Juxtabook

Time on my hands

Time? I should be so lucky! In honour of British Summer Time which began on Sunday when we spring forward an hour (spring? well it was more of a stagger in my case) Simon at Savidge Reads came up with this little collection of time related reading questions - feel free to join in.

What time do you find the best time to read?

Evening. An hour each night (more if I've time) before I go to sleep.

What are you spending time reading right now?

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro which is excellent so far.

What’s the best book with time in the title you have read?

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey -it is fantastic; it will make you want to join the Richard III Society! If you haven't read it yet, please do!

What is your favourite time (as in era) to read novels based in?

Probably Tudor, followed by the 1930s/1940s, followed by Victorian.

What book could your read time and time again?

A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer, Middlemarch by George Eliot and anything by Dickens or Austen.

What recently published book do you think deserves to become a classic in Time?

Testament by Alis Hawkins - it's fantastic, review coming soon.

What book has been your biggest waste of time?

The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve was pretty terrible and The French Lieutentant's Woman by John Fowles was a mega-hyped-disappointment.

What big book would you recommend to others to spend time reading if they haven’t?

Middlemarch by George Eliot or A Suitable Boy by Vickram Seth (Simon picked The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and Darkmans by Nicola Barker and I would have to agree with both of them too).

What’s your favourite read of all time?

It is a hard decision between David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice. How like an English teacher is that?? A more modern favourite is Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey.

Who is your favourite author of all time?

So many to chose from but I'll have to be boring and say Jane Austen.

If you have ago at this then please let me know in the comments.

A Jealous Ghost by A. N. Wilson

I have a confession to make. There are a number of top drawer literary novelists who I do not get on with at all. The list of shame includes: James Joyce, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy. Are you spotting a theme there? Late Victorian into modernism - as far as I am concerned the novel was driven up a long and winding track and was parked up for some decades until rescued by Evelyn Waugh who staggered past in officer's uniform on his way to Brideshead, and pointed the way out. In those lonely decades I can stomach Virginia Woolf in small doses and the short stories of Katherine Mansfield and that's about it amongst the literary set.

With Hardy and Lawrence I have tried repeatedly to see the point. I have read four of Hardy's works and three of Lawrence's to little avail. I do keep trying and will no doubt have another go in a few years. Joyce? Well I really enjoyed Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but Ulysses? Well 300 pages and I'd had quite enough. There are less than ten books that I've failed to finish but Ulysses is one of them.

And so we come to Henry James. If there is a good place to start with James then I would love to know it but to date I have finished only 'The Figure in the Carpet' (the short story, not the whole collection). So it was with some anxiety that I started A Jealous Ghost by A. N. Wilson, the plot of which hangs on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.

 

Sallie Declan, an American PhD student in London is getting bogged down in her literary theory driven thesis on The Turn of the Screw. She finds life in London lonely and struggles to make friends. A fellow post-grad, Kate, suggests leaving her work for a while and getting work as a live-in nanny. This way she would have a proper break and experience life in an English household, and perhaps make some new friends through her new employers. And so she does. Even without having read The Turn of the Screw it is not hard to see where this going. Sallie gets a job working for a man who requires a nanny for his son Miles Michael and his daughter Flora Francis. And so the parallels go on.

You don't need to have read The Turn of the Screw to enjoy this mad ghost story. I knew little more than it was a ghost story/psychological thriller involving a nanny. Wilson kindly flags up the parallels as we go along and does it so cleverly that the novice James reader is kept fully in the picture without having any of the twists of the tale spoilt. Wilson also uses James' heavy point-of-view style giving us Sallie's version of events to great effect. Sallie portrays herself as passive, as someone to whom things simply happen, always the object, never the subject. From the start of course we must view this with Jamesian suspicion:

That morning, her last in London for a few weeks, perhaps longer, a rush of doubts had overcome her. This was running away. She hadn't given London a chance. She has not given any of it, her life in the Hall of Residence, a chance. Would it not have been open to her to go out and meet a few people? Could she not have started to attend a church, joined one of the many graduate societies, signed on for a language class? Pilates or yoga? Overtures from fellow grads in the Hall of Residence - Grant, Zoe, Janie - had never been followed up. Even with the few Americans she had sort of befriended, such as Kate, she had been too much the passive partner. Had she ever been the one to initiate things with Kate - suggest going for a meal or a movie? Could she not have waited until the others in her Hackney household had returned from Tunisia and maybe suggested that one night a week they all ate together? What was she now doing, letting herself be taken to a place where she was six miles from the nearest train station and where she knew nobody, nobody at all?

