Archive for the 'Books' Category

New books for old

Published
by
Susha
on May 1, 2008
in Books
. 0 Comments

There’s an article in the Guardian today about internet bookswapping and the websites that enable people to give away their spare books to strangers, while receiving other books in exchange. The piece was published in the ethical living section, and therefore focuses on the environmental benefits of book swaps. These are all well and good, but I suspect that most people using the sites, like me, merely appreciate the (nearly) free books. I’ve been a keen book swapper for over a year, after discovering the sites through LibraryThing, and I’ve found it be a wholly positive experience if you don’t count the time spent waiting in post office queues.

The Guardian mentions the two main websites for British users—BookMooch, which is international, and UK-only ReadItSwapIt—there are others, but none have yet built up the critical mass needed for effective swapping. (Also not included are eco-friendly GreenMetropolis, which some people use as a swapping site, and the more whimsical BookCrossing.) The writer doesn’t go into the respective merits of the two sites (I belong to both), possibly because it’s not a very equal contest. BookMooch’s founder, John Buckman, may have a lot more time to improve his site than ReadItSwapIt’s creators do. But that doesn’t account for the key drawback of ReadItSwapIt, which is the fact that you can only directly exchange books with other users. Instead of having a choice of all 175,757 books on the site, you are limited to the number the other user has. This can lead to some truly depressing encounters, where the person looking to swap with you has 30 books, but 27 of them are written by Stephen King (luckily, you are allowed to turn swaps down). It is, of course, an inefficient system, as bartering generally is, and a reminder of why we invented money in the first place.

BookMooch, on the other hand, runs on a points system. Entering your books into the database gives you points, as does other users requesting books from you. These points can be used to ask for, potentially, any of the 470,000-odd books on the site—with the caveat that not all users are willing to post internationally (although there is a way around that too). BookMooch’s user interface is also exemplary: it’s one of the most simple, transparent, logical and attractive sites that I visit.

BookMooch is not without flaws. It can seem impossible to get popular and recently published books, the site is down rather a lot, and I find the artwork on the homepage distractingly weird. But these are really quibbles. I could go on about the website’s other interesting features all day, but I’ll spare you and merely advise that you join, and find them out for yourself.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m just off to post a book to Chile.

Writing, thinking, dreaming

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on April 27, 2008
in Arts and culture and Books
. 2 Comments

One debate that will never go away concerns the relationship between the medium and the content of writing. Putting it more specifically: does writing on a computer change what and how you write; and is this a good or a bad thing, or just a thing?

Will Self has recently talked about throwing away his computer (and not metaphorically) because of its insidious influence on his literary product. The fluency with which it allows him to think “on screen” is, he fears, a poor substitute for those words which have been processed “in the head” - which have a greater density and rigour, and a more authentically individual voice. There’s been plenty of intelligent blog discussion of such issues, and I’m sure there’s plenty more to come; it’s not a debate that’s going to be resolved any more than we’ve today reached final conclusions about what effect the pen, the printing press and the radio have had on the kind of stories we tell each other.

William Golding, perhaps a prototype for Self, scrupulously resisted exposing himself to modern visual media because of the way the “language” of cuts, fades, flashbacks and all the other conventions of the screen infiltrated the prose style of modern writers. Did this make his books better? It certainly helped keep them distinctive, and distinctively literary in a sense that, say, the works of Salman Rushdie - a great embracer of the metaphorical language of the screen - are not. On a parallel note, I have alway thought that Nathanael West gave voice to a frightening insight in Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) when he wrote that:

Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio, and newspapers. Among many betrayals this one is the worst.

West chronicled the glorious early days of Hollywood with unwavering, dazzling cynicism, and died in a car accident at the age of just 37 (he was a very bad driver, but before he went also gave us the first ever fictional characte called “Homer Simpson”). His sensibility was in some ways Hellenic: tinged by the sense that human art has been in inexorable decline ever since a near-mythical, and pre-literary, time when the tales we told and the systems through which we comprehended the world were one and the same thing. Perhaps the definitive 20th century lament along these lines is WH Auden’s 1932 Essay on “Writing, or the Pattern Between People,” which paints a bleak, defeated picutre of writing in the modern era as an enterprise hopelessly inadequate to its aims of bridging the gap between peoples and generations:

. . . to-day, writing gets shut up in a circle of clever people writing about themselves for themselves, or ekes out an underworld existence, cheap and nasty. Talent does not die out, but it can’t make itself understood . .

Of course, if you’re an idealist, writing is a pre-defeated enterprise: you will never make yourself perfectly understood. And, if you’re an idealist, you may be better off not even trying, let alone getting down and dirty in the muckily democratic universe of blogging. Better to be guided by the best that others have done, and take limited success wherever you can find it - and however you can make it.

