Skinflint Print

I am moving bedrooms this weekend, so this afternoon I am piling...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:53:27 +0100

I am moving bedrooms this weekend, so this afternoon I am piling all my books onto the floor of the landing in preparation. It has taken about 45 seconds to become distracted from this task. Yoko Ono did it.

PRESCRIPTION PIECE

Prescribe pills for going
through the wall and have only
the hair come back.

1964 spring

PEA PIECE

Carry a bag of peas.
Leave a pea wherever you go.

1960 winter

MENTAL. I bought this book at Richard Booth’s at Hay-on-Wye when I seriously couldn’t afford to spend a tenner on one book. So glad I did though.

Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda When I think of the Booker...

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:49:10 +0100

Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda

When I think of the Booker Prize, I think of Peter Carey. I loved his account of the Ned Kelly story, which in turn caused enormous disappointment when I saw the Heath Ledger biopic at the cinema. Oscar and Lucinda is the kind of story that has ‘Booker’ written right through it like a stick of rock.

Firstly, the settings are beautifully imagined, from the Devon coastline of Oscar’s childhood through the the dark and smoldering glassworks that Lucinda buys in Sydney. It has funny bits without either sarcasm or exclamation marks. People get passionate about stuff, in this case God, glass and each other. There is a twist. Carey’s twist isn’t some big fantastical whatsit, like in Life Of Pi, but the final few pages do make you realise how much importance a book’s title has in forming our expectations.

To be honest, this was a book that I read slowly, and not necessarily to savour it. Every time I read it I swooned with how brilliantly written it was, but then I’d come to the end of a chapter and not really fancy reading on. The story didn’t get under my skin and make me put other things aside like some books have, although I can’t put my finger on one single fault. It’s a flawless book, and maybe I just like a few flaws.

Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda
Publication date: 1989
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Price then: £7.99
Price now: £3.00
Bought from: Richard Booth’s Bookshop, Hay-On-Wye

Since I saw the posts about Marcel Proust on the new Days Of...

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 10:25:11 +0100

Since I saw the posts about Marcel Proust on the new Days Of Reading blog, I found a cheap copy via one of the second-hand sellers on Amazon, and then their heinous, manipulative, capitalist algorithms recommended a book from Penguin’s same series of ‘Great Ideas’, Walter Benjamin’s The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. Check out the front cover in my hastily-taken picture.

Marcel Proust - Days Of Reading (2008)

Walter Benjamin - The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction (2008)

These were both listed as ‘used’ on Amazon, but they’re in pretty good nick. What possible benefit could there be for listing a new book as second-hand?

"In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability..."

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:50:58 +0100

“In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to. We often take leave of them, at least, only with regret.”

-
Marcel Proust, Days of Reading

(via daysofreading) This is a great new books blog on Tumblr. Hope they keep it up.

Oliver James - Affluenza This is not the sort of book I...

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:00:39 +0100

Oliver James - Affluenza

This is not the sort of book I normally read. When it comes to non-fiction, I like biography and American history, and I’m an artsy type so some cultural commentary doesn’t go amiss, but pop psychology generally makes for a braindead state. I don’t especially want to get a man who wants babies/get a man who isn’t emotionally unstable/get a man at all really, which counts me out of the audience for about 95% of these things, but Affluenza attracted me because my old debt problems probably still keep my parents up at night.

The gist of the book is, duh, that money doesn’t make you happy, and James draws upon a whole host of cartoonish millionaires to prove just what a bunch of miserable cunts they are. So far, so predictable. But then it gets more interesting, especially when he starts to explore the personality traits that appear to ‘vaccinate’ people in English-speaking capitalist nations against Affluenza. He uses Tony Blair as an example of someone who shows sincerity (bad) rather than authenticity (good), and then there’s the fine line between vivacity and hyperactivity, with a great example that a hyperactive person might well be massively boring, but a vivacious person will engage totally with a subject.

On the whole, reading Affluenza has made me a bit smug, because it’s helped me realise how little I do compare myself unfavourably with others. The chapters on academic pressure and motherhood were more thought-provoking though, because I’m a student who has to suppress, not disappointment exactly, but anger, whenever someone gets a better mark than me. It’s difficult to know how much of that pressure comes from external places, and how much from within, but it’s definitely there. And then James says repeatedly that motherhood is the most fulfilling thing that a woman will ever do, and that female emancipation has been hijacked by ‘selfish capitalism’ so that women feel their status can only come from earnings. Kids don’t really appear on my future plan, and it’s worrying that that decision might come back to bite me on the arse.

