Can you recommend a book for me?

As a reader you come accross this from time to time, right? Since you read so much you must be able to recommend a book for me, right? Wrong! Well, sort of.

Sure I read over 200 books every year and my taste isn't too selective, I read pretty much anything as long as it's not horror and even then I occasionally read a scary book I didn't initially realise was scary. I like literary fiction, biographies and autobiographies, historical fiction and factual books, classics, some fantasy (I've specialized in fantasy that involves libraries and librarians or books in any form) etc. The only types of books I'm not overly keen on are poetry, short stories (although I do read them too), the afore mentioned horror stories and romance novels (and yes, you guessed it, I sometimes read them too).

So with all those books under my belt why wouldn't I recommend a book for you?

As many tastes as there are books

Cataloging my books I use Goodreads. It's one of the go to apps for us bookish people and it not only helps you keep track of what you've read but also what's out there, what your friends are reading and what others think of the books you're reading or thinking of reading. And herein lies the problem.

With millions of books out there a lot of them seem to be highly appreciated by the Goodreads community. Say you've just finished a book and you didn't like it very much. In fact you may have hated is to much that you wanted to dnf it mid read but because you don't not finish books you struggle to the bitter end and the minute you turn the last page you open your Goodreads app to log in your latest read (got to keep those reading challenge stats up to date!). 

You're still grumpy from not liking the book much but what do you notice on your reading app? The book has an average score of almost 4 out of 5!! This is crazy, you think to yourself. Am I the only one who hated this book? After a short scroll you finally find a like minded reader who's also given the book 2 stars and is listing all the problems you had with it in their review. This makes you feel a tiny bit better but you're still clearly in the minority. "A masterpiece!", "This book will make you weep!", "A beautiful tale!" cry all the other reviews.

Why would you recommend this to me?!

Some, if not the majoroity of the reviews of the books on Goodreads are reviews on give away books, which I'm sure affects the content of the review. Perhaps not everyone feels obliged to the publisher who's sent them a free copy, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people do. I know I would. But it still doesn't explain why everyone seems to love every book out there. And in all fairness, they dont.

I think on Goodreads, unlike in other online platforms people are more eager to give good reviews than bad. If you like a book you want to tell the world! We just have different tastes and like to read different books.

Which brings me back to my original dilemma of recommending books. I only ever recommend books to my closest friends whos tastes in literatjure I'm already familiar with so I can be pretty sure I won't make a huge mistake in my recommendation. And even then I might go horribly wrong.

My best friend and I have been recommending books, films and tv programs to each other for decades now and even we sometimes don't understand each others tastes. Does it matter if you recommend a book your friend won't like? Perhaps not. But I don't know if I ever get over my best friend not liking Mark Z. Danielewski's The House of Leaves, my favourite book at the time. She absolutely hated it and let me know it. I've not been able to re-read the book ever since, I worry I might not like it anymore.

So you can ask me for recommendations, but the most you will get is: "I really liked this, but you might not". Which is totally unfair as I'm always on the lookout for something new to read. Can you recommend a book for me?

Old friends

A few years ago I came across a book called Michael Tolliver lives. A book by an old, old favourite of mine: Armistead Maupin. Needless to say I bought the book at once, but then it took me a while to start reading it.

Back in the good old day of my glorious youth, me and my friend read all the Tales of The City books back to back. We were mesmerized by the atmosphere of the 80’s San Francisco the books portrayed. The last standing bastion of the 60’s hippie movement, the openly gay, lesbian, bi and transgendered people who form the chore of the books. Mrs Madrigal, Michael aka Mouse,  Mona, Brian, the oh so innocent Mary Ann who's innocence soon vaporizes as the lure and reality of  San Fransisco hits her. Not to mention the minor characters who from time to time slide into the inner circle; Michaels true love Jon, the spicy old lady Mother Mucca who's a lot more than a stranger on a bus, The Halcyon family with their skeletons in the closet and sometimes out of it...

Looking back, those bygone days seem like a golden time, one that can never be lived again. Not in the traditional sense of “oh, life was just so much better when we were young” but because of the almost endless flow of Armistead Maupin books. 

And now it looks like those happy days are here again! After Michael Tolliver Lives Maupin has written two more books in the series. Thus enabling us true fans to revisit our good old friends and see what they're up to. And I can tell you they’re up to a lot! Just like they used to. 

Reading tips from the beach

Reading tips from the beach

So there I was, minding my own business, reading a book and enjoying the peace and quiet. The sun was shining, the waves were high and the holiday was well on the way in that perfect place where you’ve settled into a routine and aren’t worried about going home yet. Out of the corner of the eye, something caught my attention. A book! Someone had gone (swimming?) and left their book on the blanket.

Now if you’re a reader like me you know what it means to spot a book. On a shop window, on the train, on a beach… You just have to take a peak to find out if it’s a book you’ve read or a book you might be interested to read, or if it’s just rubbish – in which case you can feel superior by your choice of book (which to the other person probably looks just as rubbish).

The book was called What Alice Forgot and it immediately made me think about Alice in Wonderland. Had she forgotten something in Wonderland? Did she forget to take something with her? Perhaps she’d forgotten about Wonderland all together? Also, I’m one of the people who get lured into a book by an interesting cover (needless to say this is not the best way to spot good books) and this one looked interesting enough. Well, I was intrigued.

