Reading group? Listen up!

If you're a member of a reading group, or would like to set one up, or know anyone who's already a member of a reading group, or think your next-door neighbour may once have belonged to a reading group, or have recently overheard someone on the bus talking about a reading group and think she may be traceable if only by her Yogi Bear and Booboo earrings, or... well, that's it. I just wanted to let you know that Picador, in its infinite wisdom and generosity, is offering a sizeable discount on the paperback of LITTLE MONSTERS for, er, reading groups. End of promotional message. Back to work.

French Lesson

A Christmas suggestion

Books. Because a scented candle never changed anybody's life......

Remember: no Salt, no flavour

Dithering about what to buy people for Christmas? I know times are hard, but, let's face it, what are friends and family worth? Something between a fiver and £14.99, with a 33% discount? I guessed as much.

So all you need to do is click here and buy your loved ones, and their loved ones, one or - why not? - two or three of the fabulous books produced by Salt. I'm assuming you've got a copy of The Scent of Cinnamon. What do you mean, you haven't! Shame! Order one this minute! You'll be doing yourself a favour. More to the point, you'll be helping one of the bravest, most adventurous presses around at the moment, in the UK or anywhere else, to continue to produce books that don't just look good, very good, but actually do you good. (I have a medical certificate to prove this.)

I won't make any recommendations, but these are just some of the Salt books I've read - and loved - this year, in no particular order:

Elizabath Baines: Balancing on the Edge of the World

Simon Barraclough: Los Alamos Mon Amour (shortlisted for the Forward Prize)

Katy Evans-Bush: Me and the Dead

John Wilkinson: Down to Earth

Vanessa Gebbie: Words from a Glass Bubble

Isobel Dixon: A Fold in the Map

Douglas Oliver: Arrondissements

David Gaffney: Aromabingo

Tania Hershman: The White Road

And just to show that I've put my money where my mouth is, I've ordered and can't wait to receive:

Jay Merill: Astral Bodies (I read with Jay earlier this year and she was wonderful!)

Matthew Licht: The Moose Show (I'm intrigued, and slightly turned on, by his podcast)

Andrew Duncan: Origins of the Underground (I'm in the introduction to this, by the way, and Andrew didn't even tell me! This is your chance to explain yourself, Andrew...)

Scent of Cinnamon launch

Well, after a heated Facebook debate on what to wear, I decided to do sober but casual, as befits the Aula Magna Regina of John Cabot University. Carlos Dews, writer, friend and professor of English Language and Literature at JCU, presented me with his customary charm and generosity, and then it was over to me. I read The Scent of Cinnamon and The Growing, then answered questions about influences, surprise endings and, er, dogs. Books were sold, and signed, and I had the pleasure of seeing old friends and making new ones. I can't wait for the next one. This is a large, shamelessly unveiled hint to anyone who might have a venue and some spare bottles of wine. I'm your man. I also do weddings... (Though not, alas, in California.)

Economising

According to today's Repubblica, sales of the Economist around the Italian parliament buildings have plummeted since Berlusconi returned to power. I wonder why.

The new deputies and senators aren't buying the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal either. Maybe it isn't a political thing at all. Maybe they just don't like reading.

Days in England

What I should be doing now is telling you all about my last week in England, as I promised. And since should is the governess of will, to coin a phrase, that's exactly what I'll do. It all started off with a visit to the very wonderful Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery, who publish fantastic books in exquisite editions, making their writers happy and the fortunate readers of those writers even happier. They are, of course, Salt Publishing and without them, and it, the world would be a sadder and less literate place. They also make excellent coffee and gave me a couple of freebies. What I was doing there was meeting them for the first time, which was great, and picking up some pre-publication copies of The Scent of Cinnamon, my new short story collection. And a very lovely thing it is. I think we can all be proud of ourselves. 

I then had a walk round Cambridge and discovered that whole tracts of the city are now given over to mobile phone shops. I stumbled into a queue of McFly fans waiting for autographs from two McFlies in HMV. I looked for two books I wanted, neither of them particularly arcane (OK, Edmund White's My Lives and some stories, any stories, by David Foster Wallace... Satisfied?), found neither at Heffer's and both at Borders, which came as a shock. Bowes and Bowes is now the CUP bookshop as, of course, you all knew, but I didn't and was disappointed. I almost had lunch at the Gardenia, in memory of Jonathan Williams ('street food'), but ended up with a rather miserable (in both senses) king prawn salad, sitting outside a place near the market in the unseasonable heat. 