This is about the time that I say all pop psychology books are bullshit, right?

Oliver James - Affluenza
Publication date: 2007
Published by: Vermillion
Price then: £8.99
Price now: £4.99
Bought from: Oxfam, Oldham Street, Manchester

From the synopsis: “In this eloquent account, James reveals how issues like consumerism, property fever and the battle of the sexes vary across societies with different values, beliefs and traditions. Ands leads us to an avoidable and potentially life changing conclusion: that to ensure our mental health we can and must pursue our needs rather than our wants.”

Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch The World Cup is on and my TV is...

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:36:22 +0100

Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch

The World Cup is on and my TV is broken and, let’s be honest here, even if it was working I probably wouldn’t give a shit. Twitter goes down every time a striker even looks goalward, and I’m irritated by everyone talking about vuvuzelas, never mind having to listen to them.

But let if not be said that I am oblivious to the public consciousness. I started reading Fever Pitch yesterday because the football reminded me that I had it in the first place, and two days later (albeit ones that involved greater than average train travel) I’m done. Fucking loved it. Largely because I was under the impression that it was overly-sentimental garbage-fiction thanks to the casting of Colin Firth in the film version - I breathed a genuine sigh of relief when Hornby’s introduction explained it was a memoir - but also because he made me consider aspects of football that had never previously crossed my mind. The inevitability of the Hillsborough disaster, the gang violence, the fact that being a football fan is actually pretty miserable for 95% of the time.

Fever Pitch was published in 1992 (I was 9) so not only have I never heard of any of the players (bar a few odd mentions of Gazza and Lineker, and people like Stanley Matthews from The Olden Days), but there’s no mention of the Premiership, of the New Year transfer window, of Sky Sports or of Van Persie, who I know is good because he got me some serious points in Fantasy Football at the start of last season. Hornby’s assessments of the post-Hillsborough safety measures that were being enforced, or the way fans were treated after TV schedules started to play a part, or the statistical truths behind a club’s reputation for violence were of their time, and also pretty universal. It’d be nice if he updated it one day, to talk about the encroachment of big business and the overseas buy-outs, and the fact that the rising ticket prices which paid for safer grounds now also sign the best players in the world to UK clubs. It’d be nice to hear what he has to say on the social anomaly that, in however many hundreds of professional footballers playing today, apparently not one of them is gay.

Something else I liked about Fever Pitch, is the brief mention he gives to the depression that blighted his 20s; the feeling that Arsenal must have been to blame because he had no other explanation for being so directionless and miserable. Being 9 years old at the time of publication, I can’t vouch for what the weekend broadsheets were talking about, but it seems that the fears and failures (and fear of failure) that 20-somethings experience are recognised now in a way that they possibly weren’t when Hornby was struggling to think of something to do with his life. There’s a nice, if depressing, part of the book where he talks about how someone can have talent and purpose their whole lives, and yet still get absolutely nowhere simply because that’s the the way it goes.

Fever Pitch is brilliant, and I will be having some stern words with myself about why it has taken me so long to read it (Answer: Colin Firth), but I’m still not so bothered that the telly’s broken because, as usual, England are going to crash out of the World Cup in the quarter finals. On penalties.

Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch
Publication date: 2000
Published by: Penguin
Price then: £7.99
Price now: About £2 (I bought a whole load of stuff for £20)
Bought from: The dude under the flyover on Oxford Road in Manchester

Exploding helicopters #14 Douglas Coupland - The Gum Thief I...

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:01:07 +0100

Exploding helicopters #14

Douglas Coupland - The Gum Thief

I was tweeting about reading All Families Are Psychotic last week, and my friend Nathan said that this was one of his favourites by Coupland. I’d had it in my to-read pile (which is more like a to-read bookshelf if I’m truthful) for ages, so I ignored my natural tendency to avoid reading two books by the same author in succession.

I don’t agree that it’s one of his best, mainly because the excerpts from the (terrible) novel being written by the main dude stop being amusing very early on. He’s an old alcoholic loser who works in Staples and strikes up this bizarre pen pal arrangement with a young goth girl who also works there. They take the piss out of creative writing classes by sending each other new interpretations of buttered toast - from the toast’s perspective. As usual with Douglas Coupland, it was the bits about how life is utterly pointless that I liked the best, but there were some funny bits (not included here because I could just copy out entire chapters) about going to London and realising that the only food available is packaged sandwiches.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

“How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of give to create a line quality with character, yet not so much character as to be smushy. Thank you, little pens.”