I went on reading my own book (funny, for the life of me I can’t remember what it was called) and only after a while realized the owner of the book had come back and was reading it. Now I’m not the kind of person who approaches strange people on the street. At all. Unless in dire need, and even then very cautiously. Not because I’m scared of people but because I think people are entitled to their privacy – especially when reading. But really, who was this Alice? Did she have anything at all to do with that Alice? Was it a good book? Should I read it? So I braced myself.

The woman reading What Alice forgot couldn’t have been nicer. She didn’t mind me bothering her one bit and was very helpful in telling about it. No, it had nothing to do with Wonderland but was a story about a woman who has amnesia and has forgotten about the last 10 years of her life: her children, the divorce proceedings she’s started, her enthusiasm about exercise…

I did like what I heard and so once I was in reach of the internet, I quickly acquired the book.

So did the book live up to the expectations? Surprisingly well, I have to say. Sure, it’s what you might call a romantic book with tons of feelings and crying and unexpected romantic surprises. And, obviously, a happy ending. But as a representative of the genre it was surprisingly well written, an easy read, and the characters felt reral-ish, not the stereotypical romantic novel characters you might expect. So I really am very happy with mounting up the courage to disturb a stranger and even more for trusting their recommendation. I think I will look into other stuff from Liane Moriarty!

Living room theatre

So there I was, outside a strange house on a perfectly ordinary Thursday evening, about to enter a stranger’s apartment. I made my friend meet me at the corner in case I got cold feet. We were about to go to a one man theatre performance taking place in the performer's living room and were feeling a little edgy.

We weren't alone though. The little group of women huddling on the street outside the doorway looked just as hesitant as we. Being in a group gave us enough strength and together we climbed to the sixth floor and towards a new experience.

Being in a strange house is almost always interesting. It can be uncomfortable, it can be pleasant, but nearly always it’s inspiring too see how other people live – how they decorate, what their home smells like, what books they read etc. Being in someone’s home as a spectator was not so different to being a regular guest, but it did bring extra layers to the visit. This type if a performance could have been a truly inspiring experience.

On arrival we were greeted very warmly by the performer himself and were escorted to the living room. The early arrivals had a choice of sitting on actual chairs or on the sofa, the latecomers had to settle for cushions on the floor.

It's highly improper to take photographs at a performance, so these are my books.

And this is my library - not his.

There were quite a few pauses in the performance. You know, silences. Long silences. Uncomfortable silences. Regular silences. During which I noticed there was a book called Silence tucked away at the back of the bookcase. Coincidence? As I looked around the room my eyes kept wandering  more and more to the bookcase. There were books on love - the performance was up to a point about love. I noticed some books that the performer and I shared (Shakespeare’s completed works – but everyone owns that one, right?) and tried to read the titles of the rest of them. I noticed that there weren't that many books after all and got to thinking how and why he'd picked the ones that he did have.

The inspiring aspect of the performance was how the room became a set. Things you thought were just decoration turned out to be a part of the performance and therefore constituted a set. I have a friend who's something of an expert on site-specific performance and I kept thinking what she would make of this - this set up I think would have been right up her alley.

1,5 hours passed like 2 and afterwards as we walked home in the cold, dark wintry night we wondered what we learned from what we'd just seen. Probably the most important lesson was not to avoid something just because its something new and unfamiliar. Next time I go see a performance in someone's house I'll be a lot less nervous!

Secret vices

I recently came across an an article about people posting lists of books they claim to have changed their lives. It seems that, like in social media in general people tend to list books they'd like to have changed their lives rather than the books that actually have. In short, it's cooler to list books that are difficult rather than books you actually like to read. So on the list you're more likely to find David Foster Wallace than John Grisham...

Now I've done my fair share of difficult reading, having muddled through the aforementioned Foster Wallace as well as Joyce's Ulysses and some B.S. Johnson just to mention a few. Now none of these books I felt changed my life one bit, I found them difficult and at times just plain boring. Proust's mammoth epic In search of Lost Time on the other hand kept me in its grip from the second book onwards right till the end, so I haven't found all "difficult" books equally difficult.

But when it comes to really enjoying yourself with a book it's best to find one that keeps you entertained and reels you in from the first page. The search for that book can be a painstaking job and so sometimes the best thing to do is just to fall back on old favorites. Since most of us try to look cool we never boast on our light reading, but...

For me, the best thing I can do on a hot summers day is to pick up a friendly, familiar detective story and just lazy my day away in the sun reading about a neat murder taking place in a nice upper class English environment. None of the new psychological, violent, dark murder mysteries for me! I'm all for your Agatha Christie's and Conan Doyle's and Ngaio Marsh's and Dorothy L. Sayers' etc.

It's not cool to like Agatha Christie & co. Not at all. Most people who like to read, I've found, have a disliking towards Christie, saying her books are not that well written nor realistic. Well, the so called realistic crime novel just is a little too much for me, especially while enjoying a relaxing summer's day. The true value of a nice Agatha Christie lies in the complete harmlessness of the books - the murder is always neat, the suspects well behaved and you can trust there to be plenty of soothing tea.

Now am I saying Agatha Christie changed my life? Perhaps not. At least not in the sense that I’d gotten any deep life lessons from her books. But perhaps reading Agatha Christie has changed me in the sense that her books have helped me get some tough times. Reading a familiar book is like comfort food, you know how it makes you feel and mostly that’s happy and comforted. 

On a regular day I can read a “difficult” book like nobody’s business but then comes the odd day when you just need to go back to your old friends. It could be because the sun is shining and you want to just enjoy yourself or it could be that you just need to feel safe with a book you know. 

