The Information, which is nothing and comes at night.

In his big fat tubthumper of a novel The Information Martin Amis says a writer should be able to say that he’s never had to pay for it (being published) in his life. The unintentional irony being, of course, that Amis paid a high price for writing this particular novel – that being a huge public falling out with his publisher (whom he fired) and then-friend, author Julian Barnes, husband of Amis’ former publisher, which culminated in a series of friendship-ending emails which Amis reproduced (partly) in his autobiography.

I assume most people in Australia don’t know about these shenanigans because you’re not complete dorks who follow international literary scandals like yours truly but there you go. Anyway, my point is only that I didn’t pay for my copy of The Information, as it came from a library, but I did start reading it on the way home from the library and barely stop until I finished it and I think it might be quite brilliant. It starts like this:

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women – and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses – will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, “what is it?” And the men say, “Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.”

It’s the story of two writers – one famous who writes crap effortlessly – and his far less successful best friend (who, naturally, hates him) and decides to, in his own words “fuck (his friend) up”. The theme of the novel is schadenfreude and although big and as prosey as any of Amis’ more recent novels have been it’s so freaking readable I actually took it with me to the pub on Sunday so I could get another ten minutes into me while I waited for my hot lunch date.

I've been ploughing through Amis lately, with mixed results, but this has been the biggest surprise so far - Excellent.

Jam Will Win the War

My great aunt died a few months ago, and I have taken possession of a few things left to me (not specifically, but by virtue of being the last one to grab stuff, I suppose). Let me just say though, that I have had to endure the horror of my father reading out to me every letter and postcard I ever sent her as a child (and god, I was a good grand-niece) because she kept every single one. And sorry Kato, But I have three sets of pristine, still in their packages, original 1960s seamed stockings. If you're good to my cat, there may be a pair for you.....

Aside from a few pieces of jewellery and a fabulous button collection (i know, it's not normal, but I love them), I have inherited her collection of books. I'm going to have to ship them over and there are a whole load of brilliant ones, such as the entire Dickens collection, an original imprint of Scott's Antarctic diaries and some fab 1940s cookbooks. So good, I share the intro to this one with you now:

Make Your Own Jams

- Complied from Famous Recipes

"EVERY HOUSEWIFE has at the back of her mind the problem of storing food against an emergency. One excellent way is to turn fruit and sugar into jams and preserves. Here are 263 tested recipes from which you can stock your larder with jams and bottles of delicious confections, and make the plainest fare into a feast".

How good is that? A tip for gracious living if I ever heard one. Even better is that I have open slather on all the letters she has kept which reveal the deepest, darkest family secrets. Should keep me going after it gets dark at 3.30pm....

Darkmans: there's nothing like leaving a little to the reader's own sick imagination

I've been scooting around the internet trying to find out everything I can about Nicola Barker, the author of Darkmans, the latest novel to smash my mind into a thousand pieces, melt the pieces down into a syrup and then put it in the freezer until it's solid again but forever changed. I love those novels. I love the people who write them. I google them obsessively. I promise I'm not weird. Well, not very.

I'm thrilled to learn that Barker's been busy making herself known as the author of fiction that is weird, marginal and confronting. "Not for every reader" seems to be the refrain. According to Man-Booker Prize judge Giles Foden's suggestion in the Guardian her work couldn't win this year's prize because it wasn't reader-friendly. "With much more disciplined handling, [the novel] could have been a 'Middlemarch' for our times," he writes.

Darkmans wasn't supposed to be "disciplined". It isn't well behaved, it doesn't so much have a plot as an underlying theme and its protagonists are all people on the very fringe of society who are difficult to feel sympathetic towards. It's also more than 800 pages long. It's creepy, dark and at times very funny. Apparently judges don't like that. But who cares, apparently I do.

Generally speaking, Darkmans is about history catching up with the present. But it's not so much a collision as a congruence. The present, the novel says, is informed by history - the two cannot be separated, they walk the same path, they inhabit the same places and all kinds of strange things can pop up when you least expect them. At the centre of the novel is an Edwardian jester called John Scoggin. He inhabits each of the characters by turns, making them do terrible things. He is funny, irreverent and dangerous. So is the novel. So when Foden suggests it should be more "disciplined" I wonder if he actually read it.

Darkmans is also about language. It is about the development of language, its influences, its evolution. Characters in searching for words, dredge up medieval English and Latin among other languages before landing on the one they want. Writing a book about language is dangerously self-referential but to do it Barker steps outside of traditional form and she does it brilliantly. She is all word-play, in-jokes and asides. She has one of her characters, Peta, say it directly in the last few pages when she talks about an "absurd idea that language has these gaps in it and that lives can somehow just tumble through" and admits that in floating the concept she "just said what I needed to, so we'd both end up here". Barker is talking directly to the reader, apologising, in a way, for the confusion but saying that the ends justify her means.

I didn't get the ending at first. It is like the first time you saw The Sixth Sense and when you realise Bruce Willis is dead and you think, "wait a minute," and you have to quickly replay the entire film back in your mind. In fact when the novel ended I felt I had to turn around and read it again, which is saying something for a book close to 1000 pages. The novel says what it needs to subtly. It glances obliquely at concepts without looking directly for fear that an already jittery reader may go blind. It hints, it suggests, it whispers in your ear and lets the gap between your neurons put in all the scary details. Then it claims innocence - you thought of that all by yourself, you sicko.

