The Reader Online

Online Editor and Blog Man Chris Routledge reads from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

It’s a problem most readers have, but it’s a problem magnified for anyone involved in any kind of publishing venture: so many books, so little time. From slush pile to remainder bin, books face rejection and antipathy at every turn. This post on ‘book heuristics’ by writer and publisher Merlin Mann gets to the heart of making the decision to read or not to read. He’s confronted mostly with non-fiction titles, but a lot of this applies more generally. Harsh, fair, and very perceptive:

People send me lots of books, so I have to decide rather quickly whether one should be added to the ambitious pile of stuff I already really want to finish reading.

On the off chance that you care or find it useful in developing your own filtering, here’s my insanely reductive, mean-busy-guy way to make a 90-second decision on whether to read a new non-fiction book from an author I’m not familiar with.

Here’s the link again.

Posted by Chris Routledge 

The Shipping Lines Liverpool Literary Festival takes place from 3 to 9 November 2008 and has a provisional line-up that includes Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Carol Ann Duffy, Roger McGough, A.S. Byatt. The flier for the event has just been made available. If you have a blog or website where this might look fetching we’d be grateful if you could download a copy and post it. Get the jpg or the pdf. For enquiries about the festival itself, and to request a brochure, email events<AT>thereader.org.uk

Gratuitous picture of a Scottish castle

For the last two weeks I’ve been swanning around Western Scotland, staying well away from anything to do with the Internet, email and (more or less) telephones. It’s been lovely. But now I’m back and my inbox is full. Here are a few of the choicest cuts:

First up, friend of The Reader Caroline Smailes says that her novella Disraeli Avenue is now available for pre-order. This novella will be published as a limited edition of 500 hardback books and all 500 books will be signed and numbered. The pre-order will be available direct from Bluechrome at only £10 and this book will arrive before Christmas, being dispatched on December 01 2008 (the ideal Christmas present!). All books remaining after the pre-order will have an official release on January 15 2009 (the actual RRP will be £12.99). Most importantly, all profit from the sale of Disraeli Avenue will go to One in Four the organisation run for and by people who have experienced sexual abuse. Pre-order it here.

We previously mentioned the download version of Disraeli Avenue, which is still available for free. If you download it please make a donation to One in Four if you can.

Over at Readerville proprietor Karen Templer announced that the Note:Books micro-blogging application is now fully available. If you like making notes about your reading and enjoy talking about books in a lively and friendly community, then this could be for you.

If you have romance in mind Penguin has teamed up with match.com to run a dating website aimed at book lovers. According to Marketing Week part of the idea is to bring the written word back into the art of courtship. Ah, bless. Members will be able to describe themselves by listing the books they read, but it would be a lot more fun to use Penguin’s own book classifications. I consider myself a Modern Classic of course, but I can think of at least one former girlfriend who could be described as Poetry, Drama, and Criticism. Here’s the link to Penguin Dating.

And in case you missed it, the Orwell Diaries blog launched on August 9th. Lovely stuff.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem ‘Sympathy’, first published in 1899, inspired the title to Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and after even the briefest of readings of the poem, it is easy to see why. I myself always return to Dunbar’s poem, for which neither the words ‘sad’ nor ‘happy’ can apply, striking as it does at a deeper chord of human feeling that has to do with one’s assertion of life even in the bleakest hours of struggle – an assertion of the life spirit which forces even those smallest of creatures, such as the small caged bird around which the poem revolves, to persist in their struggle for freedom which in turn requires their having to hold on to what might be regarded as an almost instinctive faith in life.

I read this poem last week at one of my Get Into Reading groups. After I had read it, two other women also wanted to take a turn in reading it. After I had read the poem, one woman, who is about seventy years old and has suffered from depression for most of her life, said ‘I think that is a lovely poem. I relate it to myself – with the prison bars and the bruised wings, I think about myself in here, but I also think about how I always make sure I go out and keep on going out, and walk around.’ I hope you enjoy the poem as much as I continue to do.

Sympathy

I KNOW what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals -
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting -
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,-
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings -
I know why the caged bird sings!

Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1889

Posted by Clare Williams

Sam Shipman works with school children, looked-after children and those excluded from school as part of The Reader Organisation’s Get Into Reading project. As well as working with groups of children in community centres and schools, she delivers invaluable one-to-one sessions. Here she discusses the contentious issue of banding children’s books by age.

By late Autumn this year many publishing houses will be putting ‘age bands’ on their children’s books, so in the future you could expect to see the shelves in bookshops and libraries stocked with books carrying recommended reading ages on them such as 7+, 9+, and 11+. The scheme is proposed as a way to help adults choose books for children, but is this really the best way of doing this? Bookstores and libraries already separate children’s literature into age ranges such as 9-12 and Teen to help us find appropriate books; printing ages on the front of books is unnecessary. The question we need to ask ourselves is what effect will age banding have on the young people reading the books? I believe in many cases it will have a negative effect; instead of boosting reading amongst young people, and increasing sales of books – as publishers hope – it will in fact do the opposite.

