Confessions...just confessions

Forgive me internet, for I have sinned. Yes, I have bought a book. In actual fact I have bought eleven books (eleven!) since resolving to stop, stop, stop buying books. I am a bad, book-buying person. There is a story, of course, isn’t there always? And perhaps once you’ve heard the story, you’ll understand why this one, slightly excessive, book purchase was in actual fact actually necessary.

So, a couple of weeks back I was in the supermarket doing the weekly shop, and my daughter came with me. I was pottering around the aisles when my daughter asked me if she could go and look at the stationery (there is a bit novelty eraser trend going on in her school right now) which I said was fine. So I carried on. I bought meat and cheese, I bought bread, I bought milk. I bought everything I needed and was ready to pay, but there was no sign of my daughter. Now as someone who is almost as addicted to stationery as she is to books, spending something in the region of thirty minutes in the stationery aisle isn’t really that odd, but all the same I was ready to go so I sought her out. And I found her, standing in the book section with a shiny new book in her hand and a hopeful little smile on her face. The conversation went something like this:

 

Me: what’s that you’ve got.

Her: (excitedly) it’s the new ‘How to Train Your Dragon Book’.

(context – since they watched a trailer for How to Train Your Dragon 2 at school, she’s been slightly obsessed with the whole series. My son had the first book and she read it in super-fast time. I think it’s the first book I’ve encountered her devouring...kind of like I do actually.)

Me: oh, interesting.

Her: can I have it? PLeeaaaase? (winsome smile)

Me: (inward dilemma. I am not buying books, not buying books for anybody. Not even gifts, that’s what I said. I am not buying books. I am not.)

 

And so we left the supermarket with a shiny new copy of the latest How to Train Your Dragon book, costing all of £3.50, in my ecstatic daughter’s hands.

That was the first one.

Then she devoured that one, and came to see me with the pleady eyes begging for the second book in the series, ‘How to Be a Pirate’. ‘No’, I thought. ‘I can’t get back into the terrible habit,’ and to my credit the first thing I did was check the book’s availability at the library. I would rather go to the library and I do love taking the kids there. No luck. Whilst there are copies, none were available and there were even reservations against them. I am able to wait, but for a nine year old waiting is never going to be a key strength. So I had a little look around the various bookshops and there are, of course, plenty of copies there and whilst I was browsing I came across a marvellous set which included the first 10 (ten!) books in the series at the meagre price of £30.

So that’s how I bought eleven books.

Encountering across a series of books that one of my kids was really interested in was an event I was not expecting. I have always had an unspoken rule that whilst I would balk at buying them toys or games or sweets, if they want a particular book they can have it. They rarely ask for books, it is not a daily occurrence but engendering a love of reading is something that I have always wanted to share with my children. It is a companion that walks with you through life, enriching it. I could have said no to my daughter, but there is a fine balance, I think, a tipping point which makes you a reader or not reader. I am always afraid of tipping the balance the wrong way, saying no at the wrong time. Whilst my principle of not buying books is a really good one, in this case it just felt wrong. My daughter is thoroughly enjoying the world of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, she is enthused and entranced by it. I have sinned, I broke my promise to the world, but in this case it was worth it to see her tucked up in bed at night destroying her eyesight with a good, good book.

So perhaps, dear world, I need to amend my vow and promise that I will not buy any books for myself. Which I haven’t, regardless of the temptation. Oh yes, I am desperate to read The Luminaries, and when The Goldfish, Donna Tartt’s new book, is released I will be itching to get my hands on a copy. If I do, it will come from the library. That part of my promise, I am keeping.

Confessions of a compulsive book hoarder...appreciating what you’ve got

I think I might have mentioned it, but halting my persistent quest for new books has had a few unexpected, and pleasant, side effects. I’ve rediscovered the wonder of the library, I’ve found a core of discipline and patience in me that I didn’t expect. And then, what would you know? In addition to all the wonderful things I’d already discovered there was still something new waiting to surprise me (and it wasn’t a book, honestly).

I have, you might not be surprised to learn, a fairly extensive library. I’ve spent a long time building up my book collection, and part of the reason for pausing the purchases was that my current bookcases are fairly bursting at the seams. I have three bookcases in total. One is built into a convenient alcove upstairs and that one houses most of my classics, my books of philosophy, my husband’s sci-fi collection (yes, he is permitted a little space) and a few children’s books I’ve held onto in the vain hope that one day my kids might read them (seriously, everyone should read The Dark is Rising Sequence. Everyone). Of course that is really the book case for the books no one actually wants to read (though now and again I will pop out a classic, just for fun). Then downstairs I have two book cases: one which is filled with the books I have read along with my ‘collections’, and the other stuffed with books I haven’t quite managed to read yet. They are both double stacked (inner row, outer row per shelf). I must have something in the region of 1,000 books packed in there.

