What I'm reading, and nothing more

I just want to make a note about the book I'm reading at the moment:

I'm really loving Diana Athill. In a sort of selfish way, I think. It's the way that she makes me feel better about my faults. She opens the book discussing why it is that she can't do some things - she's not sure if it's that she can't or won't, but regardless, she's incapable of doing things she doesn't want to do. It's nice to not be alone in that...though obviously, she managed to get into publishing several decades before I did, when it was seemingly quite interesting and she was afforded the opportunity to be engaged by it. I had no such luck, and came in at the business end of the whole sorry enterprise, way after books became nothing more than another commodity. So, yes, still alone, but only by an accident of history that had me born a good 70 years too late.

It's too far in the evening and the big glass of alcohol for me to be even trying to make it any clearer than that. You should read the book really. Also, it is incredibly funny! Literally laught-out-loud-on-the-bus-even-though-strangers-stare funny.


My absolute favourite part is where she describes something foolish, and then leaves a line of empty space on either side of:

This space represents a tactful silence.

There is nothing not to love about that.

Reading non-fiction

(Let's skip the usual 'oh no, I haven't been here in so long, I'm a terrible person' shall we, and get right down to business.)

I have never been much of a non-fiction reader, perhaps because I've not found it sufficiently absorbing, and also due to the fact that I have such a terrible memory that I forget all the interesting stuff I feel I ought to be learning from it. However, I have recently started reading it more than anything else for some reason, and I'm finding quite a lot to engage with. OK, I'm kindof cheating, in that much of what I'm reading is quite strongly related to fiction, but I'm still making a gesture towards non-fiction, which is worth something.

One of the best books I've read in ages is Burn This Book, a PEN book edited by Toni Morrison, in which several authors write on the subject of literary censorship and oppression. It's very interesting, in that so many different approaches were taken, when I might have worried that they'd be a repeat of the same argument over and over. I'd really recommend it.



I've also recently read How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen, and I'm currently on Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. I guess what's interesting about these two is that the essays within them are on topics of almost unbelievably irrelevant detail (50 pages on the demise of the Chicago post system from JF, another 50 on the porn world's version of the Oscars from DFW). I think that it's probably this detail that I love, in the same way that I love entering a completely foreign situation in a novel. It's like peeking behind some heavy curtain that you were never even meant to notice was there.

My real non-fiction love, however, is always going to be the Paris Review Interview books. I'm pretty sure I've written about them here before:



I love them so much, and they meant such a great deal to me at a particular time in my life (a time that I now feel strongly reconnected with), that I've got the quotation marks tattooed on my ankle. I wanted quotes for a while, and it made them feel more significant to get these particular ones, as they were so personal to me:



I really love the tattoo. It's a strange one though because I've thought about it for so long that it already feels as though I've always had it.

I went to my favourite local place today, Quiller Books in Buntingford, and picked up some more lovely non-fiction (including a lovely edition of Walden, complete with beautiful monochrome woodcut illustrations), so I'm off to get back to some reading!

The Beautiful Gift

I got the most wonderful book today from the Beautiful Girl for my Christmas present, More Things Like This:

It's a lovely McSweeney's book filled with an apparently unnamable art form that combines words and images, like this picture below (made by me):

It's so inspiring and interesting. It's got lots of interviews and discussions of the art form, and some great examples.

Just a short post

Because it's been a long time, and though I've thought about posting often, I keep coming online to do other things.

Here's a quote I've wanted to share:

'He didn't know what to do, he didn't know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.'
- Freedom, Jonathan Franzen

I'm reading Half of a Yellow Sun at the moment. It's a fantastic book - very understated and genuine, and most of all personal. The Nigerian-Biafran war was something I only knew the vaguest of details about, and as I got into the book, the sensation of being drawn into this huge historical event was at once both wonderful and awful.
It's the same feeling I had when I read Birds Without Wings a couple of years ago. These novels present you with something which was the absolute centre of the world for people in that time and place, and allows you to engage with it on that level. I love that in a way - it makes me feel as though I'm gaining something from being out in these important parts of the world, at least mentally. But it also makes me feel as though there is an infinity of things like this - events which are so important and about which I know so little (and can do so little about), and I feel helpless from knowing that.

There's a quote in Half of a Yellow Sun that describes that feeling - of being overwhelmed by the reality of the world and shocked that you don't collapse from the weight of that awful knowledge. It's so perfectly formed:

"It frightened him that he slept well at nights, that he was still calmed by the scent of orange leaves and the turquoise stillness of the sea..."

World book night

This is phenomenal, I'm so in love with it (check out the website of one of the creators for more amazing stuff):




Happy World Book Night.

Via

Goodnight money

For unimportant reasons, I was reading the Wiki page for Goodnight Moon, which is not a book I ever remember having as a child. It contained a link to an article about the little 9 year old boy who'd been left the royalties from the book (and many others written by Margaret Wise Brown). The article is one of those pleasingly clear and well-researched ones that make you genuinely interested in a topic which sounds quite boring on the surface. Thankyou Joshua Prager.

