75 books read in 2017

Feeling creatively somewhat wrung out after 9/10 books of all sorts in ten years, I decided to put creating aside for 2017, and concentrate on other things, mainly teaching, mentoring and hugely important this last - reading. My own reading has taken such a back seat over the last few - time to catch up. 

I aimed at 100 books in the year, was joined by some friends, and we began a closed Facebook group - all with the same goal: to read as much as we could. We weren't all reading the same books, I hasten to add - not a 'reading group' - just a group of interested people, all reading, and all making a note - nothing more, of the books they'd read. A note, a word attached to an uploaded cover image soon increased to a line or two of subjective comment. And the group burgeoned to over 200 names. 

Did I make 100? No. I read 75. They are listed below in order of reading. Nothing planned - just following my nose and interests, some I ought to have read and somehow never did, others I stumbled across, some recommendations, others that has been on my shelf for decades...and occasional light humour as counterpoint. But it is interesting (to me) to see what categories they fell into:

Novels: 29
Short Fiction: 9
Poetry: 14
History/Military History: 5
Biog/autobiog: 4
Humour: 3

the rest... all sorts - philosophy, journalism, religious analysis...

I re-read some of my favourites by friends and colleagues, including The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry, Some of Us Glow More than Others by Tania Hershman, Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy, The Flood by Maggie Gee, The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies, and Voices from Stone and Bronze by Caroline Davies. All to be recommended highly. 

I chose some books by writers of colour  - novels, poetry, short stories.  

The writer/book I am most pleased to have met/ best read of the year (thanks to a recommendation from one of the group members): Plainsong, by Kent Haruf  

I hated and discarded only one book: Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. 

Here's the list for anyone who is interested. ( [R] means a re-read.) 

[R]The Many                   Wyl Menmuir            #1     Salt a novel

Speak, Memory                  Vladimir Nabokov   # 2           Putnam           autobiograpy

The Shock of the Fall        Nathan Filer             #3           Harper/Collins novel

The Sun Fish             Eilean Ni Chuilleanain     #4           Gallery poetry

[R]They Called it Passchendaele  L MacDonald #5           Penguin military history

Ways of Seeing               John Berger             #6            Penguin           non fic

G                                       John Berger            #7             Bloomsbury     novel

Time's Arrow                     Martin Amis            #8             Penguin novel

First Person &other stories  Ali Smith        #9             Penguin short stories

The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson     #10           Penguin           novel

Too Loud a Solitude               Bohumil Hrabal   #11           Abacus           novel

Sieze the Day                    Saul Bellow              #12           Penguin         novel

The Book of Memory            Petina Gappah     #13           Faber             novel

The Way of the Strangers: encounters w Islamic State  G Wood   #14  Allen Lane religion/current 

The Bright White Tree            Joanna Seldon    #15            Worple poetry 

A Life Discarded          Alexander Masters        #16           4th Estate biography

Plainsong                            Kent Haruf             #17            Picador novel

[R] In Another Country David Constantine       #18             Comma            short stories

Trump and me                          Mark Singer     #19             Penguin journalism/bio

[R] Dark Roots                       Cate Kennedy   #20             Atlantic short stories

The Hundred Fathom Curve /John Barr           #21            Red Hen poetry

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl/Grayson Perry     #22  Vintage autobiography

The Havocs                              Jacob Polley   #23             Picador           poetry

Olive Kitteridge                    Elizabeth Strout   #24       S/Shuster novel in stories

[R]Never Let Me Go             Kazuo Ishiguro   #25             Faber             novel

To Kill a Mockingbird        Harper  Lee            #26             Arrow             novel

Britty Britty Bang Bang    Hugh Dennis           #27     Headline non fic/humour/history

[R] The Flood                   Maggie Gee           #28             Saqi novel

[R]The Essex Serpent        Sarah Perry           #29            Serpent's Tail  novel

lThe Runaway Jury       John Grisham           #30           Arrow               novel

Seven stories         Gabriel Garcia Marquez   #31           Penguin            short stories

Beloved                        Toni Morrison            #32           Vintage              novel

The Handmaid's Tale                   Margaret Attwood    #33                 Vintage          novel

After the Funeral                       Agatha Christie           #34     Harper Collins     novel crime