It’s an awful lot of books, and yet for so long I have wanted more and more. Looking back, it seems strange that I was so desperate to acquire new books when I had so many fantastic ones already waiting to be read. Looking at my bookcases with these new eyes, the first thing I noticed was that in my ‘to read’ pile there are some amazing books. I finally got around to reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and it was beautiful. I read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, which a friend bought as a present for me, and it was marvellously sad. Discovering these hidden gems in my collection has made me excited to read more of them. I have War and Peace and Anna Karenina, A Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, October Light by John Gardner, about 12 books by Don DeLillo and a handful by J M Coetzee. I have books by Jeanette Winterson, Helen Oyeyemi, A. M. Holmes, The Wonderland Quartet by Joyce Carol Oates and a sampling of the wonderful books published by Persephone all neat in their classy grey and white coats. I have Shanameh (The Persian Book of Kings), Herodotus, The Mahabrhata, The Thousand Nights and One Night, Icelandic sagas. That’s just a sampling of the treasures sitting there waiting for me to read. It is surprising, thinking about all that is there, that I ever thought it necessary to read anything else.

And that’s not the end of it. Because alongside my ‘to be read’ shelf sits the shelf of ‘already have read and when the heck are you going to get around to reading us again’. Within my collection, my already read books, I have so many that I would love to read again: The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, everything by Helen DeWitt (though that is only 2), Ghostwritten and Number9Dream by David Mitchell, The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Mao II by Don DeLillo (I’m not completely obsessed, but close). It got me thinking about re-reading, and how I’d fallen out of the habit. As a child I used to read and re-read almost obsessively. It wasn’t necessarily due to lack of availability of new books, I used to go to the library every week. No, it was something else. Re-reading a book brings something out of it that the first read doesn’t. Something of the depth of it, the bits that you missed first time around. Then there’s even more to it. Re-reading a book, delving into it over and over, etches something of the story inside you, it becomes almost a part of you. There is something wonderful in being so familiar with a character, with a world, with an idea even that it becomes like a close friend, or family. You can return to it over again and it remain unchanged and yet, perhaps, you appreciate it differently because you have changed. In this way a story can show us, in ways few other things can, how we have evolved. At the same time, the story’s familiarity is comforting. It can connect us to the person that we were the first, second or even twelfth time we read it. It reminds me that only through practice do we become really good at things, and I think there are worse things to be than an artisan of Kristen Lavransdatter or The Tale of Genji, that there is no shame in repeating and repeating the reading of a book that you love. I think in this world of relentless newness, in which we are constantly encouraged to consume and move on, that the value of a deep, repeat reading is underestimated. It is something I know I have lost touch with. And yet I know that it is enriching, that a deep understanding of a particular work of fiction can provide a hidden, unexpected backbone to your life.

If you think about it, everything we know is a kind of story. My life as I know it is a story, one that changes both in real terms as I move forward but also in my history which I invent and reinvent entirely unwittingly. I overlay my life with other stories: my husband’s, my son’s, my daughter’s, my step-son’s, my mother’s, my work colleagues’, my friends’, people I pass in the street and acknowledge or don’t. I believe in the fiction of other countries and the history of mine, and the lives of people hundreds of thousands of miles away who I will never know and never meet but who, unknowingly, my story may touch upon. And then there are the story-spinners, the ‘shapers’, who tell and retell the stories of others, of heroes and villains, lovers and haters, and everything in between. That their stories touch us isn’t such an odd thing, but it is only through reading and re-reading that we really let them in. I do believe that doing so enables us to learn something true, not only about the story but about ourselves. Perhaps it is one of the ways we learn true empathy, that by caring about a person who we know not to be real it helps us to care more about the ones that are, whose existence may be separated from our own by streets or villages, countries or even worlds. Who knows? It is possible.

One thing I have learned for sure, I am in no hurry at all to finish Proust. I have every story I could ever need already under my roof. I am looking forward to becoming more intimately acquainted with some of them.

Really Great Books by Japanese Writers

Those of you who have been following my blog may have noticed that books by Japanese writers crop up reasonably often. I have a bit of a penchant for Japanese writers. A while ago, when I was lost in a reading desert, I happened upon a book called Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, and it reinvigorated my love of reading. I’ve since read the entire of Hurakami’s output and explored a bit further into the murky world of Japanese fiction. One of the things I love about Japanese fiction is how characters are never black-and-white, good or bad. Of course any decent writer should be creating deep and complex characters, but somehow the complexity, the shades-of-grey (and not in a E.M. James sort of way, which is exactly the opposite of what I’m talking about here) is more apparent in books by Japanese writers. They kind of ‘get it’, if you know what I mean.