For some reason it seems more socially acceptable to watch the Christie adaptations on TV than reading the actual books (Kenneth Branagh had taken Christie to a whole new level) but I'm not one to care for social pressure, I promote my guilty secret openly! No TV adaptations for me - I prefer the real thing.

Best selling isn't (always) best written

A while back I started reading J.K.Rowling's Casual Vacancy. I bought the book ages ago but have never gotten round to reading it. I guess at first because I had other books to read but later I realized I kept putting it off because it got such bad reviews. I was browsing my bookcase the other day and the book caught my eye - I thought maybe it was time to give it a try.

Well, I was wrong. I'm now on page 52 and am very iffy about ever finishing the book. I can't even put my finger on the main problem since there are just so many. First of all the so far only interesting character died on page 3. What has followed is an army of unpleasant people acting in unpleasant ways and swearing a lot. I don't usually mind swearing (in some books it's almost mandatory) but here it felt like Rowling is trying to prove that she's not just a children's novelist and that writing for adults means that you have to use all the nasty words you've ever heard on the school playground when you went to pick your children from school.

Reading Casual Vacancy made me remember that the same thing happened with Harry Potter. Not that they were swearing a lot but that the books weren't too well written. The story was interesting enough to keep you hooked and the whole magical world sucked you in, but just so much of it could have done with a nice, sharp editing.

Sadly the problem of the not so high quality of writing is often true of many  bestsellers. It seems that when someone manages to write something compelling and artistic, which is perhaps written in an interesting way, it seldom becomes the #1 bestseller. For some reason the great reading public doesn't seem appreciate well written stories as much as it does a dramatic plotline. Don't get me wrong, I can absolutely see value in a catching story but why do the danbrowns of this world always manage to produce such poorly written books?

So now the good (or bad, as it seems) people of Pagford are gathering dust on my night stand. After the Potter experience I'm pretty sure the poor writing will remain but there will be few flying brooms or moving staircases in Pagford so I'm relatively sure the book will stay put where it is until the day I feel it should go back to its original place on the bookcase

And while we're on the subject: I know I'm a bit of a nitpicker, but am I the only one who finds it irritating that the name of Rowling's village is almost the same as Sirius Black's nickname in Harry Potter? How hard can it be to make up a name for a village? Padfoot/Pagford. I mean, seriously. Sigh.

Browsing books(ales)

The annual book sales began again this January.  Like in any sale in this one too the early bird catches the bookworm, so the trick to making the best finds should be to be at the spot as soon as the salespeople start loading the books on the shelves. Only this year it turns out they do it gradually, adding a few books at a time to a number of categories, including my personal favorite, paperback fiction! So the jury's still out on the question on who catches the worm this year - possibly the patient buyer who has time to come back to the store over and over again.


Now your annual book sale is the thing the serial reader most looks forward to each year, but it's not without it's pitfalls. The theory of the sale sounds perfect, right? Pristine books for half off with as wide a selection as you can hope for? The reality is never as rosy, for me at least there are two major things to be on the lookout for.

First of all the books on sale tend to be the ones I've already bought. If they're  by my favorite authors, I naturally bought them as soon as they came out. And if I was able to restrain myself and wait for the paperback to come out there's little hope I'll find anything really interesting on that shelf by the time the books are on sale.

Now the other problem also has to do with the selection, but from a different perspective. The shelves are bursting with lovely books that judging by the cover all look SO interesting. But as I have no idea who the writers are, there's a very real chance I end up with a bag full of silly books that are just poorly written. The danger is even greater come summer when the left over books form the winter sale are half off from their earlier half off price.

The cookbook find - highly recommend it!

A few years back I went completely nuts and bought two bag fulls of paperbacks for a pittance and am now wondering whatever possessed me. The only one of the books I've so far actually managed to read was an extremely bad detective story involving a lost Shakespeare's manuscript. The other's have, after a long futile wait to be read, been alphabetized onto my bookshelf with little hope of ever being read. The only ones I remember buying are Where The Wild Things Are by Dave Eggers and The Last King of Scotland, both of which I actually might read one of these days except that I wonder if the Last King won't be as violent as the film was (I'm not overly keen on violence...).

 This year I managed to avoid most of the pitfalls and only fell for a cookbook recommended by a friend over an extremely yummy dinner cooked from this very cookbook, and a pilates book, which may end up gathering dust on the shelf of the couch potato that I am.

So my point being? I have no point! Happy sales, everyone!

Reading through the darkness

We’re all familiar with the image of a person on a stormy autumn’s night sitting in a comfy chair in front of the fire, wrapped up in a homey blanked enjoying a nice book. Possibly a mug of steaming tea of hot chocolate on the table and candles blazing in the background. A lovely image if ever there was one.

Now I’m all set to fulfill that image. There’s the comfy chair (in the library no less), hot chocolate and tea a plenty and someone bigger than me seems to have taken care of the weather. Alas, no fireplace, but enough candles to fill that gap. Now you’d think that I’m taking full advantage of the situation?

Sadly, no. In recent weeks I've found it more and more difficult to open a book. My search for new things to read has been constant. A bunch of books from the library, which you’re supposed to read quickly, is gathering dust on a shelf somewhere because I just can’t bring myself to open one.

This is the time of year when our nation falls into a coma/depression. The days get shorter and shorter only to vanish completely by Christmas. The weather is wet, if not freezing cold, and a smell of rotting leaves in the air really does nothing to cheer you up. What you really crave for is a huge pick-me-up, and when it comes to reading you certainly need your book to be entertaining and maybe even funny. My recent attempts at reading have involved a 19^th century women’s prison and a street child being trained as a pickpocket/conartist by a guardian of sorts (both by Sarah Waters btw).

