Writing Letters To Dead Authors

6 imaginary letters composed to 6 significant authors to me. A meditation on art and death.

30 Day Book Challenge

I'd like to credit Becky (@stupidgirl45 on Twitter) for this idea which I have nicked and adapted for my own. You can read her original here

Day 1: Favourite Book: "Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of the World" by Murakami. An extraordinary book unlike no other I've read, in that it has two entirely different narrative worlds winding down to meet one another. One is a fairly straight forward Japanese noir thriller, the other a semi-mystical dystopia. Mind-expanding

Day 2: Least favourite book: Oh man too many to mention. But probably "Demo" by Alison Miller which is seemingly about political protest to the Iraq War, but actually is about a couple of Trustafarians slumming it for a bit

Day 3: Book that makes me laugh out loud: quite a competitive little category this one, but the late Steve Tesich's "Karoo" narrowly edges out Steve Toltz's "A Fraction Of The Whole". Both have a laugh on almost every page, but Saul Karoo is a more satisfying character to guide us through the laughs

Day 4: Book that makes you cry: I'm a geezer so I don't cry period. Can honestly say I don't think I've cried at a book, though I've moistened at the odd film or so. My father however claims that as a young child I laughed at the death of Bambi's mother. I have no way of verifying this

Day 5: Book you wish you could live in: "Sum - 40 Tales of the Afterlife" a wonderful small book positing 40 imaginative scenarios for life and post-life. Not only does it give the brain endless food for thought, but I'm rather taken with its notion that there is life after death, so yes please I'd like to reside there...

Day 6: Favourite young adult book: I'm sure they weren't called YA books when I was a lad. I didn't read books as a boy anyway except Asterix and Tintin. I'm a bit out of my depth here, but I'd recommend "Watchman" though it's not really about YA themes

Day 7: Book that you can quote/recite: Even though I have a good memory that got me through my exams by memorising stuff by rote, I would actually have to apply myself to learn quotes which I don't tend to do with my reading for pleasure. I never remember jokes either. But I did use to religiously (sic) read Camus "The Outsider" once a year for about ten years, so after repeated readings I managed to commit the first line to memory "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday I can't be sure"

Day 8: Book that scares you: What in a treehouse of terror sort of way, or the horror of knowing that it ever got published? Let's go with the former shall we? I don't scare that easily just through the power of art - I rarely surrender my disbelief, but the Jo Nesbo crime thriller "The Snowman" which I'm reading now is pretty neat on that front. For non-fiction, FBI Profiler Robert Ressler's "Whoever Fights Monsters" is pretty chilling in parts

Day 9: Book that makes me sick: Again, an extreme reaction I'm not really given to. I can tell you a film that I've tried to watch on several occasions and never made it past the first third and that's Polanski's "Repulsion". I think if I picked up any reality TV star's autobiography, penned at the tender age of 20 for the Tv tie in, that would make me upchuck. But this is supposition. Same thing Kenneth Branagh's autobiography (age 24), but I never read that either

Day 10: Book that changed your life: Okay, I don't do self-help right! But returning to Camus' "The Outsider", it was the first proper book that I read of my own volition and set me on my devouring course of literature. I'd been tipped off to it by a cooler older cousin who said check out the song "Killing An Arab" by the Cure and then read the Camus book, both of which I dutifully did and have never looked back

Day 11: Book from your favourite author: Kafka's "The Castle" sadly incomplete as Kafka ordered all his work to be destroyed on his death, but a tantalising piece of writing all the same. The author's control of both the fates of his characters and the journey undertaken by the reader are so deft and light. Mesmerising

Day 12: Book that is most like your life: Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground". I'm saying no more...

Day 13: Book who's main character is like you: I know how Meursault feels in "The Outsider" but I'd stop short of killing someone, plus I stay out of the sun... Probably one of Michel Houllebeq's misanthropes. #lowselfesteem

Day 14: Book whose main characters you want to marry: Actually I'd have to say my own character Karen Dash from "A,B&E". She is the strongest woman I know and she would keelhaul me every single day of our married life and I would be eternally grateful to her for doing so

Do You Re-Read Books?

I never really read books as a child. I was too busy playing football in the winter and cricket in the summer. If I read at all, it was Tintin and Asterix, cos they like, you know, had pictures in them...

The book that turned me on to literature was Albert Camus' "L'Etranger". An older cousin of mine, who I always tried to cling on to the coat-tails of his cool, had recommended that I listen to The Cure song "Killing An Arab" and read the Camus' book.

I faithfully did both and have never looked back in either category. (Thanks Cuz!) I have been a voracious reader ever since.

Every year I made sure I found space on my list to re-read "L'Etranger". I think I probably kept this up for about eight to ten years. The number of other novels I've read for even a second time I can probably count on the fingers of one hand. I almost never go back to a book I've read, I think because somewhere psychologically, I feel it would hold me up from discovering the next great novel on my list.

As with L'Etranger", I'm sure reading most books would yield things I missed first time round. And though I am indubitably a different person from the one twenty years ago, (having become a parent for example), would I inevitably have a different reaction to a book I had read twenty years ago? I don't know the answer to this and my empirical sample is too slight to base any conclusion on.

Also, the thing is, I kind of like imbibing what I can from reading a book for the first time. The way it can both wash over and yet percolate me. If one returns to a previously read book, both mechanisms are dampened by a base recall of the plot and character from the first time round. I've recently finished Tom McCarthy's superlative "C" (reviewed here). The book is rich in intertextuality and reference, but I feel I got the ones I got and that to read it again may yield me me more of the references I missed first time round, but would that in itself enhance my pleasure over and above what I obtained a couple of weeks ago?

I'm curious when I read online reviews of books when the reviewer mentions they would like to re-read it, whether they in fact do return to it at a later date? Like "L'Etranger", many readers have their one or two seminal texts that they return to over and over again, but do readers do it routinely with more titles than just these?

I'm about to launch into a re-read of Murakami's "Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World". The reason for this is mainly because I want to study its ingenious dual plot structure that work themselves towards a convergence that just doesn't seem possible at the outset. I want to study it because it impinges on my own work in progress. Yet I can't help feeling it's going to take the gloss off my memory of one of my all time favourite reads.

Wish me luck.