing-lots-of-other-people novels this is probably the best, and certainly the weirdest. With less philosophising and more shagging than Murdoch's other books, it is a joy to see this wonderful writer let her hair (and her knickers) down."

I'm not going to be able to better that summary, so I'll leave it there. Thanks.

February 7 - Mr Dick or The Tenth Book, by Jean-Pierre Ohl

2012-02-07T00:00:00.000Z

Well, today it is almost impossible not to mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. But there’s an awful lot of Dickens going on around book world this week, and I’ve already picked two of his books this year, so I’ll try to be a little different by picking a book that marks Dickens, but is not by Dickens.

Jean-Pierre Ohl’s Mr. Dick or The Tenth Book is one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in recent years. Really, I rate it that highly.

The book is about two men who share an obsession with Charles Dickens: Francois Daumal and Michel Mangematin. A rivalry develops between them as they both seek to discover the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens's unfinished novel.

The book’s blurb says it will “appeal to readers of intellectual, game-playing fiction and lovers of the novels of Charles Dickens.” And that’s certainly true, even if the first half of that quote makes fans seems a little pretentious.

The book plays all kinds of literary games, including changing point of view, heavy literary references and a diary format. And bonus points for one of the characters being a chess-playing bookshop owner (which is what I am in my daydreams). A fantastically enjoyable read.

An interesting interview with the author about the book can be found here.

Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip are two other books inspired by Dickens that you might want to check out.

February 6 - Bliss, by Katherine Mansfield

2012-02-06T00:00:00.000Z

Today is New Zealand’s National Day, Waitangi Day, which is held on this date every year to commemorate the signing of New Zealand's founding document - the Treaty of Waitangi - in 1840.The treaty, signed between the British Crown and Māori chiefs, was the basis for the establishment of the colonial government in New Zealand.

With this background, it’s unsurprising that Waitangi Day, like many National Days, seems to have had a somewhat controversial past. At different times, and amongst different people, the date has been met with ambivalence, protest, debate, and celebration.

This date gave me an excuse to look at my bookcases to see how many New Zealanders are there. I’m afraid to say there aren‘t many. In fact, I think there may just be two, with Lloyd Jones (as mentioned in my Saturday post) to join them shortly.

Unsurprisingly, the two I do have on the shelves are Katherine Mansfield and C. K Stead.

I’ll go for Katherine Mansfield’s much-acclaimed short story Bliss as book of the day. I read this book a long time ago, but I still very much remember the famous moment when the main character Bertha realizes that her husband is having an affair - a moment that bursts a hole in her innocent, perfect world. It’s interesting to think of this story as one in a category of books that has a defining moment - a Keyser Soze moment - that means what has preceded that moment should be looked at again. I think this is particularly noticeable in books - like this one - that have a character giving a strong voice and (therefore unreliable) narrative. I admit, I can’t remember if I knew this book had such a moment before I read it. If I did, that may explain why I remember the scene.

That short description doesn’t nearly do justice to the scene or the story, there’s a lot going on underneath the surface of the characters and the book in general.

An obvious start to NZ reading, but a story definitely worth seeking out. And now it’s for me to extend my NZ reading. Any ideas where to go next, let me know!

February 5 - Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

2012-02-05T00:00:00.000Z

William S. Burroughs was born on this date, February 5, 1914.

Like one of his cohorts Jack Kerouac from a previous post of mine, there seems to be much to dislike about this man, and his writing is certainly not to everyone’s taste. But, again like Kerouac, his influence is undeniable.

Misogyny and a juvenile fascination with guns are just two of the accusations placed against him. And, of course, he did accidentally kill his wife - that’s if we’re willing to pass off killing someone when trying to shoot an apple off that person’s head as easily as calling it an accident.

But, even so, it would be perverse not to acknowledge the influence he has had - one that extends far beyond literature with the likes of Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, David Bowie (who used Burroughs‘s cut-up technique), and Frank Zappa singing his praises, literally at times. The bands Soft Machine and Steely Dan even took their names from his work.

Samuel Beckett said of Burroughs: “He’s a writer”, which sounds like about as high praise as I can imagine Beckett saying.

For my book of the day I’ll choose Burroughs’s most famous work Naked Lunch. The book that made him a celebrity, and a book that led to obscenity trials and all sorts of other trouble.

The book follows the wanderings of junkie William Lee. It is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes, intended to be read in any order the reader chooses.

Not an easy read, but a seminal work of 20^th century literature.

February 4 - The book of fame, by Lloyd Jones

2012-02-04T00:00:00.000Z

The Six Nations starts today! This six-week period is my favourite time of year. As we see the seasons change, all chatter in Wales turns to rugby and most retire to the pub for good times and misery.

I’m a huge rugby fan and a huge book fan, but, unfortunately, those two passions rarely go together, as an article in the Guardian has pointed out.

Britain doesn’t really have a sport-writing scene like the US - neither in sports reporting nor in sport-as-life grand novels (see The Art of Fielding for a recent stateside example). There are exceptions: football has its book with Fever Pitch and Rugby League has This Sporting Life, but I’m struggling to think of Rugby Union’s contribution.

I do like this essay by Richard Burton describing his Last Match, proving he could tell a story as well as act.

But, for today’s choice I’ve had to turn to New Zealand, perhaps the only other place on earth where rugby means so much to the national character.

Lloyd Jones (who obviously should be Welsh) is an author who I’ve been wanting to read for a while, but I’m yet to buy anything by him. So, today I’m picking, and buying, his acclaimed The Book of Fame, which follows The All Blacks on their first tour of the Northern Hemisphere in 1905. Lloyd uses this story and weaves fact and fiction to explore rugby’s ingrained place in New Zealand culture. One of the few good rugby books out there. Worth hunting down by rugby fans, and others, it would seem.

February 3 - A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

2012-02-03T00:00:00.001Z

I’ll use my second Dickens pick of the year to highlight the Tale of Four Cities Conference, which started yesterday and is running until the 8th. The event is being co-run by organisations including the Saint Louis University, Madrid, and the Charles Dickens Museum, London.

To steal some blurb about the festival:

The conference takes the form of a kind of pilgrimage – festive, of course, rather than solemn – joining four cardinal places central to Dickens’s life and art. This journey of critical discovery takes us from Paris, where he finished Little Dorrit, to Condette near Boulogne where he spent time with Ellen Ternan, to Rochester and Chatham where he grew up, to end up in London, the city with which he is so often associated on the birthday itself.

This, of course, is just one of a huge number of Dickens events this year. Unsurprisingly, the Dickens Museum is a good place to get your fix.

