08 July, 2006
Rock 'n' roll
I really want to see the new Tom Stoppard play, but it seems to be sold out forever and the only tickets available cost £30. Bah.
05 July, 2006
Vikings and holidays
Very annoyed with the idiot who wrote in to the Guardian complaining about the 'Summer reading' recommendations, and taking issue with the idea that people might want to read more serious books than the latest Jilly Cooper on their holidays. Sorry, but I can read Jilly Cooper on the bus while being elbowed by some gangsta teen - aren't holidays a good time to get some decent reading done, of things that one normally doesn't have the time to concentrate on?
Conversely, I read trash when I'm stressed and busy although I'm trying to break the habit - two good trashy historical books I have read recently are The last kingdom and The pale horseman by Bernard Cornwell, which are set in the time of Alfred the Great and are about the struggle of the English/Anglo-Saxons against the Danes. These are the first two of a trilogy about Uhtred, a Saxon who due to a twist of fate is brought up by Danes. Cornwell also wrote a brilliant trilogy about a Dark Ages King Arthur, and it's interesting to see what he makes of England four hundred odd years later. His trick of giving historical characters a twist - in the Arthur books Lancelot is an out and out villain; in these Alfred doesn't seem quite so great - is very endearing, and his good research shows. I didn't enjoy the Viking books as much as the Arthur ones - I thought he did a brilliant job of depicting a world in which people still believed unreservedly in gods and magic, and his Dark Ages were splendidly muddy and bloody - but they were a jolly good read nonetheless. [31] [32]
Conversely, I read trash when I'm stressed and busy although I'm trying to break the habit - two good trashy historical books I have read recently are The last kingdom and The pale horseman by Bernard Cornwell, which are set in the time of Alfred the Great and are about the struggle of the English/Anglo-Saxons against the Danes. These are the first two of a trilogy about Uhtred, a Saxon who due to a twist of fate is brought up by Danes. Cornwell also wrote a brilliant trilogy about a Dark Ages King Arthur, and it's interesting to see what he makes of England four hundred odd years later. His trick of giving historical characters a twist - in the Arthur books Lancelot is an out and out villain; in these Alfred doesn't seem quite so great - is very endearing, and his good research shows. I didn't enjoy the Viking books as much as the Arthur ones - I thought he did a brilliant job of depicting a world in which people still believed unreservedly in gods and magic, and his Dark Ages were splendidly muddy and bloody - but they were a jolly good read nonetheless. [31] [32]
03 July, 2006
Gothic romance
The only thing which I actively enjoyed about last weekend, (apart from the weather. And seeing my grandma. And the food. And having a nice chat with my ma. Oh, all right, it wasn't that bad a weekend) was reading Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which was as marvellous as my authority on the Victorian novel (otherwise known as my sister) promised me it would be. The narrative voice was so sharp and witty and acerbic, with none of poor Jane Eyre's martyred wishy-washyness, I loved the rather overblown gothic bits, and the whole thing kept me gripped right to the end. I also very much liked the deliberately highly ambiguous ending - in fact, Charlotte Bronte basically offers her reader a choice of whether they'd like a happy or a sad ending (although one suspects she liked the sad one.) [30 - haven't been counting recently]
28 June, 2006
Recent acquisitions
I haven't listed these for a while - and I'd like to take the opportunity to thank those who gave me books for my birthday two months ago, when I received
Last week, as an impulse purchase on the way to reading poetry in a pub with some friends, I acquired Billy Collins's Taking off Emily Dickinson's clothes. Billy Collins is a fantastic contemporary US poet and any of my readers not familiar with his work should get hold of some - quiet, simple, romantic and very beautiful poetry.
And last but not least, the splendid Bloomsbury Oxfam bookshop yesterday sold me Stephen Jay Gould's Leonardo's mountain of clams and the Diet of Worms, his eighth collection of essays from the magazine Natural History, Primo Levi's collection of essays Other people's trades, and Doris Lessing's post-apocalyptic novel Memoirs of a survivor.
- Samuel Beckett's Complete dramatic works
- Hilary Rose's Alas poor Darwin: arguments against evolutionary psychology
- Stephen Jay Gould's The hedgehog, the fox and the magister's pox: mending and minding the misconceived gap between science and the humanities
- and Edward Said's Orientalism, a classic which I've been wanting for ages.
Last week, as an impulse purchase on the way to reading poetry in a pub with some friends, I acquired Billy Collins's Taking off Emily Dickinson's clothes. Billy Collins is a fantastic contemporary US poet and any of my readers not familiar with his work should get hold of some - quiet, simple, romantic and very beautiful poetry.
And last but not least, the splendid Bloomsbury Oxfam bookshop yesterday sold me Stephen Jay Gould's Leonardo's mountain of clams and the Diet of Worms, his eighth collection of essays from the magazine Natural History, Primo Levi's collection of essays Other people's trades, and Doris Lessing's post-apocalyptic novel Memoirs of a survivor.