After 2 pages I've given both books a miss and turned instead towards American sitcoms on TV. Munching a huge bag of candy I’m all set to face the worst nature has to offer - we all have to stack up to survive winter, right?

Looking for Alice

Yesterday I saw a lovely production called Edgar's Echo by Kallo Collective & Krepsko Theatre. The performance, based very loosely on Lewis Carroll's life and work, used circus, puppetry and theatre to create a wonderful, surrealistic and very Carrolian world. It also reminded me of another performance I saw a few years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe called Looking for Alice. Although one of them was traditional theatre and a sort of homage to Alice in Wonderland and the other an interpretation on Lewis Carroll's (or rather Charles Dodgson) life and works, they had the same dreamlike, wonderful, absurd atmosphere - a lingering feeling of waiting for things to happen. And they never quite do.

You can't avoid the Red Queen

In Waiting For Alice we sat in a tent and drank "ink" from a mishmash of teacups in the midst of characters from the two Alice books who had heard that "an alice" was coming. The amazement of what an alice might be - a fierce creature perhaps? - and the animals' aspiration to be The Protagonist (of what?) was all that really happened, but it was such a well  made performance and such a wonderful experience that it has stayed with me. I only wish I'd remember the name of the group - I wonder if they're still performing?

In the footsteps of Alice?

I was reminded of that earlier Alice yesterday at Edgar's Echo. Now Edgar's Echo had little to do with Alice and all to do with the life of Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson and his little muse Alice Liddell. The story in itself didn't require knowing the author's history in detail, I think the adults in the audience waited more traditional circus than the children, who were happy to just watch in awe as the house on stage started to be taken over by plants; how a troupe of tiny giraffes all of a sudden crossed the stage or a tea party on the ceiling...

I guess if you adapt Lewis Carroll to the stage you're better off not going the Disney way - the ingredients to an unforgettable performance lay in the magic of the unexpected and unsure.

A touch of the Night Watch

I just finished Kate Atkinson's Life After Life - her much awaited new novel, which left some people disappointed that it wasn't the fifth in the Jackson Brodie series, but got others excited about her return to the roots, so to speak. The novel reminded me a little of Behind the Scenes at the Museum and the other earlier novels.

A kind of a Groundhog day, Life after Life follows the life of Ursula Todd and her family, until she gets it right. The novel begins in 1910 and moves back and forth in time as things happen to Ursula - until they happen the right way. She keeps learning from her mistakes and corrects them without completely realizing what she's doing and why. Not perhaps the most original idea ever, but you can trust Atkinson to make the story into something interesting and different. 

A lot of the story happens during WW2 in a way that seems strangely familiar. It's almost as if the book is a homage to Sarah Waters' The Night Watch - you can well imagine Ursula at some point working in the same office as the girls in Night Watch and they have most likely gone to the same cafes and passed each other on the streets, perhaps taken refuge in the same shelters during air raids. Atkinson's people are more upperclass - the Waters girls wouldn't hobnob with them, but the war would have made their paths cross in a way that would have been impossible during peace time. And there are several happenings that surely aren't coincidences but neither are they at all plagiarized. A tribute perhaps, an "inspired by" maybe - a copy, never.

Perhaps not the worlds most un-putdownable book ever, but Life After Life certainly creates the urgency of needing to now what happens next. Now we just wait for the next Jackson Brodie.

Finding something new to read

I'm sure I'm not the only one on a constant quest for new books read. New books that will be entertaining, thought provoking, exciting, possibly funny, sometimes romantic. Not so easy - especially when you've spent most of your life reading. Finding a new book can be rewarding but finding a new author opens whole doors into unknown worlds to an eager reader such as myself.

A New Author will probably already have published a bunch of books one can dive into and will in most likelihood be publishing new books if not annually then certainly decennially (like Jeffrey Eugenides - a book in 5-10 years, but worth the wait), unless you happen to run into a Classic you haven't yet read, in which case you can just blame bad luck for it. A New Author,when added to the list of your favorite authors will increase the likelihood of finding readable books published out of sync with each other. So you can well imagine how fortunate I've been this summer to come across two New Authors to read!

There really is no formula for finding a New Author. Some browse the internet, some ask for recommendations in their local library or bookshop. Me, I turn to my friends for help. And with great results, I might add. In the past I've been blessed with authors such as Kate Atkinson, Jonathan Coe, Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, Mark Z. Danielewski, Dave Eggers and many, many more. Sure, I've come up with a few on my own, but it certainly helps to have friends who read.

This summer I was told to read Sarah Waters. So on I went to the local library which boasted on their wide selection of Waters. Well, the reality was very different from the fantasy created on their lousy website, but I did manage to get a hardback translation of The Night Watch. Once I managed to get over the off putting format and the language (I prefer reading books in the original language, although when it comes to foreign languages I truly only manage English and Swedish with just a little Russian and Spanish), I ended up quite enjoying the book. Set in the 1940's it follows the stories of 6-8 people more or less connected to each other. The 3 episodes are set in 1947, 1944 and 1941 - in this order. So you never learn what happens to the people because the beginning is also the ending, but you start building their future in your head through looking into their past.

