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'Vanity Fair'

 So after a break I'm back to re-reading my ten favourite books of all time. I've actually forgotten the original ghost list I'd compiled in my head but deliberately didn't write down. I think I'd been surprised by how few female writers I was intending to include. I'll probably be addressing that balance as a couple of old favourites have popped into my head this week. I'm surprised I'd left them out before.

But this week, after a disastrous dalliance with modern trendy reading (I read 'The Slap' by Christos Tsiolkas and hated it) I've returned to WM Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair'. This is definitely one of my all time favourites. It's a weird choice though and it's hard to really identify why I love it so much. It's interesting to compare it to 'The Slap', though I won't labour the point as 'The Slap' doesn't deserve the comparison. Both are books concerned with the unpleasant in human nature. Thackeray as the author butts into the narrative a lot and his breezy, non-judgemental asides about the social crimes of his characters are a masterpiece of irony. Tsiolkas in contrast just races through rough character sketches of some pretty rough characters. 'The Slap' feels like an adolescent outburst showing up the kind of people Tsiolkas obviously hates (and who wouldn't) without showing any roundedness of human nature and human society. Although Thackeray is mean and judgemental (and I like mean and judgemental) there is a definite affection for his flawed characters too. 

The scale of 'Vanity Fair' is massive and as the purpose of this reading project was really to distil what I love to read so I know what I love to write, this is daunting. It was written, like a lot of the Victorian greats, in instalments for a magazine. That has given the plot a certain rambling quality which I know I enjoy. I like audacity with narrative and the thinking on a large scale without too much concern for form or structure. But that's a tricky feat to achieve. 

Hiatus

Life has suffered a short interval but is currently underway again. As far as reading goes though, I'm caught up with the Carnegie Award Shadowing Group for school. We're reading all eight shortlisted books in eight weeks so I've got my hands full with teenage lit at the moment. No doubt I'll post a bit here.

Hippyish Tendencies?

I absolutely love 'Stone Junction'. There's no denying it.

I may, however, be in denial about my own hippy tendencies.

So far in 'Stone Junction' there's been naked walks in the rain, alchemy, meditation and acid obsessed mules.

In what way does loving this book not make me a hippy?

Next up...

I did finish 'Ringolevio' with time to spare and enjoyed it all the way to the bitter end and it was a little bitter at the end. You can't finish the book without picturing him dead on the subway, stewing in his own ego and madness (and plenty of heroin). But I guess I should be summing up now why such a weird book makes it into my top ten reads of all time (so far). And yet I'm not feeling terribly lucid this evening. 

I think it may come down to a couple of things. It's a brutally honest book. In my last post, I commented on Grogan's ego and how that may detract a little from his message about pure, anonymous actions. And yet in the last ten pages or so, he bemoans himself his 'monster ego' and alludes to how it damaged his credibility amongst his friends. It's a book with a 'character' compelled to, and unafraid to, challenge norms and accepted truths. And it's kind of a book about learning. Kenny Wisdom frantically explores all sorts of different lives and learns all sorts of different skills just because that's where his passion and his life takes him. I like that madness of that pursuit of knowledge and the effect it has on plot structure. To use a cliche, it is like a rollercoaster.

So it seems logical for February to move onto a similar book, one also produced by the Canongate Rebel Inc imprint, 'Stone Junction' by Jim Dodge. And of course Canongate published both these titles because they were exploring similar seams. It's no surprise then that already in 'Stone Junction' I can see similarities with the things I love about 'Ringolevio'. I've always thought that 'Stone Junction' was a novel about learning and teaching, for reasons I'll explore as I get further into the book. The plot structure is similar, and the characters not unlike those in 'Ringolevio.'

Next post, when I'm feeling less tired, I'll try to figure out if liking these two books makes me a hippy or not.

Pleasant Fakery

I'm doing my best to get through 'Ringolevio' this month and I've got only one hundred pages to go. This part of the book gets difficult. It becomes completely immersed in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco in the run-up to the Summer of Love and Grogan clearly became obsessively immersed in the politics of that time. Even when writing the book a couple of years later he seems unable to detach from the petty irritations that obviously drove him nuts, and was certainly still plagued by the bigger, impossible issues the Diggers wanted to tackle. The whole book becomes tied up with arguments and paranoia and the struggle to explain the fine line that Grogan felt differentiated the Diggers from some kind of hippie social workers. His fury with other figures on the scene at that time, like Stokely Carmichael and Abbie Hoffman, is a little hard to understand but seems to be rooted in the very fact that they were becoming famous. In Grogan's opinion they sought fame whereas he sought anonymity. His protestation that he wanted anonymity becomes confused a little by the ego that shines out through the entire book.