Contemporary Black British Short Stories   ed. Jacob Ross  #35 Peepal Tree   short stories

The Riddle of the Sands            Erskine Childers                    #36           Dover           novel 

The Berlin Wall Cafe                                Paul Durcan       #37             Harvill         poetry

Springlines       Clare Best /Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis         #38     Little Toller poetry/art/essay

The Snow Child                          Eowyn Ivey                   #39 Tinder            novel

In the Wild Wood                Frances Gapper                    #40     Cultured Llama  short stories

Boy in the Striped Pyjamas  John Boyne                       #41                                 novel

[R]Twenty Prose Poems             Baudelaire                     #42         City Lights     prose poetry

His Bloody Project  Graeme McRae Burnet                   #43       Contraband        novel 

Philip Larkin:Poems (selected by Martin Amis)               #44             Faber             poetry

The Wife - how it works         various                               #45  Ladybird/Penguin     humour

[R]Voices from Stone and Bronze Caroline Davies          #46             Cinnamon         poetry

[R]Candide                                   Voltaire                           #47 Penguin            classics

[R]Some of us Glow more than Others/Tania Hershman #48       Unthank          short stories

The Travels of Lady Bulldog Burton Toksvig/Nightingale #49             Little,Brown     humour

On Writing                               Stephen King                   #50 Hodder              memoir

Lusitania                                   various                            #51  Pen and Sword military history

The Disappearance of Adele Bedeaux Graeme Macrae Burnet #52 Contraband      novel

{R}The Redemption of Galen Pike  Carys Davies            #53             Salt        short stories

The 39 steps                          John Buchan                    #54 Samuel French      novel spy

Diary of a Bad Year          J M Coetzee                            #55             Vintage         novel

Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy  James Kale McNeley  #56     Uni of Arizona     philosophy

Strange Pilgrims   Gabriel Garcia Marquez                     #57           Penguin       short stories

[R]Somme unseen panoramas Barton/Banning #58 Constable/IWM      history/military

Night Sky with Exit Wounds   Ocean Vuong                 #59               Cape                  poetry

Do no Harm                         Henry Marsh                   #60             W&N       non fic medical

On the trail of the poets of WW1:E Blunden McPhail/Guest  #61     Pen&sword biog/history/military

The Magic Toy Shop                 Angela Carter           #62 Virago                  novel

Elizabeth is Missing                  Emma Healey           #63             Penguin           novel

101 things with  mexican sprayer  Heinz Deppe         #64                   ?                  humour

The Seasons of Cullen Church/Bernard O'Donoghue  #65              Faber               poetry

Narcissistic Lovers  Cynthia Zane/Kevin Dibble          #66             New Horizon   non fic

The Wars                       Timothy Findley                     #67           Penguin           fiction

Very selected                        Mimi Khalvati                  #68     Smith Doorstop             poetry

{R}The Spire                          William Golding            #69           Faber and Faber     novel

The Soul of Kindness    Elizabeth Taylor                    #70            Chatto                    novel

Into the Wild                   Jon Krakauer                        #71         Pan/MacMillan     non-fiction

Once an Artist Always an Artist Capt C J Bloomfield #72  Self pub (1921) memoir/milit hist

The Parrot the Horse and the man   Amarjit Chandan #73               Arc                    poetry
An Anthology of Mine Rex Whistler #74 Hamish Hamilton poetry/paint'gs
Photographing the Fallen Jeremy Gordon-Smith #75 Pen & Sword military history

Publication of A Short History of Synchronised Breathing

A few months late - but a catch up begins.

February 20187

The third short fiction collection, A Short History of Synchronised Breathing, came out from Cultured Llama in February. They bill it as:

Meta-fiction, fable, satire, instruction manual, or reportage? Sometimes all in the one story. A Short History of Synchronised Breathing is funny, sexy, original, heartbreaking, and with true insights to the human condition...

and who am I to argue? Indeed the lovely Paul McVeigh, author of The Good Son, gave me this glorious quote for the cover:

Charming and challenging, inventive and intelligent – a wonderful collection that is also laugh out loud funny.

Funny? Moi? Indeed, apparently. It's had a good reception, and among other quiet celebrations, was the focus of a private storytelling launch lunch which raised over £600 for Friends of Sussex Hospices.

