The Wonderful and Terrible Habit of Buying Too Many Books

There are just too many books to read. And while one might make the very good point that you could just wait to buy them when you have more room, there’s something about putting them in a row with other books, read and unread, that creates the cumulative impression of your reading self. Because, when it comes to reading, there will always be more book that you haven’t read than books that you have, and your reading ambition will always be more important than your reading accomplishments. “The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them,” wrote Benjamin. “Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property.”

A library of mostly unread books is far more inspiring than a library of books already read. There’s nothing more exciting than finishing a book, and walking over to your shelves to figure out what you’re going to read next.

So, the solution here is to just slow down on the buying, not cut it out entirely, which means things like limiting myself to one book per bookstore visit. As I start to chip away at the huge list of Books I Want To Read, I’m sure that list will deepen and broaden in ways I can’t predict, so eventually the library may be more balanced and not so skewed toward books I haven’t read, but it will never be fixed row of read books. Libraries aren’t meant to be intractable, they’re meant to change, and they change by buying books. As long as I don’t trip over those piles of books on my floor and break my leg, it seems to me that having too many books on your hands is a pretty wonderful problem to have.

Bad sex awards: the contenders for a night at the In and Out

The first thing that arises out of the nominations for this year’s bad sex awards – the excruciating writing highlighted by the Literary Review each year – is just how fecund their writers’ imaginations are. If they have done half the things they have ascribed to their characters, their spectacles must have steamed up.

There are agile tongues, rooms that begin to shake, warm wet caves, volcanic releases, moist meat, bottomless swamps of dead fish and yellow lilies in bloom and cellars filled with a heady store of wines and spirits emitting wafts of gaseous bouquets. And that is before you get to massaging, kneading, stretching, rubbing, pinching, flicking, feathering, licking, kissing and gently biting – which occurs in just one sentence thanks to David Guterson.

Now in their 19th year, the awards have shortlisted 12 authors before the presentation next month, among them some of the most distinguished – or at least bestselling – authors in the world. They come from Britain, the US, Hungary, Japan and Australia….

Small Book, Big Story: Bronte Manuscript Discovered

The magazine is tiny, “half the size of a credit card,” Gabriel Heaton, deputy director of books and manuscripts at Sothebys, tells NPR’s Linda Wertheimer, and designed to be the right size for the Bronte children’s toy soldiers. Its 19 pages are crammed with more than 4,000 words — short stories, news, even advertisements — discernible only by magnifying glass.

The pages are roughly hewn and much-handled. It’s “what makes it such an evocative object,” Heaton says. “You can almost see her there with her little scissors.”

And on these little pages, the Brontes spun such dreams, each conjuring up entire kingdoms. Charlotte’s fantasy city featured immense palaces and awesome, towering buildings. It was presided over by the Duke of Wellington and his two sons — the heroes of the story.

The private dream world of the Brontes exerted an enormous influence on their later work, in terms of the flowering of their Gothic sensibility — and, astonishingly, the recycling of key plot points.

In one of Charlotte’s stories — a “powerful evocation of madness, especially when you think this is coming from a 14-year-old girl,” Heaton says — a man imprisons his enemy in the attic. He goes mad with guilt and imagines his enemies setting fire to his bed curtains.

It’s a scene that prefigures the famous madwoman-in-the-attic and the bed burning from Jane Eyre, proving that this small manuscript might be more than just a curiosity. Heaton says, “There are clear links between this manuscript … and the later work.”

Instead of buying me things I don’t need from Black Friday sales, anyone should feel free to buy this for me for the holidays!

Bob Dylan now favorite to take the Nobel prize for literature

…Ladbrokes have just issued a press release saying that Dylan is now installed as the firm favourite, after 80% of bets taken in the last 12 hours were placed on the singer-songwriter. Odds on him are now 5/1, ahead of Adonis (6/1), Haruki Murakami (8/1) and Tomas Transtromer (10/1).

Alex Donohue of Ladbrokes said: “Everything now points to Dylan taking the prize. At first we had him down as a rank outsider but the committee have been known to spring a shock and punters the world over feel Dylan will be the beneficiary.”

What is you reaction to this news?

Talking (Exclamation) Points -- Authors and Literati discuss the exclamation point.

“…My belief is that when we read a printed page, we engage an inner ear, which follows the sense, the voice and the music in a linear way. We sort of listen to the writer. Whereas on a computer screen, we tend to pick out bits of information and link them for ourselves. The exclamation point is a natural reaction to this: Writers are shouting to be heard.”

…

“I have long tried to swear off them,” said Peter Godwin, whose book “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa” detailed life in his native Zimbabwe. “I think they are the literary equivalent of canned applause. I hate the way they jostle you, and the way they prescribe, ‘Dear reader, be amazed!’ And while we’re on the subject, there’s the ‘?!’ one-two combo. I suppose it is trying to say, ‘My question is jokey,’ or ‘I’m embarrassed to ask it in the first place.’ ”

…

“To me, there’s no more shame in filling text messages with exclamation points,” he added, “three at a time, if necessary, than there is in using strings of expletives while arguing politics at an Irish pub.”