But there's still a lot that is refreshing, even as the book becomes bogged down in a cultural era that feels stale now. Grogan is scathing of the Summer of Love, describing it as a lie perpetuated by the Haight-Ashbury shopkeepers who were to profit from it. He criticises the hippie scene as 'pleasant fakery', and describes all those middle class young people as 'poverty tourists'. He seems by this stage both enamoured and disgusted by the Haight-Ashbury scene. 

As a reader though, who grew up in the Eighties when all aspects of the Sixties were touted as some golden era, it's a relief to read an alternative narrative of the Summer of Love. It's good to have suspicions that the whole thing was a huge, mediated piece of theatre partly confirmed, even if it is by an increasingly unstable, unreliable narrative witness.

Just impulse and illusion

I'm making my way quite nicely through 'Ringolevio', even without a snow day to speed me along. Already this is proving to be an interesting exercise, trying to more closely examine what it is that I love about my favourites. I think there will be quite a few common threads for me to follow at the end of it.

At first, delving into 'Ringolevio' again, I wasn't quite sure. There is a lot about it that is irritating. It was published in 1972 and the prose style is gushy and just this side of over-stylised. Grogan references Beat poets constantly as 'switching him on' and at times the tone feels a little too close to teenage Beat fan-boy fiction for comfort. But gradually, that's where the charm comes from too as the whole thing is just so completely, wildly enthusiastic about itself. By half-way through the book, the author purports to have become a junkie aged thirteen, done six months in adult prison, gone through cold-turkey, won a scholarship to a posh school, become a successful burglar of the elite classes, run away to Europe to escape the Mob, built a church in the Italian Alps, become a Eurotrash playboy, won a prize for film-directing in Italy, worked with the IRA in Dublin, worked with a porn ring in London, been drafted and discharged from the army in San Francisco. In the midst of January, when I'm feeling like I do nothing else but steer my car through the same dark roads day after day, this could be depressing reading.

Each of these adventures could be a novel in their own right, but Grogan rattles through them all at frightening speed, writing in third person about himself as 'Kenny Wisdom', occasionally dropping out of the narrator role to comment on himself, as himself (he remarks 'To this day, Kenny Wisdom's parents believe that he stole the small, diamond-studded silver band which his father had given to his mother on their wedding day. And it's a drag.')

But even at this speed Grogan manages some lovely touches of writing. There's a lot of heavy handed, drug-addled crap too, but some occasional moments of beauty. A boy nick-named 'Clearhead O'Keefe' is called 'Clearhead' because 'his skull contained no sense of cause and effect, just impulse and illusion.'

The book is mad. The author was probably mad. The plot is mad. I'm wondering if this madness, this lack of structure and rush to narrate, is something that will turn out to be a strand running through a lot of my choices this year.

Ringolevio

Ok, so I procrastinated all of this week while I finished reading ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’. I also procrastinated a little further today and spent some time making this very sweet desk pad for my nice, new (old) desk. I was worried it was a bit too girly but the colours and the fabric look perfect with the dark and chunky wood. When I was cleaning it out I found receipts and paperwork suggesting it belonged to a farmer previously (and Sarah from Otto found a leaflet for penis extensions stuck in the roll-top!) so I think this is the most feminine the desk has ever looked. Hurrah.

 
 

Now I’ve got nothing else to distract myself with and as I’ve been without a book to read for a few days, I’m ready to make my first choice of my ten favourite books and more than ready to start re-reading it.

I was going to cheat and have as my first choice for January an old classic that I’m currently teaching at school, but as the weather forecast is suggesting I may be at home a lot next week (or, if in school, just babysitting Key Stage Three students whilst Year 11s go sledging) I’m going to make an ambitious start and choose ‘Ringolevio’ by Emmett Grogan.

This is a tricky one. It’s long, at six-hundred and twenty-four pages. And it’s not really fiction. The Rebel Inc Classic version I have in front of me now describes it as ‘manifesto, memoir and high adventure all rolled into one.’ Obviously to write a book like Emmett Grogan’s I would probably have to go and live a life like Emmett Grogan’s and that ain’t going to happen. But there’s plenty about the book that is enviable and brilliant and though it’s a big, flawed, slightly insane beast of a book, it’s my pick for January. Here’s hoping I’ll have enough snow days on the sofa to get through it all.