Three short extracts
I was always on good terms with my father and went along with his socialism. I am told that this is an abnormal relationship psychologically, making one uncombative and lacking in self-confidence. I cannot say that it had any such effect in my case. On the contrary it made me more confident to have a secure family background. It is a curious thing to be a hereditary dissenter. On the one hand, you reject established views - religious in earlier times, political and social in our own. On the other, you have no inner conflict in doing so. Indeed you would have a conflict only if you accepted them. On a committee I usually put forward subversive ideas and at the same time insist that the existing rules must be rigorously observed until they are changed.
AJP Taylor, from Accident prone, or what happened next, in From Napoleon to the second International: essays on nineteenth-century Europe.
When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history - and you become and active agent, not merely a "reporter." Then, and only then, can you become an original contributor, even a discoverer, and not only a mouthpiece.
Stephen Jay Gould, from the preface to Leonardo's mountain of clams and the Diet of Worms.
How is it possible that something that can teach you so much about the world, about nature and the universe, and, for more religious people, about God - that something that is so clearly able to teach you so many things can serve as a means of escape from precisely those things? And this is a fascinating thought, for me, about the effect of music. Whenever we talk about music, we talk about how we are affected by it, not about it itself. In this respect, it is like God. We can't talk about God, or whatever you want to call it, but we can only talk about our reaction to a thing - some people know God exists and others refuse to admit God exists - but we cannot speak about it. We can only seak about our reaction to it. In the same way, I don't think you can speak about music. You can only speak about a subjective reaction to it.
Daniel Barenboim in Parallels and paradoxes:explorations in music and society.
AJP Taylor, from Accident prone, or what happened next, in From Napoleon to the second International: essays on nineteenth-century Europe.
When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history - and you become and active agent, not merely a "reporter." Then, and only then, can you become an original contributor, even a discoverer, and not only a mouthpiece.
Stephen Jay Gould, from the preface to Leonardo's mountain of clams and the Diet of Worms.
How is it possible that something that can teach you so much about the world, about nature and the universe, and, for more religious people, about God - that something that is so clearly able to teach you so many things can serve as a means of escape from precisely those things? And this is a fascinating thought, for me, about the effect of music. Whenever we talk about music, we talk about how we are affected by it, not about it itself. In this respect, it is like God. We can't talk about God, or whatever you want to call it, but we can only talk about our reaction to a thing - some people know God exists and others refuse to admit God exists - but we cannot speak about it. We can only seak about our reaction to it. In the same way, I don't think you can speak about music. You can only speak about a subjective reaction to it.
Daniel Barenboim in Parallels and paradoxes:explorations in music and society.
An Israeli conductor and a Palestinian intellectual
Daniel Barenboim's Reith lectures were absolutely fantastic: witty, intellectual, thoughtful and profound, and reminded me to buy the book he co-wrote with Edward Said, Parallels and paradoxes: explorations in music and society. I say co-wrote, but it's actually a collection of their conversations - some in front of an audience and some in private. They discuss Beethoven and Wagner; the Israel-Palestine conflict; musical education; the way an orchestra works together; the transcendence of music; what music can teach us about the world. I don't know enough about a lot ofthe music they discuss (particularly Beethoven and Wagner) but the book makes me want to know more.
I particularly liked some of what Edward Said says about the growing specialisation of society and the way that the connections between music, art and literature, history and politics are being lost in the modern day world. Later I'll try to find a passage to reproduce here. Wonderful to read about people wanting to increase access to the arts not by making the arts more 'accessible', whatever that means, but by improving the public's education in the arts in order to ba able to present these to a wider audience.
I particularly liked some of what Edward Said says about the growing specialisation of society and the way that the connections between music, art and literature, history and politics are being lost in the modern day world. Later I'll try to find a passage to reproduce here. Wonderful to read about people wanting to increase access to the arts not by making the arts more 'accessible', whatever that means, but by improving the public's education in the arts in order to ba able to present these to a wider audience.
27 June, 2006
Thrilling discoveries
Atkins' book on the British spy novel has introduced me to a great new (to me) thriller writer, Eric Ambler, the precursor of John le Carré but the first British thriller writer to write about the mundanity and unheroicness of the spying world. So far I've read two of his novels: The night-comers, a rather dramatic but taut description of a military coup in a fictitious South-east Asian country, and The Levanter, an excellent thriller about the way a Middle-eastern businessman is blackmailed into helping a Palestinian terror group mount an attack on Israel. The prose is workmanlike, the plots are plausible and intelligent, and the characterisation is perhaps a bit macho but realistic and moving. Ian Fleming paid tribute to him in one of the Bond novels, incidentally - in From Russia with love, Bond whiles away a long train journey reading Ambler's The mask of Dimitrios. The nice thing about Ambler is that although many of his novels are currently out of print they had long print runs in cheap paperback imprints up to the 1970s, so they are perfect to collect from second hand bookshops and charity shops.