The above conference looks an interesting event, even if it does seem rather academic for my abilities. I find links between books and places fascinating, so, while I won’t be able to make this particular event, I was interested to see the themes to be discussed at it, and I’ll be heading to the Dickens Museum when the capital next invites me to stay.

Considering the event’s name, it would be rude not to pick A Tale of Two Cities as my book of the day.

February 2 - Incidences, by Daniil Kharms

2012-02-02T00:00:00.000Z

Daniil Kharms, looking cool

Reading the crazy, funny, absurd, surreal vignettes of Daniil Kharms is one of my greatest pleasures in life. There really is nothing like them. They seem wrong, like they're breaking every literary rule there is - and they probably are, which is why they are so captivating.

Kharms was born in St Petersburg in 1905. He died of starvation, caused by the Leningrad siege, in a prison psychiatric ward on this date, February 2, aged just 36.

He was first arrested in 1931, with the Soviet authorities deeming his writing anti-Soviet because of its absurd logic and its refusal to promote social Soviet values.

He continued to write for children's magazines when he returned from exile. In secrecy, he also wrote his adult short stories, which were not publishable, and they remained unknown until the 1970s.

Kharms lived in debt and hunger until his final arrest on suspicion of treason in the summer of 1941. He would not leave prison again.

Here is an example of his work. As I say, I’m a massive, massive fan of his, and I’d encourage all to seek out his work.

Anecdotes from the life of Pushkin
1. Pushkin was a poet and was always writing something. Once Zhukovsky caught him at his writing and exclaimed loudly: - You're not half a scribbler!
From then on Pushkin was very fond of Zhukovsky and started to call him simply Zhukov out of friendship.

2. As we know, Pushkin's beard never grew. Pushkin was very distressed about this and he always envied Zakharin who, on the contrary, grew a perfectly respectable beard. 'His grows, but mine doesn't' - Pushkin would often say, pointing at Zakharin with his fingernails. And every time he was right.

3. Once Petrushevsky broke his watch and sent for Pushkin. Pushkin arrived, had a look at Petrushevsky's watch and put it back on the chair. 'What do you say then, Pushkin old mate?' - asked Petrushevsky. 'It's a stop-watch' - said Pushkin.

4. When Pushkin broke his legs, he started to go about on wheels. His friends used to enjoy teasing Pushkin and grabbing him by his wheels. Pushkin took this very badly and wrote abusive verses about his friends. He called these verses 'epigrams'.

5. The summer of 1829 Pushkin spent in the country. He used to get up early in the morning, drink a jug of fresh milk and run to the river to bathe. Having bathed in the river, Pushkin would lie down on the grass and sleep until dinner. After dinner Pushkin would sleep in a hammock. If he saw any stinking peasants, Pushkin would nod at them and squeeze his nose with his fingers. And the stinking peasants would scratch their caps and say: 'It don't matter'.

6. Pushkin liked to throw stones. If he saw stones, then he would start throwing them. Sometimes he would fly into such a temper that he would stand there, red in the face, waving his arms and throwing stones. It really was rather awful!

7. Pushkin had four sons and they were all idiots. One of them couldn't even sit on his chair and kept falling off. Pushkin himself was not very good at sitting on his chair either, to speak of it. It used to be quite hilarious: They would be sitting at the table; at one end Pushkin would keep falling off his chair, and at the other end - his son. One wouldn't know where to look.

Further examples can be found here, and in a number of books, including the one I own, Incidences, which is today's book of the day.

February 1 - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark

2012-02-01T00:00:00.000Z

Muriel Spark was born on this date, February 1, in 1918. She died in 2006.

By all accounts, Spark led a difficult life, and she herself could be difficult to deal with. She underwent a painful divorce in her late twenties, and was recently recovered from a serious breakdown when the first of her more than 20 novels, The Comforters, was published in 1957.

Spark’s reputation grew when The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to the publication of what would become her most famous story, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In the book, Brodie, an all-powerful schoolteacher, goes about molding a group of girls into her own image. Miss Brodie’s chosen pupils idolize her — until the danger of her manipulations becomes clear.

Spark unfolds her plot not sequentially, but piece by piece, making extensive use of the narrative technique of flash-forward. Like all her work, the book displays a mischievous and subversive quality.

Hal Hager, in his commentary on the novel, writes of Miss Brodie and another character Sandy: The complexity of these two characters, especially Jean Brodie, mirrors the complexity of human life. Jean Brodie is genuinely intent on opening up her girls' lives, on heightening their awareness of themselves and their world, and on breaking free of restrictive, conventional ways of thinking, feeling, and being.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at 76th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20^th century.

January 31 - Guy Fawkes, by William Harrison Ainsworth

2012-01-31T00:00:00.000Z

George Cruikshank’s illustration of Guy Fawkes, published in Ainsworth’s novel.

I’ve been struggling to find a book for today - January 31 seems a particularly boring date in history. Or, at least, a date without a great deal of literary connections.

One thing that did happen on this date was the execution of Guy Fawkes, in 1606, after he was found guilty of trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament on November 5 1605.

The story of Guy Fawkes has captured popular imagination, and its influence can be seen far and wide. Indeed, I’d like to do an extended essay on the myth of Guy Fawkes based around Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, the comic book from which was born the mask which has become the clothing of choice for protestors across the world. But, I think I’ll save that essay for November 5...if this blog lasts that long...

So, today, I’ll highlight Guy Fawkes, by William Harrison Ainsworth, which first appeared as a serial in Bentley’s Miscellany between January and November 1840.

The story deals with British politics and history, focusing on the events surrounding the 1605 plot. Ainsworth also introduced gothic elements. The book ends with the execution of the plotters. The novel was very popular, and marked the beginning of Ainsworth's 40-year career in historical romances, but it was not universally admired. Edgar Allan Poe described the style of writing as "turgid pretension" and said the book was "positively beneath criticism and beneath contempt". I do love a bit of slating, especially if it’s by The Raven.

So, I’m not sure I’m recommending this book, but I think Ainsworth seems an author worth knowing about, and delving into the myth of Guy Fawkes is always of interest… to me, at least.

A 1606 etching by Claes (Nicolaes) Jansz Visscher, depicting Fawkes’s execution on January 31, 1606.

January 30 - Beautiful Losers, by Leonard Cohen

2012-01-30T00:00:00.001Z

Today sees the release of Leonard Cohen’s album Old Ideas. I am very excited by this. Leonard is one of the great old men of literary musicianship, to coin a pretentious phrase. In my eyes, he sits alongside the likes of Tom Waits and Nick Cave - people whose songs are founded on a deep knowledge of literature and an almost superhuman ability with words.

