I think I’ve surprised myself of late–I’ve become an unwitting book perv. Maybe it’s all this talk of rubbery Kindles and aluminium-brushed iPads that has me longing for the leathery musk of a russety old hardback with faded gold lettering. Ok, well, not exactly. Being the unabashed cheapskate that I am, hardbacks are more a luxury I only periodically or accidentally fall into ownership with. I’m generally much more of a grubby paperback guy, although not necessarily by choice. Though I long for yard upon yard of cyclopean, mahogany bookshelves brimming with identical, burgundy hardbacks as much as the next man, sometime you just want to read the damn book already.
In terms of senses, Id’ve thought touch to merely be limping weakly ahead of hearing in relation to bibliophilia, but it does actually influence how I feel about a great many of my books. A recent-ish paperback printing of Berryman’s Dream Songs that I had delivered came with the unfortunate texture of what can only be described as the product of some unholy union of open-minded iguana and prodigiously fertile sandpaper. God, just brushing the front cover must’ve sloughed off at least 4 weeks’ worth of dead skin cells. As far as I know, it’s the only Pulitzer prize-winning work to also double as a loofah. By comparison, the Paris Review Interviews are a ragtag dichotomy: silky smooth matt cover with stylised, gloss punctuation marks, printed on delicate paper with edges so ragged as to suggest someone lost the scissors down at the printing office. Thing is, it’s not even zigzaggy in the way that newspaper edges are, they’ve just all simply been (admittedly skilfully and relatively straight mind you) ripped by hand.
As for the whole eBook thing, well, of course, this is where I’m supposed to step in and wheedle disconsolately about the unmistakeable rustle of golden brown pages or the delightful whimsy of the chirpy stick figures bumming in the margins and so on. No, I don’t really give too much of a toss about that. I just think that their imposition of the iPod model onto books is rather a clumsy transposition all told. They’re not just things that go in different holes of the head, despite what Toby and Emily in marketing might think. While we might conjure up a heady playlist of singles from various albums for our 2 hour flight, I find it hard to believe that people will be throwing in chapter 7 of a Henry James novel before segueing into some hardcore Jilly Cooper. Admittedly, this may well work for poetry – anthologies on the go and all that – but, let’s be honest, we mostly read in slow rotations, and I can’t ever say that I’ve needed more than 3 unread novels for a holiday, and even that’s relatively indulgent. But even if it were appealing to people to do so, the model is still not the same, and here we come to the fundamental point: although it was admittedly a monumental pain in the arse, with my iPod I just ripped all of my CD library to iTunes and went from there. With ebooks – no such thing. Right back at the start buddy. Get to the back of the line and flex those buying muscles, because if you really want to see the imperious splendour of those yards of bookshelf condensed into that wee little handheld boxy, well, you’d best get your wallet out pal.
Saturday 20 February 2010
Friday 12 February 2010
Read and Reading.
I'm usually not one for being able to measure the passage of time in any kind of reliable fashion, but with the good ship 2010 not yet too far from the shore, I can actually count, for once, how many books I've read this year.
So far:
Pierre Bayard - How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Gav Thorpe - Malekith
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Tibor Fischer - Good to Be God
oh and finally - George Orwell - 1984.
The reason behind this isn't so much that I like to show off about such things but that I was able to breeze through them in such a short time with nary a strained eye or gritted jaw of forced intellectual improvement in sight.
And no, neither did I give in to pressure of the canon to read 100 'classics' before I die - 1984 was actually for some A-level tutoring I'm doing - but I'm ultimately glad that I did pick it up. Outside of the context of it being the nearest and easiest shrieking perch for people making broad and lazy comparisons with whatever 'totalitarian' sanctions their resident democracy is imposing upon them at any given time, I enjoyed it first because of the stylistic punchiness (you can tell Orwell used to be a journalist) and secondly, of course, due to the sublime distillation of the concept of power, the will to power, and politics and that. I'm not intending a review here, and by no means do I wish to breathlessly extol its every nuance, as has no doubt been done in trillions of A-level and undergrad papers to this day.
In a sense, the first book (How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read) entirely dismantles the subject of this blog. This emphasis on quantity of books read over the quality of their reading always whiffed a little off to me I must say, and it's certainly with distinct wariness that I list them here, lest I look like a preening tit laying out the respective physical evidence of his cumulative refinement. The book itself confirms something I've long suspected about reading and readers: that a vast amount of it is self-aggrandising bullshite. People largely delight in listing, book for book, what they have read or loved reading recently in the manner of a hypochondriac meticulously reading their current medication to any who'll listen, as though each is inherently imbued with a set value of culture points, you know: 50 points for James Joyce, bonus 5 for Finnegan's Wake, 60 for Dostoyevsky, bonus 10 for anything in translation, minus 5 for anything adapted into a film post-reading, or without the caveat of 'the book is simply SO much better, they ruined it completely. But even with medication, accurately dosed and completely consumed by the individual, the results are never entirely the same. This we know.
