Friday, May 19, 2006

Round-up

I've been catching up with everything I've missed over the last few weeks and have discovered a wealth of information, and vegatables, in need of harvesting.

On Friday I went to Hampton Court which was very nice, and the weather held out as well which was great. And then spent the rest of the weekend was spent reading various things and pulling books off my shelves to bring back to Gloucestershire. I now have no room at all for any more books.... unless of course I put up another shelf... or shelves

First off came the rocket in the garden, and then the excitment of seeing the turnips shooting up through the soil, followed by Maud Newton's AL Kennedy story (plus link to an ALK interview), and finally the dates for things at the Edinburgh Book Festival, and the fringe - in particular ... yes you guessed it: AL Kennedy's events.

Ok excitment over. For a moment.

I've started reading Clare Morrall's new book Natural Flights of the Human Mind (hardback published in January and paperback coming out in June) an I'm rather liking it. The jacket has gone missing somewhere in the office so I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but after a paragraph I was intrigued so I took it home with me. Along with a(nother) book set in Brick Lane, called An Acre of Barren Ground by Jeremy Gavron, which is looking very promising and takes its title from The Tempest. I picked up a copy of Carrie Tiffany's Orange Prize nominated book Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living which I began yesterday. Its set on a train which goes around Australia encouraging farmers to change the way they farm using scientific methods and lots of chemicals on your soil: stuff like phosphate and weed killer (a sort of early form of Round-up I suppose) - these days the same thing would happen to encourage farmers to go organic so the contradiction between 1934 and 2006 is interesting - and is full of an underlying humour.

And there is a new literary magazine which you can pick up in various places in London called Pen Pusher which I've not yet seen but have heard is good.

Oh and my turnips are doing very well. Did I mention the turnips already?

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

On Being Ill

Sometime ago I read Virginia Woolf's essay 'On Being Ill' in a moment of essay avoidance. I don't remember much about it, except that Woolf wondered why illness: "has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature".

Why indeed?

Having been ill with a mystery, reoccurring virus myself I decided to go in search of contemporary books and short stories which deal with illness as a prime theme. Needless to say I'm not getting very far and except for an AL Kennedy short story called 'A Wrong Thing' in which the protagonist is lying in bed in a foreign hotel being outwardly ill and paranoid about being ill in a foreign country, but also inwardly considering their failing relationship. So I don't know if that means the story's prime theme is illness at all....

Saturday, May 06, 2006

(Re)-Building a Library

In case you were wondering I haven't died in the compost heap or been attacked by a killer turnip. But I have moved and finished the first week of my new job. Its great to be doing a job which doesn't involve till stamps and what's more I enjoy.

Which isn't to say that deserting the turnips was an easy thing. Also having to leave 90% of my books at home has left something of a gap. So now I have to build a new library. Which shouldn't be too hard as I have access to a huge amount of new titles at work because publishers wanting us to have their writers at the festival send us lots of books in the post. Only since I started we only seem to have been sent the truly strange titles. However I did pick up a few from the shelf behind my desk and my latest read is Bernard MacLaverty's new collection of short stories Matters of Life and Death. I first read MacLaverty when I picked up a copy of Grace Notes from the staff bookshop at the book wholesalers I worked for. What I remember of Grace Notes is that it was set in Scotland and Northern Ireland and examined the religious differences and troubles in the latter through a story of music, and told the more domestic but no less significant story of a young woman coming to terms with love and loss.
Having only read two of the short stories in MacLaverty's new collection I can't really comment much, except to say that the stories are short, which is unusual today as short stories seem to be getting longer: I recently read Alice Munro's collection Runaway and encountered some very long stories.
I expect I'll finish Matters of Life and Death this weekend - I have a train journey to the delightful Weston-on-the-Mud (aka Weston-Super-Mare) tomorrow to take my Granny out for lunch which will provide plenty of reading time - and now I have to think about what's next. I could read Helen Simpson's Constitutional and continue with my short story pattern (recently read all of AL Kennedy's short story collections again, her new novel is due in spring 2007 but no news of a new short story collection as yet. However the story printed in the Threepenny Review, Family with Young Children, is up to the usual Kennedy standard, and can be found at the Review's website), or I could read more poetry - I been reading a combination of some wonderful Scottish poets (John Burnside, Robin Robertson, Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie and Carol Ann Duffy) for breakfast - or I could finally tackle Cloud Atlas, which I keep starting but then abandoning ... but then I did see a copy of ... oh dear, the paradox of choice.