Anyway, I'm really bad at reviews so read this one by Patrick Ness that says everything I want to say but better.

Does anyone have a copy of...

Does anyone have a copy of Ethan Frome? It has been recommended to me by a friend in the US who exceedingly keen for me to read it.

One track mind

I found Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in my brother's room recently.
The title piqued my interest at the start, then I saw it was written by a Japanese author, Haruki Murakami. Anyone who has chatted to me in the past 12 months knows of my love for that place from my visit there last year - and so I thought I'd give it a go.

As it turns out, Murakami is one of the most celebrated Japanese authors world-wide, and coincidentally, my uncle's PhD thesis was a cultural analysis of Murakami's works.

I was not disappointed.

The novel starts with two storylines - one set in contemporary Tokyo, in which the narrator is a Calcutec. A Calcutec's job is to work for Headquarters, a company which is linked but not part of the Government, and basically involves information processing.
The narrator reads information, shuffles it using the right and left sides of his brain, and then interprets the info.

The second story involves the first-person narrator arriving at a mytholgocial world with unicorns and gatekeepers and the like. When he arrives at the world, the gatekeeper removes his shadow from him "because that's what happens" and we watch as the narrator gradually loses his mind because of it.

The juxtaposition of these two worlds is brilliant, and serves to highlight the running theme throughout the book, which focuses on the mind and its limitations, or lack thereof.

"Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, subdividing for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It's making a straight line for the brain. No dodging it, not for anyone. People have to die, the body has to fall. Time is hurtling that arrow forward. And yet, like I was saying, thought goes on subdividing that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits."

The idea that the mind continues infinitely in death is an interesting one.

In all, this book is much easier to read than it is to review. However the two storylines link up beautifully by the end of the book, and I have to say it is one of the most rewarding reads I have had in quite some time.

Beautiful Losers

"[F[ind a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of those quant impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled up in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the sensless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! It's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, firemen! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropoliss rose!"

I have just finished reading Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and um, for reasons which may or may not be clear upon reading the above extract, I'm not entirely sure what to think.

I didn't know anything about the book coming into it and I think that's probably a good way to tackle it, although it certainly makes for some surprising and occassionally shocking reading.

The novel centres on a reasonably twisted sort of love triangle between the narrator (who spends most of his spare time wanking into a sock and thinking about dead people when he's not obsessing about long, long dead Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha (who happens to be my confirmation saint, just in case you wanted to know)), his dead wife (whose method of suicide was um... more disturbing than most) and his dead lover/friend, referred to only as 'F'.

The experimental, part Joyecian (Joycian?), part not-writing-just-typing style definitely plays to Cohen's strengths as a lyricist-poet and just about every page is studded with a nice turn of phrase ("what makes the mountainside of maple turn red?") that bears a second read. He has a knack for putting words together. The girl who "lay around all day in a chocolate poem" for instance is a phrase that will stick in my mind.

Buuut the book is by no means perfect. The monologues can turn into rambles. The poetry can turn into a big fat mud pit. Every so often there are a few pages in a row that read as though they were written while Cohen was quite mind blowingly high. Which he may well have been but which doesn't necessarily make for interesting writing.

Even so this book is interesting. And mildly disturbing. And fascinating. And frustrating. I lingered for awhile on certain pages and skipped over others altogether. Every so often I had to put the book down just to get another glass of wine or focus on something else that didn't involve reading about a 13-year-old girl's arse. But, faults and obstacles aside, I do feel like it's rather crept into my mind a little bit, which is just about as much as you can ask from a book some of the time.

Junkie

I have never tried smack and I've certainly never been a junkie so I can't say with much authority whether William S. Burroughs' book Junky (sometimes Junkie and originally published under the pseudonym William Lee as Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict) is an accurate representation of the life of an on-again-off-again heroin addict. I can, however, say, it's fascinating stuff and not just in a car-crash-curiosity sort of a way.

Burroughs, apparently, was a friend of Jack Kerouac's but while Truman Capote might have had a leg to stand on when he claimed the latter's On the Road was typing, rather than writing, I don't think he could do the same with Junky.

This is my first brush with Burroughs but his style is lovely: he packs a lot of description into relatively clipped sentences and is capable of being pretty funny, especially when you least expect it:

"As she talked she moved around the room, throwing herself from one chair to
another, crossing and uncrossing her legs, adjusting her slip, so as to give me
a view of her anatomy in installments."

Conisdering the book was first published more than 50 years ago and especially considering its frequently instructional style - not exactly a 'How To' guide but a nice little look at the day-to-day minutia of an addict - it's a surprise to find it incredibly readable. Although the plot is pretty much secondary to the prose the dialogue and descriptions are cute and fast enough that it doesn't get bogged down to much in the details.

"Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of
life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life."

At 158 pages it's a quick read, which makes it doubly worth the effort. I read it in two or three short sessions today and, although I wasn't entirely sure whether I wanted to develop a heroin habit or kick one, it certainly made an impression.

homelessness: tragedy or just a breather?

I have, finally, finished Down to This. Let me start out by saying it is really a great read, well written given the circumstances and a look at the world that will change your outlook as you walk down the street. Really.

In Lindsay's post on the novel she said she had a lot of questions. So here we go: "Stall, being a well educated middle class person just accepts his life in Tent City and goes about his way." Discuss.