My other reason for being in Cambridge was to go to the annual lecture at my old college, Emmanuel, to give 'moral support' (though what qualifies me for this I'm not sure, other than a willingness to be entertained) to Griff Rhys Jones, who lived on the other side of the roof garden in South Court when I was doing drugs and so on for three utterly delightful years. I used to watch him stride up and down in his room at three a.m in search 

of whatever was needed to complete his history essay, before he wisely switched to English and could enjoy the opportunities offered by constant leisure. Griff was in fine form, as usual, still striding up and down, though with shorter hair. Dinner followed and was really very good, another marked change from the Cambridge I remember. I met David Lowen, who somehow finds time to run the Emmanuel Society, and agreed to take part in a Literary Day at the college. I'll keep you informed.

My other (non-personal) reason for being in England last week was to take part in Ride the Word III. Well, I had a great time, reading the final story from the collection, previosuly available only in Dutch translation (and how often can one say that?). Elizabeth Baines and Vanessa Gebbie have both blogged about the event and impartial judgements on my contribution can be found there, but it was a great pleasure to be on the bill 

with three such interesting and accomplished poets - Simon Barraclough, Vincent De Souza and Isobel Dixon - and, in particular, with short-story writer, Jay Merill, who was an absolute revelation and a delight. Add to that the opportunity it gave me catch up with old friends and meet new ones - you know who you are - and I couldn't have been happier. Which brings us back to Salt, without which most dishes would be very dull indeed.

Ride The Word III

More about this later. Pazienza...

Summer reading

If you'd like to know my views on holiday reading - and let's face it, who wouldn't? - you can find them on the Picador blog by clicking here.

(I thought it might be nice to illustrate this post with a summery image, so I entered 'summer' into Google images. But I must have mistaken the language because what I got was a page of scantily-dressed lovelies, as the redtops used to have it.)

Adventure

I was talking to an extremely well-read American friend and writer a couple of weeks ago and I discovered that not only had he never read Enid Blyton, he'd never even heard of her. OK, he's younger than I am, but I'd never realised Blyton was such a British thing. Like most people of my generation, I devoured her books as a child, despite a growing climate of disapproval: her language was limited, her characterisation non-existent, her undercurrents of bondage and corporal punishment disturbing and potentially harmful. Some schools and libraries went so far as to ban her and I have a vestigial recollection of being looked at askance by a Lichfield librarian as I checked a Blyton out. I must have been six or seven.

I don't remember ever much caring for the ones she wrote for the very young, like Noddy, but I have vivid memories of her re-working of the Pilgrim's Progress, entitled The Land of Far Beyond, and of the Adventure series. This illustration, one of dozens produced by the extraordinary Stuart Tresilian for the series, comes from The Mountain of Adventure and has haunted me for years. I visited Lefkada some summers ago and discovered that, centuries before, the people on the island would sacrifice one of their number, usually a cripple or simpleton - known as the pharmakos, because his death, like medicine, was believed to heal the tribe. They'd attach wings to his arms and fling him from the cliff, the cliff from which Sappho also committed suicide, and I remembered this scene from the book; the scene and the illustration, as though they'd been waiting to be understood. I suspect that Blyton tapped into deeper veins than she was given credit for at the time. I think I'll take a look at some of the books again. If you're interested, The Enid Blyton Society seems to be a good place to visit.

Arrogance

In an interesting article in today's New York Times about whether the Amazon Kindle is likely or not to be a success (he thinks it is), Randall Stross says:

Stephen P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, has nothing to fear from the Kindle. No one would regard it as competition for the iPod. It displays text in four exciting shades of gray, and does that one thing very well. It can do a few other things: for instance, it has a headphone jack and can play MP3 files, but it is not well suited for navigating a large collection of music tracks.

Yet, when Mr. Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of the Kindle, he heaped scorn on the book industry. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read any more,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

I've often wondered if the air of superiority that characterises most Mac users is purely coincidental - the way some evolutionary traits just happen to appear side-by-side - or whether, like all the bits needed to expand Apple computers, it's product-specific, up its own arse and basically anti-literate.

It looks like the latter.