The Reader Online

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

There are definitely some bonuses to having my job, the most obvious being that I get to live in Japan for a year. The pay isn’t bad either, but the best perk of all is the amount of free time. Of the forty hours a week I spend in school I only spend 18 of them at the front of a classroom. Then you have to subtract the number of lessons that get cancelled due to monthly exams, sports day, having an hour-long assembly to cheer on the baseball team, and numerous other things.

All in all this leaves a lot of time for me to while away at my desk in the massive teachers’ office I share with forty other members of staff. There are plenty of ways of doing this. Even after I’ve finished planning whatever I need for the weeks classes there’s still time to devote to studying Japanese, however difficult this seems to persist in being. There’s also the highly skilled activity of staring blankly into space. And sometimes it’s fun to have a few minutes gossiping and giggling with the young English teacher who sits next to me, whilst we munch our way through the enormous store of chocolate she keeps in her desk. But I’ve spent a lot of time working my way through as many novels as possible.

During a recent exam week lull I turned to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for some inspiring school-time reading. I adore Capote’s writing style and I couldn’t stop myself from racing through the pages. Being in the teachers’ office, however, guarantees anything but quiet reading time. Between classes the students wander around, coming in to speak to the teachers about a myriad of things, most of which I have absolutely no idea about. They come over calling for ‘our Kimu’ to try out a few English sentences on me. This usually ends in them asking for candy from the prize box or telling me the Kimono-wearing Hello Kitty toy I have sitting on my desk is ‘kawaii’ (‘cute’ in English).

But reading a novel about murder most foul when I have curious students and fluent English speaking colleagues around makes me feel nervous. Does choosing to read about death somehow make me seem a bit odd? Japan can be surprisingly straight-laced at times, and I don’t want to become the English girl who likes hearing about murders. I am engrossed in reading the gory details of the murders of the innocent Clutter family when I become aware of one of the students who has shuffled up silently behind me, peering quizzically at the (I hope) indecipherable text on the page in front of me.

Capote’s thriller is proof that knowing the ending doesn’t necessarily spoil your enjoyment of a story. From the outset we know that almost all the characters we are introduced to will meet their demise at the hands of another human, but it’s hearing their stories that’s the pleasure. Still Capote complies with a thrilling ending, leaving out the details of what exactly happened on the remote farm house one cold winter night until the very end of his twisting narrative. Perhaps my discomfort in reading the novel is partly what Capote set out to achieve; to create victims and killers who elicit your sympathy.

The idea that a popular and respected family could be unwittingly the target for two criminals unknown to them leaves you looking over your shoulder. Even when you’re perfectly certain that the only person behind you is a fifteen year old girl with multi-coloured fingernails and a pink clip in her hair, who is interested in everything that the English girl does, eats and reads, the novel makes you nervous. Suddenly I find that I have way too much time to think.

By Kimberley Long

From the 9th of August the Orwell Prize organisation will be blogging George Orwell’s diaries, starting from 9th August, 1938. Here’s the initial announcement. As chance would have it on the 10th of August I’ll be going to spend some time on Jura, where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Here’s a snippet from Orwell’s domestic diary from 10th August, 1948. I don’t expect 2008 to be much different, except perhaps the strawberries:

10.8.48 Fine, not very warm. Wind tends to be northerly. Mainland looked closer than I have ever seen it. B. & his friends put the hay in the back field into ricks. Took the runners out of the strawberries, ie. the worst ones.

Here’s the link to the Orwell Diaries blog again.

Our poll to find a ‘classic’ novel for the Richard and Judy book club ends on Thursday. If you haven’t voted yet, make with the mouse. Read more about it here.

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Earlier today the Man Booker judges announced the longlist for this year’s prize. The books to be included in this year’s ’Man Booker Dozen’ (that’s like a baker’s dozen, there are thirteen titles) are as follows:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic)

Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold (Tindal Street Press)

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Faber and Faber)

From A to X by John Berger (Verso)

The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser (Chatto & Windus)

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray)

The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant (Virago)

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (Fourth Estate)

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (Fourth Estate)

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (Simon & Schuster)

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (Hamish Hamilton

Michael Portillo, chair of judges, comments:

The judges are pleased with the geographical balance of the longlist with writers from Pakistan, India, Australia, Ireland and UK. We also are happy with the interesting mix of books, five first novels and two novels by former winners. The list covers an extraordinary variety of writing. Still two qualities emerge this year: large scale narrative and the striking use of humour.

With five first novels, the list this year has passed over many of the big names in the literary world, shining a light instead for small presses, humour and horror with an eclectic selection of titles. The big runners that were expected – Damon Galgut, Tim Winton, Peter Carey, for example – have been left out of the 2008 race. I am sure that Salmon Rushdie and Amitav Gosh are able to carry the torch for the established literary world though. So, I guess it’s time to stop musing on the list and start reading through it.