There are fairly common themes in Japanese books, themes which seem to pervade the culture. Loneliness and isolation, disconnection: these themes appear regularly. The sense of duty against the rights, or desires, of the individual. Difficulties of love. Suffering. If you don’t like any of these themes then perhaps Japanese fiction is not for you, but somehow they always speak to me.

So if you’re interested in exploring Japanese writers, where do you start? Well, a great place to get a feel for what Japanese writers have to offer is the Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, which includes the output of generations of the ‘best’ Japanese writers and gives you a flavour of what to expect if you do decide to explore further. Or, if you’re feeling brave, you could trust my list below and just leap in. In my explorations, the following represent my favourite (and by definition the best) Japanese books around.

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

You can’t start a list of the best Japanese books and not mention Genji. Considered by some to be the first novel, this sprawling tale casts a curious eye on the 12^th Century Japanese court and the shenanigans of the ‘shining Genji’. And a tale that reminds us that whatever era you’re living in, life is never as good as it ‘used to be’. For a more complete review of Genji, read here: http://biis-books.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/tale-of-genji.html

Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

Kawabata is one of the cornerstones of the Japanese ‘canon’ (assuming there is such a thing, the idea of ‘canon’ always strikes me as peculiarly American and, perhaps, an inevitable fallout of the authority of Harold Bloom) and all of his novels are worth a read. Many people would mention here Snow Country, a story of beauty and decay. It is true that Snow Country is a marvellous novel, but for me Beauty and Sadness is my favourite of Kawabata’s work. This is a story of the terrible impact of young love, and how its breakdown can taint our lives resulting in catastrophic consequences.

The Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe

Everything written by Abe is odd and surreal, but none more so than The Kangaroo Notebook. A nightmarish story of a man who wakes to find radish sprouts growing out of his legs, and then embarks of a Kafkaesque journey into a dark underworld in which the barrier between what is real and what is imagined breaks down. Like Lewis Carroll on sake and LSD, this is a peculiarly Japanese surrealism which would probably make the most disturbing anime movie that anyone had ever seen. If surrealist fiction is your thing, you’ll love Abe. Also check out The Woman in the Dunes and The Box Man. Creepy.

A Dark Night’s Passing by Naoya Shiga

A reflective and sad novel following a young man with a dark secret from his family’s past hanging over him. Throughout his life, his bachelorhood and then his marriage, he is unable to shake this spectre of the past. A very Japanese take on depression, conveyed with directness (and yet obscurely – the Japanese are very good at this), clarity and honesty. A beautiful if sad story.

 

Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse

Ibuse’s terrifying novel follows the fortunes of some survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. If you ever read any novel about the effects of atomic weaponry, this should be it. Conveying the horror of the bomb and its aftermath in graphic detail, Ibuse manages to remain non-judgemental simply showing what happened and how it affected people. It is a more powerful novel for it. It is worth reading this either before or after John Hershey’s journalistic exploration of the same incident, Hiroshima. It is hard, here, to convey how excellent and essential this book is. Not easy reading, but worthwhile.

Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichiro Tanizaki

Tanizaki is known for this and its companion piece The Key (again, it’s worth reading these together), as well as the more conventional Makioka Sisters which I haven’t got around to reading yet. Using the diary form, Tanizaki explores the mind of an old, dying man obsessed with his daughter in law (and sex). Saucy and funny, yet kind of sad.

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima

I’ll say it here, I’m not a fan of Mishima. I know he is considered one of Japan’s greatest writers, but on the whole he leaves me cold. Last year I embarked on the full Sea of Fertility tetralogy which begins with Spring Snow and over the course of three following books explores the karmic cycle of death and rebirth. Of all the books in the tetralogy, Spring Snow was the standout piece (although if you’re interested in the book which, practically, fortells Mishima’s end then Runaway Horses is the one to read). Telling the story of forbidden, impossible love and the lengths to which one man will go to fulfil the impossible. At times frustrating, but in other respects a beautiful read.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

I think I mentioned this book before in my entry about books that are just plain nice. The Housekeeper and the Professor involves a woman who is housekeeper for the ‘professor’ a maths genius with a 45 minute short-term memory window. If you read it, I defy you not to end up with an unexpected interest in maths. I learned so much from this book about number theory, memory and relationships and it is, in short, a lovely read. An off-beat introduction to Ogawa whose usual fayre is dark, disturbing and may involve sexual violence. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Out by Natsuo Kirino

Speaking of dark, disturbing and sexual violence, Out by Natsuo Kirino is perhaps the pinnacle of what contemporary Japanese fiction does best. A downtrodden woman working in a factory offs her husband, and with the help of her equally downtrodden factory-worker friends they cover it up. But that’s just the start of their spiral into a darker, more forbidding world. Atmospheric, creepy and dark.

