Reading in the Twitter era

I’m half way through the next book for discussion here (not the one pictured right...) and it’s such a rich feast of delights I have to keep taking little breaks to digest before moving on, for fearing of missing anything.

Oh, I can hardly wait to share it with you…

In the meantime, while lying sick in bed for what is now nearly four weeks, I’ve had plenty of time to ponder my ongoing relationship with reading. And I’ve realised that the subconscious impulse to start this book diary was to make sure I start reading intensely again, because I was coming close to losing it.

This strange decline started a year ago when I read the first book in the Twilight series. I only picked it up because the phenomenon of Stephanie Mayer kept my last novel out of the top four slots of the Australian bestseller lists in 2008. She had them tied up for months dammit. Know your enemy, I thought.

After a sleepless night finishing it, I understood her appeal. I went on to devour the next three books and although I found them progressively less engaging, I remained oddly and intensely caught up in the parallel world she has created.

While your front brain constantly reminds you it’s hysterical teenage Mormon nonsense (Read On Public Transport score: 0), some lower area of it becomes obsessed. It was like a weird spell had been cast over me.

Then the marvellous film of Twilight came out and made matters worse, as it not only captured but improved upon everything I found compelling in the book. With the added and utter glory that is Rob Pattinson in the male lead. I still find the scene where they are high up in the tree together absolutely swoon-inducing.

The only comfort I had in this ongoing delirium was that so many of my friends, were similarly affected – mature, tertiary-educated, sophisticated, partnered-up women every one.

The collective insanity really was most peculiar and I wasn’t released until the truly terrible film of New Moon came out late last year. It was so cringingly aimed at the teen market I screamed with laughter all the way through and left the cinema feeling as though I had been exorcised.

But apart from the humiliation of being gripped by an adolescent fervour, the worst thing was that after charging through those penny dreadful novels, I just couldn’t settle to reading anything else. It went on for months, most of last year. I tried all kinds of books – even other vampire nonsense - but nothing could hold my attention.

And then the funny thing was, that around that very time, I read two newspaper articles that closely reflected my experiences. (The glory of this being a blog, as opposed to a newspaper article, is that I can’t be bothered to research who they were by. Sorry.)

Suffice to say that a woman in the Guardian described exactly the feeling of panic I have about having only a finite number of books left to read before death. Then a chap in the Times described having a reading block identical to mine. My zeitgeist gland started to throb.

The final word came just the other day – Feb 10th at 8.22 pm, to be precise – when Alain de Botton posted a comment on Twitter which summed up the whole malaise:

“The book will be killed not directly by new technology but by the monkey mind it breeds. The issue is concentration, not royalties.”

Bullseye.

And as I am entirely addicted to Twitter’s gibbon-brain perma-novelty, it seems all the more urgent I continue this reading diary, to keep my frontal lobe supple enough to absorb works longer than 140 characters.

PS The irony is that I was finally rescued from my reading paralysis by The Leopard (by Tomasi Di Lampedusa), which I was prompted to read after @indiaknight and @CharlieMcVeigh discussed it on Twitter...

5. Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz

I wondered how long it would take for this issue to arise with regard to this project: what do you do when you just can’t get into a book? Solider on, or toss it aside for something else?

My mother reads every book she ever starts doggedly to the end as a point of principle, but I just can’t do that. I’m all too aware that there is only a finite number of books left that I have time to read before I die, and I can’t bear to waste a slot on something I don’t love.

However, if I hadn’t taken advice to push on after the first three dodgy chapters I would have missed the great reading pleasures that were Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and The Shipping News. Some books repay persistence.

But in this case, I think there’s another issue to consider: I’m just not in the mood for this style of book at the moment.

I first heard of Naguib Mahfouz last year, when the words ‘Egyptian Tolstoy’ rang out of the radio at me, followed by ‘winner of the Nobel Prize for literature’.

A comparison to Tolstoy is about as high a recommendation as it gets for me (along with ‘redolent of early Jilly Cooper’…), so I got right onto Google, sussed out that the Cairo Trilogy is considered his masterpiece, and immediately bought Palace Walk, the first book of the three.

I absolutely loved it. It’s a family saga, set in Cairo in the early 20th century, towards the end of the British occupation. As big geopolitical events unfold, you are treated to a minute insight into the family’s life, as tiny as the mother’s view of the world through the lattice work window she is permitted to look through.

The varied personalities within the family are conveyed with needlepoint detail, while the book as a whole gives a vivid flavour of life in that city, in that era. He deserves his rep.

I have been gagging to read the next two volumes ever since I finished it, but got side-tracked by the Twilight experience, which oddly dominated my reading last year. I have finally come to it, but find I just can’t engage with the writing.

