Reading Challenge 1

A couple of years ago I made a new year's resolution to spend the entire year without buying any new books. I can't remember exactly what inspired this: possibly I was feeling poor, possibly I was disillusioned with what the bookshops had to offer. I have to admit that during the year I bought a handful for my bookclub, but I did try to get secondhand ones, and of course I read the new books I bought for the girls, but I don't really think that was cheating, was it?

So instead of being tempted by Waterstone's 3-for-2s or Amazon's startlingly low prices (sure to keep authors in penury), I plundered the attic, rereading favourites and giving rejects a second chance, I picked up things I'd missed the first time round in the library, and I trawled through my mother-in-law's packed shelves.

You already know how I feel about rereading, so clearly that part was hardly challenging (though whether I could only reread for an entire year is another question). As to the rest, that expression 'the cream always rises to the top' springs to mind. I don't think  I'm all that given to such expressions, but funnily enough, I was just using this one this morning to Robert, as Chris Evans interviewed Neil Diamond who had emerged from the graveyeard that is 70s easy listening to prove himself a stayer. The point is that as time passes, the books no-one ever reads disappear off the shelves, both in the library and at home, to make way for new books. The stayers are the ones people still read, and they tend to read them because they're good. Look at the output of many modern popular authors: a book a year, every year, more in some cases, for year after year. They have to; it's how they make their living. But no matter how good they are, they're not all equally good. Now take the equivalent 100 years ago: E Nesbit. She was prolific, writing for both children and adults, but fewer than ten of her books spring immediately to mind (and none of them is for adults). Somewhere along the line, the less popular have gone from the publishers' lists, from library shelves, from collective memory. You may still find them tucked away in secondhand shops, but if you buy them imagining you have an undiscovered treasure, you're likely to be disappointed (as I know).

So, having sung the praises of my experiment, perhaps it doesn't seem like such a challenge. Maybe not, but I can't tell you how thrilled I was to get a good pile of glossy new books for my birthday and for Christmas!

Rubbish is good!

There are times when only rubbish will do: illness, plane journeys, holidays, just after you've read something weighty. And I like rubbish. It can be deeply satisfying in a way that something you really have to work at is not. Like the difference between eating a plate of delicious food containing all the major food groups or eating a large bar of fruit and nut.You can sit back and let the words flow over you, disregarding clunky dialogue, inconsistencies, unlikeliness and the fact that you're sure the book you read last time you were in this situation had exactly the same story.

For me, quality rubbish, generally means something chunky with a bit of romance in it, possibly a bit of rags-to-riches or misery-to-happiness or just growing up, and most definitely a happy ending. To be honest, I could just re-read The Thornbirds and Lace  every time the need came on.They're all much of a muchness, aren't they? Occasionally something a little different will take my fancy, some fantasy, crime or horror. Last year, I devoured eight Charlaine Harris True Blood books one after another because I'd bought a job lot from the Book People for an unbelievable price. But the sweet-eating analogy springs to mind again: the last one or two didn't seem such a treat, just a bit too much of a good thing.

Sometimes Terry Pratchett seems to fill this rubbish need, but I won't quite allow myself to lump him with the rest of the category. He is clever and witty, but so very insubstantial, and I generally can't remember the beginning of one of his books by the time I'm halfway through it. I suppose I'm willing to separate him from the rest of the indistinguishable heap because his children's books, though very much in the same vein, are staggeringly good.


Sometimes I have to remind myself of my affection for trash when I try to steer children away from Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson and towards Philips Reeve and Pullman. No, I'm not saying that RD and JW are trash, but that children tend to read them from habit because they know they will like what they'll get, rather than challenging themselves to discover something new. It's the same instinct that has me reaching for something fat with a picture of a pair of shoes on the cover or a watercolour of a French farmhouse or a straw hat abandoned on a picnic blanket.