It's a POD publication, which means the publisher doesn't have to find space waiting for copies to sell. It also means you can't find it in a bookshop. But can be ordered from Amazon and so forth, and from the publisher. I'd rather the latter, if you intend buying, please. Thanks.

Link here to the publisher's web page:

http://www.culturedllama.co.uk/books/synchronised-breathing

Notes on a book. Posthumous Stories by David Rose (Salt)

Posthumous Stories is a rich experience. A visual book certainly - filled with (literal) word-paintings. A book of sounds, music, and not. A book of detail, architectural, painterly, botanical, musical - it’s a treasure box in which strange obsessive narrators look up as you pass from their usually left-brained and controlling occupations, fix you with their disturbing gazes, then look away. 

     I read and re read with a sense of intrusion such as one gets when passing a door left ajar, hearing a snip of talk not intended. Or better - as when you can’t avoid overhearing a conversation held in lowered tones, on a train. Captive, intrigued, removed. A delicious intrusion - sense of glimpsing something special, by accident, wry smile playing. Disturbing, certainly. Deliciously. And surreal, I came across many descriptions of how the body responds to machine - car, van, bike...how they merge.

 I made notes on some of the stories as I went - so forgive the lack of carefully crafted review. Sometimes, notes is all that's needed. 

    

A Nice Bucket - 

Sensuality under the surface - in the music, the hints... in the lyrical voice of the apprentice asphalter, in the son’s descriptions of his late father’s reconstructed studio. a darkness, compelling and dual-natured. Goodbad, like so many scenarios in this book. Orwellesque. Magnetic. The asphalters might be doing any old repairing job - but no. Legitimate work, under supervision (even if the supervision is sporadic), and the job - laying speed humps. Slowing things down. A reminder that the best stories, and these really are some of the best, are only appreciated of you slow down, and let them work on you.
...had me thinking, isn’t this why I (we?) read? To enjoy, yes, but to empathise. Consider. Widen. Goodbad. Vicarious experience. To remind myself that beneath everything, everyone, runs such rivers? Not to forget that. Never to take at face value. Respect the possibilities. We are living in glorious metaphor. Perhaps. 

Private View 

The son of an artist is persuaded to write the commentary to a retrospective on his father’s work. Through memories, and almost despite himself, (this reluctance to engage with memory seems to surface now and again) he is almost compelled to do so, even though it takes him on a journey of deepening alienation.I’m struck by this description: “...sliced by black vertical straight lines, regularly spaced, but in each successive work, becoming closer and closer together. The experts talk of a homage to Mondrian or the creation of abstract perspective. I think they look like bars.”Oh OK  - now I’m getting the cover of Rose’s brilliant novel, Vault, also from Salt, and a novel I loved a while back. 

.. clever, aren't I?

Fracturing, isolation, miscommunication. Here, we are island folk. And some are more island than others. 

Flora

the big questions - including what exactly, is art? The issue encapsulated by the botanist narrator musing on having to destroy a fungus,  ‘I had to admit to a sneaking regard for the fungal growth – not only its persistence, but its own strange beauty, the subtlety of its opalescent colours, the intricacy of its structure. Are we right, I wondered, to divide Nature as we do?’

The Fall

oh and jokes... many over my head, I’m sure, which is evident -  but a giggle escaped me,  in a crowded train carriage appropriately enough, when I read this:  

“One of the Servants remarked that he thought Auden’s most inspired creation was the Fat Controller “   also this 

"I even used to call her Donna, because she was always è mobile.” 

Behind ‘The Fall’ there are echoes of not only Albert Camus, but also George Orwell at several points - a religious guerrilla group made up of Servants initially using art installations to make their point. Achieving the ‘exosoma’ ... 

but I’m afraid lost patience with The Fall. Form overtook story early on, and lost this reader with it.and is it my imagination, but does the futuristic cult-theme arrive again in Clean, with its Vision and Mission meetings, mention of service, and the Intendant? “freedom of spirit depends on freedom of space, freedom of land –”
Something about isolation.  ‘Above me there’s a mile of blue and beyond that an eternity of black, a furnace of ice.”

