30 day Book Challenge Part 2

With continued props to Becky (@stupidgirl45 on Twitter) who supplied me this idea - you can read her version here

Day 15: First "chapter"book you can remember reading as a child. Not sure of this was the first, since they probably gave us something to read at school which I now can't remember for the life of me, but I was the lucky recipient of a bit of a family heirloom. My father's original hardback editions of Richmal Crompton's "Just William" books, the editions dating back to the 1930s. They were a delight and I handed them on to my cousin, now a famous kids' author in his own right. He gave them back to me a few years ago for my own son to glory in and he reads them over and over, which suggests they haven't dated. "Horrid Henry" eat your heart out.

Day 16: Longest book ever read. Bolano's "2666" and having read it I ask myself why. Definitely a case of Emperor's New Clothes to my mind. The first chapter is okay in a David Lodge sort of way and the last chapter ties some of the things together in a historical fiction sort of way. But the bits in the middle, including the relentless chapter about women murders just go on for ever and to no good purpose that I can see. Looking forward to finding a block of time to read "House Of Leaves" and "The Infinite Jest". Hope they come partially clothed at least...

Day 17: Shortest book read. "The Outsider" weighs in at 102 pages. Jenny Erpenbeck's "The Book Of Words" is a small pocketbook edition of 112 pages, so not sure how that compares, but is a very good little book about the family of a regime's chief torturer. I also enjoyed a pamphlet-like book at 80 pages called "Mr Overby Is Falling" by Nathan Tyree, but it's quite troubling as it's from the point of view of a serial killer, so it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Day 18: Book you're most embarrassed to say you like. I'm not really embarrassed as I'll defend anything I give my personal thumbs up to, but Jonathan Safran Foer seems to get plenty of clog for his novel "Everything Is Illuminated" which I enjoyed. Its tricksiness seems to have bothered people, but I revelled in that. It's not a great book and in truth I preferred his follow up about 9/11 narrated by a 10 year old boy "Up Close And Incredibly Loud", which no one else seemed to like either.

Day 19: Book that turned you on. Nicholson Baker's "The Fermata" has the premise a man can stop time for everyone else but him and as predictable as the information superhighway has coalesced around the twin pillars of sex and commerce, so the hero of the novel uses his gift to ogle women who are unaware of what he is up to. Baker also wrote a novel entirely about phone sex called "Vox", but that didn't quite do it for me. Guess that makes me more of the voyeur type... The best book about desire is Neil Bartlett's "Skin Lane". God I love this book and its sensuousness in inanimate objects.

Day 20: Book you've read the most number of times. See "The Outsider" in previous post. Once a year for ten years.

Day 21: Favourite picture book from childhood. I can't recall any of my primer books, so am going to skip straight to "Asterix and The Roman Agent". The Romans infiltrate an agent provocateur who causes strife and arguments among the redoubtable Gauls. It's really quite sophisticated.

Day 22: Book you plan on reading next. Well "House Of Leaves" may just have to wait until I've got a head space clear of my own writing. So I fancy I may just read "The Master and The Margarita" by Bulgakov. Supposed to be very funny and in the favourite comedic books in part 1 I forgot to mention Gogol's "Dead Souls". Victor Pelevin can be funny too, who said the Russians were miserablists? Not me!

Day 23: Book you tell people you've read but haven't or at least haven't finished. Probably "Ulysses". I do own up to never having read Hardy or Dickens!

Day 24: Book that contains your favourite scene. The opening to Don Delillo's "Underworld" is quite exemplary atmospheric writing, even though it's about the subject few would be that moved by. It tells the tale of a boy who bunks off school and sneaks into an important knock-out baseball game, which actually happened in history and has some endlessly played back radio commentary (much like the 1966 World Cup Final). A key hit by a batter was described as 'a shot heard around the world' in the newspapers of the time. In "Mao II" Delillo describes a mass Moonie wedding with similar breathtaking scope, balancing the mass with the individual emotion. Wonderful stuff. I'll also credit Ian McEwan for his nailing of the competitive thoughts and feelings pulsing through two squash players in "Saturday", even though the book as a whole is not so great, while the retreat from Dunkirk he describes in "Atonement" is astounding war writing.

Day 25: Favourite book read in school. Milton's "Paradise Lost", but up against Sylvia Plath poems, Tom Stoppard's "Jumpers" and Jane Austen's "Emma" I feel it didn't have a great deal of competition given my proclivities. There are some wonderful images in Milton and the character of Mammon building a counterfeit Heaven in Hell that just can't cut it has echoes even today.