Before turning to music, Leonard made his name with his poetry and prose. His first book of poetry Let Us Compare Mythologies was published in 1956. Novels The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers were published in 1963 and 1966. It wasn’t until 1967 that Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a career as a music singer-songwriter.

For today, I’ll highlight the aforementioned Beautiful Losers - a story involving members of a love triangle united by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk saint.

On release, one critic called the book "one of the most radical and extraordinary works of fiction ever published in Canada. " Another wasn’t so impressed and called it "the most revolting book ever written in Canada” - although I’m sure Leonard took that as a compliment.

Cohen himself wrote this in the foreword to the Chinese version of the book:

This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like? Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover. In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer....

Beautiful Losers was written outside, on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies, behind my house on Hydra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.

An interesting, largely negative, review of the book can be found here.

January 29 - The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe

2012-01-29T00:00:00.000Z

Edgar Allan Poe’s infamous The Raven was first published on this date, January 29, in 1845, in the New York Evening Mirror. Poe is someone whose work I have read little of, but yet I seem to see his influence everywhere - from The Simpsons to detective fiction, from Batman to the Gilmore Girls. Wikipedia does a clever job of summarising The Raven’s impact on popular culture so I’ll direct you there rather than trying to explain any further myself.

Here's the poem itself, for your enjoyment today.

THE RAVEN.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“ ’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door —

Only this and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore —

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore —

Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating

“ ’Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door —

Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door; —

This it is and nothing more.”

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,

“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;

But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you” — here I opened wide the door; ——

Darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!” —

Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,

Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.

“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;

Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore —

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—

‘Tis the wind and nothing more!”

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;

Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door —

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door —

Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,

“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,

Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore —

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

Though its answer little meaning — little relevancy bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door —

Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,

With such name as “Nevermore.”

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only

That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.

Nothing farther then he uttered — not a feather then he fluttered —

Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before —

On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”

Then the bird said “Nevermore.”

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,

“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store

Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster

Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore —

Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore

Of ‘Never — nevermore’.”

But the Raven still beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;

Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking

Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore —

What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore

Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing

To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;

This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining

On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,

But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,

She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer

Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee — by these angels he hath sent thee

Respite — respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore;

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil! —

Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted —

On this home by Horror haunted — tell me truly, I implore —

Is there — is there balm in Gilead? — tell me — tell me, I implore!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above us — by that God we both adore —

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore —

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting —

“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted — nevermore!

January 28 - Beloved, by Toni Morrison

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On January 28, 1856, the enslaved black, and pregnant, Margaret Garner and her husband Robert escaped their owner and fled across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati. However, they were soon found by slave catchers, who surrounded the house where the Garners were hiding. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife rather than see the child returned to slavery. She had wounded her other children, preparing to kill them and herself, when she was subdued. The story and the ensuing court case caught the imagination of many. Over a thousand people turned out each day to watch the court proceedings.

Margaret’s story is the basis for Toni Morrison’s truly brilliant Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. The book's epigraph reads "Sixty Million and more," the number of slaves estimated to have died in the Atlantic slave trade.

The Modern Medea (1867), by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, portraying the death of Margaret Garner’s child.

January 27 - Maus, by Art Spiegelman

2012-01-27T00:00:00.000Z

Today is the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

I imagine the Holocaust must be just about the most difficult topic to deal with for any writer. Inevitably, nearly every novel that touches on the topic gets accused of something, be it crassness or exploitation. These are certainly criticisms that were faced by Art Spiegelman - a cartoonist who dared to address the issue of the Holocaust in comic book form and who dared to do it by representing Nazis as cats and Jewish people as mice.

The result was Maus - an absolutely genius book that, for me, deals with the Holocaust as well any other book that I’ve read. Reading, or re-reading this, would be time well spent, particularly today.

January 26 - True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

2012-01-26T00:00:00.000Z

As it’s Australia Day, I’ll use this as an opportunity to make my contribution towards Australia Literature Month, being hosted over at Reading Matters.

I thought I’d go back and re-read Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, one of my very favourite books. I’ve loved Peter Carey for a long time, but I’ve never really given much thought to how strongly an idea of Australia comes across in his books. So, to fit Reading Matters’ challenge, I thought I’d read, and read up on, True History of the Kelly Gang through the lens of What does this say about Australian identity? Little did I know what a minefield I was walking into!

The story of Ned Kelly is well-known: the Irish-Australian bushranger considered by some as merely a cop-killing thug, but for others he is a true folk hero. For the latter, Ned is a symbol of Irish-Australian resistance against the Anglo-Australian ruling class, and someone whose violence was justified rebellion against the squalor and oppression he, and his family, faced.

For critic Robert Ross it seems only natural that Peter Carey, undoubtedly one of Australia’s greatest writers, should choose Ned Kelly as the topic of one of his books, for “The History of the Kelly Gang continues Carey's chronicle of Australia's quest for national identity.” The Ned Kelly story is one that is imbedded within the Australian consciousness, like Bradman or The Battle of Gallipoli. By re-telling the Kelly story, Carey gets to put his interpretation on one of the most powerful narratives about who Australians are, and what they stand for. He was clearly aware of what he was doing. In talking about the book, Carey said: “the minute you start messing with a national story you know you are doing something a little risky… and this particular risk was one I had been thinking about for a long, long time.”

It’s pretty clear to any reader which camp Carey stands in. Mostly narrated through Kelly’s words, the book provides a largely sympathetic reading of Kelly’s character and his motives. Kelly is very much the hero of the piece, with the police and the administrators of the colonial judicial system very much the villains.

Kelly and the Irish-Australians come across as the oppressed, the underdogs, with the spirit to rebel against the colonisers and the establishment. This gritty, earthy character myth (whether true or not) is one that seems very much in evidence in the popular portrayal, and indeed self-portrayal, of Australians today, most obviously in the sporting world.

The huge sales of True History of the Kelly Gang in Australia suggests this was a book that tapped into something wider that just literature - this was a great book, a national happening, which was saying something about the country and its people.

The fact that Kelly is someone often seen as purely a mindless killer, particularly by people outside of Australia, only enhances his standing amongst those who see him as a folk hero. So Bill Bryson, only provides a view for Kelly champions to oppose, and with which to harden their own contrary opinions, when he dismisses Kelly as “a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was. He came from a family of rough Irish squatters, who made their living by stealing livestock and waylaying innocent passersby. … there wasn't a shred of nobility in his character or deeds. He killed several people, often in cold blood, sometimes for no very good reason.”