It’s slower than the first book and comparisons between Mahfouz and Proust make more sense with this one. There are pages and pages of internal monologue about how a teenage boy feels about a girl he has seen. I can’t be doing with that right now. A little less conversation…

I am also put off by the translation. It’s the same American translators who did the first book, but I am finding them culturally intrusive in a way I didn’t with that one.

The dreadful word ‘gotten’ has cropped up several times and they use the term ‘casserole’ to describe a variety of Egyptian savoury dish. I don’t know what the Egyptian version of a ‘tagine’ is, but there must be something more evocative than casserole they could have used. It made me picture terrible 1970s earthenware dishes, hessian wallpaper and pot luck suppers.

I suspect all I need to do with this book is to push on until the story gears up, but right now I just don’t feel like it. I will come back to it – I particularly want to read the gorgeously named, Sugar Street, the last volume in the series – but for now I am putting it aside in favour of something else.

4. Down With Skool! by Geoffrey Willans (illustrations by Ronald Searle)

Ha ha ha bet you weren’t expecting that, but after reading three hefty tomes by contemporary women authors in a row, I needed a palate cleanser before embarking on the next one, which is another chunky read.

I have owned my copy of this book since 1968 (fifteen years after it was published) and have no idea how many times I’ve read it and all the brilliant sequels since. It never fails to make me shout with laughter.

I was prompted to re-read this time as one of my favourite Tweeters is @reelmolesworth, who posts hilarious comments on current events in the unique voice (and spelling…) of the book’s anti-hero, Nigel Molesworth.

Laughing at his postings made me eager for another look at the original. If you’re not familiar – something I find quite hard to imagine, as this book feels like part of my DNA – it’s 1950s boarding school life, through the eyes of young Molesworth, by his own description ‘the Curse of St Custards’.

Of course it’s really the whole of life through the eyes of a very witty and clever man, who worked at the BBC, wrote for Punch, and one successful screenplay, before dying far too young, at 47. So sad. What other joys might he have given us?

It’s actually hard to find much more out about Willans. Even on the Penguin website and his Wikepedia entry, there is very little background, but I have a very vivid picture of him in my head, as a cool 1950s dude in corduroy. (I am rather inspired to find out more about him now and will report back on here, if I turn anything up.)

But back to the book. It’s allegedly written for children, but it’s absolutely anarchic and as a schoolgirl I thrilled to its outrageous statements and deliberate misspellings.

It actually caused a bit of a hoo hah at the time, seen as a bad influence on real kids chiz chiz. For e.g. the section ‘How To Avoid Botany’ starts with the sentence, ‘Suply yourself with a paket of cigs.’ (sic.).

Sorry? What’s a chiz? It’s a classic bit of Molesworth-ese (synonymous with ‘swiz’…) which has become part of the British vocabulary, along with his oft-shared opinion that certain people are wets and weeds. Or, worst of all, big gurlies. Enuf said.

The chapter which always renders me insensible is ‘A Tour of the Cages – or Masters One By One’, particularly the Latin section. Molesworth felt exactly as I did about Romans and Gauls constantly attacking ditches. Why?

I’ve been looking for a bit from it to quote – consequently can hardly type for tears of laughter – but it doesn’t really work out of context. And the reason for that is very interesting. And has only just occurred to me chiz chiz because I am a wet and a weed as any fule no.

The humour of Molesworth lies in the style as much as the content and the style is all about rhythm and - this has been my revelation on this reading of the book - it’s actually a masterpiece of the ‘skaz’ style.

Skaz is the jazzed-up, lawless, stream of consciousness, first-person prose style, most famously used by JD Salinger in The Catcher In The Rye, although Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac laid the earlier foundations. Martin Amis is the post-modern master, writing as John Self in Money.

It breaks all rules of grammar and punctuation, yet is still immediately comprehensible to the reader. It gives a particularly vivid impression of the narrator, who is generally a bit cross with the world. It’s a young voice, very fast-paced and moved along by the staccato jazzy rhythm. You could snap your fingers to good skaz. Commas are rarely used if it all. Short sentences are.

The link to Salinger seems poignant, with his death just last week (27th January, 2010), but I must confess a more immediate personal interest: the novel I have just finished is written partly in the skaz style.

Randomly re-reading marvellous Molesworth, I have suddenly realised just how deeply influenced I have been in all my work by Geoffrey Willans’ writing. To the point of discovering that a short sentence I particulary love to use – ‘Next question.’ – is actually his.

I posthumously award him the Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work.

Reading satisfaction: 9
Un-put-downable-ness: 7
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9
Recommend to mother: 3
Recommend to niece: 9
Recomend to gay best friend: 9
Recommend to man pal: 10
Recommend to Helen Razer: 7
Read on public transport: 7

3. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

First let me draw your attention to the time gap between my last posting and this one – two days. That should give you an idea of how much I enjoyed this book. Which is 499 pages long in hard back. I was up to 3 a.m. last night reading it and resumed to finish at six this morning. It’s a ripper.