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami

Staying on the same theme, a man who gives tours around Toyko’s sex district finds himself on a tour with a sadistic killer. Some really disturbing stuff in this one, if you don’t like graphic crime novels then give this one a miss. I am still emotionally scarred by two pages in this book. Just thinking about it makes me feel a little sick (I am a wimp though, bear that in mind). If you enjoy the dark, seedy underworld, death, gore and dodgy sex then Ryu Murakami is probably the author for you.

Underground by Haruki Murakami

From one Murakami to another. I have read basically everything by Haruki Murakami, and he has written some excellent books (personal favourites being Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which equally has an extremely disturbing couple of pages that make you glad to still have custody of your own skin. Ugh) but as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to feel that Murakami, whilst good, is not a true great. His last novel 1Q84 had a great idea at its core, but it was flabby and overdone and his portrayal of the women in the book was sadly two dimensional, almost like a male fantasy of a woman (the main character spends a lot of time obsessing over her breasts and vagina). People have different views on what is Murakami’s best novel (I think this is undoubtedly Wind-Up Bird, but others would disagree) but of all his books the most affecting, the most compelling is this journalistic work of fact which centres around the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo underground. Murakami presents his interviews with the victims, family of victims and members of the Aum cult that carried out the attack. What comes from all these interviews is a chilling idea that given the same circumstances, most people would have done the same thing. It is terrifying, yet an honest portrayal of how people respond to authority.

And that concludes my list. I am sure there are some terrible omissions, writers that I myself haven’t yet gotten around to (I’m thinking Ooka, Soseki) and some deliberate (Taichi Yamada never did it for me, Banana Yoshimoto almost made the list but there’s something missing). What do you think? Have you encountered any truly great Japanese novels not mentioned on my list?

Confessions of a compulsive book hoarder...what I’ve learned: patience and willpower

It’s been six weeks since I bought a book. Six whole weeks. It is a long time since I’ve been able to make a statement as stark as that and it not be a lie; no hidden copies sneaked out of bags when no one was looking, no disguising new acquisitions as library books or borrowed copies. No books bought. Zero. Go me.

What’s been surprising about this whole process is quite how easy it has been. It seems that all I needed to do was make the decision and share it with the world and suddenly the appeal of Waterstones, The Book Depository, secondhand bookshops and Amazon instantly disappeared. Of course it is not quite that simple, but taking that first step has really been the boost that I needed. If I hadn’t posted it here, I would still probably be book buying like crazy.

I have been tempted, a few times. There have been books I have wanted to buy and I would have bought, certainly, if I hadn’t committed not to. I wanted, for example, a copy of the Shōbogenzo. I wanted to buy The Luminaries and The Lowland and finish my Booker shortlist reading. I wanted to buy, most recently, The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble after reading a glowing review about it on Twitter, but I didn’t and there was one day when I was feeling a bit knocked down and I could have bought any book at all just for the pleasure of its possession. I managed to stop myself, and in so doing I realised I didn’t need it.

That’s what I’ve been learning through this process. Oh, it’s not a true addiction, I can’t equate my experience to that of someone trying to kick smoking or drinking, trying to give up cannabis or heroin. My addiction is nothing like that, and perhaps it was wrong to call it an addiction at all. It was more of a compulsion, an impulse unfettered and subject to the vagaries of my whim. Silly really. Belittling as my issue is, I have learned the value of exercising a degree of self control and it has had some surprising effects on my attitude towards some other things. Because willpower involves taking a moment to stop and think, and asking myself: do I really need it? It is surprising how often the answer is no, how often I can achieve what I want to achieve by some other means.

I discovered this when I was trying to hold myself off buying The Luminaries which I really, really want to read (someone equated it to Twin Peaks meets David Mitchell and if that wasn’t dangling the carrot in front of my nose I don’t know what is). I even went into Waterstones and had a little read and it was so tempting just to walk up to the counter and buy it, it would have taken mere seconds. Then I stopped and thought about what I was doing. I realised I hadn’t explored all the possibilities. That night I fired up my computer and did a little searching and found it, easily, in the Lancashire library catalogue. They have three copies and against those three copies were thirteen reservations. I added another, and in clicking that little button all my desires, the oppressive need, evaporated. I knew I was going to read it eventually, and that was enough. That’s pretty much what happens anyway when I buy a book. Once acquired it goes onto the shelf and it can be days, weeks, months, years or in some cases decades (honestly) before I actually get around to reading it. So placing it on a waiting list and waiting until it turns up isn’t really so much different.