Bryson’s angle of criticism is not the only one faced by those who see Kelly’s story as a defining one of Australian identity. The Australian writer John Kinsella says that the True History of the Kelly Gang makes him feel “uncomfortable” because the “fictionalization of the life of Ned Kelly participates in the creation and continuation of so many national myths.” In particular, Kinsella is concerned that Kelly’s myth and Carey's book encourage a type of Australian nationalism that excludes Australians that are not of Anglo-Celtic descent, particularly indigenous and Asian groups.

Whatever the merits of the book purely as a work of fiction - and my view is it’s a work of genius - there’s no doubt that it has stirred up a debate about Kelly’s place in Australia’s national identity. Of course, this place, and this identity, is constantly shifting, and is different in everyone’s eyes, hence the nature of identity. The debate about Kelly myth will go on for centuries, and it will provide a way for all - his champions and his detractors - to define themselves. Carey’s book will now be central to this debate, and Carey has had his say on what Kelly’s legacy should be. Carey has handed the book over to his readers, particularly his Australian readers, and they will be the judge of Kelly and his place in their own identity. As Carey has said of readers’ opinions of the book “They saw it as much as history as literature. But there have been some more sophisticated readings of it, and a good reaction in Australia matters a lot. I have to write for a place, and Australia is my place. Australians read the book in a different way. They are passionately engaged and in the end it is theirs to love or to hate.”

I’d love to hear any opinions anyone has on Carey’s book or Ned Kelly in general - particularly if you’re an Australian!

As ever, a nod to Wikipedia for help with details, and a further nod to Nathanael O’Reilly’s essay on the book and identity.

January 25 - The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles

2012-01-25T00:00:00.000Z

I turn to an extract from John Fowles’s diary for today. The piece, dated 25 January 1967, reads:

The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I started writing this today. Not so much with a plot as a mood and a language I wanted to use. It was really just one visual idea: a woman standing at the end of the Cobb and staring mysteriously out to sea.

Intriguing to read about the birth of a book, 45 years ago today, that would go on to become acknowledged as one of the most beguiling novels of the twentieth century. I love the idea of a single image leading to an entire novel. Or the reverse: a novel being distilled down to a single image or phrase.

January 24 - Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton

2012-01-24T00:00:00.001Z

Today sees the 150^th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth. I could go for The Age of Innocence, a book for which Edith became the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, but that seems a little too obvious. Instead, I’ll be ever-so-slightly less obvious and go for one of her famous novellas, Ethan Frome, which provides a tale of love and broken dreams within the poverty-stricken residents of the fictional town of Starkfield, Massachusetts.

There are some good Edith Wharton resources on the web. The official site of her former home The Mount, which she designed herself, is here, complete with birthday-related business. Last week, the New York Times did a piece about Edith and social climbers that can be found here. The Edith Wharton Society is here.

January 23 - Roots: The Saga of an American Family, by Alex Haley

2012-01-23T00:00:00.000Z

January 23, 1977, was the date of the first episode of Roots, the American television series based on Alex Haley’s novel. The series would go on receive 36 Emmy Award nominations, winning nine. The series finale still stands as the third-highest rated U.S. television programme ever.

As I’m sure you all know, Roots tells the story of an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the U.S.

The novel (released in 1976) and the series would both go on to lodge their places in the consciousness of readers and watchers in America and beyond. Roots was one of the most important and influential cultural phenomenons of the America’s twentieth century.

January 22 - Petersburg, by Andrei Bely

2012-01-22T00:00:00.000Z

Few books are more about a time and a place than Andre Bely’s masterpiece, Petersburg. The place, obviously, is St Petersburg, and the time is 1905.

The 1905 Russian Revolution was a wave of mass political and social unrest, including worker strikes and mutinies.

A key date of this unrest is January 22, 1905 – known as Bloody Sunday.

On this date, around 300,000 demonstrators marched to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas the Second. The army pickets near the palace fired directly into the crowds to disperse them. Around 1,000 people were killed or wounded. This event was central to inflaming revolutionary activities and contributing to further unrest and uprisings throughout Russia that year.

Andre Bely’s chaotic and brilliant book brings home to the reader the city’s frenzied atmosphere during this period.

The novel follows a young revolutionary who has been ordered to assassinate his own father, a Tsarist official. All the action takes place over one day. The book has been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses for this reason, as well as for its Modernist approach.

Nabokov rated Petersburg one of the four greatest novels of the twentieth century - who are we to argue with that appraisal?

The picture is the ever-excellent Pushkin Press’s front cover for this book. It is taken from the painting Demonstration 17 October 1905 by Ilya Repin.

Books vs. Cigarettes, by George Orwell

2012-01-21T00:00:00.000Z

Today, we mark 62 years since the passing of Eric Arthur Blair - one of my very favourite writers. I'll read any Orwell, but it's his essays I find myself turning to most, particularly his playful ones. So, today, I'll hand it over to George for one of my fav pieces of his, Books vs. Cigarettes, first published in 1946.

If you want more, you'll find an excellent Orwell resource here.

Books vs. Cigarettes

A couple of years ago a friend of mine, a newspaper editor, was firewatching with some factory workers. They fell to talking about his newspaper, which most of them read and approved of, but when he asked them what they thought of the literary section, the answer he got was: “You don't suppose we read that stuff, do you? Why, half the time you're talking about books that cost twelve and sixpence! Chaps like us couldn't spend twelve and sixpence on a book.” These, he said, were men who thought nothing of spending several pounds on a day trip to Blackpool.

This idea that the buying, or even the reading, of books is an expensive hobby and beyond the reach of the average person is so widespread that it deserves some detailed examination. Exactly what reading costs, reckoned in terms of pence per hour, is difficult to estimate, but I have made a start by inventorying my own books and adding up their total price. After allowing for various other expenses, I can make a fairly good guess at my expenditure over the last fifteen years.

