The Reader Online

In Grand Central Station we went into the bookshop and when I finally made my way to the counter to pay, the desk clerk was reading – all praise be upon her – Middlemarch by George Eliot.

And not for no course neither – just because she wanted to… Next on her list, Daniel Deronda.

Posted by Philip Davis

The Reader New York editor Enid ‘Sparrow’ Stubin on Pickles: ‘As far as Jewish cuisine goes, sour pickles are a green vegetable.’

Phil reciting ‘I look into my glass’ by Thomas Hardy in Sarge’s Deli 548 3rd Avenue.

Not Large’s – Sarges!

Enid took us to her home ground, down on the lower east side where Sarges is her home deli – corned beef hash with eggs over was attempted by the Stube, a ridiculous no-contest. Have you seen her? She’s a sparrow! Yet see how she wields that lint-roller!

Phil ordered chopped liver and pastrami on rye – it came, he saw and conquered. The pickles were another story – that follows later.

Jane had hot brisket and onions – feh! Vegetarians beware.

Reader editor Philip Davis has been in New York promoting his new book, a biography of Bernard Malamud. He has been writing about his new role as Malamud’s posthumous publicist over on More Intelligent Life, but he has also been eating a great deal. In accordance with the old New York tradition, after the removal of lint, there is food:

We were out for breakfast at the Green Bean Cafe when these vacationers from Meridian, Mississippi (how do they spell it?) accosted the (also not shown) NY Editor Ms E. Stubin.

‘Were you in the show last night?’ young Amber asked our Enid.

‘Show?’

‘Mary Poppins,’ explained older sister Chloe. ‘But Amber fell asleep.’

‘I wasn’t in that show,’ our NY editor explained, ‘Though I might have been – lots of people who hang out in cafés in this town are in shows- or want to be…’

‘What do you like best about New York?’ asked Philip. His own best thing so far being Larges Liver and Pastrami sandwich.

‘I have a unicorn in my room,’ explained Amber. She also enjoyed the ’sliding stairs.’

Chloe was coping with an arm in a sling. They told us their favourite books were Cats, Angelina Ballerina, Care Bears and Gugi Gugi.

All this and pancakes too. English breakfasts don’t compare.

Fans of the popular diminutive book series Mersey Minis–mentioned here before–will be pleased to hear about the launch of book number 5, Leaving as well as the complete five-volume box set on November 6, 2007 at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. This is a terrific series that brings together professional and amateur voices to celebrate Liverpool’s centenary year. The launch will feature readings from Leaving by actor Brian Dodd.

About Leaving:

It is perhaps as a port of exit that Liverpool made its biggest impact on the world, but not all departures in Leavingare physical: the fifth Mersey Mini is packed with a diverse take on leaving, including lost youth, demolition, the docks and death itself. Featured writers include Herman Melville, George Melly, Noam Chomsky, Anthony Burgess and Steven Gerrard.

Edited by Deborah Mulhearn, Leaving is the fifth Mersey Mini, a series of writing about Liverpool by residents and visitors over the past eight centuries. Volumes one to four; Landing, Living, Longing and Loving have been released throughout 2007, including a giveaway of 3,500 free copies of volume three, Longing, to celebrate Liverpool’s 800th birthday on August 28th.

The set of five will be available for the first time, bound with a stylish clear PVC band, allowing the colours of each spine to show through. November 6 also includes the private view of artist Clare Curtis’ lino cuts from the series, with an exhibition following at the Editions gallery on Cook Street from November 8 to 24 2007.

Copies of the Mersey Minis are available from bookshops across Liverpool and Merseyside, and online at loveliverpool-books. Individual copies are £3.95, or the set of five is available for £14.99.

Posted by Chris Routledge

This week’s Links We Liked has the smell of the scriptorium. First up is an amazing post about a robot arm that is perpetually writing out the Lutheran bible on a roll of paper using a calligraphy pen. Click here for some thought-provoking images. The combination of robot, writing, religion, and the history of the book is almost too much to bear. Now what we need is a room full of monks writing out advertising copy for double glazing firms. A surly nod of acknowledgment to Boing Boing.

From low-volume to the bestseller list. Kirsty at Other Stories has pulled together bestseller lists from 1963 and 2007. While this year’s list is full of TV series tie-ins, celebrity crash-and-tells and the perennial Highway Code, 1963’s list is headed by A.L. Rowse’s William Shakespeare: A Biography and includes in the top 6 books by Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and Osbert Lancaster. It’s easy to see this difference in literary class as a sign of publishing’s populist decline, but at the same time I suspect that fewer people actually bought and paid for books in 1963 and those who did were among the more affluent and better educated of the population. More encouragingly ‘classic’ literature continues to sell extremely well in 2007 as it has for year after year. It’s just that Mansfield Park doesn’t sell as well in a given month as Jordan: My Life and Breasts. What happens to the mid-list author in the face of this celebrity onslaught is the real worry.

