My Weekly Book

I found this from English professor Michael Leddy (blogging at Orange Crate Art) via the inimitable BoingBoing. It’s an article on how to get things done, published on Lifehack.

Having just been through NaNoWriMo (where a little planning went a long way towards breaking down a seemingly-impossible project into do-able chunks) and having hit my goal of reading 50 books this year at the end of October, I would say this has a lot of application to the kind of things I’m talking about in this blog. In fact, isn’t it central to the whole idea of ‘a book a week?’

Anyway, here’s a link and an excerpt. And if you’re not reading Lifehack and BoingBoing already, well, you jolly well should be.

Granularity for students

Granularity is also a useful strategy for making even a daunting reading project do-able. If you have eighty pages to read, finish twenty and take a short break; then repeat. If you’re reading James Joyce or Marcel Proust, a handful of pages might be all that you can manage at one sitting, and sometimes you might need to chart your progress by the sentence. But those sentences and pages add up, and I should know. I just finished all seven volumes (3,102 pages) of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), averaging twenty pages a day over five months and two days of reading. Read full article here…

It didn’t help that I read this BBC Online story while writing the final scene of my NaNoWriMo 2006 story, with just hours to go to before the deadline expired. That couldn’t be described as containing sex - rather some very innocent teenage snogging - but it completely put me off my stroke nonetheless:

First timer takes bad sex award

Iain Hollingshead has won the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2006 with his first novel Twenty Something.

[Buy from Amazon] [Search on eBay]

Now in its 14th year, the award is given to the passage considered to be the most redundant in an otherwise excellent novel.

The panel admitted it was a close call against Tim Willocks’ The Religion but Hollingshead’s reference to “bulging trousers” tipped the scales. The 26-year-old said he was delighted to be the youngest recipient.

[snip]

Among the other nominees were established names like Irvine Welsh and Will Self but the panel described them as “beyond help at this point”. Read full story here…

I am still alive, just desperately trying to keep within hailing distance of my NaNoWriMo writing deadlines, and thus I am prevented from doing much blogging. These deadlines have gone far enough to pot to be really worrying while being close enough to what it says on my ink and highlighter-saturated piece of paper (formerly and laughingly known as a planning sheet) to prevent me sinking to my knees in despair.

The situation is as follows: I am on about 22,000 words and I should be 9,000 in advance of that. The goal is to have written 50,000 words by November 30, midnight. Who knows what will happen…

[Search for NaNoWriMo organiser Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem on eBay]

As to reading, that is going just fine, a better method of procrastination has yet to be invented. I had a little incident in Borders the other day, the kind of incident that comes with free chocolate. They are actually handing out Green and Blacks at the till and who loses here, I ask you? Anyway, it was a classic three-for-two ambush and included a new Louis Theroux (I have phrased that sentence like this deliberately in order to avoid an accident with that x and an apostrophe) entitled The Call of the Weird. Along for the ride were Alan Bennett’s extensive memoir Untold Stories and a new Sara Paretsky paperback Fire Sale. I have already read the Theroux (practically in a sitting) and two-thirds of the Bennett, as delightful as ever.

A trip into the library merely to return books took me past a display that resembled the giant bars of chocolate you see stacked at the end of supermarket aisles from mid-September onwards. The result of that was a book of short stories by Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s fame, entitled How We Are Hungry and a detective story by Judith Cutler called The Food Detective. You can see how the library staff were working to a theme in their displays which makes the end-of-aisle analogy even more appropriate. I’ve got Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy, as thick as a brick and a wonderful find, sitting on a table waiting to be started and I dearly hope I will actually enjoy that as much as I expect to. In the graphic novel department, I finally bought a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and am expecting to be reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series in the new year. Oh, and a collection of gardening columns by Monty Don arranged by month and entitled My Roots has been pressed on me by Beloved Other Half who was bowled over by tales of muddy potatoes and hazel hedges. I’ve got as far as March and am enjoying myself.

And now to what I thought was the point of this post; a couple of good things spotted in the Guardian Books pages today (spent writing hard, as you can see). The first is an analysis of the language in DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, a book I once started, did not persevere with and intend to read again. The second is a fascinating interview with Robert Persig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is essential and insightful reading because apparently he allows himself to be interviewed so rarely. Oh, and I was given the most beautiful book as a birthday present, but will post separately about that.

Back to it…

I’m feeling under pressure at the moment. In terms of picking up new books, I finished my reading challenge at the beginning of October. But I can’t finally tick it off (or read anything else with a clear conscience) until I have finished part two of Don Quixote. And, don’t get me wrong. It’s an excellent book - knockabout, funny, entertaining and with a very quick succession of scene changes to keep me involved.

It’s just that, at more than 500 pages of closely-set text (and that’s just part two; part one was about the same length) it feels like an equivalent commitment to taking out a mortgage - one that could easily take me 25 years to fulfil. I’m currently on something like page 850 - and really keen to finish so that I can say that I wound up the challenge in October.

But there’s another reason why it’s desperately important I get this project out of the way before November 1. Here it is:

To the uninitiated, National Novel Writing Month (which might more accurately, I suppose, be called International Novella Writing Month - but who’s counting) does exactly what it says on the tin. A large number of insane people from around the world undertake to write a 50,000-word work of prose, from scratch, between midnight on November 1 and midnight on November 30. That involves, in case you like statistics, producing 1,667 words every day during November. My sanity is so far in question that this is my third year of attempting it.

In 2004 and 2005 I set out to write over-ambitious thrillers and ended up with c. 35,000 words and c. 36,000 words respectively. This year my plans are a bit different - to take one of my pre-existing characters and write down a significant chunk of backstory. Unlike the previous two years I have done lots of planning and, unlike the previous two years, the story I want to tell is around 50,000 words long as opposed to something like 150,000. So I am reasonably hopeful. In fact, like everyone else taking part in what is the year’s major creative event for so many of us, I just want to get on with it.

Time to sit down and get the dear old Don to move over…