The books that I have counted and priced are the ones I have here, in my flat. I have about an equal number stored in another place, so that I shall double the final figure in order to arrive at the complete amount. I have not counted oddments such as proof copies, defaced volumes, cheap paper-covered editions, pamphlets, or magazines, unless bound up into book form. Nor have I counted the kind of junky books-old school text-books and so forth — that accumulate in the bottoms of cupboards. I have counted only those books which I have acquired voluntarily, or else would have acquired voluntarily, and which I intend to keep. In this category I find that I have 442 books, acquired in the following ways:

Bought (mostly second-hand)	251
Given to me or bought with book tokens	33
Review copies and complimentary copies	143
Borrowed and not returned	10
Temporarily on loan	5
Total	442

Now as to the method of pricing. Those books that I have bought I have listed at their full price, as closely as I can determine it. I have also listed at their full price the books that have been given to me, and those that I have temporarily borrowed, or borrowed and kept. This is because book-giving, book-borrowing and bookstealing more or less even out. I possess books that do not strictly speaking belong to me, but many other people also have books of mine: so that the books I have not paid for can be taken as balancing others which I have paid for but no longer possess. On the other hand I have listed the review and complimentary copies at half-price. That is about what I would have paid for them second-hand, and they are mostly books that I would only have bought second-hand, if at all. For the prices I have sometimes had to rely on guesswork, but my figures will not be far out. The costs were as follows:

	£	s.	d.
Bought	36	9	0
Gifts	10	10	0
Review copies, etc	25	11	9
Borrowed and not returned	4	16	9
On loan	3	10	0
Shelves	2	0	0
Total	82	17	6

Adding the other batch of books that I have elsewhere, it seems that I possess altogether nearly 900 books, at a cost of £165 15s. This is the accumulation of about fifteen years — actually more, since some of these books date from my childhood: but call it fifteen years. This works out at £11 1s. a year, but there are other charges that must be added in order to estimate my full reading expenses. The biggest will be for newspapers and periodicals, and for this I think £8 a year would be a reasonable figure. Eight pounds a year covers the cost of two daily papers, one evening paper, two Sunday papers, one weekly review and one or two monthly magazines. This brings the figure up to £19 1s, but to arrive at the grand total one has to make a guess. Obviously one often spends money on books without afterwards having anything to show for it. There are library subscriptions, and there are also the books, chiefly Penguins and other cheap editions, which one buys and then loses or throws away. However, on the basis of my other figures, it looks as though £6 a year would be quite enough to add for expenditure of this kind. So my total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have been in the neighbourhood of £25 a year.

Twenty-five pounds a year sounds quite a lot until you begin to measure it against other kinds of expenditure. It is nearly 9s 9d a week, and at present 9s 9d is the equivalent of about 83 cigarettes (Players): even before the war it would have bought you less than 200 cigarettes. With prices as they now are, I am spending far more on tobacco than I do on books. I smoke six ounces a week, at half-a-crown an ounce, making nearly £40 a year. Even before the war when the same tobacco cost 8d an ounce, I was spending over £10 a year on it: and if I also averaged a pint of beer a day, at sixpence, these two items together will have cost me close on £20 a year. This was probably not much above the national average. In 1938 the people of this country spent nearly £10 per head per annum on alcohol and tobacco: however, 20 per cent of the population were children under fifteen and another 40 per cent were women, so that the average smoker and drinker must have been spending much more than £10. In 1944, the annual expenditure per head on these items was no less than £23. Allow for the women and children as before, and £40 is a reasonable individual figure. Forty pounds a year would just about pay for a packet of Woodbines every day and half a pint of mild six days a week — not a magnificent allowance. Of course, all prices are now inflated, including the price of books: still, it looks as though the cost of reading, even if you buy books instead of borrowing them and take in a fairly large number of periodicals, does not amount to more than the combined cost of smoking and drinking.

It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. “Books” includes novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case. But if one regards reading simply as a recreation, like going to the pictures, then it is possible to make a rough estimate of what it costs. If you read nothing but novels and “light” literature, and bought every book that you read, you would be spending-allowing eight shillings as the price of a book, and four hours as the time spent in reading it-two shillings an hour. This is about what it costs to sit in one of the more expensive seats in the cinema. If you concentrated on more serious books, and still bought everything that you read, your expenses would be about the same. The books would cost more but they would take longer to read. In either case you would still possess the books after you had read them, and they would be saleable at about a third of their purchase price. If you bought only second-hand books, your reading expenses would, of course, be much less: perhaps sixpence an hour would be a fair estimate. And on the other hand if you don't buy books, but merely borrow them from the lending library, reading costs you round about a halfpenny an hour: if you borrow them from the public library, it costs you next door to nothing.

I have said enough to show that reading is one of the cheaper recreations: after listening to the radio probably THE cheapest. Meanwhile, what is the actual amount that the British public spends on books? I cannot discover any figures, though no doubt they exist. But I do know that before the war this country was publishing annually about 15,000 books, which included reprints and school books. If as many as 10,000 copies of each book were sold — and even allowing for the school books, this is probably a high estimate-the average person was only buying, directly or indirectly, about three books a year. These three books taken together might cost £1, or probably less.

These figures are guesswork, and I should be interested if someone would correct them for me. But if my estimate is anywhere near right, it is not a proud record for a country which is nearly 100 per cent literate and where the ordinary man spends more on cigarettes than an Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood. And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

The text above was taken from here.

January 20 - Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

2012-01-20T00:00:00.000Z

January 20 is the day that newly-elected US Presidents take up office. Of course, we’ll have an Inauguration Day next year. This got me thinking about books with US Presidents – fictional or otherwise.

I was tempted to go for Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which puts forward an alternate history following the 1940 election of Nazi sympathizer and anti-semite Charles Lindbergh.

But the book I’ll go for lays out the political genius of Abraham Lincoln – a President from the days before January 20 became the norm. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals is an absolutely fantastic book. Quite rightly lauded on release, I’m sure most of you know of the book, but that’s not stopping me picking this as book of the day.

If anyone has any favourite books involving US Presidents, post it up.

January 19 - On The Road, by Jack Kerouac

2012-01-19T00:00:00.000Z

On January 19, 1949, Jack Kerouac and friends set out from New York to New Orleans, heading to the home of William S Burroughs. After visiting the poet, Kerouac and the Cassadys continued on their travels to explore the Southwest. This trip would be central to On The Road, which works in material from some of their other trips too.

I’m sure no-one needs telling how influential this book is, for both adventure-seekers and for writers. Musicians too:

"It changed my life like it changed everyone else's." Bob Dylan

"I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed." Ray Manzarek

The ever-excellent Flavorwire did a nice piece about On The Road covers from around the world. Here are some of my faves.

January 18 - The Siege, by Helen Dunmore

2012-01-18T00:00:00.000Z

On January 18 1943, the Soviets announced that they had broken the Nazi siege of Leningrad, which had started in September of 1941.

The siege was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history. The siege caused widespread famine in Leningrad through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 soldiers and civilians.

