Category Archives: Reading

Recommending books to friends

An article in the Guardian newspaper made me think about what books I’ve recommended, and given as presents to friends over the years.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/jan/12/best-books-to-share-with-others-stories-giving

I’ve read several of the titles mentioned, and one of them Stoner is a favourite of mine. It was recommended to me by an American friend three years ago, so I borrowed it from the library and absolutely loved it. Written by John Williams and published in 1965, it was poorly received at the time but has since been reappraised and is now lauded for its depiction of human truths. It’s currently being adapted into a film, and I hope that they do a good job.

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Some books take you by surprise, and one of them is a novel that I would never imagine as being to my taste owing to its subject matter. Although I’m spiritual I’m not religious so a novel about the relationships in a Mormon family wouldn’t have been my first choice. I read several favourable reviews of it in 2010, so gave it a chance—and was mightily impressed! The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall is a memorable tale of relationships within a family, being humorous and tragic. It’s excellent at depicting the loneliness of the human soul and how we throw ourselves into liaisons for temporary comfort. I gave four copies of it as Christmas presents last year, and am keen to hear what my friends think of it.

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Lastly, I’d say that any collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant is worthy of your time. I think he’s still the best short story writer ever, and he packs more about the human condition into a few pages than some writers do in a whole novel. I like his novels, but the shorter form is where he excels. I’ve given many copies of this Penguin collection Selected Short Stories to friends and lovers over the year. They’re good stories to read out loud in bed at night!

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Sometimes I’ve given books to friends not just because I enjoyed them, but to help them through a difficult period in their lives.

One of these is Margaret Craven’s I Heard The Owl Call My Name, which tells the story of the last days of a terminally ill young priest sent to a remote settlement to tend the native population. He’s unaware of his limited lifespan, which has been kept from him by his bishop. He learns much about life and love before dying. That sounds depressing, but the short novel is a life-affirming read.

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Another is a novel called The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard. This is a tale about the mysteries of marriage, as well as the nature of forgiveness. I gave it to several friends whose long-term relationships finished unexpectedly, leaving them to face life alone. The story is a wise reflection on who our soulmates are, and how we sometimes need to maintain a certain distance to appreciate the value of the closeness we crave.

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Books can be many things to us, including thrilling, inspirational, educational and amusing. But they’re also a source of great comfort.

What books do you share?

Remember: one day readers will be passing our stories on…

A Catalogue of Promiscuous Praise: Dubious Blurbs

Malcolm Gladwell is under fire for his over-generous praise of friends’ and lovers’ books.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/fashion/malcolm-gladwell-hands-out-book-blurbs-like-santa-does-presents.html?_r=0

I’ve read a few of his books, enjoying them, though I’m not sure how influenced I’d be if I saw his name on blurb praising an author unknown to me. Then again, if I saw a mystery-murder novel lauded by one of my literary heroes, such as James Lee Burke or Michael Connelly, I might give it a try.

Many of the practices in publishing are a racket, but then so is much of any business—dressing up lies to be acceptable. Having once witnessed a famous law lord, journalist and writer bullied by a publishing executive into scribbling a blurb for a book that he’d never heard of, let alone read, I have a jaundiced view of the truthfulness of the words of praise one sees on book covers.

Imagine the effect it would have on sales of your YA or mystery novel if J.K. Rowling endorsed your writing! I somehow doubt that I’ve got enough money to bribe her…

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Authors who succeeded after Death

Just as cynics say “Great career move” when a fading musician dies unexpectedly, leading to a massive boost in the sales of their albums, so it takes having The Grim Reaper as your literary agent for some writers to get anywhere.

I’ve mentioned the sad tale of John Kennedy Toole in previous threads, and it would have been fascinating to know what else he would have created. At least he hasn’t been turned into a franchise operation with hired gun authors brought in to continue the series, as happened recently with Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and the long-established James Bond and Sherlock Holmes stories.

https://litreactor.com/columns/11-authors-who-became-famous-after-they-died

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How long to read that book?

