almost time for new year resolutions

I've been thinking again about blogging and its appeal, especially when one's blog is unread. There has to be a space for recording the reading one does, since I for one read something in some form for just about 90% of my waking day. That's scary. Where does it all go, especially when, like Nora Ephron, I REMEMBER NOTHING.

So, although it's a little premature, I am making a New Year resolution to record more of what I read, for my memory bank, for others if they ever find me here, tucked cosily away under a weird name, and as a reference tool, in case I need the name of a book or article. A friend of mine has been blogging publicly every week for almost nine months of this year. It's part of his job but it makes him buy a book a week, read it then write about it. I so enjoy reading about his reading and it's a wonderful service to those of us who are reading other books yet are interested in other things to read.

I have had a spate of successful reading over November with far and away the best book being Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor, about John Synge and told through the voice of Molly Allgood who was also the actress Maire O'Neill and beginning when she is in her sixties, destitute and an alcoholic. It is exquisitely written with Molly's thoughts and words captured in a lilting Irish brogue, funny, sad, beautiful.

Then Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room also captured my imagination. Switching between the first and third person it seems to be a memoir but I suspect it is a "clever" memoir in the same way as Boyhood and Youth are memoirs for JM Coetzee. One is not quite sure. Nevertheless, I found the central character whose name is (wait for it) Damon, sympathetic, easy to relate to, a loner who hates himself for not making the right connections when they make themselves available. It is a book about journeys, not travel, and discoveries about self, also about death and dying.

Finally, Birth by Peter Harris which couldn't be more different in style and tone but what a gripping read, like a thriller. Told from an uncomfortably close perspective, this is the story of how our first democratic election nearly became a national disaster. With the joint forces of the AWB and Inkatha waging a war against the efforts of the Independent Electoral Commission to organise a successful, free and fair election, one reads about the enormous strain, the ungodly working hours and obstacle after obstacle, bomb after bomb, the names of the dead listed like an apocalyptic roll call. It is horrifying. The title refers not only to the birth of the new nation, South Africa, but also to the writer's own twin boys. The two stories, personal and political are nicely interwoven to make this a moving and intensely interesting book.

Two new books found in Cape Town

I bought the new Anna Quindlen, Every Last One, and the new Jonathan Coe, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim while in Cape Town a week ago. Both are eminently readable as they say, why I am not sure now. Why eminently? Anyway, I could have finished them both in a flash but savoured them slowly, especially the Quindlen. This is sounding horribly sickly and I apologise.

Every Last One is half Wally Lamb but uniquely Quindlen who invariably writes with compassion and care but who also writes about critical moments in people's lives (dear God, I should abandon this blog right now).

This book is just what I needed, the first half anyway. It begins thus:

This is my life....

and ends with an echo of these words, but what happens in the space between their utterance is too terrible to bear, almost.

Naturally I can't tell you what happens, but from the moment I started reading, I was.... what? captivated, entranced, engaged, utterly there, completely content to read about this woman's every day life with her every day family, hoping against hope that disaster wasn't looming but of course it was. This is Anna Quindlen and she prefaces the book with that beautiful but ominous poem by Philip Larkin:

There is an evening coming in.......

Read this book.

Jonathan Coe's book is clever and also "eminently" readable (I haven't improved my writing ability in the past half hour obviously). It's like, if we are to pursue comparisons, a not so clever JM Coetzee, certainly a less pretentious JMC, in its surprising last chapter. I thought I had the mystery of the book all wrapped up until I read the last few pages, then felt mildly cheated but grinned nevertheless. Think about Slow Man, JMC fans.

While its technique is a little too foregrounded, I enjoyed the various transitions between narrative and intervening letters, short stories, emails etc all of which our protagonist is reading during the rather strange journey he's on beginning in Australia and ending there too, again, think Slow Man.

Despite my woeful attempts at book reviewing this sunny Sunday, I can heartily recommend these two books (there she goes again, "heartily", huh!).