The rise of the Bin Ladens

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on April 25, 2008
in Books and Middle east
. 0 Comments

To the LSE last night to see Steve Coll discuss his new biography of the Bin Laden family. Coll is a former managing editor of the Washington Post and currently a staff writer for the New Yorker, so I was expecting an authoritative and meticulously researched account of the rise of the Saudi engineering and construction dynasty. What I hadn’t anticipated was a raucously entertaining tale of high living, eccentric business practice and clashing cultural identity. The story of the family’s flight from the US after 9/11, from which have sprouted a thousand conspiracy theories, was a particular treat. I’m looking forward to reading the book.

All’s fair in books and war

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on April 15, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and Middle east
. 0 Comments

The London Book Fair is busily unfolding this week, with the “Arab world” as its guest of honour—as Boyd Tonkin explained in the Independent this morning. Is the Arab world ready for a literary revolution? he asks. Yes, probably, maybe, he answers.

The west is certainly ready for the Arab world to be ready. Among other things, the book fair sees the launch of PEN’s admirable World Atlas, a reader-generated global resource linking writers and readers which will focus for its first year on writers of Arab origin; the book fair will also feature the prominent presence of Kalima, a not-for-profit initiative (which we’ve written briefly about before) dedicated to bringing great texts in translation to Arab readers. But formidable internal obstacles remain. According to the UN’s 2004 Arab human development report, the Arab world still has the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa), at just 63 per cent, while both freedom of expression and gender equality for its citizens are severely limited by western standards. Not to mention that many Arab writers now winning international recognition would prefer to be read as individual artists rather than as cultural ambassadors.

Culture is no panacea—and, I’d argue, more a beneficiary than an engine of political change—but, at least on our side of the great divide, the study and translation of Arabic are booming as never before (a 2007 study by the Modern Language Association of America found Arabic has entered into the top 10 languages taught in post-secondary institutions for the first time in US history). Change is being geared up for at a considerable rate. Best to be careful, then, that the creditable energy being poured into this doesn’t prove too successful at creating an international Arab-lit expressly designed to serve the growing desire of students and publishers for middle eastern encounters.

To take a related (non-Arabic) example, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a powerful and important recent novel, but its author hasn’t lived in Afghanistan since his family moved to Paris when he was eleven. Reportage from a war zone it isn’t; and the vast international success of this title shouldn’t be taken as evidence of the sudden emergence of an authentic Afghan literature or literary culture. This in no way damages The Kite Runner’s claims to literary or historical truth, but we should remember there are different kinds of that much-sought-after commodity, authenticity—and that audiences are invariably more amenable to political fictions than political action.

Testing for deadly words

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on April 3, 2008
in Arts and culture and Books
. 6 Comments

Inspired by my colleague Susha’s recent linking, I’ve been conducting a few investigations of my own into what the New York Times has labelled the “seven deadly words” of book reviewing—the ones that should be avoided at all costs. They are, in all their poisonous pusillanimousness: poignant, intriguing, compelling, craft, eschew, muse and lyrical. How often, I wondered, are such horrors perpetrated by responsible journalists? And how do Prospect, and the NYT, measure up?

Prospect has now existed for 145 issues, which makes our PICCEML index (as I’ve dubbed this new measurement; pronounced “piecemeal”) a simple calculation: the total number of occurrences divided by total number of issues, which works out as 3.3 in our case. Measuring the New York Times is a little more complicated. To calculate fairly the PICCEML index of such a massive publication, I’ve only counted the books and arts sections in my survey, and have included every issue since 1st January 1981—a grand total of 9,955. Work it all out, and you get 4.7—largely due to NYT critics’ incorrigible fondness for lyrical and compelling works.

At Prospect, in contrast, we prefer things to be compelling and intriguing, and have little patience with musing. Despite being more PICCEML than us, however, the NYT does almost entirely eschew “eschew,” a verb we have perpetrated no less than 21 times in our history—a statistic that, I’m sorry to say, includes my own compelling musings on another’s intriguingly lyrical style.

But what’s a good, or a representative, PICCEML? Since 1st January 2001, the Guardian and Observer have averaged a combined score of no less than 11.7, while the good old Sun achieved a commendably minute 0.8—and has only printed the word “eschew” three times in its history. It has also never, ever, referred to anything as “postmodern” (which must be worth at least -0.5 bonus points): something the Guardian did no less than 1,727 times over the last decade. The PICCEML is, it seems, best deployed as an index of highbrow decadence. Any suggestions for telling measures of quality at the other end of the scale?