I have a deep distrust of autobiographies for just this reason. Very few people are entirely honest, everyone makes decisions about what is relevant, no-one wants to look as bad, addicted, hopeless or culpable as they actually are. There's probably some brilliant mathematician somewhere who could develop an algorithm to detect the percentage of truth in any given autobiography based on the author's background, predilictions and the book's subject matter. But all of that aside.

I got the impression from Stall's book that he was pretty much down and out when he made his date with Tent City. He was always a bit of a wanderer having travelled around Mexico, Italy and other places. Although he was a writer you don't get the impression that at 27 years old he'd ever held a steady job. In the course of the novel you learn that he rarely saw his parents. He was addicted to cocaine. He had just suffered a horrific break-up and been forced to move out of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend.

Sure, he had a few hundred dollars lying around probably, sure, he could have called his parents or friends. He could have hibernated for a week or so and come out having faced his demons and ready to solve the problems of another day. But mentally he didn't have it in him. His life may still have had a full tank of petrol but mentally he'd cracked a cylinder and his gearbox was stuffed. Technically his life could still go, but it wasn't going far.

So he went to Tent City with it. He told a story about it that was selective. He acknowledges it. He says that he's not been totally honest, that he didn't want to write about people until they did something to direct the course of the plot. Sure, he got sick, drink addled, mentally damaged while he was there. However, halfway through his time in Tent City he was signed up with a publisher for the book. That isn't a man full of desperation, that isn't a man like the others in Tent City, abused, imprisoned, hopeless. That is an author. No matter where you are or what your circumstances if you know why you're doing this and you know when it will end it's going to be easier. Not to say that it was easy for Stall. But when Tent City folded he had a book deal, not a crack addiction.

The book is fascinating in that it tries to pinpoint why people end up that way. Was it the desperation that led to Tent City or was it Tent City that led to the desperation? Stall decides it was the latter - after it folded half the former residents were moving up in the world after six months. He ignores the irony that he himself is proof of the opposite - he wouldn't have ventured into Tent City if he hadn't had nothing to lose. Whether he'd admit it to us or not.

Brideshead Revisited (Kate's take)

"I'm not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life they've been taking things away from me. If they once get hold of you with their charm they'd make you their friend, not mine and I won't let them."

So Sebastian Flyte tells the protagonist Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Of course it's Sebastian who's the charming one. Looking and sounding as though he's drifted in from an E.M Forster novel Sebastian is a bloody delight to read and he dominates the landscape of the book in its first half, seducing Charles (though probably not like that) and the reader with charm and booze and food and more booze.

In the preface for a reprinting of the novel Waugh said"

"It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the
period of soya beans and basic English - and in consequence the book
is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the
recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full
stomach, I find distasteful."

He has a point - it is a little bit like the literary equivalent of a turkey stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a lobster. In this I thought it was a big departure from the clipped efficiency of the wonderful A Handful of Dust or the comic stylings of Scoop but Waugh's style is so good and his ability to switch between spot-on humour and pathos that I found it completely charming and engaging.

And then we reach the second half.

Well. I don't want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it because, despite my mixed feelings, I think it is incredibly well written and very much worth reading, but the book does change - a lot - in its second half as Waugh slowly takes Sebastian apart and refocuses the novel on Charles and a new (female) love interest. I think perhaps it would have worked better if Waugh was as good at writing sympathetic women as he is men but I do not think he is. However good he is at writing bitches I've never warmed to a female character in a Waugh novel and Brideshead wasn't the one to make me start.

All that said the book is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, incredibly beautifully written and quite fascinating in its way.

Next on the list: Decline and Fall, which should round out my Waugh education fairly decently for now.

Brideshead once visited...

I once told someone I enjoyed the prose of Evelyn Waugh. He turned to me and said "Urgh, how can you? How can you like anyone who can do that to his characters?".
And the primary evidence in the trial of Evelyn Waugh was Sebastian Flyte: The brilliant teddy bear-carrying academe and bon vivant who is perhaps one of the greatest characterisations ever written.
A character Waugh slowly and maliciously turns into a sun-seeking invalid and booze-soaked lay-about.
The descent of the character is absolute. He is the creation that keeps you reading, initially, because he is so entertaining. Somehow, despite the entire tome descenting into a celebration of mediocre success, middle-aged vanity and upper-class immorality, it is still Sebastian who keeps us reading, despite the soul of his character being evicerated by his creator. Flyte becomes a shadow - both in character and in motif. Hope of his resurrection keeps you reading, long after all hope is lost.
Waugh gives all the sentimentality to setting and scene and saves none for his characters, prefering to torture them - and the reader - slowly.
This I could handle but the hero is DULL. Everyone is soooo dull. I recognise that Waugh was trying to show-up the flaws, hypocrisy, immorality and deficiencies of the upper classes but he could at least have given us SOMEONE to put our faith in.
So anyway... I read the book ages ago and seeing as Kate has just read it too, I wanted to put this out here in the hopes some of you other peeps might have something to say as well.

A Bit of a Blur

Somewhere in the 200-ish pages of his autobiography A Bit of a Blur Blur bass player Alex James finds himself twisted up in expensive sheets in a hotel room somewhere in South America, alternating between having sex with the five prettiest girls he could find, drinking champagne and snorting a dick-load of cocaine.

It was, he says, pretty much at the height of his excesses.