The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 9th September.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

In 1985 I bought my first ‘Walkman’, actually a cheap Sony Walkman lookalike wannabe personal tape player that I could listen to in the street with small, foam-padded headphones. The battery life was terrible–and non-rechargeable–and the sound quality was grim, but it felt like a revolution to me. Suddenly I could take my music wherever I went, provided I could carry enough batteries. In the early 1980s the ways we listened to music were changing. Looking back, the number of formats was bewildering. There was the vinyl LP, the 12 and 7-inch single, the CD–if you could afford it–and the cassette tape, which had a following all of its own. Since then of course we have added music downloads, the rise of the mp3 player, and–if you can afford it–music streamed to every room in the house. Music fans have never been afraid of new formats and new ways of listening. For them, the music is what matters.

But what about readers? There’s a lot of gnashing of teeth at the moment about the future of the book and the future of reading. On Sunday The Observer ran a feature on the rise of e-readers such as the iRex iLiad, Sony Reader, and the Kindle. More heat and noise is being generated by people worrying about ‘Reader’s Block’, roughly defined as a condition of buying more books than you read. On that definition I have always suffered from the complaint and so I suspect have most habitual readers, but recently I’ve noticed a definite change in my reading pattern. It’s not that I’m reading less, but I am reading differently. Books are no longer my go-to technology for stories; there isn’t one of those any more. I’m reading online, I’m listening to audio books, I’m reading more magazines, and for a few years now I’ve been reading eBooks, first on a Palm PDA and now on my iPod Touch. I read far fewer physical books, but I’m reading more than ever.

The book, as every one of these edgy articles about the coming barbarian techno-hordes points out, is a clever piece of technology. It’s portable, tough, and needs no power. Unless you want to read in the dark, that is, which I often do. But the physical book has become much more than a technology for text delivery. It is inextricably tied up with education, culture, and class. People make judgements about one another based on the books on their bookshelves, or on their choice of reading for the commute. Physical books are a mark of status. As Lynne Truss points out in the Observer’s feature, with eBooks you can’t see what people are reading. She says it as if that’s a bad thing, but it’s not, it’s a liberating thing. I don’t want people like Lynne Truss making instant judgements about me on the basis of what I’m reading, but for the record, while it may look as if I’m ruining my hearing listening to thrash metal on my iPod, in fact I’m probably listening to short stories from the New Yorker. If you see me staring out of the train window with headphones on, Lynne, ask me what I’m reading.

In any case, these new ways of reading entail engaging with other readers in ways that Gutenberg could not possibly have imagined. In a typically facetious comment on Twitter, Merlin Mann, aka hotdogsladies wrote: “Re “Why I left Books”: Margin notes [are not the same as] anonymous comments. I cannot self-link to my Blogspot site from a margin note.” The New York Times backs this up in an article on how reading is changing:

Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”

The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.

Something is happening to the way we read and it’s happening very quickly, but the possibilities are opening up, not closing down. Why fetishise the physical book when we can read aloud, or be read to, read online, on our phones, or on our ebook reading devices (NB. you need a better name for those, chaps)? The books won’t stop working just because we start using other technologies and in fact as demand for physical books declines the quality of them as objects may well improve–apocalyptic booksniffers rejoice! Naomi Alderman in her piece in the Observer even suggests that new reading technologies will lead to new literary forms. I think she’s right about that, even if, for the time being, the technology is still as clunky as my tape player in 1985.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Frances Lincoln is an award winning publisher and Seven Stories, The Centre for Children’s Books, is an innovative cultural centre for children’s literature. Earlier this month they announced that they have created an award, Diverse Voices, in memory of Frances Lincoln, who died in 2001.

The purpose of The Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children’s Book Award is to:

• Take positive steps to increase the representation of people writing from or about different cultural perspectives, whose work is published in Britain today.

• Promote new writing for children, especially by or about people whose culture and voice are currently under-represented.

• Recognise that as children’s books shape our earliest perceptions of the world and its cultures, promoting writing that represents diversity will contribute to social and cultural tolerance.

• Support the process of writing rather than, as with the majority of prizes, promoting the publication.

The Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Childrens Book Award is for a manuscript that celebrates cultural diversity in the widest possible sense, either in terms of its story or in terms of the ethnic and cultural origins of its author. The prize of £1,500, plus the option for Frances Lincoln Children’s Books to publish the novel, will be awarded to the best work of unpublished fiction for 8-to-12-year-olds by a writer, aged 16 years or over, who has not previously published a novel for children. The writer may have contributed to an anthology of prose or poetry. The work must be written in English and it must be a minimum of 10,000 words and a maximum of 30,000 words. The closing date for all entries is 30th January 2009. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony at Seven Stories, The Centre for Children’s Books, in April 2009.

