Cornflower Books

The long and winding road

 

    Much has been made of the length of Eleanor Catton's Man Booker Prize-winning Victorian sensation novel The Luminaries, and at 832 pages it is by any standards long, but why - for that reason alone - would anyone baulk at reading it?

    I ask because I've seen various comments on this and other long books along the lines of "I couldn't read a book that long". Granted, if a book is boring, poorly written, distasteful, of no intrinsic interest, and so on, the reader is not going to stick with it beyond 50 or 100 pages, never mind 800, but if it is none of the above but instead is gripping, beautifully crafted, mysterious ... why wouldn't you wish to continue and stay the course?

    Clearly, if you had to read a long book for a deadline of some sort, to discuss at a book group, say, the limited reading time at your disposal might make it impossible, but under no such pressure, why would you not just settle down and enjoy the ride?

    If you are someone who instinctively passes over long books in favour of short ones, please do tell us why. Is it that you crave variety such as a constantly changing literary landscape, a wide range of voices, difference in pace and rhythm, and a fuller colour palate than that which one book read over what is necessarily a long period might offer? And conversely, if you're drawn to long books over shorter ones, can you explain their essential charm?

                                                   ~~~~~

    For those who are interested in such things, here is an article by one of this year's Man Booker judges on the judging process, and regarding another long book, Donna Tartt's third novel The Goldfinch (784 pages) is out soon, and here she is talking about it with Kirsty Wark on The Review Show.

Leaving a trace - or not?

   

    Another short extract from The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies today, this time the authors' advice to those who 'revere books excessively':

    "Some people won't turn down the pages. Others won't place the book face down, pages splayed. Some won't dare make a mark in the margin.

    Books exist to impart their worlds to you, not as beautiful objects to save for some other day. We implore you to fold, crack and scribble on your books whenever the desire takes you. Underline the good bits, exclaim 'YES!' and 'NO!' in the margins. Invite others to inscribe and date the frontispiece. Draw pictures, jot down phone numbers and web addresses, make journal entries, draft letters to friends or world leaders. Scribble down ideas for a novel of your own, sketch bridges you want to build, dresses you want to design. Stick postcards and pressed flowers between the pages.

    When next you open the book you'll be able to find the bits that made you think, laugh and cry the first time round [...] Favourite books should be naked, faded, torn, their pages spilling out. Love them like a friend, or at least a favourite toy. Let them wrinkle and age along with you."

    Well, that's all quite uncompromising! Where do you stand on this? Do you prefer your books pristine, as I do, or is condition unimportant? Do you doodle and scribble notes, so that the book becomes a record of your life and thoughts during the period you were reading it, or do you prefer to leave little or no trace?

 

Click to enlarge.

 

    On the subject of marginalia, here's a picture of the 1476 edition of John Duns Scotus' Questiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum which I saw at Innerpeffray, and although I can't read his notes, I do admire the beautiful penmanship of the man who took to the margins to express himself there.

Book-buying, Icelandic style

 

    It's fascinating to hear about the place books and reading have in other countries and cultures, and Madeline's post here - following her recent visit to Iceland - links to a very interesting article about the Jolabokaflod or Icelandic Christmas Book Flood.

    According to the article, not only does Iceland publish more books per capita than any other country, "the culture of giving books as presents is very deeply rooted in how families perceive Christmas as a holiday", and by the sound of it, no set of presents would be complete without a bookish element. While in the UK and US, "very few people buy lots of books", and thus many people buy few or no books, book-buying in Iceland is much more widespread with most people buying several books a year. If you read on through the article you'll also see mention of the Bokatidindi or book catalogue which is distributed free to every home by the Icelandic Publishers Association - and crucially is read - and which thus starts the annual 'book flood' around this time of year. More power to you, sensible Icelanders!

    I couldn't leave this subject without at least a token reference to Icelandic books themselves, though the only one I've read at all recently is Sjón's The Blue Fox, but that post links back to the great sagas - which could be said to have forged the Icelandic literary tradition - which I lapped up as a student, and I do have two novels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson waiting to be read.

Lost in a book

    I do hope this advert hasn't been scripted and is really all the children's own words, but either way it's a great reminder of how a young reader can be 'lost' in a book.

    Mr. C. tells a story of his childhood: at school during break one day he was so taken up with The Hobbit that he was completely oblivious to the fact that a classmate had dropped and smashed a bottle of milk right beside his desk. Does this capacity to enter a fictional world - and leave the real one - inevitably diminish as we grow older, I wonder.

