Still Edgy After All These Years

Peace of mind doesn't always seem to be the territory of a successful author. This may be I think be for the best (at least for us readers!) since mid-life complacency probably wouldn't auger well for ongoing creativity. Novelist Rachel Cusk, whose new novel (her 7th) is The Bradshaw Variations, is compared to "a highly strung racehorse" by Lynn Barber in The Observer. The author seems to have it all, says Barber :

She is still extremely good looking, at 42, with a slim figure and long, dark, shiny hair. She comes from a wealthy Catholic family, was educated at St Mary's Convent in Cambridge and then read English at Oxford. She published her first novel, Saving Agnes, in 1993 and won the Whitbread first novel prize. There have been seven novels, including her new one, and two books of non-fiction.

but :

... sees herself as embattled, hounded by critics, loathed by other mothers, attacked with slings and arrows from every side. She says that when she cycles to school with her daughters, other women hiss abuse at her from Range Rovers. She used to describe herself as a red-blooded feminist but nowadays admits: "I find that I like women less than I did." She avoids school gates and places where other mothers congregate.

At The Times author Nick Hornby talks to Kate Muir who asks why despite the author's success (Book sales over 5 m. A Sundance-winning film. A new novel out. A happy marriage. ) :

.. he is ... not smug, or at least satisfied? Why does he virtually chain-smoke in our interview, and confess cheerily that he is in therapy once a week? Why does he avoid the glitz of London’s literary salons? Why is he addicted to bucket-sized Starbucks, when he could afford an espresso machine or go to any of the lovely Italianate joints near his office in Islington for a real coffee?

He also talks on video about his new book Juliet, Naked which tackles :

... among other things, ageing and creativity, as well as fatherhood and geekery.

Nick Hornby's 40 of the Best

If we are lucky, we read the right books at the right times, and both the books and the times should be left alone. Have you read Moby-Dick yet? No? Well, don't go back to The Catcher in the Rye, then. It was great once and maybe you're asking too much of it if you want it to be great all over again. This is not to diminish the books that we read at earlier stages in our lives, not to make the claim that, as we get older, our critical faculties get sharper - the sad truth is that we lose as much as we gain.

Nick Hornby's absolutely right about the impossibility of rereading certain books we loved when we were younger and feeling the same way about them. And I find myself saying increasingly about books "My much younger self would have loved this, but the me I am now is unimpressed." One of the perils, I think of growing older and having read so many other books.

Hornby has now finished his tenure at The Believer where he wrote an engaging monthly column about the books he'd bought and the books he'd read, which were then collected The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. Now he has been asked to choose 40-odd books for a writer's table at Waterstone's bookshops across the UK. His highly browsable, completely unsnobbish list is here . And although he recognises how hard it is to make reading suggestions for other people, I think he makes a pretty good job of it!

Summer Shorts

The Guardian gives you a very special gift - six specially commissioned short stories for Summer reading from some of the best writers around; Jeanette Winterson, Nick Hornby, Rose Tremain, Yiyun Li, Jay McInerney, AM Homes. Enjoy!!

Guilt-Free Low-Lit

This is for Lydia who confessed the other day that she suffers from a disease called 'Low-Lit'. It comes from the foreword of Nick Hornby's The Complete Polysyllabic Spree , a collection of his very enjoyable columns on books and readings for The Believer (the latest column is here).

One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we've got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good.

... If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity - and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured - then we have to promote the joys of reading, rather than the (dubious) benefits. I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. but please, if you're reading a book that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV programme. Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim. ... All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it.

... reading for enjoyment is what we all should be doing. I don't mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that's what you want to read, it's fine by me, because here's something no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. the whole purpose of books is that we read them, and ifyou find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

In each column Hornby lists his books read and books bought and discusses his reading, so I'll do the same:

My books most recently bought:

Silverfish New Writing 6 - ed. Dipika Mukherjee
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree - Nick Hornby
The Book of Lost Books - Stuart Kelly
The New York Trilogy, Oracle Nights - Paul Auster

Books Read:

None finished this week. Book hopping. Am reading simulataneously Auster's New York Trilogy, Silverfish New Writing 6, Filipino writer Jessica Zafra's collection of short fiction Manananggal Terrorizes Manila (many thanks, Sky) and Ziauddin Sardar's Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim (thanks Zia).

So ... how about you?

