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.