A truly fascinating portrayal of the everyday life during and after the war, The Night Watch is also a suspense novel about people on the margins living in difficult situations during a distressing time (as if life during wartime wasn't difficult enough). But the every day life is pretty much the same for everyone, with routines and worries and work, so to me the true value of the book was in the glimpses into the reality of 1940's London with bombings and food shortage and death and decay and blinders - but also with love and hope and plans for the future.

Now a true friend not only recommends books - she sends them to you! So a few days ago a parcel arrived in the mail: The Little Stranger by none other than Sarah Waters. Apparently a ghost story - possibly a scary one, too - so far I’ve only glimpsed at it. I think the best plan is to read it in broad daylight. Certainly not in the evening, alone. We'll see. But that's something to look forward to in the near future!

Oh, who was the other New Author? Well, that's a whole topic on its own, wouldn't you agree?

The Rosie Project

A while back I came across a tweet that led me to Top 10 books to read in April on Stylist.co.uk (Stylist.co.uk/books/). Browsing through the list I run into a book called The Rosie Project by Graeme Simison. The author was unknown to me (not surprisingly since later it turned out this is his first novel) but the book sounded like fun. So on I march to the local bookshop expecting to find a reasonably priced paperback to carry in my beach bag. Well, not only did they not have it ("Oh, I should have guessed this, the invcompetence of these people - can't find one little book for me. I guess it's because it's in english.") but it turns out it wasn't even published ("Oops, good thing I didn't say that out loud!").

So back I crawled into my flat revising a new game plan.

Now, the fact that I wasn't able to get my hands on it made the book all the more alluring. So I looked up all kinds of sites to see where I could get it the cheapest. I tend to browse Amazon and save things for later purchase without actually ordering anything, but with this thing I started to be so determined that I actually went ahead and ordered it - along with a bunch of other stuff on the save for later list. Better get the most out of it as long as I was finally ordering something, right?

Now that I got myself proper and excited the chances were that the book was going to be a huge disappointment. Contrary to my usual book buying practices I started reading Rosie almost as soon as I got it home. I was pleasantly surprised to notice that the book was funny, intelligent and even romantic up to a point.

The main character Don or Professor Tillman and the "I" of the book reminded me of the main protagonist in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and also of Dr Sheldon Cooper of the Big Bang Theory. Like Dr Cooper, Professor Tillman is well aware of his special characteristics in comparison with his friends, co-workers and indeed people in general. Like Dr Cooper he is proud of them, but unlike Dr Cooper Professor Tillman at least sometimes realizes what makes him stand out in a crowd and what makes people react to him in a different way. The unlikely romance between Tillman an Rosie is the main plot of the book but not the thing that makes it worth reading. Tillman's struggles with his personality and attempts at understanding the rest of the world as well as his desperate, albeit short lived struggle towards normality, are what makes the book worth reading.

For once a book that I not only liked but can even recommend! Mid you - if you enjoy dark suspense filled books with explicit scenes of violence this is not a book for you. But for light summer reading this is just the thing. I think I'll follow Stylist.co.uk's advice on books more carefully in the future!

Life without internet

So, my internet connection has been down for a month. I moved and somehow the internet didn't move with me. No internet at least to me seems a good enough reason for not updating your blog - not many an employer looks happily on as the employees write about books while working...

So without internet one would imagine that there's loads of free time for exciting things one never has the time for as every spare minute is spent online browsing the depths (well, shallows) of social media or watching films you've already seen on Netflix. Wrong. Instead of reading all the books I've bee saving till later (NW, Zoli, Life After Life, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle...) I've watched a lot of TV, even more DVD's, worked overtime and done who knows what with all this precious extra time on my hands.

Well,  my time hasn't been completely wasted. I have spent a few afternoons in the sun as the weather has treated us to a heat wave which is pretty much unheard of in these parts of the world especially this time of the year. So that to me is time well spent. Now, while laying in the sun I've managed to, I don't want to say struggled, but worked through a couple of hundred pages of Freddie Mercury's biography I bought for a pittance a few months back.  The book isn't bad, it's quite ok, but it just isn't gripping enough for me to want to gallop it in one go. So I keep returning to it hoping one day I'll finish it and can finally move on to something more interesting.

I'm still looking for a summer project but I guess this spring and early summer so far has been about biographies and musicians, and, incidentally musicians biographies. I've finished Steve Jobs' (now there's a captivating book) biography and Pete Townshend's  and Diane Keaton's autobiographies (ok, I realize Keaton & Jobs aren't musicians...) and am almost through with Freddie, so we'll see where I go from here.

Probably the next book I read will be The Great Gatsby, which I (dare I say this) have never read. I got the book as a birthday present form a dear friend probably a year ago and I totally forgot about it. I only found it today as I started to update the blog and was looking at the books looking for The Next Book. Now, was it stupid to go see the film before reading the book? I think not. This way I was actually able to enjoy the film without any preconceptions. And hopefully can still appreciate the greatness of the book without Leonardo di Caprio spoiling the image of Gatsby. We'll see. The sun is shining, summer's just arrived and the world seems full of possibilities and books. And oh, the main bookstore has 20% off all paperbacks!

Mark Z - what are you up to?

I've always been fascinated with form and layout, not just text in itself. A book that has a nice layout (and/or a cover) is way more interesting to me than a book with a bad layout. Sometimes the layout makes reading almost impossible when the text goes all the way into the binding, which annoys the hell out of me. On the other hand I get excited about books that play with the layout and form of the text, especially if it's done properly and isn't just a gimmick.

