Maggie Alderson's Reading List

Take a look at my Style Notes blog

2011-02-25T02:44:00.000-08:00

This picture seems to span both my blogs... Marilyn
reads James Joyce

I’ve decided to hibernate this blog for a while, to concentrate on the other one, which is the continuation of my Style Notes column in Good Weekend magazine.

Here's the link: http://maggiealdersonstylenotes.wordpress.com/

I update that every Saturday and if you subscribe (free!) using the button right at the bottom of the blog page, it will land in your e-mailbox every Saturday morning, just like a newspaper landing on the mat.

Mid-week I update it with my new fashion column The Rules, which appears in the Sydney Morning Herald section, Essential Style, and in M magazine, which comes with the Sunday Age.

I’m having so much fun doing it. It’s great to be in charge of my own pictures and add links - and really I love being able to reply instantly to comments.

The Reading List will come back. I’m still keeping notes of what I’m reading and I will update it eventually – it really helps to keep me an active reader, which feeds into my writing.

But for the moment I’m putting all my energy into the other blog, the new column and my upcoming new wing ding website, where all this will be gathered in one place.

There is also the not inconsiderable matter of the three books I’m working on… it’s a full life.

So please take a look at the other blog and I’ll be in touch to let you know when this one is active again, as part of my new improved website.

Freedom by Jonathan Frantzen

2011-01-30T15:00:00.000-08:00

Before I had read one word of this book two unusual events had
occurred regarding it.

First, the person I refer to in my ratings system as ‘man pal’ sent me an email out of the blue specifically to rave about it.

Sadly, this beautifully worded thing (he’s a clever old stick, Man Pal) was lost in the great Data Transfer Disaster when I got my new laptop last December, but one phrase from it sticks in my mind: ‘I felt as though it had been written just for me.’

I can’t think of greater praise.

The next thing was when my neighbour, a lovely, bright woman in her early 40s, appeared at my door one day, pink of cheek, shining of eye, and clutching a hardback copy of the book to her chest, which she then thrust at me.

‘I’ve just finished this wonderful book,’ she said. ‘You must read it.’

Of course it had already had rave reviews everywhere, as did Frantzen’s first novel, The Corrections and, as in that case, my initial reaction had been to leave well alone.

I generally avoid any books too hysterically lauded – especially Great American Novels – but after such personal recommendations, from two English intellectuals not given to hyperbole, I felt compelled to read this one.

Did I love it as much as they did? No. Did I find in it some of the most memorable sentences I have read in contemporary literature? Yes.

Here’s an example: ‘….[it] warned him not to mistake the pain of losing her for an active desire to have her.’

Mmmmm, roll that around in your head a bit. So good.

Freedom is the story of a modern American family, tracking the emotional histories of the two lead characters, Patty and Walter Berglund, in a masterfully managed non-linear trail from their very different childhoods to irrevocably entwined later middle age.

The point of view varies between an omniscient narrator, Patty, Walter, their son Joey, and Walter’s best friend from college, Richard – who happens also to be Patty’s One Who Got Away.

So it’s the same old same old angst of American middle-class married life scenario – but it is also much more.

What Frantzen does so brilliantly is to examine the motives and impulses of his characters at a microscopic level, while simultaneously maintaining the context of where they sit in the big picture of planet Earth at the very start of the 21st century.

This is achieved via Walter’s morbid obsession with the impending disaster of overpopulation – the statistics of which kept me awake at night worrying about my daughter’s future – the political class divide between the Herglunds and their less-educated Republican neighbours, and the affect of 9/11 on Joey’s developing moral conscience (or lack thereof).

Frantzen manages to keep this micro/macro view perfectly balanced throughout the arc of the story, without one trivialising or dulling the other. The environmental stuff packs a punch without ever feeling preachy.

But while there is a great deal I admired in the book from almost the first sentence, I didn’t love it so much as appreciate it for the first two thirds, because I didn’t really like any of the characters.

Their flaws and weaknesses are so exquisitely drawn they seem like monsters, with few redeeming qualities. But then there is a fulcrum after which I came to see that they are just humans, like all of us, in our weakness and vanity, just unrelentingly exposed.

Indeed, there were quite a few moments which made me wince with self-recognition.

Once I felt sympathetic towards the characters, I started to love the book and it switched gear from interesting to unputdownable - and like my friend and my neighbour, I found I wanted to seek people out to discuss it with. Particularly the ending.

The question I’ve been asking with spitty excitement at parties recently is: did you find the ending uplifting, or glib? Because I can’t make up my mind.

But what I do know, is that before the end of this reading year is up, I will have added my thoughts about The Corrections to this blog.

Reading satisfaction: 8.75
Un-put-downable-ness: 7
Recommend to best girlfriend: 10
Recommend to mother: 8
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to gay best friend: 9
Recommend to man pal: 10 (he recommended to me)
Recommend to Helen Razer: 10
Read on public transport: 10
Unpleasantness:0 (some faecal matter)

How quickly do you read?

2011-01-10T07:43:00.000-08:00

I ask about reading speed because feeling I'm slightly ashamed of how long the gaps are getting between new postings on here and I’m wondering if I’m a slow reader.

Certainly my sister, my nieces and several of my best friends seem to read at warp factor speeds compared to me. They polish off several books in a week, while I’m plodding along behind.

I mean, I don’t move my lips, or drag my finger along the line, but I’m thinking I must read more slowly than I used to.

That’s scary because it means I will be able to fit less books in before I cark it. Really scary.

Or is it a time thing? From my waking moment I am doing one of three things:

1. Being with and looking after my daughter.
2. On my laptop, working or tooling around (which always feeds into work, or that’s how justify it…)
3. Mundane chores of life.

As Coco Chanel so famously said: There is no other time.

(She divided her time between ‘work and love’, rather more glamorously. And being French, when she said ‘love’ she meant vigorous rumpy pumpy.)

Also slowing things up, I’m reading two books in tandem at the moment. I have a day book and a night book, because the day book is so fascinating, I can’t read it at night. The ideas make my brain start break dancing and I just lie there for hours with my eye wide shut.

So at night I’m reading a very long and ‘important’ novel in very short unsatisfactory bursts, which isn’t right at all.

But hopefully when I get back into my proper work schedule, according to the Stephen King method (see my post of January 16, 2010), I will be writing my 2,500 words in the morning and reading in the afternoon. So things should speed up on here.

On the other hand, is reading Formula One fast always the best way? One of my exes reads incredibly slowly. It would take him months to read a novel, but once he’d finished, he never forgot a single thing about it.

One holiday I finished what I was reading almost immediately after we’d got to the beach, and hadn’t put a new one in my bag = total disaster for me.

To stop me freaking out, he told me the entire story of the novel Perfume. Remembering every name and every detail. It was like listening to a talking book.

As I sometimes can’t remember the names of the characters in my own novels, this was pretty amazing to me.

So I think it doesn’t matter how quickly you read, as long as you do.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

2010-12-28T09:03:00.000-08:00

I feel I need to apologise to this blog for neglecting it.

It’s not that I don’t love it, I do, but I’ve been rather tied up with the new one for my Style Notes column (see link above).

Then of course there has been Christmas, not a small distraction, but the main reason was that I’ve had the most peculiar run of fails.

I was about three chapters into the marvellous Freedom by Jonathan Frantzen when my Kindle, containing it, was stolen on an Emirates flight.

When I got home I started The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas in old-style physical book form, but when I was a few pages into the second chapter I lost it, somewhere in the house. I don’t know how it happened but I just can’t find it.

Bloody annoying, as those are two very interesting books.

Next I picked up a volume so grippingly interesting I can’t read it at night. The ideas are so stimulating it keeps me awake. And during this crazy time of year, I just haven’t had any reading time in the day.

It was in the small hours of one of the sleepless nights caused by Book X (I don’t want to reveal what it is until I’ve finished it…) when I had moved to my daughter’s bedroom and put her in with dad, so I could toss and turn without keeping them awake, that I picked up The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

The idea was that reading one my daughter’s books would quickly put me to sleep. Well, I picked the wrong one. I found this tale of plucky little girls pitted against nasty grown ups, in a fictional period of English history (the reign of ‘James III’ when wild wolves roamed Yorkshire), as gripping and exciting as I had when I first read it, aged nine.

The wonderfully vivid atmosphere – be it delicious cosiness, or nail-biting tension – and intensely evocative descriptions of place, gave me exactly the same pleasure as they had on my first reading.

Now I’m going to re-read the sequel.

Reading satisfaction: 7
Un-put-downable-ness: 8
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8
Recommend to mother: 10
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to gay best friend: 1
Recommend to man pal: 5
Recommend to Helen Razer: 0
Read on public transport: 3
Unpleasantness: 0

Comfort and Joy by India Knight

2010-12-06T06:18:00.000-08:00

First of all, a small disclaimer. The wonderful India Knight is not a stranger to me.

We inhabit the same milieu, have a million mutual pals and have come to be, largely over the marvel that is Twitter, friends.

We haven’t been to each other’s houses, which is my definition of a proper friend, but I’m sure we will.

Meanwhile, we would hack our way across a cocktail party to greet each other and I was invited to the glorious launch of this book.

But let’s be quite clear, none of the matey matey stuff has any impact on what I say here. I love this book quite separately from liking its author.

In fact, I have such a girl crush on India’s writing, they are pretty much divided into two people in my head, or I would be too shy to speak to her. India my hilarious Twitter pal and India the amazing writer.

So, to the book. It’s not like her first two novels at all. I loved them both – hilarious romps – this is much more measured. I’m sure India wouldn’t mind me saying it doesn’t have a gasp-making cliff hanger plot. It hardly has a plot at all, but it is an immensely satisfying read.

I’d say it is more in the style of my favourite of her books until this one, The Shops, than the novels. That was an immensely elegant book about that art of shopping, this is a novel about the complex emotional landscape of a modern family, told over three Christmases, but the tone is similar. Sophisticated, yet earthy and real.

You live every emotional moment of it with the main character, Clara, as she observes and analyses the patchwork of ex-husbands and inlaws, half sisters, immediate family, friends, waifs and strays, who make up her Christmas landscape. And at the end, you shed a poignant tear.

It is, with great humour and style, an uncompromising appraisal of the ongoing emotional cost of modern marriage – and breaks up – to all involved.

But in the end it is a glorious Christmas carol to the wonderful gift that is family, be they ever so dysfunctional.

A comfort and joy, indeed.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 8
Recommend to best girlfriend: 10
Recommend to mother: 10
Recommend to niece: 10
Recommend to gay best friend: 10
Recommend to man pal: 9
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Read on public transport: 10
Unpleasantness: 0

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

2010-12-05T05:48:00.000-08:00

Gosh, so sorry I’ve left this blog alone for so long.

Between my book tour and all the hoo ha over the end of my column and then starting my new Style Notes blog, I just haven’t had time.

Ah yes, the new blog. If you haven’t seen it yet, please do have a look. It’s at http://maggiealdersonstylenotes.wordpress.com/

The idea is that I will post a Style Notes to it each week and if you subscribe (the little button is right at the bottom of the blog), it will land in your in tray each Saturday morning, just like a newspaper plopping through your letterbox.

But obviously better, because it’s free and doesn’t use paper.

Although if you do have any elderly rels or neighbours who used to enjoy my column in that magazine, whatever it was called, and who aren’t on line, do please print out the new online version and give it to them.

I’m also doing an added extra post from the archives mid-week as well, and if you subscribe, that will also just turn up. The miracles of the interweb. I love it more each day.

Especially as I already have subscribers from America, Singapore, Switzerland, Qatar, UK and other farflung spots and none of them could get my column before.

It’s all good.

Now, back to books. The other reason I haven’t blogged on here for ages was that I couldn’t write about the last two books I read because the lovely Jennifer Byrnes invited me to appear on the Christmas special of First Tuesday Book Club, while I was in Sydney last month, and I didn’t want to spoil the show by revealing my thoughts on here.

It has now aired (rather cheekily, considering the first Tuesday of its title isn’t until next week, but whatever…) so for those who didn’t see it here’s what I thought of Carey’s latest.

I THOUGHT IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS I’VE EVER READ.

I love, respect and worship Peter Carey’s writing with an unhealthy fervour (except for the one set in Singapore which I just didn’t get at all). True History of the Kelly Gang is one of my top ten books of all time. Possibly top five actually.

And I can now reveal that I wrote the voice of Theo in my latest book without using any commas, as an homage to the master. There isn’t a single comma in the whole of the Kelly Gang and I wanted to see if I could do it and have it still make sense. I hope I pulled it off.

This book charts the lives of two 18th century men – Parrot, the son of an English printer and Oliver, a French artistocrat – as they career around the world (there are journeys to Australia, as well as the America of the title). The chapters alternate the two voices.

It’s fast-paced, ridiculously broad in its scope and very funny. It’s really a study of the rise of democracy, via a compare and contrast of post-revolutionary France and early independent America, but it’s also a marvellous romp. There’s also some very sexy sex in it. Beautifully done.

But what I really loved about it was its flaws. It’s incredibly flawed. The plot hinges on the most outrageous coincidences – I counted five – and the side trip to Australia, with Joseph Banks, was completely unnecessary, but all of that just made me like it more.

I felt about it, just as I did with Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow: the flaws make it all the more alive and interesting. They make you feel somehow very connected to the great artist at work. And I do believe Peter Cary is a great artist. There are sentences in this book, of such glorious perfection they made me squeal with delight.

It was also the first book I read on my tragically lost Kindle *sobs*. About which more, next time.

PS If you live in Australia I think you can watch the First Tuesday Book Club Christmas special on the ABC iPlayer thingo.

Reading satisfaction: 9.5
Un-put-downable-ness: 8.5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9
Recommend to mother: 8
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to gay best friend: 9
Recommend to man pal: 10
Recommend to Helen Razer: 10
Read on public transport: on a Kindle 10, in hardback 0, in paperback 10
Unpleasantness: 0

Thank you

2010-11-11T07:11:00.000-08:00

I’m sure there must be a quick way to reply personally to each comment that is left on this blog, but I’ve never been able to find it.

Which is a big fat bore because I would so like to thank each of you separately for the lovely, heart warming, very personal and supportive messages you left beneath my last post. (Cue bugles.)

I keep expecting the morning to dawn – or more like the 4 am high anxiety breathless wake up – when I am consumed with depression over the ending of the column, but so far the black dog has stayed in its kennel.

I’m sure it’s your warm messages that have helped me avoid it.

You hear in the news people going through personal tragedies, saying how cards and notes from strangers keep them going, and now I understand what they mean.

On the scale of what life can throw at you, this is an irritating – and hopefully temporary - career reversal, not a life crisis, and your support has helped me to keep it in that perspective. If it doesn’t sound too cheesy, I feel cocooned in a big fluffy cloud of kindness.

Thank you all so much.

And if anyone can enlighten me how to reply instantly to individual blog comments, please tell.

PS I have added these images in the spirit of that most optimistic of songs 'My Favourite Things'.

The end of my Good Weekend column

2010-11-04T03:19:00.000-07:00

What a strange day. Much of it spent feeling like George Clooney (but unfortunately not feeling George Clooney…) in Up in the Air, comparing Qantas lounges around Australia.

They really should put meat pies out.

Then it got even weirder because today was the day that it finally hit the media – via Caroline Overington’s excellent piece on The Australian blog – that my column in Good Weekend is coming to an end after 12 years.

I found out a couple of weeks ago, while I was packing for my two week book tour. My first reaction was to keep it a secret, as though that would somehow make it not true.

But it quickly became slightly surreal to stand at my book events there with audiences telling me my column is the ‘only thing’ they buy the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald/The Age for and knowing it was about to cark it. So it only seemed to right to starting warning them that November 20th is the last one.

I must say the timing is excellent. To be greeted with rooms full of the smiling faces of lovely people – sometimes two different events in a day – who are there because they really like my work is exactly what I needed to get through it.

Mind you, I have been a journalist for thirty years, so I do know how these things work. Also I’ve known since I moved back to the UK to be near my ageing mother (she’s 88) that I was probably on borrowed time and I’m proud that I managed to get 600 of them out before the axe fell.

So I’ve taken it on the chin. And I didn’t shed a tear until the beautiful tweets and blog comments started rolling in today. Here are a selection:

Dear Maggie,
I've just read on Girl With A Satchel (via your Twitter feed) that the Good Weekend column is about to come to a full stop. How sad. I love your column, it's one of the first things I read, and I read it aloud to 'my other half' in bed, either on Saturday night or Sunday morning. Regret that I couldn't get one of your book events. I look forward to reading you where and when I can.
Ian

@milijana_: nooooo :( what will I have to look forward to on Saturdays :(

@pruereid: I just read the Aust. blog, even sadder now that I realise it wasn't ending by your choice, 3 generations of my family will be too!

@batrock: I actually had one of your columns in either my HSC or trial HSC English exam - I had already read the column so I did pretty well!

@alice_elizabeth: I'm devastated to hear this Maggie. Your Style Notes opened my world to so much more than the small town I lived in as a teenager.

@stolenredbasket: No! This isn't true? I quoted your column for my high-school yearbook 'Whoever said the right pair of shoes can't change your life'

@fashion_hayley: No reason to buy the paper on Saturday's without my favourite column by
@MaggieA there to greet me

@jules_stonesoup: it’s the only reason I buy the weekend paper RT @Reemski: @MaggieA end of your column?? WTF??

@BeeDreams: I am gutted that @MaggieA Will no longer grace the pages of the GW- and who gives a shit where she lives? She's great- booooooo to you GW!

So I had a little weep when I read those, but they were such a comfort. Thank you so much. Then I put on a pair of truly fabulous high heels (see photo above) and headed off to my Canberra book event.

One lovely young woman said that she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t read my column. Then another told me her mother has recently died, aged 93. In her last few months she couldn’t see well and each Saturday she asked for my column to be read to her.

When she died they read one out at the funeral. It was ‘If The Shoe Fits’, which I think is in one of the books. So that set me off welling up again. I think it’s one of the most touching things that has ever happened to me. Another lady brought me a beautiful bunch of roses from her own garden.

I feel very blessed to be so appreciated, but now is the time for the end to my sadness and the seizing of the opportunity. I may be absent from the pages of Good Weekend, but I have no intention of disappearing from your lives. Oh no.

There will be a much improved website (the current one is in limbo) and two more blogs, which I have been planning for some time. Please follow me on Twitter @MaggieA for news on those.

And if anyone out there needs a columnist who comes with thousands of truly gorgeous, bright, funny, stylish readers of all ages and both sexes – gun for hire.