Sunday morning with William Fiennes

I woke as usual around 6.30 and made my early morning tea. I knew what I was going to do this sunday, go to the gym and walk on the treadmill in the (vain) hope that my tummy would shrink and that the strange and new stiffness in my right leg would ease. Why I thought about The Music Room I don't know, but I dragged my bookclub bag onto the bed and started reading. It's now 9,36 and it's over. I read it in one fell swoop but I would like to return to it one day. It's simply beautiful, a book about boyhood in a magical place, a ancient castle, a family heirloom, greatly loved by all who live there and conjured up in this book as a reverent memory still wholly alive. The upper classes of Great Britain are an endearing lot. They struggle with money like the rest of us but on a different plane. To keep the castle in some kind of decent order, the family entertains the public throughout the summer, with Dad acting as ticket keeper and Mom as tour guide. But this is no sentimental gush about a lost past, it is a sharply focused memoir suffused with detail about birds, plants, lineage and, above all, about the human brain and the history of medical procedure and research into epilepsy. Rich, Williams much older brother acts as the focal point of this book. His charm and ferocious strength alternate with his joy in using language like a poet. His rages are terrifying but the family cocoons him with loving protection. The ending is a marvel, once again, bringing me to tears. I am definitely getting old.

William Fiennes. The Music Room. Picador. 2009.

hilary mantel

Look at that face. Before I found this photo on Amazon I had imagined Hilary Mantel as dark and studious, but she's a pixie, an mischievous elf, with upturned eyes and a wry and slightly wicked smile. Which matches my enormous pleasure in reading a 2007 novel of hers called An Experiment in Love which is absolutely not what it seems. The title would appeal to Siri Husveldt readers, something evocative and soulful. But this book is about young women as friends and foes, living together in the 1950s in a university residence in London and the book has the most remarkable Roald Dahlish denouement. Read it and find out.

After Wolf Hall and now this, I'm a dedicated fan.

Reading again

It's pathetic really the way I am (not) managing this blog. I think it's because I'm the only follower (je suis meaning I am and I follow quite appropriate here I think, are you there Karen?) and there's no pressure to write. But also because until this morning, I have not read anything that made me really want to write. Until this morning.

OK. The book in question is Paul Auster's Invisible and it was absorbing from the first page as all good books should be. He's difficult to describe in terms of literary affiliations, lots of Henry James, a little of JMC (or perhaps JMC takes his cue from PA?) something of Ian McKewan. Maybe, all the male writers of a certain age (late fifties, early sixties), the baby boomers, are all circulating around similar themes including the BIG one which is what we are doing to our planet. Ian M has done this directly in Solar, Auster does this very indirectly in Invisible. But as I reluctantly but furiously came to the last pages of the book this Sunday morning, I did what I always do when a book knocks my socks off. I say "Jesus". Then I read the passage in question again, and I repeat. Then I do a lot of gazing out of the window, then I read it again. Then I look to the back cover (note my copy has a beautiful and relevant photograph of a young couple sitting on the edge of the Seine in Paris)to see if some clever critic has said something clever (no such luck here) and i look at the cover, then I put the book down very gently and get typing on my Macbook.

This is a very illusive book about the invisibility of authors and authors within authors but it tells a cracking good yarn at the same time through multiple authors who seamlessly glide into each other while being controlled meticulously by the "REAL AUTHOR".

The ending brought me to tears. It was so utterly unexpected, not in terms of the plot which it seemed to abandon as if it was of little importance but because of the subtlety of its vision of an oh so cruel and imperfect world.

Read it and see.

Booker Prize Week

So Hilary Mantel did it and I didn't. Let me explain. Di and I were standing in Waterstones, mulling over which of the new books to buy, all of them shiny harbacks with enticing covers. Di chose Wolf Hall, the winner of the Booker, I didn't. Well done Di. Now the question is, what did you think of it?

I chose the new Iain Banks and the new Margaret Atwood although if I hadn't faced the prospect of being overweight at Heathrow, I would have bought the Coetzee as well.

I'm not being a good reader at the moment. A few pages into Home by Marylin Robinson (Gilead sequel), a few chapters into Waterlog by the late Roger Deakin, half way through the Iain Robinson, nearly finished The Wisdom of Crowds, almost finished Dreams: A Very Short Introduction (husband has grabbed it from me) and about twenty more books are glaring at me from all over my bedroom, on my desk, at my bedside and on the floor. Husband says he wants to live in a Zen environment and is very annoyed by my clutter. Ah, the joys of marriage.

Our NIKE group

This is for you, Francette.