I was also really interested in a book called The Devotion of Suspect X, it was another staring balefully at me from my wishlist. Then someone at work bought it and offered to lend it to me. I waited patiently until they’d finished it and then I took it home and started to read it. 100 pages in, I gave up and gave it back. Had I bought it, it would have been wasted cash. Sure I could have swapped it, or given it away, but the expenditure would still have been made and I would be left holding a book that didn’t appeal to me. It got me wondering how many of the books currently sitting on my shelves, that I couldn’t wait to buy, will turn out to be the same thing: a disappointment. Hopefully not too many.

All this has made me realise a few things. The first is that patience is a good thing: it is worth waiting for something. In this instantaneous world in which we can satisfy our every whim at the click of a mouse, seemingly whether or not we actually have the money to pay for whatever it is, it is too easy to give in to temptation. The internet is, amongst many other things (some very valuable, don’t be mislead into thinking I think the internet is all terrible), a vehicle for facilitating impulse or reaction. I am not too sure this is a good thing. I think this ability to impulse buy, to push a button and have goods arrive in the post, disconnects us from the reality of what we’re doing. It’s all virtual. There is no shop, no shopkeeper. The buyer does not have to walk anywhere or carry anything. They look at pictures on a screen, select, click buy and the act of purchase is done but the reality of the thing only appears a few days later unless it’s an electronic copy of a book in which case it disappears seamlessly into your reading device. It’s like a game. Even the money is fictional, added to a credit card bill which may or may not ever be paid. They certainly don’t want you to. And who are ‘they’ anyway? They are virtual too. The virtual corporation, the virtual bank spinning their virtual money. What is not virtual is the person working in a factory somewhere churning out all this stuff, probably on the minimum wage or worse. But that person is so far removed from the process, you virtually do not have to think about them. It even extends towards criminal activity. Piracy is only virtual theft, and if you want a book or a movie or some music it’s okay to take it and forget about the person at the other end trying to make a living, because the corporation distributing it is virtually stealing too. And besides, it’s not even really worth anything. There is such abundance it all becomes meaningless, worthless, throw-away.

What worries me more about this culture of instant gratification is that it bleeds, in the worst way, into other things. The internet breeds disconnection, it can be terribly dehumanising. It is easy to forget that at the end of an angry or insulting tweet there is an actual person who can hurt and suffer. Underneath the mini-skirt is a living, breathing, thinking, feeling woman. The child in the photograph...well, let’s not go there. Indulging in anger, passion, righteousness, desire for that tiny millisecond can have such terrible consequences that a moment’s hesitation, a moment’s consideration, shouldn’t seems such a difficult thing to do. It should be natural, encouraged. Yet everything in this 24/7 world conspires to create the opposite; impulse becomes king, a tool to drive consuming. To hell with the consequences.  

Patience, waiting, is something that gives meaning to the things we have in our lives. Relationships are valuable because they are grown, with difficulty and effort, they withstand and grow stronger and become more important, essential, because of it. The same is true of material goods. A vegetable grown by your own hand is immeasurably better than that which has been mass produced, which you have merely had to part with a matter of pence to acquire. A cake made by your own hand may be less perfect than one bought from a shop, but the sense of achievement alone adds greater flavour. A trip of a lifetime is such because it happens only once in the length of a human existence, but if you took that same trip every week it would cease to mean anything, it would become like taking the train to work: routine, boring.

Then there is the creative power of working around your limits. Buying the book is the easy option, anyone can do it and books aren’t so expensive (collectible or academic works aside) that the average pocket can’t stretch to one. But not buying the book means I have to work around the problem if I still want to read it. I have to find another way. This process opens up a more creative way of thinking. I blogged about this before when bemoaning the changes to the MAN Booker Prize, but there is extraordinary value in limits. To surpass them requires effort, creative thinking, problem solving. Not buying a book is a tiny limitation, but the creative process it opens up has application in so many other aspects of daily life that it leaves me wondering how I could have allowed myself to slip, so easily, towards atrophy. How did I become so dull? Because it was easy, that’s the truth.   