It’s certainly as close as he gets to detailing them as this is a book that was almost more interesting in what it didn’t say than in what it did. Oh sure James is pretty up-front about constantly cheating on his long-term girlfriend and his partying ways but the booze and coke consumption is all skated over a bit finely for my liking. Call me morbid but I want to hear about nights spent snorting coke off someone’s boobs, passing out in toilet stalls and attempted interventions by friends. Instead we get vague references to waking up covered in blood in casualty and, only when he estimates he spent about a million pounds on coke and booze do we start to get a picture of just what it is that he’s not saying.

I seem to be reading a lot of autobiographical stuff lately, which isn’t particularly like me, but it’s always fascinating to have a look at someone else’s life.James’ role in the rise and rise of one of the 90s biggest bands certainly makes a compelling read - I romped through it last night with barely a break - and as someone with a soft spot for band boys myself it’s fascinating to see fandom from the other side of the fence.

He’s also a surprisingly deft writer, which I wouldn’t necessarily have expected, and I found his meditations on music and astronomy almost more interesting than his encounters with Johnny Depp, Bjork and Marianne Faithful.

It’s also full of helpful tips for the burgeoning alcoholic, such as eating carrots between glasses of champagne to stop your breath from stinking, or having something fizzy every few glasses of spirits to avoid getting too drunk too quickly. Valuable lessons those.

The Hungry Years

"I wake up on the fattest day of my life, 20 January 2003. I am just over 6 feet tall, and weigh... how much? I step on the scale and off it very quickly, to limit the damage. 236lbs. At best! My bathroom floor slopes slightly, and I have positioned the scale carefully to ensure the smallest possible reading"

So begins UK journalist William Leith's book The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict.

This is a fascinating and addictive book. The story, which is pretty meandering but follows Leith's battles with food addiction and attempts to understand why he is the way he is, is the best kind of voyeurism. I picked it up in London a couple of years ago when it had just been released. It was a whim and I was attracted by the sight of a large, half eaten donut on the cover as well as some good reviews on the back. I don't want to take the food metaphor too far and say I devoured the thing in one sitting but the prose is so good and the subject matter so ludicrously enthralling that I have to say the book was bloody hard to put down.

I picked it up again tonight, too tired to read anything new, and had the same reaction. I've never knowingly read any of Leith's stuff (he writes for the Guardian, the Observer and the Daily Telegraph apparently) but I'd imagine he's a very good journalist because he has an incredible knack for telling you the kind of things (and not all about food) that make you squirm a little bit with embarassment but keep reading anyway:

"(Leith's girlfriend) had this one position she favoured. I would lie on my back - which, being fat, I preferred anyway - and she would lower herself on top of me, and then tell me to do a specific thing . . . Sometimes I would do the specific thing slightly wrong and she'd be furious - she'd get up suddenly, angry, and put her underwear back on, and that would be that. Once I had to stop doing the specific thing because I got a cramp in my hand."

It's about consumerism, of course, but the structure - which reads almost like a series of blogs or diary entries - manages to make what might be a tired subject sound new. Having read a fair few women's magazines in my time, for instance, I thought I had read every possible variation on the story of fat people dealing with their fatness but I can very honestly say that this book said things I have never, ever thought about before - some of which I could probably have gone without ever reading in my life, if I'm honest, but all incredibly engrossing.

It's hard to say if my interest in the book stems partly from my own on-again off-again battles with food which, although, not particularly serious, seem likely to last forever, or not. I'd be fascinated to see what someone with a completely 'normal' (or at least healthy) attitude towards food thinks of the book. I suspect, however, that the voyeristic impulse in everyone is somewhat universal and that most people would find this as readable as I do.

To conclude I'll turn it over to Leith, who writes of his fascination with watching an obese family wolf down snacks on a train - a spectacle he enjoys for probably exactly the same reason I loved reading this book:

"The sight of these poeple is almost entertaining. They each carry a plastic bag full of snacks - bags of potato crisps, cylindrival tubs of potato crisps, chocolate bars, bags of sweets. As soon as they sit down, the show begins - they grab the snaks, they tear at them, they wolf them. Their hands - soft, oversized hands - begin to cram the snacks into their mouths. Constant eating has developed in them superhuman abilities to chew, to release enzymes in the mouth, to form the food into a bolus and swallow. They do not talk to each other. The guy inhales two large bags of crisps in
three or four minutes. The girl kills a Mars bar in a couple of gulps. Then she hits the Pringles. She eats the Pringles in two-inch stacks. When she runs out of food, after about fifteen minutes of uninterrupted eating, she starts moaning. She tries to snatch her brother's food bag. There is panic, fighting. The girl is making sub-orgasmic noises. The guy is grunting. He's lashing out. The mother bops the girl on the head, and gives her a Mars bar to calm down.

It is after breakfast and before lunch, These morbidly obese people are moving towards a meal, having recently finished a meal. I think: they are addicted - to starch, to sugar... But then I think, no, it can't be that simple. There must be something else, something deep, ugly. Something unspeakable in these people's brains. When you see fat people, you want to blame them for their condition. Those fat bastards. You want to blame them."

