I planned to read more Russians this year, and I’m still hoping it will happen. But a number of other factors (including a larger project that I seem to have let myself in for) have coincided to make sure that my reading thus far has had a different theme – that of books about books. I’m not counting literary criticism here (since that is necessarily about books) but I’m thinking of characters in books who read and think about what they read. So far this year these books have included Jo Walton’s Among Others, Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock, Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, and Francis Spufford’s The Child That Books Built. I’ve also read the most recent Karen Joy Fowler collection and Charles Yu’s How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, both of which engage with other works of fiction though not as directly. I’ll certainly soon be rereading Junot Diaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Antonia Forest’s The Ready-Made Family. I might even reread Northanger Abbey, since I haven’t visited it in a few years.
2010 Books
A complete list of everything I read up until June is available at the 2010 Books tag. Then work and life got a little overwhelming and now the thought of doing a detailed review of everything I read in the second half of the year is intolerable. But here is a list, at least.
M.D Lachlan – Wolfsangel
Julia Quinn – Ten Things I Love About You
Karl Kesel and Terry Dodson – Preludes and Knock Knock Jokes
Kit Whitfield – In Great Waters
Gwyneth Jones – Imagination/Space
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan – Confessions of a Listmaniac
Vishwajyoti Ghosh – Delhi Calm
K.J Bishop – The Etched City
Shane Jones– Light Boxes
Celine Kiernan – The Rebel Prince
Rama the Steadfast (Penguin edition)
George Orwell – Books vs Cigarettes
Brian Lee O’Malley – The Scott Pilgrim series
Tishani Doshi – The Pleasure Seekers
David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster
Tom Shippey (ed) – The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories
Searle and Willans – The Molesworth books
Margo Lanagan – White Time
Terry Pratchett – I Shall Wear Midnight
Gail Carriger – Blameless
Jai Arjun Singh and Nisha Susan (ed) – Excess
Adam Foulds – The Quickening Maze
Pradeep Sebastian – The Groaning Shelf
Francisco X. Stork – The Last Summer of the Death Warriors
Richard Marsh – The Beetle
E. Nesbit – The Enchanted Castle
E. Lockhart – The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Wrede and Stevermer – Sorcery and Cecelia, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician
Loretta Chase – Last Night’s Scandal
John Mortimer – Rumpole and the Angel of Death
Ian MacDonald – The Dervish House
Mervyn Peake – Gormenghast
Victor Watson – Reading Series Fiction
Michael de Larrabeiti – The Borribles
Sarah Caudwell – The Shortest Way to Hades
P.G Wodehouse – Ice in the Bedroom
Samit Basu – Turbulence
Kate Lawson – Mother of the Bride
Salman Rushdie – Luka and the Fire of Life
Paul Jessup – Werewolves
Walter Moers – The Alchemaster’s Apprentice
Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay
Zoran Zivkovic – 12 Collections and a Teashop
Kate Bernheimer (ed) – My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
Gary Shteyngart – Super Sad True Love Story
Lauren Beukes – Zoo City
Mark Gatiss – The Devil in Amber
Edmund Crispin – The Moving Toyshop
Josephine Pullein-Thompson – Pony Club Cup, Pony Club Challenge and Pony Club Trek
Rick Riordan – Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero
Jeff Vandermeer – Finch
Talbot Baines Reed – The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s
Antonia Forest – Autumn Term
JoSelle Vanderhooft – Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories
John Masefield – The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights
Also odd chapters from academic works, a bunch of regency romances by various authors, Pamela Cox’s sequels and fill-ins to the Malory Towers and St Clare’s books, and I lost the notebook where I list these things for a while in between, so I think I may be missing something. Probably not anything important, since I’d remember it if it was.
Not the most challenging year, judging by the quantities of fluff I read, but I think it was a good one.
DU and Hatterr
I was trying to write a short note on G.V Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (one of the best things I read last year) and then I began to digress and talk about my university syllabus and it all got very long and turned into a post of its own. So here it is:
I wanted to talk about a particular aspect of the Delhi University undergraduate English syllabus (of which I am mostly quite a fan). Most people (and I was one of them) have read very little Indian writing when they start the course, and the university has wisely included a compulsory Indian Literature module that introduces them to some of the better 20th century Indian literature. The only problem with this that I can see is that it is introduced in first year. The first year is when we’re also given Victorian literature to read, presumably because this the sort of writing with which we’re assumed (probably correctly) to be familiar. The Indian Writing course has some pretty impressive stuff on it, for all that: almost the first thing we read was Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaf”. There’s Jayanta Mohapatra, there’s Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal (which is marvellous even though I think we’d have appreciated it more if we’d read it a couple of years later when we were reading people like Dario Fo) and Mohan Rakesh’s Adhe Adhure (ditto but with Beckett) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadowlines which, combined with a really good professor, was the text that really taught me how much a text gives you to play with.