One last thing. If my columns do end up being available only on line, I feel it is an act of apartheid against my loyal readers who aren’t internet attached, which tends to be the older ones.

I have so enjoyed the letters I’ve received from this group – men and women - over the years, so I have a request. If any of you have older rels or friends, would you please print out my column and give it to them each week?

With much love

Maggie xxx

SHALL WE DANCE? by Maggie Alderson

2010-10-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

Dress? Check. Shoes? Check. Several other dresses? Check. Blow dry appointment? Check. Extra shoes? Yes.

OK, I’m ready for my book launch.

My new novel Shall We Dance? is in the shops in Australia. How did that happen?

It seems only a minute ago that I was the only person on earth who knew who Loulou and Theo and Chard and Marc were and now I am getting lovely tweets from people telling me they are reading about them in the hairdressers and on the bus.

It's also great to get tweets from some Twitterers I will be meeting over the next few weeks at the various events I’m going to be doing around Australia. I love putting real human faces to Twitter tags.

Here is where I’m going to be to have a chat, answer questions and sign books. Please come along because a) being alone at a book signing is every editor's worst nightmare and b)I would love to meet you.

My new book is set in a vintage store, so one of the things I will talk about is the joy of vintage clothes and accessories – so please bring some of your favourites along to show me.

Tuesday October 26th
SYDNEY
Ariel Books, 42 Oxford Street.
7.0pm

Wednesday October 27th
MELBOURNE
Readings, Hawthron
6.30pm

Thursday October 28th
BRISBANE
Mary Ryan’s book shop, 40 Park Road, Milton.
6.15pm

Friday October 29th
NOOSA
Sheraton Hotel, hosted by Mary Ryan’s, Noosa
5.30pm
This one is ‘cocktails’ yee haw!

Wednesday November 3rd
ADELAIDE
Adelaide Library, 176 Tynte Street, North Adelaide
Hosted by Dymocks
10.30 am

CLARE
Collins book shop, 2/260 Main North Road, Clare
6 pm

Thursday November 4th
CANBERRA
Woden Library, Corinna Street, Phillip
Hosted by Dymocks
5.30 pm

Friday November 5th
ERINA
Reef Restaurant, Terrigal
10.30 am for morning tea (snacks, hurrah!)

THE KINDLE by Amazon

2010-10-12T02:26:00.000-07:00

After months of prevaricating – Kindle? Sony? iPad? books? - I have finally ordered a Kindle.

I asked the wonderful Twitterverse for its advice and the Kindle was the overwhelmingly preferred device.

I also asked a man I saw reading one on the train yesterday if he was happy with his gadget and he was very enthusiastic about it, saying he was reading a lot more since he’d bought it.

Glancing at the huge tote bag on the seat next to me, containing the hulking great hardback (a Booker prize nominee, so not available as a paperback for a whole year…) which I have to read for work by next week, and my mind was made up.

One click this morning and I am £149 poorer – and keenly anticipating the postman.

Apart from the portability – and with three weeks work travel coming up, that is very attractive – the other thing which convinced me finally to get an electronic reader is comfort of reading.

I like to read in bed, lying on my side, and with a great big hardback, it’s just not comfortable. There are wrist issues and I need my wrists for typing. With a Kindle, all books will be rendered equally readable, no matter where they sit in the publishing hierarchy.

I will also be able to manipulate the font size, another issue that has seriously affected my reading pleasure this year.

I keenly ordered a book people had been raving about on Twitter, only to discover the type was just too small for me to read without glasses – and it’s completely impossible to read in bed lying on your side wearing specs. I tried.

So rather than being the death of books and publishing, I’m hoping my Kindle will solve all these problems and have me reading more. I’ll let you know how I get on with it.

And the Diane von Furstenberg limited edition cover that was also accidentally purchased…

Wait For Me! by Deborah Devonshire

2010-10-08T03:01:00.000-07:00

To my very great surprise this is a fail. I’m hoping only a temporary one.

I’d like to think I will finish it one day and that my decision to put it down half way through (she’s not even Duchess yet…) has been hastened by the book I have waiting next in line.

(It’s a cracker, just too tempting, sitting there by the bed, and I’m desperate to get stuck into it.)

It’s not that Wait For Me! is boring – it’s just that so far I have known all the best bits, described so hilariously by Debo’s big sister Nancy Mitford in her novels The Pursuit of Love and Love In a Cold Climate.

And the less good bits – the family’s close pre-war friendship with Hitler – has always been offputting in the extreme. Although I must say that Debo is wonderfully frank and level-headed about all that.

There are some new gems to savour, such as her father – Farve, better known as Uncle Matthew in Nancy’s books – calling his last cup of cold coffee, which he liked to take off to his study, ‘my suckments’.

One morning a new maid cleared them away before he’d had a chance to take them out of the dining room. ‘Some monkey’s orphan has stolen my suckments!’ he roared.

From that day on he kept the cup in his safe until the moment of perfect drinking.

Also, to be fair to Debo, she has always maintained that she is the quiet Mitford, preferring wild flowers and poultry to the extreme politics and sparkling society (meaning mostly gay society, in Nancy’s case) that her sisters were so drawn to.

I will finish it. My devotion to Nancy Mitford borders on a cult. I have several shrines to her in my home and office and the least I can do is finish her baby sister’s memoir.

And considering I drove an hour and a half from my mother’s house to Chatsworth especially to get hold of a signed copy, it would be crazy not to.

Just not at the moment.

Debo, aged 20, in 1940. So beautiful and doing what she likes best.

Reading satisfaction: 5
Un-put-downable-ness: 5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8
Recommend to mother: 10
Recommend to niece: 8
Recommend to gay best friend: 6
Recommend to man pal: 7
Recommend to Helen Razer: 0
Read on public transport: 7
Unpleasantness: 0

IMPORTANT ARTIFACTS AND PERSONAL PROPERT...by Leanne Shapton

2010-09-23T06:03:00.000-07:00

To give the full title:

Oh. My. God. This is so wonderful I can hardly find words, so I’ll start with context. My niece Katy told me about it, after she saw it on India Knight’s blog (see list of blogs I follow, although I clearly wasn’t that day).

So what’s so amazing? Everything, not least that it is a totally new idea. It’s the entire story of a four-year relationship between two New York creative media coolsters (a food writer on the New York Times and a freelance travel photographer), told through an illustrated auction catalogue. The glossy kind that Sotheby’s and Christies do, with lots of photographs of objects and concise captions in a very flat and restrained formal style.

It starts with the invitation to the Halloween party where they met and continues on through print outs of emails, snapshots, clothes, postcards and other personal artifacts, which tell you with great subtlety absolutely everything about them and their relationship.

I love the idea of it, I love how brilliantly she’s done it – and I love the style of their romance, which is so redolent of my first marriage, it was really quite spooky.

The last book I blogged about made me uncomfortable it was so close to home at times; this one got much closer, but made me smile about it.

The Joni Mitchell lyrics, the Smythson diaries, the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul, the beach house at Orient Point, Long Island – there are so many chimes of my own life in this book, it was insane and delicious. I had read just about every book featured in it.

I felt like it had been written just for me and I think anyone from the world’s collective creative milieu would feel the same.

It speaks to the global tribe which shops in flea markets and Prada with equal glee, considers certain books to be close personal friends, collects images and quirky objects like precious gems, travels rather than holidays, and actively prefers used things for their soul.

But while it is a beautiful object in its own right, made with exquisite taste, it’s not just an exercise in style. Towards the end, there’s a letter from the heroine’s sister which contains great wisdom about relationships:

‘I used to talk about how I pitied the boring couples who never experienced any of our highs and lows, but I decided it’s hard to get things done with the highs and lows. You spend a lot of time avoiding life…. It has nothing to do with happy.’

Amen to that.

Reading satisfaction: 9
Un-put-downable-ness: 8.5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 10
Recommend to mother: 3
Recommend to niece: 10 (one of them recommended it to me…)
Recommend to gay best friend: 9
Recommend to man pal: 9
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Read on public transport: 0 (too big)
Unpleasantness: 0

ONE DAY by David Nicholls

2010-09-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

I fell in and out of love with this book constantly while I was reading it. Almost as often as the two main characters do with each other.

I’ve been trying to analyse why I started out feeling slightly antagonistic towards it and have concluded the banner quotes from Nick Hornby ('Big, absorbing, smart...') on one edition and Tony Parsons on another (‘A totally brilliant book.’) didn’t help.

I was already nurturing an unattractive (and I hope uncharacteristic) bitterness about it being yet another work of light modern relationship fiction being taken seriously (hardback, if you don’t mind…) because it was by a man, which would be dismissed as chick lit if it were by a Davina Nicholls.

As one the great luminaries of that genre (Mr Hornby being the Imperial Wizard thereof) Tony’s blessing was the last straw. *

Twisted by such rancour, I convinced myself as I read that the author was a smug long-time contributor to GQ and other such manly mags and his hyper real description of the decadent media whirl in London in the 1990s was pretty much autobiographical.

So I felt pretty stupid when I actually took the time to Google him and find out that David Nicholls is actually a pretty serious actor, playwright and screenplay dude. He’s adapted Thomas Hardy for the telly. I gave myself a talking to and read on.

If I found some of his descriptions of that particular milieu in that particular era a little too close for comfort, that’s my problem, not his. And there were several moments in the book where I gasped, he nailed particular situations so perfectly.

Sometimes I laughed out loud, at others tears pricked my eyes. Some of the times past evoked were a little painful to revisit.

There were passages, however, when I found the forensic accuracy of the rendering of earlier decades made it read more like journalism than fiction.

But once I knew he never had been a regular contributor to the Sunday Times Style section, or a columnist on Arena, I got over that. And, I’m happy to say, over myself. Then I could just enjoy a ripping good love story.

What Nicholls has done here is to serve up in its entirety the emotional journey, from university graduation to middle age, of his generation – just five years younger than mine, and close enough to be entirely recognisable.

It’s The Glittering Prizes of Generation X, really, and I hope he writes a sequel in twenty years time. Which I promise I will approach with my prejudices on hold.

* I’ve got a bit of history with Mr Parsons. I’ll write about it in my next post.

Reading satisfaction: 6
Un-put-downable-ness: 6
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8
Recommend to mother: 3
Recommend to niece: 10
Recommend to gay best friend: 8
Recommend to man pal: 6
Recommend to Helen Razer: 5
Read on public transport: 5
Unpleasantness: 0

THE FAIRY CARAVAN by Beatrix Potter

2010-09-14T07:18:00.000-07:00

I picked up this book – the first novel length Beatrix Potter I’ve ever seen – at a car boot sale.

Although it was a lovely old hardback and only £1, I nearly didn’t buy it, as I thought it would be just another book to clutter up the house and remind me of how my daughter doesn’t read.

But it just might turn out to be the breakthrough book.

It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever known her ask for the same book at bedtime night after night – admittedly with me reading, but at least it has sustained her interest – and one morning she even brought it out to the car and read it all the way to school.

So what is it about a book first published in 1929 that has captured her imagination more than any of the ‘cool’ contemporary chapter books I have tried to tempt her with?

The answer is simple: beautiful prose.

No exclamation marks, no ‘zany’ type, just elegant, measured, economical English. For example:

‘Next morning at daybreak a crowd of guinea-pigs collected on Tuppeny’s doorstep. More and more arrived until Mrs. Tuppeny came out with a scrubbing brush and a pail of water. In reply to inquiries from a respectful distance, she said that Tuppeny had had a disturbed night. Further she would not say, except that he was unable to keep on his nightcap. No more could be ascertained, until, providentially, Mrs. Tuppeny discovered that she nothing for breakfast. She went out to buy a carrot.’

At first I thought words like ‘ascertained’ and ‘providentially’ would put a 21st century eight-year old off, but far from it. She loved the book from its first sentence and I’ve hardly had to explain anything: the gold standard of good writing.

Which has me thinking that we are doing our children no favours with ‘modern’ books which feature farting jokes and other *kraziness*. Children respond to good writing just as adults do.

This idea was supported when, during bedtime chats last night, she asked me if I knew a hymn which had something in it about ancient feet and a holy lamb. It stumped me for a moment, but then I started to sing ‘Jerusalem’ and she joined in enthusiastically.

She’d heard for the first time at school that morning and declared it is now officially her ‘favourite hymn of all time’. We went over the words repeatedly until she was satisfied she knew them.

She loved the idea of her sword not sleeping in her hand and having a chariot of fire of her very own, just as much as I do.

So an eight-year old who has never read a book on her own can be profoundly moved by the words of William Blake. I find that intensely encouraging.

Reading satisfaction: 7
Un-put-downable-ness: 4
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9
Recommend to mother: 9
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to gay best friend: 0
Recommend to man pal: 4
Recommend to Helen Razer: 0
Read on public transport: 2
Unpleasantness: 0

EUCALYPTUS by Murray Bail

2010-09-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

What an extraordinary book. It’s been on my bookshelves for the twelve years since it came out and there was so much fuss about it, and now I can see what they were all going on about.

It’s not like anything else I’ve ever read.

The basic concept is simple: a man’s wife dies and he moves to a large property in rural Australia with their astonishingly beautiful daughter. He’s obsessed with eucalyptus trees and makes it his life’s work to have a specimen of every variety – 600 plus of them – growing on his land.

His daughter grows up and he declares that the man who can name every tree correctly can have her hand in marriage.

So it’s not what you would call social realism, but it’s not quite magical realism either. The closest thing I could think to it is 1001 Nights, as the larger narrative is broken up with an endless trail of tiny meaningful stories, which Bail delivers via several different characters.

At first it made me a bit cross. There’s no single narrator and at times Bail’s own voice seems to loom into earshot. I didn’t know where to put it all in my head. I couldn’t see the point of it. But by the end I absolutely loved it for being impossible to categorise.

I’d also decided it was one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read. But nothing sappy, a wonderfully gruff Australian version of big sweeping love. It’s the romance of flaking sun-bleached paint, curled up fence wire and corrugated iron roofs.

A taciturn romance made all the more poignant by the harshness of the environment - and the insane ludicrousness of the main storyline.

Reading satisfaction: 7
Un-put-downable-ness: 3
Recommend to best girlfriend: 7
Recommend to mother: 5
Recommend to niece: 7
Recommend to gay best friend: 7
Recommend to man pal: 6
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Read on public transport: 9
Unpleasantness: 0

THE LACUNA by Barbara Kingsolver

2010-08-22T14:05:00.000-07:00

This book is the reason there was a bit of a long lull between posts recently. I was trying to see if I could finish it, but I can’t.

I should have known it was going to be a fail when I was about one third of the way through and deliberately left it at home when I went on holiday. I picked it up when I came back, but still it failed to excite me.

I’m bewildered about that.

I love Barbara Kingsolver. The Poisonwood Bible is one of my favourite ever reads and while none of the other novels I’ve read were as grand in their sweep as that, I found them all immensely enjoyable.

This one bored me from the get go. Right there on the fourth page of text is a flowery description of fishes on a coral reef which had me rolling my eyes. I’ve always loved the strong presence of nature in Kingsolver’s other books, but in this one it seemed forced and overly description-y.

I soldiered on and started to find her main character as likeable as they always are, but the narrative remained uncompelling to me. It plods along in a straight timeline, with very little entwined around it. Then he did this and then this happened so he did that…

And perhaps because I always enjoy Kingsolver’s characters so much, I found the presence of Frieda Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky in the book clunky. Rather than adding richness to the scenario they seemed to make it cartoon like.

It certainly doesn’t add tension having real people in fiction, as you already know how it ends with them. In Trotsky’s case that only requires a passing familiarity with the lyrics of The Stranglers.

I’m gutted that I could I be so unenchanted by a book by one of my favourite authors, which has garnered rapturous reviews and won awards (the Orange Prize, no less) and fear the failing is all mine.

So, any of you who have read it tell me this: I’m three quarters of the way through. If I keep on to the end, will it all become clear to me?

(No scores as I haven't finished it - yet.)

PS In a sweet moment of synchronicity, the day after I posted the above my lovely Twitter pal @randallwrites (Lee Randall - who writes brainy stuff for The Scotsman newspaper) posted a link to her new interview with Barbara Kingsolver about this book.

It explains the genesis of the book very interestingly, although I'm still not sure it's going to enable me to be gripped by it. Take a look:

http://living.scotsman.com/books/Barbara-Kingsolver-tells-how-her.6486808.jp?articlepage=1

THE BOOKSHOP by Penelope Fitzgerald

2010-08-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

I can’t remember where, why or when I bought this book, but I’m awfully glad I did.

I found it recently while browsing in the piles of the great unread which teeter under my bedside table and woofed it up in a day.

I can see why it was nominated for the Booker Prize.

It’s a very slim volume – 156 pages of widely-spaced lines – but packed with insight. Maybe that’s because Ms Fitzgerald was a late arrival at the literary ball, like the last author I read, Mary Wesley.

Fitzgerald published her first novel at 60, after a career that started at Somerville College, Oxford and then spanned the BBC, editing a literary journal, teaching and running a bookshop. Presumably the inspiration for this novel.

It’s packed with satisfying characters and, unlike my most recent Elizabeth Taylor outing (A View of the Harbour), I found them all equally believable and enjoyable. One of my favourites was a 10-year old girl. Another, an old man who runs cattle on the marshes.

Several of the people are marvellously horrid. One of them actively, from vanity and self-importance, others from laziness, frustration and general weakness. One is very good, but hopelessly ineffectual. I found all that very much like my experience of real life.

It’s an oddly unredemptive story, which did make me slightly wonder what point she was making. Perhaps just that bad things happen to good people?

Or to show how one really unpleasant person can be given enormous power by lots of people not bothering to do very small things which could prevent it.

Which is, I suppose, a metaphor for the whole great wide world.

As well as the people, I very much enjoyed the setting of the book, a bleak little village in East Anglia, which is so vividly portrayed, the weather and the topography of the location become characters in themselves.

I look forward to reading more books by Penelope Fitzgerald, but for now, I really want to find something to read which isn’t about middle-aged middle-class English women.

Suggestions gratefully received.

Reading satisfaction: 7
Un-put-downable-ness: 5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 10
Recommend to mother: 10
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to gay best friend: 7
Recommend to man pal: 5
Recommend to Helen Razer: 8
Read on public transport: 10
Unpleasantness: 0

A SENSIBLE LIFE by Mary Wesley

2010-08-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: I get really cross when authors rely on coincidence to bring their plots together.

And it’s amazing how many serious literary names do it.

Edith Wharton has ridiculous chance meetings in The House of Mirth and I remember being incredulous that Jay McInerney – a writer I love – used coincidences so lazily in The Good Life.

