A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books ? So John Carey has read every 20th century book? Well no he hasn’t otherwise (fill in the missing A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books ? So John Carey has read every 20th century book? Well no he hasn’t otherwise (fill in the missing title) would be on the list. But I think he might have a different idea of what is pleasurable than most of us. Six of his choices are :
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Joyce’s anguished, tortured book about losing his religion and growing up as an unacknowledged insufferable genius
The Immoralist – Andre Gide’s depressing novel about a guy with a dying wife who realises he’s really gay and extremely attracted to very young boys
Prufrock and Other Observations – Eliot’s poems of bitterness and defeat in a world without moral values
Crow – Ted Hughes’ brilliant but horrendous, black and nihilistic tirade against a nasty meaningless violent world
The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan’s jolly tale of incest
And
Seven Types of Ambiguity – William Empson’s 300 pages of “dense, turgid and baffling” (GR reviews) trawlings through ancient poetry in order to extract every drop of poison from the concept of ambiguity.
I would not myself describe these books as “pure pleasure”. Really, Mr Carey is a bit of a highbrow – his other choices include Maxin Gorky, Sartre, Bulgarkov, Yeats, Thomas Mann and Gunter Grass but he does throw in the odd D H Lawrence and Thomas Hardy to show he’s a man of the people too.
These little essays are pretty nice but this list of 50 books is a real wonky donkey....more
This is a drop dead gorgeous book and people like us can easily waste a whole hour checking out all these great books that we know we will never get rThis is a drop dead gorgeous book and people like us can easily waste a whole hour checking out all these great books that we know we will never get round to reading.
It’s really quite insane reading about books when you could be reading the actual books you’re reading about, but we do it anyway.
Some names that Penguin could never get rights to - Gunter Grass, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath. But they did get the rights to a whole bundle of authors I never heard of, leading to the sadly unanswered question
Who decides that these books are classics anyway?
I know it’s a tough question but it hangs in the air over enterprises like this and you may have thought Henry Eliot could have devoted one little page out of the 604 to attempting to formulate a response. No such luck.
But still, who’s carping.
Had we but world enough and time, This catalogue, Penguin, were no crime. We'd read every volume in this list. Not even Morrissey (page 162) would be missed My bibliophilic love should grow Vaster than libraries and more slow; But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Our TBR shelves, until we die...more
Some people are at their best when they’re in a bad mood, their teeth clamped in some nearby flesh, violent words set off like firework rockets, injurSome people are at their best when they’re in a bad mood, their teeth clamped in some nearby flesh, violent words set off like firework rockets, injuries happening to bystanders, more suffering to follow. Their whole brain is engaged, their vocabulary erupts and you don’t want to catch their eye. I think Michiko Kakutani must be one of those people. I have read some brilliant eye wateringly bad reviews of books by her and I wish this book of her stuff contained those instead of these dweeby anodyne capsule summaries of books she actually likes.
The problem is she thinks these 100 plus books are great and she turns in a couple of pages on each one that read like slightly extended blurbs written by the anonymous hacks who write those panegyrics, using the same polite gushy ameliorating phrases. The whole thing is not worth anyone’s time. There are hundreds of wayyyyy better reviews of each of these books here on goodreads, of that you may be assured.
Also, the books chosen here are a rather dull parade of the Great and the Good : The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Handmaid’s Tale, Augie March, Robert Caro, The Federalist Papers, Invisible Man, Marilynne Robinson, Barack Obama, and on and on. You can’t object to any of them really (except Blood Meridian, groan) but the plod of 1984, The Moviegoer, Mason & Dixon, Midnight’s Children gets very wearying. Most surprising inclusion : Life by Keith Richard.
If she ever publishes Hex on your Libris : 100 Books Never to Read I will buy it immediately. That would be fun....more
The most outrageous part of this occasionally entertaining stroll through Edmund’s bookish enthusiasms is chapter 11. This is suddenly not about booksThe most outrageous part of this occasionally entertaining stroll through Edmund’s bookish enthusiasms is chapter 11. This is suddenly not about books but all about “my young husband Michael Carroll” who is 25 years younger than 78 year old Edmund. The poison that drips onto these pages is something to behold, the Borgias would have loved a few bottles of it. We understand that Michael is devoted to Edmund and not the least resentful of Edmund’s effortless success. Michael toils away at his short stories (“Michael writes every day in a deserted bar… he works very slowly…Michael has kept writing for 35 years with an iron determination and very little encouragement”). Edmund is very fond of back-handed compliments and Michael gets plenty : “Michael hates culture, abhors the theatre, is allergic to ballet and opera, dislikes museums… he is bored by my frivolous social evenings and dinner parties…Michael needs to preserve his street cred, though you couldn’t locate his street on any known map. He hated my snobbish, condescending friends in Paris…” Maybe it’s because he’s descended from “small farmers in Tennessee too poor to own slaves”. Edmund flaunts how unsuited they are for each other. He expertly uses the technique known as back-door bragging : “My blasé airs and cosmopolitan good manners irritate him… he wants to be a real person and write about real people”. Sometimes Edmund throws up his hands : “I waste so much time frowning at Michael disapprovingly”. But he hurries to make sure we understand he really loves Michael : “I don’t want to make him sound like a bully, since he can be kind” (note “can”). Edmund dishes out some withering compliments like a parent finding something nice to say about his least favourite offspring : “he does keep his skin moisturised and his hair straightened”.
Note to Michael : you have to leave this guy, he might be rich and famous but he is not good for you.
My favourite Edmund and Michael moment :
I took him along when I interviewed Elton John…unlike me he knew who he was, which was convenient
Note on back-door bragging.
Jenna (from 30 Rock): Backdoor bragging is sneaking something wonderful about yourself in everyday conversation. Like when I tell people it's hard for me to watch American Idol cause I have perfect pitch....more
Following on from my excavation of 1000 Books to Read before you Die on behalf of those readers looking for something short, sharp and also allegedly Following on from my excavation of 1000 Books to Read before you Die on behalf of those readers looking for something short, sharp and also allegedly great, here is a similar list of 15 novels from this book. Our editors focus on the 200 best novels published between 1950 and 1999 when this guide was published, and here are 15 of the 200 that are all between 150 and 200 pages long :
Age of Iron : J M Coetzee An Artist of the Floating World : Kazuo Ishiguro Owls do Cry : Janet Frame The Unfortunates : B S Johnson Happiness : Mary Lavin Injury Time : Beryl Bainbridge The Murderer : Roy Heath Sleepless Nights : Elizabeth Hardwick Lamb : Bernard MacLaverty In Custody : Anita Desai Family and Friends : Anita Bruckner The Other Garden : France Wyndham A Summons to Memphis : Peter Taylor Ellen Foster : Kaye Gibbons A Strange and Sublime Address : Amit Chaudhuri
Some of these have really dull titles, it must be admitted -Family and Friends, Ellen Foster, The Other Garden - that would surely put off even dedicated browsers, so that's why we like these guides. I had only heard of the first four.