The first meeting of the NIKE (just do it) group met the day after a new moon in Leo and a partial solar eclipse. This was obviously auspicious since the group seemed (to me at any rate) to be centred and calm yet inspired and inspiring. Alternating waves of laughter and quiet filled the room. I loved it, every bit of it, and wished that we had booked in for the night so that we could be together a little longer.
I had been reading, with rapt attention, a book by Nancy Kline called Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. Armed with the provocative ideas Kline puts forward about listening, really listening to people, and knowing that I had an awe-inspiring video by Sugata Mitra to share, I felt only positive anticipation about the day's conversations. There seemed to be no tension this time and no bone-wearying boredom either, but I could be wrong about this. It is possibly easier to be the organiser than the receiver on these occasions as one is able to control the flow and pace of the talk.
There will be another blog soon with heaps of information and a synopsis of the day's events but for now that's all, except to say, thank you Colette, thank you Elmarie, thank you Deon, thank you everyone for being so generous with your ideas and reminding me that there is power in the collective.
A luta continua!

On Netherland and reading at 3 am

So the dog wakes me at one in the morning and I curse my stupidity in going to bed too early because I can't get back to sleep. I stagger to the lounge and pick up where I left off last time Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. I am reading this book v-e-r-y slowly because it's such a marvel. When I use my usual skimming methodology, I have to go back and read again, because you can't miss a single sentence. Even though this book has the game of cricket at its centre, as Breath had surfing at its, and I don't know much about cricket nor will I ever, O'Neill has this gift of instilling significance into every phrase, not in that soppy sense of Wow, This is Significant Stuff, but in the real sense which makes me put the book down and stare into the middle distance. So early this morning at the time when one feels most alone and wonders how many other people are also up, I thought of what it means to write a really good novel, as this is. A novel that, like Henry James's, doesn't do much. A contemplative novel that manages to keep your interest throughout the contemplation. Hans has roots in the Netherlands - his memories return there repetitively with scenes of skating, the quiet orderly streets of The Hague, his mother, his school - yet his heart is in New York where he is an unwilling sojourner, a legal alien. The Chelsea Hotel comes to life in this book in a miraculous way, just as that other hotel, whose name I have forgotten, but which is being restored, will always remain for me part of my childhood thanks to Eloise. This morning I read this wonderful scene in which the Turkish angel (he wears rather dirty angel wings and robes) is lying on the roof of the synagogue and Hans lies next to him while the angel's mother has hysterics believing that her son has committed suicide. Hans looks up at the night sky and what follows is typical of the book - a synergy of signficant moments which I can't possibly capture in my clumsy and turgid prose but which made me put the book down and stare into the middle distance. You'll have to read it yourself.
So I get back into bed at 3 in the morning and lie there writing this in my mind. How annoying that the words flowed so fluidly there in bed which they never do when I face the screen, hands poised over the keys. I thought of what it means to write in this blogging space - how private it is - and what a paradox that is, to be most private when being most public. But no-one reads this. It's name - anacoluthon - protects my privacy. Who would bother with a blog with a name like that? So, why is this different from writing in a journal? Well, someone always finds the journal, so it's never a truly private space, whereas this huge etheric place which is theoretically open and free for all is a better place to hide.

Oh, and Kate Atkinson's latest is also a joy albeit in a totally different form.
And I have further thoughts about the novel as the most accomplished form in which to grasp the meaning of life, but I won't go there.

weddings and dogs and books

Well as you can see, it was a happy wedding despite the torrential rain that started falling just after N and V took their vows, a good omen people assured me repeatedly. I believe it too.
There are other photos of course, but I will start a new Wedding blog for interested parties. Huh. That's a joke.
Anyway, the wedding was wonderful. Hats off to Vicky for meticulous planning, right down to the placing of guests at tables which turned out to be the most difficult of all as there were two fathers, one stepfather, two mothers and one stepmother to be placed at dinner. It wasn't at all a Four Weddings and a funeral affair, much more a When we were...??? (that Joyce Carol Oates book about reconciliation?) and I still have that lovely feeling in the pit of my stomach, memories of a beautiful and healing weekend.
Right! Now for the dogs. The cute puppies have turned into greedy monsters who bite and scratch. Nearly 5 weeks old, they now eat, eat, eat, eat, sleep and play, in that order. Great fun. I want to do this again.

