Well, it is getting on for a month, with no sign of another blog-post from me, and so I’m going to do something I’ve thought about for a while, in an attempt to get my to-be-written-about pile of books down to a more manageable size, and just write about a few books in brief. I’ve therefore picked a selection of books that I would recommend to people in my non-internet life, something that I rarely do.

You can take it as read (excuse the pun) that I thought they were all wonderful, for a multitude of various reasons, but I have had trouble writing about them all, either because I didn’t want to give too much about the plot away, and couldn’t see how not to in an extended blogpost, or because I just haven’t been able to form my thoughts on them into a coherent piece of writing.

The first book, basing my choices roughly on the ages for which they were intended, is Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, which, while probably best classed as a young adult novel, is far too subversive, inventive, and generally witty to find itself restricted by that category. Set in a parallel UnLondon, where ‘trash’ forms packs and comes alive to run the streets like stray dogs, and broken umbrellas- unbrellas, in fact- seem to have a sinister life of their own, Mieville has created a finely realised fantasy world that is full of humour and a cast of characters that are wonderfully vibrant.

The book started of with a bit of obligatory slang thrown in, just to let us know we were dealing with teenagers, which very nearly put me off reading any further but I am glad that I didn’t as the story that unfolded was, frankly, brilliant, and very subversive in the way that it dealt with the idea of the Chosen One, and the adventure-quest, within fantasy as a genre. I’d recommend it for you if: you read children’s literature anyway, you like comic fantasy, you fancy reading something light and inventive.

The Owl Service, by Alan Garner, is a young adult novel as well, but perhaps for a slightly older readership. The story is based on a Welsh myth from the Mabinogion and three teenagers find themselves acting out the story of Blodeuwedd, which, as it is on wikipedia, and is pretty much covered in the book itself, I shan’t relay here. Nevertheless, mythology and folk tales are two of my literary passions, so I though Garner’s ability to weave an ancient Welsh myth into his narrative was brilliant.

The book is, unsurprisingly, not funny, but it is incredibly powerful, very eerie, and created quite an oppressive atmosphere, at least to my mind. I read this book back in July, though, and wasn’t entirely sure what to think of it, but, even after all of the books I have read since, the impression it made on me is still really clear in my mind, so it is definitely a slow-grower. I’d recommend it for you if: you don’t mind if a book doesn’t clear up every mystery it presents, you like very evocative stories, you think the Canongate Myths series is a really good idea.

Up third is The Magic Toyshop, by Angela Carter, which I absolutely loved. It’s dark and creepy, whimsical and fantastical, all at the same time, which is, basically, just my kind of book, and I now really want to read everything she has ever written. The story focusses on Melanie, who is sent to live in London with her aunt, who suffers from mutism, and her uncle, a dictatorial toymaker, after both her parents are killed.

It could have been a story about the grieving process, but instead, Carter presents the reader with a neo-gothic fairytale that really got under my skin. Reading the novel, I found myself thinking, about forty pages from the end; “I love this book so much, there is no way that the ending cannot disappoint me”. Thankfully, I was completely wrong, and the denouement more than exceeded my expectations. I really don’t want to give too much away about the plot, because the way in which Carter reveals the plot to the reader, building up tension in the process, is really very wonderful. I’d recommend it for you if: you always preferred the darker originals to modern PC fairytales, you like disturbingly quirky literature, marionettes freak the frick out of you.

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson, is an entirely different type of book from the others, but it really is beautiful. The book cover writes as if there is a plot to the book, but, really, it is simply a series of wonderful little vignettes, depicting the relationship between a grandmother and her granddaughter Sophia as they spend the summer on their family island in the gulf of Finland.

The relationship between grandmother and grandchild is lovely to read about, and the grandmother herself is a fantastic character, who is very much attuned to the natural world, but what I found so moving about the book was actually the descriptions of the natural world and a lifestyle that is slowly becoming extinct. It’s not a long book, but I spent a wonderful afternoon sitting in the garden with a cold drink, and the sense of place the book created was just amazing. I’d recommend it for you if: you don’t mind a book that doesn’t really have a plot, you like books that bring a place to life, you like reading about eccentric characters.

My last recommendation is again a very different one; I’ve done children’s literature, I’ve done adult fiction, so now it’s time for the poetry. I never really know how to write about poetry collections because there’s no plot to describe, no characters to talk about, and, when you get right down to it, poetry succeeds or fails on the language the poet makes use of, and that is the one thing you can’t describe in anything but abstract terms. Nevertheless, for anyone who already reads poetry, I would definitely add Swithering, by Robin Robertson, to your TBR pile, and, for those who don’t read poetry regularly, you could do worse than to break yourself in with Robertson’s book.

Robertson writes primarily in free verse, but his work has a great deal of musicality in the lines, and the collection is mainly composed of clear, deeply moving, and powerfully personal lyrics and you really don’t need a great knowledge of poetic form to understand them, although, as with most poetry, you have to put in a little more concentration than you might with a novel if you are to get the most out of the book, but it is definitely worth it, and there was hardly a single poem in the whole collection where I didn’t come across at least one line and think ‘wow, I wish I’d written that’. I’d recommend it for you if: you like contemporary poetry, especially poets such as Simon Armitage, Don Paterson and Christopher Reid, you want to start reading poetry and you are looking for something powerful to start you off.

And now, I’m going to have a nice cup of tea and relax, feeling slightly less guilty about my incredibly poor blogging habits.

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.

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.

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?

Sometimes life reflects reading to an extent which is slightly bemusing. It’s fairly frequent that I find myself able to draw links between what I’m reading and something that’s happened to me during my day to day business of being (it’s only natural, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything exciting if I hadn’t been reading whatever it is that I was reading – y’know?), but just sometimes it’s particularly awesome.

