Friday Bullets

1. I should really be writing a very serious review of Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, which was a stunning novel. But Friday is never a good day for that sort of thing, in either writing or reading. I want people to read the novel, so I decided to schedule a review for early next week and do something foolish and frivolous today.

2. I’ve taken most of this week off, as I realised I’d been cramming as much reading and writing as possible into the past six weeks and my brain was feeling fried. This was a ‘light’ reading week, and even so I’ve read two books and parts of two others. I’m hardly complaining – is there a better way to spend one’s time? – but a break was necessary.

3. Over these past six weeks I’ve been helping two friends with some editing. One has written a novel, the other is in the process of writing a series of linked short stories. I’ve been loving it. Of course, it helps that both are fantastic writers, but the whole experience has made me think that this is something I could actually do a lot more of, though I expect I’m too old now to move into publishing. I would like to run my own online literary journal, though, and can see quite clearly what I’d want it to be. Not this year, maybe not next, but I’ll do it one of these days.

4. I had completely forgotten about my creative non-fiction reading, and suddenly realised I was almost on top of my deadline for the next book. I’ve begun Geoff Dyer’s Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, and it’s an easy read, though Dyer takes inordinate pleasure in focusing on the disastrous side of exotic travel. I expect by the end to admire it, and to feel confirmed in my desire never to strike out for radically different cultures and climates.

5. A word about women’s writing week, too: Dark Puss and I felt we needed more reading time, so we have rescheduled our posts on our joint reads for the third week in June. I’m actually making the whole of June about women’s writing, simply because I have so much good stuff to read. It does happen to include Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and if possible the ongoing Karl Ove Knausgaard. So they’ll just have to be honorary girls for the month.

6. My poor son is deep in revision for his upcoming examinations. I wanted to give a shout out to all the poor souls stuck in what feels like the endless loop of exams. I can promise you that summers without them are every bit as great as you’d imagine, and that whilst exams dominate the moment, they are surprisingly unimportant compared to the other great events of life. Watch the news – it’ll put them in perspective.

May Reading

As is so often the case, my eyes have proved to be bigger than my stomach, and despite reading every available moment, I realise I’m not going to get through all the books I set myself! Therefore, A Week of Espionage will be shifted from this coming week to next, beginning on 13th May and running through to the 19th. I don’t expect anyone was exactly holding their breath in anticipation, but if you wanted to join in there is at least another week to pick up a book in. Though really, given that I can’t keep up with my own reading, I hardly expect anyone else to!

This month’s creative non-fiction book is Geoff Dyer’s Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, and I’ll be writing about that on Sunday 26th May.

The Slaves of Golconda’s next book will be The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, which is a book I’m really looking forward to, as I’ve wanted to read it for ages and ages. We’ll be posting reviews on the 8th June and please do join us if you’d like to.

I’m also hoping to read this month Knausgaard’s first volume of My Struggle, entitled A Death in the Family (in the UK), Louise Erdrich’s new novel, The Round House, and Shirley Jackson’s classic We Have Always Lived In The Castle. And anything else I can squeeze in!

And many apologies, my manic reading has put me behind in all other online activities, including commenting on your posts and replying to emails. I will catch up very soon, I do hope.

A Few Trailers

Just a reminder that the first creative non-fiction book I’ll be reading – hopefully with some of you – will be Bluets by Maggie Nelson this coming Sunday, 21^st April. If you’d like to join in there’s still time, as it is a mere 95 pages with a lot of white space, and very, very good indeed.

And a couple of other features lined up: the first is a Week of Espionage, which will happen here over the second week in May (5^th – 12^th). There have been so many intriguing spy novels published lately that I couldn’t resist lining them up like skittles. I’ll be reading The Girl From Berlin by Elizabeth Wilson, Red Joan by Jennie Rooney, A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming, a bit of non-fiction with The Spy Who Loved, the story of Christine Granville, first female spy of WW2 by Clare Mulley, and, if the paperback on pre-order arrives in time, Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.

Then during the first week of June (2^nd – 9^th) it will be Women’s Writing Week. You may recall a while back that Dark Puss and I decided to put the issue of gendered novels to the test. Dark Puss asserts that there are no books written ostensibly ‘for’ women that men cannot also enjoy. As a real challenge, I ought to have prescribed a diet of neat Marian Keyes and Sophie Kinsella, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this to him (or to me). So we will be reading and discussing together:

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty, in which a young newly-engaged and pregnant woman slips and bangs her head in an aerobics class only to regain consciousness having mysteriously ‘lost’ a decade. Now she’s a bossy mother of three in the middle of an ugly divorce, wondering what on earth has happened. This is a straightforward genre novel, right in the ballpark of ‘women’s’ interest with a domestic focus. And I think Moriarty is a good writer.

Small Changes by Marge Piercy. I thought I’d hit the jackpot here with this feminist novel about a woman physicist battling to make headway in a man’s world. The publication date is 1973, so it will take us back to the middle of the consciousness-raising movement and it won’t mince words about male prejudice. But it turns out Dark Puss has read quite a few Marge Piercy novels! Should be interesting nevertheless to see what he thinks of a woman’s perspective on the scientific environment.

