Lloyd Jones’s The Book of Fame, an enjoyable, and often beautiful, novella which gives a fictionalised account of the 1905 tour to the Britain and Ireland by the All Blacks. Jones previously wrote Mister Pip, but this is a far more gentle affair, in which a group of ordinary men transform a sport and become famous for it. It has a great sense of place, as well as the strange sense of dislocation experienced by men far from home, unused to becoming such objects of curiosity.
Granta 101, specifically a piece by Owen Sheers on the British nuclear tests off Christmas Island, a short piece by Douglas Copeland on visual thinking and an eerie and oddly-affecting short story by Joshua Ferris.
Actually, in the last year or two I’ve been reading a lot more short stories, and occasionally wondering - as publishers and writers regularly do - why they tend not to sell. There is, perhaps, an idea among the public that short stories are something for Leaving Cert courses, or that they are prose without obvious narrative, drifting to a messy conclusion. And yet there are so many good collections that out a prove that to be untrue. I’ve enjoyed Anne Enright’s Taking Pictures and Kevin Barry’s There Are Little Kingdoms. Anything by Tobias Wolff is a winner. I’d also recommend any of the annual anthology, the Best American Mystery Stories, which give short, sharp thrills.
I’ve started ploughing my way through Brian K Vaughan’s Ex Machina, a comic book series in which the world’s only superhero becomes New York City’s mayor in a post 9/11 America. An alternate history, political satire and down-to-earth superhero tale (well, as down-to-earth as you can get with a superhero), it’s smart, snappy and well-plotted. It’s easy, then, to see why Vaughan was made co-producer of Lost so that its flabby plot could be tightened up. (More on that here.)
Vaughan’s other big work is Y: The Last Man, a recently concluded graphic series following the only male to have survived a plague that wiped out all the rest. It’s an expensive business catching up on collected comic books; Ex Machina averages at about €15 per paperback of five issues. But it’s damned addictive. You can download a free PDF of Ex Machina #1 at DC’s website. And you can download Y: The Last Man’s first issue here.
Spot the odd one out:
Host of renowned national and international authors to attend the Irish Book Awards 2008
Among those confirmed to attend include Gráinne Seoige, Ireland AM’s Sinead Desmond, rugby star Trevor Brennan, budding author Kathryn Thomas, and Man Booker winning author Anne Enright
The book 1001 Historic Sites You Must See Before You Die has 16 Irish entries. They are:
Blarney Castle, Co Cork
Clonmacnoise, Co Offaly
Derry town walls, Derry
Dublin Castle
General Post Office, Dublin
Grave of WB Yeats, Drumcliff, Co Sligo
Guinness Brewery, Dublin
Hill of Tara, Co Meath
Jerpoint Abbey, near Thomastown, Co Kilkenny
Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin
Newgrange, near Drogheda, Co Meath
Old Jameson Whiskey Distillery, Dublin
Oscar Wilde’s house, Dublin
Prospect Cemetery, Dublin
Rock of Cashel, Co Tipperary
Trinity College Dublin
All predictable enough, although I have a soft spot for the Gallarus Oratory in Kerry. And while Trinity makes it, it’s unfair on UCD. That really should be seen before you die, just so you can say you’ve seen the ugliest university campus on the planet.
The consistently brilliant Digested Read in the Guardian picked Cecelia Ahern’s latest book Thanks for the Memories, and the results are typically caustic.
My heart races when I see him. Suddenly I know all about art history and am fluent in three languages I’ve never spoken before. Could it be that this is the man whose blood was donated to me? Could he be Mr Right?
“Bejaysus, Joycie,” my da says that evening. “You don’t seem in the slightest bit bothered about acquiring all these new skills.”
“Don’t let it worry you,” I laugh. “No one ever got poor by overestimating the reader’s intelligence for rom-com chick lit. How else could anyone possibly guess I had been given Justin’s blood unless I acquired some of his characteristics?”
“You’re right,” he nods. “But how are you feeling about the baby?”
“What baby? All that matters now is that we go and have a series of ever more improbable near-miss encounters with Justin in Dublin and London before we finally get together.”
The writer of the Digested Read, John Crace ends it with this:
“Oh Justin,” I sob, holding him tight. “There’s just so much I don’t understand. Like how someone can get away with a plot as poor as this.”
Aherns and poor plots? It’s probably something the British don’t understand as well as we do.
(Thanks to Haggis for the tip-off)
On Saturday, The Guardian ran an extract from Phillip Pullman’s new story Once Upon A Time in the North, which will be published next month. As with Lyra’s Oxford, it will be a small book, separate but connected with His Dark Materials. The story involves a young Lee Scoresby and his first encounter with the bear Iorek Byrnison. The extract is very much a taster - expect no big revelations.
On a previous World Book Day a radio show asked me what one book I would recommend that everyone read.