I thought this might be useful for those who like lists but have been condemned to live only one life. (That’s a tough break.) In this beautiful 1000 I thought this might be useful for those who like lists but have been condemned to live only one life. (That’s a tough break.) In this beautiful 1000 Books volume there are included about 380 novels. Now some of them are monstrous, like A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys – 1100 pages! But I spotted a handful that are actually under 200 pages each. I mean, to make it into a guide like this they must have something going for them, you would think, so it’s a new year revolution of mine to read these quickies because I, too, have been condemned to live but one single life.
A Lesson Before Dying – Ernest Gaines The Quiet American – Graham Greene The Haunting Of Hill House – Shirley Jackson The Pursuit Of Love – Nancy Mitford Einstein’s Dreams – Alan Lightman Heat And Dust – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala A Rage In Harlem – Cheter Himes The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne The All Of It – Jeanette Haien The Spare Room – Helen Garner Offshore – Penelope Fitzgerald Clear Light Of Day – Anita Desai The Moving Toyshop – Edmund Crispin O Pioneers – Willa Cather Navigator Of The Flood – Mario Brelich The Bridge Of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
Some famous names that I never did get round to, maybe because I thought they were all 700 page epics. But they aren't....more
The breakdown of what’s in here is roughly as follows
Novels – 382 Memoir/autobiography – 154 Short stories – 40 Religion – 10 Children’s – 47 Plays – 36 TraThe breakdown of what’s in here is roughly as follows
Novels – 382 Memoir/autobiography – 154 Short stories – 40 Religion – 10 Children’s – 47 Plays – 36 Travel – 33 History – 72 Biography – 32 Essays – 35 Poetry – 38 Other including all the sciences – 118
It doesn’t add up exactly, because of my bad counting!
SOME OTHER RANDOM OBSERVATIONS :
This is a gorgeous book – it’s so diverse one’s little head is spinning. I think you probably need it!
It is true that Mr Mustich’s enthusiasm for each and every one of the thousand-ish books here often sounds like a publisher’s blurb :
Unique in the genre when it appeared, Stranger in a Strange Land compels immersive reading with its suspense and grace, and had immense cultural fallout during the 1960s. It continues to absorb, entertain and jostle readers today
The force of Rushdie’s prose is so propulsive, the currents of story-within-story so transporting, that each page is a further winding of the crank on an enormous jack-in-a-box that explodes again and again with the wonders of living that history can never contain.
Philosophical profundities and everyday realities, petty jealousies and pregnant poetry are conjured one after the other with subtle intelligence and art. Forster’s masterful absorption of the colours, tones and shadows of life and language provides an almost symphonic literary score that lifts the details of his characters and their actions into some new dimension that sets this book apart – in manner, mood and mystery – from any other you have read.
There are so many memoirs/autobiographies, 95% of which I had never heard of, some are by people who played sports, and those I will not be reading! I wasn’t expecting that.
There is a lot of science, food and gardening.
As we can see from the almost 50 children’s books, like The Secret of the Old Clock, Little House in the Big Woods, Little Bear, Goodnight Moon, etc, this is not a big list for all adults to plough through religiously.
I’m a bit suspicious about whether James Mustich has really read all of this stuff – I know, heresy! But ignoring the easy peasy lemon squeezy stuff, there is a LOT of big fat fundamentals-of-human-thought type material here. Has JM really read All the Bible, ALL the Koran, ALL of Proust, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, The Tale of Genji, War & Peace, Black Lamb & Grey Falcon, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Godel Escher & Bach, Freud, Marx, the complete stories of Clarice Lispector….? (sound of reviewer slumping to the ground).
Of the 380 or so novels, I have read 131 and only disliked 13 so that’s a good hit rate. There are a great number of oddball choices here. I noticed no Handmaid’s Tale, no James Baldwin (except his essays), no Last Exit to Brooklyn, no Martin Amis, no Paul Auster, no George Gissing, no Bernhard, no Pilgrim’s Progress, but he does have room for House Made of Dawn by N Scott Momaday, All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West, Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout and The Spare Room by Helen Garner, none of which I had heard of. Well, I could go on like this.
There are also some pulpy choices he includes companionably, so we can have a good laugh now and then. So in these pages you will find The Da Vinci Code, The Firm by John Grisham, The Silence of the Baa-Lambs and From Russia with Love. So, The Da Vinci Code but no Last Exit to Brooklyn, hey? What a joker.
But this is nit-picking. I will be finding why-didn’t-I-already-know-about-this books in here for a long while to come. Brilliant. ...more
Now I know what you’re thinking – “the old idiot has finally lost his marbles, he’s already reviewed this book, and only last month too, what a shame.Now I know what you’re thinking – “the old idiot has finally lost his marbles, he’s already reviewed this book, and only last month too, what a shame. He’ll be carted off to the Home for Gaga Reviewers soon”.
No, that was a different one.
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Also not to be confused with this one
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so there are three books published by Penguin celebrating the sheer effusive penguinity of their lovely covers! Well, why not. It’s their rules, they paid for all this, they can do what they like.
Here are a few random favourites from this collection, starting with some socially-sanctioned sleaze from the 60s
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I love this one
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and this
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there was a handbook on scootering. Like, how to ride a scooter. Scootering? Scootering!
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This is quite interesting. Graham Greene thought his name was sufficiently big so that he did not need any kind of illustration on his book covers. So Penguin published a few of his novels like this
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According to this book “sales fell dramatically”. So the illustrations came back :
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I mean, just a little scribble and something that looks like a broke down tardis makes people immediately buy it? What does that say about us book buyers? Are we that shallow?...more
Straightforward book porn for bookophiles like me and you, those weirdos who riffle pages and take deep sniffs, who chuck away family heirlooms to makStraightforward book porn for bookophiles like me and you, those weirdos who riffle pages and take deep sniffs, who chuck away family heirlooms to make an extra four inches of shelf space, those who if they have a little bit left at the end of the month after buying books reluctantly pay the electricity bill and get some food – 700 book covers of mostly stuff you really wouldn’t want to read, like The Culture of the Abdomen by F A Hornibrook
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or The Australian Ugliness by Robin Boyd
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or The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation by Margot Bennett
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We learn interesting things from this book. We find out how Penguin discovered very early on that it’s too easy to do cool crime thriller covers
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(that is my favourite of all the 700!) or
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and that even though Penguin is a proper grown up book company if there is a tv series or movie made they will immediately republish with really horrible results
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But if the cover designers were presented with something sciency or psychological, then they had a go-to collection of very similar looking stuff
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and they liked to play with words themselves:
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But mostly what they seemed to do is snip a bit out of an existing painting, which, really, is cheating just a little bit, I think
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Prize for the most misleading cover must go to Honor Blackman’s Book of Self-Defence by Honor Blackman. If this worked I don’t think any of the Harvey Weinstein scandals would have happened at all
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this is from inside the book
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And I end with one of my favourites, a spin on Edvard Munch’s Scream
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This is a guy caught on a bus with nothing to read....more
The tenacity of poor SF is renowned. It has unfortunately formed the hallmark of the genre.