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

I saw the movie years ago and loved Christian Bale's performance of a yuppy serial killer, so I thought I'd pick up the book and have a read.
What a brilliant piece of work.
The character development is top-notch and while it can be, at times, a little wordy, the descriptions of settings and characters really does set the reader up well for the rest of the novel.
The book is narrated in first person, which makes reading it all the more unsettling, and goes to sometimes painstaking lengths to describe the complete outfit that every single character is wearing at the time.
For example: "Carruthers is wearing a silk double breasted pinstripe suit from Armani, an off-white shirt by Hermes and crocodile-skin shoes by Gucci."
This constant reference to brands and appearances, while cumbersome at first, really sets the scene for the culture in which the main characters exist.
It is far from subtle yet extremely effective.
The reader is given the impression that these people don't live in the 'real world,' that the normal rules don't apply to them, which sets the scene nicely for a bit of needless violence, torture and murder.
The book is far more graphic when it comes to the detail of what the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, does to his victims. Some of the scenes in this book you just can't show in a movie.
But aside from that, the first-person perspective allows the reader to track Bateman as he slowly loses it and becomes (more) criminally insane.
There is one scene near the end of the book when he is involved in a gunfight with police (while resplendent in his Versace suit) and during the middle of it, the narration switched from first-person to third for a few pages, which is quite effective in emphasising the protagonist's detachment from reality.
Oh, and without spoiling the end for anyone, the movie ending is Hollywood fluff. The book ending is a lot more satisfying for the reader who, amazingly, is still made to empathise with the character despite the fact that he is a cold-hearted, remorseless killer.

Kate

I demand you write your observations on Down to This here immediately. And please try not to sound smarter than me. xx

I am Down to This...

OK, because of my literary schizophrenia, I picked up a completely random book the other day - A book called Down to This by the improbably-named Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall. In 2001 Stall (then aged 27) decided his life was shit and he would go and live for a year in Tent City, in Toronto, among the homeless and perhaps write a book about it.
I was quite transfixed. I'd like the other members of this literary wankfest to read it and tell me what you think. It's spruiked as a memoir and I suppose it is,but it raises on hell of a lot of questions for me.

Stall at no point really, really seems to regret his decision. He never seems to question the validity of his choice or really deeply longs to just go home. He accepts his new life as easily as we accept that what we want to order isn't on the menu today. It is curiously written and perhaps more refreshing that way. He doesn't write the book I expected him to write.

Sure, he describes the people he lives with in details, in depth, but somehow I don't have a picture of them in my head. Nancy, Jo-Jo, Karen - they are all bonkers, one had a baby, one is dying, one fights with two-by-four, one is a hooker - I can't remember which. Maybe all. They are interestingly sad people whose lives have been characterised by violence and abuse. They, in turn, abuse themselves and each other but, like any people, ahve an immense capacity to care and love and look out for others.

Stall, being a well-educated, middle class person just accepts his life in tent city and goes about his way. Sure, he ends up with carbon monoxide poisoning and the shit kicked out of him, not to mention more, but this is his real life. I suppose it shows how much he wanted to run away from his old one. There's crack and coke and booze of all kinds every second of every day. But there's a community and a shit-kicking affection that seems to be missing from his regular life.

And after finishing the book , I don't have closure, and I have been dreaming endlessly about it, to the point that for the last two days I have been grumpy and sleep-deprived. He writes about being cold (remember canadian winter, living in non-waterproof shack that you built yourself/tent), the way that Knut Hamsun describes being starving on the streets on Sofia in the 1800s in his aptly-called Hunger (it's fictional BTW) in a way that you can't help feeling it yourself.

When I read Hunger, I had to get up and make a sandwich every few chapters. I had sympathy pains. And when I read Down to This snuggled up in bed, I couldn't get warm. I am confused by this book. I want to ask Stall a whole bunch of questions. It is a curious tome that really grabbed my attention and I could go on but I don't want to spoil it.

Maybe the end message isn't about homelessness or what Stall thinks about it in the end. I think it's about love and where you find it.

On the courier to the next person who asks. Unless it's Kate. Then I just throw it at her head.

in a world of danger the pen is still mightier

Every now and again something inspires you to pick up a book that is completely out of character for you. It is completely unlike something you would normally read and you don't even know why you want to read it. But you have to. I felt that way about The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

It is a post modern voyage into the conceptual. No, that's not me trying to be smarter than I am, it actually is. You start with a man who wakes up with no recollection of who or where he is. Gradually, through notes left for him by himself before he lost his memory he is introduced to a world in which all the communications, information exchange, relationships, memories, thoughts and ideas between people form a kind of conceptual fluid. In this fluid swim conceptual fish. This particular man, the main character, is being hunted by a shark - it wants to feed on his mind until there is nothing left.

Cue adventure story, clue following and conceptual shark hunting. The great thing about the novel is its premise, the adventure story lost me a little because it felt a bit too Indiana Jones - complete with love interest and humorous side kick. Although the intertextuality of the story was great and made me remember how much I love postmodern writing. Collective subconscious anyone? The brilliance of Hall's tale is based on the idea that words and ideas are powerful and dangerous. The fact that people are impressionable and easily manipulated, that minds and identies are easily fractured.

This is not something I'd normally pick up, but something I'm glad I read. It does have a Da Vinci Code feel to it and it is a film waiting to happen, both of which cheapen it a little. But I'd still recommend it. It's like taking a can opener to your mind.

Incidentally Kate, you might be interested to know that Hall has named Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying by Belle & Sebastian as his main character's theme. Oh yes, film rights on their way.

P.S Might I add that it somehow reads like a manga movie in parts, a comic book in others and a philosophical tome in the rest (that isn't adventure story). It's a good read.

my mind is hungry

From 50 books.