I share this passion with a friend. She once wrote a paper for our post graduate seminar in two columns each with a different story and a different style. So she told me about this completely weird book by Mark Z Danielewski called House of Leaves. I got the book, read it and loved it. Sure the frame story of someone finding a mystery chest containing the story of a mysterious house is a silly one and even sillier when the guy who found the chest gets scared by what's happening in the story he's reading. But the actual story of the House of Leaves got me totally hooked.

The style of writing varies between the frame story and the story of the House so you know from the font which one you're reading. But as the story progresses the writing starts to follow the events of the book. Or maybe it comments on them? Either way, when things start happening quickly you suddenly read really fast; when things slow down, so does your reading. At one point people are in a maze and the text all of a sudden is a maze too.

I admit it looks like a gimmick and it does take a bit of an effort to read, but the text is all there, you can really read it and it makes total sense. I remember being overwhelmed with the effect of the form imitating or commenting on the text and loving every moment of it. 

Now as you can imagine, when someone's this excited about something, they're bound to tell about it, right? So I recommended the book to another book loving friend with whom I've shared many a book in the past (she once dropped my Sex and the City book into her baby's bathwater which may very well have been the most appropriate place for it even if I didn't appreciate it at the time). So, imagine my disappointment when it turns out she hated House of Leaves! She found the story tedious and implausible and didn't get the thing with the form at all. And after glancing through a few comments about the book on a sellers website I see now that she's not alone: you either love it or hate it. Now I can no longer recommend it to anyone and can probably never read it again being a afraid I'll hate it too...


Mark Z clearly isn't one of the Productive Writers. Or one who publishes his works often. After House of Leaves (published 2000) came Only Revolutions in 2006 and now this year I came across The Fifty Year Sword (published 2012).

Only Revolutions was a strange tale of two youths, a kind of a love story I guess, but told from one end of the book from her point of view and form the other from his. They had their own colors (gold and green) and there were two bookmarks (one of each color) to help with the reading. It didn't make as great an impression on me as House of Leaves had earlier, but I remember enjoying the experience of the book. It was advised that the book should be read a chapter at a time first from one persons and then the others point of view. Reading the book I kept thinking how different the experience would be had I chosen to start from the other end. The writing was more or less stream of consciousness and at times it was hard to tell what was happening, but the charm of the book at least to me was how differently we interpret things that are happening to us; how we misunderstand each other and how love affects us. Again, I'm not sure I recommend it...

Now The Fifty Year Sword remains a mystery. I was going to start reading it but noticed that it was an autumn book so it makes sense to postpone reading it until next autumn. But as expected the book looks to be more than the writing. The cover has little holes in it like it has been punctuated from the inside. And there are different colored marks that symbolize different things (or people, perhaps?) in the actual text. But this I will find out come autumn. In the mean while there are a few peculiar Facebook updates to ponder. The last one from April 11th: "50-84779-2-89552". Mark Z - What are you up to?

Color co-ordinating your books

We've all seen pictures of color co-ordinated bookcases in fashionable design magazines, right? They look fabulous and create a great visual element in a room that with an ordinary bookcase would look, let's face it, ordinary. So when a friend of mine a few years ago moved we suggested she organize her books by color. Now she's a very visual type of person so she decided to give it a go and I have to admit her bookcase looked pretty darn fab by the time we were finished with it. She says she can find her books, so I suppose it works for her.

Now encouraged by this positive role model I decided to try it myself. I'm sort of living in two places: my old house where I used to live and my new house in the city where I work. Being a manic book lover I've got plenty of books in both places. The old house has 3 pretty big bookcases organized by genre and alphabetized by author, so I wasn't going to start with messing that up. But with so many books some of them are in two rows and they're not organized by anything, so they became the perfect target for my experiment.

I was and still am pretty pleased with how they turned out. I tend to fill this bookcase with books I've already read, so finding them isn't really an issue.

With one successful project behind me I now turned to the bookcase in the city where I work and live. Now this one I share with my darling partner, so I not only had my own books to sort out but his as well. And much as you'd expect, there were more of them, too. But in the end I think it turned out quite well. In fact it looks exactly like the other one, doesn't it?

The trouble only started once you tried to find a particular book. Now the problem with living in two cities simultaneously is that you can never be 100% sure the thing you're looking for isn't in fact in the other place. With my new order finding books became almost an impossibility. Sure you thought you remembered what color the book was, yellow, right?  Only it wasn't the spine, it was the cover and the spine was black. Or red. Or even blue. And then when you can't find what you're looking for you wait until you're going back for the weekend to your old house only you won't find it there either because it turns out you've stuffed the book into a cupboard.

We're moving now and last week my hubby said to me: Honey, when we move can we have the books by subject again? I can never find my books anymore...

A new Summer Project

I need a Summer Project. I've had a few Summer Projects over the years, all of which have involved books and with summer closing in this is the perfect time to plan the New Project. A good project take time but is also fun, there's no point in for example reading school books over the summer. My projects have been many and miscallaneous. There was the summer I read A la reserche du temps perdu (not in French mind you, my knowledge of French is pretty much limited to s'il vous plays), the one when I read all the Harry Potters back to back (well, that hardly took all summer, more like a week), the one with Lord of the Rings which then continued with The Hobbit and a Tolkien biography, the one with Virginia Woolf... I can't even remember all the Summer Projects from years gone by. But now I feel like finding one again.

I've been thinking about maybe reading all four of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie books, perhaps visiting Jonathan Coe's The Rotter's Club -series (although can you call it a series if it's just two books?) or maybe finding something completely new? Finding the Summer Project really is the trickiest part of the project...

