Man Booker
Don't you just love lists? I adore making lists of books that I want to read although I seldom stick to the rigidity of a list and often deviate from it. Stay tuned in the coming week for my summer reading list, which thus far only appears in my mind.
This year I am steadily progressing through the list of the Guardian's 1000 Books You Must Read and by year's end I should have completed one fifth of it, so that list will be taking me some time. Another list that I will probably want to embark on later this summer is the Man Booker Prize longlist, which will be announced at the end of July. So far I have dabbled with longlists and shortlists for the main literary prizes and only read ones that appealed to me but now that I am blogging I may make a conscious effort to complete the entire longlist, or at least the shortlist.
Thinking about the Man Booker prize and having requested J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace this week from the library I thought I would list the Booker winners that I have read (and those I own but have not yet read). There's a possibiility that I may try to read all of them - are there ones you have read that you particularly recommend or ones that you are wanting to read?
2008 - White Tiger by Aravind Ariga
2007 - The Gathering by Anne Enright
2006 - The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (own)
2005 - The Sea by John Banville
2004 - The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (reviewed here)
2003 - Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (own)
2002 - Life of Pi by Yann Martel
2001 - True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
2000 - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
1999 - Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (will be reading shortly)
1998 - Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
1997 - The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
1996 - Last Orders by Graham Swift
1995 - The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (own)
1994 - How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman
1993 - Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
1992 - The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
1992 - Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (joint winner)
1991 - The Famished Road by Ben Okri (own)
1990 - Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt
1989 - The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1988 - Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
1987 - Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
1986 - The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
1985 - The Bone People by Keri Hulme
1984 - Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner
1983 - Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee
1982 - Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally
1981 - Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
1980 - Rites of Passage by William Golding
1979 - Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
1978 - The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (fairly certain that I own this)
1977 - Staying On by Paul Scott
1976 - Saville by David Storey
1975 - Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
1974 - The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
1974 - Holiday by Stanley Middleton (joint winner)
1973 - The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell
1972 - G. by John Berger
1971 - In a Free State by V.S. Naipaul
1970 - The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens
1969 - Something to Answer For by P.H. Newby
Nine -soon to be ten- of forty one winning novels is not great but neither is it woeful. Funnily enough I haven't read anything that won before the year I was born and wonder if this is telling at all or just coincidental? As an aside: Midnight's Children (the Booker of Bookers and the Best of Booker) is one of my favourite novels; I love its lushness and epic, grand scope, and continually discover new gems upon re-reading. Anyway, best get back to reading as I have a lifetime of reading lists ahead of me.
Fahrenheit 451
Last November I visited the TH.2058 installation by Dominique Gonzales-Foerster in the Tate Modern, London.
The concept behind this temporary exhibit was a dystopian post-apocalyptic haven. From the brief (which appeared on the wall before you entered):
It rains incessantly in London – not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has now lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities, imagination and desires. They dream about infinitely dry deserts.
This continual watering has had a strange effect on urban sculptures. As well as erosion and rust, they have started to grow like giant, thirsty tropical plants, to become even more monumental. In order to hold this organic growth in check, it has been decided to store them in the Turbine Hall, surrounded by hundreds of bunks that shelter – day and night – refugees from the rain.
It sounds somewhat like a John Wyndham book, doesn't it? The rain, of which there was audio, also reminded me of post-nuclear black rain. Dystopian literature lay on the bunkbeds so that voyeurs could participate; the artist's vision was for people to lie down and read the books (not steal them, as happened). The photograph above is one I took but there were many books (apparently to begin with one on every bunk) including The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells; We by Yevgeny Zamyatin; The Drowned World JG Ballard; Hiroshima mon amour Marguerite Duras; The Man in the High Castle Philip K Dick. A number of these books -or the subsequent movie adaptations- I studied in the Writing the Disaster topic module I completed for my Master's course, but Fahrenheit 451 was one I hadn't yet read.
"FAHRENHEIT 451: the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns".
The above quote appears before the opening line, as a preface and introduction. The opening line reads "It was a pleasure to burn". Both lines ignite the imagination and desire to read more. Further down the page ... "He strode in a swarm of fireflies". Such poetry in a dystopian future where poetry is forbidden and books burned, incinerated by people themselves in the incinerators that each house contains, or by the subverted firemen who ignite fires rather than put them out. We are given insight into his totalitarian pyromania by the "He" in "a swarm of fireflies", the fireman with the symbolic 451 on his helmet, Guy Montag, who does not consciously question the burning of books, knowledge, and power, until he meets his neighbour, Clarisse McClellan, whose influence turns his world upside down within a week.
Conceptualised in the years following the A-bombs and written during the early years of the Cold War this Science Fiction classic is an actualised study of nuclear paranoia. Written on a pay type writer in the basement of a UCLA library, Ray Bradbury wrote a novel about his love of books. Completed during the era of McCarthyism, no publisher wanted to take the risk of publishing a book that they thought was about censorship until a visionary editor bought the manuscript for $450 (all that he could afford) to serialise it in his new magazine; the young editor was Hugh Hefner, the magazine was Playboy, and as Bradbury says in his preface to the novel, "The rest is history."