Mother Tongue

This is the first time I've contributed to the CNG Lending Library blog so I just thought I'd share what I'm reading.
I'm about a third of the way through Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue. Anyone who has read Bill Bryson before knows his work is always an entertaining read, and this book in particular is of interest to all my fellow wordsmiths (in fact it's a must-read) - it basically goes into all the intricacies of the English language. Anyone who wishes to borrow it is welcome to do so when I'm done. Here's a passage with which to leave you:

"Even when you strip out its obsolete senses, round still has twelve uses as an adjective, nineteen as a noun, seven as a transitive verb, five as an intransitive verb, one as an adverb and two as a preposition. But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks a wholly unassuming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of a single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participal adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the Oxford English Dictionary 60,000 words - the length of a short novel - to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English."

A Novel approach

So lat night I had an hour or two to myself after the gym and I began work on my masterpiece: The Definitive Australian Gay Classic.
This hasn't been done before, to my knowledge.
It fits somewhere into the same genre of those old Crawford productions like All The Rivers Run. A bit like A Town Like Alice (the second half). A feast of the Baz Luhrmann variety. With a bit of Brokeback Mountain thrown in.
Priscilla Queen of the Nineteenth Century.
In novel form.
Not a movie. Which the above would infer.
I plan to be the Colleen McCollough of homos.
I post this here in the hope it will encourage my fellow literary-types to also write. The Lending Library could expand its borders a little.

Down in the Dumps Books

When I’m in a certain mood, by which I mean a bad, sad mood there are always certain books I gravitate towards. Books that tell me what I want to hear, some times, or books that sink into depression with me.

Right at the top of the list for the latter category is Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, which is also one of my favourite books for any time. It’s a nice, bitter little volume and the literary equivalent of listening to depressing music when you’re already depressed or going out for a drink with someone whose life is just as shite as yours.

“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside
Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to
serve the winter mood: Oh God. You’ve done enough. You’ve robbed me of enough,
I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.”

Greene’s prose is so lovely and so emotive I often find myself stuck with a quote from this book in my head, or mooching along in the cold, imagining myself as the book’s protagonist in a long overcoat.I’ve tried to write this sort of stuff when I’m quite depressed myself or when things aren’t going well but it never works out - I seem to spiral into self pity and get nothing done but clocking up a lot of couch time. I just don’t know Greene did it and I’m struck down with serious envy.

“I sat with the telephone receiver in my hand and I looked at hate like an ugly
and foolish man whom one does not want to know. I dialled her number. I must
have caught her before she had time to leave the telephone and said: ‘Sarah,
tomorrow’s all right, I’d forgotten something. Same place. Same time. And
sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look
forward to, I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.”

Anyway, enough of the jealousy - what about you guys? Anything particular that you reach for in time of crisis?

don't accept books from strangers

My list for the super fun book mart is mostly comprised of books given to me by someone who couldn't be bothered with the trip to Good Sammies. Don't judge me. Please.

1. One copy of Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle. Self help book given to me by my much treasured aunt and uncle who clearly think me in need of unprofessional help. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds. Good to read outloud ironically while drunk. Condition: one small cut in bottom right hand corner - consequence of frantic Christmas present wrapping.

2. One copy of A Month of Sundays- How to go Travelling Without Leaving Town by James O'Loghlin. Condition: Slightly curly corner on the cover as consequence of being stored in a box. Other than that barely been opened. When I travel, you won't see me for dust.

3. Creepers by David Morrell. It is about "urban explorers who illegally enter sealed buildings. . . soon after the group enters it becomes clear this decaying seven-story building holds more secrets than they could have imagined in their worst nightmares." Condition: second hand but looks like its first owner thought as little of it as I did and left it firmly closed.

4. Beneath the Skin by Nicci French. Zoe Jennifer and Nadia are three women with nothing in common. Except for the man who wants to kill them. Ho hum. Condition: practically new- shouldn't have been written.

5. Cathedral by Nelson Demille. March 17 is a day when everyone, everywhere is an honorary Irishman. Everyone except IRA man Brian Flynn. Cosmopolitan called it a "bulldozer of a book". Need I say more? Condition: third hand - could do with some semtex.

Super Fun Book Swap Mart # 2

Ok. I'm unwilling to part with a much as I previously thought but I have:

1. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Johnsy has already requested)
2. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (I have two copies and I hated it)
3. Property by Valerie Martin (Winner of Orange Prize 2003. Not my bag, baby)
4. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (A rather nice copy, but I can't do it.)

Free to good homes. please take them. please.

Super Fun Book Swap Mart

Kate and I have just been talking about going on a massive book-buying spree, but I have just realised that I really do not have any more room left on my bookshelves and the catbox couldn't possibly accomodate another lot of furniture. However, there are a few books I would willingly part with in order to make room for preferred one. These are ones I started and never finished, books I hated, odds and sods. I am already sending a duplicate copy of Hitchhikers Guide to Johnsy tomorrow, so I suggest this: Everyone does an audit of their bookshelves and advertises their extraneous wares on the CNG library blog. Books are free to good homes although swapping is encouraged.

I shall post my audit tomorrow. It will probably start with Henry James' Wings of a Dove.

has it come to this?

A used book seller in the States has started burning books in protest at the declining value of the written word. Tom Wayne had thousands of books in storage and tried to give them away to thrift stores or libraries but was told there was no room in the inn. So he burnt them. Well, he burnt some of them before the fire department forced him to stop because he didn't have a burning permit.
He told spectators "This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today".
All I can ask you is: on a scale of one to ten - how horrifying do you find this?