I have put one chance meeting in my new novel, but only after a lot of agonised consideration. In the end I left it in as it is the kind of coincidence that we have all experienced – bumping into a friend unexpectedly – and it is absolutely not germane to the plot. It’s just an amusing incident that allows greater insight into one particular character.

So it was very disappointing that this novel – which starts really marvellously – relies on no fewer than three ridiculous chance meetings, one of them hilariously unlikely, and a far-fetched coincidence of place, to bring it to a ludicrous close.

I can’t understand why the author’s editor allowed her to do it to herself. Mary Wesley is better than that.

I remember so clearly when she burst onto the scene in the early 1980s. An instant literary sensation, publishing her first book at the age of 71, she was an inspiration to everyone who dreamed they might write a novel one day. Which included me at that stage.

I loved Jumping the Queue and The Camomile Lawn, so when I stumbled on this one in my mother’s study, in search of something to read, I was delighted to be dipping back into Wesley again.

I really loved the first three quarters of it, particularly the opening section, which is set in Normandy in the 1920s, where a lot of English families are gathered on holiday.

It’s a really vivid evocation of the period, combined with the universal experiences of adolescent angst and first love. There are also some wonderfully believable hateable characters, particularly the narcissistic parents of the little girl who is the main focus of the book.

Their blithe way of making sure that having a daughter impacts as little as possible on their own self-indulgent lifestyle rang true with many modern parents I have observed.

So I recommend the book for this early section alone, but with a warning that it has one of the most laughable endings I have ever read in a novel. The scores below reflect this. Had it ended properly it would have had the first number.

Reading satisfaction: 8/3
Un-put-downable-ness: 7/5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9/5
Recommend to mother: 9/8
Recommend to niece: 7/4
Recommend to gay best friend: 5/3
Recommend to man pal: 0/0
Recommend to Helen Razer: 0/0
Read on public transport: 4/4
Unpleasantness: 0

A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR by Elizabeth Taylor

2010-08-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

My great holiday reading treat was to allow myself another taste of my new favourite author. My third.

I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the first two and think I may have come into her oeuvre at the top by reading In A Summer Season first.

I’ve read it twice now and it has taken its place in my personal Top 100 Favourite Novels. It’s a miniature masterpiece.

This one follows her format of an omniscient point of view of a small group of people over a relatively short period of time, so that you see each moment through the eyes and feelings of each person involved in it. It makes me wish you could live like that in real life.

As usual the main focus is a middle-class English family, in the post-war period, but there were some peripheral characters in this one, which didn’t ring as true to me as I expect from this author.

I have never liked all her characters – but that’s precisely what makes her writing so vivid. You see their flaws, but also experience their feelings, which makes it impossible entirely to despise anyone. The empathy is written in.

A bonus of this volume is an introduction by another writer I admire, Sarah Waters, another massive E. Taylor fan. She says it’s her favourite - and she particularly enjoys the characters I didn’t, so there you go.

One thing she said that did really resonate with me though, is that she believes the reason Elizabeth Taylor – the novelist - isn’t better known, is because of the coincidence of her name with the other Elizabeth Taylor, the film star.

I think that’s a very good and interesting theory – and please help me to turn it round, by reading her novels and telling everyone you know how good they are.

Reading satisfaction: 7
Un-put-downable-ness: 7
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8
Recommend to mother: 9
Recommend to niece: 8
Recommend to gay best friend: 7
Recommend to man pal: 5
Recommend to Helen Razer: 5
Read on public transport: 9
Unpleasantness: 0

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD by John le Carré

2010-08-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

I picked up this classic espionage thriller genre after having a dream that I wrote a book in that genre. This was inspired entirely by the thrilling recent news story of that young Russian spy Anna Chapman

I was gripped by all that, thinking she was just like a character from one of my books, who happened to become a spy. My subconscious clearly jumped aboard this notion and I dreamed a whole plot along those lines.

The next morning I wondered whether I shouldn’t perhaps write it, so thought I would take a look at the most famous work of the acknowledged master of the spy thriller. I was further encouraged by seeing that the book is one of Time magazine’s 100 Best Novels.

The cover also boasted a – characteristically economical – quote from one of my favourite authors, Graham Greene: ‘The best spy story I have ever read.’

His book The Quiet American would still be my vote for that title, but I did read this one with interest.

Le Carré’s tense, cool style is compelling and enjoyably male. I was also relieved that I found the machinations of the plot very easy to follow – which is all down to the intelligence of the author, not the reader.

But do I think it deserves to be on Time’s list? Not so sure. I found it as much of a period piece as the Edith Wharton I read just before it, and the Cold War paranoia in every sentence seems slightly hysterical with the hindsight perspective of nearly 50 years of subsequent events (the book was published in 1963).

Le Carré’s portrayal of all Communist party functionaries as brain-washed psychopaths, who are using that dogma as a way of amassing personal power, rather than because they might have believed in it as a way of creating a fairer society, made it seem rather one-dimensional.

The main baddy – the really sadistic psycho Commie – is actually a Jew-hating former Nazi, which I found quite hilarious. The underlying message being that Communists are actually just more of the same old evil fascists in different uniforms.

That hints to me that Le Carré was just as brainwashed in the other direction as his Commie characters and reminded me uncomfortably of McCarthy era paranoia.

What’s really scary to me is how deep that fear still runs in America’s psyche. It’s what made ordinary working Americans protest against having a fairer new state-subsidised health care system. That’s how frightened they still are of anything that even hints at – whisper it – socialism,

Of course, Communism didn’t work – although of course it depends how you measure it. Communist Cuba has the highest literacy rate in the world. The people don’t have much to eat, but they can all read War and Peace while they don’t eat it.

That aside, Communism didn’t work because human nature won out. I believe it comes down to the most basic survival instinct: the individual triumphs over the notion of the mass.

And although I’m a fervent fan of government-funded health care and education systems, I’m very glad I never had to live under Communism to enjoy them. At least in a Capitalist state you don’t have to pretend you’re not following your genetic prerogative.

But I do ask myself, while they might have jeans, biros and even McDonalds on tap now, are the ordinary people of Russia really better off now a new superrich elite has replaced the Communist party?

An elite very similar to the one the Communists threw out in 1916, except they’ve amassed the cash by all means necessary, rather than inheriting it.

Anyway, I'm going on a bit, but I do wonder what Mr le Carré thinks about all that. I'll have to read read one of his more recent books to find out. And perhaps he'll be inspired to write one about Anna Chapman.

Reading satisfaction: 5
Un-put-downable-ness: 5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 3
Recommend to mother: 7
Recommend to niece: 5
Recommend to gay best friend: 0
Recommend to man pal: 10
Recommend to Helen Razer: 0
Read on public transport: 5
Unpleasantness: 4

2010-08-04T14:38:00.001-07:00

Testing testing testing: forgive me loyal followers, I'm tooling around on here trying to get the Blog Lovin' thing happening on here.

Normal service will resume shortly.

Follow my blog with bloglovin

THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett

2010-08-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

When I was a little girl in the early 1960s I used to watch a television programme with my granny called 'The Black and White Minstrel Show'.

It consisted of a large chorus of male dancers done up in black face make up with big painted on white lips and eye-holes, and cropped black afro-style wigs. There would be a big line of them in matching suits, bow ties, white gloves and boaters.

Even as a child of five I thought it was weird, but at the time nobody could see anything wrong with it. It was a prime time show on Saturday nights.

The blacked-up men would do their odd synchronised dances in long rows, like legions of golliwogs, doing jazz hands, then Kathy Kirby would come on and sing in a lovely sparkly gown and my granny enjoyed it all as an entertainment in the music hall tradition.

I haven’t thought of it for years – until this book reminded me.

The author is a white woman – from Mississippi – who has written two thirds of The Help in the voices of two black women, who were maids in Jackson, Mississippi, back in the early 1960s, right when I was watching that terrible television show. And when a black man would still be lynched down there, for using a lavatory reserved for white people.

The book may be her attempt to redress some of the wrongs of that terrible time in American history, when the South lived under brutal apartheid law, but as far as I’m concerned, she’s written it in black face.

How dare she?

It’s a huge bestseller – two million copies and counting – and it has had rave reviews everywhere. Am I really the only person to be outraged by her profiting from the hardships of another race? And using their voices to do it?

I must stop and say here that it’s a wonderful, riveting read. Stockett writes beautifully, her white characters are brilliant (especially the really nasty one) and it’s grippingly interesting to have insight into just how badly black maids – the ‘help’ of the title – were treated by their white employees.

I just hate her writing in their voices.

Her heart is clearly in the right place – she grew up in Mississippi, raised herself by a black maid, who it seems was more of a mother to her than her real mother – I get all that and I admire it. But she really loses me because the person who helps the black maids in this book move on from their oppression is, guess who? A white woman.

Maybe I am more alert to all this than I might have been because a couple of weeks ago I heard a very interesting programme on BBC Radio 4 discussing that most famous novel of southern US race relations, To Kill A Mockingbird, which was published fifty years ago this year.

To my surprise most of the commentators on the show – all serious academics - were quite critical of the book, saying they found the portrayal of the black character, Tom Robinson, patronising and archetypical.

I listened in disappointment – this was one of my all-time favourite books they were dissing. Then it gradually came out that the majority of the contributors to the programme were of British Afro Caribbean descent i.e. black.

They were prepared to acknowledge that the book was very much of its time and to make allowances for that – much as I did about the grotesque anti-Semitism in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth - but their consensus was that over the long view, while not the author’s fault, those outdated attitudes lessened the ongoing worth of the book.

I felt sad about To Kill a Mockingbird, but by the end of the discussion I could see their point – so that made it all the more shocking that Ms Stockett has up and done exactly the same thing in the here and now. Written a patronising white woman’s view of dem down home black folk.

When there is a black president in the goddam White House.

To put it in another context, this book is the equivalent of me – a white English woman - writing about the systematic extermination of aboriginal people in Tasmania by the British invaders, using the voices of two aboriginal woman. I wouldn’t bloody dream of it.

I carry the race shame of what my forebears did – and I would not insult the victims of it further, by writing a make-it-better book in their voices (perhaps with a lovably wayward aristocratic British woman as the one who helps them…).

Stockett even knows it was wrong herself. There is a little apologia at the back of the book, entitled 'Too Little, Too Late', where she writes about the childhood experiences in Mississippi that inspired the book, and then says this:

‘I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person.’

And then: ‘What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960s.’

So she knows it’s wrong – and she did it anyway.

Read it if you want to – you will enjoy it - but ask yourself what Michelle Obama would think about this book. And then, if you want to know how a real black American woman feels about things, read some Toni Morrison.

Reading satisfaction: 8 and also 1
Un-put-downable-ness: 8
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9 (because I want to discuss it with her)
Recommend to mother: 9 (ditto)
Recommend to niece: 9 (as above)
Recommend to gay best friend: 9 (same)
Recommend to man pal: 3
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9 (as previous)
Read on public transport: 0
Unpleasantness: 2

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton

2010-07-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

Whew, it's been a while. I've been on hols in Corsica for two weeks and this is the first of the books I read there.

How appropriate that I should have finished it after an afternoon shamelessly goggling the enormous yachts and gin palaces moored at the nearby resort of Bonifacio. Or rather, the people on them.

We are talking vessels of P Diddy bling. Four-storey gleaming white crates with phalanxes of tanned and orthodontically perfect crew wearing crisp white polo shirts and khaki shorts.

One of the biggest boats had two launches, a speed boat, various jet skis and a racing yacht attached to its side. And a helipad, of course.

Far more chic to my eye, were the two-masted schooners, especially the one with bleached teak decks, scattered artlessly with greige linen cushions. Even its wheel was a thing of perfect beauty. I stood looking at that boat for some time, imagining the life it was part of. My, she was yar.

What made the scene particularly interesting to me though, is that Bonifacio isn’t an obvious spot for this kind of display. I’m sure Diddy has never moored there. Nor Abramovich.

An ancient citadel perched perilously on a cliff top at the very southern tip of the island, just 14 k of azure Mediterranean water from Sardinia, it has some charming bars, souvenirs shops and ice cream cafes along the harbourside, but no branches of Prada or Graaft.

It would thus be the destination of the more discerning billionaire who understands the code of discreet and degagé chic. More likely to shop at Loro Piana than Louis Vuitton.

I have no idea who any of these blingy boat people were, but my husband was very excited to spot one of his sporting heroes Fabrizio Ravinelli, formerly of Juventas, Middlesborough and the Italian national football team, strolling along the quay. I was more interested in a young woman of ridiculous beauty wearing a sportif ensemble I happen to know was by Versace.

It was all I could do not to follow her like a dog trailing after a string of sausages, just so I could gaze longer on the smooth brown skin of her ridiculously long slim legs. She was like a creature from another species. I wanted to study her.

But the most interesting group of all were the boat owners. I spotted three of them and to a man, they were short, fat, old, red and very very cross.

On the rear decks of their respective boats they were each remonstrating with a young, beautiful, tall, brown, smiling member of their staff, clearly used to dealing with the old man’s dyspeptic rages. Yessir, right away, sir.

In short, they were exactly like the super rich men in Edith Wharton’s so precisely observed New York society of 1905.

And that young woman I saw, bowling along the quay in her tree frog green silk jersey mini skirt and perfectly flat sandals, could have been Miss Lily Bart, the book’s beauteous heroine.

Like the characters of the book these are people who understand the very specific nuances of clothing, status symbols and deportment. Haute semiotics. And just like Wharton’s rich people, while having it all, the ones at Bonifacio didn’t look particularly happy, although Miss Legs did a fine line in laughing over her shoulder with advanced hair tossing.

I’m reluctant to say too much more about The House of Mirth, for fear of giving away the story – as the back cover of the Penguin Classic edition I read so infuriatingly did so if you get the same edition, don’t look at it. (It also has the most cringe-making and sometimes inaccurate footnotes: ‘Marrons Glacés – chestnut sherbert.’ Er, not.)

Yet despite these and other irritants, I loved this book. Couldn’t put it down, felt enriched by it, drove my family nuts by constantly disappearing to read it.

The heroine is maddening at times, to a Thomas Hardy level – no! don’t do that, you stupid woman! noooo! – but Wharton’s forensic dissection of the myriad forms of human moral weakness is as satisfying as the outcomes of them are tragic.

But there are some deeper flaws. Part of the storyline hinges on the most vile anti-Semitism, voiced equally by the characters and the author, to the point where for a moment I wondered if I could read on.

Again and again Wharton ascribes unappealing tendencies to a particular character – the Jew - as ‘typical of his race’. It was so offensive it was like having a bucket of cold water thrown over your head.

I mightn’t have minded so much if it were the characters that said these things, but over and over again it was Wharton herself.

I kept telling myself it was ‘the times’ she lived in, but knowing that the book was published just 34 years before the outbreak of WW2, didn’t make that much of a comfort, but I needed to know how it ended so I read on.

The annoying jacket describes it as a ‘black comedy’, but I think I must have missed the funny bits. I found it terribly sad.

And what you are left with is such an incredibly vivid insight into the constraints women lived within when they were still economically reliant on men, I think all girls should be forced to read it before their eighteenth birthdays. Freedom from all that is still so recent.

It’s also a perfectly preserved-in-amber portrait of an apparently lost world of privilege and pecking order - which my time on the quay in Bonifacio confirmed actually still exists 100 years later, just with a different set of codes to manipulate, exploit and breach.

And much shorter skirts.

Reading satisfaction: 7
Un-put-downable-ness: 8.5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9
Recommend to mother: 9
Recommend to niece: 10
Recommend to gay best friend: 8
Recommend to man pal: 7
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Read on public transport: 10
Unpleasantness: 6

HOLIDAY READING

2010-07-01T04:13:00.000-07:00

In just over a week I’m off for a Proper Holiday. Well, I hope it will be that, which for me means days and days lying on a sunlounger reading. So it’s crucial to take the right books.

My benchmark for holiday reading satisfaction is a camping trip I went on with my best friend when I was 17. I packed six classic early 20th century novels, enriching my mind more in that single fortnight than in years of education.

It was a wonderful experience, like going to an ashram of reading. Total immersion. I can still remember exactly what I read:

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
1984, George Orwell
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Quiet American, Graham Greene

What a glorious orgy. And I know exactly how I assembled the list – trawling through the family bookcases.

We have a collective fetish for Penguin books, as a result of my maternal grandfather buying them all, literally, from book one. So we grew up surrounded by orange spines, and by the time I was 17, the house was simply stuffed with paperbacks from the Penguin stable.

The association had been deepened by my sister winning a Penguin Classics competition to name the 100 most important books of all time. The prize was a copy of each of them.

Then, when I was ten, I won a Puffin Club competition and got to spend a week with fellow bookworms in a country house in the Malvern Hill, meeting famous children’s authors – and the great Kay Webbe herself. Probably the most important week of my life.

With a little diverted to Barbie clothes, I spent all my pocket money extending my own library of books, which had to be Puffins. It hated having to buy Methuen to add Winnie the Pooh to my collection.

We were brand-obsessed before marketing had been properly invented. (So imagine the collective family satisfaction when I came to be published by them… I could feel my late grandfather smiling down upon me.)

By this point in the mid-1970s when I was off to Brittany, we were particularly obsessed by the ones with the grey spines: the Modern Classics.

So that was where I went to find my holiday reading. I chose the ones with grey spines which looked most interesting and, as a system, it did not let me down. (They don't all seem to be published by Penguin now, but they were then.)

But what shall I take with me this time? And how many? There’s nothing worse than not taking enough books and being forced to spend the last precious reading days with ragged copies of left-behind Jeffrey Archers.

Also maddening when you take a big pile of books you think you ‘ought’ to read – severely restricting clothing space in suitcase – only to discover once you get there, that you hate them all.

Now I know I could prevent both these eventualities by embracing the e-book in some form, but I’m just not ready to do that yet. I can’t imagine it being comfortable to hold an electronic gadget on my knees in the heat.

Also, a holiday for me, means being away from a bright screen; that’s what I spend my whole life staring at.

But, as Joan Armatrading says – I’m open to persuasion. So I would be very interested to hear about your experiences of the various kinds of electronic books.

And in your suggestions for my holiday reading.

TONY & SUSAN by Austin Wright and MY UNCLE IS A HUNKLE, SAYS CLARICE BEAN by Lauren Child

2010-06-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

Please forgive the radio silence but I’ve had some reading mishaps, involving two of my previously mentioned personal stumbling blocks: unpleasantess and poor segue.

The first was in what I can tell – even though I had to stop reading it - is an extraordinary book.