Willpower, and the value of exercising it, is another thing I have learned to value. What is surprising about willpower is how applying it to one thing can affect your relationship towards others. Asking myself whether I really want to buy that book translates into whether I really want to buy that skirt or dress or DVD. It instantly makes me more conscious of where and how I spend my money and, more importantly, how I want to be in control of spending my money. If I really want something, I can wait and save up for it (except the fridge freezer, which broke last weekend and required an instant replacement. There are limits.). It made me realise how easy it is to fritter away cash on little impulse purchases: a coffee here, a CD there, a shop-bought lunch, a box of nice tea. Being able to stop myself from buying every book that passes my fancy has made me more confident about addressing other things that need willpower for me to succeed: a diet, perhaps, or exercising more, controlling family finances, walking to the supermarket rather than jumping in the car, knuckling down in my career, getting writing. When I commit to something, I want it to be valuable. I’m not entirely there yet, it’ll take work and more willpower and patience, but I’m working on it.

All because I stopped buying books.        

Playing tennis with the net down

Robert Frost famously said that writing [poetry] without form is like playing tennis with the net down, or something to that effect, and this saying has been on my mind ever since hearing about the change in the MAN Booker Prize rules. For a while now I have been following the MAN Booker Prize, and I had been hoping to make an annual feature of the MAN Booker Prize listed books in this very blog. But the recent announcement has left me feeling quite disenfranchised with the prize. Which is weird, really. After all, it’s not my prize, I am not associated with it in any way and the odds that I’ll ever write anything that could be in the running for it are so astronomical that there probably isn’t a number you could write in your lifetime that would represent it. Still, I feel let down.

Many of the newspapers have focused on the fact that the change in rules means that American writers are now in the running for the prize, and there’s been a lot of emphasis of this point as though there is such a slim possibility that a British or Commonwealth writer could compete with the Americans that we might as well call it the Washington prize. Or the Philip Roth prize, perhaps (though Roth leaves me totally cold, I really don’t understand the almost gleeful excitement there. Now DeLillo...that’s a different story). I am not sure where this terrible sense of inadequacy comes from. There are, indeed, many great writers from America as there are equally many great writers from UK and France and Brazil and China and Japan and so on including the vast and varied nations of the Commonwealth. It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the amazing talent that is out there in this ever-shrinking world and the idea that a literature prize could seek out the best book written in a single year is quite an exciting prospect. But that’s not what they’re doing with the MAN Booker prize. They’re not interested in finding the best book written in the world (cue Jeremy Clarkson impression), only the best book written in the English speaking world.

This is where that little phrase sticks in my head. One of the things I liked about the MAN Booker prize was that it was limited. The value of having limits is often underestimated and yet limits can encourage innovation, creative thinking; limits are the stuff that make life challenging. It made it interesting that the prize only applied to British and Commonwealth writers, and this limitation has opened my eyes to some writers I might not otherwise have encountered. Of course it doesn’t really matter what the nationality of the writer is, nationality is only a story we tell ourselves anyway, but the limitation allowed the prize to be focused in a way which could make its listings surprising and innovative. In making this small change, to focus on the best writing in the English speaking world, the MAN Booker prize is letting the net down just a little, not enough that you could make it into a different and perhaps more exciting game, but enough to spoil it.  I understand, and to some measure support, the MAN Booker team’s attempt to make the prize more global, to position itself as the pinnacle prize in the literary world. But that’s not what they’ve done. In limiting their extension to books written in English it makes it look like a cynical attempt to open the doors to American writers only, as though there is something important and terrible about their omission as opposed to the omission of Chinese or Chilean writers, and it also leaves me asking the question: why? And I can’t help but think that there’s cash somewhere at the bottom of this decision, that it is a marketing strategy, and as a reader and lover of literature that feels somehow intrinsically wrong. Or perhaps I am just paranoid.

I love books. I love discovering new writers. Over the years, the MAN Booker prize has helped me to do that. I can’t help but wonder whether this new MAN Booker prize will continue to do that or merely promote the interests of already known names, that the list will become less surprising and less innovative, and infinitely more predictable. What I do know is this: the net is down, the game is spoiled, and I no longer feel inclined to play. I know this disappointment is both silly and pointless; I know that my views affect the MAN Booker prize not the tiniest bit. I still feel like something powerful has been lost, and that's a shame. From now on I will need to look elsewhere for my new and wondrous writers. Perhaps that is a good thing.  

    

Harvest by Jim Crace

Continuing with the theme of Booker longlisted (now shortlisted) novels, I turned my attention to the bookies’ favourite: Harvest, by Jim Crace. Crace is a well established and widely lauded writer whom many think is overdue a Booker win (I might say the same about David Mitchell), but as the prize is awarded on the strength of the individual novel, does Harvest stand its ground or is its status as favourite largely influenced by Crace’s track record? As a virgin reader of Crace, I hoped to find out.