Tell me honestly...

When to blazes is everyone finding time to read so much?
I have barely started a book I received a fortnight ago and am thoroughly enjoying!
I think I have too many commitments. I need to shed something. I used to find hours and hours each week. I used to finish books in a sitting. (The first time ever, for any book of length, was Roald Dahl's Matilda. Don't know how old I was but I just devoured it!). But now... now I can barely find five minutes!
So tell me... when are you stealing five minutes?

Presents for Bookworms

At some point this afternoon, you will each receive a CNG Lending Library Commemorative Gift. Use it wisely. Word out.

communion of literature

Just a quick note to point out that the latest instalment of Yann Martel's suggested reading to Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper is out: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie.

I've never read any Agatha Christie, which is probably an admission that will see me thrown from this venerable forum. I suppose there are things that just wouldn't occur to you to read for whatever reason - that's what makes this arrangement we have here a good one. We all suggest things that are new and different to each other, give 'em a go and see how we enjoy it.

I'd also like to draw your attention to Martel's comments on second hand books that made me want to shake his hand.

Read the full post at The Glass Wall.

Australian Literature

Some of you are probably going to want to ask, "does it exist?" or will say, "that's an oxymoron".
Perhaps you're right. But given that the lovely Kemery has just refused a copy of We Of The Never Never which my Grandmother gave me for Christmas (which she had purchased as a secondhand volume herself some 15 years before and had left on her shelf until she gave it to me, and which I found on the weekend under a pile of paperwork at the weekend) I was wondering if there ARE some Australian classics anyone thinks we simply SHOULD read?
Come on. There must be one.
Mustn't there?

Does this sound like the worst book ever?

Trading Places …
The Secret Lives of a Brothel Owner and a Priest!

Respected Western Australian author, Maurice Czarniak has just released his exciting novel, Accidental Discovery. This quirky, original work of fiction centres around Brendan, a handsome Catholic priest, who wants to leave the church due to his emerging sexual desires. As fate would have it, Brendan has a chance meeting with businessman and brothel owner, Jack – a series of unpredictable events culminate in the two men swapping roles.
The tale is rapidly propelled along in exciting and dangerous directions when it is discovered that Brendan has supernatural powers! Converting the brothel into a sex therapy clinic, and pseudo-priest Jack delivering his ‘original’ version of a Sunday sermon, makes for entertaining and compelling reading from start to finish!
Accidental Discovery is an original tale, with fast-paced good humour and passionate romance steeped in mystery – an impressive new novel indeed!

I can't even begin to list the things that are wrong with this synposis. Or the scenarios I would have to find myself in before reading it is an option.

It's out through Zeus Publications people, in case you cared....

Review: The Virgin Suicides (Jeffrey Eugenides)

I read this book years and years ago because I had a huge crush on the person who suggested I should read it.

I believe I still have his copy of the book and this weekend I re-read it because I really love it.

"None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two
parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five
glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and rufffle, bursting
with their fructifying flesh."

I'm shite at writing reviews about anything I like (generally I'd really much prefer to tear them to shreds) but something about the language of the book really gets to me. Sure, it can be a little bit Stand by Me with the whole 'looking back at childhood' thing but it's one of those books that really straddles the gap between being a super simplistic story about highschool crushes and a house full of hot minxes and a look at a complex and sad little world.

"He tasted first the grease of her Chap Stick, then the sad Brussels-sprout
flavor of her last meal, and past that the dust of lost afternoons and the
salt of tear ducts. The peach schnapps faded away as he sampled the juices
of her inner organs, all slightly acidic with woe. "

I don't want to get all Michael Perrot and just rehash the storyline but I do really enjoy the fact that, as the book progresses, it's more and more obvious that the story's not really about the girls (the titular virgin suicides, though that's a total misnomer) but about the narrator and the other guys and the way they have been disappointed with life.

Incidently I think the movie did a fairly good job of translating some of the book onto screen but it certainly missed a lot of the poeticism of the writing and is, in my opinion anyway, it doesn't stand up that well alongside the book, although the soundtrack rocked.

"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but
only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do
not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft
bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all
time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never
find the pieces to put them back together."

Highly recommended (and in my bookcase).

We Need To Talk About Kevin (Shriver): nature vs nurture

"Dear Franklin,
I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you. But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards."

To sum this book up - heartbreaking and terrifying.

Shriver is a clever writer, her style is relatively simple but is so vivid and cleverly constructed. Every now and again she'll throw in a phrase or sentence that makes you stop and want to shake her hand. I was hooked from that opening sentence above.

The the novel, for those who haven't read it, is written as a collection of letters to her husband. It's a great technique that makes you think about all the times you've stopped yourself during an extreme moment and thought 'how would I tell this story later?'. It also allows her to dose the whole book in a sense of impending doom fitting for the subject matter. Which is dire. The main character Eva's son Kevin is imprisoned for shooting dead nine classmates. She lives with the notion that she always thought there was something wrong with the boy, but what do you do when it's your son? This is the nature vs nurture argument writ large. Rest assured you'll need a big hug and a stiff drink when you've finished reading this one.