So here's to all those authors who find a winning formula and then write the same book again and again. May they keep providing us with fruit and nut forever!

short stories - essentially unsatisfying or little gems of a writer's craft?

I’ve been thinking about short stories. What set me off was that Elspeth has been practicing her creative writing because she has exams. They have a paper with 20 topics on it and an hour and a quarter to do it. That really means you only get about 50 minutes of actual writing, by the time you’ve read through the paper to choose a topic, made some kind of plan and allowed yourself time to read it through at the end. The paper has what used to be called ‘discursive’ topics back in the day, which E’s teacher has told them to avoid as they’re difficult to do well, ‘personal writing’ which they’ve practised quite a bit, and strikes me as easiest anyway, and narrative writing, i.e. ‘write a story about/set in/on the theme of/inspired by…’ Anyway, Elspeth is an avid writer and I think she may think the personal writing is too easy; she’s determined that narrative writing is the choice for her. So she’s decided to practise regularly, with me providing topics for her, and that I have to do it too. We gave ourselves an hour to write, but only one topic, so no choosing had to be done. And it was so hard! Firstly, because to be on a level playing field we decided that I too had to write by hand (which was a challenge for E to read!) to slow me down, and also so that I would be forced to write forwards, instead of constantly adding and editing, as I normally would; but secondly because I am (as you will no doubt have realised) a witterer, and to write a narrative with some sort of progression in 50 minutes is very nearly impossible for me.

And the thing is, I don’t even like short stories. My heart sinks when someone gives me a book of short stories to read. When I come across one sometimes in a newspaper or magazine, even when it is written by an author I love, I just turn the page. I know that many great short stories have been written, and I understand that many fellow obsessive readers will be unable to understand how I can spurn these little gems of the writer’s craft, but I just don’t see the appeal. I suspect it is at least partly to do with what one is used to from reading. A novel has a gradual progression, characters develop though their behaviour and interactions, building from page to page, plot and setting unfold, the narrative has time to expand and usually time to reach some kind of satisfying conclusion. But, for me, short stories are essentially unsatisfying as they must needs portmanteau these elements into a shorter framework. For me, this usually leads to one of two results: either I have become interested in the characters and feel cheated when the story ends and I still feel there are things to find out; or the story wraps itself up in some sort of tricksy ending, a twist that seems too clever, and leaves me irritated (and yes, top of the list is Maupassant’s La Parure a story I loathe for its manipulativeness but cannot help admiring).

I will admit to a couple of exceptions. I love Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber which I first read after seeing the movie The Company of Wolves (yes, loved that too). These though might as well be fairy tales and they work the same way, little snippets of narrative with the weight of half-remembered folk symbolism behind them which gives their insubstantialness a peculiar and marvellous depth. I must have read Ian McEwan’s In Between the Sheets and First Love, Last Rites at about the same time. These two collections I have read and reread and for some reason they just really do it for me. I saw a one-man show based on The Cupboard Man at Edinburgh one year and it struck me then that McEwan had managed to capture the essence of this character and his story here, that it worked as a short story (and a short play) because there was nothing else to be said. I loved these stories so much that for years I bought each new Ian McEwan novel, but never found any of them struck me as deeply until I read Enduring Love (which is so short as to be almost a novella). The extraordinary and unsettling, so prevalent in all his books, struck me once again as perfectly realised in this little book. At the moment, Solar is lying in the pile next to my bed. Will it do it for me again?

Do you reread?

Do you reread? I do, but not often; certainly not as often as I did when I was a child. Then, certain favourites would be sure to call to me again and again. I read both Alices on a regular basis (I preferred Looking Glass then, I think because it was more structured, but now I prefer Wonderland, perfect evocation of the wild variety in dreams). I read all the Enid Blyton boarding school books many times over. I read the entire Lord of the Rings about once a year from the time I first read it at 13 until the time before last, in some university holidays, and then again a few years ago, when the films came out and I wanted to see if I could find in it what I had found then (and I did, which was such a relief). I reread Elizabeth Goodge, Barbara Willard, KM Peyton, E Nesbit; if a book was really worth reading once, it was certainly worth another go.