    When were you last lost in a book - and what was it?

Reading in a churchyard

    Bronze statue of St. Edmund of Abingdon by Rodney Munday, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. There are more views of him here, and apparently students are often to be found keeping him company, reading on the seat beside him.

Holiday reading - a few questions for you

    I think we talked about holiday reading way back, but why not revisit it now with a few questions to gauge your habits - unless of course 'everyone' is away and no-one's around to answer them! Here goes, anyway:

-   Have you been on holiday recently, and what did you read while you were away?

-   Did your reading have some connection with the place you were visiting?

-   Was your reading matter typical of what you read when you're at home, or does a trip away give you the chance to read something you don't usually pick up?

-   If the latter, would you describe your holiday reading as light, or does freedom from work and household responsibilities give you space and time to tackle something heavier than usual?

-   Have you ever found a great book (one you hadn't read before) in a holiday house, or have you found good local shops and done lots of book-buying on holiday?

(Re. Summer In February, it's been on my wish list for a while so when I saw it in Waterstones yesterday I bought it and might take it with me when I go away. Have you read it or seen the film?)

Why do you read?

    In Stet: An Editor's Life, Diana Athill explains why books have meant so much to her:

    "It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because [books] have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also - thank God - of the light which continues to struggle through."

    That's as good a reason as any to read, and unless our reading follows a particularly narrow path, it is one which will apply to most of us. But what else is there? 

    Finding it hard to analyse, I took as an example the first and third books I mentioned in the last post, ones which I found particularly powerful and effective and enjoyed enormously, and could commend for various qualities such as strong narrative 'pull', beautifully realised setting, characters who invite empathic engagement, economy, balance, restraint and regularity in the unfolding of the story which must itself be finished and complete (i.e. no 'joins' visible), deep but understated passion - if they were pieces of music they would send shivers down your spine.

    That being so, why do I seek such books and rejoice when I find them?

    The word which came to mind when I considered that question was 'exquisite', defined by the OED thus: "extremely beautiful and delicate; intensely felt; highly sensitive or discriminating". A book of which that can be said provokes in this reader an emotional reaction (albeit at one remove from that of 'real' life, and to a greater or lesser degree according to subject matter), and a correspondingly positive and visceral response to the book's aesthetic in the widest sense. Experiencing any art form is to go in pursuit of perfection (back to 'exquisite' again), so that, I suppose, is why I read.

    Why do you read?

Reading plans and resolutions - how are you getting on?

   

    Way back at the beginning of the year I asked whether you had made any plans for your reading over the coming months, or had resolved to adopt some scheme or acquire a new habit in relation to it.

    As we are now half way through 2013 I thought I'd invite you to let us know how you are doing. If you commented on the initial post do please give us an update, and if you didn't comment in January but have stuck to a resolution or followed a plan (or not!), it would be great to hear about it.

    The most common goal from the January post was to read from the TBR pile as much as possible, while others were to venture into less frequented genres, and read at long last authors whose work was on the 'would like to read' list. Some people had a target number of books in view for the year, others simply wanted to devote more time to reading. Whatever you decided, I hope it's going well and your plans are letting you savour your reading.

    Please tell us how you are getting on.

Bookmarks, a bookshelf, and a book festival

    For readers:  

   Bookmarks is Random House's new "consumer insight panel". It's been set up for an initial nine month pilot period to gather opinion from readers via polls, surveys and discussions on subjects such as covers, genres, digital reading and so on. If you're interested in joining - and members will get previews of forthcoming titles, among other things, follow the link above.

   

     For writers:

    Dancing Beastie, who is always worth reading, has a most interesting post today, Creating a mental bookshelf: an exercise for the aspiring writer.

    Incidentally, I've read three of the five books DB lists there (Fiennes, Swift, and Macfarlane) and would endorse her recommendation wholeheartedly.

    Having written your book, you move on to 'sending it out', and as making a good first impression is all-important, advice on doing just that should be welcome. If you're within reach of Felixstowe, you can attend editorial consultant Cressida Dowling's talk and workshop on submitting your manuscript at the Felixstowe Book Festival on 15th. June.

   

     For festival-goers:

    Lots of Cornflower friends and favourites will be taking part in that festival including Elaine, Simon, Adèle, Linda, Rosy, and Sara - I wish I were nearer and could go and see them all.

As yet unread books

   

     " 'Hello!' I said. 'Here's Larry's book.'