Fahrenheit 451 is a quick read -172 pages- and I read it overnight, in three sittings, and it is fairly accessible; some of the post-apocalyptic visions confused me and the fourth wall dimension of television -where the "family" appear in your "parlour"- blew my mind but overall it is an enjoyable futuristic study of dystopia that ranks up there with 1984 and Brave New World as a dystopian classic. The crux of the novel is that television has destroyed any interest in reading literature, a concept that is as pertinent -and even prophetic- now as it was almost sixty years ago. This was an enjoyable and rewarding read.
I would also like to leave you with a question: if you were fleeing a burning house but had the chance to save one book, what would it be? Would it be a rare, priceless and irreplacable one; a signed copy; a favourite; a sentimental choice? For me I would hate to lose my collection but material possessions can be replaced and however much I adore my books, sentiment and memory take precendence. I would grab my copy of Toni Morrison's Love from the shelf, a hardback copy that my boyfriend gave me for our first Christmas the year it was published, and which he beautifully inscribed.
A mish-mash of book related things
I hate hay fever. My head hurts and I haven't made much headway in my leaning tower of to-be-read books this week. I could catch up on some overdue reviews but my thoughts are too fuzzy. I am struggling with two books that I do need to finish: one is Lady Chatterley's Lover for book group next week and the other is a review copy that I need to finish reading and write up for the end of the month; the former I have barely made a dent in and the latter I am enjoying but do not seem to be progressing with at any great rate.
To give myself some semblance of reading achievement this week I have started to read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a book that I have been meaning to read for some time. When I read "breathing the finest pollen in the world, book dust, with which to develop literary allergies" in Bradbury's preface to the novel, I knew I had made a good choice. Fahrenheit 451 immediately ignites the imagination and I look forward to reading more and sharing my thoughts. I need to finish it quickly so that I can return it to the library and collect a few requests but I don't think that will be much of a problem, providing my head allows me. Perhaps I should be relieved that I only have hay fever and not a bout of Swine Flu since it seems to be spreading at an almost alarming rate in my home city...
Season 2 of the HBO series True Blood based on the Sookie Stackhouse Vampire Mysteries series began this week and upon watching the premiere I tried to request the second book in the series (I read the first at the beginning of the first series last Autumn). Regrettably the library don't stock it but when lamenting that to a friend he very generously offered to post it down to me and it arrived today along with the next two in the series! He thought that they would keep me occupied and they certainly will; this series is my guilty pleasure and pure addictive fun (um, a bit like Twilight ... so you could say I have two guilty pleasures). This is also the friend who introduced me to the Armistead Maupin Tales of the City series two summers ago so you could say that he is a great friend indeed, and he really is. He is also off to San Franciso tonight, of which I am very envious, and will be taking photos of famous locations from Tales of the City.
Oh, that reminds me of one of the most obscure book-related anecdotes that I have to share... as I was reading one of the books from the series, on a train home after work one night and immersed in the fun of 28 Barbary Lane, I was interrupted by somebody asking "are you in love?" I looked up startled to find the train conductor looking at me oddly and as I was too busy checking for the exits and calculating my chances of survival if I jumped from a moving train I didn't answer in a hurry (even though, yes, I am very much in love). Perhaps noticing my panicked state he elaborated, "I mean with Michael?" Ah... strange conductor on train is actually engaging me in literary conversation and is asking if I am in love with the main protagonist of the series, Michael Tolliver, I realised and sighed with relief. I managed to find my breath and squeak "Yes". Later on as he passed through the carriage again he apologised after realising that he had freaked me the hell out.
Lastly, did anyone read this article on today's Guardian online? I actually have a copy of ANONthology that I picked up from my local bookshop recently but you can download a copy for free from the website. This makes for an interesting experiment and I look forward to participating. Now back to the reading and taking of painkillers.
Teaser Tuesdays
Quote a couple of spoiler-free sentences from the book you’re reading to tempt others.
The Call of the Weird
Louis Theroux is a British-American journalist, son of travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux, who was given his first TV break by the political and often controversial filmmaker, Michael Moore. Louis has a smiliar style to Moore, of quasi documentary and Gonzo journalism. His travels in American marginalised subcultures, on the fringes of society, were aired in the UK with the title "Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends" and featured groups of people ranging from UFO hunters to Porn Starts to White Supremacists.
The documentaries themselves were eccentric, as well as the subjects, and his approach ironic, witty, and often introspective. I was curious how this would translate to written form but it was as if I was reading Louis's own voiceover script for one of the episodes. He is even more introspective in words and meditates upon the nature of weird and how his and our voyeurism and consumption of weird contributes to society's overall weirdness.
Some of the subject matter and the people are far from just a source of amusement but are intensely thought-provoking. The book delves deeper into the disturbing nature of these subcultures and the harm done to the participants. Often the people Louis has gone to seek out are the ones he was most concerned by and their follow-up stories are sad; Louis documents and evokes the decline of their lives, their loneliness, their disturbing beliefs. Not only are these -the TV documentaries and book- an insight into fringe societies but they are a comment upon society as a whole, as a composite of weirdness.
