A Meme about Books

I haven't indulged in these for a while, but this one intrigued me. I nicked it from Sheenagh Pugh's blog which is well worth reading in any case.

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

Lord of the Rings – sorry!

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you'll read next?

Currently reading Mainstream Love Hotel. Just finished The Lost Symbol, because I like reading pulp and giving out about it just as much as anyone else!

3. What book did everyone like and you hated?

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. I really wanted to like it, but I got a bit annoyed with the heroine in the end. Probably just me being curmudgeonly, because I know the book went on to win great honours for its author, so it must be good.

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you'll read, but you probably won't?

Ulysses by you-know-who. I know the plot, the characters and the story: I just need to read the damn thing.

5. Which book are you saving for "retirement?"

Isn’t that a bit ahead – who knows what I’ll be doing then!

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

If I get annoyed with the book I will do this, but I’ll still read the rest of it. Mainly I wouldn’t do this on myself, as I enjoy holding back too much.

7. Acknowledgments: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

I can see both sides to that argument. A publisher I know said it was better to try and be concise, rather than thanking everyone, including the cat. Funnily enough, established writers don’t have long Ack. lists, if at all.

8. Which book character would you switch places with?

Watson, from Sherlock Holmes. I’d love to see Holmes in action, see the way his mind worked. I reckon I might have a bit of trouble in the trouser department, though.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

I have a book that I bought second-hand: Richard Scarry’s Big Book of Words. I bought it because it was the first book my parents bought me after a trip they had away and I loved it the way some kids love a teddy bear, or doll. I did let the kids read it – I’m not that precious – but I have reclaimed it, to ‘pass on.’

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

The Crowning Privilege, a book of Oxford lectures by Robert Graves. It was the first, and probably the last, book I bought on eBay. It was brilliant – Graves had a strange mind when it came to poetry and how it worked – if you’re in any doubt about that, try reading The White Goddess.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

I find it extremely hard to part with books, but I have given them away - I gave a signed copy of a Billy Collins poetry collection to a dear friend of mine. I regretted it instantly, but she adored it.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?

Probably that copy of The Lord of the Rings. It has moved house with me countless times.

13. Any "required reading" you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?

Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. I hated it in secondary school, but loved it later as one of twelve 19^th c novels I had to read for a literature course.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

Dried flowers. And a shopping list. Not in the same book, obviously. Although who knows..?

15. Used or brand new?

I like both. I love the smell that second-hand books have, slightly musty and, well, bookish, but I love the feel of a book that hasn’t been opened yet, cracking the spine of it – that sort of thing.

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

I’ve read him, but I don’t like categorising. Pass.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

I had reservations about Peter Jackson tackling LOTR. But I thought he did very well in the end. Can’t think of any movies that are better than the book, because I do like both mediums and also I like the world I create in my own head when I read a book.

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

Uh, can't think.

19. Have you ever read a book that's made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

Paradise by Abdul Razzak Gurnah. It was aching. It made me hungry to experience eastern Africa. But that part of Africa probably doesn’t exist any more. All the more reason why the book worked for me.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you'll always take?

I used to have a great friend who was always dropping in really interesting books and CDs. Alas we don’t live in the same town anymore, but I always read those books – many of which I still have.

Now, if you feel like having a go at this yourself - nominate yourself. Go on, you know you want to!

First Thoughts... on The Zoo Father et al

... are how disturbing I find the poems in this compact collection (but not in a bad way). I can see why The Zoo Father was much talked about when it came out. There's a fusion of personal mythology with a wider mythology which really works: it's scary in places and has you asking lots of questions, not just of the text, but of yourself too. It makes me excited by the possibilities of poetry: what you can do with material when you're not prepared to just go with ordinary face value.

It also makes me question what I'm doing in my own work - no bad thing. My own stuff has gotten steadily darker lately, and I was wondering if I was going the right way. I'm a bit obsessed with people who are fallen and implements of torture and it's all very heavy going at times. I know I haven't finished mining the present seam I'm excavating, and I can see that in Petit's work, the way that her themes continued into a follow-up collection, The Huntress.

I'm very excited by the pamphlet I got, The Wounded Deer, (only £3.00!) which will be developed into a full 50 poem collection, What The Water Gave Me, expected next year from Seren. I think that Pascale captures not only Frida Kahlo's voice, but the way that she made art, very well. I have a real soft spot for Frida's work, ever since I came across it in an article in the Sunday Times magazine a good few years ago. I like the allegory and symbology that Kahlo uses, which is why her work makes a good subject for Petit to work with.

If you like the sounds of these, go over and check out Pascale Petit's site, there are sample poems you can read, including the award winning The Strait-Jackets.

Now, I'm off to mind this lamb tagine I'm cooking. I'm so sick of salads!

Another five writers or should that be books?

This time I move from childhood into adolescence, with some of the writers and books I discovered then.