Postscript:

Lydia's right (in the comments) ... I really should have linked Daphne Lee's very nice piece on much the same topic in Starmag yesterday: she talks about Daniel Pennac's The Rights of the Reader, and provides a link to a lovely downloadable poster with illustrations by Quentin Blake (right). And this she says to parents:

... don’t even think in terms of knowledge-gained, increased-vocabulary or improved reading-skills. All that will come, I assure you, but don’t make it the reason you buy your kids books or encourage them to read. You don’t want your children to view books with apprehension, but with joy. You want them to see reading as an enjoyable activity. ... The list of rights says that the reader is the only one who has a say in what, where, when and how he reads. It says it’s OK to relax with a book; it’s OK to be lazy with a book; it’s OK to escape into a book; be loud with a book; and be silent with a book. It’s all good so long as you’re having a good time.

Postscript 2:

cw posted an interesting response to this post.

An Easy Way In

There are readers who want to read seriously but need an easy way in, in the form of a list of books that are well-written and enjoyable, but not too lengthy or difficult.

The best list of books of this kind I've come across is the list of Easy Reads on the British Council's EnCompass Literature website. It includes reviews of fiction and poetry, as well as links to related websites. Many of the titles on the list are available at the British Council Library. (I put them into the last shopping list I prepared.)

Here's a little taster picked at random:

Douglas Adams The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
William Boyd Fascination
Anita Brookner Hotel du Lac
Mavis Cheek Janice Gentle Gets Sexy
Carol Anne Duffy The World's Wife
Heln Fielding Brigit Jones Diary
Anne Fine All Bones and Lies
Esther Freud Hideous Kinky
Susan Hill A Bit of Singing and Dancing and Other Stories
Nick Hornby About a Boy
Alexander McCall Smith The Number One Ladies Detective Agency
Tony Parsons Man and Wife
Meera Syal Life Isn't all Ha Ha Hee Hee
Fay Weldon Watching You, Watching Me

See? Nothing dumbed down or pulpy about this list. Good stuff, just easier good stuff.

Readership needs to be grown. We all know the school system here doesn't do enough to make this happen, largely because of a lack of funding for school libraries, partly because of a lack of willpower. Many, if not most school-leavers have not learned to fall in love with books, and if there isn't a reading culture in Malaysia, someone has to create it!

I actually think that the bookshops should play a more active role in promoting titles of this kind. (Instead of, she says cynically, giving so much space to Dan Brown, patron saint of marginal readers.)

And talking of well-written popular fiction, Nick Hornby, a writer I enjoy very much, talks about his novel A Long Way Down at The Age website.

Related Post:

Literature for the Sub-Literate (4/3/06)

Books in Custody

The competition of find Britain's best reading group was recently won by a inmates of a prison. The Penguin/Orange Prize was awarded to the "book loving fools" of High Down Prison reading group, Surrey.

Loved the reaction from the one-male member of our group Fiction&Friends when I forwarded an article about the finalists:

"Am laughing out loud at the fact that the only all-male book club consists of a bunch of convicts. So that's how you get men to read. Take them out of the general population and lock them up!"

Why is it that women love to meet and talk books but men not?

Postscript:

Read about Nick Hornby's prison visit.

Slam Dunk!

It's been described as "a cult cabaret club of words, music and all things intersected" and it's the latest craze to hit literary London: the Book Slam. The event has its origins in the slam poetry scene and the concept is simple: authors known and unknown read extracts from their work and DJs and bands play in between.



"It's just like a night down the pub, only with story-telling thrown in," is the way that Patrick Neate who started the Book Slam at his London bar Cherry Jam described it. And it isn't the great unpublished unknowns that turn up to read there: the venue has attracted hip established writers such as Jonathan Coe, Hari Kunzru and Nick Hornby, presumably looking for new ways to present their work and new audiences.


Toby Litt has a go!

Think it would catch on here? My bet is that it would. The combination of words and music is a sure-fire crowd puller. Last year during the Litfest I felt that the most exciting happenings actually took place in the bar in the evenings, especially on the evening of the superb Songwriter's Round.

It drew one of the biggest crowds the bar had seen - and many of those who turned up to listen and enjoy the readings were folks who'd never usually pick up a book from one year's end to the next.

Time to do something like this again methinks. Our literary scene could do with an infusion of hip.