    'Yes, it came this morning, but I've been so busy, I had a thousand things to do before lunch and I was lunching out and I was at Molyneux's this afternoon. I don't know when I shall have a moment to get down to it.'

    I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and may be puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread til the reader has nothing else in the world to do."

    That's W. Somerset Maugham in The Razor's Edge speaking as himself, and ruefully of course, for how else would an author feel when that which represents years of time, effort and expertise goes unremarked and unregarded?

 

    As I'm here to spread the word so that the books I read or receive will in turn find their wider readership with a little help from these pages among others, I must press on with posting the recent arrivals, and today's book sounds as though it's one to look out for.

    Appetite by Philip Kazan is set in Italy in 1466:

    "In Florence, everyone has a passion. With sixty thousand souls crammed into a cobweb of clattering streets, countless alleys, cloisters and churches, they live their lives in the narrow world between walls. Nino Latini knows that if you want to survive without losing yourself completely, you've got to have a passion.

    But Nino's greatest gift will be his greatest curse. Son of a butcher and nephew of great painter Fra Filippo Lippi, Nino can taste things that other people cannot. Every flavour, every ingredient comes alive for him as vividly as a painting and he puts his artistry to increasingly extravagant use.

    In an age of gluttony and conspicuous consumption, his unique talent leads him into danger. His desire for the beautiful Tessina Delmazza and his longing to create the perfect feast could prove deadly. Nino must flee Florence to save his life and if he ever wants to see his beloved again, he must entrust himself to the tender mercies of fortune, and battle each of the deadly sins.

    Appetite is a story of lethal longing, the sensuous life of art and food against a backdrop of deadly power-plays and a city that won its place in history with equal measures of lust, genius and treachery."

    Nothing bland or inspid there, then!

Mind the gap

               

    A while ago we had a post called Mind the gap? which was about physical space on the bookshelves, but today's 'mind the gap' is more to do with time and/or mental space - the gaps between books in your reading life.

    As another topic in our reading habits series, my question is how much time do you let pass from finishing one book to starting the next? Do you always go straight on without a pause? Do you allow a few hours/days to elapse while you digest what you've just read? Does it depend entirely on what you've been reading? Do you perhaps switch to some non-fiction after a heavy diet of fiction, or turn to another genre for your next novel - i.e. a gap in terms of style or subject matter? I daresay no-one reads to any set pattern as such, but I wondered whether you could identify trends and leanings like those in your own literary life.

    I often have a biography or other work of non-fiction on the go which I pick up between novels because I find its change of voice, pace and emotional pitch is welcome, rather like switching to a good documentary when you've had enough of television drama. Sometimes I'll take months to finish that book, but it's there on my bedside table whenever I need it as a (usually) restful alternative to the fiction which makes up most of my reading. Catherine Horwood's Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present was my most recent ongoing book, and although I enjoyed it greatly it took me a couple of years simply because it was performing that occasional gap-filling function; you might also call it a thirst-quencher or a refresher for those times when the world of fiction gets a bit too hot or dry.

    So then, do you leave gaps, do you have a change of pace with a gap-filler, or do you forge straight ahead to more of the same?

Extras

   

    The Point of the Paperback is a very interesting article by Nichole Bernier on paperback publication and what it can do for a book (and my thanks to Madeline Miller for the link), but one passage caught my eye particularly and so I thought I'd canvass opinion on it; this appears towards the end of section 3:

 

    ' “Often by the time the paperback rolls around, both the author and publicist will have realized where the missed opportunities were for the hardcover, and have a chance to correct that,” says Simon & Schuster’s Sarah Knight. “Once your book has been focus-grouped on the biggest stage — hardcover publication — you get a sense of the qualities that resonate most with people, and maybe those were not the qualities you originally emphasized in hardcover. So you alter the flap copy, you change the cover art to reflect the best response from the ideal readership, and in many cases, the author can prepare original material to speak to that audience.”

    Enter programs like P.S. (Harper Collins) and Extra Libris (Crown Trade and Hogarth), with new material in the back such as author interviews, essays, and suggested reading lists.