Reports of cannibalism appeared in the winter of 1941–1942, after all birds, rats and pets had been eaten. There are even stories of hungry gangs attacking and eating defenceless people - which shows that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is perhaps not as far from real life as we might hope.

Helen Dunmore's The Siege does a fantastic job of giving the reader a glimpse of what living in this unimaginable situation would have been like.

The narrative tells a personal tale of love and death, focusing on a young woman living through this horrendous experience. Some chapters provide wider context as we see events through the eyes of the city's head of administration.

At times, a tough read, but one that’s well worth it.
　
As ever, I must give a nod to Wikipedia for help with some details.

January 17 - The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer

2012-01-17T00:00:00.000Z

Murderer Gary Gilmore was executed on January 17, 1977 at 8:07 a.m. by firing squad at Utah State Prison. He himself had insisted that his own death sentence be carried out rather than going to appeal.

Gilmore was the first person in the United States executed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. His story has had immense cultural resonance, and can be seen in the works of many writers, artists and musicians. For example, you'll find references in Seinfeld and in a song by The Police.

Perhaps most famously, Norman Mailer depicted the events surrounding Gilmore death in his 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Executioner's Song. The book is based on interviews with the family and friends of both Gilmore and his victims.

Gilmore last words were “Let’s do it” – apparently the inspiration for Nike’s famous “Just do it” slogan.

January 16 - The Bees, by Carol Ann Duffy

2012-01-16T00:00:00.000Z

My bookshelves display a rather shameful gender imbalance. And they contain absolutely no poetry. Two of my three reading resolutions for 2012 look to put these points right.

A small step I’ve taken towards both goals is buying Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees, which is on the shortlist for tonight’s TS Eliot prize.

The book has won plaudits for being a “mixter maxter of every kind of Duffy poem: angry, political, elegiac – elegiac about every endangered or disappearing thing in the natural world or the individual psyche – witty, nakedly honest, accessible, mysterious”. Others have criticised it for being uneven and lacking energy.

I look forward to giving it and go and seeing if this poetry thing really is for me. Somehow, I fear not, but we'll see.

By the way, the third challenge is to read the rather long The Brothers Karamazov.

January 15 - Paper Lion, by George Plimpton

2012-01-15T00:00:00.000Z

January 15, 1967, was the date of the first ever Superbowl, with NFL champions the Green Bay Packers beating AFL champions the Kansas City Chiefs. The match followed the merger of the two leagues: the well-established NFL and the upstart AFL.

As a sports-freak, I wasn’t going to miss today's opportunity to do a little research into famous American Football writing. In the US, sports-writing is an ultra-serious business, with some heavyweight stars, and with famous novelists often doing a spot of moonlighting in the field.

George Plimpton will be a name known to many, not least for his work as co-founder and editor of The Paris Review. George is the author of Paper Lion, one of the most famous American Football books out there.

The book follows him as he goes about the task of becoming quarterback for professional outfit The Detroit Lions, who kindly, and oddly, allowed him to join training. As an out-of-shape, under-strength 36-year-old, he was obviously never going to achieve his goal. But the book is less about his failings, and more about being a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a crack American Football team. The book details the relationships he builds with players and coaches, giving real insight into the minds of professional athletes. A riveting read, and one not just for sports-fans. Hugely influential too.

Time includes Paper Lion in its list of 10 great literary stunts – a link well worth clicking on.

January 14 - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

2012-01-14T00:00:00.000Z

January 14 1967 was the date of the Human Be In festival at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. This gathering of around 30,000 people is seen as the event that kickstarted the hippie movement and led to the Summer of Love.

Following the lead of the Beat Generation, the hippie movement’s artistic side played heavily on the interplay between music, performance, poetry, and prose (with a fair amount of mind-altering potions thrown in too, of course).

Choosing one book to represent the hippie movement is a difficult task. I was tempted to go for Ginsberg, Pynchon or Brautigan, but I've settled on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.

This "nonfiction novel” follows hippie-icon Ken Kesey and his cohorts as they drive across the country in a school bus spending much of their time taking drugs.

In the words of Eliot Fremont-Smith of The New York Times, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is "not simply the best book on hippies… [but also] the essential book”.

January 13 - Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness, by Reinhard Kleist

2012-01-13T00:00:00.000Z

I’m not missing the chance to mention Johnny Cash's infamous Folsom Prison gig (from Jan 13, 1968) and this excellent graphic novel by Reinhard Kleist.

Cash had been interested in playing at a prison ever since his 1955 song Folsom Prison Blues. His wish came true 13years later at a concert that would help re-launch his career, and that would give us one of rock’n’roll’s best-loved live albums.

The first chapter of this book starts with the inmates talking about the upcoming gig - “Forget Elvis! He’s too high n’ mighty to ever play here. Cash is our guy. He knows what it’s like to go through hell.”

And therein lies one of the great appeals of The Man in Black - follow his story and his songs and you get a sense of what it is like to live a certain kind of life in a certain kind of America. Not a nice, good life - one filled with drink, prison, violence and worse. But a life worth living, and one that provides for a great story.

This graphic novel charts Johnny Cash’s life through his youth, glory days, darkness, and resurrection under Rick Rubin’s steer. A good introduction to this icon of 20^th America. The only man ever to make Bob Dylan feel inferior, or so some such story goes anyway.

January 12 - The Last Holiday: A Memoir, by Gil Scott-Heron

2012-01-12T00:00:00.000Z

Today sees the UK release of Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir The Last Holiday (well, it was due to, but, as books often do, it seems to have snuck out a little early).

Scott-Heron was one of the most influential people in the history of music. His famous phrase The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (taken from a poem and song of his) has entered the popular lexicon and is an essential reference for every hip hop artist, media studies student and hipster out there.

While he’ll remain most famous as a musician, Gil Scott-Heron also made his mark as a writer of serious and important literature. The Vulture and The Nigger Factory are well worth seeking out for anyone wanting an uncompromising look at Black America in the 60s and 70s. The publication of this memoir follows Scott-Heron's death in May 2011.

I’ll steal a little of The Last Holiday's promotional blurb to summarize it: In the autumn of 1980, Stevie Wonder invited Gil Scott-Heron to join him on a forty-one-city tour across America, ending in Washington in January 1981, to gather popular support for the creation of a holiday in honour of the great civil-rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. Scott-Heron uses this history-making tour as the backbone of his memoir. The Last Holiday is also highly personal account of his growing up in the South. It is full of Scott-Heron's keen insights into the music industry, the civil rights movement, modern America, governmental hypocrisy and our wider place in the world.

