My Weekly Book

How We Are Hungry – Dave Eggers

This was an irritating book, not least because it wasn’t at all badly-written. What it reminded me of more than anything was early Douglas Coupland, before he went crazy and tore up the script and started deliberately writing rubbish or trying to re-write his own most popular published works. Possibly the same fate awaits Dave Eggers – but, once bitten, twice shy, I certainly don’t intend to award him 10 years of my life in which to prove himself, in the way that I did with Coupland. It does, to be fair, appear that he wouldn’t need it. His whole trajectory of going down the toilet really does seem to be occurring much more steeply, and in a much tighter timeframe, than that of his Canadian forebear.

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To dredge up a few positives. The writing in these stories was vivid and immediate, capable of great urgency, and the whole anthology had a broken, disrupted rhythm which serves to make it uncomfortable mental baggage – which I think is to its credit in shaking readers out of the complacency with which they might otherwise approach the book. But I felt about as engaged as if I’d switched on the television for a few minutes’ casual viewing before getting bored and doing something else more worthwhile instead. I suppose one of my biggest problems with it was ‘why on earth should I care about these people?’ Which is usually a pretty good indication that an author isn’t doing his or her job properly.

Here’s an excerpt from an excellent review on the website Pop Matters that really captured what I thought, and also seems to express the Coupland parallel mighty well:

How We Are Hungry suffers from the same unevenness that has plagued all of Eggers’s work to this point. When he’s good, he’s great: He can wrap you up in the swirl of ambition and pain and sincerity of young people wanting to make a difference in the world. As in the conversation between God in the ocean, he can echo the boldness and grandeur of Blake and Whitman, imaging humans as players in the grand drama of the universe. What’s lacking, however, is the why, the reason, the motivating factor for such strong desires and longings. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers railed against the universe like Job, feeling betrayed and jilted by a God that would let such horrible things happen to such good young people; in You Shall Know Our Velocity, his characters railed against the greed and selfishness and inertia of Western life, which comes off as smug and condescending and not all that compelling. In How We Are Hungry, Eggers continues along the same path, with earnest characters wanting to break out of whatever box they are in, to connect with others and with the universe, but who are suffering from not much more than, well, boredom. I’m very sad to say it, but to me Eggers seems like a one-trick pony. When the world first came across his style in his memoir, it flipped. Now that we’re seeing it yet again in his third book, perhaps we, like his characters, are beginning to get a bit bored. Read full article here

Been there, done that, sorry if I can’t be bothered a second time now I’m grown-up and therefore far more laid-back. And this guy doesn’t even make 33 references to The Smiths (or however many it is) to keep you amused during dull points in the story. An excellent point made to me on a Bookcrossing message board the other day was that perhaps you need to be a certain age to read Coupland; I suspect Eggers is the same and that I’ve simply got too old and insular and impatient for this kind of twenty- and thirty-something peculiarly American angst which has nothing whatsoever to say to me these days. If it ever did.

Some links:

• BBC Collective review
• McSweeneys
• Dave Eggers’ Wikipedia entry

The Food Detective – Judith Cutler

Coming across books like this is one of the best reasons for belonging to your local library. It’s a detective novel by a very well-established writer that’s got a really distinctive voice and a heroine who you end up hoping might invite you round for Sunday lunch. Josie Welford’s a no-nonsense Brummie lady (of a certain age) with Gypsy blood just a couple of generations back. She’s survived marriage to a gangster followed by a long spell on her own while he was a guest of Her Majesty. Now he’s dead of cancer and Josie, who knows full well where the cash is hidden, is benefiting from a ferocious diet regime and a new incarnation as a publican and restauranteur. That means relocating to a village on the fringes of Exmoor that makes Royston Vasey look about as metropolitan as Seattle, taking flying lessons and availing herself of any nice little opportunities (for example, personable ex-RAF flying instructors or osteopaths who are very good with their hands) who might just chance along.

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And it’s all looking like a nice little prospect until she starts to ask loud, uncomfortable questions of her meat supplier, tells the regulars not to grope the teenage bar staff and finds that the copper who sent her old man away has turned up in a new incarnation as a food inspector living in a mobile home at the local caravan park. As the suspicious locals boycott her pub, send her to Coventry, persecute her staff, dump offal on her doorstep and generally develop an increasingly strong resemblance to the occupants of Gormenghast, Josie gets the chance to show us what she’s made of.

Fictional women being what they so often are, and especially in crime novels, she’s such a breath of fresh air. She’s strong-willed, opinionated, talented, unafraid, formerly fat and I would guess nudging pretty close to fifty. She’s bolshie, independent and incorrigibly nosy, plus her ex-husband and his henchmen have taught her all sorts of useful skills like handling firearms and doing stunt driving, all very handy for an amateur detective. There’s a good plot that doesn’t fully unfold until the last few pages and a strong authorial voice that made reading this a pleasure. Great fun all round and a good introduction, I would say, to this author’s work.

Some links:

• The author’s website
• An interview with Judith Cutler
• Birmingham UK: Judith Cutler
• The geography of the novel

Final total for the 2006 reading challenge: 63 books.

A complete list of titles broken down by genre follows below the fold. Reviews for the last two will be written up when I have the time and the inclination. But soon, anyway.

A slap on the back for me and it’s time to move on to the 2007 openers – likely to be Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and a crime anthology edited by Sara Paretsky called Women On The Case. Oh, and also her recent book Blacklist although I agree with everyone who has complained about the ridiculously small type…

Anyway. Here they are.