Still, faced with a class of undergraduates recently come from CBSE/ICSE schools, I can imagine the university would leave out a few things as possibly being too much. If it was necessary to break us in with the Victorians (for the next two years the compulsory courses all followed historical chronological order), it was equally necessary to keep the Indian literature we did accessible and recognisable. And since this is the only reason I can think of for All About H. Hatterr’s exclusion from the syllabus, I think it’s best to assume that this is why.
There’s an Angela Carter essay where she talks about the enormous importance of James Joyce both to the English language as a whole and to her personally:
Nevertheless, he carved out a once-and-future language, restoring both the
simplicity it had lost and imparting a complexity. The language of the heart and
the imagination and the daily round and the dream had been systematically
deformed by a couple of centuries of use as the rhetorical top-dressing of crude
power. Joyce Irished, he Europeanised, he decolonialised English: he tailored it
to fit this century, he drove a giant wedge between English Literature and
literature in the English language and, in doing so, he made me (forgive this
personal note) free. Free not to do as he did, but free to treat the Word not as
if it were holy but in the knowledge that it is always profane. He is in himself
the antithesis of the Great Tradition. You could also say, he detached fiction
from one particular ideological base, and his work has still not yet begun to
bear its true fruit. The centenarian still seems avant-garde.
And that is what Desani could, should be for us. We are still angsting over the idea that English is a foreign language in this country – there are plenty of issues around our English usage to angst about (like the amount of power those of us who can speak it hold) but this, whether or not we are allowed to use it as if it belonged to us, should not be one of them. Desani owns English. He’s not afraid to dogear it or roll over onto it or do whatever he needs to to get the effect he wants. And the results are bizarre and musical and hilarious, but they also achieve a cadence that feels appropriately Indian even to someone like me who has major issues with that descriptor.
Desani’s approach to language is so far away from the way English is taught and experienced in Indian schools that it isn’t even, as with Joyce and the Great Tradition, the antithesis to it. The two bear no relation to one another; they exist in different planes entirely. And so I’d like to see what would happen if Delhi University undergraduates were to be exposed to All About H. Hatterr. In third year, perhaps– by then there’d be a certain amount of context to help them to make sense of him. Yet if an unsuspecting class of first years were to come across H. Hatterr it might be exactly what they needed for the next few years of college.
Read This Now, or Little Light is magnificent
Garner love
For many months now I’ve been promising myself a reread of Alan Garner’s magnificent book The Owl Service (and a rewatch of the very good BBC adaptation alongside). I’ve written about Garner on this blog, though never enough to express quite how vital he has been to me, and to how I read.
English has failed me
Does the English language have a way of addressing an email or letter to someone whose name, gender or designation you don’t know that isn’t “sir/madam” or “to whom it may concern”? These are situations where you can’t casual, but you don’t want to be stiff.
If English does have a better option , feel free to mock me here for not thinking of it (but tell me what it is as well, please).
If not, it really, really needs one.
Storyfinding help?
There is a (fantasy) short story that I read years ago and recently I’ve been thinking I’d like to read it again. The only problem is that I cannot remember who it was by. It was in an anthology of some sort when I read it; I’ve skimmed through some of the fantasy anthologies I own but haven’t found it (which doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t there). A title and author would help.
Here is what I remember: a brother and sister arrive (by ship) at an island, and there is a creepy but strangely attractive flying boy. There is possibly a cave as well.
That’s all I remember. Does anyone recognise this? I get the feeling it’s by someone at least reasonably famous.
Practically Marzipan: An Obituary
I discovered last week that William Mayne was dead and had been for about ten days. The reason it had taken me so long to find out was that hardly anyone had reported it – the Darlington and Stockton Times had a story here, and that was the only mainstream publication to have mentioned it at all. Since I wrote the column last week there have been a few more mentions of his death – Locus has a bit here, and links to this bit in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, and I’ve discovered this two line obit in the Times. There’s a nice, long piece by Julia Eccleshare in the Guardian too. Which probably makes this column unnecessary. Still, though.
I suspect I made this more about me than was strictly warranted.
[An edited version of this was published in today's New Indian Express]
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This must be how the Michael Jackson fans felt.
When Michael Jackson died last year and various people were writing obituaries, I was a little disturbed by friends’ refusal to confront the child sexual abuse allegations. It wasn’t their conviction that he was innocent of the charges that was bothersome (everyone has the right to weigh the evidence for themselves and believe what they choose) – it was the complete dismissal by people who would normally take such allegations very seriously, just because they happened to be fans of the accused. That’s the easy way out, of course; it’s harder by far to acknowledge that an artist whose work you love and admire may have had serious flaws or committed crimes. There were obituaries that did just that, and those must have been difficult to write.
Fans of British children’s writer William Mayne do not have the comfort of wishing the bad parts away. Mayne was charged with the sexual abuse of young female fans. He pleaded guilty (though he later retracted this statement) and was convicted in 2004. He was imprisoned for two years.