What is it to even say that we've 'read' a book anyway? That we've categorically ripped it to our internal hard-drive and stored it in our cerebral bookshelf forevermore? Even with Harold Bloom-like reading speed (he could apparently, in his youth, scoff an entire novel in an hour), how much is honestly retained? The shameful truth, that I know lurks in the dingy basement of my brain behind the dusty bookshelves, is that the vast majority of authors I 'know', or have 'read' soon become mere fluffy blurbs with brief internal memos on character and style; a fuzzy glow that shames us with the knowledge of our hours spent furtively poring over page after damn page for our own intellectual well-being. Stoically we all brave our Milton or Shakespeare as we would our greens at the table: it's not nice, we know, and it's not tasty, but it's GOOD for you, listen to Big Mother. As Bayard writes (and I can't remember this exactly because I'm an imperfect reader), with many texts we're simply better off saving ourselves the bother of reading them, and instead merely becoming au fait with the conventions and stock phrases of book-talk that can generally be transposed onto any given book. Things like comments on the accuracy of the setting, the pace of the dialogue, how much better his older stuff was, or the accepted attitudes towards a work and its place in literary history. As he says, I know that Ulysses was a crucial modernist text, that it's written in a stream of consciousness style and takes part over the course of a day from the point of view of various characters such as Stephen Daedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom. Also it's written by James Joyce, who's Irish. And there's a sex scene at the end, or something.
But if one were to go through the sheer martyrdom of reading it, who's to say that this isn't all they'd be able to remember after a few months or years anyhow? Of course, it's not as if I have acute reading dementia and can only know what's on the page in front of me (true as it is to a certain extent), but people need to be more honest about how much we con each other and ourselves about what we truly know about our books. It's not that people shouldn't read, but that the literary hair-shirt wearing of so many cultural flagellants is simply a colossal waste of time. Put War and Peace down Carol, look it up on Wikipedia, and have a bloody cup of tea.
So far:
Pierre Bayard - How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Gav Thorpe - Malekith
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Tibor Fischer - Good to Be God
oh and finally - George Orwell - 1984.
The reason behind this isn't so much that I like to show off about such things but that I was able to breeze through them in such a short time with nary a strained eye or gritted jaw of forced intellectual improvement in sight.
And no, neither did I give in to pressure of the canon to read 100 'classics' before I die - 1984 was actually for some A-level tutoring I'm doing - but I'm ultimately glad that I did pick it up. Outside of the context of it being the nearest and easiest shrieking perch for people making broad and lazy comparisons with whatever 'totalitarian' sanctions their resident democracy is imposing upon them at any given time, I enjoyed it first because of the stylistic punchiness (you can tell Orwell used to be a journalist) and secondly, of course, due to the sublime distillation of the concept of power, the will to power, and politics and that. I'm not intending a review here, and by no means do I wish to breathlessly extol its every nuance, as has no doubt been done in trillions of A-level and undergrad papers to this day.
In a sense, the first book (How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read) entirely dismantles the subject of this blog. This emphasis on quantity of books read over the quality of their reading always whiffed a little off to me I must say, and it's certainly with distinct wariness that I list them here, lest I look like a preening tit laying out the respective physical evidence of his cumulative refinement. The book itself confirms something I've long suspected about reading and readers: that a vast amount of it is self-aggrandising bullshite. People largely delight in listing, book for book, what they have read or loved reading recently in the manner of a hypochondriac meticulously reading their current medication to any who'll listen, as though each is inherently imbued with a set value of culture points, you know: 50 points for James Joyce, bonus 5 for Finnegan's Wake, 60 for Dostoyevsky, bonus 10 for anything in translation, minus 5 for anything adapted into a film post-reading, or without the caveat of 'the book is simply SO much better, they ruined it completely. But even with medication, accurately dosed and completely consumed by the individual, the results are never entirely the same. This we know.