Today’s top links (about books)

Published
by
Susha
on April 1, 2008
in Books
. 0 Comments

The Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing. My pet hate is “lyrical.”

Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao wins the Tournament of Books (the prize is a live chicken).

Chris Lehmann dissects the fake memoir Love and Consequences.

Where do they find the time

Published
by
Susha
on March 31, 2008
in Books
. 1 Comment

As someone who, much to the despair of the online editor, has difficulty finding the time to write a blog post, I’m always (perhaps overly) impressed by people who manage to write books without giving up their day jobs. Many of Prospect’s writers seem particularly fecund—longtime contributor AC Grayling may hold the record for published books, although I can’t tell from his website how many he’s written (perhaps even he has lost count). Enigmas and puzzles columnist Ian Stewart claims a total of around 80, including a couple of novels. Contributor Raymond Tallis, according to a recent Times interview, is working on five different books at the moment. Which is the number that our Lab report columnist Philip Ball has coming out this year—if you count his trilogy on pattern formation as separate books. (The others are a novel and a book on Chartres cathedral.) I’d love to know what their secret is, but I suspect there isn’t one. Writing books is probably just habit-forming for some.

Ross Raisin’s novel

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on March 28, 2008
in Arts and culture and Books
. 0 Comments

In the September issue of Prospect, we published a short story called “Infested” by Ross Raisin, a young writer from Yorkshire whose first novel (still to be published then) had already got the literary world buzzing with excitement. “Infested,” a macabre tale of revenge set in a pest control deparment, certainly showed talent. Cleverly plotted and written in a deceptively unshowy style, it announced the arrival of someone with a singular way of looking at things, and with the ability (by no means to be taken for granted among fiction writers) to use his imagination.   Ross’s novel, God’s Own Country, has now been published by Viking, and, having just finished it, I can confirm that it justifies the hype. It really is a good book. Its narrator is a young farmer named Marsdyke who lives and works with his parents on the Yorkshire Moors, having been expelled from school. Marsdyke is an engaging, often likeable character, with a dour wit and a rich imagination, but he is also not quite all there. When a middle class family from London move into one of the neighbouring houses, he develops a crush on their teenage daughter, with ultimately calamitous consequences.   The book, which has been widely compared to Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (but also reminded me in places of Ian Banks’s The Wasp Factory and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange), cleverly combines seemingly opposed qualities: it is creepy but also very funny; it is linguistically ambitious yet very accessible. What knits it together is the ingenious, highly original narrative voice that Raisin contrives for Marsdyke. Rarely can a novelist have made such effective use of local dialect. Words such as “glegging,” “gradely,” “viewsome” and “usselves” (some of which I suspect Raisin simply made up) recur throughout the narrative, as well as all manner of grammatical contortions. The result is that a unique linguistic world is created, with its own rules and conventions, and this acts as a corollary for Marsdyke’s basically deranged, but also oddly coherent, moral universe. 

The Prada prostitutes

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on March 27, 2008
in Books and Inside Prospect
. 13 Comments

Does it not demean a woman, every bit as much as it does a man, to position her either as a victim of men’s appetites or as a fantasist of them? asks Howard Jacobson, who’s been dutifully ploughing through a series of memoirs by high-class hookers for the latest issue of Prospect. The books are cartoonish, he finds, but no less so than accounts that cast prostitutes as mere victims of rapacious male sexuality.

It’s time for a more grown-up debate about sexuality, both male and female, suggests Jacobson—one which acknowledges that there are many types of prostitute, just as there are many reasons for men to visit them. Do feel free to debate, in grown-up fashion, below.

Writing the nation

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on March 26, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and Inside Prospect
. 4 Comments

The “state of the nation” novel, it seems, is back in fashion. This spring sees a rush of novels taking in Britain’s recent past, from the 1970s to the Blair years. One of them—The Northern Clemency—is by Philip Hensher, who in this month’s magazine writes about the origins of the genre, and surveys the novels that are competing alongside his own in this suddenly rather crowded corner of the market. Hensher is less than impressed with the competition. Surveying new works by Hanif Kureishi, Louis de Berniers, Richard Kelly and Helen Walsh, among others, he writes: “Where these books fail, I think, is in their point of departure. Too often I felt that the author had started not from memory and the painstaking reconstruction of long-forgotten sensations…The started, instead, from journalistic accounts of a period, from their own nostalgia-laden record collection and from a vague recollection of the drugs people used to talk about.” He also has some entertaining things to say about Kureishi’s shaky grasp of English grammar. If you have any thoughts on Hensher’s essay, or on the “state of the nation” genre more generally, do leave comments below.