It is, in a way, an impossible question. A book for everyone? But it was a bit of a challenge. I first thought of suggesting The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy simply because it’s the most cheerfully funny book I’ve ever read, and everyone deserves a laugh. But, thinking that it might put off those who really just don’t get science-fiction (as well as those too young to get some of the references) I chickened out and went instead for Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad which is an epic vision of hell, of a country making appalling decisions to save itself, and, most importantly, of the people at the centre of it all. It’s a history book, but really it’s about humanity.
You will no doubt disagree. But, please tell me what one book would you recommend everyone read?
Holiday reading last week was David Park’s The Truth Commissioner, a novel hinged on a fictional Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up as part of the North’s peace process. It focuses on one case of a “disappeared” 15 year old, through four points of view - a truth commissioner, a newly-retired RUC officer, a provo-turned-politician, and another former provo who left for a new life in the States.
It’s a big subject, but Parks succeeds in not only keeping it under control, but also in adding something fresh to what might appear to be an already jaded subject. It is a novel about collusion - about how a boy dies for it, only for the truth about this to later be suppressed by an alliance of provos and “securocrats”. It is cynical but Parks doesn’t allow himself to be submerged by that, and while his characters are sometimes familiar, he gives them depth and a vital individuality even when they are linked on many levels.
And it gathers pace as it progresses, fairly zipping by over the closing 100 pages - always a treat with any novel.
At times, it is a little stylised for my liking,with the writer’s presence too apparent at times. There are also at least two recurring similes in the novel - across different characters - which are so obvious that I became inclined to believe they were deliberate - even when they appear clumsy. Then again, it’s a simile-heavy novel.
It is, though, assured and engrossing for the most part - and I’d recommend it.
We now know, since The Irish Times started printing sales figures alongside the books in the weekly bestsellers chart.
In original fiction, The Gathering is number five on the list with 334 sales last week, although the bestselling hardback novel, Lessons in Heartbreak, sold 2,496.
In hardback fiction Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret tops with 1,218 copies sold, but Rachel’s Food for Living sneaks in with just 168 sales.
In paperback fiction it took 782 copies of The Shakespeare Secret (don’t know it, but I’m guessing the title offers a clue to the genre) to get in at number five. In non-fiction, misery-lit Ma, He Sold Me For A Pack of Cigarettes, at number five, sold 273 books, only a few behind top-seller, the cult-took-my-children romp Escape by Carolyn Jessop (315).
In comparison, The Secret needed to sell 2,932 to reach number five in the UK harback non-fiction chart, while it takes over 21,000 sales to get onto to its paperback fiction list.
Keep in mind that sales are seasonal and that this is not the best time to flog books - the Spring season is still around the corner and during December (the boom time for books) sales can double week on week until Christmas Eve.
However, as a general point, it suggests that a book called, say, Please Don’t Beat Me, Da, Or I’ll Keep The Secret Of The Shakespeare Code has a good chance of getting in there on title alone.
There was a good piece by Mark Abley in yesterday’s Guardian about the death of Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker of the Alaskan language, Eyak.
Most residents of Anchorage, the Alaskan city where she spent her final decades, had never heard of her. Even after she addressed a UN conference on indigenous rights, she managed to maintain her privacy. Yet among the advocates for minority languages, Jones was famous. A few of them knew her by a different name: Udach’ Kuqax’a'a’ch’, a name that belonged to the Eyak language and means “a sound that calls people from far away”.
He used a quote that emphasised just how precious each language is:
Linguist Ken Hale put it more bluntly: “Languages embody the intellectual wealth of the people that speak them. Losing any one of them is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre.”
For anyone with an interest in language - and why and how quickly they disappear - I’d recommend Abley’s Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. (I also mentioned it in a column a while back.)
Before I see the film, I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, and not only is it intensely filmic, but it could have been written with the Coen Brothers in mind: the peculiarity of the language; the local sheriff versus violent outsiders; the landscape as a character. The novel is taut and violent, and its refusal to bow to the reader’s expectation is vital, and I’m guessing that even if you’ve seen the movie it’s still worth picking up the book.
- If there can be a Math Rock then there can be Grammar Rock. Here’s Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend.
- Cloverfield is out in the States, and critics say it’s brilliant/rubbish.
- Complaints about the UK press rose 31 per cent in 2007
- McDonald’s drops plans to advertise on the front of school report cards
- Are you just a brain floating in space?
- RTÉ’s tradition for dodgy comedy goes back a long way. Here’s a 1970 Christmas Special, which packs two stunning punchlines into the first minute. Then skip forward to three minutes to see Dickie Rock’s comedy masterclass.
Another strong Arts Lives last night, with the profile of John Banville once again giving insight into the craft as well as the person. Banville was an excellent interviewee: bristling with ego yet self-aware and funny. And, importantly for an artist, he managed to remain just out of reach.