Further details about submitting an entry can be found on the Seven Stories website.

Think of the Brontës and poetry isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. It’s more likely to be Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights or Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (which, incidentally, is the focus of Readers Connect in the current issue of The Reader magazine and one of the novels in our Richard and Judy Poll, which closes at the end of the month). Yet Emily Brontë is widely regarded as one of the most original poets of the nineteenth century, remembered for her lyrics, such as ‘The night is darkening round me’ and for her passionate invocations from the world of Gondal (an imaginary world that she created with Anne), as well as more personal musings and visions, of which ‘Stanzas’ is one. It is vivid in its evocation of the atmospheric landscape of the moors, which are the centre of her thoughts and the place of her inspiration.

There is, however, some doubt as to whether Emily did indeed write this poem; that it should probably be ascribed to Charlotte. Yet Emily’s poetic work, like Wuthering Heights, so often evokes the moorland scenery that surrounds her - something she was more intensely attached to, and concerned with, than her sisters – this poem is no exception. Surely it was Emily? We’ll never know.

Stanzas

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:Today, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

Emily Brontë

Posted by Jen Tomkins

In which Phil Davis, editor of The Reader magazine, reads from Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian.

Visit the downloads page to read issue 29 of The Reader magazine at the compelling price of absolutely free. Or subscribe here.

Back in June Kate McDonnell wrote about The Reader Organisation’s involvement in the Edge Hill Short Story Competition. Here’s Clare Williams with an update:

For the past few months Get Into Reading groups have been involved in the judging panel for this year’s Edge Hill Short Story Competition. There were five authors up for nomination this year, and GIR groups read one story from each of these author’s short story collections. Everyone involved enjoyed taking part; at the time we had no idea who the authors were so it was all very exciting.

The competition raised important questions amongst GIR members about what a short story should be like. One member from my Wednesday morning group offered the following suggestion about what makes a good short story:

A good short story is one that confronts awkward feelings and thoughts and situations that we all experience as human beings. A good short story makes us recognise the fact that these feelings and thoughts are difficult, and does something with them to make us think and reflect. It is not about being clever or wordy or filling it out with lots of stuff. A good short story needs to have some substance in it … 

On Thursday 3 July GIR group members who had been involved in the competition were cordially invited to attend the award ceremony. Two of my group members came along, as well as several others from different groups, and we all had a really good time. With wine on tap and an exciting array of canapés continually being offered to us (and note I’m talking about very posh canapés of salmon and caviar and goats cheese and aubergine) we really felt part of the occasion and, well, really quite important. Indeed, one of our own group members joined Jane on the platform to announce the winner for the Reader’s Choice Award. Claire Keegan with her short story collection Walk the Blue Fields won the first prize of £5000. During her award speech, Keegan spoke about how the form of the short story had become unpopular as a literary genre because it was often regarded by others as too slow, and yet as Keegan recognised, its very slowness was an integral part of its point. The author interestingly observed:

The short story is there to slow us down. It doesn’t follow a clear progressive narrative in the conventional way. If you’re not reading the short story at the pace of the narrative voice within it, you’re not reading the story.

A very interesting idea I thought, and one that is no doubt integral to the rationale behind GIR itself. Indeed, one of our group members, Louise, spoke in turn about how the short story competition offered the opportunity for a break in the normal ongoing routine of life. Simon Robson won the second prize of £1000 for his collection The Separate Heart. The Reader’s Choice, nominated by GIR, was Christopher Fowler’s ‘Cupped Hands’, taken from his collection Old Devil Moon.

To top the evening off, after several glasses of wine, one of our GIR members thought it would be a good idea to ask one of the authors to join our table. The author in question was Simon Robson, who wrote the short story ‘Fat Girl’, which tells of a young boy’s redemption through the accident of fate. The story’s ambivalent ending (which I won’t give away for those of you who haven’t read it) had always perplexed some group members, hence why Len decided to bring the author over for a personal question and answer session. After the initial shock of nerves and trepidation, and increased confidence with a little help from the red and the white stuff, we suddenly found ourselves involved in a serious literary discussion with this talented author.

Posted by Clare Williams

Meg Guroff wrote to let me know about her labour of love, powermobydick.com, an online, annotated edition of Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby Dick. There are other online editions out there, but this one is presented clearly and simply, with annotations that ‘announce’ themselves as you mouse over the relevant word or passage. Search, and a nifty T-shirt are apparently coming soon. As some readers will know I’m a big fan of this novel and while I’ve had time so far only to scratch the surface of the site, I expect to be coming back to it quite often.

Here’s the link again.

Posted by Chris Routledge