Why tell struggling and dyslexic readers that they are reading books aimed at much younger children? I work with a 13 year-old boy who is currently enjoying a book that publishers will probably label as 9+, how would he feel if he knew? He would probably feel deflated and embarrassed. What he had previously recognized as a great achievement would suddenly shrink because the book that he has come to love and respect would be telling him that he should have read it when he was 9. The boy’s new enthusiasm for reading could quickly be buried under feelings of shame and inadequacy.

J, foster carer of 5 young people said of the proposed age banding, ‘I think it is ridiculous, children are all different and read at different levels, it will destroy the confidence of struggling readers.’

Here at The Reader Organisation we see reading as socially inclusive, a book can bring people together and foster a sense of community. It is because of this belief in inclusion that I agree with Philip Pullman when he says: “Declaring that a book is for any group in particular means excluding every other group, and I don’t want to exclude anybody.” Do we want to divide our children so clinically into groups of readers by age or do we want to keep the pages of books open to them as they were to us?

Many writers, librarians, illustrators, teachers, and booksellers oppose this proposal and have joined together to form a petition led by Philip Pullman. Visit the wesbite to find out more.

Posted by Sam Shipman

The FREE tickets for all of the original performances of Wirral Community Shakespeare’s open-air production of The Winter’s Tale in Birkenhead Park ran-out last week. Tickets for the performances have been in such high demand that The Reader Organisation has decided to stage TWO EXTRA performances, releasing 600 more FREE tickets.

The two extra performances will be on Thursday 28th August at 7.45pm and a matinee on Friday 29th August at 2pm. The tickets are FREE and will be available from 10am today, Thursday 21st August, at Birkenhead Park Pavilion (can be obtained from 10am – 4pm, Monday to Saturday thereafter). There are also a few more tickets available for the three original performances (Friday 29th August at 7.45pm, Saturday 30th August at 2pm and 7.45pm). Be quick, they’ll be snapped-up!

Cast members in rehearsals

The Wirral Community Shakespeare Project is community led; it was an idea that came from members of Get Into Reading groups. Twenty-eight members of the Birkenhead community join professional actors and crew, Coronation Street’s Pauline Fleming (starring as Paulina) and Brookside’s Neil Caple (Director) to put on a performance that aims to make Shakespeare more accessible to more people. Due to the unprecedented demand for tickets and the project’s engagement with the community, this production proves to be successful in reaching out to new audiences – spectators and participants. 

Posted by Jen Tomkins

As you know, a couple of months ago we started a campaign to get a classic work of literature on the list for Richard and Judy’s Book Club next year. The book we will endeavour to get onto the renowned book list – voted for by you - is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë.

It appears that we’re not the only ones putting the pressure on. In The Observer last Sunday Andrew O’Hagan wrote, with no reservations,  about how Richard and Judy’s selection of books failed to challenge readers. With such a captive audience at their finger tips, Richard and Judy have an “opportunity to use that connection to to turn a generation on to good writing.” He continues by saying,

We know it isn’t impossible because Oprah Winfrey did it in America. I know she introduced a lot of cack, but along the way she had them reading Tolstoy and Jonathan Franzen – who wasn’t happy to be read but that was inverted snobbery. You can’t wave a wand over the audience for Richard and Judy and say: “You should be reading Kafka”. It is a lifestyle show, but these books oversell a reduced, unimaginative notion of what people’s literary enjoyment might be. If they were to up it just a little bit, that might be good news.

Good to know we’re not the only ones that think classic literature deserve a higher profile and that readers should be encouraged to read more widely, deeply and imaginatively. If they’ve done it on Oprah, surely they can do it on Richard and Judy?

Posted by Monkey

This poem was given to me to read last week by one of our Get Into Reading group members. K, who has also been volunteering in our office found the piece of paper with the poem on it filed away with a collection of short stories, or rather sandwiched between other things in haste after one of the reading groups. It had been lying there, forgotten about, “It’s time we brought it back out into the light,” K said, ”isn’t it?” Urging me to read it, telling me that it was one of the most beautiful poems that he’s ever read, I turned away from my computer screen to do just that.

What struck me most about re-reading ‘Piano’ by D H Lawrence was that it didn’t strike me as being merely an act of nostalgia but a beautifully penned illustration on the nature of memory. One can almost hear the “tingling strings” of the “tinkling piano”. These strike me as being like crystal clear water trickling and tumbling in narrow, rocky streams. So our lives move on, never stopping – like a river – and we’re left, on occasion, with our own “insidious mastery of song” which takes back to somewhere we can never really be again (and we may well not want to be) but in those moments floods our present life all the same.

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

D. H. Lawrence, 1918

Posted by Jen Tomkins

As part of the BBC’s Free Thinking festival, Director of The Reader Organisation, Jane Davis, appeared on Radio 3’s breakfast show with her impassioned ‘Free Thought’ about the real value of literature. Jane talks about how she founded The Reader Organisation, with the aim of “Bringing books to life, off the syllabus, down from the shelves and into the hands of people who need them. We all need the added brain power and meditative reflection that reading can bring.” It’s very short and very strong. Listen here.