I scored these two very shiny and pretty cookbooks for a fiver at Oxfam Dalston:
Heston’s Fantastical Feasts by Heston Blumenthal, and Creole by Babette de Rozières. I bought the Blumenthal book mostly because it has instructions on how to make lickable wallpaper, a la Willy Wonka. But I am more excited about the Creole book, described as a “colourful and sumptuous celebration of West Indian Creole cooking”.
Just a bit of a preview before adding the to the towering pile of books next to my bed – aren’t the pictures luscious? Can’t wait to make some of the sweet dishes from the Creole book, like coconut flans with caramel, and try some traditional Guadeloupean ti’punch – a white rum and lime mix.
“The most powerful, eloquent moments on screen require no verbal description to create them, no dialogue to act them. They are image, pure and silent.” - Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee.
It may sound odd coming from a book teaching you to write but it’s true. Show not tell. The Piano comes to mind.
There has been a lot of hoopla around Erin Morgenstern’s début novel – The Night Circus. After seeing many glowing reviews I was keen to read it myself, and even more so after hearing the book started life as a National Novel Writing Month manuscript. NaNoWriMo, as it is lovingly called, and is an annual challenge to write a 50,000 word first draft in the month of November (it’s a fun experiment and as my friend Rebekah said – it’s excellent for turning off the inner critic).
Last night I finished reading The Night Circus, and to my surprise felt very conflicted. I adore the premise – immersive experiences really float my boat. And the book is stuffed with gorgeous imagery – think ice gardens, a living carousel, paper birds and other transcendent illusions. I have no doubt that this story will be translated for the screen.
But when it comes to mechanic like character and plot, it is a rather clunky story. This thorough Amazon review cites a lot of grammatical errors that will make you frown, and the use of first person present tense makes you feel like you’re leafing through a child’s choose-your-own-adventure. While Harry Potter is technically for younger readers, as a 25-year-old I can still read the series and feel satisfied. Likewise with Meg Rosoff’s fantastic How I Live Now. I don’t feel this with The Night Circus.
The plot staggers around the world like a drunk, flipping from dull character to character. And like some drunks, it’s got a bit of a paunch. It just didn’t feel fully polished and the middle of the books sags. Writers, if you’re concerned about your weight, Kat Asharya has written an excellent piece on fictional Flabby Middles and How To Tone Them.
Once you’ve spewed your dreams on paper and have that shitty first draft down, it’s time to re-vision the work. It’s important to edit, edit, edit and when you’ think you’re done, put it away for a month before editing some more. Various writing tutors I’ve met over the years always say hard work is where the magic lies. I really wanted to love The Night Circus. To echo countless parents around the globe – I’m not angry, just disappointed.
I went on a book buying binge yesterday afternoon from the comfort of my kitchen table. Here are the books I now have lined up on my Kindle to read. It’s an odd mix… a little bit like October.
Life by Keith Richards
Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
London Fields by Martin Amis
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (it’s free for Kindle!)
When we left the restaurant, the sky was a brilliant splash of colours. The kind of air that felt like if you breathed it in, your lungs would be dyed the same shade of blue. Tiny stars began to twinkle. Barely able to wait for the long summer day to be over, the locals were out for an after-dinner stroll around the harbour. Families, couples, groups of friends. The gentle scent of the tide at the end of the day enveloped the streets.
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (rereading this – one of my favourites)
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I’m reading it right now – so far, so good! It’s set in a not too distant time, and I love this musing on the ‘evolution’ of language:
Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words – ‘friend’ and ‘real’ and ‘story’ and ‘change’ – words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like ‘identity’, ‘search’, and ‘cloud’, had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had ‘American’ become an ironic term? How had ‘democracy’ come to be used in an arch, mocking way?
(Don’t worry, the rest of novel is not all as earnest as this – it’s a bit more sardonic.)
I am a bookish girl, and nothing pleases me more than libraries, notes in margins and the smell of binding glue. But recently I was given the super lovely gift of a Kindle
(thanks Ma & Pa!) – and now I’m a convert.
{My Kindle, snug in its blue case – the device itself powers a light in the case!}
Why I love my Kindle:
- All the hits, for free. I HEART HEART HEART that most of the classics are available for free. Doing some top-level math, the cost of a kindle would be covered by just a tiny stack of Penguin Classics. So far I’ve read Pride & Prejudice, Little Women and Anna Karenina, without trotting down to the library.