An extract can be found at The Guardian's site here. The Telegraph has an interesting review here. And the book's publisher Canongate has a cool little interview with the man.

And I just love the fact that his Dad played football for Celtic - how random is that?

January 11 - Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy

2012-01-11T00:00:00.000Z

Thomas Hardy died 84 years ago today, aged 87. Like with Dickens from my Monday post, I have to admit to being somewhat of an amateur when it comes to knowledge about this giant of nineteenth century literature. However, I stumbled across two interesting articles on the Flavorwire website (here and here) about disturbing books and they have encouraged me to seek out the last of Hardy’s novels, Jude the Obscure.

My bookshelves are littered with dark and controversial reads, and Jude the Obscure appears to have quite a reputation in this area. With its criticisms of marriage and Christianity, and its dark graphic scenes, the book found itself heavily criticised on release, and still shocks today. Flavorwire warns me of "that horrible incident involving “Little Father Time,” the son of Jude Fawley and his first wife" - which I look forward to reading. I daresay many of you know what horror awaits me...

For those that prefer to enjoy Hardy in a more relaxed manner, I see the Thomas Hardy Society has two upcoming events: a Woodlanders Walk on March 10 and a London walk on May 5. Enjoy if you make it to either.

January 10 - Tintin and the Secret of Literature, by Tom McCarthy

2012-01-10T00:00:00.001Z

Tintin first entered the world on January 10, 1929, appearing in a cartoon strip published in the youth supplement of a Belgian national newspaper.

In Tintin and the Secret of Literature, avowed Tintin-nut McCarthy takes the little Belgian as his starting point for a tour of books and ideas. For McCarthy, Tintin's influence can be seen everywhere in books, cartoons, film and wider culture.

While an entertaining reading of Tintin in itself, this book is perhaps most interestingly read as a way of entering the mind of McCarthy - someone clearly set out as a starlet of modern British writing, with much already delivered, and much more expected of him. His style and the connections he makes are useful to see for anyone wanting to learn not just the secret of past literature, but where McCarthy and modern British writing are heading as well.

The Herge Museum is well worth a visit if you're ever in Brussels. The website's not bad too.

January 9 - Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

2012-01-09T00:00:00.000Z

This year, we’re all going to go crazy for two things: Dickens and the Olympics.

Whilst fairly well clued-up on all things Coubertinian, I’m afraid I’m rather a novice when it comes to Dickens, which seems odd as his tales of 19th London and the underclass seem right up my street. But, this year, with the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth, I feel I’m going to get ample opportunity to swot up.
The Dickens and London exhibition currently showing at the Museum of London gives me an excuse to give Charles his first of what I think will be many outings on this blog this year. Of the many Dickens-related shows there'll be, I think this one will be my favourite. Its emphasis on the city seems particularly interesting. I'm looking forward to visiting in the next month or so.

I’ve picked Great Expectations as, even as someone who hasn’t read it, that story and the images it conjures up have ingrained themselves into my mind. That’s one of the ideas behind this blog: looking at how books have conjured up ideas that seep out into the consciousness of all. As a clever little guide on the BBC site makes clear, Dickens has given a great deal to the modern world…and perhaps no more so that in his big story of little Pip.

January 8 - Paula, by Isabel Allende

2012-01-08T11:30:00.000Z

Isabel Allende began writing her first novel, The House of the Spirits, on 8 January 1981, as a letter to her dying grandfather.

Again on 8 January, 11 years later, she sat down to compose a letter to her daughter Paula, who had been in a coma for a month due to a rare genetic disease. Allende begins, “Listen, Paula, I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.”

Paula never did wake up -she died one year later, having never regained consciousness. Allende wrote this book while keeping vigil by her daughter's bedside at a Madrid hospital, and then in her home in California. The story moves back and forth from present to past and back again. Paula’s illness inspired Allende to reflect on her own extraordinary life, and the lives of her ancestors.

A masterpiece from one of Latin Americas’s leading storytellers.
　

(A nod to 501 Must-Read Books for blurb on this)

Saturday 7 January - On Books and the Housing of Them, by William Gladstone

2012-01-07T11:00:00.000Z

Gladstone's Library

I’m afraid this one is rather self-indulgent, and it’s an essay not a book, but as today I'll be visiting the booklover’s heaven that is Gladstone’s Library, I hope you’ll forgive me for going a little off-piste with this selection. Gladstone's Library (Hawarden, North Wales) was founded by the four-time Prime Minister William Gladstone. In 1895, Gladstone donated over 32,000 books from his own collection to establish what is now Britain's largest residential library.

A beautiful building, a fascinating book collection and on-site accommodation - this really is the perfect place to retreat, browse and work on your blog!

So, today, I’ll point you towards this half-playful, half-earnest essay about the collecting and cataloguing of books, written by Gladstone himself.

Some excerpts are below, you can read the full essay at Project Gutenberg here.

ON BOOKS AND THE HOUSING OF THEM
By William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898)

…the book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, should be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil! Unless indeed things are to be as they now are in at least one princely mansion of this country, where books, in thousands upon thousands, are jumbled together with no more arrangement than a sack of coals; where not even the sisterhood of consecutive volumes has been respected; where undoubtedly an intending reader may at the mercy of Fortune take something from the shelves that is a book; but where no particular book can except by the purest accident, be found.
…

Such being the outlook, what are we to do with our books?

Without answering in detail, I shall assume that the book-buyer is a book-lover, that his love is a tenacious, not a transitory love, and that for him the question is how best to keep his books.

I pass over those conditions which are the most obvious, that the building should be sound and dry, the apartment airy, and with abundant light. And I dispose with a passing anathema of all such as would endeavour to solve their problem, or at any rate compromise their difficulties, by setting one row of books in front of another. I also freely admit that what we have before us is not a choice between difficulty and no difficulty, but a choice among difficulties.

The objects further to be contemplated in the bestowal of our books, so far as I recollect, are three: economy, good arrangement, and accessibility with the smallest possible expenditure of time.