It was recommended to me by my crime fiction expert friend, who said it was one of the best books she has ever read and she was thrilled to see it had been recently republished.

She read it when it first came out in 1994 and was puzzled at the time, why it didn't receive the critical recognition it deserved.

This has now been rectified - I've rarely read such deeply admiring reviews - but in a sad echo of The Girl With the Open Sandwich Tattoo, the author died before he could see them.

Tony & Susan comes with these two quotes on the cover:

Ruth Rendell: ‘Absorbing, terrifying, beautiful and appalling… This novel I know I shall never forget.’

Saul Bellow: ‘Marvellously written – the last thing you would expect in a story of blood and revenge. Beautiful.’

If I’d read the quotes properly, instead of just going Ruth Rendall, oooh, Saul Bellow, oooooh, I might not have opened the covers. Terrifying and appalling don’t go near it.

I was so terrified by the end of the first chapter I had to stop reading. My heart was pounding. Nothing awful had happened yet, but you just so knew it was about to. I couldn’t sleep for ages, worrying about the people in the book and what might be about to happen to them.

Although I thought the writing was compelling, I was too scared to read on, in case what I feared was about to happen did. So I rang the friend who recommended it to ask how horrible it actually was.

She couldn’t remember, it was more the atmosphere of the whole book which had stayed with her for over fifteen years, she said, rather than the plot. But yes, it was pretty heavy stuff.

Don’t you mind reading that kind of thing? I asked. Doesn’t it upset you?

Not if it’s not happening to me, she said. It’s just a story, it’s not real.

But that’s my problem. It’s not real in this case – but real stuff like it happens all the time. And at some kind of primitive level I’m frightened if I read about ghastliness it will come into my life. It feels like you’re opening the door a crack.

I was in quandary, to read on, or not? The writing was so interesting and in something of an American form of the spare style I loved so much in my previous read, by Elizabeth Taylor, so I wanted to. But what if it got as ghastly as I thought it might?

Then I had the idea to flick forward a bit and see if any serious unpleasantness was apparent... Holy shit. The worst kind. And now it’s in my head without even having the pleasure of a proper reading of Austin Wright’s tight prose.

So if you’re not a big wuss like me, if ghastly murders don’t send you quivering under the covers, I would say read this book. I honestly wish I could.

This experience has given me an idea: books should have Certificate Ratings, like films. Even the telly warns you now if a programme ‘Contains scenes of extreme violence.’ Why can’t books do that?

It would have saved me from years of being haunted by some of the things I read in Last Exit To Brooklyn. Just a quote from American Psycho that I read in a review of that hateful book, still floats round in my brain like a malevolent spirit.

Obviously 'Rated X' or 'Rated R', or 'Warning: reading this book can blight the rest of your life' is never going to happen, but I am going to add Unpleasantess as a rating in my own system.

Now for the segue. I mentioned in my last posting that I had spoiled my enjoyment of Barbara Kingsolver’s oeuvre by guzzling it down in one orgiastic readathon, after being blown away by The Poisonwood Bible. So it seemed amusing to make my next read her Orange Prize-winning novel The Lacuna.

But after Taylor’s marvellously cool and restrained English style and Wright’s taut American modernism, I found I was repelled by the poetic descriptions of nature in this one – exactly what I normally love in Kingsolver’s work.

This time, though, all kinds of soppy fish flitting about on a reef, being nature-y seemed way too akin to the Emily Dickinson and Henry Thoreau skipping through the meadow school of Am Lit, which has always given me the willies.

So I needed a palate cleanser - and what could be better than the shortest book in my current personal book Top Twenty?

By the acclaimed author and illustrator of Charlie and Lola, this is her slightly older – much naughtier – creation.

All the Clarice Bean pictures books are great (the chapter ones, not so much), but this is the winner.

The text weaves through Child’s wonderful illustrations, just as it does in Charlie and Lola books, but there is a whole pantheon of complex characters.

These range from Clarice’s very annoying younger brother and her teenage siblings – the male of whom never leaves his bedroom and the female never gets off the phone – to various fabulously flawed adults. The grandfather is a particular joy.

The hunkle is Clarice’s frankly gorgeous firefighter uncle (it does worry me slightly that I can have a semi-crush on a character in a children’s picture book, but I can’t help thinking Lauren Child has too, rather as I do on my own male leads when I'm writing).

Among other endearing habits, he loves watching westerns with Clarice and uses phrases like ‘Hey there, little lady…’ He gets in trouble with Clarice’s mum when he teaches Clarice to use a lasso and the table lamp gets broken.

That’s just a small part of the drama. There’s a lost guinea pig, an annoying boy next door, a grumpy lady down the street… so much action packed into this small space.

Every time I read it – whether to my daughter, or secretly to myself – I bark with laughter.

It’s the perfect antidote to high level unpleasantness and after a couple of reads of it, I moved on happily to my next novel. What is it? Aha!

These scores are for My Uncle is a Hunkle, as I didn’t finish Tony & Susan (but if I had I would have given 9 for Unpleasantness).

Reading satisfaction: 9
Un-put-downable-ness: 2
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9
Recommend to mother: 8
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to gay best friend: 8
Recommend to man pal: 4
Recommend to Helen Razer: 4
Read on public transport: 0
Unpleasantness: 0

AT MRS LIPPINCOTE’S by Elizabeth Taylor

2010-06-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

When I grow up, I want to be Elizabeth Taylor. Not the film star, the oddly underappreciated English novelist.

Well, maybe I don’t want to be her, she died in 1976 for one thing, but boy, would I like to write like her. Even just a little bit like her.

I say she’s underappreciated, but that’s probably the wrong word – it’s more that she is not as widely known and read as she should be. For those who have read her books, she is unanimously highly regarded.

Looking at the reviews in this edition she is lauded by several of my other favourite authors, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Anne Tyler, Jilly Cooper and – one of my all-time literary heroines – the goddess Rosamond Lehmann.

Even that famous misogynist Kingsley Amis (father of the more attractive Martin) rated her so highly he called her ‘One of the best novelists born in this [20th] century…’

This is only the second of her books that I’ve read. As I said in an earlier post, after reading In A Summer Season, I was so astonished by the luck of coming across such a distinguished author with ten more novels still to read, I decided to eek them out like a box of very special chocolates.

I made the mistake with Barbara Kingsolver of reading all her novels in one great guzzling, right after The Poisonwood Bible and I think I wasted some reading pleasure in the process.

So I won’t even allow myself to buy another Elizabeth Taylor for a while, lest the temptation should prove too great. In the meantime I have been trying to emulate her style.

As an exercise I wrote my last short story using the omniscient point of view, which I think Taylor does better than anyone else I’ve ever read.

This means that the story unfolds equally through the eyes of all involved, as if related by an all-knowing narrator, who describes how each person experiences a situation and what they think and feel about it.

From sentence to sentence the viewpoint can change from one character to another.

It’s a form aspiring authors are advised to steer well clear of, because it's technically hard to pull off (as I discovered when I tried it...) Omniscience can also give the book a pompous tone, which stops the reader developing the close relationship with the protagonists that the first person – which I have written all my novels in, so far – promotes.

What Taylor manages so extraordinarily well, is to be all knowing and all seeing about her characters in this way, without ever seeming like a superior being.

Rather than giving the impression of some omnipresent deity hovering over the action, as some male Victorian novelists do, she makes you feel she is inside the head of whichever character’s point of view she is conveying. And she can switch from an eight year old girl to a Wing Commander without missing a beat.

There is no sense of her judging her characters, just the keenest observation of human fraility - and virtue - exquisitely and succinctly conveyed. As a result, her characters are subtly vivid - quite a feat.

This is her first novel and while I didn’t find it quite so swooningly marvellous as In A Summer Season, I did love it. There are sentences and phrases in it which made me want to clap. They made me thrilled to be alive – and able to read.

They probably won’t work in isolation, but I marked these two, as so concisely evocative of the stuffy suburban house to which an RAF family have been billeted, just after World War I:

‘Golden privet was unremitting in its attempt to cheer.’

‘Summer rain darkened the rooms entirely; not only the sheets of rain, but all the dripping foliage as well. The house seemed glued up…’

The house seemed glued up. I was so excited by that phrase when I found it, I hugged the book to my chest.

So, to those of you who are yet to read a novel by Elizabeth Taylor, I commend her to you, but I would read In A Summer Season first.

PS I have just remembered another thing which delighted me in this book. Two of the characters discover that their share a love of Charlotte Bronte's less well-known novel Villette - one of my favourite ever books.

It's the first time I've read someone else expression this opinion, which I fervently share:
'Jane Eyre is NOTHING to Villette,' he observed.

Reading satisfaction: 9
Un-put-downable-ness: 4
Recommend to best girlfriend: 10
Recommend to mother: 10
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to gay best friend: 8
Recommend to man pal: 8
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Read on public transport: 10

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Stieg Larsson

2010-06-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

The back of this book tells you that 12 million people have already bought it.

Was I really the only one in that multitude to find it, at best, average?

I also wonder how my opinion can differ so much from all the eminent reviewers who are quoted inside the cover.

One of them calls the author ‘the Tolstoy’ of crime… Did he mean Leo? Or the less well known Kevin Tolstoy?

Maybe it’s because it falls into a genre I’m relatively unfamiliar with: ‘crime thrillers’. Also it contains a great deal of that thing I have previously expressed my intolerance for: unpleasantness.

There is a great deal of very detailed unpleasantness in this book, but what really irked me, was that I found it strikingly unoriginal unpleasantness.

If I’m going to subject myself to fictional ghastliness – when there is so much of the real variety around us - I do at least expect it to be interesting. Show me something I’ve never seen before.

For that reason, the book which kept popping into my mind as I read this one – particularly in the later stages – was The Silence of the Lambs.

That crime thriller was spectacularly unpleasant in places, but the scope and methodology of it were so twisted, the psychology of the psychopaths so fascinatingly complex – yet utterly believable - I would put it on a list of the best books I have ever read.

If I’m going to have nasty, I want brilliant nasty.

I couldn’t sleep for a week after reading The Silence of the Lambs. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo kept me awake reading into the night too, but not so much with suspense as irritation.

For starters: I have over my writing desk a piece of A4 paper bearing the words ‘Don’t tell it – show it’, reminding me to get the back story and essential facts over in the course of narrative action, rather than in long tedious pages of explaining.

In future, I might just prop a copy of this book there, as the first third of it is an object lesson in how not to impart a large amount of background information to the reader of fiction.

With the plot centred around a missing person in a wealthy family of Gothic complexity and – to the foreign eye – bonkers names, at times I didn’t feel I was so much reading a novel, as trying to memorise the lineage of medieval Swedish kings and queens.

Now who came first again? Gottfried or Harald?

Then there was the clunky translation. It kept using awkward words like ‘anon’, meaning later – ‘he said he would see her anon’. And in the first half the word ‘straddled’ is used in a sexual context, at least three times. ‘She straddled him…’

Couldn’t she have climbed onto his lap and sat astride him? Or pushed him back, straddling his legs with hers? Or slid onto him, pressing herself against his… anyway.

As I am currently nit combing my own 739 page manuscript to remove extraneous usages of the words ‘hysterical’ and ‘hilarious’, it annoys me that the translator of this one, Reg Keeland – or his editor – didn’t make that tiny effort. With search and replace, it’s not so hard.

There are also repeated mentions of the Scandinavian dish the ‘open sandwich’, which is one piece of rye bread with a lot of stuff (usually involving smoked fish) piled up on it.

I’m familiar with the genre because my mother got very obsessed with them in the late 1960s, around the time the duvet and the first Habitat furniture came into our lives.

I’m sure the Swedes have a snappier term for this national snack and were I translating from that language, I would have taken the liberty of simply calling it a sandwich.

‘He made himself a sandwich of pickled herrings and cucumbers and gazed out of the window into the dark night, wondering when next a woman he barely knew would straddle him…’

Now read that again inserting the word ‘open’ before sandwich. Not so snappy, huh?

Every time I came upon those wretched words ‘open sandwich’ (and they never stop snacking, these people) I felt like I was reading a pamphlet from a provincial tourism office.

‘Be our welcome guest and enjoy our smoked fish and traditional open sendwijes!’

I know that’s a very small point in a 538-page book, stuffed with perverts, Nazis, computer hackers, Swedish nymphos (all stereotypes confirmed) and rogue financiers, but it’s exactly the kind of stone-in-my-shoe that can wreck a reading experience for me.

Another thing I found peculiar was that after the main crime is solved – and at least I didn’t guess whodunit until the point where you were supposed to – the book continues for ages, going off onto a whole new tangent.

The last time I was struck by such a sense of a bolt-on extra was Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice which careers off into another adventure that happens after the fabulously dashing hero and the female lead have not only got it on (swoon swoon), but are actually married.

At least Shute had the excuse of composing on a manual typewriter. In the age of the laptop such authorial lapses are much less forgivable.

So that’s everything that hacked me off. On the plus side, there are some interesting characters – the girl in the title, in particular. I just didn’t find any of them very believable.

I did like, however – despite the Open Sandwich factor – the ongoing references to the landmarks of the Swedish year. It’s made me quite excited to celebrate midsummer and very keen to try glogg, which is drunk at Christmas. (Fancy a glogg? No thank you, I’ve just straddled an open sandwich.)

I was also interested to get some insight into computer hacking and the intricacies of off-shore and secret Swiss banking. Well, quite interested. I am more interested in glogg.

So, it’s a complex yarn, with a wide-ranging cast of damaged nutters and some very lovingly described great unpleasantness against women. Will I be reading the next two books in the trilogy? No, I will not.

And now I think of it, the last book I felt I ‘should’ read because so many other people had was The Da Vinci Code. Enough said.

(PS And yes, I do know that the author of this trilogy died suddenly before knowing it’s success, in a literary parallel to Eva Cassidy’s story. It’s very sad, but it doesn’t make me like the book.)

Reading satisfaction: 3
Un-put-downable-ness: 5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 2
Recommend to mother: 2
Recommend to niece: 0
Recommend to gay best friend: 3
Recommend to man pal: 3
Recommend to Helen Razer: 0
Read on public transport: 0

MORE ON MY LITERARY PIN UP

2010-06-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

Found this marvellous picture of my literary heart throb Martin Amis on the Telegraph site, thanks to a tweet and retweet by @neversarah and @gabyhinsliff.

Do I need an excuse to share it? No, I don't. Oh the joy of blogging. Look at the darling little crease on the top of his nose. So adorably grumpy. Sigh.

Even better is the article that goes with it, describing Amis's talk at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival last week, on the subject that literary awards only go to boring books. Here's what he said:

"There was a great fashion in the last century, and it's still with us, of the unenjoyable novel.

"And these are the novels which win prizes, because the committee thinks, 'Well it's not at all enjoyable, and it isn't funny, therefore it must be very serious.' "

The unenjoyable novel. So perfectly put. He goes on to descibe his own intentions as a writer, comparing them with the experience of reading late James Joyce:

"I want to give the reader the best glass of wine I have, the best food in my kitchen. Some writers clearly don't feel that way at all.

"When you visit the later James Joyce, you knock on the door and there's no one there.

"Eventually after you have wandered around for a bit you hear him in the other room mumbling to himself as he prepares a snack of two slabs of peat around a conger eel and some homemade cider that is absolutely undrinkable."

As I have always said that I hope one of my books is the reading equivalent of settling down on the sofa with a box of rose and violet creams, this makes me very happy. Martin and I clearly feel exactly the same way about it.

I love him. I just love him. I wouldn't want to go on a villa holiday with him - but in type, I love him.

Here's the link to the article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7807054/Awards-only-go-to-boring-books-says-Martin-Amis.html

FILTHY ENGLISH by Pete Silverton

2010-05-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

What an utterly marvellous book this is.

Right, now I’ve established that, I have some personal connections to fess up to – but first, a warning: this book is about swearing, so this review is going to contain some VERY RUDE WORDS.

So if you have a problem with that, don’t read on.

Fuck shit cunt tits arsehole motherfucker piss. OK?

Confession, the First: The author is an old colleague of mine.
I first met Pete Silverton when I went to work as a commissioning editor on You magazine in the mid-1980s. In those days it wasn’t a women’s interest title as now, but something more wide-ranging, with a strong emphasis on fabulous writing.

(That was also where I worked for the greatest editor of my career, the late-lamented, wonderful John Leese, who died far too young. I still miss him.)

Pete was one of the magazine’s team of crack freelance writers and I got to commission some great things from him. It was always a joy as his copy would flow in, on time, very funny and not needing a word changed.

So although we never became close friends (we didn’t go to each other’s houses, which is my personal definition of that) we do go back a bit. Like 25 years. And I always liked him.

Second Confession: I am quoted in this book.
Pete contacted me out of the blue last year and asked if he could interview me for it. It was around the time In Bed With was coming out – the collection of sex stories written by leading women novelists, which I co-edited with Jessica Adams (it was her idea), Imogen Edwards-Jones and Kathy Lette.

Not surprisingly, considering the brief – ‘write a short story of an explicitly sexual nature, really really filthy’ - that book contains a lot of cunts, fucks, tits, cocks etc. and Pete reckoned I would have some insight into how women feel about the use of those words, most particularly: cunt.

I don’t know about insight, but I certainly have a lot of opinions about it.

Which leads me to..

Confession Three: Next month Pete and I are appearing as part of the Women’s Word festival at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, to discuss this issue. The session is billed: ‘What do you call yours?’.

If any of you can come along, it would be absolutely great to see you. Here’s a link to the festival, which has a lot of other great events at it too (but obviously, this is the one you should come to ha ha ha).

Now I’ve got all that out of the way (will five Hail Marys be enough?), back to the book. To partially quote the author: it’s absofuckinglutely great.

Among many other bit of fascinating linguistic ephemera, he tells you that the particular style of word structure is called ‘infixing’. It’s common in Eskimo and Tagalog, but rare in English.

Pete then makes the point that to use the word ‘fuck’ in that way – a word that in itself describes an insertion – adds another whole layer of power to it.

He looks at swear words at this micro linguistic level, but also in their widest global, historical, cultural and sociological contexts. Not forgetting psychoanalytical, of course.

What I particularly love about it, is that he manages to convey all that information – some of it, academic to a degree of quite bonkers intensity – with the same lightness of touch he brought to his articles for You magazine.

The book is very funny. The writing very witty. And the tone very personal, because he manages to lay all the info ‘n’ facts down on a bed of personal memoir, which in Pete’s case is well worth reading.