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Sarah Waters, but confess I was a little disappointed when I first heard about this one because it isn’t about fascinating lesbians of yore. I love that stuff, the sense of being let into a secret history.

By contrast, the narrator of this book is a straight, middle-aged man living in rural England in the late 1940s - and it’s the proof of Waters’ prodigious talent that his voice is utterly convincing and compelling from the outset.

The story revolves around a beautiful country house which is crumbling into disrepair – the family which owns it in equal decline. The narrator’s mother was in service there as a young woman and he visited as a child, attending a let-them-eat-cake jolly for the workers’ children, during which he had a tantalising glimpse of the house and family in their full Edwardian splendour.

He returns as a grown man - and a doctor – to find it all in near ruin. This shift in his relative status and its implications within the minute calibrations of the English class system – already in turmoil under the post-war Labour government - forms the background theme of the book.

The upfront issue is a gripping ghost story, so scary at times, I was quite nervous getting up to go to the loo in the dark. But while the supernatural suspense kept me turning pages into the small hours, what makes this book such a satisfying experience overall is the exquisite rendering of the minutiae of human relationships.

The missed glance, the tilted head, the nibbled fingernail… All the tiny details by which we signal our emotions and connections, are almost forensically described, but with such delicacy it doesn’t drag the pace.

Talking of which, the book does start quite slowly and I did wonder around chapter four if she couldn’t get on with it a bit, but then I got in step and appreciated it as a ghost story in the Wilkie Collins style. It has that Victorian quality of wildly gothic events having more impact described by a very restrained narrator, so familiar from Wuthering Heights.

My only tiny criticism is that there are quite long passages, really germane to the plot, where the first person narrator describes in detail events he didn’t witness, without recourse to ‘as Caroline told me later’ devices.

I was amazed that a writer of this calibre could make such a fundamental fiction boo boo – and that her editors didn’t notice – but in the end it was almost a relief that she isn’t totally perfect. I think this flaw actually made me enjoy the book a little more.

The Little Stranger will make a brilliant film – I just don’t want to spend the night on my own after seeing it.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 9
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9
Recommend to best gay friend: 9
Recommend to mother: 9
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to man pal: 8
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Read on public transport: 9

2. Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon

What rock was I napping under when this came out last September? A new book by Fay Weldon is an event to me – reading Down Among The Women when I was 13 (shortly after The Female Eunuch…) made me a feminist - but this one totally passed me by.

Possibly because I find the book pages of newspapers are mainly given over to studious biographies of Napoleon’s second general, so I hardly look at them…

When I did finally stumble upon it last week, the title sprang out rather than the author, because Chalcot Crescent is a street in Primrose Hill right around the corner from Chalcot Road, where I used to live.

And, adding to my interest, the book I have just finished is set entirely in Primrose Hill and one of the main characters live in Chalcot Crescent…

Anyway - the book. Bloody brilliant. It’s set three years hence in a dystopian future created by what might have happened if governments around the world hadn’t propped up the banking system when it was on the verge of collapse in 2008. (She must have turned this book around at warp speed.)

On top of this sparkling conceit Weldon applies another intriguing notion – what if we all suddenly lost interest in the consumerist way of life that actually entirely underpins capitalism?

In her parallel universe people have suddenly and collectively realised that constantly acquiring more ‘stuff’ is not the route to happiness. No shopping means no ‘growth’ means no economy…

As a result, houses are worthless, credit doesn’t exist, the EU falls to bits, it’s every country for themselves, food is the most valuable commodity and after a couple of hung parliaments an unelected government takes control.

What’s so gripping, is that for a moment back there something like this really could have happened. It still could.

That’s just a few of many brilliant possibilities the book explores, but what makes it more than a smart contemporary update on Brave New World and 1984, is that running alongside the big picture ideas, is the more personal – and fundamentally female - story of the narrator, Frances.

She’s a brilliant idea in herself – the person who might have existed if Fay Weldon’s real mother hadn’t had a miscarriage, when Fay was a child. A what if? sibling. Weldon then tantalises the reader with through-the-looking-glass parallels between Frances’ life and her own, as already laid bare in her autobiography, Auto da Fay.

Through 80 year-old Frances, Weldon retreads the issues of sexual freedom, financial semi-equality and legal triumphs, which have so occupied women over the last eight decades - while teasingly re-visiting controversial revisions of her own, from the post-feminist era.

And all of it done with the wit and verve you expect from this master stylist. ‘Banksters’ is just one term I delighted over.

There were sections when I slightly lost interest – hence relatively low un-put-downable-ness score - feeling that the ideas were taking over from pushing on the story, but then something bright and sparkling would hook me in again.