THE QUICK VERSIJOIN ME AND TOGETHER WE CAN RULE THE GALAXY!
The tenacity of poor SF is renowned. It has unfortunately formed the hallmark of the genre.
THE QUICK VERSION FOR THOSE IN A HURRY
This could be a rather long review so for those with more time pressure here’s a summary :
This is a splendid history of SF from whenever it started (disputed) up to the mid of the 1980s. It was an update of his earlier Billion Year Spree, and I am only sorry that Brian Aldiss hasn’t done a Gazillion Year Spree yet. He is still with us (now aged 91) so really there’s no excuse. Come on Brian! Get off your backside! I can’t see any other useful history of SF out there. You the man!
MY PROBLEM WITH SF
I could write you a list of my favourite sf short stories as long as your arm but I still wouldn’t call myself a fan because such a large amount of sf, especially sf novels, is obsessed with
war! What is it good for? Absolutely nuthin’. Except providing the plot for every other damned SF novel.
Usually between or within
Galactic Empires!!!
And I’m like …. Yawwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn……
FORTRESS ROUND MY ART
In the olden days Frankenstein and Jules Verne and HG Wells and RL Stevenson and Olaf Stapledon were not recognized as science fiction because the genre did not formally exist. Then it was invented in in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback who called it “scientifiction” and launched the magazine Amazing Stories which amazingly enough is still in existence (online since 2006). Brian calls Hugo
One of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field
because by creating a magazine which published nothing but SF he created a ghetto. And as an editor he was “without literary understanding” and set “dangerous precedents” which have been blindly followed. Brian says that when he made these remarks in the first edition of this book he thought they
merely expressed a truth apparent to any reasonable mind. Instead they aroused fury. My book was widely condemned.
So SF built itself a ghetto (an American ghetto) and all the magazines which followed and authors who filled them up were considered by non-fans as the worst kind of pulp and totally ignored. (“Pornography got a better press.”) It took 30 years for SF to climb out of its self-imposed isolation. A great novel like 1984 was not published as science fiction. In 1960 Walter Miller’s brilliant A Canticle for Leibowitz was published and
was immediately greeted with the warmest praise by reviewers – i.e. they said it was so good it couldn’t possibly be SF
Aldiss is a wonderful commentator on every aspect of the long history of SF because he doesn’t hold back, he’s waspish and sometimes irascible. Here are a few of his opinions which pleased me.
ALDISS ON ISAAC ASIMOV
What does one say in his praise that Asimov himself has not already said?... He is a great producer. He enjoys enormous popularity. He has become monstrous.
ALDISS ON FOUNDATION
(Aldiss describes the Galactic Empire, the Foundation and the concept of psychohistory) Neither of these ideas bears a minute’s serious investigation. Yet upon these structures Asimov builds his huge house of cards. … what Asimov presents us with is Rome in Space… an epic in true Hollywood tradition, with extras hired for the day, rather wooden actors and plastic props.
ALDISS ON ASIMOV’S MERGING TOGETHER OF THE ROBOT NOVELS AND THE FOUNDATION NOVELS INTO ONE GIANT SERIES
What can one say about this painful obsession?
ALDISS ON HEINLEIN
He is not a particularly good storyteller and his characters are often indistinguishable.
ALDISS ON THE LATER A E VAN VOGT (HAVING LAVISHED PRAISE ON THE EARLIER)
Van Vogt produced a number of novels in the seventies, few of which made any real sense.
ALDISS ON PHILIP K DICK
Between life and death lie the many shadow lands of Dick, places of hallucination, perpetual sumps, cloacae of dim half life, paranoid states, tomb worlds and orthodox hells. All his novels are one novel, a fatidical A la recherche du temps perfide.
[fatidical, fa-tid′ik-al, adj. having power to foretell future events: prophetical.]
ALDISS ON STAR WARS
It was apparent from the first that Star Wars was an outsize elephant with the brains of a gnat (Having said that he then goes on to shower praise on it.)
ALDISS ON THE 1980s
Even a cursory examination of the mass of SF currently being published reveals one striking phenomenon immediately. Much of it is not SF. It is fantasy.
ALDISS ON FANTASY
(I paraphrase). The fate of the world depends on some poor slave girl and a man of low birth with mystic powers and an amulet. And by the way, why are so many fantasy novels set in a feudal culture? Because the authors have no knowledge of economics. And also, they’re writing for adolescent boys who have no knowledge of economics.
A TYPICAL STORY OF INJUSTICE
Dimension of Miracles (1968) was Robert Sheckley’s best novel in the 60s. …It puts the Big Questions as perhaps they ought to be put – comically. Some of us grieved when Douglas Adams came along with his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and grew rich doing the Sheckleyan things which appeared to keep Sheckley poor
SECOND STAR TO THE RIGHT, AND STRAIGHT ON TIL MORNING
I finished this with a weighty sensation of the vast amounts of SF written up to the 1980s, and this was before SF REALLY took off and began to eat everything else. I felt like Spiderman in issue number 33 (“The Final Chapter”, 1966)
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In this analogy, I am Spiderman crushed by the weight of all the unread SF.
Then add another 25 years of the stuff…..
But perhaps the problem is not so big, if you exclude all the GALACTIC EMPIRE rubbish AND SF-which-is-really-fantasy, PLUS all the unreadable technophile stuff which can only be read by people who actually know something about science (not me, not me) – maybe you’re only left with 17 books! I could manage that....more
This is not in any way a discussion of the novels Andy read, this is wiffling and wittering about the novels Andy read. Also, they didn't save his lifThis is not in any way a discussion of the novels Andy read, this is wiffling and wittering about the novels Andy read. Also, they didn't save his life. I mean, he wasn't ill or dangling from somewhere high. He wasn't in intensive care & someone rushed in a copy of Beloved. But sometimes it's true that he gets hold of a funny idea – like that there are many strong points of similarity between The Da Vinci Code and Moby Dick :
- Quest – one for a whale, one for a grail - Infodumps by the kilogram - Unnatural dialogue - Obsession with symbols and symbolism - Both authors attempted to make careers as singer-songwriters* - Both books were hated I mean hated by the critics – Moby had to be rediscovered 50 years after it was published
*except for Herman Melville, he didn’t do that
So yes, this is another account of My Year of Reading (which we all could do and (actually) a lot of us do do here on this very site); and another by a very British middle class type which coming hard on the heels of Nick Hornby (The Complete Polysyllabic Spree) was probably one British middle class guy too many, especially when Andy discourses unwinningly about his upbringing and all the nostalgic bollocks. Ah, where are the Silver Surfers of yesteryear? Gone, grasshopper, now part of the mulch of filthy time itself. Also I’d have done happily without the winsome blether about the wife & kid but then I have a heart of flint.
I always like it when people who are earnestly slogging through classics & think they have a bounden duty to understand, grok & love to bits each one of the smooshy volumes and annoyingly mostly do too (oh Anna Karenina, you shniggypotamus, you) but then smack their frontal lobes hard on something they utterly detest – for Andy this would be Pride & Predge and 100 Years of Solitude . The latter I loved, so ha ha Andy. However he loved stuff I hated so we’re even.