Day 26: Favourite non-fiction book. "The Alphabet" by David Sacks, a history of the source of each of the 26 letters and a consideration of some of their associations and imagery. A theme elaborated on in "26 Letters" a collaboration between 26 writers and 26 designers, taking one letter per pair and designing a poster for an exhibition to bring out the life in each of their letters. Superb stuff that probably launched my interest in typography being a significant part of fiction writing.

Day 27: Favourite Fiction Book. Well, apart from the Murakami listed in part 1, it's probably Roth's "American Pastoral". Although I don't really buy into the Americans' fixation with "The Great American Novel", this truly is an epic that encapsulates all of post-war America, with its psychic splits in the 60s. I'm not a huge fan of Roth, seeing him as self-absorbed and self-obsessed, but this is a strikingly brilliant and complete novel.

Day 28: Last book you read. "Bad Intentions" by Norwegian writer Karin Fossum. I watched a BBC4 programme on Norse Noir and off the back of it the next day marched into a bookstore and bought this and the book in Day 29. The Fossum was so so. I was attracted to the claim that it concentrates on motive for the crime through the criminal's eyes, but I wasn't entirely convinced by the portrait on offer. Some of the language was a bit ropy too, but that may just be the translation, since Fossum has also written poetry.

Day 29: Book you're currently reading. The second Norse Noir I was tipped to and this one is far more satisfying. "The Snowman" by Jo Nesbo. Someone tweeted me yesterday that they'd seen Nesbo read livee and thatthe scene had stayed with her in her nightmares and I can see why. I think I'll read all his ouevre. So from the programme I discovered one out of the two authors to my tastes, a pretty fair strike rate I'd say.

Day 30: Favourite coffee table book. Huh? I have neither a coffee table, nor do I drink tea or coffee while idly browsing a book. However a very kind friend sent me "Joy Division" by Kevin Cummins which I have promised myself to read as a treat when I've finished my current work in progress. Joy Division were my favourite band and Cummins was the photographer there from the beginning so I'm anticipating a great artbook. The band certainly lent themselves to great imagery, being very associated with the de-industrialisation of Northern England in the early 1980's.

So thank you for indulging me in my personal favourites. There were plenty I would have liked to include on here but couldn't. Honourable mentions must go to Dubravka Ugresic, Jeanette Winterson, William Burroughs, David Peace, David Mitchell, Imre Kertesz, Craig Cleveneger, Kate Atkinson, Jonathan Lethem, Scarlet Thomas.

Peace and Lethem are my two favourite contemporary authors, I can't believe I couldn't get them into the 30 books!

What Is Fiction For? - Referencing Bolano

In the twenty-first century I pose two questions of literature;

1) In the light of all competing leisure pursuits and activity, is there still much of a place for reading fiction today?

2) If so, what will such literature look like?

Roberto Bolano's "2666" has been hailed as the first genuine novel for the current century. While epic in its sweep, no more so than "Cloud Atlas" and other (Easy-) Jet Set novels in our global village age. And what are his metaphors for the modern age? Death, madness and sex. Desultory and purposeless. Very 21st Century... Sort of like the late 20th Century only with, well without any added value really. (Though he does bury Magical Realism as Latin America's outdated literary trope, beneath a welter of desultory realism - a Cormac McCarthy for South of the border). The largest section of the book reads like a stitching together of every opening segment of every single episode of CSI. Chapter 1 deals with academics pursuing an obscure author. Come on guy, these are not radical metaphors to change the way we view the world, ya get me!

And for a book pronounced as forward looking, it's curiously obsessed with the literary tradition. Not only of Latin America, but of Europe and America too. Bolano writes of vanished writers, writers committed to insane asylums, writers who hide their identities and writers who steal their way to a writing career on the backs of other, lesser pixie dust struck writers. All well and good if the writer of today in the 21st Century had any status worth devoting so much philosophical study to. But this is no longer the era of authors standing in Peruvian Presidential elections, of poets in the Sandinista Cabinet, of Havel in Prague's (but not Kafka's) Castle, of Sartre, Camus & De Beauvoir marching in Paris with petitions that changed government policy, of Malraux also being in the cabinet. No now we have Blair & Clinton guaranteed millions for their memoirs once they step down from office and oh so graciously endowing libraries. We have bored MPs cheated of being close to power writing novels, Rupert Allason (Nigel West), Douglas Hurd, Anne Widdecombe and who could forget Edwina Currie's? We've got the ex-head of MI5 writing novels too. Seems in our culture, you have to have the commodity name first, before you get a book deal to sell on the back of it.