I discovered Mayne’s writing only last year, and as an adult. I had heard him spoken of in connection with other children’s writers I liked, and around this time last summer invested in secondhand copies of A Grass Rope (which won a Carnegie Medal in 1957) and A Swarm in May (which was filmed in the 1980s). And I was overwhelmed; this was phenomenal writing. Not quite real, not quite fantasy, deep and introspective and uncomfortable and lovely. When I look back and try to remember my childhood (which wasn’t that long ago) Mayne’s books feel achingly familiar.
And this is not just my opinion. Mayne was widely acknowledged as one of Britain’s finest children’s writers. In addition to all the critical acclaim, he was quite popular. In addition to the movie of A Swarm in May, a five-part television series adaptation of another of his works, Earthfasts, was shown on the BBC in 1994. By anyone’s standards he ought to be considered at least a reasonably well-known writer.
Mayne was found dead in his home on the 24th of March this year. He was 82, and he seems to have died alone. Only one newspaper (and not a particularly big one) has reported his death. As of this date (almost two weeks after his death) none of the major papers have made mention of it. I don’t know why that is; whether it has anything to do with his crimes (and as I said before, such an obituary has to be hard to write) or he has just been forgotten.
Mayne was one of the greatest writers of the last century. His writing thrilled me when I first discovered it, and it continues to delight me. His actions in his personal life on the other hand upset and anger me. It’s a contradiction that we should all be used to handling by now (so many great artists have been less than ideal as human beings), yet somehow it’s still hard.
But I’m writing this column because Mayne deserves some sort of memorial, somewhere. He was brilliant, he was loathsome, but he mattered, and it would be shameful to let that knowledge die.
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Also (and I wish I could have hyperlinked this in the column itself) here is the Guardian’s report of Mayne’s trial. The quote from Mayne there enrages me.
In which I express shocking opinions and defend a C.S Lewis book
SF Signal recently had a Mind Meld on the topic “Which SF/F/H book do you love that everyone else hates? Which SF/F/H book do you hate that everyone else loves?” that was rather interesting and made me think a bit about what mine would be. These are the best conclusions I could come to:
Practically Marzipan: Books on a plane
I am amazed I managed to get through this without screaming about getting these motherfucking books off this motherfucking plane.
Anyway. An edited version of this appeared in the New Indian Express yesterday.
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Recently I read of a rumour (hopefully proved false by now) that passengers on flights bound for the US would not be allowed to carry anything on their laps during the last hour of the journey in order to prevent terrorism. Among the dangerous items banned from passengers’ laps were books.
Packing books for a journey is a complex and involved process. For one thing, there’s the time factor to be considered. How long is your trip, and how much time will you, realistically, have to read? If you’re like me, you will vastly over-estimate this and carry twice as many books as are actually required, but it’s good to have a figure to base things on.
There’s also the question of packing relevant reading. Until relatively recently, when I went on holiday I would try to carry books about the place I was visiting – historical fiction or crime thrillers or anything that would be familiar with the geography of the place. It took a few years for me to realize that this didn’t always work. Some places simply that interesting, and even when they are you still risk an informational overload that could leave you craving a bad romance novel. The situation is made worse for me because I’m actually a terrible packer, and far too prone to wanting to carry everything I might need – I have a pair of formal shoes that have traveled halfway across the world with me on the pretext that I might need them. They have never been worn. With books, my instinct is to fill my bags with related and unrelated literature, thus (in theory, at least) preparing myself for every eventuality.
At this point constraints of space and weight come into play. I know through long experience exactly how many trade paperbacks can be stuffed into a regular backpack – subtract four if the backpack also contains a laptop. Whether it is wise or healthy to carry a big bag of books on ones back is of course another matter entirely. But the alternative is to put the books in one’s checked-in baggage and airlines are unfairly harsh about those of us who wise to transport mini-libraries around with us. (I could, perhaps, just about avoid having to deal with airline baggage allowances if it wasn’t for the fact that I buy books compulsively when in other cities).
Once on a plane, the books you’ve carried with you become tremendously important. You don’t want to carry anything that will make you cry – I made two businessmen seated next to me quite uncomfortable once when I carried a particularly weepy book on a flight. Equally, you don’t want something that will make you laugh too much or cause the stewards to think you require medical assistance (P.G Wodehouse is not a valid excuse for disrupting a flight). And it must be absorbing enough to keep you absorbed, since if you glance away from the page you run the risk of being sucked into conversation with the guy next to you, who wishes to tell you all about his son in England who is well settled and unmarried and possessed of every virtue. Do not look away from the page. If books are a weapon in this case, they’re a defensive one.
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The book that made me cry and so disturbed those unfortunate men was Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses, which I wrote about here. I think my most inspired choice of themed books was on a few days’ trip to Turkey, when I carried Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, and Teresa Tomlinson’s The Moon Riders (also a tear jerker, though).