    “We started Extra Libris last spring to create more value in the paperback, to give the author another opportunity to speak to readers. We had been doing research with booksellers and our reps and book club aficionados asking, What would you want in paperbacks? And it’s always extra content,” says Crown’s O’Shea. “Readers are accustomed to being close to the content and to the authors. It’s incumbent on us to have this product to continue the conversation.” '

 

    How do you feel about extra content at the back of the book - an interview with the author, an essay on, say, what lies behind the book or how they came to write it, a list of books for further reading? I welcome it as I'm an eager consumer of supplementary material (I never overlook an author's note* or even their acknowledgements, as they can tell me much), but as we discovered in the comments on this post, many readers are content with the story alone and need nothing more. How about you?

 

*I've just finished Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (I loved it, and I'll write about it soon) and I noticed that in her acknowledgements she points readers towards her website to find out more about the writing of the book. She rightly attaches a spoiler alert to the link to the page where she goes into the background to the book, so don't read it if you've not yet read the novel itself, but it's an interesting piece and she gives a lengthy list of sources used in her research.

Number crunching

    My thanks to everyone who took the trouble to answer my questions on numbers of books read per annum, and so on, the other day. As I suspected, responses indicated a wide range in terms of reading capacity, from those who read a book a week to others for whom several hundred books a year is typical; the average is about 115. Most people have more than one book on the go at any time, and a fiction/non-fiction/poetry combination seems popular, though on the whole people read far more fiction than other things. Again, most seem to read (i.e. get to) most of the books they borrow or buy, though as to finishing them, a couple made interesting points which I'll come to. As far as format is concerned, although there were exceptions, e-readers are used mainly while out and about and for wider travelling rather than for daily reading at home, and audiobooks are favoured by several people and consumed in addition to print ones.

    Some commenters kindly went a little further with their answers and gave extra information which is always helpful and illuminating. For example, there was this from Mary: "I eventually read most of what I buy but like to have a lot of future reads on hand. I like the anticipation and potential of an unread library." Oh, so do I!

    Crafty Green Poet says that although she doesn't do it very often, she is "increasingly prepared to give up on a book". I wondered whether others find the same - if you are someone who by nature tends to stick with a book to the end, do you find yourself less willing to do so as you get older, or perhaps as life gets busier? (Similarly, has anyone left the theatre or concert hall halfway through a performance which they haven't been enjoying - I've done it once, and relief outweighs the guilt!)

    Still on getting to the end, Artemis says she will finish a book which someone has recommended to her, "even if it's not very good" - she has no such loyalty to random finds from the library. I applaud her willingness to try to discover the qualities which have led to the recommendation.

    Susan noted that 30%-40% of the books she read last year were by authors new to her, while for Audrey, roughly 80% were books she hadn't read before with 20% re-reads. Lots of new ground being trodden, then.

    If you didn't answer the questions on the earlier post but would like to do so now, please go ahead, and if you have anything you'd like to add in the light of the above, I'd be glad to hear it.

With apologies for the dust

   

    You'll find me 'lost in the stacks' over at Danielle's blog today, talking about my books and bookshelves, showing pictures of (some of) my embarrassingly large TBR piles and no doubt revealing quantities of dust, too!

    My thanks to Danielle for kindly inviting me to be her guest - it was a great pleasure to answer her questions.

The comfort of a sweet disorder - on books

   Today's post on Cornflower, The comfort of a sweet disorder, refers to buildings, but it occurs to me that those words could just as well apply to books. Images of Tudor chimneys, irregular eaves and lopsided roofs such are envisaged there could easily be transposed to our tilting piles and listing stacks of books, or those shelved - perhaps because space permits no other arrangement - haphazardly, squeezed in, squashed up, but happily there.

    Just as, in the passage quoted on the other site, a house shows its family's history, so our bookshelves reveal our personal ones, and a collection of books built up over some years may have layers of significance within it, life stages, interests, passions and preoccupations apparent on closer inspection rather as unearthed artefacts provide clues to the existence of earlier cultures.

    A glance at my own shelves reminds me of people, places and events connected with my books and with me at the time I read them or acquired them - each volume is so much more than simply itself, a text, a story, a container for information. I think that is why I am so reluctant to part with books and I rejoice in the fact that I have so many: they are an element of identity and a key to memory, and there is real comfort in that sweet disorder.

Light up your brain

    Scans of the brain taken when subjects were reading Shakespeare, Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot show that activity is heightened compared to what occurs when reading "straightforward" texts in everyday language. Apparently this leads to a beneficial effect on the mind, with attention engaged and moments of self-reflection triggered - so a recent study shows.
   
    "Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain," says Professor Philip Davis, "the research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike.”
   
    Another good reason to Brush up your Shakespeare!