He started his career as a rock writer, going on tour with the Sex Pistols among many other highlights. I particularly enjoyed a scene where he remembers time spent with the late Tony Wilson, of Factory Records/Joy Division fame.

He earns his place in the book, because the term ‘wanker’ became applied to him to such a degree, that he couldn’t walk through is home town of Manchester without it being shouted at him – and seeing it graffitied all over walls.

For someone like me, who always approaches non-fiction with some trepidation – I had to read so much of it at college, I’m slightly, pathetically phobic now about anything that doesn’t have a story – this provides the perfect sweet medium to relish absorbing all the other stuff.

So Pete, my old mucker, I salute you. You’re a clever cunt. And a funny fucker.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 6
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8
Recommend to mother: 0
Recommend to niece: 8
Recommend to gay best friend: 8
Recommend to man pal: 9
Recommend to Helen Razer: 10
Read on public transport: 9

HOT GUYS READING BOOKS

2010-05-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

This is a little in-between books offering for you - and a distraction for me from editing the novel I'm working on. I need a break.

I’ve been making my living as a writer for over 25 years and I still have to knock myself out on the editing. I’m doing the pre-typesetting edit of my new novel (number six) at the moment, and I feel like my brain is dripping out of my ears. The level of concentration required is almost physically painful.

I’m very lucky to have a wonderful editor to work with. She can remember that I have used phrases like ‘I burst into uncontrollable giggles’, ‘we were all absolutely hysterical’ and ‘his eyes twinkled as he slowly undid his belt’ before, with 300 pages between them.

So take a bow, Ms Jocelyn Hungerford. You're my pal.

All writers need editors. I once spent a day with one of my all-time literary heroes, Peter Carey (I got to take him to Australian Fashion Week, it was a total blast) and in between fashion shows, I sat at his feet and asked a few questions about writing.

I was editing my first novel for publication at the time and finding it very hard, so I asked him if he still worked with an editor – I thought someone on his level might be above it.

I remember his reply so clearly: ‘Every. Single. Word.’

He’s won the Booker Prize twice, remember. Twice. So every time I think I can't stand it another minute going over page 615 for the nine hundredth time, I think about him saying that and get back down to it.

Or I take a little time out to look at this blog, which I was put onto by my lovely friend Derek Brown (find him on Twitter @dbrown_esq, he’s really worth a follow).

Here is the link to Hot Men Reading Books http://hotguysreadingbooks.tumblr.com/

And above is my Man of the Month. I'd love to know who you like.

COLD TO THE TOUCH by Frances Fyfield

2010-05-11T05:40:00.000-07:00

In my last but one posting (Wolf Hall) I mentioned my problem finding a title for my new novel.

My most recent post was on the theme of sychronicity.

So I find it almost exquisitely pleasing that one of the key people on my own ‘title committee’ came up with the name for this post’s book - which I had already nearly finished reading, when I stumbled across Mind Tricks. Shazam!

My very dear friend Barbie – who came up with the absolutely perfect title Cold To The Touch - is also a good friend of Frances Fyfield’s, so we're friends-in-law. We all had coffee together once.

All of which I tell you, so it is properly open and transparent that this is the first book I have discussed on here where I have a personal link to the author.

It’s also the first crime novel I’ve written about, because apart from the necessary obsession with Raymond Chandler in my late teens, crime is not a genre I’ve ever been particularly drawn to. Frances Fyfield’s books may have changed that.

I read Blood From Stone – for which she won the 2008 ‘Golden Dagger’ CWA Duncan Lawrie prize, the Man Booker of the crime fiction world - because I liked her so much when we met. And I enjoyed that so much I read this one. Now I’m going to ask Barbie what to pick up next.

What I particularly admired about both books is their cool, measured tone, which bespeaks Ms Fyfield’s former life a solicitor working for the Crown Prosecution Service.

That ability to step back from grisly scenarios and situations, and describe them vividly with great attention to detail, without it ever becoming lurid, makes compelling reading.

It also bypasses one of the reasons I have steered clear of crime and thrillers in the past: I can’t bear gratuitous ghastliness. There are so many horrid real things on the news, I just can’t understand why anyone would seek out additional fictional ones (I feel the same about violent films).

I’ve never quite recovered from reading Last Exit to Brooklyn and the tiny snippet I read from a review of American Psycho has added a truly horrific image to my mental lexicon that I have never been able to erase.

But as I don’t want to be condemned to a literary diet of Miss Read, I have to step outside my comfort zone sometimes. And, of course, I do also understand that it’s necessary to describe and explore the human capacity for cruelty. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, however much I would like it to.

Done well, it throws light upon such behaviour, helping us understand what makes people do it - and making us consider whether, in the perfect storm of events, we could possibly sink that low ourselves.

Perhaps it’s also our post-religious way of warding off the evil eye. By studying evil, we can avoid it.

But my own phobias about violence and cruelty weren’t tested by this book. While there is a lurid murder in it, its real subject is human character and relationships.

Examining – with forensic detachment, but not without empathy - how the small details of our lives and circumstances, can lead to catastrophic events and shape how we deal with them.

It is also a quick and satisfying read. And I absolutely did not guess whodunit.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 7
Recommend to mother: 10
Recommend to niece: 6
Recommend to gay best friend: 7
Recommend to man pal: 8
Recommend to Helen Razer: 5
Read on public transport: 8

Mind Tricks, Ancient and Modern by Steven Saunders

2010-05-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

Here’s something you won’t know about me: for several years I studied neuroscience. True. Go on, ask me anything about the hypothalamus.

It was part of my study of psychology which I did for A-level and then for another two years at uni – until the statistics and animal testing side of it sent me screaming into the gentler arms of Art History. A subject where no one will ever ask you to do something unpleasant to a baby chick or pick up a white rat.

It was my own fault. If I’d researched my university choice better I would have known that St Andrews psychology department was firmly in the Skinner camp. Which is the empirical, hard science end of it. Lots of rats running around in mazes.

But although I ended up disillusioned with my course, I still found all the stuff about brain anatomy and chemistry absolutely gripping. Snap my synapses, baby. Equally, my interest in the diametric opposite end of psychology’s sweep - the philosophical jag, where you find Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung – never lost its appeal.

Freud is over-dug and some of Jung’s ideas have been tainted by association with New Age’s daffier dingbats, but the ideas of subconscious, ego, Zeitgeist, Collective Unconscious, and Synchronicity have always made perfect sense to me. (Even Sting couldn’t put me off.)

Why am I telling you this? Oh yes, because it all came bolting back together yesterday, when I was browsing in a bookshop and had a moment of gripping synchroncity. Looking at some attractively packaged small volumes on a rotating stand, I picked out Mind Tricks. Or my subconscious did. Ooooh.

Opening it randomly (or was it random? *waggles head knowingly*) I found myself reading a sentence that related exactly to the basis of a neurolinguistic programming technique I have recently learned, which has enabled me to recover very quickly from a long dreary illness.

(It’s called the Lightning Process and if you, or anyone you know has any form of chronic fatigue – I strongly recommend you Google it.)

The next page I turned to explained exactly the memory system that Hilary Mantel describes her superhumanly clever hero Thomas Cromwell using in Wolf Hall – the last book I wrote about on here. Cue spooky music…

So I immediately bought the book and sucked it down on a two-hour train journey. It’s a great little read, putting the points over amusingly and succinctly, with just 300 words and some jolly illustrations for each topic.

It might not appeal to everybody, but what I found so satisfying about the whole experience is the way it brought together those two arms of psychology which have always interested me.

Being synchronistically relevant right now, because the most interesting thing I learned from the Lightning Process is that all these ancient mind-over-matter techniques - from fire walking to hypnosis - far from being magical occult oogi boogie, can now be very exactly explained using the most advanced brain-mapping techniques. Neuroscience, innit?

Or to put it in terms that any student of psychology would understand – the grand canyon between Skinner and Jung now has a rock solid scientific bridge over it.

Reading satisfaction: 5
Un-put-downable-ness: 3
Recommend to best girlfriend: 5
Recommend to mother: 0
Recommend to niece: 5
Recommend to gay best friend: 5
Recommend to man pal: 6
Recommend to Helen Razer: 4
Read on public transport: 10 (very light)

WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel

2010-04-28T03:42:00.000-07:00

I’m suffering terribly at the moment, trying to come up with a title for my new novel.

This is something which dogs me, as I always start out with a working title I’m very excited about - and then write a completely different book, so the original one doesn’t work any more. Then there is much tearing of hair until the right thing pops into my head.

Today I was – semi-seriously - wondering if I could call it Untitled 6, in conceptual artist stylee. That won’t be allowed, of course, so I wish I could get Hilary Mantel to help me think of one, as Wolf Hall has to be one of the great titles of all time. As soon as I heard it I wanted to read it, even before it won the Booker Prize and all that hoo ha.

But I wonder if it actually was Ms Mantel who came up with it – or a very clever publisher? Because it has nothing to do with the book.

I haven’t felt so ripped off by a book title since Brick Lane. I rushed out to buy that on hearing the name, imagining a multi-layered portrait of the street I have loved since I lived in the East End in the 1980s.

I was eagerly anticipating Bangra, balti, bagels and bohemians in a delicious multi-cultural modern London mix, written with an insider’s insight. Instead it is the rather lowering tale of an isolated young Bangladeshi wife in an anorak.

I couldn’t finish it and felt vindicated when I read somewhere that the original title for the book had been Across Seven Rivers. That is not something I would have been attracted to and much more fitting to the content.

So I’d love to know what Hilary Mantel’s original title was. The Other Cromwell Boy, perhaps? Because it’s the not about the fabulously-named Wolf Hall – which was the country seat of Jane Seymour’s family – but Thomas Cromwell, great uncle of the more famous Oliver. A key historic figure I’m ashamed to say I’d never even heard of.

He’s an amazing character. A blacksmith’s son, who rose up through his own wits – and fists – to become first Cardinal Wolsey and then Henry VIII’s right-hand man.

An autoditact polymath polyglot supergenius with street smarts, an iron grip - but a tender and fair heart - and a gift for one liners that wouldn’t be out of place on The Sopranos, he has to be one of the most attractive dudes in fiction.

Indeed there were times – particularly when he seemed about to invent the internet in 1535 – when I wondered if he wasn’t almost as idealised as the male leads you find in, well, books like mine, really.

Ms Mantel seems at pains to stress that he was not a handsome man, but when he is so astonishingly brilliant in every other way, it really doesn’t matter. You get a bit of a crush on him anyway. Well, I did.

So despite my rather outraged surprise that the books is not set in an amazing old Tudor house called Wolf Hall – which is only referred to a few times in the book – I did really enjoy getting to know this fascinating man.

I also now have a real feeling for Cardinal Wolsey and the vile Thomas More, and some of the key historical details of this era. I confess – not on the rack, which More so enjoyed using, I’m happy to say – that I had never quite understood what people were being tortured and burned at the stake for during Henry VIII’s reign and now I fully do.

This insight into 16th century religious politics was really a bonus, as it seemed at first that the book was dwelling way too long on the Ann Boleyn story, which anyone who has supped deep at the cup of Philippa Gregory (as I have) is already more than well versed in.

In fact reckon I could go on Mastermind with the sex lives of the Boleyn sisters as my special subject, so I’m done with that Tudor Paris Hilton - and her party pooper Spanish love rival, for that matter.

But once we got into the really meaty bit about why Henry VIII broke away from the Vatican, gave the Pope the finger, founded the Church of England and cashed in the monasteries, I was gripped.

Especially as I was reading it while the husband one of my best friends – Geoffrey Robertson, married to Kathy Lette – is drafting serious legal proceedings to sue the current Pope when he visits Great Britain later this year.

So the row that was pushed to its limit five hundred years ago by Ann Boleyn practising The Rules (Google it...) on Henry VIII (unlike her younger sister, she wouldn’t put out until he married her), is still burning hot today. Yee haw.

What I hadn’t grasped until I read this book, though, was that the Roman Catholic church in the 16th century, as espoused by creepy hair-shirted More, wouldn’t allow the people to read the bible in English. I’d never understood that before. What an outrage!

Prior to Henry’s split from Rome, people could be burned at the stake simply for possessing the bible in a language they could read it in. This was the church’s way of keeping the people in their power – because only the educated elite knew what the bible really said.

Superfly guy Thomas Cromwell was secretly a supporter of a sect who wanted the bible to be available to all – so that they would be able to see for themselves what is in it.

Nothing about purgatory, nothing about cash for forgiveness ‘indulgences’, and no rules dictating that you have to go to church every week and give money to a lot of old men in Rome.

I was so moved by finding this out, I have resolved to go out and buy a bible in English. I probably won’t look at it but - like a vote – a privilege people sacrificed so much to win for us all, must be used and appreciated.

At 650 pages, this book is a serious reading commitment, but one that is worth taking on. Just choose your moment, as it requires long sustained reads, not five minutes at bed time.

And don’t be put off by the fascinating facts element. Living in the story, as you will for quite a while, you absorb the history lessons while reading what Thomas Cromwell had for dinner (quite a lot of capons) and who he fancies (Jane Seymour! Hold the front page of Tudor Grazia...).

It’s absolutely gripping stuff, conveyed at a cracking pace, with wonderfully vivid characterisation and settings. A description of a visit to Thomas More’s creepy home set up, particularly sticks in my mind.

So do read Wolf Hall. I just don’t want you to be as disappointed by the title as I was.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 5
Recommend to best girlfriend: 7
Recommend to mother: 7
Recommend to niece: 7
Recommend to gay best friend: 7
Recommend to man pal: 7
Recommend to Helen Razer: 7
Read on public transport: 0 (too heavy)

The Story of Clothes and Costume. A Ladybird ‘Achievements’ Book.

2010-04-12T10:53:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like about being an author is that people sometimes ask you to contribute to those ‘your-answer-here’ magazine columns. I love them and always fill them in mentally as I read other people’s What I Eat for Breakfast, Me and My Favourite Garden Implement etc.

I have been asked several times for my five all-time favourite books (impossible, so you just have to plunge in) and more interestingly, for the ones which have changed, or formed my life. In the latter, I had no hesitation in including this book.

Like most middle-class, middle-aged Brits, I have an almost unhealthy fetish for Ladybird books and have been collecting them for years from charity shops and car boot fairs. (Most of them are in my daughter’s room, but they’re really for me.)

The appeal lies in the glorious ideal-real illustrations and the sense of comforting wellbeing the books give off. You won’t find any unpleasantness in a Ladybird book.

But while I can enjoy casually flicking through The Ladybird Book of Pets and Out In The Sun (two titles randomly picked from my daughter’s shelf), in the same spirit with which I’ve embraced the recent advent of Ladybird merchandise, The Story of Clothes and Costume had a far deeper impact on me.

I must have been about eight when I got it and was instantly gripped by reading about the way in which clothes have changed over the centuries and poring over the satisfyingly clear and detailed illustrations.

Very quickly I was fully across the progression from mid-Victorian crinolines (‘The Early Days of the Railway’) to the late-Victorian bustle and over time I brought every picture in the book to life, by dressing up in my own versions of each outfit, which I think helped to imprint those details on my mind forever.

We had a big dressing up cupboard in the playroom on the top floor of the house and I amused myself there for hours, rigging up Regency bonnets (tie a chiffon scarf round an old straw hat…), Medieval wimples (a wire coat hanger and an old net curtain) and so on.

Beyond dressing up as glamorous ladies in long dresses – I particularly adored the family of Cavaliers (and loathed the ghastly Puritans on the next page) – I think what grabbed my young interest was the way that the text put the changes in clothes into a socio-historical context.

I had no that’s what it was, of course, but the idea that the precise times you live in entirely determine changes in what everyone wears made perfect sense to me.

And when – fifteen years later – I went to my first designer fashion show (Katharine Hamnett…) it seemed obvious to view those new clothes in exactly the same terms.

So without this book, I don’t think I ever would have written about fashion. Thank you, Ladybird.

Me Cheeta by James Lever

2010-04-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the long radio silence. This was simply because I haven’t finished another book for ages, due to another bout of the previously discussed challenge of engineering a satisfying succession of reads.

Right after the rollercoaster of the Martin Amis (Martin Amis!), I felt I needed something much more measured and picked up a work by Elizabeth Taylor – not the American actress, the wonderful and insufficiently lauded British 20th century novelist.

Knowing that there are still ten Elizabeth Taylor novels left for me to read is one of the great comforts of my life. I’ve only read one so far – In A Summer Season - and loved it so much I am saving the rest up, just as I don’t wear Prada shoes for a year or so after I’ve bought them, because they’re simply too special to wear when new (plus I hate being too obviously ‘on season’).

Post-Martin felt like the perfect moment for the cool and restrained Ms Taylor, but after luxuriating in the first couple of chapters, I decided I wanted to save it a bit longer, for a moment all its own, rather than as a literary sorbet between heavier courses. A particularly exquisite form of torture, it teases me from my bedside.

So then I cast around for more of a throwaway read and settled on Me Cheeta, which I had read discussed on Twitter and heard discussed on Radio 4. It’s a very clever and amusing idea – the autobiography of the chimp who played Cheeta in the Tarzan movies. Note the prefix auto, there.

The world-weary actor memoir voice and hilariously bored namedropping are perfectly rendered, but a few chapters in the word ‘clever’ started to resound too often in my head as I read.

‘How clever!’ I kept thinking, until I realised that I was admiring the trick of the writing and the construct, rather as you would admire a trained chimp pouring a cup of tea and drinking it. How clever!

Finally, despite laudable early chapters which convey just how cruelly animals are trained to perform such ‘amusing’ tricks, with references to the very worthy, and Jane Goodall-endorsed, campaign No Reel Apes*, which is aiming for a total ban on using trained primates in films, I decided I couldn’t go on with the book.

The main reason? I just didn’t care about the narrator enough. Because I knew he wasn’t real. Well, of course he is real, he’s a real chimp, but the anthropomorphised version in the book isn’t real. And the last thing you want spoiling your enjoyment of fiction is notions of comparative reality.

Did I not enjoy E. Nesbitt because the psammead is not a real creature? Was Twilight less of a thrill because vampires aren’t ‘real’? No! Being totally caught up in stories of imagined creatures and situations is the whole point of fiction. To free us from the constraints of dreary reality, while shining light back upon it. Once the suspension of disbelief is slightly torn it’s all over.

So while I doff my hat to the brilliance of the concept of Me Cheetah, the cleverness of the voice - and it is very funny in parts - I decided, according to my rule of putting down books which don’t fully engage me in this year of active reading, to move on.

I might pick it up at a later date, for more of the Hollywood 'Golden Era' content which the reviews raved about, but just for the moment, I want to read a book I feel completely immersed in.