There is a also lot of repetition in the book which made me wonder at first if Ms Weldon didn’t have an editor strong enough to stand up to her, until I realised she was using it deliberately, more vividly to paint her octogenarian anti-heroine.

At nearly 80 herself, this book shows Fay Weldon still has more ideas crackling in her brain than she knows what to do with. I bow at her feet.

And now I’m going to read what the brainy broadsheet reviewers had to say about it on publication.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 6
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8
Recommend to spouse: 5 (he might read this because of socio-political content)
Recommend to mother: 8
Recommend to niece: 8
Recommend to man pal: 6
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Happy to read on public transport: 9

Here I go with my first post in my List of Books I’ve Read This Year. But just one thing to make clear before I start – these are not reviews. I don’t review novels.

Just one time I reviewed a novel for a newspaper and my verdict wasn’t entirely positive. When I came to write my own first one, not long after, and discovered exactly how much work is involved, I was consumed with regret and swore I would never write another review of a work of fiction by a living author.

There is a reason there are those who do and those who criticise…

So these are my very personal reactions to the books I’ve read this year. I’m doing it for fun, but also to make my reading more ‘active’, which I think can help improve your own writing.

I will also do my best not to give the stories away.


1. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

What a stellar start to my first catalogued reading year. This is a fascinating book on several different levels, written in a very quiet and measured voice, which is surprisingly compelling.

It’s the first person story of an American First Lady, based - in the author’s own statement - on a very particular recent presidency the reader will immediately recognise. Apart from that, she says, the characters and what happens to them are fictional. So that’s a pretty interesting set up to begin with: real, but not real.

One of the major themes, it seemed to me, was an exploration of the American class system, which seems to be a personal obsession of Sittenfeld’s.

Her first novel, Prep, which I also loved, was about a regular teenage girl who wins a scholarship to an elite private boarding school and her introduction to – and subsequent disillusionment with - the very particular behaviour, values and mores of America’s privileged class.

The family the narrator of this books marries into come from exactly this milieu, while she is the daughter of simple white-collar down home folk, whose good looks propel her upwards.

I’m fascinated by the nuances of class and the peculiar behaviour of the very rich myself, so find all that gripping.

Then there was the imaginative leap of seeing inside the bedroom of the White House, which I thought she pulled off brilliantly. How it feels to sit in your body as a simple human being, but know your husband can fundamentally affect the lives of millions of other people with any decision he makes.

There are actually some pretty massive flaws in this book – I won’t spoil it, by dissecting them – but that actually made me like it more. It gave me something to chew over, as I read, just as a beautiful face is made more compelling by a scar.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 6
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8

Why Don’t I Update My Blog More Often? Well, I’m Going To.

The function of this blog up until now has been as a news platform, to promote upcoming publications, book tours etc and I will still use it for that, but I've now decided to start using it also as a very personal reading diary.

This was inspired by a fascinating book I read last year by Stephen King, called On Writing, which is about – funnily enough – the process of writing.

Although I've enjoyed all the films I’ve seen of his books (I think 'The Shining' is the best horror film ever made), his novels are not in a genre that interests me, but after a fellow novelist told me about this one, I thought it would be interesting to see how one of the biggest-selling authors of all time approaches his craft. Might pick up some tips...

The book changed my life. Seriously.

I had been getting quite low sitting on my own in a room from 9 to 5, five days a week, which was how I was writing my books. I felt guilty if I didn’t give it all my possible working time. Then I felt guilty for not enjoying what I do, when I know I’m so very lucky to make a living as a writer. Ooh, lots of lovely guilt – great for the creative process. Not.

But then I read about Stephen King’s rationale: his writing day is finished as soon as he has chalked up 2,000 words. Revelation! Sometimes he’s done by 11am, other days he’s at his desk until tea time, but once he hits the magic number he’s free.

He then went on to relate how other writers approached it. Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope – who had a full-time job running the Royal Mail, but also managed to pop out an astonishing 47 novels – wrote for a precise amount of time each morning. If he finished a novel with five minutes left to go, he would start another one. If he was three sentences from the end of one, it had to wait until the next day.

Another thing that fascinated me in King’s book was a list of all the books he had read in the previous year. It was a very long list, because that’s what he does when he’s finished his daily word count. He reads.

My reading has come down to a few minutes each evening before I drop asleep, so it takes me ages these days to read an average-sized book, and I was doing it passively, not fully engaged.

I used to rip through several novels in a week, reading while I was wide awake with synapses in full snap and Stephen King made me realise that to continue developing as a writer, I need to get back to being an active reader.

Add to that a growing awareness of the ever diminishing finite number of books left that I will be able to read in my lifetime, and I knew I had to take affirmative action

So my plan for this year, is to stop work when I’ve written 2,500 words, to read more, and to keep a list of what I read. And that list will be in the form of posts on here.