Procrastination of course

So I've now finished 'The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit', thanks to the bounty of an unexpected snow day. I enjoyed it, though the ending was somehow disappointing. It was one of those novels where you're hoping for a happy ending all of the way through, hoping it works out for the characters. But you're not really expecting it to happen. So, stupidly, I did feel sort of cheated when things did end happily. Obviously, it was a slice of post-war optimism, but you can't help but feel Sloan Wilson simply dodged writing a much bigger, much darker book.

Anyway, that was not one of my favourite books ever and by now, a day after finishing it, I really should be onto the first of my top ten for 2010. I'll confess to having a shadow list in my head, so it's not that I don't know what I'll be choosing. But I am procrastinating about what I'll choose first. Maybe I'm worried about committing myself, and choosing something that will take up space on the list, when I may later think of something more worthy of a place. Silly. The rules are entirely my own and therefore the first rule should be that I can change any damn rule I want.

But it's Friday tomorrow, so I think I'll just put off the final choice of the first book until the weekend. Just to be sure.

Finishing off before starting up

I haven’t rushed into my top ten list yet as I’m still finishing off some Christmas reading. To my shame, my vampire phase hasn’t tailed off yet, and I’ve been enjoying ‘Dead Until Dark’ by Charlaine Harris. These are the books that they’ve made the ‘True Blood’ tv series from and they’re a lot less irritating than the ‘Twilight’ novels, which were written later. They’re still cheesy and sensationalist and all of that over the top stuff that the genre demands. They just feel a little more tongue in cheek about, less emo.

 But I’m in the middle of a good Christmas gift, inspired by my fondness for ‘Mad Men’ on tv (another telly inspired piece of reading, worrying). It’s ‘The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit’ by Sloan Wilson which I had heard of but never actually encountered (which is surprising considering how much American post-war lit I’ve devoured over the years). It’s a great book, very modern in its disgust with how much stuff everyone wants to consume, how dissatisfied we all are. But still it’s rooted in its time as, by the middle of the book it becomes clear the main character is haunted by his actions during the Second World War. This of course is a theme explored by a lot of fifties noir-type novels, but it’s done a little more explicitly in this one and for its time is quite horrifyingly graphic.

 So I’m finishing that off and mentally honing my list of top tens so that I can start that in earnest this week sometime. I think I’ll avoid setting my list in stone just yet, so that I can follow tangents as they arise. 

Ten for 2010 - a predictable New Year's Day post

It wouldn’t be New Year without some new project to kick-start the year. I have been half-heartedly blogging about gardening on and off for a couple of years, until really this spring I realised that gardening was just something I wanted to do, not necessarily something I wanted to write about. I have lots of pretty pictures to show for my gardening efforts and no doubt I’ll post lots more here throughout the year, for no other reason than they look nice.

 So I shied away from the idea of starting up my garden blog again as I knew I’d be doing it just for the sake of something to write, to keep my pen moving and the ink flowing - avoiding clots. But without enthusiasm behind it, the whole process would be doomed to failure.

 Better to start something completely afresh, something else to chip away at for the next decade.

 I’m going to write a novel. I have written one before. Three, actually. Only two of them were completely awful. One is okay, in fact. But all three of them were written kind of like experiments – could I force myself to sit down and just write a novel? Could I just make it happen?

 It turned out I could, but without the painstaking thought and attention to detail and planning and revision that you associate with the craft of novel writing. Really, those three novels were an exercise in discipline. And it was a surprise to me that I could muster the discipline from somewhere to get the job done. My next novel then, I want to be about more than discipline. It needs to be more than just an endurance test.

 So I’m committing most of this year to exploring what it is I really want to write and how I want to write it. It may be an naïve, English-teacherish approach, but I’m going to do this by re-reading my favourite ten books of all time. I’ll re-read one each month for the next ten months and then see where I’m at. I’m hoping I’ll discover, and blog about here, what it is I really admire in writing, what themes and ideas really grab me. By the end of the year, I hope to be ready with a novel idea of my own that I can spend 2011 writing.

 Now, even though it’s January 1^st and a few hours ago I said I was done with drinking, I’m hankering after a glass of wine.