At the weekend, I was in the enviable position of having just finished The Lacuna – which I loved – which features Aztecs, and having just started a new book, about women pirates, called Bold in Her Breeches. Yarr!

It was at this point that I was spirited away to partake of some crazy golf. Ah, how I do love crazy golf! Only, blow me down with a feather, the crazy golf course was split in two: half was Aztec-themed, and the other half was pirate-themed! It couldn’t have been more perfect.

Have any of you chanced upon any fun links between life and books recently?

A few years ago I went through a period of collecting books from The Women’s Press. They have a great catalogue, and I loved – and continue to love – their commitment to publishing interesting and challenging women’s writing across a broad range of categories. In short, they’re awesome.

I stopped, due to the growing size of my ‘To Be Read’ pile and growing guilt about buying more books to add to it.

Now that I’m older and wiser, well… I’ve got over it. The pile is no smaller, but I’m still reading my way through at my own leisure and I’ve got to say that books from The Women’s Press tend to look interesting and bump themselves up the TBR list anyway. Besides, I like feeling like I’m supporting The Women’s Press, and am a fan of the old-school black and white striped spines. So I think it’s time that I get back into the collecting game!

To mark this decision, I’ve just picked up a copy of The Women’s Press edition of Vida by Marge Piercy, which looks like a great depiction of politics and radical activism in the 1960s and 1970s. I think I’ll enjoy it.

Do any of you find that you have publishers that you warm to more than others? I find that I increasingly do. Which seems like as good a place as any to mention the new Persephone Forum, for discussion of the Persephone Books catalogue, one book at a time. I look forward to seeing people’s thoughts, and reading some more Persephones myself!

So, it’s been decided: The Lacuna is the winner of this year’s Orange Prize.

I confess to having only read one book on the shortlist, Wolf Hall, and that was before it was actually shortlisted. It’s not that I don’t like the Orange Prize, because I really do, I’ve just never been good at reading shortlists.

So total kudos to some of the book bloggers who’ve been trying to read the whole blooming longlist, and very nearly as much to those who’ve been reading the shortlist. I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself, folks!

In particular, I’ve been following Kirsty at Other Stories, Buried in Print, and last but not least, Victoria at Eve’s Alexandria who already has her own choice for the winner up. I’ve really enjoyed all of their thoughts over the last few weeks, and it was on the recommendation of various book bloggers that I went out and bought The White Woman on the Green Bicycle last week, which I’m looking forward to reading.

Having said that, I’ve been excited about The Lacuna since I first knew it was coming. I’m not wealthy enough to go around splurging on hardback books, but now that it’s out in paperback, I have my very own copy of the Orange Prize winner ready to read! Others may read the longlist, still more may read the shortlist, but I shall take on the momentous of challenge of reading the – really rather long – winner. Wish me luck!

With some books I find that I react to them in quite a visual way, which often seems to be because I’m emotionally involved in the book and find it particularly evocative. It’s quite a personal reaction. Manja by Anna Gmeyner is one of those books that’s done that for me.

I missed out on Persephone Reading Week recently, mostly because I hadn’t heard of Persephone books until I read about them in relation to that project. When I became clued-in as to what it was all about, though, I looked through their fascinating catalogue and skipped out to buy a copy of this book.

It’s about a group of 5 children in Germany in the inter-war years with the book alternating between focus on the group of friends, and the adults who form part of their world and their own stories (starting with the conception of each of the children). The eponymous Manja is at the heart of the group, and the book in a more general sense. It’s a book that really resonated with me. I do think that it’s wonderful, although hard to read.

Really what I want to do, though, is a little experiment: a ‘visual response’ to the book. I’ll preface this with the immediately obvious fact that I am no artist, not even a little bit. And I’m not trying to be: I don’t think you can create high art from an hour or so of ‘picture collage’ and a few Google image searches (or maybe you can, but I really can’t); but I don’t think that stops us from trying to explore our own relation to a book through the medium of pictures!

So here goes…

After tinkering around in Photoshop for a while, this is what I came up with. It’s just touches of the colours, the images, the structure that I took from the book. It’s somewhat representative, for instance with the inclusion of ‘the wall’, which is where the children gather, but it’s far from a replica of the story – no spoilers!

As you’d expect during the period in which this covers (1930s Germany), the young boys are part of Hitler Youth. This has always been an aspect of Nazi Germany that I’ve found sinister and distressing. This is a picture from the German Federal Archive of a branch of Hitler Youth meeting with Goring on his birthday. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-16515 / unknown / CC-BY-SA)

There are a few locations that are really important in the book, and one of them is a bridge which features several times. I don’t know what it looks like, but I don’t think it was wholly unlike this: the Ludendorf bridge, near Reimagen taken from Wikimedia Commons.

It’s just a few of the things which continued to have an impact on me after I put the book down, but perhaps it’s a little insight into the tone of the book. At any rate, I enjoyed it!

In place of a Wednesday Waffle, I want to point out a great post on Racialicious today on literature of colour, and I recommend giving it a read.

I personally think it’s fairly clear that the reading and writing of literature is not free from questions of race (or other political issues); creativity does not happen within a social and cultural vacuum, and expectations and assumptions inform the activities of both writers and those responding to their work.

Having read through the comments as well, I would certainly second the commenters in recommending Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which is an excellent novel touching on these themes. Having said that, I haven’t yet read anything of Toni Morrison’s that I didn’t love, and I’m still wanting more. So I think I’m going to take some time out to send a little book-love to her today. Can’t wait until I find her most recent novel in a charity shop (bookshop books are going to be out of my price range for a while)!