Echoes of Camus again in Viyborg - a novel - a dead pan outlining of a lyrically written novel - a wry  take on various scenes.

Mind you, what with these installations in fiction and the pieces desccribed throughout, I think I’d like to see Rose's visual art - if he does. Who knows.

The Fifth Beatle

The fab four becomes five, with the reminiscences of the unplanned extra in the iconic abbey road shot - I loved this one. And I didn’t understand one reviewer’s snip about Rose not writing women well. Yes, he does, just not many. Suspect that's what the reviewer meant, there aren’t many female main characters - and speaking as a writer who vastly prefers writing males than females - what’s wrong with that? 

Clean -

'the cause' raises its head again, Regional Intendant looms, and a ‘devotional’ meeting. 
Quotes: Life’s a bitch, but it’s all to plan.’ 

and 

“... below that, to the silken silt where there are no reflections, to the reality of the fish.” 

Rectilinear

I feel I ought to be listening to Mahler while reading this - the trouble is, my ears and eyes don’t multi-task. Bach - need to look up Chaconne. What a wealth of architectural detail here... and what a brilliant house - turning things on their heads - kitchen on the top floor, the south wall blank. 

“Holes for doors and windows are the destruction of form’ - Le Corbusier. I lived for a year within a mile or two of Firminy Vert -the  Le Corbusier development, near St Etienne. 

Moller (Muller) House, Prague

Church, Firminy Vert - by Le Corbusier

By the way, you can hear David Rose reading Rectilinear, here: https://soundcloud.com/user529052175/rectilinear?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=facebook

In Evening Soft Light

The unexplained shower of stones - the wife, novels, reading one page then becoming tired... rather Alice-in-Wonderlandish. Or Through-the-Looking-Glass-ish. One is right. 

Shuffle

A world where there are season tickets for brothels, meters tick in the bedrooms. A world where you douse your e-reader in appropriate perfume - segue into ‘correlating my relationships with my library by sniffing the books for perfume.’ Control, control. And the ghastly but compelling image of a man working out how many books he might read before he dies - a sort of literary actuarial computation.

Lector

Who would have the job of reading aloud the minutes of meetings of those in government...at whatever level? Reading to workers at a factory lunch break seems better, until you see the political agenda behind the choice of books. ‘The evening’s theme is the means and meaning of a transparent society....It involves us all. Open government requires openness of its citizenry. We all know the problems we face. Ignorance, poverty, bad manners.’... and then the lights go out...

Zimmerman

Description of a story - from the outside, as it is told/narrated. The opening goes like this:“The story begins with a man – we assume him to be Zimmerman – loading an accordion onto a cart, the cart being attached to a bicycle. He loads it carefully, with elastic straps through the handles and hooked to the cart. We gather later it is the last accordion in the country...”and Zimmerman has one of the most perfect endings of any story, anywhere. (Vast exaggeration, but try it. I’m right, aren’t I?)

Home

Terrific use of humour to relax the reader before the ambush. OK, I’ll enjoy, but am still ready for the ambush. “In home, my wife wear burka. They say to me, you Muslim? I say no, she most ugly woman.” 

“...find book, Kama Sutra. But is all dots. How you say it? Braille. I say in shop, is no good to me, is no pictures.” 

Ambush is good, too. :)

The Castle

The hand-made coffin maker, whose masterpieces are meant to echo the life of the deceased...and be buried before anyone’s had a proper chance to enjoy. 

 (Tis always disconcerting to find my name in a story, especially a Vanessa who plies her trade beneath the motto: ‘In constraint lies freedom...’ Yeah right. Even if this is an Oulipian tale, I have to fight against ‘but I never did that...’ which I guess Janes and Sues don’t get bothered by...) 

Loved this description of Eton, it seems rather appropriate:“...however much they try to shrug it off, self-assurance fits them like their handmade shirts. For all their little acts of bohemian defiance, their hands twitch in readiness for the reins...” 

However - and it’s a big however...I do wish there was no explanation of both this story and The Fall, earlier in the book. As Perec said, "The problem, when you see the constraint, is that you no longer see anything else.” Is it a mistake to actively draw the reader’s attention to the game? It was for this one. I see the contraption, the scaffolding, and it masks too much. 