What is it to even say that we've 'read' a book anyway? That we've categorically ripped it to our internal hard-drive and stored it in our cerebral bookshelf forevermore? Even with Harold Bloom-like reading speed (he could apparently, in his youth, scoff an entire novel in an hour), how much is honestly retained? The shameful truth, that I know lurks in the dingy basement of my brain behind the dusty bookshelves, is that the vast majority of authors I 'know', or have 'read' soon become mere fluffy blurbs with brief internal memos on character and style; a fuzzy glow that shames us with the knowledge of our hours spent furtively poring over page after damn page for our own intellectual well-being. Stoically we all brave our Milton or Shakespeare as we would our greens at the table: it's not nice, we know, and it's not tasty, but it's GOOD for you, listen to Big Mother. As Bayard writes (and I can't remember this exactly because I'm an imperfect reader), with many texts we're simply better off saving ourselves the bother of reading them, and instead merely becoming au fait with the conventions and stock phrases of book-talk that can generally be transposed onto any given book. Things like comments on the accuracy of the setting, the pace of the dialogue, how much better his older stuff was, or the accepted attitudes towards a work and its place in literary history. As he says, I know that Ulysses was a crucial modernist text, that it's written in a stream of consciousness style and takes part over the course of a day from the point of view of various characters such as Stephen Daedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom. Also it's written by James Joyce, who's Irish. And there's a sex scene at the end, or something.
But if one were to go through the sheer martyrdom of reading it, who's to say that this isn't all they'd be able to remember after a few months or years anyhow? Of course, it's not as if I have acute reading dementia and can only know what's on the page in front of me (true as it is to a certain extent), but people need to be more honest about how much we con each other and ourselves about what we truly know about our books. It's not that people shouldn't read, but that the literary hair-shirt wearing of so many cultural flagellants is simply a colossal waste of time. Put War and Peace down Carol, look it up on Wikipedia, and have a bloody cup of tea.
Wednesday 3 February 2010
Ole!
So I eventually found my way, against all likelihood, back to Spain for a second time. Although destinacion ultima is the Andalucian gemstone that is Granada, I have to travel there by first landing in Malaga. Now, being somewhat light of pocket, these last two times I've decided to suppress my bourgeois affectations for things like light, space and oxygen and opt for Ryanair. Having sampled Greyhound in America, I'm somewhat familiar with the 'fight tooth and nail with every man, woman and child' approach you generally have to take.
This time, after assuring the baggage woman that I hadn't forgetfully left my acid-spurting anthrax firework in my luggage, I eventually made it on and to a window seat without much en-route skull-crushing needed. I did actually think that, being February and all, there might be less people than usual clamouring for the marginally-less-freezing shores of Malaga. Needless to say though, with Ryanair being the last-ditch refuge of all of the UK's desperate, fleeing emigres that it is, it was packed as a bastard.
I then had the pleasure of sharing a flight with the curious combo of an imperious, snowy bearded Count Dooku of Tunbridge Wells and his wife, who just seemed to stare vacantly, intermittently affirming his haughty diatribes with fragmented english, giving me a mouthful of greasy afro every time she answered in the negatory. I'm guessing she was some variant of bargain basement mail-order bride. Once the air hostess had finished her ritual flying dance with the oxygen mask and the lifejacket, it seemed to act as some bizarre aphrodisiac to them both, my nose descending further into my Roth novel in wilful denial of the orgiastic kneading, kissing and chafing of wrinkles going on next to me. Also, he may or may not have asked her to call him daddy.
What also interests me is that the disembodied 'voice of Ryanair' that spills out occasionally to tell us either to love them and that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery etc is always either chirpily Irish or disrmingly Scottish. Which is all well and good, and admittedly a welcome refrain from the constant, icy tone of RP English forced upon us daily, but I suspect people just like being told things by an accent that hasn't invaded them in recent centuries.
This time, after assuring the baggage woman that I hadn't forgetfully left my acid-spurting anthrax firework in my luggage, I eventually made it on and to a window seat without much en-route skull-crushing needed. I did actually think that, being February and all, there might be less people than usual clamouring for the marginally-less-freezing shores of Malaga. Needless to say though, with Ryanair being the last-ditch refuge of all of the UK's desperate, fleeing emigres that it is, it was packed as a bastard.
I then had the pleasure of sharing a flight with the curious combo of an imperious, snowy bearded Count Dooku of Tunbridge Wells and his wife, who just seemed to stare vacantly, intermittently affirming his haughty diatribes with fragmented english, giving me a mouthful of greasy afro every time she answered in the negatory. I'm guessing she was some variant of bargain basement mail-order bride. Once the air hostess had finished her ritual flying dance with the oxygen mask and the lifejacket, it seemed to act as some bizarre aphrodisiac to them both, my nose descending further into my Roth novel in wilful denial of the orgiastic kneading, kissing and chafing of wrinkles going on next to me. Also, he may or may not have asked her to call him daddy.
What also interests me is that the disembodied 'voice of Ryanair' that spills out occasionally to tell us either to love them and that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery etc is always either chirpily Irish or disrmingly Scottish. Which is all well and good, and admittedly a welcome refrain from the constant, icy tone of RP English forced upon us daily, but I suspect people just like being told things by an accent that hasn't invaded them in recent centuries.
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