Harvest is an historical novel set in a small agrarian village, at an unidentified point in history.  The story is told from the point of view of Walter Thirsk, a widower who is, to all intents, an outsider who married in albeit some time ago. Although Walter counts himself amongst the villagers it soon becomes apparent that he is not as integrated as he wishes himself to be.

There is duplicity from the beginning. A fire destroys the master’s dovecote and part of the stable. Although Walter, and the villagers, know the fire to have been caused by three local lads high on hallucinogenic mushrooms the blame falls on a group of outsiders who have the misfortune to stake their own claim to a place in the village on the same night as the fire. Of the newcomers, the two men are punished with a week in the stocks and the woman, for whom all the men immediately harbour longings, has her head shorn. The verdict is considered lenient, and yet the villagers all know its severity being cognisant, as they are, of the newcomers innocence.

This is the beginning of their unravelling. They bring in the harvest and celebrate in the usual way, but something is amiss. One of the prisoners dies in the stocks, the master’s horse, Willowjack, is brutally killed in the night. The woman is missing. The field is not to be ploughed; instead, Master Kent confides in Walter that the land is no longer his, that his brother in law is coming to convert the village to sheep-keeping. A scribe, nicknamed ‘Mr Quill’, is brought in to accurately measure the shape of the village and reshape it to its new image. Walter is an outsider again. In the space of only a few days the town, as he knew it, and all his friends have disappeared.

Harvest is a short, terse and well constructed novel, verging on the claustrophobic. Crace is definitely an excellent writer, producing a technically fine novel which draws you quickly into this strange, yet strangely familiar seeming world. At the same time, it left me totally cold. I could see its technical skill, the artistry in its construction, but for me something critical was missing. It stirred no emotion in me. Considering the violence and decay present in the novel, there was something terribly muted about it all. The alleged passion for the new woman was empty. The connection to the village, also empty. The acts of violence against the townswomen, including the woman Walter Thirsk was secretly sleeping with, were presented as though through an obscuring veil which robbed it of its power. If Crace was aiming to produce a novel with a deadened sense of emotion to it, he certainly succeeded.

Overall, Harvest is a good novel, I can understand how it has come to be in the Booker shortlist and Crace is undoubtedly a masterful writer. But in the end it left me with the same feeling as a well constructed technical document. It was well written, well done, but without feeling. It didn’t really work for me.

Harvest receives a conflicted 7 out of 10 Biis.

Confessions of a compulsive book hoarder – rediscovering the library

Since I’ve not been buying books, I have been giving some thought to how I am going to satisfy my acquisitive nature without breaking my unbreakable vow. Since I have started Proust (yes, I have finally started) this thought has been rather more pressing as I am starting to realise that it will take me quite a long, long time to work my way through all 6 dense volumes. I am determined to stick to my plan, so I need alternatives and the most obvious alternative, the natural place for any book lover, is the library.

Glossop Library

I am very lucky, I know I am, because I have access to some very good libraries. It is shameful, really, that I haven’t been exploiting them to their full potential, particularly n the current climate where many libraries are under threat. The way to support your library is to use your library, I know this. And in the past I have been a big supporter of the library service. As a teenager I spent most of my Saturday mornings in the lovely library in Glossop, and I even did work experience there and it was marvellous. In fact I probably should have become a librarian and perhaps that would have prevented the bulging book shelves that I find myself lumbered with (as the most wonderful burden) now.  

When my children were old enough to hold a book, I took them to the library. I got them their own library card and we would go every 3 weeks or so, under the strict understanding that they didn’t get more than 12 books. It was always enormous fun flicking through the various boxes of books finding old favourites and new ones. Our local library is the one in Chorley, and often on a Saturday there would be organised activities like painting and colouring, and I remember how excited the children were the next time we visited and they found one of their creations on the wall. They loved self-scanning their books, or taking them to the counter and letting one of the library assistants scan and stamp them through, and they loved taking part in the summer reading challenges and collecting stickers and rewards, all complimentary and delivered with a real warmth and passion by the lovely librarians.

Chorley Library

 

Then we stopped going. I’m not really sure what happened, I’ve tried to pinpoint a particular reason but I can’t really figure what it is. I think, perhaps, that my children stopped wanting to go, they replaced their bookish adventures with more interactive ones: X-box, DS, the internet. Whilst I liked Chorley library, the only time I could really get there was a Saturday morning, and it was, at times, a bit of a pain with parking and such. All rubbish excuses, I know. For my own books, I started visiting Manchester Central Library, a glorious wonder-dome stacked with ramshackle shelves stuffed to bursting with a huge range of reading matter. Shelves and shelves of poetry, drama, literary fiction not easily locatable in the more provincial shelves at Chorley: Sartre, Saramago, Nooteboom. It was easier for me to visit, I could go in every day at lunchtime if I wanted and late returns were rare. My relationship with Central Library was something of a love affair. I would go there and scout the shelves, borrowing old favourites or maybe just browsing. Sometimes they would sell old stock, and I have a few treasures in my collection that came my way for a meagre 20p.