M John Harrison, writing in The Guardian, found both The Castle and The Fall ‘tiring’. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/19/posthumous-stories-david-rose-review

...making it to the end, only to find that this particular end came along in an earlier story... and feeling a bit miffed.  

--------------------

But Harrison responds to the vast majority  of the pieces here, as I did, with pleasure, recognition, admiration.  “The best of Rose is fragile,” he says. “...retrospective, centred on the characters' recognition that something in life, be it a general condition or an absolutely specific moment, has evaded them.” 

Well, yes. 

 A kaleidoscope. That’s what this book is. And just as with a kaleidoscope, you will meet similar motifs in different stories - music, image, even strange recurring Orwellesque shadowy conductors of life - slightly autistic-seeming, detached, displaced characters, shifting, and tumbling. 
      If there is ever a book you can go back to, reread, assured that you will find something new, or something familiar seen from a new angle you missed last time round - this is it. Who knows. I might even set aside a couple of weekends, go somewhere very quiet, and read the Oulipan bits until they make sense, or I hit the bottle.

Here is a very interesting Q and A with the author, David Rose: http://www.neg-press.com/interview-david-rose/  He says at the end that he is no longer writing. If that is so, it's a huge loss to anyone who loves reading. 

His work is great. Posthumous Stories is one of the best reads in a long time - my non-understanding of a few pieces is my issue, not the book's!  Go read it. We could have such an interesting natter...

ON SHORT STORIES, PHILIP PULLMAN SAVING LIBRARIES, POETRY AND BEDSIDE TABLES...

Celebrating the short story!

Following the cuts in short story broadcasts announced by BBC Radio 4, there has been a real upswelling of protest. So far no-one from the Beeb has explained why we need yet more current affairs instead of a well written, well told short story a few times a week. So, in case you are feeling bereft already, here are a few suggestions to put things right.
First get thee over to Tania H’s blog, where the celebrations of shortstorydom have filled the last week – with links, ideas and general jollity. And link s to several short story comps closing soon...If things have moved on on the blog, scroll back to 22nd July and on.
Second, if you are on Twitter, join in #StorySunday to receive myriad tweets sending you to wonderful short stories to read online. Share your own favourites too. And if you want to write them, I tweet a (hopefully) interesting prompt each day - #StoryGym.
Third, discover the fun that’s going on at Scott Pack’s 365 Stories, where he is reading and reviewing a short story every day. Some big names are getting short shrift!
Fourth - check out the 2011 Small Wonder Festival -
for a glorious few days in deepest Sussex, dedicated to the short story - so many marvellous writers coming this year!
And last but most definitely not least - visit the blog of Prof Patty McNair of Columbia College, Chicago. to read among other things - a wonderful series of in-depth articles by successful short story writers discussing such topics as 'why'? and 'What about money'? and 'the relationship between short and long, for writers' and 'the importance of getting the endings right..'.


Philip Pullman in support of the Save Our Six Libraries Campaign

Last Wednesday evening, off I went to Queen’s Park Community School NW6, to hear Philip Pullman interviewed by Maggie Gee, in support of the Brent Save Our Six Libraries Campaign. Funds are needed for a judicial review into the proposed closures. I’m the daughter of a librarian. Library books were everywhere in our house, an ever-changing galaxy of stories, information, worlds to discover. When I was growing up, going to the library was as important (if not more important) than food shopping. There was always tinned spaghetti if Mum forgot...

The Pullman-Gee show was a gem of an event! In conversation with Maggie (who it turns out once occupied Kensal Rise Library in a previous closure threat...) Pullman gave some insights into his inspiration. He spoke about his love for the old stories, myths, and legends. The classics. He spoke about reading them out loud to his students when he taught, and lamented the fact that kids at school today do not have the chance to hear whole books read to them, instead they are given sound-bites to learn for tests. He spoke about language, and listening. About writing when young, and how ideas take time to surface – how he read a particular article and it sowed a seed of intrigue, and ‘what if’s echoed and wouldn’t go away, and it surfaced a long time later as the wonderful Northern Lights. He talked about writing a scene to find out what would happen, to learn about his characters. I was hanging on his every word like a teenage groupie. He read, not from the trilogy but from ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’ – which I have read, but didn’t enjoy. Maybe I will try again sometime. So glad I went. Nice to touch base albeit briefly with the Willesden gang.
Afterthought– as he started to read, towards the end of the interview, the heavens opened, and rain thundered on the roof of the school hall. And even our best known atheist cast an eye heavenwards...