And in that moment, I swear we were infinite

I have been sort of wanting to read The Perks of Being a Wallflower for quite a while, but I thought I'd left it too late to really appreciate it. However, the beautiful girl read it recently and I ordered it from Amazon on her recommendation. It arrived yesterday, which turned out to be just in time.
I got home today with this crushed and worried feeling built up inside me. It comes from lots of things, and it's been lingering for a while, but today while walking home from work the whole mess of it started to spill out and I felt kindof out of control.
I didn't really want to indulge the feeling (as it would have been so easy to do), and lose a whole evening to turning the same stressful issues over and over again in my mind. So I ran a bath and pulled out Wallflower to try and get carried away by it.
As the beautiful girl warned me, there are places where it seems a little tough to take and unbelievable. But honestly, it's wonderful. It takes me back so clearly to those feelings I'd forgotten of learning about life for the first time. I can actually feel the infinity Charlie writes about, I had let it get so distant from me and I hate that.
I hate that I'm so far away from the honesty he has. I remember being 16 and telling a boy that I liked him, even though I knew he didn't feel the same way, just because I thought it would be worth it to give him the good feeling of knowing that somebody thought of him that way.
I would never be so open these days. I feel like all I have is a jealously guarded handful of scrounged together happiness, and I'd fight to the death before I'd consider giving any of it away.
If I was 16 now and looking at my grown-up self I'd be so unhappy.

I think I've made too many compromises and protected myself too much. I think I want to find a way back from that, to feel a moment where I would swear that I was infinite.

Writing and Hair

Thanks to The Rejectionist for this cool site - it analyses your writing and tells you who you're most comparable to. I got Margaret Atwood, which is a nice compliment, but looking at Tea Berry-Blue's research into the site, it would appear that the person responsible for the coding may not be lovely sort of person you might hope.

Apart from generally procrastinating on the internet and watching 9-5 today, I have also finished One Day by David Nicholls (it's not without fault, but I did cry buckets at the end, which was exactly what I needed), and dyed my hair a shade of red that made the water I rinsed with look like a river of blood. Not sure that last part was the best idea ever, since I have to give a presentation at a very important sales conference with work in a couple of weeks. I need to look important and respectable in a way that blood-red hair may not quite enable me to do. I'm hoping that if I team it with a lovely green vintage dress, I will look charming and memorable, which is about the best I can ever hope for.

Later, I will be baking cookies for a party at work and doing some more crafting. All in all a lovely weekend, but it is conspicuously missing any time spent writing. I cannot even consider writing anything without shuddering with revulsion at the thought of my output. I think I may have to ease my way back into this with a resurrection of a fiction journal.

Where the streets are paved with gold

Much as I hate to admit it, I really enjoyed being in London this weekend. Certainly, part of that was due to the presence of the beautiful girl and a certain boy, but the city itself did not seem as awful to me as always.

I feel that the boy tricked me somewhat with Primrose Hill deliciousness:

But there was also the loveliness of the Tate Modern. I don't like the way the collection is laid out there (it tries to do far far too much), and there was the usual weekend business (especially the annoying children so well described by Waldemar Januszczak a couple of weeks ago). But, amongst other things, there was a lovely Calder mobile which took me right back to the entrance of the Guggenheim in Venice:

(Arc of Petals - Calder. Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice)

And there was also a delightful little room of strange and sweet drawings. It contained a collection of Marcel Dzama drawings:

(Marcel Dzama Last Winter Here, 2004)

The same person who did the artwork for this wonderful album:

And in the same room were some Dave Shrigley drawings, which were really surprising and great (this one was my favourite).

Then there were the books. So many lovely books. I got Wilson by Clowes (signed and all too lovely) and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern 13 from Foyles. Then yesterday we went to Henry Pordes and I experienced an awful Sophie's Choice of just too many good books.

Too wonderful.

Bookshelves

Oh oh this is the most wonderful blog in the history of the universe. Yes, this is my most geeky thing - an absolute love of bookshelves and libraries. I spend a little bit of most days book-shopping, but that's usually work related. I only wish that my department looked as beautiful as some of the libraries on the blog. But there's really only so much you can do with science books.

Do Not Eat This Book

I love this!

(borrowed from the library)

Read the Paris Review Interviews!!

I have finally bought myself The Paris Review Interviews vol 3. Someone recommended it to me a month or two ago...I think perhaps Geoff Ryman, and I wanted to get it then. I bought two copies - one for me and one for the beautiful girl. I have been working my way through it, skipping around to interviews that seemed most interesting or necessary. It's very helpful while writing.

There are 4 volumes and I have just ordered all of the others - NEW! That's how good it is. 4 new books within a month is unheard of for me, and so it must be clear how good these interviews are.

Some of them can be read here. I shall probably quote some later, but for now, I will just push them on anyone who comes across this.