My Weekly Book

[Crossposted from main journal, so apologies to those few acclaimed souls who have friended both - they will be getting their rewards in Heaven.]

NaNoWriMo 2004 has ended.

With a collective word count of 410,845,023.

My personal wordcount was 34,504, spread across 37 chapters.

Which, as you will immediately perceive, is not enough to get me on the winners' list.

I'm disappointed about this, because I don't like failing at things.

But, in my own defence, I will say that I didn't start writing until November 7.

So I've chalked up 34,500 words in the space of three weeks, and I'm actually very tempted to keep going and to see if I can get to the 50,000 by December 7.

Which doesn't qualify me to win, but would be personally rather satisfying.

As points out, I didn't have 34,500 words of a novel this time last month, so it can't be all bad.

Would I recommend trying NaNoWriMo? Yes, definitely. Because of the pressure to keep knocking the words out, you are granted permission to be bad. This frees you from obsessive-compulsive checking and polishing of individual sentences.

I came to it after the blunt rejection of a long-term writing project by the BBC which left me feeling very bruised. And NaNoWriMo got me writing again after that, at a point when I couldn't even face fan fiction (and I have this cracking idea involving Snape and Andromeda Tonks but that is, literally, another story.)

So I'm glad I took part but, if you will excuse me, it's time to crack on… My hero's stood in a train station late at night with no idea about what to do next and I'm not much the wiser, so we'd better go and get him sorted out…

An interesting link spotted this week:

The American Library Association’s list of Challenged and Banned Books

Here's the American Library Association's list of the 100 most banned and challenged books in the US between 1990 and 2000, among other things.

For those who can't be bothered to read down the list it contains works by Aldous Huxley, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, JD Salinger, Margaret Atwood, Harper Lee, Isabel Allende, Kurt Vonnegut and William Golding - and JK Rowling, naturally.

Judy Blume features bigtime, as do countless sex education books. Full list below cut.

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From The Independent:

The life-changing novels every woman should read

A survey asking 400 women which books have made a difference to their lives reveals some surprising choices. Louise Jury reports.

While works by Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot are only to be expected on a list of essential female novels, the inclusion of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes as something of a surprise.

But a survey of 400 women from academia, the arts and publishing shows that women are as likely to cite Douglas Adams's comedy as the book that made a difference to their life as a novel by the feminist icon, Virginia Woolf.

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Brilliant article from the always-readable Lucy Mangan in The Guardian (contains potential spoilers and just seems to have got more relevant as time has passed.):

A word-of-mouth success

Why are people lining up to rubbish The Da Vinci Code? Simple - it's a bestseller that doesn't know its place

And so the backlash against The Da Vinci Code begins. The main charges against Dan Brown's bestselling thriller appear to be that while the Parisian monuments and buildings he describes do exist, the routes taken by the protagonists between them do not make sense, that Harvard has no professor of symbology (the status ascribed to Brown's hero), and that the ultra-traditional Catholic group Opus Dei does not, in fact, harbour albino assassin monks for deployment against renegade cryptographers and art historians.

I'll give you a moment to recover from the shock of discovering that a thriller writer appears to have picked out elements of real life, used them to lend verisimilitude to his lurid imaginings and distorted geographical and other truths in order to construct a pacy narrative.

The book has also been accused of denigrating Catholicism (although a straw poll of my left-footing family and friends reveals that none of them has suffered any crisis of faith as a result of the tale of the Church's cover-up of Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene) and of providing juicy fodder for conspiracy theorists from sea to shining sea.

It is of course an unfortunate fact of life that if thousands upon thousands read a book written by an established thriller writer, described as a thriller and sold as a thriller, some of them will persist in believing instead that the author is speaking sooth. These people should ideally be herded into the middle of the nearest crop circle and beaten with their own copies of The Bible Code until they see reason, but thanks to a statutory oversight, this is illegal. Read full article here.

Oh my, oh my. Last night I went around with a notebook and came up with a list of all the outstanding books lying around the flat, belonging either to me or to , that I wanted to read. And here is the final list. I'm hoping that if I write them down here, it will give me some structure for reading them all:

Wish you were here: the official biography of Douglas Adams - Nick Webb. I bought this in the Charing Cross Road Waterstones branch and started reading it about 10 minutes later. It is an absolutely excellent read, although I would definitely recommend reading it alongside The Salmon of Doubt, edited by Peter Guzzardi. Doing that gives the insight that there was a Douglas Adams who existed beyond the Hitchhikers series, which is a timely reminder.

The Full Cupboard of Life - Alexander McCall Smith. The latest lovely volume of adventures from Mma Precious Ramotswe, her reluctant husband-to-be Mr JLB Matekoni, her business assistant Mma Makutsi, her two foster-children and all the other occupants of her little corner of Botswana. This is also underway.