And, books? Quarter of the way through Wally Lamb, a leviathan of a book focused on the Columbine High School massacre but wandering along through all sorts of byways. I don't know what I think yet as am reading it too slowly. Finished all the Simon Gray I can handle for now and have his plays to dip into.
I'm a rather dismal reader at the moment actually, preferring by far to play Solitaire on my phone. How pathetic is that!

about saying goodbye to Simon Gray

I'm in a rising panic. I've reached the last book of the Smoking Diaries, number 4, called, appropriately, Coda and I can see that the last page is coming up and I don't want to get there. So today, in the expectation of finishing Coda (and what after all can come after a Coda?) I went to the library and got out about 7 plays and two more memoirs by Simon. This last book has been a painful read. Deliberately avoiding listening to a prognosis, Simon and Victoria are plodding along with his cancer until some silly doctor blurts out that he has a year max. The book takes a funny turn after that - this is why I am finding it so fascinating - one can read as if in real time Simon's shock and inability to focus on his writing. Nothing means anything. How could it with his death sentence staring at him. In the end, it wasn't the cancer that killed him, despite the awful treatment (why do people persist in having it?). He died of an aneuryism. Coda becomes almost unbearably poignant with this knowledge. At each stage, there is some wishful projection into an imagined future - will I make my next birthday, is this my last swim in Greece? Oh dear. I am writing this to stave off reading the last few pages.

About Agaat and puppies

Three weeks old. Our two males, held by Steve.

This is a lonely business, blogging. I hope Ilovenotcamping is going to log on soon. However, here are my latest thoughts on reading. or not reading Agaat. Yes, I must confess, I have given up on Agaat. Sorry Trace. Sorry Karen. Sorry everyone. I tried hard. Perhaps its just not my time but I have been thinking that it's more than that. There is something unfinished about Agaat, something too raw and 'in your face' for my liking. While it's almost Joyceian in its flow, I couldn't actually admit to enjoying reading it. After bribing myself and performing other tricks, I have decided to shelve it for another time and gratefully fled to Exclusives yesterday to buy the final two volumes of Simon Gray, The Last Cigarette and Coda. Want a taste of him?
2005
I'm still in Suffolk, where it's a typical August afternoon, cold and damp, with England losing a test match in Birmingham, and things can't go on like this. I say that, but how can they change? Well, I can make them change by stating categorically -

that intend to give up smoking.
I've left out the 'I'. Do it again, with the 'I' in it.
I intend to give up smoking.
There. I've put it down. It's legible, in firm, blue ballpoint. There's no getting away from it because it's plonk in the middle of the page, and to tear it out would be cheating.

And so it continues, anacoluthically and quite wonderfully. Now this is what I call good writing. See?

Oh, and I also read Hotel de Dream by Edmund White, which I bought a long time ago for the Bookclub and gulped that down with gratitude. Magical stuff. You can keep the South African farm fiction.

New Year Pup

Here is one of them at two weeks' old. Just finished feeding. Picture of satiety. Love it. Not that any of you will see this, numskulls that you are, forgetting passwords, forgetting self's name, etc.

Christmas Eve

I bought myself a Christmas present at Exclusives yesterday, something I have been wanting for a while. The complete Simon Gray Diaries. Well, I only bought two, the first two, and I'm well into the first, reading very slowly. What fulsome, light, anacoluthic writing! If anyone is in doubt about the meaning of that word, read Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries. The pages are full of pauses, dashes, changes of direction, shifts of feeling, laugh out loud bits, reflective pauses. Oh it's good. There are only four, so I will buy the last two in a while. Sadly, the final one, called Coda, is posthumous. He died earlier this year (I think). Remember the play Butley? That's the man.

BTW, I know it's Christmas and holidays but really girls, don't you ever go onto your computers for fun? Not one comment. Not one response. V disappointing.

Pups are a week old, eyes tight shut, enormous monsters each one of them and looking more like German Shepherds by the day.

whelping and other matters

I know this has nothing to do with books or anacoluthons (well maybe I could make this somewhat anacoluthon like?) but I must tell you about Monday night 15 December. Spot on target, Nanuq created the most beautiful whelping spot complete with antechamber and secret hideaway. Only problem was that it was in the dam. So we persuaded her to abandon it (feeling very guilty and rather like a weaver's wife, you know the kind, rejecting nest after nest?) and she dropped first pup on Steve's bed, on top of expensive African cloth bed cover. Ah well.