Without having read the original, I am perhaps not best qualified to say this, but it does seem a very effective parody, at least of James' style as advertised. Wilson's prose is of course affected by the fact that the whole novel is subsumed to the twists and turns of the parallel plot and the parody structure. Everything else takes second place, especially characterisation, but we don't need to believe in Sallie as a character, that's not the point, she just has to fit our notion of the Jamesian heroine and help the pages rustle along nicely as a ghost story.

This is an extremely good read and races along beautifully with some slighty dark literary fun; I even preferred it to the admirable The Woman in Black because A Jealous Ghost does combine the usual ghost story features with a strong sense of fun: the fun of writing, of reading, of parody, of ghost stories, of spooking yourself silly from the safety of home, of Anglo-American kinship and misunderstandings, and the rest. If the modernist novel writers had more of a sense of fun and I might find them more readable, as it is I think I prefer A. N. Wilson to the real thing.

Database Revival and Very Hungry Caterpillars

Well after a day of panicking and general hysteria over the damaged database, the cavalry arrived in the form of a friend who works in IT. He found my missing data apparently reclining behind a virtual curtain and after a bit of a wrestle managed to update the database again and left me with a fully working copy! Hurrah! It has however left me feeling very distrustful of what I thought was my faithful book database. If it is going to start hiding data how can I be sure I am backing everything up properly? I shall have to keep a close eye on the blighter. It reminds me of teaching and trying to get course work out of reluctant-but-able kids. I could have stayed at school to be this stressed!

Again, an interesting link in lieu of a proper post. An interview with Eric Carle creator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in honour of the 40th birthday of the book's publication. Like Thomas Keneally with Schindler's Ark, Carle must be frustrated by readers hardly being aware of his other books, but he has written lots. Also in honour of Carle's work google have some rather cute art work on their famous search page. Just in case you haven't see it today ...

Dying Databases and Dignified Dustwrappers

Well this time yesterday I thought I was really behind with work and very busy. I had been having some bother with my books/invoices/customers database. I discovered that for some reason that it was not backing up in its entirety but only up to transactions up to September 2007. Having twiddled with various things with no success I contacted the database's creator who made a suggestion, which I admit sounded feasible, but as a result of the subsequent course of action the guy suggested I appeared to have killed off my only working copy back as far as September 2007. 18 months work - Grrrrrrr! I would now give anything to merely behind and busy as I was yesterday. Now we're up a notch and I am officially hysterical!

Taking my mind off that with a saunter round the web I happened upon Faber's flickr site where they showcase Faber covers old and new along with other Faber ephemera. I rather like The Faber Book of Children's Versecompiled by Janet Adam Smith, and the Ambrose Heath jackets, but one of my favourites is How the Whale Became and Other Stories by Ted Hughes. See what you think.

Unfortunately Catherine ...

Unfortunately Catherine has been so busy at work, with 5 year old child with ear ache, with attending a family funeral (distant family), that she has been not able to blog about books much. A quick way to a mildly amusing post, however, has been pointed at by Juliet. You google, in inverted commas, "unfortunately Catherine" (change name as applicable) and note the results:

"Unfortunately, Catherine eventually had to go back to working during the day, instead of working the night shift, and stopped spending her nights with him. ..."

"...unfortunately Catherine has had to cancel her appearance ..."

"Unfortunately, Catherine dropped hers. My parents asked if anyone would share and I said I would. But then I started licking the ice cream ..."

"Unfortunately, Catherine, though young, was far from innocent: In her early teens, she had had an affair with Francis Dereham, a young scholar employed by ..." [that'll be Catherine Howard then; I pay attention to my Shardlake and I'm not married to a history teacher for nothing!]

"...unfortunately Catherine injured her ankle early on in the trekking ..."

"Unfortunately, Catherine was not able to make the call, so I shorten the call and added some information about MyArtSpace."

All of which suggest far more exciting lives than simply being busy with accounts and childhood ailments! How "unfortunate" are you?

