For anyone who has never had reader’s block, you are very lucky, and I might well hate you! For the last month I have been feeling distinctly meh, and generally mentally exhausted, with any spare energy I do have going into my search for a job, which sucks, and is incredibly boring, and I just can’t seem to get into the books that I pick up. The only exception has been rereads of Terry Pratchett books, which are the literary equivalent of comfort food to me. As it is, I have three books on the go; the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way, which I am really enjoying, but just takes too much concentration, a short biography of Tolstoy, which is interesting, but written in a style which I find incredibly irritating, and a collection of Nawal el Saadawi’s writings, which is really interesting, but not something I could read all the way through.

Hopefully, though, as my life starts to get a little more organised, I’ll get my reading mojo back. Until then, however, I’m going to be using this little reading hiatus to try and get my blogging a little bit more up to date, and actually post some reviews, unless anyone else has any ideas on how to get yourself out of a total reading funk?

I think I may well be really late to the game on this one, but who else finds themselves glued to Five Books? There’s something deeply compelling about just getting someone who knows stuff about a thing and then getting them to pick five awesome books about it. It makes for excellent reading and some great reading recommendations. There are so many subjects it covers, too, that it must give everyone a big happy once in a while.

From the general to the specific (there are selections on feminism, and also Islam and feminism) and books from all over the world, I’ve got some serious booklust. Which is deeply worrying, for I do not have the bank balance to be feeling such high levels of desire for the written word. Never mind! The website itself will just have to be enough for me for a while.

The only sad thing is that I can’t just browse around by author, which would be excellent. But that’s just me being a greedy book lover.

Such a simple idea, so nicely done. In many ways, it’s like Pop Tarts.

Ah, the blogging portion of the internet! I remember you!

It’s been both hectic and quiet in these parts of late, which has meant a lack of blogging fun (although I’ve still been mostly keeping up with my Google Reader…). By that I mean that I have been busy, but I’ve been busy not doing a great deal. Which suits me fine.

You’d think that I’ve been reading lots! I kind of did, it’s just that the book I’m reading right now is incredibly dense and really quite long, so I’m not actually halfway through it yet. And it’s been a while. It’s become the Everest that I must climb. I must finish this book. I’m sure others among you have battled with books which are great but just incredibly time-consuming?

On top of that, it’s back to college for me. The final accountancy exams before I can be an exam-qualified Chartered Accountant are looming and this is the bad, the very bad, kind of busy. But this time round I’m going to keep a certain portion of time to one side for reading, because I just don’t understand people who can do nothing but account for stuff. Really, deferred tax, consolidated financial statements… they’re just not that much fun. A little reading goes a long way…

I’m tired, and I’m rambling, and I know it. I’ve got two books to review, and reviews are coming, but what I’m really posting for today is: what should I be reading, alongside MAMMOTH BOOK* to keep me going through the dark months of exam-studying ahead? I’ve got just oodles on my TBR pile, including White Woman on a Green Bicycle which looks like it could be quite nice and readable. Any other ideas? I really don’t want to give in and live a life with no literature!

What a dreary life that would be for a book addict.

* A very large, dense book. Not a book about mammoths. Although reading about mammoths is not something that I would rule out.

Basically just housekeeping, but here it is anyway, for your reading pleasure. The longlist:

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan – Picador)

Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin – Fig Tree)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Books)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy The Long Song
(Headline Publishing Group – Headline Review)

Tom McCarthy C (Random House – Jonathan Cape)

David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet  (Hodder & Stoughton – Sceptre)

Lisa Moore February (Random House – Chatto & Windus)

Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin – Hamish Hamilton)

Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House – Chatto & Windus)

Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic – Tuskar Rock)

Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Random House – Jonathan Cape)

There were a couple on there that I have not heard anything about, but which look very interesting, quite a few that regularly popped up in forums and on other blogs as suggestions. The Levy, Carey, Mitchell, and Tremain books were ones that I thought might make it on to the list, but I had no idea about the rest, and I was actually quite surprised by the omission of <i>Solar</i> from the longlist. Nevertheless, I’m thrilled that Helen Dunmore’s latest is on the longlist, as she is a fabulous writer. It looks like there are quite a few chunksters on the list again, though, which raises the question, is anyone going to attempt a readathon of the longlist this year?

