Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including a love letter to the secretive literary sensation of the moment, Elena Ferrante, reads for runners, and a journey following DH Lawrence’s footsteps in Sardinia.
Audrey Schoeman followed Oranje14’s recommendation and read My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante:
[...] and I’ve fallen head over heels in love. I liked it so much that I can hardly form a coherent sentence about it, but apparently it’s oft recommended but the recommendation is rarely substantiated so I will have to have a go. There are some more comprehensive thoughts on my blog here, so this is the short version.
First up, I think the truly terrible cover, combined with the fact that this is a book by a woman about a friendship between two girls, puts a lot of people off. Please be reassured – although there is a wedding in the story, this is a book about two precociously bright girls struggling to break out of the confines of a life of poverty and violence, and not a novel where marriage equates to a happy ending. Ferrante has captured the intensity of childhood friendships – their all-consuming nature, the passions and the near romantic obsession – brilliantly. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about children which has evoked childhood so clearly without ever dropping into childishness.
[...] I feel like I can’t do any kind of justice to this book. I wish I could be more eloquent, or knew more about literary criticism, but all I can do is very strongly suggest that you get hold of it yourself.
hvadaltsaa is reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot – and had to change formats halfway through:
I started reading this via ebook on my computer, then via Gutenberg on my phone but nothing is more satisfying that the old school method of reading a book (even though they almost cost the price of a theatre ticket). Cuts out all the technological issues like phone batteries dying in the middle of a sentence. Almost feel like wearing gloves though because I don’t want to ruin the cover.
Vogelmonade recommended the New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant Please:
A great tragicomic graphic memoir depicting one woman’s perilous struggle of coping with her ageing parent’s steadily increasing geriatric problems and needs for assistance. Sad, thoughtful, hilarious, melancholic and a great read. A journey through a changing parent-child relationship, whose problematic nature is never shrouded and always depicted realistically, in a way that might be described as gentle comical realism.
chameleon recommended Why We Run: A Story of Obsession by Robin Harvie:
He talks about his love of ultra running, how this led to a better understanding of himself and his relationship with those around him. His obsession lead him to attempt the Spartathlon, the dreaded 152 mile continuous race from Athens to Sparta. He speaks of how running extreme distances brings him to a new understanding of himself and his connection to the physical world. He also speaks of how difficult it is to convey this realisation to those who have not experienced it.
And BerlinBirdie followed suit:
I’m absolutely not a runner and not interested in being one – but adored Born to Run by Chris Mcdougall. You may have read it already, but if not, you might want to give it a go. It’s the only thing I’ve ever read that made me feel I might start running (for about 15 secs)!
Peter Law-Jones shared:
I’m reading In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower, volume two of the Penguin translation of Proust’s masterpiece. There’s something about a novel on this scale, with its own rhythms and grand themes, that is utterly spellbinding. One feels awestruck in the face of his dissection of identity.
TimHannigan kicked off a fascinating conversation about the travel and nature writing genres and publishing:
Once upon a time – circa 1996 – travel literature was enjoying a publishing boom. At that time, any moderately well connected person with a working understanding of the book trade – a mid-ranking metropolitan journalist, or a junior editor in a publishing house, for instance – could say, “I’m taking a few months’ leave and going to Central America; I don’t speak Spanish, and to be honest, I’ve never been much of a traveller, but could I have an advance please?” Chances are, the answer would be in the affirmative.
The books they produced – usually subtitled “Travels in XXX”, “A Journey in Search of YYY”, or “In the Footsteps of ZZZ” – weren’t actually bad, as such. They understood the genre, its required clichés and formulas. Generally, thanks to their background, they could write perfectly proficiently, if rarely with much proper sparkle. But they hardly added anything to the sum of literary achievements; their books fuelled the bloating of travel literature, and that bloating almost certainly contributed to the fact that, around the turn of the millennium, its tide began to retreat, leaving only a flotsam and jetsam of comedy quests and TV tie-ins, a few legacy attractions (Paul Theroux and Colin Thubron) permitted to ply the scenic routes on summer days, and a very occasional commissioning editor’s anachronistic indulgence (“A travel book! We’ve not commissioned one of them for ages!”)
These days, however, that same writerly demographic – well connected, understanding the industry, wanting to “write a book” but lacking either the inclination or the wherewithal to pen a novel – has a new option. What they now say is “I’m taking a few months leave, and I’m thinking of going walking in the Lake District. I’ve never been much of a one for the outdoors, and I live in North London, but I think I did a school project about ponds when I was eight, so I could probably spin something out of that. Or deer, maybe; I’ve got a few books out of the library about deer. Can I have an advance?”
I wish commissioning editors wouldn’t say yes to them. They are bloating the “new nature writing” genre in exactly the same way that they bloated the old travel writing, and surely propelling it faster than needs be towards its inevitable demise. See the full comment, and the whole discussion, here.
Interesting links about books and reading
- Bookstores Won’t Go the Way of Video Stores: Let’s hope so – for now, this piece on Electric Literature is convincing.
- In Praise of the Book Tower: on clutter, collecting, and the infinite stack. Need we say more? Susan Harlan, a collector who lives in this amazing “unabashedly stuff-oriented” house, making us feel better about our book messes, on Literary Hub.
- At 96, Poet And Beat Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti Isn’t Done Yet: an absolutely heartwarming NPR audio story about the Beat publisher and City Lights bookshop co-owner Ferlinghetti, who has a busy summer ahead – he is publishing three books this year. Long may he continue!
- Internet Poetry: Is the internet, by warping our methods of reading, forcing modern poetry to bend itself in a certain shape? A piece by Northern Irish novelist and poet Nick Laird.
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The Frightening and Wondrous Things That Will Happen to You When You Publish Your First Novel: “I mean, do you think you’re as talented as Faulkner and Hemingway?” By Rufi Thorpe on Medium.
If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.
And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.