I have found one and I'm reading as fast as I can (clue: it's 600 plus pages long...)

* I wanted to put a link to the campaign on here, but I can’t find it online. If anyone else can, please let me know.

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

2010-03-20T14:29:00.000-07:00

Martin. Amis. Even typing those words makes my fingers tingle with excitement. Why? I’ve been madly in love with him since 1977.

That was when I first read The Rachel Papers, closely followed by his second novel Dead Babies.

Both are hilarious, fresh, naughty, wrong and baaaaad in all the right ways and gave me, above all, a sense that – although he is ten years older than me – I was reading someone from my own generation.

As well as the beaming joy of (slightly sexually excited) admiration I feel when reading his words, Martin Amis (Martin Amis!) also gave me my soulmate best friend, Victoria.

It might have been her gold Dunhill lighter and improbably long cigarettes which first impressed me when I met her on my third day at university, but it was our mutual love of MARTIN which bonded us for life.

We still quote passages to each other, a particular favourite being the moment in Dead Babies when the coolest of the dudes gets his cock skin caught in his zip: ‘Ooh, my snake, my fucken rig!’

Maybe you had to be there. We were. We still are and always will be the age when we first read Martin Amis. Those books are as much the accompaniment to my youth as Brass in Pocket and Rock With You.

(And I will never walk along Queensway without these words coming into my head: ‘There is a pub in the Moscow Road where they serve Particular Brew. After the first pint of Particular Brew…’)

So that’s just to give you an idea of the sense of anticipation with which I approached this book. Further heightened by it being lent to me by my other BFF – who back in the day actually had a bit of an ongoing scene with Mr Amis. I’ve got history with the guy, both personal and by proxy. Expectations were high.

So I was amazed to find that the first quarter of the book reads like an ill-edited mish mash of jottings, musings and quotes from favourite poems that he’d shaken up in a bin bag and randomly thrown together.

Where was the tight bitten prose I’m used to? Where were the one liners that make you squeal with (slightly sexual) excitement?

Instead there were quotes from Phillip Larkin and a running theme of snippets from the myth of Echo and Narcissus forfuckssake, which I found particularly self-indulgent and old person-ish.

Could this jumble of ill-assorted thoughts really be by the man who wrote Time’s Arrow? One of the most finely-crafted works in Eng Lit – it’s written in chronological reverse. Even some of the dialogue is backwards.

Yet it’s entirely comprehensible - and a meaningful re-visit of the Holocaust. Phewee. I read the whole thing with my eyes on stalks of (slightly sexually excited) amazement.

Where was Amis’s editor with this one, I wondered? Or was he too up himself to listen to one? It made me so distraught, I was going to give up before all my illusions were shattered, but the former Amis squeeze pal urged me to continue.

She also gave me some useful background, which I’d missed because I deliberately avoid reading about the books I’m going to discuss on here, because I want to come to them entirely fresh.

I had already picked up by osmosis that The Pregnant Widow is Amis’s comment on feminism – living through the process and the ongoing outcome of it – and had intuited that it is a return to the group summer holiday of his youth that inspired Dead Babies.

My BFF added that it had taken him years to write, and had been more of a memoir at one point, until he thought better of it and re-worked it again. It reads like it, I replied.

But out of courtesy to her I pressed on and I’m so happy I did, because I ended up loving this book almost as much for its faults than despite them.

This is an older, slightly beaten up Amis, still obsessed with short men, peri-psychotic sexual yearnings, unrequited love, money and the English class system, but a lot less cocky than he was.

He’s not hiding behind a hard carapace of style anymore. It’s much more personal than any of his other books and I found it deeply touching for that.

He’s put all the dopey bits of poetry in – and hero worship references to Jane Austen – because he loves them so much. Rather as I love him, so I get that.

As for his insights into feminism, he actually reveals a lot more about himself – and the men of his generation – than the women he alleges to be studying. Because Amis’s take on feminism is entirely sexual.

He clearly believes that womankind’s great leap forward of the past forty years is sexual freedom. There is not a single reference to any of the women in this book doing – or aspiring to do - any form of work. It’s extraordinary.

Gloria, the 1970s woman he dubs ‘the Future’ – what women will become after the feminist revolution (i.e. now) - is the one who has achieved a man’s separation of sexual desire and emotion.

Meanwhile, she is pursuing a series of rich men in pursuit of securing her financial situation. She has a lot more in common with a Jane Austen heroine, than a 21st century woman.

So if I ever got to sit with my hero in a pub in the Moscow Road – or even the Italian restaurant in the Moscow Road, which features in this book – this is what I would tell him: Feminism didn’t create sexual freedom. That became possible with the advent of the contraceptive pill. It was science which changed morality, not ideas.

The pill changed the lives of men for the better – they got to have a lot more sex a lot more easily – while it enabled women to plan motherhood around their careers (if embrace it at all), so they no longer had to be financially dependent on men.

But after the third pint of particular brew I wouldn’t care and I’d just want to snog him anyway. Because while this book is massively flawed in its structure and ideas, it is still shoutingly, adorably funny, insightful, clever and wonderful.

And I'm still in love with Martin Amis.

Reading satisfaction: 7
Un-put-downable-ness: 5
Recommend to best girlfriend (the one who hasn't shagged him): 9
Recommend to mother: 0
Recommend to niece (if she’s read early Amis): 8
Recommend to niece (if she hasn’t read early Amis): 0
Recommend to gay best friend: 6
Recommend to man pal: 8
Recommend to Helen Razer: 8
Read on public transport: 7

Getting a child to read

2010-03-13T09:47:00.000-08:00

The average number of blog posts achieved by most new bloggers before they lose interest and/or inspiration is six. This post is to let you know that I haven’t reached that point.

It’s just the book I’m reading at the moment is a 470-page monster and as I’m stuck into editing my own novel as well, it’s taking me a while to get through it. And I’m dying to blog about it, so watch this space. It’s a fascinating object.

Meanwhile I am wondering how I can get my seven and a half-year old daughter to start reading. By which I mean free reading - on her own, without help or encouragement. Proper nose in a book/the house could fall down reading.

It’s not that she doesn’t like books. It’s just she sees them as something that I read to her. Ideally with a lot of bright pictures. Chapter books with a few scrappy line drawings every six pages just don’t hold her attention.

How is it possible that I have a child like this? I’ve been obsessed with books ever since my father read me Paddington Bear. I laughed so hard at the part where he climbs onto the table in the station café and slips on a cream bun, I fell out of bed.

I can clearly remember the moment, shortly after, when I realised that this source of hilarity was trapped inside the pages of the book forever and would be there any time I felt like having a laugh. Shazam!

From that moment on I read everything I could lay my hands on, saved all my pocket money to buy books, knew every inch of the local children’s library, and was a founder member of the Puffin Club.

To encourage a similar passion I have read to my daughter since before she could talk and filled her environment with tempting books at every stage. Plus, she has grown up surrounded by people who share my love of reading.

One of her godmothers is an eminent publisher, I’ve lost count of the books another one has written, and the third is my favourite book-discussion pal, who has also written a novel. Her three godfathers are equally reading orientated, so she has always been surrounded by book talk, in a house where you can hardly move for the bloody things.

Yet while contemporaries at her school from far less literary backgrounds romp through the entire Beast Quest, Mr Gum and even Harry Potter series, it’s all I can do to get Peggy to read Olivia to herself. She does have favourites – Eloise would be near the top – but she’s just not a reader.

I blame myself, of course. I’m a mother! That’s what we do… But seriously, while surrounding her with books, I fear I have also let her watch far too much television. As an only child, I thought it was company for her, but I fear it is has zapped her concentration span.

But I keep trying. Early attempts at chapter books – ghastly things about Susan the Skating Fairy , Penny the Pony Fairy and Deidre the Dreary Fairy – just put her off. I could see why. They were the childhood equivalent of Barbara Cartland.

The best success so far were the Ottoline books, which are pleasing small hardbacks with as much illustration as text and kooky characters, but while she did read both of them to herself, it failed to ignite an ongoing reading habit.

I would do love to share my most enduring pleasure with her. So if anyone has any tips – or words of encouragement - to share, I would be deeply grateful.

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

2010-03-07T13:25:00.000-08:00

Although I haven't just re-read it, I have to come to the defence of this book – and its author - which have both been trashed on the 40th anniversary of its publication by an Australian playwright called Louis Nowra.

Because if I were to write a list of the most important books I’ve ever read, The Female Eunuch would be at the top. It made me.

Aussie readers will be familiar with the hoo hah, but to put everyone else in the picture: Nowra was commissioned to write a contemporary critique of the book by the male editor of a magazine called – hilariously in the context – The Monthly.

I haven’t been able to read the article in full – it’s oddly unaccessible online - but the extracts I’ve seen from it are very disappointing in a publication which styles itself as ‘Australia’s leading cultural, political, and social magazine.’

A large part of his argument that the book is worthless seems to be that Germaine Greer looks like a mad old lady, similar to his late granma. But as I haven’t read it, I will leave it to people who have to comment directly on it. See links below.

My reaction is entirely personal – and points up exactly why the editor of the magazine should have commissioned this article from a woman. Whatever Louis Nowra thinks of this book now, I read it in 1973, when I was 13 and it shaped my whole life.

I can remember very clearly the lightbulb moment, while reading it, when I realised that if I didn’t make my own money, I would always have to ask my husband for the cash if I wanted to buy a new dress.

And that I might have to be nice to him and agree with things he said, that I didn’t believe in, and have sex with him even if I didn’t feel like it, and make what he wanted for dinner even if I didn’t want it, to get that money. Ping!

I know that’s a pathetically trivial reduction of Greer’s theses, but it was what brought the bigger issue home to my 13 year-old head: that economic independence is the foundation for freedom.

I worked hard at school, uni and beyond, driven by that understanding. I haven’t been supported by anyone else since I left education. There was a lot of other stuff in the book that made a deep impression too, but that was the revelation that made me the person I am today.

I’m not going to re-read it now to see whether it’s stood the test of time, because it’s doesn't matter. It wasn’t written for 2010, it was written for 1970. And nobody puts that better than Greer herself:

‘It was the best book I could write at the time; I have written better since. If I feel any disappointment at all it is that The Female Eunuch is still in print. A tide of better books should have knocked it off its perch within a few months of its first appearance.'

And even if parts of it are no longer relevant because there have been some – not nearly enough, but some – advances in male/female equality, or other social structures have changed, it doesn’t make the book any less of an achievement. Because the key thing is it was so very important in its time.

Germaine Greer, you are one of my all-time heroines and always will be.

You can read a great piece from my alma mater, the Sydney Morning Herald here.

A hilarious potty-mouthed polemic by Helen Razer here.
And Ms Greer’s typically elegant comment here, although I’m not clear if this was written in response to Nowra’s piece, or is just where she stands generally on feminism now, here.

Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

2010-03-04T16:17:00.000-08:00

Often it’s not the quality of a book that counts so much as when you read it. Things that thrilled me in my youth seem tedious when I go back to them now, so I don’t re-read much, preferring to hold on to the memory of the first vivid experience.

Sometimes a book comes along entirely by chance at exactly the right moment. I heard about One Million Little Pieces - a powerful semi-fictional memoir of drug rehabilitation - right after a friend had died after years of substance abuse. I stayed awake all night reading it.

But that’s quite rare. More often it takes luck and judgement to know which book to pick up next, because what comes before influences your reaction to the new one. You can miss out on a great book, by starting it too soon after another with a lingering atmosphere.

That happened after I finished A Single Man, when I found that an early Marian Keyes I had been keenly anticipating didn’t capture me at all. I’ve put it away for a sun lounger moment. With a big meaty literary read next on the bedside pile I needed something to smooth my passage, so I turned to my collection of Persephone books.

This wonderful British imprint publishes forgotten treasures, which have languished out of print.

They are beautiful objects in their own right, with signature dove grey jackets, each with its own set of brightly-printed end papers, taken from a design of the period when the book was written. And a matching bookmark. Joyous.

I have a small pile of them on a shelf, so pleasing to look at and always there when I need a gentle segue from one big shouty book to another.

Because although they are by a wide cross section of authors – there are works of non-fiction too – they all seem to have a similar quality of restraint and elegance, which seems to sit well no matter what you’ve been reading recently.

This is one of Noel Streatfeild’s* forgotten adult books. I adored Ballet Shoes and all the rest when I was a child and was delighted when I was 14 to discover her memoir, A Vicarage Childhood. It gripped me so much, I remember reading it on my way home from school and walking smack into a lamp post. Painful.

Saplings is the story of a middle-class London family with four children growing up in the six years of World War 2. At first I was amused by their tiny anxieties, which made me think of the ‘middle class problems’ jokes on Twitter (‘My Aga has stopped working and I’m going to Barbados tomorrow’ etc).

The arrival of evacuees means the oldest girl can’t have her usual bedroom at her grandparents’ country house; the oldest son is anxious his sister will spoil the shrimping expedition, that kind of thing.

But I underestimated Ms Streatfeild, who incrementally increases the stress on these apparently privileged kids over the course of the war, until by the end, after a constant accumulation of small hurts, misunderstandings and bad decisions made for them, on top of one big trauma, you can see that their lives have been quite ruined.

It’s done with sublime skill and with an almost forensic understanding of how a child’s mind works and develops over time. Confused adolescent longings are described as ‘mud and flowers’.

Streatfeild appears to make fun of herself in the book, including in it a character who is a childless writer, famous for her fine portrayal of children and their feelings. She never had children. But as a late mother myself (43), I can testify that this would be exactly how she held on to her insight. Once you become a parent you seem immediately to join the gamekeepers and lose that perception.

The adults in the book are observed with equal precision, each character’s thoughts and motives economically but exactly described.

For a writer like me, not brave enough to venture from the first person, it’s a master class in the use of the omniscient point of view, when the narrator relates what every character thinks and does, written with the utmost elegance.

But more importantly, it’s a jolly good and thought-provoking read.

* Streatfeild is the odd but correct spelling.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 4
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9
Recommend to mother: 10
Recommend to niece: 8
Recommend to gay best friend: 5
Recommend to man pal: 5
Recommend to Helen Razer: 8
Read on public transport: 10

Some thoughts about my ratings system

2010-03-02T13:40:00.000-08:00

A few days after my last post (cue bugler) a friend who happens to be gay questioned my Recommend To Spouse score for A Single Man – a book written from the point of view of a gay man. I’d only given it five out of ten for him, whereas all the others in my recommendation list were eight and up.

My pal’s comment (via wonderful Twitter, of course) confirmed something that had been niggling away at me since I started this caper. Which is that the Spouse scores were skewing the results on all the books, because every one I have written about so far has been fiction – and he doesn’t read fiction. So I’ve taken him off.

My husband perfectly fits that male demographic which read books about war, politics, history, sport and philosophy – or biographies and memoirs of people involved in the aforementioned subjects.

He has read a lot of the great classics of Slavic literature (he’s Serbian), but the only novels he’s picked up since we’ve been together (15 years) were my first two. He hasn’t even read the other three.

Do you think it’s weird that it doesn’t bother me? I really don’t care. Stephen King says he writes all his books for his wife, but I don’t write mine for my partner. I write them for my Australian publisher, my best friends (gay, straight, whatever) and my nieces. Really, I write them for myself.

But since I took my old mucker off the ratings, I don’t have a heterosexual man on the list. Does it matter? I chose the other people on there because they’re the ones I discuss books with the most, not because of their sexual preferences.

But having introduced the notion of 'gay best friend ' - who happens to be one of the most voracious readers of fiction I have ever known - it seemed right to offer a cross section.

I had to wrack my frontal lobe a bit to come up with a straight bloke I talk to much about reading and the best choice is my very dear brainy film maker friend, who I will call Man Pal.

As I’m being so PC, it then occurred I haven’t covered ladies of the islander persuasion (LESBIANS, Your Majesty). Helen Razer has granted me permission to cite her name in this category.

I think that covers it. And if I ever review a book about footballing Stalinist generals, I’ll put the spouse score back in.

7. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

2010-02-24T11:56:00.000-08:00

This is the first time I’ve ever read a book right after – and as a result of - seeing the film of it.

Normally I rush to read the book first, in fear a poor adaptation will ruin the chance to enjoy it fresh from the page, because generally I find movie versions don’t live up to books I have loved.

I loathed the film of I Capture the Castle, with that terrible, terrible wig, and I’m so sad my seven year old saw the blah film of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe before she could read the Narnia series. I actively tried to shield her from it, but she watched it at a friend’s house. Dammit.

Sometimes though - Harry Potter - the movies are much better than the books, and then there are the rare and joyous cases where both experiences, the reading and the watching, are equally transporting. Gone With the Wind is the classic example, and I’m happy to report that A Single Man falls into that category too.

I adored the film. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve had a fag hag crush on Tom Ford for years and his sexy smooth aesthetic defines the cinematic experience from the start.

Colin Firth richly deserved that Bafta (and I hope he gets the Oscar, too), but the film is so quietly visually ravishing, it would be a glory to watch with the sound down too. It’s worth seeing for the women’s hairstyles alone. A lot of the critics were bitchy about all that, like it was a bad thing it looked so beautiful. Ignore them.

But beyond the superficial I was gripped to find out why Ford was so strongly moved to make this particular book into a film, he even co-wrote the screenplay (swoon).

One of the themes that particularly interested me is the portrayal of a deep friendship between a gay man and a straight woman. It’s a rarely-explored area and one very close to my heart, as such relationships have been some of the most significant of my life. Which is why it’s a major thread in my first novel, Pants on Fire. (Really the straight love story in that book is just a vehicle to look at the more interesting meeting of minds between the heroine and her boy pal.)

That’s one detail that is notably different in Ford’s film; perhaps unsurprisingly, he has made his on-screen gal pal much more glamorous than Isherwood’s literary version, who is plump and poorly dressed (the horror!).

And probably advisedly, the film doesn’t go near a section of the book which outlines the gay protagonist’s utter revulsion at the mere idea of female genitalia, amid a passage of general intense misogyny.

That chapter was like a slap in the face to read, but brilliantly brave and honest to put it down in print. I’ve known gay men who feel that way – a simultaneous adoration for and shrinking away from the female. Indeed that’s precisely the contradiction which can make the fag/hag relationship so interesting. And so complicated.

The most major change though, is a crucial storyline in the film, which isn’t in the book at all. (I’m not saying what it is, because I don’t want to spoil either of them for anybody.) It makes the film less subtle than the book, but I can see why they needed it for narrative pace. The book is none the lesser for not having it, though.