There are two types of fiction. That which seeks to engage with the world, to try and reflect parts of it, to try and come to an understanding of what lies beneath the surface. Then there are those which provide an antidote to the world, a short-lived means of escaping its dreary, oppressive torpor. I have never understood why people who have an unmediated diet of the latter, don't ask themselves why their world needs escaping from in the first place? A question which might be broached by taking on some of the former reading challenges. Okay, so I am not really addressing the escapist literature here. Who is left reading the former type, that which Bolano would inevitably come to be categorized as? Fewer and fewer people it seems to me. There is no public discourse, on any subject matter. So atomised are we by all the consumer and leisure options we have and our insistence on ceding political decisions to politicians who refuse to open out major issues to a public debate.So with the dearth of public forums for ideas, (at present Twitter and the like are not culturally broad mediums), then what can literature contribute? When did a book last capture the public's intellectual imagination and give them pause for thought on an issue in the real world of their daily lives? Apart from the obscenity trials surrounding "Chatterly" or "Brooklyn", you probably have to go back to Charles Dickens for a fiction that fed back and informed the world in which it emerged from. Nowadays, the fiction that captures the public mood seems to be that with TV/ Hollywood tie ins, instant merchandising opportunities and an ability to leach zombies on to cover art of the Classics. Works that add nothing to the cultural pool (sump) of ideation and self-reflection.

Possibly high literature is still being touted in the universities, but they seem to have been cut off from having any sway over public taste decades ago. Literary academics resemble those art historians who ceaselessly regard the works of Rembrandt and Titian, great works undoubtedly, but fixed in time and with no possibility of fresh additions to the canon. It is museum literature and while clearly the Classics will always be read (at least until the schools dumb down to a year zero and teach kids only how to read html), there is still an anorexic rump of us out there in the market, shades of our former literary selves hovering around the 'literary fiction' shelves on the look out for 3 titles that have been graced with a '3 for the price of 2' sticker. But we struggle to cobble together 3 titles worthy of fulfilling the discount. We are starving because the authors do not feed us with books that speak to us of our contemporary time. The writers fail us, but they claim the market precludes them from writing these type of books because agents and publishers insist they cannot sell them. A vicious circle and also the writers too easily settle for such logic and start self-censoring their output to try and meet the perceived market.

Who cares about the literary tradition if we kill it dead by failing to continue it into our own age? Digital preservation will ensure all such books that have been handed down into our current century will survive into perpetuity. And by all means indulge the academics in talking about 19th and 20th Century literary trends that have seemingly died out in terms of still being produced today; such as the whole Modernist canon of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolfe, Eliot and Pound. Bolano's work was not radical and divergent. He did not continue any legacy stretching back to any great experimenters that I can see. He offered a diffuse, ambiguous narrative that just fizzles out in the same way that the tarmac burns up in the final frames of the road movie "Two Lane Blacktop" and that the film reels themselves are also shown to burn as the final statement of unending and ultimately purposeless journeying.

So to restate my opening two questions, in the light of Bolano not having reinvented the novel in "2666" (except in the hallucinatory minds of literary critics parched for fresh intake):

1) In the light of all competing leisure pursuits and activity, is there still much of a place for reading fiction today?

Apart from escapist literature probably not. Flash fiction and other web-based writing are all fine and good, but a little like some toothsome hors d'oeuvres, with nothing more substantial to fill you up afterwards. And I say this as a writer of literary fiction...

2) If so, what will such literature look like?

I don't know exactly (though I'm trying to offer some fresh perspectives, some fresh language and particularly some fresh metaphors in my novels), but I sure as hell know it wont look unchanged from those books of the last century which we are still churning out spasmodically and calling them 'new'. These are old themes, given a modern spin and no more. I would hazard that as printing technology becomes more and more accessible to writers, even if it is only virtual printing, the 21st Century novel will contain far more design elements within its typography and its look on the page. It may no longer follow a linear block print for example. It may of course also involve embedded videos like Nick Cave's novel "Bunny Monroe". Just so long as these are artistic decisions taken by the writer, either singly, or in collaboration with designers and typographers, then we may just be on to something. However, if they have been initiated by the publishers, in a desperate measure to rekindle sales by offering different packaging, presentation and distribution, then it will be the same tired old book.

Writers, start your engines. We live or die by our content.

And I for one am very discontent.