About halfway through I'm afraid I started to lose interest, describing it to my boyfriend as like The Omen, if Damien's so bad and no-one believes her why doesn't she just leave?
But all of that dropped away for the last quarter. Although the story makes no bones about the tragedy in its opening pages, she manages to not let the reader just grow complacent, she keeps reminding them about the consequences, the innocence of the people that were maimed and killed. She saves some terrible surprises for the end. But Eva's narration becomes increasingly unreliable, she remains adamant on things she had done, for which there is no proof. She leaves out parts of the tale until the very end, flooring you when she finally reveals them. And, despite all claims otherwise, she still loves her son.

What stuck me as interesting is after she has finished her story she acknowledges that Kevin was, indeed, still her son. In among the nature/nurture arguments Kevin, who seems irreparably broken earlier in the novel, starts to make sense to his mother. Somehow the experience or the passing two years has brought them closer together, although he was the perpetrator. How she could find time for him when he took so much from her I just couldn't understand. But I suppose she understood him more than anyone, as a child there was nothing he would miss if it was gone. In prison he discovered the importance of his mother. It breaks your heart that Kevin had so much growing up to do when he killed those people and had he just started a MySpace page instead he could have turned into an alright person. He starts repeating his mother's words he mocked as a younger boy. She keeps his bed made, just in case.

It makes the quote on the opening page ring true:

"A child needs your love most when he deserves it least"

To Fold or Not to Fold?

That is, indeed, the question. According to Anne Fadiman, author of Ex-Libris - Confessions of a Common Reader (which you will all love but I no longer have a copy...), there are two kinds of people in this world: Those who fold pages and those who do not.

Some see folding the corners as the indelible mark of enjoying and loving a book, while others think it is pure sacrilige. Thoughts?

Reviews

I think we should be making a concerted effort to write up reviews of the tripe/treasure we're reading at any given time and blog them here. I've considered cross-posting my Maurice review from my other blog (just for the record really, as it was an early CNGLL success) but thought there was probably no point. Anyway, food for thought.

Oh god, must I? Books we couldn't be bothered with

Since the 100 books seem to have stalled let's keep that on hold and think about something else.
What are the books you had to read for whatever reason and could not, come hell or high water, get more than a chapter or two in?

To kick us off I'm touting that old favourite:
1. The Da Vinci Code - My only wish for Dan Brown is for a violent accident to befall him. His smugness on Oprah saying it was a work of fiction based in fact while he's licking his lips thinking of his bank account will never cease to irritate me. Die!

2. Ulysses - I actually feel a great deal of shame at this one - I like Joyce, I was in love with modernism. I got about halfway through and in my confusion about what was going on, I admitted defeat.

3. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh: what were you thinking? And as if one wasn't enough he wrote a whole series of them.

Over to you.

100 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Picking up on what Lindsay wrote below... what are the 100 books we must read before we die?

The rules are strict here. They must be novels. No plays, short stories, poems or movement instructions for interpretive dances written in binary code. All works must be fictional. Novellas qualify.

I'll kick things off with obvious classics (and two of my favourites):
1. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. Vanity Fair, WM Thackerary

(And I realise all Dickens' works were originally serialised in newspapers, but surely this doesn't discount them as novels?)

What with classical literature, modern literature and absolute tat to chose from, this should be an interesting exercise - perhaps with lively debate chucked in for free.

Over to you good people... what 100 books must we read before we die?

What's your most overrated book of all time?

Just out of interest. You know what I mean: everyone loves it, or it's a classic and you think you will love it but it turns out to be pants...

Bibliophiles Unite

I love this blog. I love love love it. I am currently immersing myself in Howard's End (lordy, that sounds a bit risque for a library blog, doesn't it?) and I now have the enthusiasm to go forth and actually read the 100 books on my "100 books I must read before I die" list. And you clever chaps are going to help me. Page-smackingly good this idea is, Dan. I salute you.

how cheap is too cheap?

After reading a certain blog of note and knowing we are in one of the most poorly paid professions I feel I need to run a question by you all. But I've been too ashamed to ever ask anyone else so you have to promise not to judge me.

The question du jour is: is it unforgivably cheap to give a person a second hand book as a gift? Now don't get me wrong, I'm not asking is it ok to go through the bargain bin on the street outside Elizabeth's and buy the most dog eared Dan Brown tripe just because you want to save a quid. I mean what if you're someone like me, who only shops at second hand bookshops because you believe reading is a pleasure that should be both shared and affordable. What if on one of these shopping expeditions you happen across a book (a hardcover book, a nice one) that your mother would just love. What if mothers' day happens to be coming up and after paying your car rego you have to face the fact that there ain't going to be a new dress for you for the ballet. Is it still just too cheap to contemplate? Should I feel as dirty and ashamed as I suspect I should?

The look of the thing

Anyone who wants to make this thing look less fucked, feel free. You should all have access to the template and settings.
If not, email me and I'll tell you the password to log in as cnglendinglibrary.
Dan

On the net the journos come and go...

So here we are dears. I little site of our very own to discuss things literary, keep track of who is reading what, what they think of it, and who they borrowed it from.
I have been thoroughly enjoying this reciprocal exchange arrangement. It has already given me hours of pleasure experiencing Forster's Maurice and soon I hope to rejoice in Joseph Heller's Catch 22.
This was a great idea. Hopefully there will be some point to this blog, which we can all contribute to at any time by direct post or leaving comments.
New parties are welcome to join at any time.

Book Suggestions

Great idea for the blog. To kick things off I'm looking for a new book. I want something awesome. Suggestions?