(more…)

Not my readers, sadly. No, this is an article from The Guardian in which the reading public is invited to nominate its choice of the year’s best discoveries. Which is a nice spin on the seasonal book list. Here’s the link: Readers’ Digests.

And, just to add value, my list of the best books I read this year (learn more about them via this link):

• Dead Run – PJ Tracy
• The Sixth Lamentation – William Brodrick
• Dead Lagoon – Michael Dibdin
• Death Knock – Frederic Lindsay
• Have Mercy On Us All – Fred Vargas
• Missing – Karin Alvtegen
• Interface – Joe Gores
• Total Recall – Sara Paretsky
• Touching the Void – Joe Simpson
• Holding the Key: my year as a guard in Sing-Sing – Ted Conover
• The Call of the Weird – Louis Theroux
• Untold Stories – Alan Bennett
• V for Vendetta – Alan Moore
• Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Rule Britannia – Daphne du Maurier
• Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
• The King of Elfland’s Daughter – Lord Dunsany
• The Chrysalids – John Wyndham
• The Eagle of the Ninth – Rosemary Sutcliff

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Writing Home – Alan Bennett

December is drawing to a close and this is now a race to see how far in advance of 60 books I can get before the year ends. Perhaps then I was unwise to choose this 600-page doorstop to take away as holiday reading. However the last book of Alan Bennett’s writings that crossed my path, Untold Stories back in November, was so enjoyable that its 600-plus pages just flew past and I was left desperate for more. Therefore I was confident of having backed another winner.

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And I had, but perhaps less so than I was expecting. There is no doubt that this is a consumingly readable and thoroughly enjoyable book. It just doesn’t connect in the way that the subsequent volume does. It was perversity on my part and the serendipitous accidents you have in bookshops that lead me to read the later instalment first. And I’m glad it happened this way round or I’m not so sure I would have been running out of the door to get my hands on another volume. It would definitely still have been on my list, but considerably further down and I would have missed out mightily if events had indeed unfolded in this order.

The difference between the two is small but striking. In Writing Home we are seeing the author’s formal public face. Almost everything he includes in this first anthology has been previously published, or made public – as a book review, a lecture or an address. His diaries have been carefully edited for publication in the London Review of Books. The accounts of filming or producing his work, laced with theatrical anecdotes and astringent observation, as often at his own expense as at that of other people, make for fascinating reading which leaves you laughing out loud on public transport and irritating friends and family with your compulsion to quote every other perfectly-honed line at them. But still it maintains a relentlessly public face.

As the introduction to Untold Stories explains, the author was faced in 1997 with a very serious run-in with cancer. This seems to me, having read this earlier book, to have given his writing an unflinching clarity and honesty which, while not exactly lacking from this first volume, is not to the fore in the same way. It is much more reserved, buttoned-up even, and commensurately less gripping as a result. Whereas a preoccupation with the personal can turn into prurience and inquisitiveness, it’s also the thing that forms the deepest connections and provokes the strongest responses with readers and nowhere is that more evident than in a comparison between these two books. For the full story, seek out this introduction for yourself. But it concludes thus: “I might have preferred to tell it differently – in the form of plays, say or fiction – but this album is a quicker if less face-saving way of doing it. ‘Pass it on,’ says Hector in The History Boys. ”Just pass it on.’”

In a final attempt to make my point I shall quote two things. The first is a passage from Writing Home that occurs in a review of Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin entitled Alas! Decieved: “[Larkin's father] was the City Treasurer of Coventry. He was also the veteran of several Nuremberg rallies, a pen-pal of [President of the Reichsbank Hjalmar] Schacht’s, and had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece that gave the Nazi salute… to describe a childhood with this grotesque figure at the centre of it as ‘a forgotten boredom’ seems ungrateful of Larkin, if not untypical, even though the phrase comes from a poem… so Larkin is telling the truth rather than the facts… Still to anyone (I mean me) whose childhood was more sparsely accoutred with characters, Larkin’s insistence on its dullness is galling, if only on the ‘I should be so lucky’ principle.” The second is a from a review of Untold Stories from the Glasgow Herald that rather took my fancy at the time which stated that “[Alan Bennett] can find more drama in a cup of Darjeeling than others could in a household of nymphomaniacs.”

So what ties these two quotes together? In Writing Home the author refers obliquely to his childhood and family on occasion. In Untold Stories they form the backbone of the book. He may, by his own assessment, have been working with the cup of Darjeeling rather than the nymphomaniacs but the material he comes up with makes compulsive reading nonetheless. For this reason the later volume is on my list of stand-out reads of the year, while I don’t think this is. But it’s still an excellent book – just in extremely exalted company when viewed next to its successor.

The Corfu Trilogy – Gerald Durrell

I have a terrible confession. The other day I went to Whipsnade Wild Animal Park. (I think it was a Safari Park when I was a kid, but that sort of thing is sorely unfashionable these days, even more frowned-upon than being a zoo.) As we wandered round, marvelling at the white rhinos, the giraffes and the zebras, I could hear nothing but Johnny Morris providing me with a humorous running commentary on all the animals in front of us, deploying his full range of funny voices – ponderous, squawking, shrill or gruff, depending on the bird or beast in question.