Books still to be started:

The Birthday of the World - Ursula le Guin [still unread in Jan 2008 and not currently on Mount To Be Read (MTBR)]

Racundra's First Cruise - Arthur Ransome [still unread in Jan 2008, MTBR]

My Cousin Rachel - Daphne du Maurier [Have since read, is brilliant]

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon [still unread in Jan 2008, MTBR]

The Ashdown Diaries - Paddy Ashdown [still unread in Jan 2008]

The da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [Have since read, is brilliant, stood up to a re-read pretty well, too]

No Logo - Naomi Klein [still unread in Jan 2008, MTBR]

Weaving the Web - Tim Berners-Lee [still unread in Jan 2008]

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick [still unread in Jan 2008]

Maximum Bob - Elmore Leonard [still unread in Jan 2008]

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold [Have read, thought it was utter nonsense, that’s several hours of my life that I wouldn’t mind getting back]

Archangel and Enigma - Robert Harris [Archangel read, Enigma unread and on MTBR]

The Accusers - Lindsey Davis [Read, very good indeed]

Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre [Couldn’t get into, will try again ]

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson [Read, serious commitment of time and energy but worth every minute]

Life of Pi - Yann Martel [Have since read, is brilliant]

Mountains of the Mind: a history of fascination - Robert MacFarlane [Have since read, is brilliant]

Vilette - Charlotte Bronte [still unread in Jan 2008, MTBR]

Man of the Hour - Peter Blauner [still unread in Jan 2008]

This three-for-the-price-of-two business in bookshops is really getting out of hand now.

I went out in my lunch hour at the beginning of last week and popped into a bookshop to look for a travel guide for the far north of Scotland - to fuel my dreams of visiting high latitudes. No travel guide, no lunch and slightly more than one hour later I arrived breathlessly back at the office with three special-offer books, two magazines, a packet of premium liquid-ink pens, two packets of writing paper and a small red bear subsequently named Ridley. The three-for-two that had snared me here was Books Etc on High Holborn, and I had to run the gauntlet of another one in the nearby WH Smith while buying the paper, the pens, the magazines and the bear. Get anything as sensible as a travel guide in Smiths? Are you joking? Have you been in there recently?

Today, I got absolutely caned in the Charing Cross Waterstones (the three-for-two being endemic in UK bookshops regardless of proprietor). I had no intention of buying books. I was killing time before going to an art exhibition, for goodness' sake, so carrying bags full of heavy and unnecessary purchases was not really on my agenda. However, never one to do things by halves, I came away with my three books plus another book (a fat and heavy thriller) plus a copy of Granta's film edition intended for Mr Random.

The problem is that they always put these damned three-for-two stickers on books that you had intended to buy anyway, so it appears to represent a genuine opportunity to get a free book – the reason it works, I guess, is that it seriously ups the impulse-purchase rate. A slightly earlier post than this one features an article from the New York Times putting forward the argument that reading in itself has become an uncritically worthy and rather complacent pastime – virtuous in its own right regardless of the text involved.

In the same vein, I would suggest that bookshops will find us gullible bibliophiles an easy target as long as we can tell ourselves - “Impulse spending on books is has a moral worth that other impulse spending does not.” Yes, but that's not true, is it? And then there is the other thing I must now come to terms with – where to put the buggers once you get them home. Remember, there's two people of a bibliophilic temperament in this one small flat, and we are in serious debit bookshelf space-wise.

Astrofiammante's Latest Impulse Purchase List:

• The Full Cupboard of Life - Alexander McCall Smith
• A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
• Mountains of the mind – a history of a fascination - Robert MacFarlane
• Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
• The Accusers - Lindsey Davis
• Wish You Were Here – the official biography of Douglas Adams - Nick Webb
• Enigma - Robert Harris

Last night, while there was still some semblance of a Tube service, I was privileged to read the following poem:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never -”

“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.

Stephen Crane

• More on Stephen Crane
• More on Poems on the Underground, for those lucky enough not to regularly have to use the Tube.
• And finally… London Underground's Poems archive.

Found in the New York Times:

“There's a new piety in the air: the self-congratulation of book lovers. Long considered immune to criticism by virtue of being outnumbered by channel surfers, Internet addicts, video maniacs and other armchair introverts, bookworms have developed a semi-mystical complacency about the moral and mental benefits of reading. 'Books Make You a Better Person,' a banner outside a Los Angeles school proclaims. Books keep kids off drugs. They keep gang members out of prison. They keep terrorists, for all we know, at the gates. This is what we hear at the 200-odd book festivals that have proliferated across America from San Francisco to New York. This, indeed, is what we hear during the N.B.A. playoffs! City dwellers vote and choose a single book for everyone to read at the same time. ''Read a book, save a life,'' one radio ad intones; and even in the absence of charitable contributions, this is very nearly what we feel we are doing. To be a reader these days is to be a sterling member of society, a thoughtful and sensitive human being, a winner.