The section in which he reacted to opening lines from his books was an inspired idea. “How pretentious. I can’t believe I wrote that.” It ended with a life-affirming note in which he said that he wasn’t afraid of death, but wanted to live forever on this “exquisite” world. And he said the word “exquisite” with such infectious sincerity that, as the credits rolled, you couldn’t help but agree that this was indeed a wonderful, exquisite world.
Then I turned over to Katherine Lynch’s Working Girls just in time to catch the colonic irrigation joke. And the moment was ruined.
On his blog, John Connolly has posted about the difficulties of trying to write one book (The Lovers), while another (The Reapers) is about to return from the editors, and a third (The Unquiet) has just been published. Plus there’s a script, and various invites for anthologies. Not a bad predicament for a writer to be in, of course.
Still, I managed to get almost 2000 words written today, and this column. The frustrating part is knowing that I may not get as much work done again on THE LOVERS for a couple of weeks at least, and I’m kind of enjoying the writing of it. I also know that a structured approach to its writing - a routine, by any other name - is essential if progress is to be made. Sometimes, ‘having written’ is better than ‘writing’, but writing, for all the times that it can be difficult (or, perhaps, because it is often difficult), is still immensely fulfilling.
Unfortunately, the business of being a writer occasionally gets in the way.
He has previously posted about being interviewed, and it touches on matters discussed here earlier (as well as the disappointment of knowing a journalist hasn’t read his book). (more…)
1. The latest Dublin Review of Books is online.
2. Curry Chips is back. But the Dolores O’Riordan fans are not amused. (more…)
A few books I enjoyed this year:
FICTION
I thought that Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip was the best thing on the Booker list, although I enjoyed Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach too. But the first novel I read this year, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, was the one that really stuck with me. Mixing tenderness with stark horror, it had my stomach in a knot from page one.
FUNNY
If you don’t laugh at Rob Long’s tale of a year in the US sitcom industry, Set Up, Joke. Set Up, Joke, then you are joyless.
BRAINY
AC Grayling’s Toward the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West does what it says on the tin, but it does it with clarity and obvious enjoyment of the topic.
JOURNALISM
I enjoyed David Remnick’s collection Reporting, in which the New Yorker editor compiles some fine interviews including an excellent piece on Al Gore from when his pre-Nobel wilderness years.
(While I’m mentioning the New Yorker, anyone looking for a gift for themselves or someone who likes Anthony Lane’s Nobody’s Perfect is a brilliant collection of his New Yorker writing - many of them film reviews, but also a lot of profiles.
For something different, Clive James’s most recent volume of his ‘Unreliable Memoirs’, North Face of Soho is often very funny, and is a snapshot from a time when journalists were very different to how they are now. Plus, there are great anecdotes from his early TV years and his pot-smoking days.
- Conor Pope’s moment of fame has arrived. He’s been “done” on Gift Grub.
- China’s moon probe a fake? No, just touched up
- Charlie Brooker’s column this week was, amongst other things, on what happens when you write nasty things about someone, and then bump into them on the street
- Christian movie site MovieGuide.org reviews the Dylan biopic I’m Not There: “Strong mixed pagan worldview with strong humanist, politically correct elements…”
- Shouldn’t we read more sci-fi?
- That British canoeist who “disappeared” for six years only to emerge in dubious circumstances this week, could have done with help of this site: How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found.
Slate’s intro to its review of Steve Martin’s new autobiography Born Standing Up is both factual and cutting: “Steve Martin Explains Why He Used To Be Funny”.
A few weeks ago, the Guardian ran an interview with Martin, in which it somehow failed to deal with the obvious question of What the Hell Went Wrong? He was a great stand-up. His first movie was The Jerk.
Now, like others of that generation - Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase - he ended up sliding towards dodgy remakes and schmaltzy dad roles, despite various attempts at grown up movies. Thank God for Bill Murray, otherwise it might have been a write-off.
While his book is being described as a very good account of how he became funny, what would be really interesting would be one that explains just how he stopped being a comedy genius. Martin made some classic films, played to 20,000 people at a time, was a bona fide megastar in the 80s. So how the hell did he end up making Cheaper By The Dozen 2?
Because Will Ferrell (who owes a lot to Martin) would be advised to learn some lessons before it’s too late.
The Golden Compass premiered last night, in advance of its release on December 5th, so we’ll finally discover if the film version of the His Dark Materials trilogy is likely to be more Lord of the Rings than Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
[UPDATE: There are reviews here (a “spectacular shambles”), here (”can’t be faulted for excitement”) and here (”looks wonderful, with epic dash”).]
While we wait for the full thing, you can find a daemon-themed featurette here, a short scene here and the trailer here. (more…)
An expensive way to stand out from the mainstream masses