The best chapter is a filleting of the abominable institution of the Book Club – I too have tried a couple of those things and came to similar shamefilled conclusions one of which is
the only people worth talking to are those who completely agree with every nuance of my opinion on every single book
so that would be like nobody then.
MEMO TO SELF
No more autobiographical coming of age shite ever again Also no more reading about somebody else reading for a long while.
There’s a blurb on the front of this : “Like nothing else I have ever read” – Observer. Oh my God – I have read seven books like this one! But no more!...more
A Bug’s Life and Antz were both released in the same year, 1998. Same idea in both movies. Capote and Infamous came out within 12 months (2005/2006) -A Bug’s Life and Antz were both released in the same year, 1998. Same idea in both movies. Capote and Infamous came out within 12 months (2005/2006) - both biopics of Truman. Analyze This starring Robert de Niro as a mafia boss who goes to see a psychiatrist came out in 1999, the year that The Sopranos began, which featured James Gandolfini as a mafia boss who… you guessed. So people had the same idea at the same time.
John Brookes got the idea of reading a book from each country in the world in 2008-ish and began in 2009. His book is called Reading the World. Ann Morgan got the exact same idea in 2012, having possibly not heard of John’s blog/book (if she had, she never mentions it, which would be naughty). Her book is called Reading the World.
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THE DIFFERENCES
Ann got to publish her book this year with a proper publisher in a spiffy hardback. Copies sent to the proper grown up reviewers (not us toads) and notices duly appeared in The Guardian and so forth. John self-published his first volume ("England to Russia") in 2013 to zero fanfare.
Ann does not include any actual book reviews in her book, which wrong-footed some readers who were expecting, not too unreasonably, a collection of round-the-world book reviews. No, instead you get a pretty interesting account of how the different cultures of the world relate to the idea of a novel, the idea of publishing – like, are ebooks to be included or are they just not quite there yet?, the awkward situation of being an author in exile, political interference, what is a novel, and to begin with, what is a freaking country anyway? So hard to define… So that’s Ann.
John – he’s a bloke you see – is more robust. He gives you the reviews, one after the other. But he also has to scoff multiple aspirins right at the get-go fending off the headache caused by the same question : what is a freaking country anyway? Because, you know, there are no rules. Or there are, but no one respects the rules. Yeah, the Republic of France is a country, nobody can deny. But what about the Turkish Federated Republic of Cyprus? Or Kurdistan? Or Transnistria? It all gets a little subjective.
One big difference : Ann decided to do all her global reading in one year (2012) and John, well, he’s still strolling round the globe, no artificial time limit involving Stakhanovite levels of reading time for him.
It’s quite amusing watching these two Olympic medallist readers John and Ann both run into the same problem with the world’s teeny countries, of which there are many. The general concept for each is to read a novel from each country, but you may be scratching around when it comes to San Marino or Vatican City or Monaco or Andorra. So the rules are loosened and travel writing by non-San Mariners or true crime thrillers by non-Cardinals are allowed.
JOHN’S WHIMSICAL TRAVELOGUE
He likes to connect all his reviews together with an imaginary travel itinerary, as if he was really going from one place to another. So :
I make my way from Kiev to the capital of neighbouring Slovakia, Bratislava. Having enough of plodding trains and bumpy car journeys for a while, I elect to make the trip between these two capital cities by plane. I get a cheap flight with malev Hungarian Airlines from Kiev airport (actually known as Boryspil International Airport, which is 18 miles east of Kiev itself) leaving at 16:15 and – after a brief stopover back in Budapest – arriving in Bratislava at 21:00 in the evening, from where I get the N61 bus into the city centre
OMG – after every single review this is what we get. The jest wears off quickly – once was enough – but no, every review is connected to the next like this.
BUT THE ACTUAL IDEA IS SURELY PRETTY INTERESTING
So let’s consider what books John reads on his way from London through all of Europe to Russia. One rule John had was that the novel had to have been published after 1995 and set after 1990 – no historical novels. He was after modern fiction. What this gave him was a series of countries with two similar experiences – the first is the ex-communist states like Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. The story there is of massive culture shock and a steep plunge into poverty and into the hands of the mafia followed by a gradual improvement. The second is the ex-Yugoslavia countries like Bosnia and Montenegro. Here the experiences are of the horrors of modern war, the shelling , the fascists, the mass graves, the guilty secrets, the racism, followed by a compromised peace. John’s reading therefore becomes a litany of woe.
It made me consider : are all serious novels criticisms of their own societies? To take an obvious example, as Dickens got more serious and left behind the sunny tomfoolery of Nicholas Nickleby or the Pickwick Club, and as he lost his belief in the ability of the goodly hearted middle class to solve anything (they usually turn up at the end of the middle novels to provide an inheritance and a safe home) he got finally to the pessimistic mazes of Little Dorritt, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Is that the way it always goes? Does any serious novelist intend his novel to be in praise of or even broadly supportive of the values of his own society? So, therefore, are all serious novels jeremiads?
WHICH WERE THE GOOD ONES?
John rarely slags off anything, he damns with faint praise sometimes. But these seemed to be the really good ones :
What can I do when Everything’s on Fire? – Antonio Lobo Antunes (Portugal, 2008)
Snow – Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, 2002)
Natural Novel – Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria, 1999)
Death and the Penguin – Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine, 1996)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago – Wolf Haas (Austria, 2006)
Summerhouse, Later – Judith Hermann (Germany, 2003)
Stella Descending – Linn Ullmann (Norway, 2001)
I ended up admiring John’s indefatigable spirit. I’d bet diamonds that I myself would never have got beyond the south of France. John’s blog is here
I had a breakthrough. You know, like you get after months, maybe years, of intensive therapy. The solution had been staring me in the face – it’s ofteI had a breakthrough. You know, like you get after months, maybe years, of intensive therapy. The solution had been staring me in the face – it’s often the way, isn’t it. The thing was, the lowest shelf of my shelves of novels – it’s actually the space between the real lowest shelf and the floor - was just too short. It was 8 inches, which is fine for most of the novels on this shelf but Cold Snap (Jones), Ulysses (Joyce), Lake Wobegon Days (Keillor) and The Collected Works of TS Spivet (Larsen) are 8 and a half inches tall, just because they’re more important than all of Henry James (which are all 6 inches), so they won’t stand up, I have to lie them down on their bosoms with their backsides protruding into the public gaze – it’s just not right. I hate doing that to books more than I hate going to the dentist. But then I noticed the top shelf of the back wall, which was populated by plays and poetry and sundry unclassifiable items. I never read plays and poetry no more. I know – it’s a terrible thing. So I just don’t care if playwrights and poets are on their front or their backside, they probably couldn’t stand up straight if you paid them anyhow, what a bunch of drunks. So I switched the beloved novelists for the less well beloved poets and playwrights and voila! I switched them round! No more dentist!