In preparation for the release of the Man Booker long list this year, I’ve been spending a bit of time on the Man Booker Prize website and around bookish chat rooms, just to see what some of the predictions were for the long list. What caught my attention more than the books themselves, however, was the constant mention of the “Booker Controversy”, something that seems to crop up nearly every year, whether it’s who gets on the long list, the short list, what the judges say, what the authors say; there always seems to be something. I wasn’t surprised, then, to come across this quote, from Publishing News:

“Each year’s controversy raises the odds. Just how shocking can Booker get? Topless judges? A page 3 committee?”

What did surprise me, a little bit, was the fact that this quote appeared on the Man Booker website itself.

I actually studied the Booker Prize’s beginnings earlier this year, as part of a course on 20th Century Literature. What I never knew was that the Booker Prize very nearly didn’t make it past the early 70s, as they just weren’t getting enough publicity, and so, in a way, I can understand why they make such a big deal of the controversies that have basically kept the prize going. Of course, the extra publicity also means that even the books that are longlisted get a sales boost, which must be nice for writers that are working in the “genre” of literary fiction, which isn’t really known for its fiscal rewards.

Added to this, it means that publishing houses continue to invest in at least a few literary fiction titles, meaning that we are given some respite from endless lists of Dan Brown-alikes, and the kind of shock-memoir and celebrity “confessions” that routinely fill supermarket shelves. Still, despite the positives, I can’t help feeling that there is something, well, a little bit icky in the amount of pride the Prize administrator’s seem to take in their “bad” publicity, as if they were naughty children. It’s just a little bit sick-making that a prize that claims to be looking for ‘the best book of the year’ doesn’t actually seem willing to let the books speak for themselves.

*Ahem* You’ll have to forgive me for that one, I just couldn’t resist. All abysmal jokes aside, I decided that the only way to catch up with my reviewing was to pop a couple of books into each post until I’m caught up, and the two books that immediately jumped out at me were The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, and Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger; not only do both books feature dead people as central characters, but, to me, they also had a similar kind of feeling about them, too. So, onto The Lovely Bones first.

So, I’ve always been wary of the pod-people-like effect that seems to go hand in hand with bestselling books like The Lovely Bones, where seemingly everyone on the planet is reading the same book, and praising it to the sky. I rarely find that those books live up to my expectations, and, if I do want to read a bestseller, I usually wait at least a couple of years; which brings me to Alice Sebold’s novel. In case I’m not the last person on the planet to read the book, The Lovely Bones is narrated by Susie Salmon, a girl who was raped and murdered at the age of fourteen, and tells the story of her afterlife in heaven, where she watches over her family as they slowly fall apart. It’s not a whodunnit, as you know who killed Susie almost straight away. Instead, it charts the effect of Susie’s death on those she left behind.

There probably isn’t a lot more that I can say about this book that hasn’t been said hundreds of times before, but, personally, I enjoyed the book. I will admit that, on occasion, I found Susie a little annoying, and the ending, for me, wasn’t exactly brilliant, but the writing was lovely, the characterisation was brilliant, and the book was certainly emotionally charged. I’m glad, nevertheless, that I left it a few years before I read the book, as I think I would have found the book slightly disappointing if I had read it while all of the hype was still going on. While The Lovely Bones probably won’t make it onto my ‘best reads of the year’ list, and I can’t really see myself rereading it, it was an easy summer read, despite the subject matter, which was great when I was going through a patch of literary laziness and didn’t feel like reading anything that would tax my brain.

Her Fearful Symmetry, compared with The Lovely Bones, is a much more complex book, and, I have to say, I enjoyed it more because of that. I have to confess, I haven’t read The Time Traveller’s Wife, although I have a copy knocking about somewhere, but I loved Niffenegger’s “novel in pictures”, The Three Incestuous Sisters (which isn’t about incest, just so you know), and I thought that Her Fearful Symmetry sounded like it was in a similar vein, which it is.