I suppose then, the comfort of familiarity, and the knowledge that the book would be good before I started to read were factors making me want to reread. Also, of course, the fact that all these books were there on my shelves, I didn’t have to go to the effort of discovering something new. It didn’t seem to bother me that I already knew what was going to happen. In fact, the anticipation seemed to add to the pleasure.

It’s different now. I reread far less and when my children ask me ‘what’s your favourite book?’ or even ‘who’s your favourite author?’ I couldn’t possibly answer them, although I certainly could have at any moment of my childhood. Of course, I can’t answer them; I’ve read too many books to make a decision like this, and who knows, the next one I pick up may be my favourite. But also, I no longer get that pure joy, that certainty that feeling that what I am reading is absolutely perfect in every way. I suppose my critical faculties get in the way, so that as well as letting the story into my brain, I am aware of the structure, the vocabulary, the places where the author could have done one thing but chose to do another. That’s not to say that I never reread, and generally I will only keep books that I think I am likely to want to pick up again some day (about 70% of those I buy or am given).

So having said all this, I had a truly perfect rereading experience lately. I was stuck for something to read, and though most of my fiction is STILL in the attic, I do have a couple of shelves of books by my bed that have somehow escaped being boxed up and put away. I picked up The Time-Traveler’s Wife, a book I loved when it first came out. I was slightly dubious about it this time, as a couple of people had told me since that they thought it was trite, so I did wonder if it would stand rereading. Sometimes books are enjoyable the first time but you can’t see it at all when you reread (Captain Correlli’s Mandolin, for example). At first I just opened it randomly and read a few different parts. I was trying to remember how the chronology worked. But in no time, it hooked me, and I started again from the beginning, and then devoured it in a few sittings. It didn’t matter that I knew what was going to happen. Actually the book makes it quite clear from early on that it’s not going to end well. I found myself enjoying it as much as the first time I read it, and maybe even more, because the anticipation added spice to the narrative. The best part was that Robert was out the evening I finished it, so I read the last 50 pages or so, all alone, with tears running down my face. Bliss!

Library reading frenzy

I went to the library twice this week. Which is remarkable really in that I haven't been at all in about a year. When I was a child we seemed to go all the time. It would have been once a week, I suppose, to keep my mother in books, but it seemed like both a habit and a treat. The times I remember best were after I was at boarding school, so those library visits were for reading fodder to fill in the lovely freedom of holiday hours. My mother always went straight to the returned books rack (why? because books other people had read might be more appealing? or newer?) usually followed by the crime section. I could have spent hours browsing, but clearly I needed a system too so I could keep up with her speed selection.So I would always pick one book of fairy tales (I favoured those Ruth Manning-Sanders ones, A Book of Trolls, A Book of Princesses as well as the Fairytales from... one place or another), plus something by an author I already knew and liked, then I'd select two more fairly randomly, trying to beat my speedy mother (and if he were there, my brother, who sought out dull books about space or fishing, as far as I can remember). One time when Mum beat me to it, she pulled from the shelf an Elizabeth Gouge to add to my pile; I forget which one but it was the first, and a revelation. Maybe she did this often, opening my eyes to undiscovered writers.

Anyway, this week I took the girls because it's their holidays, and even though we have enough books in the house to entertain them for several years, more and different books are always welcome. Besides, the choosing in a library is such fun. You can have lots ( I actually don't know how many) and you can experiment. It doesn't matter if you don't like them. And the books in a library are so different from those in a bookshop. Certainly, you'll find a few by all the currently popular authors, and if you ask, you can  probably get all their stuff. But it's not all sitting there, taking up shelf space to the exclusion of all else. In between one or two blockbusters, there'll be something by someone you've never heard of, or something that came out several years ago that you missed, or something ancient that you've always meant to read. Book heaven!