Without the consensus of large parts of the public on this point, a film like Mark Moskowitz's diminutive documentary, 'Stone Reader,' could never have provoked the hosannas it has, much less made it into the aisles of Blockbuster. Loosely organized around Moskowitz's search for a lost novelist, it shows its hero trudging from one book-lined office to another, stacking books on the desk, cooing over their covers in otherworldly delight and leading his friends in raves about the joy of reading.

[snip]

The fact is Moskowitz has nothing whatever to say about the books he fondles in shot after lingering shot. It's not about the contents of the books. It's about their fetishization.

It is easy to fetishize things that we imagine are on their way out. In the age of Comcast and America Online, books seem quaint, whimsical, imperiled and therefore virtuous. We assume that reading requires a formidable intellect. We forget that books were the television of previous years — by which I mean they were the source of passive entertainment as well as occasional enlightenment, of social alienation as well as private joy, of idleness as well as inspiration. Books were a mixed bag, and they still are. Books could be used or misused, and they still can be.

We all know people who use a text the way others use Muzak: to stave off the silence of their minds. These people may have a comic book in the bathroom, a newspaper on the breakfast table, a novel over lunch, a magazine in the dentist's office, a biography on the kitchen counter, a political expose in bed, a paperback on every surface of their home and a weekly in their back pocket lest they ever have an empty moment. Some will be geniuses; others will be simple text grazers: always nibbling, never digesting — ever consuming, never creating.”

This has taken me a while to decide, but here's what I'm reading next:

• The Birds and other stories by Daphne du Maurier - Halfway through the six short stories in this book and, like Daffers' oeuvre in general, they really are excellent if a touch on the dark side. There's a very gothic feel about this little volume, so if that's your thing, get reading.
• [2008 update: read this, liked it a lot, was moved to seek out more of du Maurier’s short fiction which is almost always experimental, difficult and nerve-touching, quite different from her novels.]
• Hey! Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland - the not-insignificant last chapter in my well-documented bid to get back on top of the works of one of my formerly favourite authors, in danger of slipping if not taken in hand.
• [2008 update: the great Coupland challenge finally grounded on Eleanor Rigby which was such rubbish that I vowed never to read another of his new books. I’m totally out of patience with this author now.]
• Do Not Pass Go by Tim Moore. This is a history of London and its society masquerading as a history of Monopoly, and I am assured by Mr Random that it is excellent. In exchange for my reading this, he has agreed to read Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, although why he should need persuading is beyond me.
• [2008 update: tried it, could not get into it, abandoned it. Took Mr Random years more to read His Dark Materials but, eventually, he loved it.]
• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. A classic I understand, and also a Bookcrossing book from Basingstoke (what humorous alliteration). I had a go with Illywhacker once and got precisely nowhere - in pre-bookcrossing days, I think I donated my copy to the local library. But in the spirit of the enterprise, I am willing to give Carey another try.
• [2008 update: another book I spent years meaning to read - and finally sent on its Bookcrossing way. I fear life may be too short for Peter Carey]
• The Birthday of the World by Ursula le Guin - having finished the Earthsea books it's time to venture onto new territory. I found this in a second-hand bookshop and have been saving it up to read. Last but definitely not least.
• [2008 update: Still haven’t read this. And not so keen on the author any more, after her recent behaviour in collaborating with the Science Fiction Writers’ Association of America in trying to suppress legitimate online reproduction of her work.]

Once upon a time in Norwich, round about Theatre Street, there was a very nice Central Library that I visited first as a student, then for a quiet place to study when I was training to be a journalist. It was an unremarkable, 1970s sort of a building, but quite pleasant to visit.

Unfortunately, not long after I left Norwich, it burned down in a horrendous freak accident involving a light switch and a gas leak. In its place, and with overtones of Millennium projects about it, a folly of vast grandeur was built - a veritable Crystal Palace de nos jours. It is called The Forum.

Actually, it's rather nice, for something that failed to co-exist in Norwich with me. As well as a phoenix-like incarnation of the Norwich Central library there's an outpost of the BBC, cafés, a pizza restaurant, much Bookcrossing activity, an area frequently given over to arts and crafts exhibitions and many enjoyable ways of wasting money.

Chief among these is The BBC Shop just across the way. In here you can find videos, DVDs or cassettes of any radio or TV programme produced by the BBC that you care to name. It is an absolute money-pit.

But here are three things I bought in there on Friday which I am very happy to recommend:

Alan Bennett: The complete Talking Heads - “I didn't say anything…”
Round the Horne - “Hello, I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy…”
I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue… - “I'm afraid I'm going to have to invoke the street-level rules…”