In a private library, where the service of books is commonly to be performed by the person desiring to use them, they ought to be assorted and distributed according to subject. The case may be altogether different where they have to be sent for and brought by an attendant. It is an immense advantage to bring the eye in aid of the mind; to see within a limited compass all the works that are accessible, in a given library, on a given subject; and to have the power of dealing with them collectively at a given spot, instead of hunting them up through an entire accumulation. It must be admitted, however, that distribution by subjects ought in some degree to be controlled by sizes. If everything on a given subject, from folio down to 32mo, is to be brought locally together, there will be an immense waste of space in the attempt to lodge objects of such different sizes in one and the same bookcase. And this waste of space will cripple us in the most serious manner, as will be seen with regard to the conditions of economy and of accessibility. The three conditions are in truth all connected together, but especially the two last named.
…

I fear that arrangement, to be good, must be troublesome.
…

I have arrived at the conclusion that nearly two-thirds, or say three-fifths, of the whole cubic contents of a properly constructed apartment may be made a nearly solid mass of books: a vast economy which, so far as it is applied, would probably quadruple or quintuple the efficiency of our repositories as to contents, and prevent the population of Great Britain from being extruded some centuries hence into the surrounding waters by the exorbitant dimensions of their own libraries.

January 6 - Dancer, by Colum McCann

2012-01-06T00:00:00.000Z

Dancer is Colum McCann’s captivating semi-fictional tale of Rudolf Nureyev’s life and the times and places in which he lived. Starting with a vivid portrait of a war-ravaged Russia in 1941, the book takes in the dancer’s first season in Paris, before we spend time in New York with the likes of Andy Warhol and John Lennon. We end back in Nureyev's homeland with a touching scene as the dancer goes to visit his dying mother. The disparity between the various times and places is all too obvious. In fact, this is perhaps a book about Russia and the world of showbusiness as much as it is about the dancer.

Nureyev’s shows were a joy to all…even if his company wasn’t, by the sounds of it. McCann does justice to both Nureyev’s art as well as his erratic behaviour.

The story ends before Nureyev’s death (which happened on January 6, 1993, through AIDs-related complications), but today is a good day to remember Nureyev, and this book is a great way to learn about the legendary dancer.

January 5 - The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera

2012-01-05T00:00:00.000Z

Kundera is perhaps my favourite writer of all. And I’m pulling no surprises by picking this absolute classic as a book of the day for my blog.

But it would be difficult to write this date-related and event-related bookblog without an early mention of Kundera because his novels are so related to place and time.

In the unlikely event there's anyone reading this blog who is unfamiliar with the book...The Unbearable Lightness of Being explores the artistic and intellectual life of Czech society during the Communist period, from the Prague Spring -which began on this date in 1968 - to the Soviet Union’s August 1968 invasion and its aftermath.

Within this particular setting, we get a complex tale with the everyday, everywhere themes of love and sex at the centre.

Largely because of its title, I think, this is a book that is a byword for pretentiousness and showy-offness. But that reputation is far from deserved. This is a piece of genius for all to enjoy and ponder over.

January 4 - The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

2012-01-04T00:00:00.000Z

Today we’ll find out the category winners in the Costa Books Awards.

Of the nominees for the Novel Prize, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending is the only one I’ve read so I’ll pick that book for today. While I’m a massive Barnes fan, I found The Sense of an Ending a rather slight book, not just in size but in substance too. His use of language is always exquisite though, so I have no qualms in recommending this book for anyone who has yet to indulge. However, I’d just say, that if you only read one Barnes book, don’t read this one - Metroland, Arthur and George, and, particularly, Flaubert’s Parrot are light years ahead of this for me. My main gripes were the plotholes (what seemed to me, anyway) and the number of things that just didn’t ring true. But I won’t go into those so as not to spoil it for others…and because it seems rather a lot of effort.

Barnes praised the book’s designer during his Booker speech, and I’m glad about that, as the cover somehow conveys the mood of the book in some indefinable way (for my abilities, at least) and adds to the reading experience. The US cover is also rather good too, I feel. The overall Costa prize-winner will be revealed later this month.

January 3 - Libra, by Don DeLillo

2012-01-03T00:00:00.000Z

Don DeLillo’s books are tailor-made for what I hope to do with this blog. Read DeLillo, and you don’t just get a great read, you get real insight into people, times and places - with DeLillo's speciality being 20th century America.

The heart of DeLillo’s Libra is the killing of JFK - perhaps the defining cultural moment in the lives of people of DeLillo’s generation and homeland. Around this, DeLillo’s spins a wondrous tale, going deep into the pysche of Oswald and the lone gunman’s country.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby is brought to life in a vivid portrait. Towards the end of the book we read about Ruby’s final days, dying of cancer in prison as he awaits his retrial for the murder of Oswald. His torment is laid bare. “Jack Ruby has stopped being the man who killed the President’s assassin. He is the man who killed the President.” Ruby passed away January 3, 1967.

A book to read for great literature, as well as great portraiture.

January 2 - Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

2012-01-02T00:48:00.001Z

Today I'll pick Alice in Wonderland, to tie-in with the exhibition currently showing at Liverpool Tate.

To steal some of the gallery’s blurb, “Alice in Wonderland at Tate Liverpool is the first exhibition of its kind to explore how Lewis Carroll’s stories have influenced the visual arts, inspiring generations of artists. The exhibition will provide insight into the creation of the novels and the inspiration they have provided for artists through the decades“.

From what I hear of the exhibition, that description seems fair enough. Of course, the original story is well worth reading in itself, but the spider’s web of ideas that the story has spun gives a fascinating insight into the times, places and minds in which the tale has been re-imagined.

A nod to Flavorwire for the cover - see the excellent website’s trawl through the history of Alice covers here.

January 1 - A Scandal in Bohemia, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

2012-01-01T14:39:00.002Z

Sherlock is back on the BBC, and this Holmes-nut is very happy about that. For that reason, I’m not missing the opportunity to have a Sherlock tale as the first of 366 books I’m going to highlight this year.

Tonight’s show will be a modern reworking of A Scandal in Bohemia, first published in The Strand in 1891. This story is much-loved by Sherlockians, and Doyle himself (rather precisely) ranked it as his fifth favourite Holmes story.

The original story sees the King of Bohemia ask for Holmes’s help to retrieve a potentially damaging photo from his former lover Irene Adler.

Holmes, however, finds Irene a formidable and alluring combatant, who manages to turn the tables on him. This is one of a surprisingly high number of Holmes stories where he is bested or, at the very least, not everything goes his own way.

I, for one, look forward to seeing how Steven Moffat and co bring this classic Sherlock tale into the 21^st century.

Image: Holmes, Watson and the king of Bohemia, drawn by Sidney Paget. Taken from the original publication of the story in The Strand magazine.

2012 - a year of good reading

2011-10-21T21:37:00.000+01:00

Hello, and welcome to my blog for book fans.
I’m just getting started with background stuff, so come back to join me for a book on Jan 1 2012. I’ll be highlighted a book a day all year - hoping to find books that suit each day.
See you on Jan 1 2012!