Manchester Central Library

Of course, as with so many love affairs, something went wrong. In this case, it was the renovation of Central Library. I honestly think that my buying habit stems back to the closure of that glorious building, all the way back in 2010. At the time the idea that the library could be closed for 3 years seemed inconceivable, it was so much a part of my daily existence. A new library opened on Deansgate, but it was so much smaller and a lot of the stock went into storage (or was pulped: the horror). Now those treasures were harder to find, the stock of poetry strimmed down to the bare minimum, the volumes on offer for 20p no more. There was something else missing from the new library. I am sure it is weird to call it a ‘soul’ but that’s what the old library had whereas this new one, nice as it was, was nothing much more really than a room with books in it. It wasn’t really a library, there was always something pop up about it, temporary. Now, on Monday, it is closing and the Manchester library is moving to an even smaller location, temporarily, until the renovated Central Library reopens in 2014. I am both excited and perturbed about the opening of the new library. I am hoping they do not strip the heart out of the building and turn it into one of those awful white marble operating theatres, all gleam and no substance (I am thinking of the horror post Manchester bombing when the developers turned the wonderfully warm and soulful Corn Exchange into that heartless hole that is the Triangle). I know it is just a building, but it is also much more than that. We stitch ourselves into these locations, they become a part of us and when they change, when what makes them special to us is gone, something is lost. It sounds silly, but that library meant a lot to me. It was a refuge, a sanctuary, an oasis of peace and calm to which I could retreat from the daily strains of my work. I am hoping that when it reopens it remains all of those things to me. I guess, in time, I will see.

In thinking about all of this I realised quite how much libraries have meant to me over the years, how in a world which is often so incomprehensible libraries have offered me meaning and understanding. Friendship, even. I have not often felt like I belonged, but I always felt that way in a library. No one watches over what you’re doing, no one judges your choices. You can spend however many hours there you want and you only get kicked out at closing time. It is quiet, but never oppressively so. People respect each other’s thinking time, their reading space, but no one complains if there’s a child squealing at something they’ve read or found, or running about with four books under their arms. It is a place where what they have to offer is knowledge, understanding, but it is never forced. You are, instead, allowed to discover it by yourself, in your own time and to your own agenda. If you want assistance, there is always a friendly librarian on hand to help and support you. Librarians are, on the whole, a friendly and warm bunch of people with a genuine love of books and reading. Their job is all about sharing, about helping people find and discover.

I think all of this makes me realise, too, how shameful it is that I allowed myself to lose that connection. Libraries have helped to bring meaning to my life and in return I turned my love of books and reading into an acquisitive greed, turning away from those places which had offered me so much without asking anything of me. But no longer. I am back to being a library-goer. I am taking my children too. They want to go (and that’s the best thing).

So, a couple of weeks ago, I found myself perusing the hallowed-halls of the Preston Harris Library, a lovely building with an adjoining museum which is surprisingly interesting and definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area. I took my daughter with me (my son was asleep, he was very grumpy when he found out we went without him). We were looking for a few things: The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin which I wanted to read as part of my Booker cycle (and have done, and will review though I haven’t written that one yet) and some books of poetry by Seamus Heaney whose death leaves a gap in the world of poetry that cannot be filled. I found almost everything I wanted, excepting a copy of the Shobogenzo, which I had seen in the catalogue but turned out to be book 4 so not much use until I’d read books 1 to 3. But still, it satisfied a need in me, and it reminded me that whatever books I want to read I can probably find them, eventually, at the local library. It only needs a little patience. I can be patient.
 

My book haul

Book lovers: support your library. They are often the unappreciated heart of local communities. A gathering place in which people can share knowledge, can learn, can develop new skills and interests. But libraries are under threat, and only boots through the door will change that. It is not just for people like me, the book hoarders, that libraries are an essential service. Libraries provide support for people who are unemployed, they provide computer skills lessons for the elderly and cheap access to the internet for those who can’t afford a home computer or broadband. They provide shelves of books about coping with cancer or bereavement or depression which you hope you will never have to read but, inevitably, one day you will. Or not; the important thing is that it's there, a free service, available whenever you need. It is a safe place to be, a warm friendly spot on a cold day. There is so much more to the library than just books, but without the book borrowers they won’t exist. Borrow a book today. Go on. It won’t hurt you but it might, just might, help preserve something marvellous.