The novel is actually composed of interweaving narrative threads, but the central story concerns Julia and Valentina, a pair of American “mirror-twins”, who inherit a flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery from an aunt, Elspeth, whom they never knew they had, and from that point on their lives interweave with those of Robert, Elspeth’s lover, and Martin, the crossword setter who lives in the flat upstairs, confined by his severe OCD, and whose wife has left him, unable to bear living with his illness anymore. The twins see their move to London as a chance to gain their independence, and start living separate lives, but they face several problems, not least of which is that Elspeth hasn’t quite moved on, and is, in fact, spending her afterlife in the flat with the girls. Things get ever more complicated, until the novel comes to a surprising, beautiful and poignant end.

There are quite a few twists in this one, and while everyone would probably pick up on a few, I think it is fair to say that there will always be a few surprises; it is a testament to Niffenegger’s skill in handling her characters that none of these plot twists, when they come, seem out of place, no matter how surprising. Her Fearful Symmetry, then, is a deftly plotted, intricately woven piece of fiction, which is not only a highly interesting read, but is also beautifully written, perfectly paced, and incredibly moving. I loved it as soon as I finished the book, but over the next few days snippets of the book kept coming back to me, and I love it even more now, if that’s possible, than I did when I first finished the book. I can’t say for definite that I will read any more of Alice Sebold’s work, and I don’t know if I will read The Time Traveller’s Wife any time soon, but I am really looking forward to Niffenegger’s third book, which looks incredibly interesting too, and I would be happy to recommend both books to anyone who thinks they sound even remotely interesting.

Usually, I steer clear of books with any kind of “celebrity” associations, but I just couldn’t resist Shappi Khorsandi’s first literary offering. Not only did it seem like the kind of light read I was look for, considering that I think Khorsandi is a fantastic stand-up comedian, but A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English also sounded like a fascinating book in its own right. And, overall, it is. The book tells the story of the Khorsandi family’s move to London, and their eventual exile from Iran, the problems Shappi and her brother face growing up in a foreign country, whilst also interweaving snippets of stories about the childhood’s of other members of the Khorsandi family, still at home in Iran.

Khorsandi’s father was a renowned poet and satirist, and the book begins in Iran, where Shappi’s parents are preparing to leave for London, in the hopes that a stint in a foreign country will help Hadi Khorsandi’s career. Once the family arrive in London, however, Shappi recounts the trouble she had in settling into her new life, unable to speak English and yet forced to go to an English nursery, then on to school, while the revolution begins in Iran. Once the revolution in Iran is over, however, Hadi Khorsandi is exiled from his own country, and the Khorsandi family is forced to face up to the fact that they might never be able to return home.

Having read Persepolis recently, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir about growing up in revolutionary Iran, and a similar, though solitary, exile from her country, I was somewhat familiar with the politics behind Khorsandi’s memoir, but the book is more about family life than politics, and that is the real strength of the book; at heart, A Beginner’s Guide to English is simply the portrait of a close, creative, quite eccentric family, and their attempts to adjust to a new country, and a new way of life. Of course, things inevitably get more complicated than that, but I have no intention of spoiling the book for anyone.

What I actually found very satisfying when reading the book, though, was the fact that Shappi doesn’t try and write a “funny” book. Certainly, there is a lot of humour in the book, but this comes mainly from the actions of the family, such as when Shappi and her brother ‘play firemen’, and accidentally set fire to a brand-new sofa, but there are a lot of sad moments in the book, as well, and it is the balance between the two that is so satisfying. I won’t say that Shappi Khorsandi is breaking new literary ground with A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English, but the book is a moving, funny, and, above all, very satisfying read, the perfect choice for a couple of sunny days in the garden.