The above is the kind of thing that Nick Hornby might have but didn’t write in this book. Really, he’s quite similar to me – always playing the giddy goat – but of course he is a beloved million selling writer of novels so the resemblance shrivels and dies right there. This book is a collection of columns he wrote for The Believer, an American literary mag founded by Dave Eggars in 2003. So this is a chatty, witty record of what Nick bought and read in the years 2003 to 2006.
I liked it. I’ve spent 20 years avoiding anything by Nick Hornby until this year when I stumbled on the movie version of High Fidelity and thought it was a real hoot (not a fake hoot). Why did I avoid him? Well, who wants to read about modern British suburban life? No one has any guns, there are few tornadoes, a little bit of doleful adultery, it’s all a bit meurgh.
In true Hornby listlike fashion I will now present
BOOKS BOUGHT BECAUSE OF NICK’S ENTHUSIASTIC WIBBLING
Robert Lowell, a Biography : Ian Hamilton Another Bullshit Night in Suck City : Nick Flynn
BOOKS I HAD ALREADY READ & WAS PLEASED TO SEE NICK AGREED WITH ME
Clockers : Richard Price How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World : Francis Wheen Hangover Square : Patrick Hamilton Like a Fiery Elephant : Jonathan Coe Chronicles : Bob Dylan In Cold Blood : Truman Capote Stuart – A Life Backwards : Alexander Masters Persepolis : Marjane Satrapi
BOOKS I HAD ALREADY READ & WAS HORRIFIED TO SEE NICK DISAGREED WITH ME
No Name : Wilkie Collins (it did not fall apart in the last 200 pages!) The Long Firm : Jake Arnott (it was unreadable macho crap) Saturday : Ian McEwan (it was stupid) Housekeeping : Marilynne Robinson (it was like being buried alive in angel dust)
There’s a much longer list of BOOKS NICK READ SO I DIDN’T HAVE TO such as Philip Larkin’s Letters (ugh) and Oh Play that Thing by Roddy Doyle (sounds grim) or Father and Son by Edmund Gosse (I'm asleep already).
Reading about some guy reading is probably a complete waste of time which should be better employed filling in those terrible gaps in your own literary knowledge like BALZAC or HOUELLEBECQ or GOGOL but this was fun.
Quote from page 67: Oh man, I hate Amazon reviewers. Even the nice ones, who say nice things. They’re bastards too.
Lord knows what he’s said about Goodreads since then. ...more
As you may know, the idea here was to read a work of fiction from every country in the world IN ONE YEAR. It was inspired by AM’s realisation of how iAs you may know, the idea here was to read a work of fiction from every country in the world IN ONE YEAR. It was inspired by AM’s realisation of how insular her reading had been throughout her entire life. She almost never read translated novels, only US & UK ones, like a lot of us. Who, me? Yeah, you. She points out that this insularity is encouraged by the universal recommendation concept of “if you like that then you’ll like this”.
With so much well-pitched material on hand, the prospect of seeking out stories from further afield feels a bit like being asked to abandon the bright supermarket aisles where everything is arranged just as we like it to forage for literary sustenance in the local park.
Along with many people I thought the account of this year of reading through the planet would be a mosaic of reviews of the books encountered, but it isn’t. The blog has the actual reviews. Instead, this book is an exploration of the difficulties and implications of trying to read a book from every country, and international book culture in general. Oh yeah. Uh huh.
SCOTLAND NO, TUVALU YES
She encounters a lot of heavy weather when she tries to find out how many countries there are in the world. What is a country? How do you reach a reasonable definition? If you consult the United Nations official list of 196 members you find that Taiwan is not there at all – only 21 other countries recognise it as an independent state, although it walks, talks and quacks like an independent state all the time. I mean, Taiwan is right there, you can see it. Likewise Scotland is not there, as it’s a part of the UK. But if you tell a Scottish person that Scotland is not a country you might get a Glasgow handshake. Whit? Boom! Stitch that, sonny!
In many ways, it’s a cute but silly idea. 12 of the 196 countries have a population of less than 100,000 – so they get one book each, as does Indonesia (population 255 million), Bangladesh (155 million) and Japan (126 million). The political boundaries of the world are as arbitrary as any other way of categorising humans. My own next reading challenge will be to read a novel by someone who is 7 feet tall, one by someone 6 feet 11 inches, and so on down to 3 feet. The problem is that there has only ever been one 7 foot tall novelist but there are 1 billion ones who were 5 feet 8 inches tall. Ah well.
LUSOPHONE!
Only 4% of books published in English are translations from other languages. When AM considers the case of Portuguese, she finds that there are 9 lusophone (new word!) countries with a combined population of 260 million, and in one year (2005) only ten books were translated from Portuguese.
AWKWARD!
If there’s a theme to this book it’s awkwardness. Discomfort. Things not fitting. Out of balance. What’s the word – koyaanisqatsi? Yes, that’ll do. When you have made some difficult decisions about what a country actually is (Palestine? Kosovo? Kurdistan?) then there’s the problems encountered by the authors themselves. Do they grok the very idea of a novel? If so, what do they want to say? They have to deal with Western cultural imperialism, with their own cultural impediments (maybe in their culture it is not right to make up stories displaying the less pleasant side of life) and with the forces of political and religious repression. They might come from a place of absolutely no books and no publishing. American critic Eric Larrabee commented as follows:
As an exercise in imagination, try to conceive of an author who 1) probably has never met another author; 2) owns no books; 3) is not known to his daily acquaintances as an author; 4) has no personal contact with his publisher; 5) is not certain where his book is on sale; and 6) does not think of himself as an author.
So AM has to go to some lengths to find something to read from some teensy countries. She got one book translated specifically so she could read it. (I sure hope she liked it!) I had to cringe as I read AM’s account of one book from a Pacific island which was a collection of oral folk tales some jolly NGO Westerners had got recorded and written down, as the book is the holy grail of cultural imperishability, and this here folk culture was visibly wilting. The result sounded ghastly, with stage directions. AM says it was “like a po-faced interpreter relaying a stand-up comedian’s routine”. And that is one of the very few places she lets us know what opinions she had of the books she read.
DEALING WITH CULTURE SHOCK (ENCOUNTERS WITH HOMOPHOBIA )
This was the most interesting chapter. I wasn’t so jazzed with the ins and outs of self publishing and ebooks and the dubiousness of translations and so forth, but the chapter about culture shock got my undivided attention:
Newcomers to Nepalese folk tales, for example may find the frequency with which coins are stuffed into animals’ rectums in the hope of making them appear to excrete gold disconcerting
She outlines very well what I think may be the central reason why there are so few non-Anglophone novels translated each year.
Without the context to understand the significance of these events we are left faltering, wrong-footed, unsure how to respond. Should we feel pity for the wife who is forced to submit at knifepoint or treat this as part of a ritualised performance enacted to formalise marriage? Are we supposed to laugh at the gold-stuffed donkey or disapprove of the owner for being cruel? Can we take what we read at face value or is there unknown contextual information that might temper these accounts? …We stare hesitantly at the things on offer, unsure where to start and what is expected of us, afraid of committing a faux pas.