I know I could catch up on my classics; maybe reading all or even just a few Dickens', but I've never really been a fan so I doubt I'll go into that direction. The great Russians - I really have no enthousiasm going back there. Jane Austen I quite like because her books are so light and funy but I've read them a few times and I'm not sure Jane Austen really qualifies as a Summer Project. A proper Summer Project is something heavier or bigger. Like when I read all the Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events books. Although with that project the main hardship was trying to find all the volumes in different libraries. And then when I got to part 11 it turned out that parts 12 and 13 hadn't been published yet! Which is why I still own only the last two parts of the series. I did not have time to wait for them to appear in the local library, I had to get them straight from the printers!

I'm starting to lean more and more towards re-reading something I've been meaning to re-read for a long time. Only the trouble with re-reading something you've really liked is that there's a very true danger you won't like the book the second time and you'll end up destroying all the lovely memories you had. But. A few years ago Armistead Maupin published a new volume in the Tales of the City series. (See how a good project tends to involve a series?) I was very doubtful about it - very doubtful indeed. After all, the original series had been lovely; funny and interesting and captivating, I read all the volumes and learned to love the characters and have fond memories of it and them. Now how was I going to feel about a completely new volume which took place in the present time?

To my surprise I liked it. A lot. Well, really I guess it shouldn't have been such a surprise, I did after all like the first umpteen volumes so why not the latest one? The characters all came back to me in a flash and it felt like meeting old friends after a long time. Sure they had aged a little but inside they were still the same.

So maybe re-reading the series will be this summer's Project. Or maybe I'll just settle to reading all the I don't know how many books I've bought but haven't had time to read. Zadie Smith, Kate Atkinson, J.K.Rowling, Diane Keaton's biography, Mark Z. Danielevski's latest... All waiting for me in the book case. Oh, there's still time. Summer's a long time coming.

Penguin Books

I think I really truly became aware of Penguin books only after they started merchandising. Sure, I'd read Penguin books ever since I started reading books in English, but I never really took notice of the publisher - or should I say brand? But there they were: lovely, captivating, must-have Penguin book mugs!

It must have been over 10 years ago when I noticed them in a bookshop in London and like in a flash realized that I absolutely needed to have one. And once you buy one you really need a whole bunch of them. I mean, how can you possibly always be in the mood for a cup of A Room of My Own-coffee? Over the years I've managed to collect quite a library of these novels, detective stories, travel books and plays. Sometimes it takes more time to choose the cup you're drinking from than it takes to make the coffee...

But the mugs (and later the tea towels, the note books, the address tags...) made me more interested in Penguin. And I realized I had been reading them for years without even noticing. I'd read a ton of P.G.Wodehouse all in Penguin, detective stories too numerous to mention, possibly some Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Orwell, definitely some Woolf, Brontë, maybe Homer... When you really get into it the list is almost endless. And wasn't it a Penguin competition that my friend won receiving her height in books? That's a competition that any reading person would love to win. For a more detailed list of Penguin authors, not to mention the newcomers, please visit http://www.penguin.co.uk. The mugs are there too...

I think in the end I prefer the classics. The orange of fiction or the green of detective stories, the purple of non-fiction and so on. The books are so thin, so small - they make you fully appreciate the pocket book genre. And when they are old enough they carry that special smell that makes it just so much more interesting to read. The smell of history, I guess, of belonging to another era, a more leisurely time when paper was softer and less shiny. Don't get me wrong, I love the smell of a new book too; but it's a different kind of smell, more modern and efficient.

I've started to buy old Penguin books from flea markets and used books stores - they really do seem to call out to me. Sometimes I buy them even though I know I could borrow them from my mother, sometimes even in the exact same edition. But you see one of those volumes and you just feel like you must have it, or you must save it because let's face it: will the next person appreciate it as much as you do?

My friends know of my passion, I got a On the Road name tag for my luggage and a The Lost Girl passport cover for Christmas and a few years ago Postcards From Penguin which I've used for example to decorate my coffee table! My love of all things Penguin went a tad overboard with the Great Penguin Bookchase - a board game that should have been fun but really needed a lot of guesswork or very detailed knowledge (Which famous author's grandmother...?) to be any fun. 

But my love for Penguin continues.

The price you pay for leaving home without a book

I always carry a book with me when I know I have to spend time traveling or waiting or even if there’s just a hint of a danger of traveling or waiting. So why did I then like an idiot go to a meeting where I knew I had to pass 45 minutes on my own without a good book to keep me company? Well, that you may very well ask, the answer is a mystery even to myself.

But there I was, on my way to the meeting, clearly bookless. Imagine my happiness when I stopped for a bit of lunch and realised there was a library right next to the café I was in! With 10 extra minutes to spare I rushed in and pretty much grabbed the first book I could even vaguely imagine reading. And what did I get? Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies – a book I vowed never to read.

A while back I read Wolf Hall, Mantel’s first acclaimed novel in what was going to be a trilogy. Only I found out about the trilogy bit after finishing the first part and wondering why Anne Boleyn was still alive…

I was initially very excited about the book - I mean who wouldn’t be? A book about Thomas Cromwell, a forefather (great uncle or some such) of the great Oliver; Henry VIII’s main man, the man behind a mountain of beheadings… I’ve always loved biographies and histories, despite or perhaps because of suffering from the worst history teacher in the history of teaching. I’ve read about Henry VIII, his wives, his daughter Elisabeth; about Charles II, George IV (or v?), his children – just to mention a few in British history (then there are the kings & queens of other European countries, but that’s another story). So in a word: excited!