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It’s obviously my age – if you, like me, were a British child in the 1970s I defy you not to have the same experience. Such was the pervasive influence of Morris’s show Animal Magic on the viewers of tea-time television. In fact a few minutes with Google has just demonstrated how the Guardian review of this very book and an Independent profile of Durrell both carry that title, which proves my point rather nicely. But whereas Morris got hold of you during your childhood, Gerald Durrell almost inevitably followed in your teens. With its junior protagonist My Family and Other Animals was considered the perfect book to get 11- and 12-year-olds reading and in due course, having turned up at secondary school, I was given it to read as an inspired choice of English set book.

Since Durrell started his formal naturalist’s career as a trainee zookeeper at Whipsnade in 1945, we have now come more or less full circle and can turn our attention to the book. This fat, 750-page trilogy has been published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the author’s most famous and best-loved work. Many, nay, most of us will have heard of it, if not actually read it. But I wasn’t even aware that its two less famous siblings, Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods, existed. Having enjoyed the original so much, on first reading and during all subsequent re-reads, I jumped at the chance for more of the same.

It would be impossible to appreciate this properly without starting at the beginning so I resisted the temptation to skip. Instead I treated myself to a pleasant warm-up jog through the familiar bit. And I realised that Durrell’s story is composed of two elements. One is the sun-drenched and idyllic descriptions of glorious Greek sunsets, gorgeous blue Ionian seas, shimmering olive groves – and, of course, all the flora and fauna that inhabit these mythic landscapes. The other is the humorous dialogue and description of his family, their manners and mores and the many characters that they meet and interact with on the island (Spiro the cab driver turned family patron saint, Lugaretzia, the aptly-named hypochondriac housekeeper, Margo’s appalling Turkish boyfriend or the enigmatic Rose Beetle Man). The genius lies in the fact that either of these things on their own would probably bore the reader silly – but in tandem they are delightful and give the author an opportunity to write about his preoccupations and be a crowd-pleaser at the same time. And, of course, they are both born from Durrell’s naturalist’s skills of observation and the ability to put his conclusions down in concise prose. I first read this book something like 25 years ago and it is a testament to its quality that I’m still enjoying it and finding new things in it now. It is worthy of space on anyone’s must-read list and if I had to make the famed Desert Island-style choice and limit myself to one small bookshelf for all my remaining mortal reading requirements I think this would truly have earned its place.

In Beasts, Birds and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods an older Durrell returns twice more to the scene of his childhood for additional volumes of reminiscences covering the same period of time. He describes the problem this gives him in the introduction to the first of these titles: “New readers do not want to be constantly irritated by references to a previous book that they have not read and the ones who have read the previous book do not want to be irritated by constant repetition of events with which they are familiar.” Durrell’s solution to this – as may be divined from the paraphrase of a title – is to reprise the first book, but for grown-ups after the children have been put to bed. This means a number of the more racy and amusing anecdotes not fit for the initial volume, for example Larry’s yacht-wrecking activities, Margo’s dabbling in spiritualism, Leslie’s court appearance, Mother’s reluctant romance with a very salty old sea-dog, the presence of an infuriating French count and a couple of entertainingly gullible gay American artists and Gerry’s presence at a birth (you almost expect him to whip out his collecting kit and start taking notes and samples) are all served up for the reader’s delectation. The more knowing, adult tone makes these later works read like a much more conventional memoir than the magical first volume and their policy of making explicit that which had been left implicit the first time around reaches an end point in a series of extracts from letters and postcards pinpointing the whereabouts of each family member at the outbreak of the war. Having read them I can see why they are commensurately less famous than My Family and Other Animals – great to read if you have enjoyed the first volume, and want more of the same but, to be perfectly honest, probably not classics in their own right. However I feel my appreciation of the first book has been immeasurably enriched and added to by having the context and backstory that these books provide and I think that alone would justify the decision to publish them as a trilogy.

Having read them, it’s easy to see the how the seeds of Durrell’s career as an animal collector were sown – a career that led him around the world in search of exotic specimens for zoos and later to a passionate interest in conservation which was well ahead of its time. This brings me back around to Whipsnade. Even as someone now quite far advanced into adulthood, an excursion to look at tigers, hippopotami, elephants, antelopes and all their exotic cousins has lost none of its thrill or wonder. I understand and empathise with all the arguments on why these wonderful animals shouldn’t be penned up in a damp and chilly Bedfordshire field merely for my viewing pleasure. But I also cannot dismiss the notion that allowing people to get right up close to something as rare and precious as a family group of white rhinos, or to exclaim in delight over a wobbly baby giraffe, builds a strong pro-conservation lobby and puts a concrete, understandable face on the abstract ideas of global warming, depletion of species and the crucial importance of biodiversity. Gerald Durrell (and probably Johnny Morris too, more than we’d like to admit) is responsible for creating this sense of wonder as well as for his more concrete conservation work – and for that we may be very thankful, from the biodiversity perspective, in a few generations’ time.