Like Rachel Fox, I too remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird, being part of the curriculum of growing up in Norn Ireland. Harper Lee wrote a novel that convincingly told of a youngster, Scout Finch, growing up in the South of the US and whose father Atticus had taken on what seemed like a no-hope case. The man her father is defending, Tom Robinson, is accused of raping a white girl. The themes of racial discrimination and childhood are so well drawn in this book that I remember racing through it long before our English teacher had got us to finish the book. Deeply affecting at the time, I guess, about thirteen?

In third to fifth year, about fifteen years old, there was a textbook we had in English, which I remember as being called Soundings. Try as I might, I can't locate this on t'net, probably because it's not a terribly original name, or I have it all wrong. Anyway, herein lay poets like Robert Frost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes (oh, how we tittered at Dick Straightup), Wilfred Owens, Siegfried Sassoon and many more. I still recall lines from 'The Windhover' and 'Dulce et Decorum Est,' whether I want to or not.

Just as influential was a book called Exploring English, which was an import from the South. In this I read the stories of Frank O'Connor (First Confession, Guests of The Nation), Brian Friel (The Potato Gatherers, A Man's World), Brian MacMahon (The Windows of Wonder) and Sean O'Faolain (Up the Bare Stairs).

Macbeth was a revelation, the way our English teacher showed us - in fact all three, poetry, prose and plays were well handled by Sister Olive, as I remember her. I'm not so good at quoting from Shakespeare by rote (I developed a bit of a phobia against the rote (or rot, as me Mum used to call it) way of learning), but I remember how the words turned, in Sister Olive's patient distillations, into clear drops of understanding that came alive. She has a lot to be thanked for, that lady.

The most important book, in our house at least, was the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There's a myth in our house as to why we are missing one volume of this heavy reference book set. One version of it involves a bet, a drinking spree and an inability to pay for that month's edition of the series. Another version of it involves a simple loan-out that was never returned. Whichever it was, I'd often cause to curse the reasons why we hadn't got it, when the index books referred you to M-N... or was it P-Q...? These days, google is so much handier... and just as hard to interpret correctly!

Lovely Books

Back to reality from Dublin on Thursday, an excellent reading, listening to all gathered in Chapters of Parnell Street. I love the themed readings, this one being Sun, Sand and Ice Cream, because it pushes you out of your normal reading choices and can sometimes urge you into writing about things you'd not considered before.

Most poets managed to link in the sun and the sand, in their readings, without too much stretching the framework. Good to hear the Galway contingent, Aoife & Celeste, who unfortunately had to turn around and head back to Galway. I bought their chapbook, Smoke & Skin, available from Lapwing, Belfast. I snuck in the ice-cream, reading the one posted below about Our Family. I cheated a wee bit on the sun, getting in a long poem that I wrote in June about boobs. It was its first outing ever at a reading and went down surprisingly well. Inspired, in part, as a riposte to Alan Gillis's 'The Lad,' I would post it, but it's under consideration at present. Fingers crossed, eh?

I went on a mini book-buying spree in Hidges Foggis, buying Mick Imlah's 'The Lost Leader,' one I couldn't get back in June, for love or money; a selected of John Hewitt, a selected of Michael Longley and the recent short story collection by Claire Keegan, 'Walk the Blue Fields.' I read the first story set in Achill in the Heinrich Boll cottage (and laughed), whilst sitting on the grass in Stephen's Green - a little hard to imagine the sunshine of Thursday against the storm-lashed day that's outside now! I've since read the opening poems of Imlah's - bloomin 'eck. Great stuff.

A London Blogmeet... and a Launch!

Plans are afoot for a blogmeet for Bookarazzi members in central London. I thought I would go too, since it's nice to have faces to put to names and really talk books with everyone there... and then I thought about tucking copies of Kairos in my suitcase and erm, well, launching it there... and then I remembered that I'm 40 on the weekend in question...

It's the 1st of December, and I can't think of a better way to celebrate it... how about you?

Tagged for a book meme!

1. Total number of books owned - Erm, I really can't count them all - they're in every room of the house and the attic. Even the smallest room. Even the car. Even the garden shed. I have the inherited family 'book sickness.'

2. Last book bought - Hugh O'Donnell's Planting a Mouth; bought and signed at his wonderful launch in Dublin: really complete and beautiful poetry too.

3. Last book read - The Man With Night Sweats, Thom Gunn; The Truth of Poetry, Michael Hamburger (still reading this one); The Children of Hurin, Ed. Christopher Tolkien; Northern Lights, Philip Pullman (I read about four or five at a time and often re-read books that I've read before for comfort too). Okay, that might be cheating!

4. Five books which mean a lot to you.

Stranger Music by Leonard Cohen - a selected poetry and songs.

Gilgamesh, English version by Stephen Mitchell - a very contemporary, yet mythological account of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Song of Taliesin by John Matthews - oops does my interest in myths show.

The White Goddess by Robert Graves - without this I'd never have had all those poetic arguments in my head.

And John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious, a very precious book indeed for all the philosphical treatises that came from it and indeed for its rarity.

Taggees: Belle, Colin Will, and Cyberscribe - everyone else seems to have done it already!