At the moment, I’m trying to plug some gaps in my reading. There are so many books that I’ve really wanted to read, but not got round to, or genres I’ve barely begun to explore. More particularly, I’m increasingly aware that I used to read loads of ‘classics’ when I was young, since I hit my late teens, I’ve barely touched an old-school ‘classic’. I think the last one I read was Tess of the d’Urbevilles and, let’s face it, it’s great but hardly a barrel of laughs. I think I just overdid it and went into a spell of not reading any.

So I picked up my forlorn and neglected copy of The Odyssey. What better way to get back into some classics reading than with a super-exciting adventure story, right?

Right! It was a lot of fun to read. It did, though, surprise me and that’s what prompted this post. The thing which surprised me is also something I loved about this book: everybody cries, all the time. Quite rightly! They all keep losing friends and relatives, being in awful situations, and on it goes. There’s something quite pleasant about it being explicitly okay for ‘heroic’ men to sit around weeping; it’s not something that often gets represented, I suppose. So it was a bit of a cultural shocker, but incredibly refreshing.

Not that I think representations of masculinity in The Odyssey were nothing but good, but this was a really positive aspect of the story, and I think I connected a lot more sympathetically with the characters as a result.

Have you been reading any books that surprised you lately?

You know what I think it’s time for? Another Wednesday Waffle! As the more astute of you may have noticed, I subtly dropped the ‘Weekly’ part of the initial ‘Weekly Wednesday Waffle’ as I felt it was too limiting. I’ve subsequently posted Wednesday Waffles on really whatever day I felt like it. Happily for me, I feel like it today: and you could have knocked me down with a feather when I noticed that today is, in fact, Wednesday.

(Note that I refuse to drop the ‘Wednesday’ part: just calling a post ‘Waffle’ makes it sound like something that should be topped with cinnamon, and makes me hungry.)

The magic number today is… 619!

It’s time to rock it up with Freedom, Law and Justice by Lord Justice Sedley. This is part of the Hamlyn Lecture Series: a series of annual lectures given by important people from the legal world.

I’ve actually had these on my shelves for a while. I got them (for free!) when I finished my Law degree and waited until I had a bit of distance to start reading them. And I actually did, recently! I was going to wait until I’d finished them all before talking about it. I won’t review the series (well, I’ll never do that, as there’s more than 50 of them, and I only have 5) right now, but let’s just say that so far I’ve read one: From the Test Tube to the Coffin. It was about the law surrounding family life – birth, marriage, death – written by Brenda Hale, and quite frankly, I was slightly disappointed by the analysis. I felt as though it relied too heavily on the concept of ‘choice’ in forming an argument, and just didn’t go far enough: for instance, in one place, it was commented that marriage as an institution continued to be useful without going into any further depth.

Personally, I’d have liked to see something a bit more challenging. If we’re going to go there, why not really interrogate the social structure of marriage, what it’s ‘uses’ are and how it could potentially be developed and changed (or done away with altogether) in search of more egalitarian social institutions.

And there, I tentatively think, may be the issue. It’s a series of lectures by people who’ve made their name in legal circles, who are accepted by the big bad – generally fairly conservative – legal world. How challenging is it really going to be, and to what degree is it going to attempt to legitimate rather than rigorously analyse the status quo? I can’t answer that for you yet, but I certainly have my doubts.

Nonetheless, what I have read has been interesting, and sometimes it’s fun to stretch those brain muscles by arguing with a book in my head. We can’t only read things we agree with, after all! Thinking more specifically about what I’ll find in this particular book, by Lord Justice Sedley, I feel inclined to think that it will actually be extremely interesting. Sedley is notorious for having argued that all UK citizens, and all visitors to the UK should be included on a DNA database. Where that seemed to come from, though, is from his belief that the current system was biased against, for instance, ethnic minorities: a situation he called “indefensible”. He’s done a lot of work and speaking about civil liberties, an area close to my own heart, and whether I agree with it or not, I think that Lord Sedley is an interesting character and comes at things from unexpected angles. So this is definitely one that I look forward to digging into soon (although I am going to be strict with myself and read in chronological order).

How about you; do you tend to gravitate towards books which fit in with your own views, or do you sometimes or always take on something which at least attempts to challenge those views?