Some links:

• Guardian review
• Independent profile of Gerald Durrell
• Penguin book pages – synopsis, extract, author bio
• British Children Have More Fun (with onward links)
• Margo’s Wikipedia page
• Larry’s Wikipedia page (including details of The Wife Who Is Never Mentioned)
• Theo’s Wikipedia page
• The Jersey Zoological Park (now known as Durrell Wildlife)

Total Recall and Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky

Sara Paretsky is my new favourite author. I cannot believe I have left it this long to start on her books. Of course, like Robert Rankin, she was one of those authors that I always knew I should be reading. But somehow, maybe for this very reason, I found her daunting. It didn’t help that I tried, a few years ago, to start my Paretsky reading career with Total Recall which I would imagine is anything but a typical book. I was stymied by the wealth of detail in the opening chapters on people I didn’t know anything about and so I put it back on the shelf. Several times it nearly went to the second-hand bookshop, or into the Bookcrossing pile. But something stayed my hand and now I’m thanking my lucky stars it did.

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I started out this time around with Fire Sale, Paretsky’s latest, after it caught my eye in Borders. (Alongside Louis Theroux’ Call of the Weird and Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories – this must have been a record for getting through three for two acquisitions.) I usually hate taking series books out of sequence but this time it has worked. And, indeed, many of the things I really liked about it were born of its position as the latest instalment in a very lengthy narrative. Fire Sale is an extraordinarily rich story, built on the framework of the classic hardboiled detective tale but containing elements of the psychological thriller, of social commentary, of coming-of-age narratives and even of family sagas. It’s got a very densely-drawn and consistent internal world which draws strongly on the series history. This includes previous character development, VI’s network of friends, old acquaintances and colleagues that keep her rooted in the world and allow her to function, and a strong sense of social injustice which is utterly explicable if you scroll down to the links at the bottom of this article and read a couple of the non-fiction pieces the author has published. But it’s also tightly-plotted, psychologically convincing, highly exciting and capable of getting you emotionally involved with its large cast of characters. It’s a long book, which some readers have complained about, but I was completely absorbed in it, and therefore quite happy with that.

It’s also got an incredibly strong authorial voice, which it’s important not to confuse with the voice of Vic Warshawski herself – author and character are, after all, not in any way obliged to be the same person. Paretsky is old enough and experienced enough a writer to know very well what she cares about and it’s all there for the reader to appreciate. It just happens that I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the world view that she (and, by extension, Vic) are expressing however I can see how it might not be to the taste of everyone. And it’s pretty upfront, so if you don’t share her concern for social justice and freedom of speech then you might find this book a little hard to take.

Having more or less inhaled Fire Sale I was immediately rummaging about for more Paretsky to read, which is how Total Recall came back into play. This time, with a bit of context to help me, I had no trouble with it whatsoever. This reminded me strongly of William Brodrick’s The Sixth Lamentation – a book with similar themes – which is so much more than just a mystery story that it probably makes it to the exalted category of actual literature. The story sees the heroine pushed to the limit as she tries to keep her bread-and-butter clients warm while looking into the case of an insurance policy that was cashed in years before the deceased actually died, sort out a problem that is making the life of one of her dearest friends a misery and prepare for her journalist lover to go off on an extended mission to Afghanistan. All these plot elements are handled superbly, coalescing as you would expect into one convincing whole.

VI’s biggest problem in this novel that she seems to rub every one she talks to up the wrong way. Driven and determined, she’s got no time for the soft touch and none for nice words either. It’s a brave move by the author to portray her leading lady in such unsympathetic terms, especially when the lady herself has no idea what she’s doing to put up the backs of everybody she speaks to. And once again the book’s an absorbing, tightly-plotted tale that keeps you turning the pages long after you should have put it aside and gone off to do something else – the kind of book that makes you impatient about reaching your stop on the train. It uses the device of an interspersed narrative from one of the other chapters to help expand the story and the sum of all its disparate parts add up to much more than just your run-of-the-mill genre novel and one that it might take you a little while to get out of your head. Definitely a recommended read. Next on my list is Blacklist – as soon as Christmas is out of the way and I can get to a bookshop to find a copy.

Bibliography (abridged from the author’s website)

Novels:

• Fire Sale, 2006
• Blacklist, 2003
• Total Recall, 2001
• Hard Time, 1998/9
• Tunnel Vision, 1994
• Guardian Angel, 1992
• Burn Marks, 1990
• Blood Shot, 1988
• Bitter Medicine, 1987
• Killing Orders, 1985
• Deadlock, 1984
• Indemnity Only, 1982

Short stories:

• Photo Finish, published exclusively in VI x 2, which includes as well the VI short story Publicity Stunts
• Windy City Blues, A collection of nine V I Warshawski short stories, 1995
• Editor: Women on the Case, Original crime stories by women, Virago, 1996
• Editor: A Woman’s Eye, Original crime stories by women, Virago, 1991
• Dealer’s Choice, The Man Who Loved Life and A Taste of Life, reprinted as a Penguin Sixty, 1995
• Freud at Thirty Paces in 1st Culprit, 1993
• The Great Tetsuji, in 2nd Culprit, 1994

Some links:

• A critical introduction from enotes.com
• Thrilling Detective entry (plus bibliography)
• Sara Paretsky: an interview by Bob Cornwell
• Truth, Lies and Duct Tape: Writing in an Age of Silence – an inspiring talk on freedom of speech given by Sara Paretsky and reproduced on her website
• Guardian article by the author
• Sisters in Crime

My Roots – Monty Don

A book that is not all that it first appears, and undoubtedly more than the sum of its parts. It is, ostensibly, a collection of gardening columns written for The Observer over the course of several years. It is skillfully put together, in that the columns appear in their correct month order, thus accurately mirroring the passage of the horticultural year. But it is more than a mere collection, and more than a book about gardening. It is no less than a manifesto for a better way of life.

