bigmagpie

'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. 

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.

Ta Daaaa!

Woo hoo! Queue triumphant music, I finally put an end to my dissertation today!!!! Assuming I pass, I've given it the rather glorious title of:

MA (Ed) English and New Media

Teachers, Bloggers and Creativity within the Key Stage Three Framework for Teaching English

Sounds fabulous!

And now that's overwith - onward! Instead of writing about blogging I can do blogging again. And a multitude of other things. And to begin, there's this:

From Mags, the thirty books you should have read meme. I'm showing off how many books I've read from that list that went round from someone or other about classic books you should definitely read. Highlight ones you've read in bold, italicise ones you'd like to read and strike out ones you haven't and don't want to. (Except I don't know how to do that strike out thing, so I haven't).

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – yes and taught it, so there.

The Bible – mostly. I remember deciding when I was around 17 that I really should see what it was all about. It was so boring I made myself read three pages a night, like taking medicine.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien – Nope, started it but it was even more boring than the bible.

1984 by George Orwell – well yeah.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens – nope, don’t love Dickens.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – yep, but saw the movie first.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen – YES!

All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque – Nope…

His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman – Yes, despite the odious views of Mr Pullman

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks – nearly finished it, but thought it was patronising pants

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – yep, but wouldn’t have chosen this Steinbeck…

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding – yep, but the memory of it has been tainted for me by boss’ rendition of its key theme with the aid of only a paperclip and a blob of blue tak

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon –yes but really this was only a good book, not a great one.

Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy – yes, yawn.

Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne – but of course. When others were carrying 'A Clockwork Orange' as rock n roll style rebellion, I was a cutey pop kid type person. Mandatory reading.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte – and again, yawn.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham – nope, think this is, as my mother would say ‘an English thing’.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell – nope but love the film!

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – yes, I think this is the only Dickens I’m keen on.

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – hah, no, but just recently had this recommended.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold – nope, is this seriously on the list?

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran – nope, haven’t even heard of it!

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens – nope, way too much Dickens

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – nope, see The Prophet.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov – ditto…hmmm

Life of Pi by Yann Martel – nope.

Middlemarch by George Eliot – yep but not mad keen.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver – nope, I thought everyone had forgotten about this.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess – no! although I always meant to…

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn – nope, other kids read this, but we did ‘Of Mice and Men’ instead.

Some time has passed

I haven't meant to ignore my blog, but it just seems to have happened. We were in London for the BETT conference last weekend, which was great but already it seems like a long time ago. And since before then we've had the saga of Scully's mysteriously lame leg, which is never-ending and draining a hole in my savings. And I wouldn't mind, bless him, but he seems determined to flout the vet's treatment at every opportunity, refusing to stay in and rest and refusing to take his medications. It's like looking after an elderly relative, or a child or something. Except more expensive.

I have read a lot though, on trains and on the couch with Scully sitting on my knee, when he consents to rest. I finished 'Cloud Atlas' a while ago, and meant to write my thoughts about it here. It's been a while but I remember being unimpressed to start, finding it so similar to David Mitchell's previous 'Ghostwritten'. That novel was following the slightly unconventional structure of seperate stories linked by a common element, in that case a wandering spirit. 'Cloud Atlas' is very similar though the stories are a little more tightly woven, with recurring images, themes, and links. I guess I should have liked it more than I did, interested as I am in hypertextual structures, but both David Mitchell novels leave me a little cold. I think that has more to do with me as a reader than with Mitchell as a writer, as in 'Cloud Atlas' I found myself eventually drawn in to many of the narratives in it, then merely irritated rather than intrigued when the narrative broke off and the next one started. I think then I'm most interested in hypertexts as potential narrative medium because they are so problematic, and I've never read one, electronic or otherwise, that's held the narrative as powerfully as I would like. Then again, there is James Sallis and his Lew Griffin books, but that's a world too big to get into tonight.

After 'Cloud Atlas' I went on to 'Restoration', another Rose Tremain historical novel. I wasn't mad on 'Music and Silence' but there was something in her style that appealed to me and I had enjoyed the film of 'Restoration'. It turns out the film took very few liberties with either the plot or tone of the original and I enjoyed the book a lot. It's hard to pinpoint why, except that I think she placed a very modern character, so easy to identify with, in such a historically familiar setting. It's interesting to kind of experience the Plague and Fire of London through the eyes of a self-obsessed child-man, taking an age to finally grow up (played so perfectly by Robert Downey Jr in the film).