Black Milk; On Writing, Motherhood and the Harem Within by Elif Shafak. I really wanted us to have one properly literary, experimental-ish book, and this memoir by this popular Turkish writer ticked all the boxes. Depressed after the birth of her first baby, Shafak listens in to her internal monologue and finds it breaks down into six ‘thumbelinas’ who live inside her head and bicker constantly. Their voices are interspersed with those of other women writers who tried, or failed, to combine artistic creativity with motherhood. I’m really looking forward to this one.

If you’d like to join in and read along, please do feel free. And I’ll be reading lots of other books by women writers too (don’t know what yet, but open to suggestions!).

Some News

1. I’m so sick of my yahoo email account being hacked that I’ve decided to shut it down. It’s been the email attached to this blog, so please note that if you want to contact me, the address is different now. I’ve altered the About page accordingly.

 

2. For several weeks now, I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a non-fiction writing course. The upshot is that I’ve ended up thinking I might as well concoct my own. Most of the courses I’ve looked at focus on reading and commenting on appropriate books, and I figure that while writing is always hard, reading is sort of what I do. So I’ve made a list and a schedule and if anyone would like to join me in reading and thinking about any of these books, that would be lovely (descriptions below are not mine but come mostly from amazon). This is the schedule for posting:

 

Creative Non-Fiction Reading

 

21^st April – Bluets by Maggie Nelson

‘A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.’

Mid-May – Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It by Geoff Dyer

‘It is more of a travelogue than the self-helplessness book suggested by its title. But the journey logged is less geographical than psychological – an edgy ramble through the mind of the author as world traveler. In these 11 short vignettes, Dyer recounts vividly the particulars of a decade of wanderlust. Instead of a sequential narrative, Dyer gives us, “an endless accretion – a kind of negative archeology – of material.”’

Mid-June – Ghosting: A Double Life by Jennie Erdal

‘Ghosting is a remarkable account of one woman’s life – or, to be more accurate, lives. For fifteen years, Jennie Erdal had a double existence: officially she worked as a personal editor for one particular man – Tiger – but in reality she was his ghostwriter and in some mysterious sense his alter ego. During this time she wrote a great deal that appeared under his name – from personal letters and business correspondence to newspaper columns, novels and full-length books. Ghosting moves from a vivid evocation of an austere upbringing in Fife to superbly rendered portraits of the people with whom Jennie Erdal worked at a London-based publishing house. This moving and beautifully written memoir is laced throughout with rich, quiet comedy and profound insights into what it means to be human and to live in language.’

Mid-July – The Mirador; Imagined Memories of Irène Némirovsky by her Daughter by Elisabeth Gille

‘When Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française was first published, the world discovered a new great writer. Even in France, however, Némirovsky had been more or less forgotten for years, until her youngest daughter Élisabeth Gille, only five years old when her mother died in Auschwitz, wrote a book to bring her back to life. In 1992 Gille published this fictionalized autobiography of the acclaimed novelist, who had led a sparkling life in Paris as one of the most successful and prolific European writers of the 1930s before being arrested as a Jew and led to her death in 1942.’

Mid-August – Thin Paths; Journeys In and Around an Italian Mountain Village by Julia Blackburn

‘Julia Blackburn and her husband moved to a little house in the mountains of northern Italy in 1999. She arrived as a stranger but a series of events brought her close to the old people of the village and they began to tell her their stories. Of how their village had been trapped in an archaic feudal system and owned by a local padrone who demanded his share of all they had, of the eruption of the Second World War, of the conflict between the fascists and the partisans, of death and fear and hunger of how they hid like like foxes in the mountains. ‘Write it down for us,’ they said, ‘because otherwise it will all be lost.’ Thin Paths is a celebration of the songlines of one place that could be many places and a celebration of the humour and determination of the human spirit.’

Mid-September – Man with a Blue Scarf by Martin Gayford

‘A beautifully produced paperback edition of the literary artbook hailed as one of the best and most continually fascinating books about painting in recent memory. Lucian Freud spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. Gayford describes the process chronologically, from the day he arrived for the first sitting through to his meeting with the couple who bought the finished painting. As Freud creates a portrait of Gayford, so the art critic produces his own portrait of the notoriously private artist, recounting their wide-ranging conversations and giving a rare insight into Freuds working practice.’

Mid-October – The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane

‘The Wild Places is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space. Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places. Certain birds, animals, trees and objects – snow-hares, falcons, beeches, crows, suns, white stones – recur, and as it progresses this densely patterned book begins to bind tighter and tighter. At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history, it is written in a style and a form as unusual as the places with which it is concerned. It also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.’

 

3. Finally, I was delighted to find that I’d been ‘freshly pressed’ by wordpress for the post I wrote on James Lasdun’s account of internet stalking: Give Me Everything You Have. The post was also featured as one of their Friday Faves, which is a sort of ‘best of’ freshly pressed for the week. This was really lovely recognition for an elderly blogger like me (7 years next month) when, as any blogger knows, you can often feel like you’re just posting away into ether, not sure whether anyone still likes what you do.

I was then brought firmly down to earth by finding out that Bloomsbury had had their annual bloggers’ tea party and I hadn’t been invited. I’m not sure whether, as an introvert who generally dislikes parties, I’m allowed to be miffed about this. Although I am a bit, as I have assiduously reviewed almost every book they’ve sent me. Honestly, I am so forgettable. So the motto of this week is definitely: you win some, you lose some!