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This makes it inspiring and damned irritating in about equal measure. There are subjects on which I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Don – chiefly regarding the organic movement, the soul-stirring pleasure of growing and eating your own veg, the ills of the food production industry and the importance in every life of space for a little bit of fantasy and creativity. And then there are the subjects on which he drives me mad – chiefly the all-consuming joys of family life which the people experiencing it never seem to appreciate may apply to them but doesn’t necessarily resonate with everyone else out here in the big, wide world.

It’s no use picking this up if you want good advice about growing spuds or tips for an infallible display of disease-free rose blooms. Because that’s not the author’s game at all. He’s celebrating the garden as more than just organic, but as an organism and as an extension of the people that create it. As such it is self-willed, dirty, untidy, dynamic, bloody hard work, prone to failure and disappointment and in need of a master plan that takes place over years, possibly even decades rather than weeks or months. But infinitely rewarding as well and that’s one of the key messages for readers to take away.

In our household, the passing of Alan Titchmarsh from Gardeners’ World was a moment of great tragedy. When we heard that Monty Don was to take over, we were cautiously optimistic (a sentiment not necessarily shared by the rest of gardening Britain, but never mind.) ‘He’s a vegetable man,’ we said to ourselves, and our faith has been justified. When we settle down for our regular Friday night fix we can be sure of an update on the progress of the winter brassicas and the recently-planted radicchio, not to mention the tomatoes in the greenhouse. Marry this with inquiries into the whys and wherefores of good composting, the necessity to chit potatoes before planting and paeans of praise for allotments and flower and veg shows and round here you have happy viewers.

If you’re the same then there’s little question that you’ll enjoy this. But maybe if you never give your garden a thought you will find something in it for you as well. Maybe you’re interested in questions of environmentalism and the economics of food production, maybe you’re more inclined to speculate on the nature of human spirituality. Whatever appeals, it’s possible you’ll find food for thought here. It’s that kind of book…

• Read an extract
• Monty Don introduces the above extract
• Gardeners’ World

England’s Lost Eden: adventures in a Victorian utopia – Philip Hoare

I am going to admit this, right up here at the top of this entry. I have quite a bit of sympathy for the person who, while reviewing this book on Amazon, said the following:

“What a bizarre result! The text is padded out with multitudinous cul-de-sacs – veritable brain-dumps of boring tripe – that make this book twice as long as it should have been.” (See link below.)

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This comment reeks of genuine and understandable frustration with Philip Hoare and I am aware that this is a terrible way to begin an account of what I actually thought was a very good and interesting book. But I did feel that it suffered from a distinct lack of focus at times, especially in the early chapters, and that this was making me less inclined to persevere. However it would be very sad if you allowed this arguable flaw to put you off reading it altogether.

One of a number of its narratives concerns a sect of primitive Christians believing in such notions as celibacy, common property and the imminent coming of the Apocalypse, who took up residence in the New Forest round about the 1870s. Their leader was a Suffolk woman named Mary Ann Girling and they lived for a time in a fairly well-appointed house but were eventually driven by a combination of unworldliness and ill-will from their neighbours to the expediency of camping in other people’s barns and fields.

The fate of the Girlingites is ostensibly the main theme of the book. But where it gets really interesting is where Hoare ties them in with the Victorian obsession with spiritualism and its effects on the work of people like John Ruskin, members of the Pre-Raphaelite group and the writer Laurence Houseman. Even Oscar Wilde gets a brief look in – but that’s not surprising since the author’s written another book about him. Much of the most illuminating stuff in here documents the reaction of wider Victorian society to utopian cults like the Girlingites. A consumer-driven society where technological advances were coming thick and fast, the Victorians were strongly drawn to both the notion of founding a ‘utopia’ where humanity could return to some kind of mythic Prelapsarian state and to the idea of being able to communicate with spirits from beyond the grave. And of course a large proportion of Americans de nos jours are similarly convinced that the Apocalypse is just around the corner so the parallels become even more interesting…

Some of the book’s byways are just delightful – such as the exploration, close to the end, of the tower-building activities of Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson at Sway in the New Forest, creating a structure that was built of concrete on principles that its constructor had observed in Calcutta. If subject matter like this interests you, or if you have a particular interest in the New Forest region and its history then I would say it’s well worth the effort of an attempt on this book despite its occasional frustrations.

Some links:

• BBC Where I Live review
• Philip Hoare on Authortracker
• Amazon reviews

Dead Reckoning: the new science of catching killers – Dr Michael Baden and Marion Roach

Dr Michael Baden has had a long career doing the kind of things that most of us can barely imagine. As a forensic pathologist and former Chief Medical Examiner of the state of New York, he is an expert in the causes of violent death whose expertise has been sought in investigations including the OJ Simpson trial and the bid to find and identify the bodies of the last Tsar of Russia and his family. He’s conducted countless autopsies and overseen the exhumation of many bodies. So he’s got pretty good credentials for the book he’s written, a guide to forensic science which sets out to demystify various branches of the discipline.