Just an old bedside table
It is a strange time. I am sorting out my father’s house, where he lived with increasingly unrelenting dementia, with our support, for the last two years, until he moved into a home in March. He died on the evening of my birthday not many weeks ago.
I’m finding the oddest things in the oddest places. And not finding some things at all.
But he kept intact all his war memorabilia, his papers and diaries, and four years worth of letters back and forth from where he was on active service, between him and his bride. He wrote marvellous letters.
I found in the roof an old bedside table, painted white, with a single small drawer. The base of the drawer was covered in multicoloured crayon scribbles – and in the middle, careful but wonky capital letters spelled out my name. I’m trying to pin it down, searching memories, rooms. Was I three, maybe four? I used to write my name like that on everything – under the kitchen table, behind the bedhead, low on the wall in the hallway, or on the flagstones of the terrace. Maybe I was staking a claim. “I am here. This is me.”
And it strikes me that’s what we do as writers, isn’t it, and maybe when I was three, or four, I was only doing what I do now. When we write, and when it is published, we are saying, ‘This is me.’ And when we’ve gone, if our words survive, it’s a bit like leaving graffiti on a wall saying, very simply, "I was here".



Poetry -
really delighted to have a poetry acceptance at Tears in the Fence, a print journal of poetry, prose and reviews. It is fun, building a CV in a different skill – reading and learning something I will never understand, (I hope not anyway – if you understand something there’s nothing else to discover...) but which works sometimes. It seems this thing works when you don’t try too hard. Maybe the trick is to wait until something moves you, then write down what comes? Who knows? And here is some great advice on Mslexia website, on preparing your poetry for submission, the third of three great articles from Jane Holland:




Reviews of Storm Warning

Charles Christian on Ink Sweat and Tears this week - calls it a must-read.“Gebbie's skill (and of course she is at home in this format, she's contributed to a couple of books about the art of short story writing) is to keep the tales (which range across history from the religious persecutions of the Reformation to the First and Second World Wars and on to the armed struggle in South Africa) firmly grounded on the individual and their experiences and impressions. And, this is where something magical happens for despite the awfulness of everything her characters witness and experience, along with the inevitable sadness and despair we also see the genuine humanity peeking through. The compassion, the gallows humour, the recognition of the ironies of life - in fact all the stuff (bad word I know) that makes people human, that keeps people going even in the face of death.”
For the whole review scroll down to Thursday July 21st.

Benjamin Judge on Bookmunch wasn’t quite so keen, starting with a warning, “Can you recommend a writer, and maybe even their book, but still be wary of it and its existence?” and he finishes a very keen-edged and thought-provoking review (for the writer, anyway!) with a decent pat on the back: “Gebbie should be praised for taking on a near impossible subject to satisfy her readers with. That she almost manages to pull off such a difficult trick is down to her skills as a writer.”

Meanwhile Scott Pack, on his 365 Stories project mentioned above, read the first three stories, (one full length story and two flashes) of the collection. ‘The Return of the Baker Edwin Tregear’, (Review 31) was given four out of a possible five stars: “A novel's worth of story in a handful of pages.” Things then went downhill fast, as Storm Warning, the title flash, got a two-star rating (Review 37), but Pack was kind, and said “she is a really good writer. I just didn't click with this one. It happens.” The next, ‘Gas Gangrene’, (Review 41) crept up to three stars... “This is a decent piece of ventriloquism from an interesting writer. This collection of stories inspired, informed and influenced by war is proving to be a rewarding read the more I venture in...” and I was able to relax again. Much later, Pack reviewed the title story of Words from a Glass Bubble, (Review 170), and I’m back up to four stars again, as he said among other things, “Sweet and sad - a charming tale to warm your heart on Father's Day.” Interesting. I didn’t think I did ‘charming’, but I bow to Scott Pack’s better knowledge of industry nuances!

My thanks to all three reviewers – for taking the time to read my work, and to think about it. Appreciated.