And what about when you plunge in to a novel from, say, Papua New Guinea (AM’s example) and discover
That the casual homophobic slurs that pepper the narrative and the increasingly outlandish plot – which comes close to conflating homosexuality with paedophilia – make giving the novel the benefit of the doubt difficult… It dawns on us slowly that Stella (the author) expects us to share his protagonist’s prejudices, and the result is uncomfortable.
I should say it would be.
AM’s IRON DISCIPLINE
She read 197 books in one year. Now, for some YA readers on this site, that’s like a stroll in the park, but for most people that’s extreme. Last year I read 46 novels – well, not all the way through, I abandoned 12 of those. So yeah, 197 novels in one year, wow. This is how she did it:
I had to be very organised. I worked out the amount I needed to get through every day (around 150 pages to keep on track to read four books a week) and made sure I stuck to it. This meant reading for two hours on my commute (I was working full-time for most of the year) and an hour or two in the evening. I sometimes read in my lunch break too. In actual fact, the reading was only half the battle – writing the blog posts and doing all the research took as much time, so I got up early to spend an hour or two on this before I left for work.
Mind you, AM was always something of a freak reader – she ploughed through The Satanic Verses at age 11. Didn’t understand a word, but read every page anyway.
OKAAAAAAAAAYYY
This was something really worth doing but the present volume is ever so slightly earnest and teetering on the edge of being dull at times. It could so easily have been rescued if AM had included her reviews of the actual books – maybe not all 196 but the 20 best and 20 worst, say. That would have been fun fun fun whereas what we have here is worthy worthy worthy.
"our young dzhigits are strapping, and their caftans are covered in silver"
The subtitle “Adventures in Extreme Reading” is a leetle bit of an overstat"our young dzhigits are strapping, and their caftans are covered in silver"
The subtitle “Adventures in Extreme Reading” is a leetle bit of an overstatement. Truly extreme reading would be completing all of Marcel Proust whilst in a bathysphere suspended in the Mariana Trench (north of Papua New Guinea) eight miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean and living entirely on a diet of raw cabbage and crème de menthe and the whole thing broadcast live on a dedicated tv channel. .
But I am quibbling. This is such a nice book. I love it when people set themselves rigorous challenges and then stick to them. There are a few music blogs I follow, for instance Popular (http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular) where gradually every British number one record is being eruditely reviewed & analysed; and My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection (http://alltherecords.tumblr.com/) which speaks for itself and is a lot of fun. In novel reading, some people dedicate themselves to reading all of the 1001 Books You Have To Read Before Dawn Or You Will Die, Ha Ha Ha. Phyllis Rose’s self-challenge was the OPPOSITE of the 1001 books challenge. The point of it – to read through a whole shelf of books at her local Manhattan library – was to avoid all the mediation which usually comes between the book and the reader. These books were chosen by the alphabet, not by reviewers or awards committees or critics or friends, the usual way books come to us. Phyllis calls it “off-road reading”. I love the idea. However…..
THERE’S A GIANT FLAW
which Phyllis herself reveals apparently unwittingly (but how could that be, Phyllis is the most witting of companions). It is this : how did the books get on to the library shelves? All is revealed on p 138, in my favourite chapter, all about space in libraries, no, not science fiction Space but that very vital kind of space, shelf space, which keeps librarians waking up in the night with a shriek as they have another dream about coming to the end of their shelf space and falling falling falling with all their friends and family and pets into the abyss of infinite forgetting. So in a library there is a head of acquisitions, and a team of jolly helpers, and they sift through all the reviews & critics &NYRB and all of those things. They also respond to reader requests – if a book is requested by 3 people, they’ll get it. (Hint – you and two friends can totally rule your library acquisitions, but you’ll probably need to change your identities every 9 months or so).
Boosted by reviews, prizes, large sales, word of mouth, or personal recommendations, a novel may make its way on to the library shelf
Says Phyllis. So... there are all the same “mediators” who she was trying to avoid by this systems-based reading, but they are one step removed.
LOOKING OUT OF MANY PAIRS OF EYES
And so it begins, in South Africa, arbitrarily (One for the Road by Etienne Leroux), then into the Caucasus (A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov), to Paris for The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, off to Quebec for The Habitant-Merchant by James LeRossignol…. It’s a time-travelling travelogue, The Shelf is The Tardis, Phyllis is Doctor Who – but, unless you stick rigidly to one kind of book or a teeny group of writers, that’s what novel reading is for all of us; & so The Shelf reflects back to us the Joy of Fiction, and Why We Do It.
LIKE A PERFECT CONVERSATION
All manner of great stuff is uncovered as Phyllis the Hungry Caterpillar eats her way through The Shelf. Many questions come bounding towards us – including -
How accurate should a translation be? (Nabokov translated A Hero of Our Times, and he thought Lermontov’s prose was dreadful, full of hackneyed phrases, so he rendered it into hackneyed English; in fact he beat up Lermontov’s novel so badly in his multitudinous finger wagging and censorious footnotes, that Phyllis had to immediately read another translation to get Vlad out of her brain)
Every reading of a book is the creation of a new book. Every reading is a misreading.
Why did this author suddenly stop publishing? (This was Rhoda Lerman – Phyllis tracked her down & found she was fully devoted to running a breeding kennel for Newfies (Newfoundland dogs) and had become a New Ager; and this was also Lisa Lerner, who published Just Like Beauty in 2002 which PR loved and then nothing – again, PR tracks her down (it’s easy with the internet) and finds out – Lisa says “I never intended to write a novel, I was a performance artist” – and now she’s a scriptwriter, because there’s maybe some actual money in that)
How much damage does a bad review do? (PB looks at his shoes and mumbles “aw, hardly any”)
Followed by : what are online amateur reviewers doing to books? (GR doesn’t get a mention but she has great fun with one Amazon reviewer who five-starred God’s Ear by Rhoda Lerman and also reviews shoes:
I hate to say it but this shoe is dreadful… I put them on and within moments there were painful pressure points on my feet. I took off the shoes and my feet had red marks where the pressure areas were literally ‘killing’ me
(What can we say to this poor Amazon reviewer? That she should have tried a larger size? That she also doesn’t know what literally means? )
and, our final question,
What is CREW and MUSTIE? (well, those deserve a paragraph unto themselves)
THE DARK SIDE OF LIBRARIES : CREW AND MUSTIE
CREW = Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding, yeah, that’s right, throwing out books!
MUSTIE is how you decide if a book should be crewed.
M = misleading (more relevant to scientific books, but I would certainly class all novels by Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade as misleading about various important issues)
U = Ugly! I.e. this book is worn out!
S = superseded (there is a new better edition we should buy)
T = Trivial (this one is controversial; one person’s Spot the Dog is another person’s superstring theory
I = Irrelevant (to the needs to the community the library serves)
E = Elsewhere, as in, can this be found elsewhere, such as on the web, in the Gutenberg Project, etc According to Phyllis, this is how those librarians roll. Terrifying.
