The Reader Online

If there is one thing the Web has taught us it is that a lot of people have too much time on their hands. This video is evidence of that. It was recommended to me by Angela Macmillan and is remarkable not only for the quality of the reading (Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’) but the length of time it must have taken to train the dog to speak. And with such lovely vowels too:

Kimberley Long is a former Reader volunteer currently teaching English in Japan.

For my Christmas visit home I chose a book that was recommended to me years ago. At school we were split into two classes to study literature. So while I was introduced to Brian Friel and Shakespeare’s sonnets, many of my friends studied Anthony and Cleopatra, and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. It was Atwood who I finally found myself reading on my twelve hour flight back to Heathrow.

Alias Grace is, without a doubt, my friend Lauren’s favourite book, almost to the point of obsession. She has pestered me for years to read it, so when I told her last summer I had finally got around to buying it she went all glassy-eyed and stared into the middle distance. Atwood seems to have a mesmerising effect on people. I studied The Blind Assassin in my first year at university and witnessed the effect of Atwood again then. Four years on and a large number of my course mates will still list this book as one of their all time favourites. So I was excited when I pulled the book from my hand luggage and curled up to read the best I could in my cramped economy class seat.

Despite spending a whole day flying home and back it wasn’t enough even to get half way through the novel. Alias Grace isn’t a short book, but nor is it Les Miserables or War and Peace. Still it took me the full month of January to finish reading it. This is not meant as a criticism. If I really love a book I will read it in short chunks at a time, maybe only a chapter a day, hoping to prolong the experience for as long as possible. During the summer I read a six hundred page modern crime novel (which shall remain nameless) in four days because I disliked it so much. Once I’ve started reading a novel, regardless of how much I dislike it, I have to know what happens. So I will plough through it to get it out of my life again as soon as is possible. Alias Grace by comparison  was to be savoured and lingered over.

My favourite thing about Atwood is the responsibility she places on the reader. When you open a novel you instantly place all your trust in the narrator, whether the protagonist, an observer, or an omniscient being kindly chronicling the tale for our benefit. With Atwood however this trust is slowly unravelled. She creates narratives where you are encouraged to question everything that takes place. Can the narrator be trusted? How significant are certain events really to the story? Is Grace insane, or cold and calculating to the point of total unfeeling? Does Mary Whitney really have such a massive influence on Grace’s life? And the most interesting point for me; does Jeremiah the Peddler really return under different guises?

And I know this is the biggest faux pas in the world of literature, but I was drawn to the cover. I couldn’t help but be intrigued by a novel that, regardless of its country of publication, features a drawing of Pre-Raphaelite model and wife of Dante Rosetti, Elizabeth Siddal.

For anyone who has never read anything by Atwood before I implore you to try her. She is certainly the author who has been recommended to me most often and her work repays careful reading. Atwood’s novels are also a marvellously productive and challenging way of passing time on ridiculously long trans-continental flights.

–By Kimberley Long

We realise that we can’t bring you chocolates, or bunnies, or bunches of flowers, but we can bring together many aspects of Easter with the help of some great poets. Below is a collection of ‘Easter’ poems, pulling together a few of our seasonal favourites for you to read whilst you finish off that last slice of simnel cake, prepare the lamb, consume a buttered hot-cross bun, get ready for church or bite the top of your Easter egg. Hopefully they will bring a little something extra to enjoy amongst the festivities.

Easter Wings

Lord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:

With Thee
O let me rise,
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day Thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne;
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.

With Thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day Thy victorie;
For, if I imp my wing on Thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

George Herbert

It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens (1929)

It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens, 
Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond, 
Watching traffic of magnificent cloud 
Moving without anxiety on open sky— 
Season when lovers and writers find 
An altering speech for altering things, 
An emphasis on new names, on the arm 
A fresh hand with fresh power. 
But thinking so I came at once 
Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench, 
Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted 
Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken.

So I remember all of those whose death 
Is necessary condition of the season’s putting forth, 
Who, sorry in this time, look only back 
To Christmas intimacy, a winter dialogue 
Fading in silence, leaving them in tears. 
And recent particulars come to mind; 
The death by cancer of a once hated master, 
A friend’s analysis of his own failure, 
Listened to at intervals throughout the winter 
At different hours and in different rooms. 
But always with success of others for comparison, 
The happiness, for instance, of my friend Kurt Groote, 
Absence of fear in Gerhart Meyer 
From the sea, the truly strong man.

A ‘bus ran home then, on the public ground 
Lay fallen bicycles like huddled corpses: 
No chattering valves of laughter emphasised 
Nor the swept gown ends of a gesture stirred 
The sessile hush; until a sudden shower 
Fell willing into grass and closed the day,
Making choice seem a necessary error.

W. H. Auden

Chocolate Cake

I love chocolate cake.
And when I was a boy
I loved it even more.