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It has chapter headings such as ‘blood’ and ‘bugs’ and these potentially rather dry subjects are cleverly brought to life by focusing on the larger-than-life forensic experts who specialise in them. Of course, the blow-by-blow description of an autopsy which kicks the narrative off is anything but dry and the reader could be accused of prurience or ghoulishness by seeking this kind of thing out. I, however, found it a fascinating and factual introduction to the subject laced with wonderful details about human physiognomy. For instance, did you know that a man with a right testis which hangs lower than the left will almost always have situs inversus, a condition where all the body’s organs are in the mirror position to the rest of us? Also, that coffins rarely remain underneath the neat oblong of the grave but can drift about underground to the extent that ground-penetrating radar is needed to find them if they have to be dug up again? No? Me neither, but I do now and these are the kind of little quirky facts that I love. Also I’ve had a close relative’s remains put through a post-mortem examination so it’s quite nice to hear from a pathologist about what actually goes on as opposed to just imagining it.

So I would say nothing big or complicated here, quite a lot to put off the squeamish, but you know who you are already. If you want a nice, accessible introduction to this subject that goes a little bit deeper than CSI, and you don’t mind the fact that it deals largely with an American milieu, then this is definitely a book worth looking at.

Untold Stories – Alan Bennett

This is one of those occasions when I’m not actually sure what I can add to what’s been said already. As an illustration of what I mean here are some of the reviews. The Daily Telegraph said: “This thick book is so full of good things they could sell it for twice the price.”

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And The Times: “I have never read a book of this length where I have turned the last page with such regret.” The Guardian: “My normal reaction, when faced with 600-odd pages of prose to review, is a groan of despair; when it’s Bennett’s prose, it’s ‘goody.’” I particularly liked the statement made by the lady in The Glasgow Herald (and I suspect Mr Bennett might well feel the same): “He can find more drama in a cup of Darjeeling than others could in a household of nymphomaniacs.” It’s a hefty read at nearly 700 pages, and yet you never think it is too long or do anything other than wish you had another 700 pages to go. (I have, after a fashion, as soon as a certain massive online book retailer pulls its corporate finger out of its corporate arsehole and delivers my copy of Writing Home.)

The book is a miscellany of essays, diaries and lecture notes and never failed to keep me interested, amused and entertained. By its very nature some bits were better than others – I thoroughly enjoyed the art section which some readers have claimed to find boring, but it is a subject that interests me anyway. On the other hand, having previously read ‘The Lady In The Van’ in a delightful edition that I’d like to call a ‘Penguin 60′ except for the fact that it wasn’t published by Penguin, I didn’t come away from this book much better-informed on the subject of Miss Shepherd than I was already.Then again, Seeing Stars is an essay about the experience of growing up with 30s and 40s cinema that could not be more tailored to my interests if it had been specially commissioned.

However the best bits were undoubtedly the most personal – marvellous sections of reminiscence and family history which, in the hands of such a skilled writer, take on a whole new tenor and significance as well as their bald value as social history and as an insight into what shaped the outlook of one of our most important contemporary writers. It appears that much of this made it onto paper courtesy of a very nasty health scare – the ‘average rock bun’ of the title was a doctor’s pithy description of a cancerous growth in the author’s bowel – and the feeling that if he didn’t get all this down on paper pretty quickly he may never get the chance. And, as he points out in the introduction, after a “somewhat speculative” unauthorised biography was published in 2001 he was not prepared to let someone else have the last word.

The result should dispense with any notion that Bennett is somehow a ‘dull’ or ‘cosy’ writer – much of what he treats on here is raw, direct, emotional and brutally honest, not least in his description of the painful toll that mental ill-health and dementia has taken on his loved ones – and, by extension, him. From many writers this would make for very difficult reading but here of course it is leavened with such wit, skill and humanity that quite the opposite is true. In the introduction he observes: “There is other stuff in the book which, while I was writing it anyway, I did not expect or want to see published in my lifetime. I had no objection to it being read, I just didn’t want to be in the room at the time… a death sentence, like moving house, meant the tidying had to be done and done quickly: there was a deadline. My earlier misgivings about what I was prepared to see published in my lifetime now seemed almost laughably irrelevant: none of it was likely to be published in my lifetime, so where was the problem?”

And I think that the imposition of this deadline, fortunately for all of us not Mr Bennett’s ultimate one, has produced a brilliant book. If life is too short to read rubbish, rest assured that you won’t be wasting a second here.

The book reviewed by Simon Callow:

The Call of the Weird – Louis Theroux

If, like me, all things weird and wonderful call to you with a siren song then best not to pick up this book while you are busy. I nearly read it through in a sitting, having initially resisted buying it as part of this vain stand against the key decisions in my reading life being governed by what publishers decide to flog on special offers. That, as I now acknowledge, was a mistake. I could have had all this fun at least a month earlier.

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I enjoyed every page-turning minute, but not without a considerable side-order of guilt of a sort that has been dogging me rather a lot recently. The main effect of this past year’s reading challenge has been to make me agonise about the quality of what I read while simultaneously being reassured that the quantity is sufficient. And you have to ask the question. Is this merely another voyeuristic trip through an illusory landscape populated by porn stars, prostitutes, con-men, survivalists, ghastly neo-Nazis and people who believe they have been personally responsible for the deaths of up to ten aliens?

And the answer, surprisingly, is still no. How do you behave when an avowed fascist turns out to be a nice, helpful guy on a personal level and you end up owing him a favour? When you’re the only white man in a club full of armed gangsta rappers and their fans? When you get overly concerned for the welfare of a Vegas working girl who you know full well is manipulating you? How do you have a serious conversation with someone who describes himself as Thor Templar, the Lord Commander of the Earth Protectorate? Especially after you have realised that you, personally, may have been responsible for his near-complete change of identity and disappearance from the Internet thanks to some ill-chosen remarks you made in an interview?