JODI PICOULT
Well, she wasn’t on The Shelf but Phyllis keeps running into her, as it were, for one reason or another, and figures she should read at least one of her novels, so she looks up the interview with Ellen DeGeneres on youtube and reports back :
In her mid-forties, she wears her long reddish hair unstyled, in loose curls. She has a pretty face and makes a lovely impression although (or perhaps because) she is slightly overweight and not especially well-dressed. She is totally comfortable on television and speaks in contemporary uptalk.
I was not au fait with that expression, but helpfully Phyllis illustrates the Jodi style of speech:
I worked on Wall Street? But the stock market crashed? That was probably a good thing for me?
So that’s contemporary uptalk. May it die screaming.
IF YOU LIKE THIS THEN YOU’LL LIKE THAT
I could go on and on, this was a completely delightful book which I recommend to all of you lovely people. Every person on this site will enjoy this book! Guaranteed!
(I may mention that there is another less well known book-about-books, called Reading with Oprah, by Kathleen Rooney – if you love The Shelf you’ll love that one too. It’s another system-based reading challenge – Kathleen reads all of Oprah’s book choices and contemplates wittily what her famous book club has done to America – Highly recommended too!)
AND NOW
Back to my own personal Shelf, and some reinvigorated munching. ...more
The best things in life are free But you can give them to the birds and bees I need Manny (that's what I want) That's what IWHAT I SAY IN PUBLIC IS THIS:
The best things in life are free But you can give them to the birds and bees I need Manny (that's what I want) That's what I want (that's what I want)
Your reviewing gives me such a thrill I read them all and I never feel ill I need Manny (that's what I want) That's what I want (that's what I want)
Manny hasn’t read everything, it's true But what he ain’t read, I can't use
Manny! (that's what I want) Lot's of Manny! (that's what I want) A whole big truck load of Manny! (that's what I want) Oh yeah, that's what I want!
BUT WHAT I AM REALLY THINKING IS THIS :
I read all night, I write all day, to get your votes, this is the way Ain't it sad But still he gets more votes than me – this is the way That's too bad
Manny, Manny, Manny he’s so funny In this Goodreads world Manny, Manny, Manny Always sunny In this Goodreads world
Aha-ahaaa All the things I could do If I was like Manny That would be canny
I’d understand Sir Stephen Hawking Babes with specs would all be gawking I’d fly around the world in jets Accompanied by Penthouse Pets And fluent in all languages And eating foie gras sandwiches And giant tomes on superstrings Would be one of my favourite things And when Obama has no solution For health and wealth redistribution He tells his staff it’s a no brainer They have to call up Manny Rayner Ah-haaa Mmm-hmmm
At first I couldn’t really see the point of entering all your Unfortunately necessary postscript added
***
In Manny's foreword he writes about Goodreads
At first I couldn’t really see the point of entering all your books on an internet database, writing reviews of them, and comparing them with reviews other people had written . . . but, remarkably quickly, I found I had become an addict. I have now posted well over a thousand reviews…. So what is the point, you may ask? I’m not quite sure I can explain, but let me try. Your first reaction, if you’re a sensible person, is that it’s silly: how can you possibly think of something new and interesting to say about Hamlet, or Jane Eyre, or even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? But every person reads the book in their own way and has their own associations; to themselves, to the people they know, to other books they’ve read. Writing about a book is a way of writing about your whole life
How true this is. So perhaps this is a good moment to ask what Goodreads is and what it has been doing for the last few years. Which is to say what we have been doing. Or haven't.
For me there are two big things we aren't
1) we aren't professional – the pros come in two sizes, the professional reviewers who you read in the Sunday papers or in the LRB/NYRB; and the lit crits. The first lot are I think getting worried by all this online reviewing. I've read a couple of articles asking if they have a future – why trust a professional reviewer who you know is a novelist moonlighting for extra dosh as a reviewer of novels written by people she might well have had … lunch with that very day - why not trust a fellow reader with no axe to grind? As for the lit crits, you have to have a gun at your head to read most of them.
and
2) we aren't Amazon - there are still many great reviews on Amazon but it isn't a community, and strangely, patchily, goodreads is. I've noticed there are almost no idiots on goodreads whereas you can't move on Amazon for grossly misspelled ranting by people who don't get out much.
More from Manny :
I don’t want to make exaggerated claims for Goodreads. Like all social network sites, it’s a tremendous time-waster. People have bitchy conversations and fight for meaningless status rewards (there is intense competition to see who receives most votes for their reviews).
Also true. I've even written one review in the form of a begging letter for more votes. And given the enormous popularity of YA and romance fiction unsurprisingly the famous Top/Best lists are sclerotically clogged with YA/romance lovers and the all time best reviews list constipated with Twilight parodies which will remain there until goodreads freezes over. So the lists are only partially useful/fun. In chart terms there have always been R&B charts, dance charts, folk charts, country charts (no one buys enough jazz for them to bother). GR could do with YA top 50s, romance top 50s and SENSIBLE top 50s. What we have at the moment is democracy gone mad.
The vote-grabbing does tend to tempt certain persons into bad ways, though, it must be admitted. My third-most popular "review" is of New Moon, just some cute things Georgia (daughter aged 12 at that point) said about the books and the movies. I have no intention of reading New Moon but I knew people would like to read her observations and they did. And sometimes I think all I do is comedy reviews, which isn't good, or reading something because I think I can get a funny review out of it, which is worse. I should delete those. You can see some people flogging themselves to do a really thoughtful piece on some big serious history book and getting three votes. Must be disheartening.
I'd take issue with Manny about time-wasting, however. Was it a waste of time for him to take the idea of the Celebrity Death Match and transform it into the surreal caravanserai of readerly lunacy it became last year? No – who would not want to reead about Jane Eyre beating down Winnie the Pooh and leaving him stuffed half in and half out of a storm drain?
And in general, speaking for myself, I was always a big reader but I never liked the chocolate-box aspect of reading, just gobbling up one book after another. I like to discuss and debate the thing of words which just passed through my brain. I like to figure it out if I can. But I don't know anyone in real life who also likes to do that. Or if I do, they're reading other stuff. And book clubs don't work for me either because they have so many rules – you have to read a book everyone agrees to – but I only want to read the books I want to read when I want to read them. Is that unreasonable? No! On goodreads someone is always reading the book I'm interested in. Imagine if you're living in a foreign country, you don't speak the language, you're walking along the streets of the capital city, you turn down an unfamiliar road and there sprawled out across the pavement is one of those loud shouty cafes full of people who not only speak your language but grab you and sit you down and buy you a drink and tell you their latest theory about Bram Stoker. That's what this place is like. Something like that.
Oh yes, and Manny's book is really good, but you know you can read all that stuff for free online. Don't tell him I told you.