- Space (and back) saving. It lets me cut down on the space required to store my belongings. Currently most of my possessions is books… and moving house is painful. Books are heavy! With the Kindle I can store hundreds in my satchel.
- DIY magazines. You can push long articles from the web to your Kindle to read later as a separate ”book”. A Chrome extension gives you this ability with just a click. I am looking forward to making my own awesome magazines to read on flights and more.
- Freedom to connect. I got the 3G model, which seems superfluous in the age of wi-fi. But should I ever make it to the backwaters of Borneo again, I’ll never spend hours searching for an internet café. A 3G Kindle will let me check email and the web (albeit slowly) from anywhere on the planet.
Books I have lined up to read:
- Here She Comes Now (3 short stories) by Chad Taylor. ‘Here She Comes Now’ is a collection short stories about modern relationships and family tensions, with a focus on dialogue. The author’s 2004 novel, Electric is one of my favourite New Zealand books.
- Do the Work
by Steven Pressfield. A productivity guide aimed at writers, based around the Art Of War. How could I resist?
- Just Kids
by Patti Smith. Just Kids chronicles Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s time in New York before they found fame. I’m sure many of you have read this already and you’ll agree, it’s captivating. I am half way through it already and I don’t want it to end.
- The Wasp Factory: A Novel by Iain Banks. I have read some of the science fiction, and rather like his 2003 novel Dead Air. A friend recommend this book to me as “life changing”, and I can’t think of higher praise than that.
I think at this stage the Kindle and I are entering into a long-term relationship, but if I fall in love with a book, or appreciate its design aesthetic, I’ll probably buy a hard copy. Or should I happen to drift into a second-hand bookstore, I’m sure I’ll emerge with a bag full of new-to-me books.
Anna Karenina. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I always got the plot of this book mixed up with the life of one Anna Karina.
Currently cracking into Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. It’s the next read at Book Club For Drunks, and I look forward to gleefully yakking about it with my tipsy comrades.
Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics? Information is Beautiful’s David McCandless scraped the results of over 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100′s, from Oprah to some high-faulting lists. The cloud shows the consensus on what we must read. I always find it interesting how War and Peace still persists in these lists, despite the fact I am yet to meet anyone who’s read the thing. Get access to the full analysis here.
While the data is pretty cool in a cloud, I would love to see someone make a more vibrant graphic with the information. A book spine bar chart? Something to do with issues & rubber stamps? It could be a nice wee project.
My friend Leon recommended A Confederacy of Dunces to me. Which amuses me no end – the main character has a very similar hat to his. It was written by John Kennedy Toole and published in 1980, 11 years after the author’s suicide. It’s a chewy sort of book, full of awful characters and unpleasant medical upsets – valve strains and the like. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s good, but not pleasant. Will persevere.
Summer lets me zip through books at the speed of light. Post-festivities and pre-work, all you’ve got is a lot of time to sink back into the beanbag, sip ginger beer and flip through the pages.
It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. “Books” includes novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case.
From George Orwell’s rather grand Books v. Cigarettes essay. (This will come as a surprise to you all but…) I think the value lies in books. I love dipping in and out of favourite passages, and turning to people far more knowledgeable than I for advice. Books are definitely my vice. If only there were enough hours in the day to read all the ones I buy. Read the entire text here.
The posters for the four books we’ve read so far at Book Club For Drunks! This is a mostly-monthly book club I host for people who enjoy the fine combination of reading and drinking. As this combination sometimes impairs memories, we provide notes for each meeting detailing the author’s life, cocktail recipes, how the book starts and key liquor infused quotes. (If you’re interested in reading a PDF of these notes please email me.)
Up next is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel, The Great Gatsby:
F. S. F.’s a bit of a babe, don’t you think?
That’s a portrait of Charlotte Bronte – isn’t she a nineteenth century doll? Inspired by my recent visit to the Peaks District – where Char and her esteemed siblings grew up – I have just finished reading her 1847 novel Jane Eyre
. It feels like a grown up version of all those British adventure/boarding school books I devoured as a child. The plot is ridiculous (provoking many raised eyebrows) but moments of Victorian romance, proper etiquette, Gothic horror and orphan tragedy shine through! Recommended if you want something trashy yet pseudo-classic to read.