Not dilemmas most of us will have to face very often, which is why it’s a jolly good thing we have Louis to do it for us. It is quite easy to see him as mocking his subjects but I’m not actually convinced that he does (all that much). At least, I’m not convinced its his main purpose. He’s certainly not their best buddy – no journalist ever can be and he has some self-awareness on the subject. But I think the real value of this book is the way he goes in and reveals all the stereotypes listed above as real, complex, contradictory people who are really not all that different from the rest of us. That and how much part of human nature it is to try to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

On picking this up I was intrigued by the parallels between Mr Theroux and the journalist Jon Ronson who is an absolute favourite of mine (and, I still think, the better writer of the two). The blurb for an event plugging his latest book states: “[Jon Ronson] has been writing for years about real eccentrics, not least himself.” And this is the crux of the thing.

Theroux writes like an impartial scientist putting these odd creatures he encounters dispassionately under the microscope. While he might find them engaging on a personal level there’s the constant feeling that he has no real empathy for their strange ways or, worse by a factor of ten, that he might actually be laughing at them. Ronson, on the other hand, appears to be fighting a constant rearguard action to prevent himself from being drawn in. Which makes his work that much more honest and engaging, I think. Not that this is a reason to walk away from this Theroux book, which is just great. I just don’t think he’s claimed the crown for this genre with his debut volume.

Some links:

• Louis’ Wikipedia entry
• Pan MacMillan publicity page
• Times review

Have read books 53 to 57 (almost). They are, in order: The Call of the Weird – Louis Theroux; Untold Stories – Alan Bennett; Dead Reckoning: the new science of catching killers – Dr Michael Baden and Marion Roach; England’s Lost Eden: adventures in a Victorian utopia – Philip Hoare; and My Roots – Monty Don. Haven’t quite finished that last one actually, I’ve only got as far as May (it’s a year’s worth of gardening columns). But I’m confident of being able to knock it off this weekend.

Now NaNoWriMo is over and I’ve cleared my backlog of library books I can update this blog with reviews of the above and plan what I’ll be reading for the rest of December when I’m hoping to take my reading total for the year over 60. Unusually, I’m having to return a couple of library books unread. They’re both hard-boiled detective fiction and I’m just not in the mood for it.

So, what now? I’ve been trying to get hold of a copy of the first volume in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, Preludes and Nocturnes. It’s really difficult. Currently I have it on order from Amazon but it’s one of those four to six week jobs that often end in an email explaining how they can’t sell it to you at all despite the extreme optimism of their earlier communications. If this occurs, it’ll be off to eBay. In the meantime I have managed to get hold of volume two, The Doll’s House, and I have heard that volume one is arguably not the best place to start with this series, so maybe I shall just go ahead and read that.

Possibilities for December/Jan:

• Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll; Tennyson’s Gift – Lynne Truss (both inspired by Philip Hoare’s book on Victorian spiritualism in Hampshire)
• The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman and The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender
• Fire Sale – Sara Paretsky (the last outstanding volume of a recent three for two)
• The Corfu Trilogy – Gerald Durrell
• Writing Home – Alan Bennett (also currently on order)
• American Gods – Neil Gaiman

The feedback to my request for help on feedback about reading Philip K Dick came up with the following suggestions:

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• The Man in the High Castle
• A Scanner Darkly
• Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick

So that’s somewhere to start, then. Thanks to everyone who made the suggestions!

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…

This is a post asking for your help. I’d really like to read some Philip K Dick before the year is up – but it’s not easy knowing where to start, given that he’s such a prolific author and a cult figure too.

His Wikipedia entry highlights the following works: The Man in the High Castle; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Ubik; Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said; A Scanner Darkly; VALIS; Exegesis.

Anyone got any experiences with these, good or bad, that they’d like to share? Or other recommendations? How about the short stories?

All help (please email me here) is greatly appreciated…

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Don Quixote – Book 2 by Miguel de Cervantes

*Contains spoilers*

God, what a slog. As I keep saying, it’s not that I’ve disliked the book or regretted reading it – very entertaining, and a great feeling of achievement. I would definitely recommend that other people consider reading it – book one, at least (if not the Exemplary Stories which are short and easy). It’s just so dense and unremitting that there are times when you simply feel as if you will never reach the end.

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Having done so, I can’t feel like I enjoyed part two nearly as much as part one. The first book describes Quixote’s attempts, in the face of all rational proof to the contrary, to live his ideals. And, by doing so, he makes the world a different and (by his own terms) better place. Because of his determination that the ideal of knightly chivalry should exist in the world, it does. In the second book the people he meets on the road know all about him (having read book one, you see, there was quite a gap between the publication of the two halves). And they play along for their own amusement or diversion – but, in essence, they are making fun of the Don for being a madman and all the innocence has gone out of it. It’s too knowing and contrived. Apparently there’s considerable scholarly debate over whether Cervantes was truly responsible for this second volume but I will have to leave it to wiser readers than me to divine. And, tragically enough, when Quixote is finally disabused of the notion that he is a knight-errant, following a defeat contrived supposedly for his own good, he returns to his village and dies of grief, surely an apt metaphor for the fact we all need dreams, ideals and silly notions in our lives, never mind their benefits for humanity as a whole?