Today in Women's History: Jamaica Kincaid, Caribbean novelist, born in 1949.

todayinwomenshistory:

Jamaica Kincaid’s twisted quest for self began with her May 25, 1949 birth in Antigua. She was then christened Elaine Potter Richardson, but when she fled the island at the age of seventeen, she left her family as well as her name behind and entered North America as Jamaica Kincaid. Her life should seem familiar to those who know her heavily autobiographical work. She worked first in New York City as an au pair, for an upper class family much like the one pictured in Lucy. She left this work to study photography at the New School for Social Research and then went on to Franconia College in New Hampshire (but did not take a degree) before returning to New York. There she became a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine, writing for nearly twenty years (1976-1995) before the arrival of new management convinced her to leave. She now resides in Bennington Vermont with her husband and children.

Kincaid’s status as an exile informs so much of her writing. It allows (or perhaps forces) her to maintain distance from both her past and her present, as she critically examines the suffocating smallness (and small-mindedness) of her native Antigua, then juxtaposes it against the ignorant opulence of North America. Her narrators too seem alienated from all those around them, seeking both control over and freedom from these human connections known as relationships. But no discussion, no matter how brief, can be complete without mention of the central relationship in Kincaid’s life—that with her mother. Kincaid’s tight, lyrical prose guides the reader through her tortured recollections of her mother, as that relationship takes on the dual gravity of mother-daughter relationships that many readers can relate to as well as of the hegemonic interactions between mother country (here England) and daughter island (Antigua). Stacking these parallel visions on top of each other and infusing them with her own feelings of anger and suffocation, Kincaid draws the reader through the struggle for personal development not only of her narrators but of the writer herself.

Philip Roth protest had nothing to do with feminism, says Virago founder

The founder of the feminist press Virago who withdrew from the judging panel of the Man Booker International prize over its decision to honour Philip Roth has dismissed criticism that her decision was driven by Roth’s portrayal of women.

Publisher and author Carmen Callil caused a literary storm when she announced she had retired from the award’s panel of judges because she did not “rate [Roth] as a writer at all”.

“He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe,” she said.

Callil’s comments about the author most often tipped to win the Nobel prize in literature for the United States caused uproar. Toby Young called her a “petulant prima donna” in the Telegraph, while Observer critic Robert McCrum wrote that, as “an ebullient and pioneering feminist publisher from the 1970s [it’s] hardly a surprise that she should find herself unresponsive to Roth’s lifelong subject: the adventures of the ordinary sexual [American] man”.

Although Roth’s writing – always from the male perspective, often explicitly about sex – is widely perceived as containing a broad streak of misogyny, Callil told the Guardian her dislike of the author was based on what she sees as his literary shortcomings. “Feminism had absolutely nothing to do with my criticism of Philip Roth’s work, or with my retirement from the judging panel,” she said.

“This kerfuffle is an ad feminam attack from the boys and, of course, the odd girl, but mainly it’s a boyzones attack. Take Robert McCrum, for instance, who certainly has his critics, but they, unlike him, do not have instant access to the media. Yet he feels free to badmouth me as a human being, rather than discuss the ideas and issues involved.” Callil “never thought of feminism for one second” when she was considering Roth’s work. “I may have founded Virago 40 years ago but I’m a creature of books, of writing,” she said. “It never occurred to me and it comes as a surprise to me. I’d no idea – and I’m nearly 73 for goodness sake – I had no idea that his work was objected to because he is seen as a misogynist.

“My objections are literary. If you take his best book, American Pastoral, it is wonderful about women. If Philip Roth doesn’t like someone, it is himself, not women.”

Callil expands further on her dislike of Roth’s writing in an article in the Guardian’s Review, in which she describes the author’s reach as “narrow … not in the Austen, Bellow or Updike sense, because they use a narrow canvas to convey the widest concepts and ideas.

“Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist. And so he uses a big canvas to do small things, and yet his small things take up oceanic room. The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor’s clothes.”

Callil said that “it would have been much easier” to accept Roth as winner of the prize. The judges’ chair, rare book dealer Rick Gekoski, and novelist Justin Cartwright both supported the author. “It would have been simple if I could have tolerated his writing, but the principle of judging is very important to me,” she said. “I was fighting on behalf of the prize, too.”

Umberto Eco: 'I'm a writer not a reader'

Umberto Eco: There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read. Who has actually read Finnegans Wake – I mean from beginning to end? Who has read the Bible properly, from Genesis to the Apocalypse?

And yet I’ve a fairly accurate notion of what I haven’t read. I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then. The Mahabharata – I’ve never read that, despite owning three editions in different languages. Who has actually read the Kama Sutra? And yet everyone talks about it, and some practise it too. So we can see that the world is full of books that we haven’t read, but that we know pretty well.

And yet when we eventually pick them up, we find they are already familiar. How is that? First, there’s the esoteric explanation – there are these waves that somehow travel from the book to you – to which I don’t subscribe. Second, perhaps it’s not true that you’ve never opened the book; over the years you’re bound to have moved it from place to place, and may have flicked through it and forgotten that you’ve done so. Third, over the years you’ve read lots of books that have mentioned this one and so made it seem familiar.

Jean-Claude Carrière: There are books on our shelves we haven’t read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life. The terrible grief of the dying as they realise their last hour is upon them and they still haven’t read Proust.

UE: When people ask whether I’ve read this or that book, I’ve found that a safe answer is, “You know, I don’t read, I write.” That shuts them up. Although some of the questions come up time and time again: “Have you read Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair?” I ended up giving in and trying to read it, on three different occasions. But I found it terribly dull.