Okay, I know I already kind of posted about Aztecs and pirates, but that was in the mini-golf sense. Now I thought it might be time for a brief review of my very exciting reading of late.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
There’s been a lot of chat about this from all over the blogsophere and beyond, so I don’t really want to go too in-depth with a big old plot analysis. I do want to say, though, that I really enjoyed this. It helps, I think, that I’m really interested in the period that was covered, and the characters. It speaks volumes for the author’s skill at drawing you in that despite knowing some of the things that were going to happen (Trotsky’s going to die), I’d still get quite emotionally involved (“Oh no, Trotsky!”).

My one gripe about this, and it’s a general fault with the ‘diary’ format in fiction I think, is that it did go beyond the bounds of believability a fair few times. I don’t demand realism in my fiction. And don’t get me wrong, I can usually suspend disbelief with the best of them, but it does jerk me out of a book from time to time when the structure within which the story is told is at odds with the way the story is written. Which is a really long and fluffy way of saying that I just can’t stand pages and pages and pages of dialogue in what is supposed to be a diary. It’s a fairly minor gripe, though, and it’s hardly like Barbara Kingsolver is the only one guilty of this, so it didn’t overly hamper my enjoyment.

Essentially, I think it’s a great book, and I felt quite attuned to it because of my personal interest. Having said that, I don’t necessarily think that it’s the best quality novel out of the Orange shortlist. I’ve only read two – this and Wolf Hall – so I suppose what I’m really saying is that I think Wolf Hall is some high-quality fiction. The Lacuna is a great read, though: it might be big, but I whipped on through it, because I got so invested. Which is always a nice reading experience!

Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages by Jo Stanley
I’ll stand right up and say that I love a bit of gender history. And maritime history and pirates is an area quite in need of a more objective, reasoned analysis. Women in this context have either been written out completely, or painfully sensationalised. So I found this a fascinating book: it covers women involved in piracy from Artemisia in ancient Greece, to the modern day (well, ish, it was published in 1995, but that’s not the book’s fault). What I found particularly interesting was the attention given not just to women as pirates, but to the role of women in supporting piracy in a wider context: for instance women on land providing information and sexual services. It’s a great introduction to this area, and I’d love to do more reading around this.

Another aspect of the history which is incredibly interesting from a more political angle is the relationship between piracy and the state, and between piracy itself and privateering or working in the navy. There was a point in time when states were more inclined to tolerate such activities, and could indeed profit from it. That’s obviously a long, long way from the state of play (couldn’t resist the pun) today, when piracy can be a hindrance to international trade and ‘legitimate’ profits. Again, this book discusses these issues and has sparked my interest in further reading – I’ve already sourced a couple of books about piracy and international politics and history!

Finally, what I really appreciated was a realistic approach to women pirates. They are neither glamourised nor demonised: that kind of approach is something I think is inherently limiting. Without taking into account social factors and constraints, there’s a real shallowness to how women pirates (and pirates generally, too) have been treated. That includes the crossdressing involved when women have taken to the seas within a patriarchal culture. Crossdressing can be a practical consideration, rather than a particular desire to seem sexy or depraved to audiences of the 21st century. As for the pirates themselves, I’ve got to say that I have to agree with the author when she says:

I have the impression that I would not like most of these women pirates; they might steal my best bath oil and laugh at my poems. I also believe that women should be free to travel without fear of molestation [...]. As I think human beings should not have to risk death in the course of their work, how could I hold a brief for people – whatever their sex – who attack employees?

This study of women pirates, though, is really interesting, and a great introduction to women involved in piracy. As much as anything else, it’s given me a lot of enthusiasm for taking it further and looking at some other books focusing on particular issues, such as crossdressing or international trade. Again, that’s made this a really satisfying reading experience for me. I like getting excited about my reading, and I really did here.

It’s been an exciting reading period. I’m now going to settle down with a nice quiet-living book: The Odyssey. (Ahem.)

The Lacuna counts towards both the Chunkster Challenge and the Global Reading challenge as my book from the Americas. Bold in Her Breeches counts towards the Women Unbound Challenge.