And so I now find myself on another book well made into a film - 'Regeneration' by Pat Barker. I enjoyed the film which I saw before reading the book. And this time around I only realised once half way through reading the book that I have actually read it before. It's interesting and enjoyable but somehow obviously forgettable, though that may because any echoes I'd noticed I'd written off as stemming from the film. She has a twitch though, Pat Barker, of using too darn many italics to really emphasise how her characters are speaking. It's a bit like reading a marvel comic at times, and I'd rather have more left to my imagination. Huh.

Re-Start

I've been desperately trying to find my re-start button but having no luck. So even with one tantalising chapter of my book left to go, I can't quite find the commitment to sitting down to it and just finishing the thing. I think this is partly because I can feel the peril of wanting to rush through the last chapter and scream 'Done!' and hit the wine in celebration. And partly because I'm beginning to feel like at 45000 words long the thing is neither fish nor fowl and needs some serious re-writing - cutting the over written sections and developing the sub-plot. And that could take some time, maybe as long as the first draft did.

So instead of doing anything terribly productive, I've been wallowing in Jane Austen novels. 'Emma' slipped down like a dream, bringing back all the laugh out loud moments from sixth year English, in which we snickered about Mr Elton making violent love to her in the barouche, and Mr Knightley finally exposing himself in the shrubbery. Still makes me giggle, ahem.

'Sense and Sensebility' was a bit more troublesome and I kind of wished I'd stuck with 'Bridget Jones' and her ilk for my escapism reading. I think seeing the Ang Lee version with Hugh Grant as a stuttering Edward kind of spoils it for me, but I couldn't help being surprised at how saucy it all was, with not one but two ruined women having illegitimate babies out in the country. Phew.

But up next, is 'My Summer of Love' by Helen Cross, more saucy stuff if the film was anything to go by. I'm told there are more laughs in the book than in the film, but isn't that always the way. Bet it isn't as funny as Emma though.

Darned Pirates

Just started reading 'Pirates' by Celia Rees. I really enjoyed her first big hit 'Witch Child' which was a historical novel for teens telling the story of a girl who fled England after her grandmother was hung as a witch. She gets into more bother in the New World and ends up running off with a Native American and having adventures. It was great stuff, hooking neatly into the whole teen zeitgeist for all things witchy, while at the same time providing worthy historical interest. (The follow-up 'Sorceress' however, was quite weak, following the same character's tale as seen by a modern day Native American on a vision quest. Uh-hum - sequel!)

But even just reading the first few pages of 'Pirates' made me want to down tools on my own book, the writing was so good. It's a first person narrative but without any of the navel gazing my character seems so prone to (wonder why?). Like all good teen fiction should, it rockets along at some cracking pace but with historical detail so tidily woven in the whole thing seems incredibly real.

Rees' character, Nancy Kington, is another girl who defies convention. Finding herself set up by her family to marry a slave trading Brazilian sleeze-ball in Jamaica, she runs off with rebellious slaves and lives outside all society, finding herself going from Beau Nash's Bath social scene to the wild mountains of the West Indies without a second thought. She's already killed two men and I'm only half way through.

It's a great read, but what I'm learning most from it is how to get a narrative ticking along at a furious pace, even with a first person narrator. I've picked up a few tricks of the trade from this book and now can't wait to finish my first draft, so I can get re-writing.

Only another ten thousand words or so to go, at two thousand words a week. Maybe by Christmas...

Historical

Just finishing off Rose Tremain's 'Music and Silence', which it feels like I have been reading forever, because of quick detours into non-fiction with 'Touching the Void' and 'Circled with Stone'. I seem to be having a phase of only reading books with three word titles. Might try to keep it up till the end of the month, just to be tidy.

Not too sure how I feel about 'Music and Silence'. It hasn't been an un-put-down-able book by any means. And at first that bothered me, that the narrative drive was so slow to kick in. Reading a lot of teenage fiction (and I'm writing teenage fiction) I'm really used to the solid narrative thrust books for younger readers have. They're often first person, ripping good yarns. I'd kind of forgotten about the joy of the slow layering of different viewpoints and narratives into a gradually connecting whole. That can be great. But 'Music and Silence' isn't quite great. Sometimes books like that can be a real joy to get lost in, a world that's been so carefully built up the reader feels like they know it really well. I feel like I know the world in this book really well, it's just that I don't care to spend too much time in 17th Century Denmark with only a sniff of a plot to hold all the historical detail together.

I'm not hating it. It's just not one of those books you think longingly about, wishing you were reading instead of sitting in yet another meeting.