This was 8pm. Next one was 8.40. Then we waited. And waited. Self rang the Fourways Veterinary Hospital. What to do? A gentle male voice told me not to worry. If there were more pups, she would push. Which she did, at 11.30 while we were secretly rejoicing that there were only two pups to look after. And so it went, throughout the night. Do all Alaskan Malamutes take hours between deliveries?
Last two were between 2.15 and 2.50 am by which time, I collapsed onto Steve's bed with torch in hand and tried to sleep between squeaks, getting up frequently to change the hotwater bottle.

Several females, all very dark. A few males, ashy coloured. Life is good if a little wearying.

Finished White Tiger

Right! I have just finished reading the Booker prize winner White Tiger. Not a comfortable read. Not, in my opinion, a prizewinner. A very surprising choice as so many reviews have noted. However, it is very worthwhile reading. It begins on a light note and I settled in very quickly with that wonderful Indian humour. But the book darkens towards the middle and by the end it wasn't pleasant. I was pleased it was over this morning. All this shouldn't put you off reading it. It goes like greased lightning.
It is really a book about servitude which was why it made me feel so uncomfortable. Written from the point of view of a successful entrepreneur who broke out of the prison of servanthood.

I'm really not sure what I think about this book. But I would really like it if everyone read it (she said bossily) so we could talk about it.

Starting over with a new name

Ladies of power, let's begin. This is our new blog as I gave up on last one. Couldn't work out how to begin a new post. Anyway, we have expanded our brains since the last postings begun in June 2008 and are now professional anacoluthons, not so?

Let's record our reading on this blog as we go so that our monthly bookclub meetings can be for catching up on news, sharing, eating and drinking.

Right! As soon as I got home from Tracy's I started Zoe Heller's The Believers. This is the author of Notes on a Scandal, now made into a rather good movie which you can watch on DVD. The Believers begins in London in 1962 with a young woman who seems cut off from the world and rather shy but who, as the novel progresses, becomes one of the most awful woman in literary fiction. Heller does this rather well, vide the ageing lesbian teacher in Notes on a Scandal. She, Audrey that is, in The Believers (the awful woman) marries a man she hardly knows, lands up in America, and dominates the novel since poor old husband is in a coma for the rest of the plot. But his secret history emerges in the form of an unknown affair and a child and the rest I'll leave to you. I would rate this around 7/10. Not absolutely fabulous but interesting and readable.

Then I read Eileen's book, Chasing Daylight: How my forthcoming death transformed my life. Interesting how books cluster together periodically along the same fault lines. I had recently read Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture so could compare that with this. What I found interesting was that this man was faithful to his personality type until his death. He might be labelled a boring accountant because he set about ordering his death and the family's affairs with amazing tenacity. But the centre of the book is his plan to have one "unwinding" session with each of the people in his life and that turned out to be quite a few. During this "unwinding" session, he would focus on the one perfect moment he had with each of these people. This was his way of saying goodbye and sharing the different kinds of relationships he had with different people. I can see Karen's toes starting to curl at this point, but it's a thoughtful book on a thoughtful theme and I liked it.

But my number one is Tim Winton's Breath. It is quite magnificent written in a new fresh style and with such a light touch. It's basically about surfing which is hardly a topic that would attract me but with such fine descriptions of the ongoing relationship between humans and the sea that I found myself gasping at times (literally holding my breath) and recalling times when I had been dumped by a vicious wave, being rasped by the sand at the bottom of the sea, being terrified of being swept against the rocks and so on. Besides the power of his words, this book also holds together like a poem. At first, one doesn't understand the relevance of the opening scene of the "suicide" of a teenager, but by the end, the meaning of 'breath' is perfectly clear.
i can't do justice to this book but read it. This is major new talent.

OK. I have Agaat to look forward to and the new Wally Lamb which I couldn't resist buying as there it was in Exclusives, asking me to take it to the checkout counter. I could hardly refuse. It's called The Hour I First Believed and it's 728 pages. Typical Lamb pattern. Huge, unputdownable books. Can't wait.