Which brings me to the other front in the publishing wars: The Internet. Anthony Grafton has a link-packed piece on the New Yorker website summarizing some of the developments in libraries and online archives in the last few years. There are some real gems here: an online copy of Alice in Wonderland and recommendations for the excellent Project Gutenburg, the Internet Archive, and the Open Library. For those of us with access to large libraries, Grafton celebrates JStor; I would add that it is best used in conjunction with the Zotero extension for the Firefox web browser. In fact for anyone doing any kind of online research Zotero is the thing.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Jane Davis, Director of The Reader organisation exhorts us to Vote For Books in the Radio 3 People’s Choice, part of the 2007 Free Thinking Festival.

Go ahead and vote for her proposition that of all the arts only books allow us to fully understand the human experience. You can listen to her pitching her case here.

Cast your vote here.

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Featuring Reader editor Philip Davis on 6th Avenue with our Spy from NY, Enid Stubin, she removing the lint from his dusty editor’s jacket before heading for lunch at Larges. We who have been left at home wonder whether the resourceful La Stubin has something for swatting moths in the unlikely event that PD offers to buy a drink.

Of course the reason for this madness is this appearance at the 92nd Street Y.

The last poet to feature in this series is Hugh Dunkerley, a teacher at the University of Chichester and currently West Sussex Poet Laureate. We move back to nature and the organic with Dunkerley’s poetry, how we are connected to nature and how we are also completely separated from it. However his work takes on an idea of there being something beyond, “for me a poem usually begins as something almost physical, a feeling of excitement which coalesces into a few words or lines”, a sense that his writing has to expose what it is that the poem is trying to say.

I believe poetry is still relevant and important because it retains the ability to replicate the complex nature of experience without giving in to the kinds of explanations that ideology and mass consumerism push on us every day. It is a space in which we can contemplate the ultimately mysterious nature of existence.

Ominous in its communication of desertion and unknown threat, ‘Early Warning’ conveys the the sense of humanity being both a part and apart of nature, here in a detrimental manner, with a delicacy that we would not normally associate with such a dystopic image.

Early Warning

Suddenly the bees deserted the air,
the hives fell silent
and the garden filled with an absence.

Meanwhile the numb flowers
went on offering up their sweet surfeit
to nothing and no one

and he scoured the skies
for some dark unseen threat.
Later, as he was planting the first

of the new potatoes,
the rain came, running in rivulets
down his back, soaking his shoes,

drumming on the hives like hail.
That evening, on the news, he heard
about the stricken reactor,

thought of the potatoes in their darkness
ticking with danger,
of his own wet skin, how by morning

the bees would swarming
at the hive entrances,
yearning for nectar.

(This poem is reproduced with permission from Oxford Poets 2007: An Anthology, edited by David Constantine and Bernard O’Donoghue, published by Carcanet Press.)

In her piece a few weeks ago, Get Into Reading project worker Mary Weston introduced the Mersey Care Reads project, a joint venture between The Reader and Mersey Care NHS Trust, which aims to set up reading groups in trust sites across the district. She spoke of the fantastic support we have received from the trust in getting the project off the ground.

One month later we have six groups up and running across the services with another three due to be set up before Christmas. One of these groups is based at Mossley Hill Hospital, working with older people’s services. So far we have had three sessions together and have read poetry by Wordsworth and Pam Ayres alongside short stories by Helen Dunmore and Ernest Buckler. Last week we read Chapter 6 of Little Women, the classic tale of four sisters growning up during the American Civil War. In this section, Beth, the quiet, modest sister, is invited to play the grand piano at the house of their rich neighbour Mr Lawrence. Having been educated at home, due to her chronic shyness, this is an almost impossible prospect for Beth, whose love of music battles with her timidity in this chapter. The thing we liked most was the way the characters of Beth and Mr Lawrence each brought out a different side of each other through the chapter. One group member commented

‘Reading this has made me wish I took more notice when I read it years ago. I didn’t take things in then, but now I notice the details. It is so wonderfully written. It really is beautiful’

We have decided to continue looking at this novel in the coming weeks, looking at the characters of the other sisters.

The support from Mersey Care staff has continued to enable the project to get off to a fantastic start and the Mossley Hill group has benefitted from the hard work of two excellent Occupational Therapists who are part of the team being trained to facilitate reading groups themselves so that the project will leave a lasting legacy of reading groups throughout the trust in years to come.

Posted by Katie Peters