So, why did we have to go twice? Well, Livia (7), unused to the 'grab as may as you can' ethos of holiday library visits, only took out two books, which she read in two days; Elspeth (13) read until her eyes ached, finishing four books in three days; and Marianne (10), who wasn't with us on the first visits, but for whom I'd taken out the next Harry P, thinking it would take her all week, finished that in two days. And as for me, I'd only gone to pick up a couple of books about keeping chickens, but I was so enthused by the girls' reading frenzy, that when I went back I took four for myself. True to form, I picked something newish I'd never heard of, one I'd not read by a familiar author, one by a columnist I like though I didn't know he wrote fiction, and a classic that had passed me by. They don't have much of a fairy tale selection though...

To read is to own

'When a person we like gives us a book, we look for them first between the lines - for their tastes, for the reasons they thrust into our hands, for a sign of the bond between us.'
From The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac.

How is it that we feel we own the words we read? Is it to do with the fact that we have to think them as they pass through our brains en route from black marks to imagined scenes? Is it that here on the page is exactly what we've been trying to say? How can it be that when we share a book with another person, we feel we are giving them something of ourselves or showing that we recognise something in them?

Last week I heard author Mark Haddon talking about how his book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (or 'Curious' as he called it, which amused me) was one of the free books to be distributed by volunteers for World Book Day. He was asked how he felt about people choosing his book as a book they wanted to give to others. He replied that he didn't really feel that he owned the book any more, that it had gone out into the world and become its own thing, like a child leaving home. How odd, I thought. Would you not always feel that a book you had written belonged to you utterly? But then, authors do say that their books grow beyond them, with people reading far more in them than the author originally intended. And perhaps, once you have finished the creative process, the out-pouring, the honing, perhaps your mind is changed by the completion of the work, so you are not the same person you were when you were writing, you could never write it again, and so the book is no longer your own.

Disenchanted reader

I've just finished reading Enchanted Hunters: the power of stories in childhood by Maria Tatar and I'm feeling frustrated. The quotations and the blurb promise me that she will pin down, analyse and explain the magic of storytelling and the power of reading in children's lives. Hurray! I thought. Therein lies some questions I'd like answered. But it revealed nothing at all but rather repeated the purely obvious: stories allow children to explore situations and other emotions beyond their own experience and allow them to indulge their imaginations by plunging them into fantasy. Perhaps I have not read carefully enough and there's more substance to this than I'm seeing. She has interesting things to say about various books (especially about the child-centredness of Lewis Carroll and Dr Seuss), and I enjoyed the part about how story-telling morphed into bed-time reading over the ages. There's also an entertaining appendix of quotations from different authors about how they first experienced reading. But on the whole, a disappointment, and I didn't follow Maria Tatar's explanation of why she used a quotation from Lolita for the title at all.

I come away with unanswered questions:

Why does the fantastic appeal to children? Why do they love magic and other worlds, time slips and aliens?

Why do many adults lose the taste for the fantastic? Do they gain something else? Is it to do with the fact that the whole world is less mysterious to them? Is it to do with the fact that they have learned to be critical and can no longer suspend disbelief?

Why do I still like to read children's books? Is this childish? Do I read them the same way as I did when I was a child?

Why do some children become so involved in stories? Or perhaps how? Do they feel part of the action? Or is observing enough? Why do reading children seem to get this all-encompassing involvement often, whereas I only occasionally reach this point with a book (I suspect there is a time-to-spare factor here!).

So here's my plan. I'm going to search out some books about reading, about how we read and why we read, and some books about children's books (or I could reread the dozen on my shelves whose contents I seem to have forgotten). And I'm going to think about it. Maybe the reason Maria Tatar didn't come up with any revelation is because there isn't any. So, more on this at a later date, but if you have any answers or can suggest any promising leads in my quest, let me know.