Books for all weathers

   

     In her comment on the 'plans and resolutions' post, Freda said she wants a few occasions this year when she devotes the whole day to reading. She did this recently picking up Eowyn Ivey's wonderful novel The Snow Child on a suitably snowy day, and she's looking for suggestions of other books to match the weather, e.g. a rainy day, a misty one, a howling gale, etc.

    What do you think? Does anything spring to mind? For mist, there's always Susan Hill's ghost story The Mist In The Mirror, and if anyone wants another snowy book there's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (our Book Group book for this month) or the excellent and gripping The Outlander by Gil Adamson (post here), but what about other sorts of weather. I don't think it's enough just to have a weather reference in the title, the whole mood of the book has to be atmospheric in the meteorological sense. Suggestions, please.

Edited to add: via Twitter, we've had Bleak House for a foggy day and Wuthering Heights for a windy one, both suggested by Lynn Shepherd, and Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood, perfect heatwave reading, offered by Gav.

Plans and resolutions

    So much of my reading is dictated externally that I rarely make any resolutions regarding it, personal plans coming second to duty. I'm always interested to hear about others' resolutions - or lack of them - though, whether it's something like Margaret's intention (as she mentioned in her comment here) "to read as slowly as possible to try to absorb more of the book", or others planning to read from their own shelves as much as possible, making a reading list such as Danielle's, or simply to read on a whim with no 'musts' or 'shoulds' about it.

    Many people set quite ambitious reading goals for the year, for finishing a number of books, say, or including a spread of categories. Another method is to looking forward to what is yet to be published (and there's one such preview list here) and map out the reading year ahead, at least in draft, plotting publication dates and scheduling time for books too appealing not to pick up straightaway.

    Do share your reading plans and resolutions with us, even if you have none and are relying on serendipity! Are you going for slow and thorough, hoping to reach a target number of books, venture into unfamiliar genres, read all the work of one author (such as in this Dickens project)? I'd love to know, and I hope that whatever your approach you find much to enjoy this year.

Reading on the move

   

    Having spent the last few days away, journeying by plane, train, bus and Tube, I've been taking covert glances at other travellers' reading material and analysing my own ability to read on the move.

   Our morning flight to London seemed to be largely full of business people for whom checking email was more pressing than reading for pleasure, but there was the odd book in evidence, the new Ian Rankin and an Iain M. Banks, for example. Going into the city on the train I noticed a young woman deeply engrossed in a dictionary of physics, while later on the Oxford-Heathrow coach a fellow passenger was reading The Vanishing Act by Mette Jakobsen, and I finished Trains and Lovers.

    At Heathrow itself on the way north again we had a very long stay indeed due to a technical problem with the plane which meant disembarking and waiting for another aircraft to be found for us. Among our fellow passengers were two politicians, but I wasn't close enough to see what, if anything, they were reading. Former PM Gordon Brown was obviously whisked away to some V.I.P. lounge when the flight was held up and must have made other arrangements as we didn't see him again when we eventually went northwards, but ex-chancellor Alistair Darling stayed around and chatted to people in the terminal; if he had a book with him it was stowed in his bag.

     I found I couldn't settle to my book at all while I was waiting with no definite indication of a departure time. We had regular progress updates from the captain (who came up to the gate frequently to make announcements and answer passengers' questions) but despite his best efforts the wait went on and on. One lady nearby clearly found The Hunger Games diverting enough, but I couldn't get on with my novel until we had at last taken off. That was no fault of the book's, I hasten to add, but something to do with needing to feel 'settled', wherever I am, to give my concentration to any text. Do you find that too, i.e. a defined wait is fine for reading but an apparently open-ended one is not? Does it depend on how gripping your book is? Are there books which absorb your attention to such a degree that external circumstances and events are irrelevant and you are oblivious to what's going on around you?

Common ground

 

     While writing my previous post I realised it was perhaps time we did another mini survey (like this one from 2010) to identify our literary likes and dislikes, the points at which our tastes converge (or diverge), our common reading ground.

    If you wouldn't mind answering the following questions, or volunteering any other information you think might be relevant or helpful in forming a general reading profile, I'd be most grateful.

    1. What are you currently reading (for pleasure), is that fairly typical for you, and how highly would you rate it in terms of your own enjoyment?

    2. Which genres do you tend to read most, and which are you unlikely to try?

    3. Who/what are your all-time favourite books/authors?

To all those who take the time to answer, thankyou for your help - it is much appreciated.