World Book Day

Have you ever lied about reading? It is World Book Day and, as part of the publicity surrounding it, a survey has been released showing the books people are mostly likely to have lied about having read. The top ten are apparently:

1. 1984 - George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses - James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (6%)

Well I am happy to admit that I have never read 1984 or War and Peace. I read only 300 pages of Ulysses before abandoning it. I have read quite a bit of the Bible but by no means all, in fact I probably re-read the same bits. Of the rest I have read Madam Bovary and Midnight's Children. I can't imagine lying about reading.

The BBC also have a corresponding article about what we do read but pretend we haven't.  Are there secret airport novels that we hide under our OUP classics? So what's your guilty secret? Mine? er, I quite like Dan Brown! I've read three of his novels, but not The Da Vinci Code. The best of the those I have read is Angels and Demons, though I gather it has a very similar plot to The Da Vinci Code.

So come on then, confession time, do you have guilty book secrets, or have you ever fibbed about reading something you haven't?

Completely Novel and The Lighthouse Keeper by Alan Baker

Completelynovel.com, which went live to the public on January 27th, is going to add a new twist to the new book trade. If BookRabbit was a cross between Amazon and Facebook then CompletelyNovel is a cross between BookRabbit and Lulu: it combines book buying, social networking, and self-publishing. The self-publishing is in a much more attractive format than Lulu.

Like all these things you join and set up a profile. You can then add books to your library, write review of give marks out of 5 via a star system. You can also read reviews and join in discussions. Most mainstream novels are available to buy via Amazon links on the site which make following up goodies you've spotted very easy.

What is different about CompletelyNovel is that there is free fiction content too. Where ever you see the logo of a rather demented looking redhaired badger you can read the complete text for free. These are the self-published works. So what is in it for the authors? Well apart from obvious things like getting reviews, publicity and feedback whilst trying to get a conventional publishing deal, Compeltelynovel also makes it possible for readers to buy physical copies. So you start reading something, get to page 20 and think, yep, this is my cup of tea, and click and buy, and courtesy of digital print on demand a copy will wing its way to you from the printer. The author sets the price, and keeps the profits once the printer has been paid.

The use of free material seems to be on the increase. Within the last month Emma Barnes at Snowbooks announced that they would be making proof copies available via Lulu and even bound copies of their AIs. Scott Pack has also mentioned that The Friday Project hope to make some material free online sooon, though whether that will be the whole text of a work like at CompletelyNovel is not yet clear.

So what is on CompletelyNovel? Well there aren't huge numbers of free to read books on there at the moment as they have only been going five minutes, but I had a browse about and popped a few into my library with the intention of reading a few pages and giving you an idea of what the quality appeared to be like on there. Then I  started Alan Baker's The Lighthouse Keeper. I began Friday evening and kept interupting my accounts to finish the work on Saturday. All 215 pages online - yuk. Bad neck this morning, but with his supernatural thriller Alan Baker has hit the page turning button, and I couldn't leave it alone.

Set across December and January 1900/1901 and with a parallel contemporary narrative thread too, 'The Lighthouse Keeper' begins with the true story of the mysterious disappearance of three keepers from their posting on the Flannan Isles, one of the most remote parts of the UK. The parallel stories continue as we follow the experieinces and the discoveries of thre relief lighthouse kepers sent out after the disappearance in 1900 and the modern day scientists on the island. The events in each story are an echo of the other, and the reader wants to race to the end (as I did!) to discover whether any of the characters, in either chronology, escape and how.

Baker builds up the interest, atmosphere and suspence from the first pages. The book has a strong sense of place, and of time, and uses these beautifully to build the ghostly atmsophere. His prose is very neat and tidy just like a spic and span Victorian lighthouse, or the thought processes of the modern scientists, and as such is perfect for the job in hand. Nothing is overplayed en route to the end in his orderly sentences; and of course the hysteria should be the reader's and the protganists,' not the narrator's, so this just as it should be.

Part supernatural thriller, part convincing historical fiction and part science-fiction it is scary in the fun way of classics such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Woman in Black. But like The Mysteries of Udolpho the ending is a little disappointing, but in a sense that is a tribute to the strength of the build-up. The prose is so tight and the emotional build-up so strong that nothing, however bizarre, in this world, the next world or a parallel world, could be suficiently bizzare to be truly satisfying. This is a tiny quibble; The Lighthouse Keeper is a hugely enjoyable read. If this is the callibre of the fiction available CompletelyNovel may well be onto something.