A new online database is offering a service that estimates how long it will take a reader to complete a book. They have twelve million titles in their vaults, so you should find the book that interests you. It’s possible to tailor the reading speed per minute rate, should yours be different from their average of 300 words.

http://www.howlongtoreadthis.com/index.php

I find this intriguing and a bit worrying. Given that there’s been a reported trend towards people reading bite-size chunks of stories on their smartphones, and that short stories and novellas are proving more popular, where does that leave novels? Will readers look at how long a book will take to consume, discounting it should the estimate be too long?

Too long; didn’t read is increasingly seen as an abbreviation TL;DR

I anticipate that it will come about that publishers start to print the probable reading time on the cover, in the same way, that CDs and DVDs have a running time. I’m being whimsical here, but perhaps the information could morph into nutritional content as well:

‘A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens contains valuable lessons about charity, sharing, benevolence and conquering regret; parental warning: contains ghosts, so may be unsuitable for young children.’

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Bookmarks—what do you use?

This article in the Guardian shows some unusual objects used as bookmarks:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/sep/24/bookmarks-versus-dog-ears-how-you-keep-track-of-your-reading-in-pictures

I abhor the practice of turning over the corners of pages to mark where someone left off reading. I also get annoyed when previous readers have left written comments on the page, as I was brought up to value and look after books. I can just about see the point of making useful notes in a textbook, and it’s something that I’ve done with Haynes workshop manuals for cars and motorcycles when I’ve found a better way of doing a repair.

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Although I’m able to remember the number of a page, where I left off reading, for, after all, it’s only one number, I tend to use postcards as markers these days—such as when I have four books on the go at the same time. These cards include a greetings card with a charming message from a friend, as well as some American rustic postcards from Wyoming that a photographer sent me. I’ve been known to use squares of tissue paper, though it’s been a while since I had a proper leather bookmark with tassels.

Librarians are always finding bookmarks, and usually, keep a box of them under the counter— just in case a reader asks for their return. When I worked as a librarian, I sometimes found things that we most definitely did not keep. You may find it hard to believe, but these included slices of bacon (cooked and uncooked), condoms (used and unused), combs, straws, razor blades, cocktail sticks, matches and paper-clips. Weirdest of all was a squashed army of woodlice, which I think are known as pillbugs in America. Their flattened corpses marked the reader’s progress through the book. This slaughter had been deliberately done, as the reader left a message declaring her hatred for woodlice beside her last victim!

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Are tablet computers harming our children’s ability to read?

This article is in today’s Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/24/tablets-apps-harm-help-children-read

My first reaction to the concerns raised is that as long as children are reading something, it’s better than not reading at all. I agree with the worries that tablets could join televisions as being unpaid babysitters that are used to occupy the attention of youngsters, while their parents do other things.

There’s plenty of distractions available on tablets, which might well take a young reader’s attention away from the story. I like it that Gruffalo creator Julia Donaldson took a stand against allowing an app for her book to be created.

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The notion that the powers of imagination could be neutered by expecting things to happen automatically at the touch of a button is terrifying to me. Extrapolate that concept far enough, and you’re entering territory where stories are written by computers – which is already happening, of course, as discussed in other threads. Artists, of all types, would become redundant.

I agree with what the UK’s National Literacy Trust’s project manager Irene Picton has to say about books:

We often forget that books are a technology too, and one that’s had several centuries to evolve. With ebooks or apps, we’re comparing them to a relatively new format for reading. It’s important to be open-minded around this,”

It troubles me that the social aspect of reading a book together can be lost, should the tablet be seen as a solo device. Also, their space-saving capabilities mean that homes will have fewer books on shelves, which also reduces their importance. The tactile qualities of a book make it a friend to the reader, something lacking in a shiny electrical device.

Do any of you have children or grandchildren? It would be interesting to hear some empirical evidence on how youngsters use tablets for their reading.