Having said that there’s plenty of amusing scenes and diversions for the reader. The adventures remain readable and captivating and we’re introduced to plenty of colourful characters – not least the Duke and Duchess that go to such extraordinary lengths to play along with the Don. The character of Sancho Panza also gets some good development and he proves himself, on finally having achieved the governorship he coveted, to have a very wise head on his peasant shoulders. One of the features I particularly enjoyed about the first book was the interpolated stories – here they seemed to by of much lesser importance, almost perfunctory in places. Maybe Cervantes should have let the story be after the first volume – but who can blame him for cashing in on his unexpected success story, or seeking to protect Quixote’s legacy by making sure his hero was dead and buried and not susceptible to resurrection by imitators?

Some links:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4254511.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote

- – - – -

And here endeth the 50 Book Challenge :- ))

I’m now within a hundred pages of the end of Don Quixote. And then I will be free. Coming up next (but not necessarily in this order):

53. England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia – Philip Hoare
54. The Corfu Trilogy – Gerald Durrell
55. The Sandman Companion – Hy Bender
56. Dead Reckoning: The new science of catching killers – Dr Michael Baden and Marion Roach

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…

Here’s a list of the 50 books I actually read as part of LiveJournal’s 50 Book Challenge, listed by genre. Re-reads are labelled as such. Books I thought were standout excellent are marked with an asterisk. It appears that a full quarter of my reading matter was either crime or thrillers – that wasn’t in itself, so much of a surprise. I was interested to see that non-fiction was such a major genre for me and I also read more sci-fi and fantasy than I was expecting.

I came to the conclusion that it’s much easier to walk into a bookshop or a library, pick up a crime novel and get a decent read than it is to do the equivalent with a thriller. The quality of crime novels seems to be more consistent, which is why I read more of them. I enjoy a compulsive, page-turning, can’t-put-it-down thriller much more but it’s harder to be sure of finding good ones.

I hate the attitude that popular, genre or children’s fiction simply isn’t worth reading, especially if it’s something that’s really caught the public imagination. I think well-written genre fiction can challenge preconceptions and deal in the currency of ideas just as well as obscure lit-fic. I have a feeling that this is a product of my education, some of which took place at a university that put a premium on cultural studies, was one of the first in the country to offer a degree in film studies and routinely taught causes about Mils & Boon novels and comics before this was common elsewhere. I also reject the idea that enjoyment isn’t a worthwhile objective of reading a book.

Even so, I did try to make sure there were some slightly more challenging and literary entries in this list. And I think I might be trying to boost the numbers next year.

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Read in 2006 – Books by genre (50):

Thrillers (8)

The da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – re-read (Jan)
The Sixth Lamentation – William Brodrick (Feb) *
Live Bait – PJ Tracy (March)
Dead Run – PJ Tracy (March) *
The Third Man and The Fallen Idol – Graham Greene (March)
Holy Smoke – Tonino Benacquista (April)
The Rainmaker – John Grisham (June)
At Risk – Stella Rimington (August)

Crime/Noir/Roman Policier (17)

Dead Lagoon – Michael Dibdin (Jan) *
Cosi fan Tutti – Michael Dibdin (Feb)
Scandal takes a Holiday – Lindsey Davis (March)
A Long Finish by Michael Dibdin (March)
Death Knock – Frederic Lindsay (April) *
Blood Rain – Michael Dibdin (April)
Have Mercy On Us All – Fred Vargas (May) *
Missing – Karin Alvtegen (May) *
And Then You Die – Michael Dibdin (May)
B is for Burglar – Sue Grafton (June)
Interface – Joe Gores (June) *
A is for Alibi – Sue Grafton (June)
C is for Corpse – Sue Grafton (August)
A Trouble of Fools – Linda Barnes (August)
The Lighthouse – PD James (September)
Medusa – Michael Dibdin (September)
See Delphi and Die – Lindsey Davis (September)

Non-fiction (8)

Everest South West Face – Chris Bonington (Jan)
Success in Politics: a comparative study – Neil McNaughton (Jan)
Touching the Void – Joe Simpson (Feb) *
Holding the Key: my year as a guard in Sing-Sing – Ted Conover (April)*
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim – David Sedaris (April)
You Can’t Tell The People – Georgina Bruni (May)
The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli (June)
Not Abba: the real story of the 1970s – Dave Haslam (August)

Graphic Novels (2)

V for Vendetta – Alan Moore (Feb) *
Tomorrow Stories (Books 1 and 2) – Alan Moore (May and August)

Literature (2)

The Professor – Charlotte Bronte (June)
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes (July and October)

Contemporary/Literary Fiction (3)

Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (March) *
Rule Britannia – Daphne du Maurier (October) *
Eleanor Rigby – Douglas Coupland (October)

Horror (1)

Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice (April) *

Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Far-Fetched Fiction (8)

The Whole and Entire Hitch-Hiker’s Quintrilogy – Douglas Adams – re-read (May)
The King of Elfland’s Daughter – Lord Dunsany (July) *
The Greatest Show Off Earth – Robert Rankin (August)
Good Omens – Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – re-read (August)
Trouble with Lichen – John Wyndham (September)
The Antipope – Robert Rankin (September)
The Chrysalids – John Wyndham (September) *
Monstrous Regiment – Terry Pratchett (September)

Children’s (1)

The Eagle of the Ninth – Rosemary Sutcliffe (September) *