Sometimes we used to have it for tea
and Mum used to say,
‘If there’s any left over
you can have it to take to school
tomorrow to have at playtime.’
And the next day I would take it to school
wrapped up in tin foil
open it up at playtime
and sit in the corner of the playground
eating it,
you know how the icing on top
is all shiny and it cracks as you
bite into it,
and there’s that other kind of icing in
the middle
and it sticks to your hands and you
can lick your fingers
and lick your lips
oh it’s lovely.
yeah.

Michael Rosen

(This section of the poem has been reproduced with kind permission by the poet. If you want more you can get it from Quick Let’s Get Out of Here (Puffin Books) or on CD from Quick Let’s Get Out of Here (Abbey Media). I highly recommend both.)

Holy Thursday

‘Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green,
Grey-headed beadles walk’d before, with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ waters flow.

O what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among.
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor;
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

William Blake

I stood tip-toe upon a little hill

I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,
The air was cooling, and so very still, 
That the sweet buds which with a modest pride 
Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside, 
Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems, 
Had not yet lost those starry diadems 
Caught from the early sobbing of the morn. 
The clouds were pure and white as flocks new shorn, 
And fresh from the clear brook; sweetly they slept 
On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept 
A little noiseless noise among the leaves, 
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves:

John Keats

Over at The Book Depository Mark Thwaite has been interviewing Nicholas Murray about his next book, So Spirited A Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool. In the Capital of Culture year there are going to be a lot of new books about Liverpool (I’m guilty as charged) the best of which will avoid what Murray calls ‘Merseycliche’ and give real insight into this rather wonderful city:

Mark Thwaite: What gave you the idea for So Spirited A Town?

Nicholas Murray: It was a combination of wanting to write something about my childhood and adolescence in Liverpool and wanting to give some sense of the city in which I grew up from a literary point of view. The book, when it is not about me, is about all the writers who have left their impressions of Liverpool and the number is surprisingly large. Some of the names are unpredictable too: Kazantzakis, Capek, Primo Levi, etc. Obviously the designation as Capital of Culture helped to galvanise things. It was a fairly obvious kind of opportunism. The idea had been gestating for a long time but now seemed like a good time to secure a publisher’s interest. I also thought that the eyes of the world would be on Liverpool and people might be searching for something a bit different from the usual Merseycliche. I must also say that I had reviewed several years ago in the TLS Gladys Mary Coles’ anthology of Liverpool writing, Both Sides of the River. Although she wasn’t interested in a lot of the writers I discuss it was an excellent anthology and really gave me the idea of exploring further.

[more...]

Nicholas wrote about So Spirited A Town for The Reader Online back in October 2007. Here’s the link to the interview with Mark Thwaite again.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

Bea Colley writes with information about the Wirral Bookfest which runs for a week from April 7th and features readings, workshops and other bookish things, including a Get Into Reading reading group, hosted by Wirral Libraries. Here’s the leaflet.

C. Max Magee at The Millions has an interesting post about the recent speech made by Barack Obama addressing the issue of race. Although he was more or less compelled to make a speech on the subject the way he did so has been generally praised for its candour and bravery. More interesting though is the way he used a quotation from William Faulkner:

Barack Obama gave a speech today taking on the complicated history of racial relations in America. Considering the how difficult a topic this is to tackle, it was a brave move. Embedded within the speech was a quote from Faulkner, "The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past."

Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic ran a letter from a reader explaining why "what Obama was signaling - that his speech - and his candidacy - are about confronting history from a Faulknerian standpoint was, to me, the bravest thing he did."

Here’s the link to Magee’s post.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

Deadlines have left me a little out of touch in the last few days but I wanted to share this lovely little post from Steve Stack of It Is Just You, Everything’s Not Shit. He is absolutely right when he says that children reading is one of the most marvellous things there is. Or even just trying to read, turning the pages and reciting familiar words.

It’s up there in the weepy stakes with the final story from the Winnie the Pooh series, entitled ‘Eeyore Finds the Wolery’. It ends with Christopher Robin realising he is growing up and is about to go off to school; he has ‘his eyes on the world’ but he and Pooh are enjoying the final days of the summer:

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

by Sarah Coley, The Reader magazine’s deputy editor.

If you want the company of a great soul, read The Prelude slowly and eagerly, as if for the main news of the day. Now I come to think of it, I’d like the news better and trust the world more if the paragraph or newscaster began, ‘There is a blessing in this gentle breeze’. ‘There is…’ Wordsworth’s literalism does you good even when you can’t believe it.

Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, The Prelude is rambling, ramshackle and unevenly sublime. He knows very well what matters to him but he cannot predict its presence nor summon it. In a very real sense The Prelude is about the actual power of memory - not the associative recall that goes, ‘Ah, I know this happened because I was listening to the Shipping News at the time, and you were wearing yellow…’, and not the memory that holds onto the past with an unbroken tenacity. The kind of memory that Wordsworth wants is the supplanting and powerful kind that knocks you off your feet with the unchanged impact of the original experience. This memory depends upon a kind of forgetfulness - as if you had to burn off the thoughts you’ve saved (the thoughts that protect you) in order to get back to experience itself. So he writes of his ‘spots of time’:

Oh! mystery of Man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours! I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands, but this I feel
That from thyself it is that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Come back upon me from the dawn almost
Of life: the hiding-places of my power
Seem open; I approach, and then they close;
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all, and I would give,
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
A substance and a life to what I feel:
I would enshrine the spirit of the past
For future restoration.
(XI, 329-43)

It’s as if the thought itself - the thing beyond recall - almost pushes the mind that thinks it out of the way in order to be thought, ‘I am lost, but see…’ You cannot hold onto the world of sense if you’re to search this mystery from the depths. I love how the senses tumble from sight to feeling: I am lost but see… but this I feel… It sounds almost like Bible-talk when his realisation gathers impetus, ‘But this I feel, / That from thyself it is that thou must give, / Else never canst receive’.

If you’ve just finished reading Howard Jacobson in The Reader 29 and are sharing his near-rebellion against the safe and modern atheism, look to Wordsworth for guidance and be persuaded (almost) that there is a mystery amongst us. Wordsworth is great because he believes you can find almost unspeakably profound thoughts and feelings in ordinary places, with ordinary lives. The ‘future restoration’ that he speaks of at the end means not only the recovery of the memory (in the words of the song, ‘Ah yes, I remember it well’) but the greater fact - the restoration (or even creation) of a self able to feel it. And that in a nutshell is what Jane’s Get Into Reading is all about.

Tomorrow (Saturday March 15th) heralds the grand re-opening of the Bluecoat arts centre in Liverpool. After a £12.5 million refurbishment project over the last three years, the time has come for the Bluecoat to swing open its doors to the public once more. To celebrate this they have put together a free showcase weekend of music, dance, visual art, live art and literature for this Saturday and Sunday.

As part of the event The Reader Organisation is running a workshop that aims to help you cope with some of life’s difficulties. Members of The Reader team will offer advice and possible solutions to your problems or contemporary issues - The Reader Clinic will turn to the pages of novels and poetry in order to find some answers:

“My boss tells me he loves me but there’s another, and she’s so beautiful. I can’t work out what I should do, my heart tells me one thing and my head another …” What book could possibly help with such a problem? Perhaps Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre?

“I have been getting up to a bit of mischief recently and scribbling all my notes in my diary. I think that my flatmate may be reading my entries!” Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal is just what’s needed for this situation.

How about this predicament: “I am a tall, gangly lad and I keep tripping over my own arms and legs. None of the other kids will let me play football. What can I do?” Solutions to this problem can be found in Liverpool Reads’ book for 2008, Keeper by Mal Peet.

From Shakespeare’s Richard III, we may be able to identify certain similarities with our own PM Gordon Brown and that of Richard, the future king: “Now is the winter of our discontent…”

“With my truest friends, it doesn’t matter how long it is since we’ve spoken, we’re still as close as ever but I struggle to express how much they mean to me.” Take a look at Elizabeth Jennings’ poem ‘Friendship’.

How can books help?

Bring your concerns, questions or dilemmas to the Garden Room at the Bluecoat tomorrow, 1.30 - 2.30 (just turn up at the venue, no ticket required) and meet the editors of The Reader magazine and members of The Reader Organisation as they host this special event to offer advice with the help of some great books. You can also hear more about The Reader Organisation’s projects, including the nationally acclaimed ‘Get Into Reading’ project and learn about the background of Blake Morrison’s feature article in The Guardian.

Find out how to get to the Bluecoat Art Centre here.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

I’ve been teaching Nabokov’s Lolita this week and came across Zembla, a superb website dedicated to the writer. There has been a lot of noise recently about another, unread, Nabokov book, currently locked away in a vault in Switzerland, but under threat of incineration at the writer’s last request. Slate reported on this story in January but more recent developments suggest Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir’s son, may be ready to sell it.

Last week we commented on Paul Constant’s article about book theft and the same day ran a poll of readers to see how many people would ‘fess up to the deed. A whole 23 people have responded so far, over half of whom have claimed to live lives without blemish or stain. It makes one’s heart swell with pride to know that a whopping 52 percent of our readers can be trusted. My faith in humanity is restored, truly it is. It is also pleasing to find so many (17 percent) of the respondents to this highly scientific and well thought-out survey are of a radical persuasion and believe all property is theft. If so, hand over the modern first editions I say. And two people have so far claimed preparedness to set themselves up in book acquisition and fencing schemes. They can get in touch using the usual channels.

But most pleasing of all is that after a whole week, The Guardian books blog has finally caught up with us. It is shocking to learn just how depraved and crooked Guardian readers can be.

And finally a couple of weeks ago National Geographic noted the sighting of a white whale. The marine biologist who spotted it is no Ahab chasing his impossible dream. And they wonder why kids don’t want to do science: “I had heard about this whale, but we had never been able to find it,” said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. “It was quite neat to find it.”

Posted by Chris Routledge