So in the final analysis, as this is a reading diary not a film page, what did I think of the book? I thought it was a tiny precious gem, as sparkling and finely worked as a Graff diamond.

There are so many big ideas concentrated down into a very slim volume – it’s almost a novella – but so lightly drawn it never drags. It skitters along like sunbeams bouncing off cars on an LA highway, as apparently lightweight as the city where it’s set, but with the great depth of Isherwood’s skill and experience, supporting it from below.

Thank you, Mr Ford, for prompting me to read it.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 6
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8
Recommend to mother: 7
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to gay best friend: 9
Recommend to man pal: 9
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Read on public transport: 10

Note: have decided to take spouse out of my ratings, as he doesn't really read fiction (not even my bloody books). Will put him back if I do a non-fic book. He likes books about history/war/boxing/philosophy etc.

6. Redeeming Features: A Memoir by Nicholas Haslam

2010-02-18T11:56:00.000-08:00

I was so sad when I finished this book I shed a tear. Not because the book is sad – although it has its moments – but because I will miss it so much.

It was also a tear of frustration, as I hadn’t actually realised I was at the end, until I turned the page to read on and found myself looking at the index.

The last sentence of the text appears at the very bottom of a right-hand page, so you don’t even realise you are at the end of a chapter, let alone the conclusion of 323 pages of rapture. Most frustrating.

So why is this book so hard to leave behind? Take one copy of Diana Vreeland’s V. Stir in Lee Radziwill’s Happy Times, Dominic Dunne’s The Way We Lived Then and Rupert Everett’s Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. Add several handfuls of Cecil Beaton’s diaries, sprinkle over a little Chips Channon and finally whisk it all up into high peaks with a large helping of fairy dust.

What an extraordinary seventy years Nicky Haslam has led and how very beautifully he tells us about it. This book could have been one long dreary brag about all the fabulous people he calls very dear friends, their fabulous lives and their fabulous homes, but his elegant and atmospheric writing makes it something much more (and the on dit is that he really did write it himself).

Of course he does also shamelessly collect scalps. Cole Porter, the Duchess of Windsor, Andy Warhol, Noel Coward, Bette Davis, Debo Devonshire, Mick Jagger, Cary Grant, Liberace, Paris Hilton…. That’s about the number – and variety - which appear on each page. I’m not kidding.

So it’s endearing when he persuades an LA friend’s housekeeper to get her sister to introduce him to Elvis, whom she works for. The result is a bizarre encounter in a trailer, which the King pretty much sleeps through.

I liked Haslam enormously for sharing this rather humiliating anecdote, because unlike most legendary people Mr Haslam meets – his dazzling social career starting while he was still at Eton – Presley did not immediately become a lifelong friend.

His success rate is so mindboggling, Haslam’s dazzling charm must be visible from space. And this was all kicking off long before he became Nicky Haslam the human luxury brand, who every arriviste desperately wants to add to their quick dial list as a symbol of being properly in with the in crowd. (Bryan Ferry is a very good friend, of course.)

We are at I Tatti - where his father hung out with the Berensons in his youth - by page 21, and as a barely-hatched young man he became instant new best friends with Bunny Roger, Cecil Beaton and Lady Diana Cooper when he met them.

And not just as cocktail party cheek-kissers, mind. Meaningful relationships which continued to the ends of all their lives, despite the enormous age differences. There are wonderful pictures of Beaton at Haslam’s Arizona ranch in the 1970s (all the photos are great, actually).

But what I found so interesting is that the friend who introduced him to those three deities was a man-about-town called Simon Fleet, whom Haslam had met entirely by chance one day on a London street. (And who later turned up at Haslam’s house one morning with Greta Garbo in tow….)

Meeting Fleet, while he was still at school, is just one of many such extraordinary chance encounters in this life. Another was being picked up on the street in New York – when Haslam was on his first visit there, aged 14 – and finding himself a couple of days later having lunch with Tallulah Bankhead. As you do.

He was beautiful, of course (he does tell you that quite often), which makes such events more likely, but still there is a magical element to his life that makes engrossing reading. There is also much more to it than a passagiata through his address book (which must have as many volumes as the Concise Oxford English….).

It’s a social history of the entire 20th century cultural elite, and reaching back much further – to Queen Victoria and Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (a distant rel) - by association. You could do the most amazing flow chart connecting them all up, but you would need a very large piece of paper.

It’s also a touching sentimental journey of a gay man keeping step with the beat of liberation. Although in that respect I found it very odd that AIDS isn’t mentioned at all, particularly as he lived in New York in the first glory days of gay pride. It may be to do with the aversion to physical sex he is mentions in the earliest pages of the book.

There was only one section in the entire Hermès-orange bound volume that grated on me. Near the end he talks of various current friends – notably the Bamfords, who lent him their Barbados mansion (formerly property of the Tree family, as in Marietta, as in Penelope…) to write in – whom he has met as clients for his decorating business, with a slightly toadying tone.

But that was the only wrong note in a marvellously vivid rendering of an extraordinary life, from a little boy stuck in bed for three years with polio, to ranging the world on an Triple A List magic carpet.

PS Although I have only met him once and briefly (I’m sure he would like me to mention it was at Rachel Johnson’s party and Kathy Lette introduced us…), Nicky Haslam was the inspiration for the character Uncle Percy in my novel Mad About the Boy.

I based Uncle Percy’s mid-life style change to black-haired rocker entirely, and with the greatest respect, on Mr Haslam’s own makeover.

Reading satisfaction: 9
Un-put-downable-ness: 7
Recommend to best girlfriend: 10
Recommend to mother: 6
Recommend to niece: 5
Recommend to gay best friend: 10
Recommend to boy pal: 5
Recommend to Helen Razer: 4
Read on public transport: 9

Reading in the Twitter era

2010-02-14T08:14:00.000-08:00

I’m half way through the next book for discussion here (not the one pictured right...) and it’s such a rich feast of delights I have to keep taking little breaks to digest before moving on, for fearing of missing anything.

Oh, I can hardly wait to share it with you…

In the meantime, while lying sick in bed for what is now nearly four weeks, I’ve had plenty of time to ponder my ongoing relationship with reading. And I’ve realised that the subconscious impulse to start this book diary was to make sure I start reading intensely again, because I was coming close to losing it.

This strange decline started a year ago when I read the first book in the Twilight series. I only picked it up because the phenomenon of Stephanie Mayer kept my last novel out of the top four slots of the Australian bestseller lists in 2008. She had them tied up for months dammit. Know your enemy, I thought.

After a sleepless night finishing it, I understood her appeal. I went on to devour the next three books and although I found them progressively less engaging, I remained oddly and intensely caught up in the parallel world she has created.

While your front brain constantly reminds you it’s hysterical teenage Mormon nonsense (Read On Public Transport score: 0), some lower area of it becomes obsessed. It was like a weird spell had been cast over me.

Then the marvellous film of Twilight came out and made matters worse, as it not only captured but improved upon everything I found compelling in the book. With the added and utter glory that is Rob Pattinson in the male lead. I still find the scene where they are high up in the tree together absolutely swoon-inducing.

The only comfort I had in this ongoing delirium was that so many of my friends, were similarly affected – mature, tertiary-educated, sophisticated, partnered-up women every one.

The collective insanity really was most peculiar and I wasn’t released until the truly terrible film of New Moon came out late last year. It was so cringingly aimed at the teen market I screamed with laughter all the way through and left the cinema feeling as though I had been exorcised.

But apart from the humiliation of being gripped by an adolescent fervour, the worst thing was that after charging through those penny dreadful novels, I just couldn’t settle to reading anything else. It went on for months, most of last year. I tried all kinds of books – even other vampire nonsense - but nothing could hold my attention.

And then the funny thing was, that around that very time, I read two newspaper articles that closely reflected my experiences. (The glory of this being a blog, as opposed to a newspaper article, is that I can’t be bothered to research who they were by. Sorry.)

Suffice to say that a woman in the Guardian described exactly the feeling of panic I have about having only a finite number of books left to read before death. Then a chap in the Times described having a reading block identical to mine. My zeitgeist gland started to throb.

The final word came just the other day – Feb 10th at 8.22 pm, to be precise – when Alain de Botton posted a comment on Twitter which summed up the whole malaise:

“The book will be killed not directly by new technology but by the monkey mind it breeds. The issue is concentration, not royalties.”

Bullseye.

And as I am entirely addicted to Twitter’s gibbon-brain perma-novelty, it seems all the more urgent I continue this reading diary, to keep my frontal lobe supple enough to absorb works longer than 140 characters.

PS The irony is that I was finally rescued from my reading paralysis by The Leopard (by Tomasi Di Lampedusa), which I was prompted to read after @indiaknight and @CharlieMcVeigh discussed it on Twitter...

5. Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz

2010-02-10T04:41:00.001-08:00

I wondered how long it would take for this issue to arise with regard to this project: what do you do when you just can’t get into a book? Solider on, or toss it aside for something else?

My mother reads every book she ever starts doggedly to the end as a point of principle, but I just can’t do that. I’m all too aware that there is only a finite number of books left that I have time to read before I die, and I can’t bear to waste a slot on something I don’t love.

However, if I hadn’t taken advice to push on after the first three dodgy chapters I would have missed the great reading pleasures that were Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and The Shipping News. Some books repay persistence.

But in this case, I think there’s another issue to consider: I’m just not in the mood for this style of book at the moment.

I first heard of Naguib Mahfouz last year, when the words ‘Egyptian Tolstoy’ rang out of the radio at me, followed by ‘winner of the Nobel Prize for literature’.

A comparison to Tolstoy is about as high a recommendation as it gets for me (along with ‘redolent of early Jilly Cooper’…), so I got right onto Google, sussed out that the Cairo Trilogy is considered his masterpiece, and immediately bought Palace Walk, the first book of the three.

I absolutely loved it. It’s a family saga, set in Cairo in the early 20th century, towards the end of the British occupation. As big geopolitical events unfold, you are treated to a minute insight into the family’s life, as tiny as the mother’s view of the world through the lattice work window she is permitted to look through.

The varied personalities within the family are conveyed with needlepoint detail, while the book as a whole gives a vivid flavour of life in that city, in that era. He deserves his rep.

I have been gagging to read the next two volumes ever since I finished it, but got side-tracked by the Twilight experience, which oddly dominated my reading last year. I have finally come to it, but find I just can’t engage with the writing.

It’s slower than the first book and comparisons between Mahfouz and Proust make more sense with this one. There are pages and pages of internal monologue about how a teenage boy feels about a girl he has seen. I can’t be doing with that right now. A little less conversation…

I am also put off by the translation. It’s the same American translators who did the first book, but I am finding them culturally intrusive in a way I didn’t with that one.

The dreadful word ‘gotten’ has cropped up several times and they use the term ‘casserole’ to describe a variety of Egyptian savoury dish. I don’t know what the Egyptian version of a ‘tagine’ is, but there must be something more evocative than casserole they could have used. It made me picture terrible 1970s earthenware dishes, hessian wallpaper and pot luck suppers.

I suspect all I need to do with this book is to push on until the story gears up, but right now I just don’t feel like it. I will come back to it – I particularly want to read the gorgeously named, Sugar Street, the last volume in the series – but for now I am putting it aside in favour of something else.

4. Down With Skool! by Geoffrey Willans (illustrations by Ronald Searle)

2010-02-05T10:49:00.000-08:00

Ha ha ha bet you weren’t expecting that, but after reading three hefty tomes by contemporary women authors in a row, I needed a palate cleanser before embarking on the next one, which is another chunky read.

I have owned my copy of this book since 1968 (fifteen years after it was published) and have no idea how many times I’ve read it and all the brilliant sequels since. It never fails to make me shout with laughter.

I was prompted to re-read this time as one of my favourite Tweeters is @reelmolesworth, who posts hilarious comments on current events in the unique voice (and spelling…) of the book’s anti-hero, Nigel Molesworth.

Laughing at his postings made me eager for another look at the original. If you’re not familiar – something I find quite hard to imagine, as this book feels like part of my DNA – it’s 1950s boarding school life, through the eyes of young Molesworth, by his own description ‘the Curse of St Custards’.

Of course it’s really the whole of life through the eyes of a very witty and clever man, who worked at the BBC, wrote for Punch, and one successful screenplay, before dying far too young, at 47. So sad. What other joys might he have given us?

It’s actually hard to find much more out about Willans. Even on the Penguin website and his Wikepedia entry, there is very little background, but I have a very vivid picture of him in my head, as a cool 1950s dude in corduroy. (I am rather inspired to find out more about him now and will report back on here, if I turn anything up.)

But back to the book. It’s allegedly written for children, but it’s absolutely anarchic and as a schoolgirl I thrilled to its outrageous statements and deliberate misspellings.

It actually caused a bit of a hoo hah at the time, seen as a bad influence on real kids chiz chiz. For e.g. the section ‘How To Avoid Botany’ starts with the sentence, ‘Suply yourself with a paket of cigs.’ (sic.).

Sorry? What’s a chiz? It’s a classic bit of Molesworth-ese (synonymous with ‘swiz’…) which has become part of the British vocabulary, along with his oft-shared opinion that certain people are wets and weeds. Or, worst of all, big gurlies. Enuf said.

The chapter which always renders me insensible is ‘A Tour of the Cages – or Masters One By One’, particularly the Latin section. Molesworth felt exactly as I did about Romans and Gauls constantly attacking ditches. Why?

I’ve been looking for a bit from it to quote – consequently can hardly type for tears of laughter – but it doesn’t really work out of context. And the reason for that is very interesting. And has only just occurred to me chiz chiz because I am a wet and a weed as any fule no.

The humour of Molesworth lies in the style as much as the content and the style is all about rhythm and - this has been my revelation on this reading of the book - it’s actually a masterpiece of the ‘skaz’ style.

Skaz is the jazzed-up, lawless, stream of consciousness, first-person prose style, most famously used by JD Salinger in The Catcher In The Rye, although Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac laid the earlier foundations. Martin Amis is the post-modern master, writing as John Self in Money.

It breaks all rules of grammar and punctuation, yet is still immediately comprehensible to the reader. It gives a particularly vivid impression of the narrator, who is generally a bit cross with the world. It’s a young voice, very fast-paced and moved along by the staccato jazzy rhythm. You could snap your fingers to good skaz. Commas are rarely used if it all. Short sentences are.

The link to Salinger seems poignant, with his death just last week (27th January, 2010), but I must confess a more immediate personal interest: the novel I have just finished is written partly in the skaz style.

Randomly re-reading marvellous Molesworth, I have suddenly realised just how deeply influenced I have been in all my work by Geoffrey Willans’ writing. To the point of discovering that a short sentence I particulary love to use – ‘Next question.’ – is actually his.

I posthumously award him the Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work.

Reading satisfaction: 9
Un-put-downable-ness: 7
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9
Recommend to mother: 3
Recommend to niece: 9
Recomend to gay best friend: 9
Recommend to man pal: 10
Recommend to Helen Razer: 7
Read on public transport: 7

3. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

2010-02-02T03:32:00.000-08:00

First let me draw your attention to the time gap between my last posting and this one – two days. That should give you an idea of how much I enjoyed this book. Which is 499 pages long in hard back. I was up to 3 a.m. last night reading it and resumed to finish at six this morning. It’s a ripper.

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Sarah Waters, but confess I was a little disappointed when I first heard about this one because it isn’t about fascinating lesbians of yore. I love that stuff, the sense of being let into a secret history.

By contrast, the narrator of this book is a straight, middle-aged man living in rural England in the late 1940s - and it’s the proof of Waters’ prodigious talent that his voice is utterly convincing and compelling from the outset.

The story revolves around a beautiful country house which is crumbling into disrepair – the family which owns it in equal decline. The narrator’s mother was in service there as a young woman and he visited as a child, attending a let-them-eat-cake jolly for the workers’ children, during which he had a tantalising glimpse of the house and family in their full Edwardian splendour.

He returns as a grown man - and a doctor – to find it all in near ruin. This shift in his relative status and its implications within the minute calibrations of the English class system – already in turmoil under the post-war Labour government - forms the background theme of the book.

The upfront issue is a gripping ghost story, so scary at times, I was quite nervous getting up to go to the loo in the dark. But while the supernatural suspense kept me turning pages into the small hours, what makes this book such a satisfying experience overall is the exquisite rendering of the minutiae of human relationships.

The missed glance, the tilted head, the nibbled fingernail… All the tiny details by which we signal our emotions and connections, are almost forensically described, but with such delicacy it doesn’t drag the pace.

Talking of which, the book does start quite slowly and I did wonder around chapter four if she couldn’t get on with it a bit, but then I got in step and appreciated it as a ghost story in the Wilkie Collins style. It has that Victorian quality of wildly gothic events having more impact described by a very restrained narrator, so familiar from Wuthering Heights.

My only tiny criticism is that there are quite long passages, really germane to the plot, where the first person narrator describes in detail events he didn’t witness, without recourse to ‘as Caroline told me later’ devices.

I was amazed that a writer of this calibre could make such a fundamental fiction boo boo – and that her editors didn’t notice – but in the end it was almost a relief that she isn’t totally perfect. I think this flaw actually made me enjoy the book a little more.

The Little Stranger will make a brilliant film – I just don’t want to spend the night on my own after seeing it.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 9
Recommend to best girlfriend: 9
Recommend to best gay friend: 9
Recommend to mother: 9
Recommend to niece: 9
Recommend to man pal: 8
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Read on public transport: 9

2. Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon

2010-01-31T08:13:00.000-08:00

What rock was I napping under when this came out last September? A new book by Fay Weldon is an event to me – reading Down Among The Women when I was 13 (shortly after The Female Eunuch…) made me a feminist - but this one totally passed me by.

Possibly because I find the book pages of newspapers are mainly given over to studious biographies of Napoleon’s second general, so I hardly look at them…

When I did finally stumble upon it last week, the title sprang out rather than the author, because Chalcot Crescent is a street in Primrose Hill right around the corner from Chalcot Road, where I used to live.

And, adding to my interest, the book I have just finished is set entirely in Primrose Hill and one of the main characters live in Chalcot Crescent…

Anyway - the book. Bloody brilliant. It’s set three years hence in a dystopian future created by what might have happened if governments around the world hadn’t propped up the banking system when it was on the verge of collapse in 2008. (She must have turned this book around at warp speed.)

On top of this sparkling conceit Weldon applies another intriguing notion – what if we all suddenly lost interest in the consumerist way of life that actually entirely underpins capitalism?