**
this was written before the GR minnow was swallowed by the blue whale of Amazon, and so point 2 above rings a little hollow now - but still, I'm in the blandly optimistic "they won't kill the goose that laid the golden egg" frame of mind at the moment. ...more
What distinguishes humans from animals? Some say it’s a sense of humour. But I saw two squirrels the other day telling each other jokes and laughing fWhat distinguishes humans from animals? Some say it’s a sense of humour. But I saw two squirrels the other day telling each other jokes and laughing fit to burst. And only yesterday my neighbour told me his dog Claude is getting pretty big on the stand-up circuit. So I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s that some humans would rather die than be caught reading the latest novel by Jodi Picoult. That’s what makes us essentially human.
Kathleen Rooney writes in a very captivating manner, stepping neatly from egg-head observations* into excited girl-fan admissions and from academic rigour to the conversational** . Mostly she’s brisk and witty and negotiates huge cultural controversies with an adroitness I wish I had a quarter of. I was sorry to take my leave of her.
What this book is about is giant issues of sex, class, education and taste all rammed through the concentrating lens of the thing called Oprah’s Book Club – in KR’s words “the reasons behind the cultural unrest surrounding this mother of all book groups”. And what a fascinating knot of complication it is, too.
KR : “it behooves us to try to understand why we, as individuals, experience such powerful inclinations to embrace certain artistic and cultural phenomena while rejecting others.”
Well, let’s see.
PB’S ANATOMY OF ALL THE BOOKS THERE EVER WERE
1)There are highbrow books (which may be good or bad) - Example : Ulysses, good; Finnegans Wake, bad)
2) There are middlebrow books (which may be good or bad) - Example : The Poisonwood Bible, good; The Cider House Rules, bad)
3) There are lowbrow books (which may be good or bad) – example : The Killer Inside me (good); Flesh Gothic (bad)
But hold on…. can those words good and bad be applied to books at all? There’s no such thing as “taste”, the republic of books is democratic – if anyone tells me this or that book is essentially good or bad and I must – must! – agree with them I say fie! Fie! I fling your opinion back in your pink startled craw – monster! I reject this outrageous imposition of arbitrary value on a book!
And yet … speaking personally, I think I have perfect taste. Here’s what I think :
1) there are books I think are good which most people also think are good (which reinforces my opinion and makes me sure I’m right) Example : The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
2) there are books I think are good which most people think are actually bad ( but I know what’s what and they’re all idiots) Example : A Canticle for Leibowitz
3) there are books I think are good which are actually bad (but when I say good, I don’t mean good good, I mean many things, such as so-bad-it’s-good, or so sleazy it’s good – I realise that Pringles and Galaxy Caramel isn’t haute cuisine) Example : Interview with the Vampire
Corollary of this is :
there are books I think are bad which most people also think are bad, and ditto ditto as above, ending with
there are books I think are bad which are actually good (which fills me with anxiety – am I not as smart as I thought I was? this too-clever stuff makes my brain hurt) Example : Darconville’s Cat or Wittgenstein’s Mistress
And behind this kind of interrogation of personal taste there is a conviction that:
there are good books
and
there are bad books
or more explicitly
there are intrinsically good books – also known as great literature
there are intrinsically bad books – also known as worthless rubbish
Can all that be true? The very idea of literary “taste” implies that your judgement is subjective, and yet those who think they have “taste” (meaning “good taste”) don’t think their idea of a good book is subjective at all, they think that the books they think are good really ARE good, no arguments allowed.
THE OBC : THE CASE FOR
Oprah has never figured in my world but I knew she was a phenomenon. When I bought We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates it came with an OBC sticker on the cover. I did not realise the significance of the sticker. Here are the facts.
The first phase of OBC ran between September 1996 and April 2002. One book was chosen more or less each month “and in an industry in which only a few novels sell more than 30,000 copies, those recommended by Winfrey routinely sold a million or more…Oprah’s endorsement of any title meant a minimum of 500,000 extra sales.”
As the OBC became the mightiest power in the land of American literature, it also became “a crucible for the heated clash between high and low literary taste”.
Disclosure : Of the 45 novels chosen in this first phase of OBC I have read six (She’s Come Undone, A Virtuous Woman, The Poisonwood Bible, We were the Mulvaneys, The Corrections and A Fine Balance) and they were all good or great except Wally Lamb, which wasn’t.
Kathleen Rooney read the whole lot and concluded that there were 5 unreadable ones, 5 dreadful ones, and the rest were good or great. So in her opinion (which is worth having) Oprah was directing her vast, vast army of fans towards good stuff, mainly. The OBC was a terrific force for good. It got millions reading who hadn’t touched a book for 15 years (i.e. since they had to). So… that’s agood thing, right? What was the problem?
RAINING DOWN ON OPRAH
“the club’s selections were too depressing, too woman-orientated, too bourgeois, too middle-brow, too self-helpy”
“Winfrey, then, via her simplistic How did this book make you feel? approach, habitually represented genuinely good novels as little more than self-help texts to be consulted in her ongoing treatment of all that ails America”
it was thought to be “a cheesy, sentimental, middlebrow institution”
“if you’re that popular, the thinking goes, if you speak to the masses, you can’t possibly be saying anything too intelligent”
Jonathan Franzen : “she’s picked some good books, but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself”
Jonathan Franzen: “ Beginning the next night in Chicago I’ll encounter two kinds of readers in signing lines. One kind will say to me, essentially, ‘I liked your book and I think it’s wonderful oprah picked it’ and the other kind will say ‘I liked your book and I’m so sorry Oprah picked it’”
KR : “Franzen left a trail of anti-Oprah comments like a swimmer bleeding carelessly in the ocean”
Some writers “feel that their books are being read by the wrong people, i.e. housewives from Oklahoma who don’t know SoHo from TriBeCa and worse, don’t care” (Jonathan Yardley)
Description of Oprah’s choices ; “penny dreadfuls for the Therapy Age”
“the Oprah list offers us that rather ominous thing : not a world without pity but a world composed of nothing but” (Tom Shone)
“you just can’t bear another inspiring yet oh-so-depressing tale of a single mother whose daughter is kidnapped or worse but who works through her pain and finds strength in the midst of tragedy” (Bill Ott)
Title of Wall Street Journal article on OBC : “Read them And Weep – Misery, Pain, Catastrophe, Despair… and that’s Just the First chapter”
IN CONCLUSION OR THIS REVIEW WILL JUST GO ON AND ON
Kathleen Rooney says in effect that the OBC did a great thing in the worst possible way.
“Winfrey consistently interpreted the books of the OBC not as literary novels but as so many self-help texts. Winfrey damaged these complex, sophisticated narratives of her own choosing by treating them as corollaries to her program’s doctrine of mindless American optimism… such a reductive and sentimentalizing approach – one which told people only that it’s good to read, not necessarily that it’s even better to be thoughtful about it – could hardly be expected to teach people to be careful, contemplative, discriminating readers. And indeed it didn’t.”
MORAL OF THE STORY
Yes it’s true – we live in a world where no good deed goes unpunished.
* There’s a chapter where she uses the words “othering” and “positionality” and I had to look those up.
** e.g. “if I may flog this OBC as recently deceased loved one metaphor just one final time…” ...more
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