I should have taken more notice when a friend of mine said she didn’t finish Woolf Hall. She’s someone I love talking books with, someone with a similar but not always the same taste in books. We’re read tons of the same books and agreed on most of them but not by far all. I probably like history a little more than she does so I figured that maybe this just wasn’t her cup of tea. And ignoring all signs of warning on I plunged – straight into the depths of Tudor intrigues. I mean come on – she won the bloody Booker prize, didn’t she?

Why she won the Booker is the more relevant question. I found Wolf Hall tedious – it was too long, too dull, and too full of boring details. And as I’m fond of historical facts I found all the fictional dialogue between real historical characters dubious and annoying. Also the character of Thomas Cromwell was just too much. Surely such a great humanist, a smartass, a man who has survived from an abusive childhood and a few wars and has risen to great power, a man who seems to instinctively know what other people are thinking - surely such a man knows better than to get himself beheaded? OK, yes, I’m running ahead of things, so far Cromwell is on the height of his power and is so far beheading other people, but it’s just difficult to see how he’s going to transform into a very different person. That is if Mantel is even remotely true to history. Maybe this time he lives to see his grandchildren grow old.

But more to the point: will I ever finish Bring Up the Bodies, which I reluctantly started to read to pass the time but never got further than page 7? I run into a colleague by accident and so spent my waiting time merrily chatting away instead of ruining my day with Mantel.

So what is the price you pay for leaving home without a book? You get stuck with Hilary Mantel.

Ps. The first 7 pages were just like the first 500 of Wolf hall…

Elizabeth and Georgiana

I saw the film Duchess recently while on holiday. The film, much like every film about real people, got me thinking about the people in it. What were they really like? Did things really happen the way they did in the film?

I had an inkling that the film may not have been completely truthful as I remembered my mother talking about The Duchess of Devonshire, but like so many things a mother tells her children this piece of very useful information had passed me happily by. What I did remember however was that she had a book about the Duchess. It turned out she had two. One about Georgiana, The duchess of Devonshire and another about Elizabeth, the third party in the ménage a trois, which included the two aforementioned ladies and William Cavendish, the 5^th Duke of Devonshire.

Much as I had suspected the film had little to do with real life. And even after reading the two books much is still unknown about the famous (or infamous) trio. What I did discover was that Georgiana was a fascinating woman who was not only the absolute fashion icon of her time but also an influential figure of the political world in a time when women weren’t allowed to vote. She was also a manic gambler with debts that in current money equal millions of pounds. In the film she was in an unhappy marriage and jealous of her husband’s lover, her own friend Elizabeth. In real life it seems she didn’t mind the relationship between the Duke and Elizabeth that much – at least they were great friends all the time they knew each other.

Now in Amanda Foreman’s book Georgiana, The Duchess of Devonshire it is clear that like many a biographer she has fallen in love with her subject. This is possibly unavoidable, I’m thinking of testing the theory with a biography of Stalin– although history shows us that enough people have blindly fallen in love with him so why not a biographer? Anyway, Foreman clearly admires her subject but is also aware of her weaknesses.

Now I wonder if I would think differently had I read Caroline Chapman’s Elizabeth & Georgiana first, but after Foreman’s extremely well researched and written book Chapman’s biography was a massive disappointment.

Chapman also has fallen in love with her subject but has also quite clearly been wearing rose coloured glasses while writing the book. This has made it necessary for her to make continuous excuses on behalf of her heroine. The more Chapman defends poor Elizabeth, the more I start to feel like she was an extremely annoying and opportunistic woman.

When Elizabeth and Georgiana first met, Elizabeth was pretty much an outcast of society. She had left her husband, and doing so had no means of supporting herself and no respectful house would ever welcome her to a social event. So when she met the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire who both took a liking to her and were willing to support her financially it must have felt like a godsend. But not to Chapman, who says it is unlikely that in a situation like that a person would see and opportunity and grab it. Yeah, right.

That Georgiana and Elizabeth became best friends is an undoubted fact, they wrote thousands of letters to each other and were as close as any two friends can possibly be until Georgiana’s death.  Georgiana made sure her friend had a position in the Devonshire household and that she was treated with respect. After her death it was a completely different ballgame. Georgiana’s children resented the fact that Elizabeth stayed on and behaved like the lady of the house. They disliked her and felt that her attempts of friendship were forced and artificial. Now this tells more about the children’s feelings than about the personality of poor Elizabeth, but Chapman feels it her duty to remind the reader that the children were clearly wrong. Because once again it is impossible to see how someone who has just lost a beloved mother would be annoyed when her friend / their father’s lover decides to hang around instead of just plain moving out.

And so on and so forth. Every time someone dares criticize the lovely Elizabeth to her rescue comes Chapman like a knight in shining armour. And critics she had plenty of. Elizabeth lived a long life for example excavating the ruins of Rome and being, according to Chapman, the light and heart of Roman society – or, according to some of her contemporaries an upstart, a-know-it-all, a Georgiana-wannabe.

The further I read the more annoyed I became. So what if Elizabeth was annoying? There are plenty of people in this world who are annoying; it doesn’t make them any less interesting. Trying to undermine the intellectuality of the reader on the other hand makes me see red. Every letter of Georgiana’s children is rebutted with a quote from someone who’s really not relevant to the situation. But maybe some good became from reading both books: I’m still very curious about the mysterious Elizabeth, the captivating Georgiana and the Duke who in possibly the most famous threesome in history is left with the role of a minor character.