In her parallel universe people have suddenly and collectively realised that constantly acquiring more ‘stuff’ is not the route to happiness. No shopping means no ‘growth’ means no economy…

As a result, houses are worthless, credit doesn’t exist, the EU falls to bits, it’s every country for themselves, food is the most valuable commodity and after a couple of hung parliaments an unelected government takes control.

What’s so gripping, is that for a moment back there something like this really could have happened. It still could.

That’s just a few of many brilliant possibilities the book explores, but what makes it more than a smart contemporary update on Brave New World and 1984, is that running alongside the big picture ideas, is the more personal – and fundamentally female - story of the narrator, Frances.

She’s a brilliant idea in herself – the person who might have existed if Fay Weldon’s real mother hadn’t had a miscarriage, when Fay was a child. A what if? sibling. Weldon then tantalises the reader with through-the-looking-glass parallels between Frances’ life and her own, as already laid bare in her autobiography, Auto da Fay.

Through 80 year-old Frances, Weldon retreads the issues of sexual freedom, financial semi-equality and legal triumphs, which have so occupied women over the last eight decades - while teasingly re-visiting controversial revisions of her own, from the post-feminist era.

And all of it done with the wit and verve you expect from this master stylist. ‘Banksters’ is just one term I delighted over.

There were sections when I slightly lost interest – hence relatively low un-put-downable-ness score - feeling that the ideas were taking over from pushing on the story, but then something bright and sparkling would hook me in again.

There is a also lot of repetition in the book which made me wonder at first if Ms Weldon didn’t have an editor strong enough to stand up to her, until I realised she was using it deliberately, more vividly to paint her octogenarian anti-heroine.

At nearly 80 herself, this book shows Fay Weldon still has more ideas crackling in her brain than she knows what to do with. I bow at her feet.

And now I’m going to read what the brainy broadsheet reviewers had to say about it on publication.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 6
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8
Recommend to spouse: 5 (he might read this because of socio-political content)
Recommend to mother: 8
Recommend to niece: 8
Recommend to man pal: 6
Recommend to Helen Razer: 9
Happy to read on public transport: 9

2010-01-21T01:32:00.000-08:00

Here I go with my first post in my List of Books I’ve Read This Year. But just one thing to make clear before I start – these are not reviews. I don’t review novels.

Just one time I reviewed a novel for a newspaper and my verdict wasn’t entirely positive. When I came to write my own first one, not long after, and discovered exactly how much work is involved, I was consumed with regret and swore I would never write another review of a work of fiction by a living author.

There is a reason there are those who do and those who criticise…

So these are my very personal reactions to the books I’ve read this year. I’m doing it for fun, but also to make my reading more ‘active’, which I think can help improve your own writing.

I will also do my best not to give the stories away.

1. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

What a stellar start to my first catalogued reading year. This is a fascinating book on several different levels, written in a very quiet and measured voice, which is surprisingly compelling.

It’s the first person story of an American First Lady, based - in the author’s own statement - on a very particular recent presidency the reader will immediately recognise. Apart from that, she says, the characters and what happens to them are fictional. So that’s a pretty interesting set up to begin with: real, but not real.

One of the major themes, it seemed to me, was an exploration of the American class system, which seems to be a personal obsession of Sittenfeld’s.

Her first novel, Prep, which I also loved, was about a regular teenage girl who wins a scholarship to an elite private boarding school and her introduction to – and subsequent disillusionment with - the very particular behaviour, values and mores of America’s privileged class.

The family the narrator of this books marries into come from exactly this milieu, while she is the daughter of simple white-collar down home folk, whose good looks propel her upwards.

I’m fascinated by the nuances of class and the peculiar behaviour of the very rich myself, so find all that gripping.

Then there was the imaginative leap of seeing inside the bedroom of the White House, which I thought she pulled off brilliantly. How it feels to sit in your body as a simple human being, but know your husband can fundamentally affect the lives of millions of other people with any decision he makes.

There are actually some pretty massive flaws in this book – I won’t spoil it, by dissecting them – but that actually made me like it more. It gave me something to chew over, as I read, just as a beautiful face is made more compelling by a scar.

Reading satisfaction: 8
Un-put-downable-ness: 6
Recommend to best girlfriend: 8

Why Don’t I Update My Blog More Often? Well, I’m Going To.

2010-01-16T14:03:00.000-08:00

The function of this blog up until now has been as a news platform, to promote upcoming publications, book tours etc and I will still use it for that, but I've now decided to start using it also as a very personal reading diary.

This was inspired by a fascinating book I read last year by Stephen King, called On Writing, which is about – funnily enough – the process of writing.

Although I've enjoyed all the films I’ve seen of his books (I think 'The Shining' is the best horror film ever made), his novels are not in a genre that interests me, but after a fellow novelist told me about this one, I thought it would be interesting to see how one of the biggest-selling authors of all time approaches his craft. Might pick up some tips...

The book changed my life. Seriously.

I had been getting quite low sitting on my own in a room from 9 to 5, five days a week, which was how I was writing my books. I felt guilty if I didn’t give it all my possible working time. Then I felt guilty for not enjoying what I do, when I know I’m so very lucky to make a living as a writer. Ooh, lots of lovely guilt – great for the creative process. Not.

But then I read about Stephen King’s rationale: his writing day is finished as soon as he has chalked up 2,000 words. Revelation! Sometimes he’s done by 11am, other days he’s at his desk until tea time, but once he hits the magic number he’s free.

He then went on to relate how other writers approached it. Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope – who had a full-time job running the Royal Mail, but also managed to pop out an astonishing 47 novels – wrote for a precise amount of time each morning. If he finished a novel with five minutes left to go, he would start another one. If he was three sentences from the end of one, it had to wait until the next day.

Another thing that fascinated me in King’s book was a list of all the books he had read in the previous year. It was a very long list, because that’s what he does when he’s finished his daily word count. He reads.

My reading has come down to a few minutes each evening before I drop asleep, so it takes me ages these days to read an average-sized book, and I was doing it passively, not fully engaged.

I used to rip through several novels in a week, reading while I was wide awake with synapses in full snap and Stephen King made me realise that to continue developing as a writer, I need to get back to being an active reader.

Add to that a growing awareness of the ever diminishing finite number of books left that I will be able to read in my lifetime, and I knew I had to take affirmative action

So my plan for this year, is to stop work when I’ve written 2,500 words, to read more, and to keep a list of what I read. And that list will be in the form of posts on here.

How To Break Your Own Heart published in UK

2009-07-02T05:01:00.000-07:00

My new novel How To Break Your Own Heart is out today. Hurrah! Well, it's new in the UK - it came out last November in Australia. So why the long delay? Well, it seems, I am something called a ‘summer author’.

I’m very happy with that tag because I like to think of my books as something you would reach for when you have a bit of time for yourself – such as stretching out on a pool side lounger, or settling into a flight to somewhere sandy and salty.

The book went down really well in Aus, I’m delighted to say, and I hope it has the same appeal in my home country (where it is set). I must admit I have a special affection for it. There are several characters in it I really love (not least the gorgeous male romantic lead…. hubba hubba) and I still miss spending time with them every day at the computer.

The other reason I think it’s special to me is that Amanda’s story is – in part – my own. I was that woman who found out at the age of 36 that your fertility goes down in a black ski run gradient at 37.

I’d really had no idea, which is a bit shameful considering I am a doctor’s daughter, but I think like most of my generation I was so intent on being a world expert in contraception (thank you Cosmo magazine…) the conception part of it got left out.

Everything else in the book is fiction (my first husband is American and NOTHING like Ed!), but that terrible moment happened to me.

I’d love to hear feedback, if you read it.

Apologies for not posting on here more often. It's mainly a factor of having so much to write already. I do my column every week for Good Weekend in Australia, plus I am stuck in to writing my next book.... BUT the best place to find me is on Twitter.

I'm @ MaggieA. Love Twitter and would love to chat to you on there.

Maggie xxx

In Bed With book signing Feb 11th, Selfridges

2009-02-05T04:27:00.001-08:00

I’m thrilled to say that our collection of unashamedly feeelthy stories by well-known woman novelists (Fay Weldon, Joanne Harris, Ali Smith et al) is selling as only sex can – big time - and stirring up a bit of a media furore too.

Yes! Yes! Yes!! (to quote Meg Ryan in the famous deli scene). I’ll have what she’s having. A filthy book to bring on the frisky fun. And perhaps a side order of rabbit ragout. (You can figure out what kind of rabbit yourself...)

Next Wednesday, February 11th, the four editors – being me and my three droogs, Kathy Lette, Jessica Adams and Imogen Edwards-Jones - will be signing copies in the book department of Selfridges.

We’ll be there between 1 and 2pm. Please come by and say hello.

In Bed With

2009-01-28T03:49:00.000-08:00

May I proudly introduce my latest venture: the wicked temptress of a book which is In Bed With. The UK edition was published yesterday (January 22nd), amid something of a media maelstrom. Hurrah!

In Bed With is an outrageously sexy collection of filthy stories written by 20 very well-known women novelists (see full list below), all writing under our X-rated name: first pet and first street you lived on. Or something similar.

Everyone in my family would have instantly recognised the name ‘Ringo’ as the baby bird which the gardener rescued for the 3 year old me (and which died the same day…), so I had to be inventive. And no, I am not telling.

This brilliant anthology was the idea of my very great friend Jessica Adams, who roped in me, Kathy Lette and Imogen Edwards-Jones as her co0editors. We have had the most hilarious time pulling it together, with three years of emails zapping round the world – and a few essential face to face meetings at The Wolseley - to make it happen.

It was really hard work actually, but so worth it. The day Fay Weldon said yes, closely followed by Joanne Harris, Ali Smith and Esther Freud, we knew we had something special on our hands.

And it really is. Apart from the fun of trying to guess who wrote what – and all our lips are sealed – the stories are the most wonderful mix of styles and genres. Then there is the added attraction that In Bed With could certainly help a cold dark credit crunch night pass more excitingly… if you get my drift. With or without company.

In Bed With contributors:

Adele Parks
Ali Smith
Bella Pollen
Chris Manby
Daisy Waugh
Emma Darwin
Esther Freud
Fay Weldon
Imogen Edwards-Jones
Jane Moore
Jessica Adams
Joan Smith
Joanne Harris
Justine Picardie
Kathy Lette
Louise Doughty
Maggie Alderson
Rachel Johnson
Santa Montefiore
Stella Duffy

Published by Sphere, £7.99

'A book that has the literary world abuzz with excitement, causing a frisson of electricity to pass through the corridors of the country's publishing houses.'
The Daily Telegraph

'Your favourite female authors...as you've never read them before...the literary world is in for a shock'
Good Housekeeping

'How a group of Britain's female writers are making erotic fiction cool...a steamy new short-story collection'
Harpers Bazaar

`In the past several women have given themselves pseudonyms to write naughty books such as Petite Anglaise, The Bride Striped Bare and Belle de Jour, which was turned into a TV series with Billie Piper. But they were by unknowns. Here, the authors have no need to make a mark. '
The Times

A new book of erotic fiction will trigger a juicy literary guessing game after a gaggle of female writers were invited to contribute risque stories under pseudonyms.
The Daily Mail

Back to reality

2008-11-17T04:56:00.000-08:00

Where's Miles? How am I supposed to get anywhere without him? Oh, that's right, I don't have a car and personal driver with a CAP in my real life. That's only part of Book Tour World, along with other people picking up my towels, making my bed and washing my pants. Oh well.

Here are some wonderful things I encountered while I was back in my beloved Australia for the tour.

1. Aussie lady writersTwo of my favourite , pictured above, at a lovely drinks party hosted by my bezzie mate and publisher Julie Gibbs. Left to right Lee Tulloch, Marion von Adlerstein, Julie and moi. My great pal Robert Rosen - Mr Snaparazzi - took the shot.

2 Coin-operated hair straighteners in public loos
Image is everything in Sydney and to make sure you never have to worry about your hair getting a little bit mussed up - it can be a bastard on those humid February days - a company called Glide puts coin-operated hair irons in the loos of night clubs and bars. Brilliant.

3. No Starbucks in Melbourne
I am reliably informed that all the branches of Starpukes that opened in Melbourne closed down because no one there would drink such foul coffee. Australian coffee is the best in the world - better than Italy. Trust me on this. They use weird UHT (Ultra Horrible Turtle milk) in Italy. In Australia you get the perfect roast on the bean, highly-trained baristas and delicious milk. And the right vessel for each style of coffee. I loathe the tankards you get for lattes in the UK. They should come in medium-sized Duralex glasses.

4. Hako Japanese restaurant
This is some of the best Japanese food I have ever eaten in a very groovy Shoreditch style interior. Perfection. 310 Flinders Lane. 03 9620 1881.

Brisbane

2008-10-26T17:48:00.000-07:00

I'm staying at The Limes - a boutique 'design' hotel so cool they don't do anything as mundane as serve breakfast. Instead they provide a proper kettle and mugs, a jug of real milk in the fridge and a top selection of teas and coffees - and a list of Brisbane's best breakfast cafes.

At first I was outraged - I WANT MY ROOM SERVICE!!! - but I'm converted. Loved walking to Cafe Cirque this morning, where I had avocado, tomato and basil on toast. Yum.

I am slightly stressed about my first live event tonight (see details below...), but will be boosted by wearing my new Easton Pearson top. As I am in the label's home town - I'm having dinner with the designers Lydia and Pam tonight - I am going to declare that I'm wearing Local Costume. Also going to their flagship store today, swoon, thrill, pant. Yes, I am very very shallow.

And continuing the theme of smallworld.com from my last post - the absolutely delightful young man on the front desk at the hotel here, turns out to be Lydia Pearson's son, Felix.

This is where I will be tonight:
BRISBANE - Monday 27th October, 6:15pm to 8:pm
Talk about the book, Q&A and signing.
MARY RYAN BOOKSTORE 40 Park Road, Milton.

It would be lovely to see you.

Maggie x

Rest of tour:
SYDNEY - Tuesday 28th October, 12.30 to 1.30pm
DYMOCKS George Street, CBD
Now this will be funny. This one is actually about In Bed With - the anthology of absolutely FILTHY short stories that I have co-edited with my best writer gal pals Kathy Lette, Jessica Adam and Imogen Edwards-Jones.Kathy, Jessica and I will be in store - along with some lingerie models who I will be trying very hard not to stand next to - and some of the contributors, including my old colleague Emma Tom.

MELBOURNE - Thursday October 30th, 6:30pm to 8pm
Talk about How To Break Your Own Heart, followed by Q & A and signing.
READINGS BOOKSTORE 701 Glenferrie Road,Hawthorn

SYDNEY - Friday October 31st, 1pm to 2pm
Talk about How To Break Your Own Heart, Q & A, signing.
CONSTANT READER BOOKSTORE EVENT Stanton Library, 234 Miller St, Crows Nest.

It's Friday - so it must be Sydney

2008-10-25T03:55:00.000-07:00

Why, oh why, did I bring two pairs of jeans but no actual trousers? Why didn't I bring any leggings or tights? Why did I bring three pairs of open shoes and no proper shoes apart from drag queen heels and trainers?

It's the usual story. I packed in a big rush and have so many flowery skirts and cotton cardigans qith me I can't decide which ones to wear on warm afternoons with a cheeky hint of a Harbour breeze. Any other kind of weather and I will be done for. And it was snowing in the Blue Mountains this week, so Margie Blok tells me.

So I have been shopping... I had to and it was such bliss. I find shopping in London quite hard work and it's all so compact and easy here by comparison. I got a top haul.

As well my standard Sydney shopping list (MIMCO hat, Louise Mitchell nightie, Bay Tree cotton pique shower cap...) I found one of my fashion Holy Grails: a lovely feminine summer dress in a red and white print cotton, that actually fits and doesn't make me feel like Hattie Jacques, or Margot Leadbetter.

It was worth coming to the other side of the world to find it, but when I looked it said label it is from London. So where the hell was it when I was ransacking the West End for dresses this summer?

That's definitely coming with me when I go to Brisbane in the morning to gear up for my live appearance at the Mary Ryan book shop on Monday night(see details below). Also seeing my old mates Jerry and Michelle Harris. Jerry was my publisher when I was editor of British ELLE, then when I came to Sydney to be acting editor of CLEO, his wife Michelle was my advertising director = smallworld.com.

Also looking forward to dinner with Pam Easton and Lydia Pearson, designers of the wonderful fashion label Easton Pearson, who live in Brizzy. I will be wearing the tobacco brown silk top I bought in their Sydney shop today. Sadly not the unutterably beautiful black linen dress in there which it took maximum will power not to buy. It made me feel like an intellectual, but would have rendered me a bankrupt.

See previous post for the details of my live appearances on this book tour.

Maggie x

ps Did I mention I have not one, but TWO new books out? Will tell more about the other book on my next posting.

pps It's absolute FILTH.

Australian Book Tour October 2008

2008-10-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

Tuesday
I can't believe I am leaving for Sydney tomorrow.

I am so not packed, I have no nice clothes, but I did manage to do a supermarket sweep on Top Shop and buy two pairs of wild shoes this morning.

Anyway, enought of that chit chat, here is where I will be in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne next week, talking about my new novel How To Break Your Own Heart.

It would be great to meet you. Please come.

BRISBANE - Monday 27th October, 6:15pm to 8:pm
Talk about the book, Q&A and signing.
MARY RYAN BOOKSTORE
40 Park Road, Milton

SYDNEY - Tuesday 28th October, 12.30 to 1.30pm
DYMOCKS
George Street, CBD
Now this will be funny. This one is actually about In Bed With - the anthology of absolutely FILTHY short stories that I have co-edited with my best writer gal pals Kathy Lette, Jessica Adam and Imogen Edwards-Jones.

Kathy, Jessica and I will be in store - along with some lingerie models who I will be trying very hard not to stand next to - and some of the contributors, including my old colleague Emma Tom.

MELBOURNE - Thursday October 30th, 6:30pm to 8pm
Talk about How To Break Your Own Heart, followed by Q & A and signing.
READINGS BOOKSTORE
701 Glenferrie Road,Hawthorn

SYDNEY - Friday October 31st, 1pm to 2pm
Talk about How To Break Your Own Heart, Q & A, signing.
CONSTANT READER BOOKSTORE EVENT
Stanton Library, 234 Miller St, Crows Nest.

Hope to meet you at one of them.

Maggie x

PS Did I mention that I have a new book out?

Website under construction

2008-10-20T15:34:00.000-07:00

Testing testing one two three. One two. One two. Can you hear me at the back?

Apologies if you have been led here under false pretences, but I am just setting this up so I can attach it to my website. Then I will be able to go live with this and I hope you will visit again.

love

Maggie x