Having discovered him and bought The Levanter from Waterstones (reprinted as a commemorative run celebrating his publishers' thirtieth anniversary), I came across The night-comers in a second hand bookshop in Elephant and Castle shopping centre in a gaudy retro paperback edition, for 40p.
The Elephant bookshop, called Tlon, is one of my latest discoveries and I'm delighted by it. I'd always passed it by assuming (for some reason) that it was a Bible bookshop. I'm absolutely delighted to discover that on the contrary it's a proper community second hand bookshop - no collectors' editions costing pounds, but instead lots of decent quality paperback copies of recent literary fiction and classics, an excellent history and politics section, and everything reasonably priced - a far cry from the Gower Street Waterstones second hand section in which the most unremarkable of Penguin paperbacks is carefully priced to undercut the price of any new edition by only a couple of pence.
I've also discovered the Bloomsbury Oxfam bookshop, just round the corner from Tas Bloomsbury on Bloomsbury Street, which is another bookshop aimed more at the paperback reader than the collector of exquisite folios. They also seem to do a good line in art and cookery books, although I have my eye on a nice hardback edition of JB Priestley's Angel pavement, one of my favourite novels and my favourite London novel, priced at three quid. A friend has also recently emailed me his recommendations for second hand bookshops in South East London, so my book purchases may spiral wildly out of control in the next couple of weeks.
Having discovered him and bought The Levanter from Waterstones (reprinted as a commemorative run celebrating his publishers' thirtieth anniversary), I came across The night-comers in a second hand bookshop in Elephant and Castle shopping centre in a gaudy retro paperback edition, for 40p.
The Elephant bookshop, called Tlon, is one of my latest discoveries and I'm delighted by it. I'd always passed it by assuming (for some reason) that it was a Bible bookshop. I'm absolutely delighted to discover that on the contrary it's a proper community second hand bookshop - no collectors' editions costing pounds, but instead lots of decent quality paperback copies of recent literary fiction and classics, an excellent history and politics section, and everything reasonably priced - a far cry from the Gower Street Waterstones second hand section in which the most unremarkable of Penguin paperbacks is carefully priced to undercut the price of any new edition by only a couple of pence.
I've also discovered the Bloomsbury Oxfam bookshop, just round the corner from Tas Bloomsbury on Bloomsbury Street, which is another bookshop aimed more at the paperback reader than the collector of exquisite folios. They also seem to do a good line in art and cookery books, although I have my eye on a nice hardback edition of JB Priestley's Angel pavement, one of my favourite novels and my favourite London novel, priced at three quid. A friend has also recently emailed me his recommendations for second hand bookshops in South East London, so my book purchases may spiral wildly out of control in the next couple of weeks.
20 June, 2006
30 May, 2006
End of the world as we know it
Can any readers suggest books about post-apocalypse life on earth? The apocalypse can be plague, nuclear holocaust, the oil running out, whatever - I'm interested in compiling a list.
So far I have a few children's books:
- Plague 99 - Jean Ure
- Children of the dust - Louise Lawrence
Adult books include:
- On the beach - Nevil Shute
- Memoirs of a survivor - Doris Lessing
- Greybeard - Brian Aldiss
- The drowned world - JG Ballard
- Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
- Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank
I'm sure there must be loads more. Any suggestions?
Building a new world
I've just been enjoying enormously Linda Grant's novel about Palestine at the end of the British Mandate period, When I lived in modern times. It's the story of a girl, Evelyn Sert, who travels from post-war Britain to Palestine in the hope of helping to forge the new Jewish state, who is confronted by a world in motion where her every decision is a statement about herself and her view of the embryonic Jewish state. It's also about double identity: Jewish/English and inner life/outer life.
The book is set in Tel Aviv and Linda Grant has said she wanted the writing to be like the city: simple and strong. It is both those things, and a thrilling evocation of what it must have been like to be in Palestine at that time: one of the books you read as much to find out what it was like to live in a particular period as for any higher literary experience. The narrative voice very subtly underlines some of the hypocrisies and compromises of the Jews as well as of the British imperial administrators, and it also looks at what it means to be modern and shows Evelyn's growing up from a girl to an adult very beautifully. All this and a truly gripping read! I recommend it highly.
The book is set in Tel Aviv and Linda Grant has said she wanted the writing to be like the city: simple and strong. It is both those things, and a thrilling evocation of what it must have been like to be in Palestine at that time: one of the books you read as much to find out what it was like to live in a particular period as for any higher literary experience. The narrative voice very subtly underlines some of the hypocrisies and compromises of the Jews as well as of the British imperial administrators, and it also looks at what it means to be modern and shows Evelyn's growing up from a girl to an adult very beautifully. All this and a truly gripping read! I recommend it highly.
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