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...