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A rabbit that sends your child to sleep

A book called The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep, written by a Swedish behavioural psychologist and linguist Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin, is currently outselling Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman and Paula Hawkins The Girl on The Train.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11803484/Bedtime-phenomenon-scientist-develops-book-to-send-children-to-sleep-in-minutes.html

It’s sending children to sleep all over the world. Useful to know, should you have a troublesome toddler.

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Secret Bookcase Rooms

I think that I’ve found my favourite hotel in Amsterdam. Hotel No Hotel features extraordinarily themed suites, including Secret Bookcase, whose various rooms are hidden behind swinging bookcases.

http://www.hotelnothotel.com/rooms/

Even better, they have one-way windows, disguised as mirrors or paintings so one can check if it’s safe to come out!

I’ve been hiding behind books all of my life…

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We are all Librarians

I actually trained as a librarian back in the early 1970s, working in the profession for six years. I always loved books, and as a lonely child, they were my constant companions. I’m a firm believer in the library movement, as historically it offered a way of allowing ordinary people to access knowledge. Governments would rather that we didn’t know things, and simply believe everything that they tell us. In the current economic recession, many libraries are being closed or are operating on restricted hours. My local branch is only open two and a half days a week these days. As Ray Bradbury said: 

Image result for "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

After feeling stifled by the way that libraries operated in a very static way, I jumped into a crazy way of earning a living, by becoming a motorcycle dispatch rider in London. I’ve done about forty different jobs since over the years, sometimes with the thought in the back of my mind that this would be a good way of learning things to write about later. I moved back into what might be called disseminating knowledge, through writing self-help and technical articles for magazines and by training as an infant teacher.


Since returning to creative writing six years ago, I’ve become aware that I never left librarianship behind at all. The whole world runs on a system of classifying and organising things, as regimented as the Dewey decimal classification system by which most libraries shelve their books. We understand how people, ideas and machines work by comparing them to other things. One of the first things that strangers ask of each other after exchanging names, is ‘What do you do?’ That becomes the first step towards pigeonholing someone, so that they can be understood. We paint folk with the colour of what we understand being a butcher, social worker or car mechanic means.

This habit affects writers in distinct ways. I wrote a crime story as my first novel for several reasons, including the commercial one of it being a successful genre of writing that sold well online. I like crime stories, but don’t exclusively read them, and nor do I only write them. Most of my twenty short stories and novellas are about other things, with just one concerning a case of mistaken identity in a murder investigation. Yet if The Perfect Murderer achieved any commercial success, I would immediately be labelled a crime writer.

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Anna Quindlen

It must be very frustrating for successful authors who get defined in this way, expected to write more of the same sort of story—to become a brand. It’s not that their other tales fail to work, it’s simply that the first one that readers glommed onto was a Western, a Science Fiction short story or a torrid Romance. We all do this sort of thing every day though – just think of the elevator pitch, which is used to quickly describe your new novel. ‘It’s a space romance, set in the 25th century and based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but featuring a love affair between a human-being and an alien creature.’ This immediately gives you a load of cultural reference points, which may tickle the agent’s interest or not.

Even our everyday life involves being a librarian. What about the cutlery drawer in the kitchen? The knives, forks and spoons are separated out, probably in a moulded tray. You may have other items arranged around the tray – corkscrew, spatula, coasters, scissors – and you know where everything is so you can find it straight away.

Running wild and free may be fine as a liberating concept, but to get through life without hassle we need systems, fences, boundaries and other organizational tools that make sense of chaos. We should definitely consider who we are and how our status, experiences and current circumstances can be used to sell ourselves as writers. We are as much classified by the public, as our books are.

Our potential readers might fail to be charmed by the idea of a novel written by an author who’s worked most of their life as an accountant, but be immediately attracted to a blurb which mentions how you’ve made 200 parachute jumps. This immediately transforms you from boring bean counter to exciting risk-taker.

Who are you?

Where do you fit in on the shelf?

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