I read in a newspaper last week about this scientist who claims that the human race will, over the upcoming millennia, split into two distinct species. One will be a superhuman race, the other, Gollum-like hunckbacked retards. His argument is that selective breeding will produce an underclass that will then become a distinct race. Scientists have already isolated part of our DNA that ‘intelligent,’ ‘sociable’ types have and others don’t. I think these scientists should come into Staples and do some DNA swabbing. I think we’ve already leapt into that future and the rest of humanity needs to catch up with us.

Douglas Coupland - The Gum Thief
Publication date: 2007
Published by: Bloomsbury
Price then: £10.99
Price now: I wish I could remember. I’m the worst blogger ever.
Bought from: Pretty sure it was Ebay, although it might have come from somewhere in Hay-on-Wye.

From the synopsis: “Coupland reminds us that love, death and eternal friendship can all occur where and when we least expect them and that, even after tragedy has hit, one can still find solace in the comedy and strange comforts of modern life.”

Douglas Coupland - All Families Are Psychotic I decided to read...

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:48:00 +0100

Douglas Coupland - All Families Are Psychotic

I decided to read some more Douglas Coupland after my disastrous experience with The Handmaid’s Tale. I’ve had Miss Wyoming and The Gum Thief (next on the list) for a while, but All Families Are Psychotic jumped the queue when I picked it up in Brighton the other week, and it was fucking awesome. I lapped it up, just the sheer ridiculousness of it. A mother becomes HIV positive after her ex-husband shoots their son and the bullet passes through him and into her. Their other son’s new girlfriend is planning to sell their baby to a couple who are actually only going to sell it on for further profit. A pharmaceutical billionaire is willing to pay thousands of dollars for a letter written by Prince William to Princess Diana after her death, but gets it for free in exchange for curing Janet’s AIDS using a Ugandan prostitute who was raised in the diplomatic system and has a natural immunity to the virus. Oh yeah, and her daughter is a child genius born without a hand due to Thalidomide who goes into space to procreate with her lover in zero gravity.

I know, AMAZING, right?

Douglas Coupland - All Families Are Psychotic
Publication date: 2001
Published by: Flamingo
Price then: £9.99
Price now: £2.50
Bought from: Rainbow Books, Brighton
From the synopsis: “Even all-American astronauts have personal problems, and with Janet’s ex-husband and his trophy wife coming to town, Janet has the whole of this sultry Florida morning to contemplate her family, and where it all went wrong.”

Exploding helicopters #13 Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus It took...

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:12:31 +0100

Exploding helicopters #13

Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

It took me about 85 years to read this book because of stressful uni times, but Vonnegut’s nice like that; you can appreciate his nuances even if you’ve pretty much forgotten what happened at the start. Hocus Pocus is another one which is big on the anti-war message, featuring a Vietnam vet who is sacked from a school for rich dyslexics just before a massive prison break on the other side of the valley. He sleeps around, but only with older women who are emotionally damaged and hanging on my a thread.

I am certainly sorry if I ruined the lives of any of those women who believed me when I said I loved them. I can only hope against hope that Shirley Kern and all the rest of them are still OK. If it is any consolation to those who may not be OK, my own life was ruined by a Science Fair.

An appropriate sign to put over the gate to Athena might have been, instead of ‘Work Makes Free’, for example: ‘Too bad you were born. Nobody has any use for you,’ or maybe: ‘Come in and stay in, all you burdens on Society’.

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness.

Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus
Publication date: 1991
Published by: Vintage
Price then: £6.99
Price now: £0.99
Bought from: Ebay

My exams are now over, and I’m staring down the barrel of...

Mon, 31 May 2010 10:10:00 +0100

My exams are now over, and I’m staring down the barrel of four months’ thumb-twiddling, so I finally have the brainpower to string a sentence about books together.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Brighton and let me tell you, it was lovely. (Apart from all the young hipster types. Could’ve done without them.) I spied Rainbow Books almost as soon as I arrived, and returned to do some proper browsing just before my train home. Inside, it was a bit like entering one of the houses they feature on those reality TV shows about old mental guys who live in shit. The shelves were too close together so all the books were stacked on their sides and you couldn’t see what they were, and then downstairs there was this massive pile on the floor. Like the Nazis had been driven out before anyone had found any lighter fluid.

The dude who worked there asked me if he could help me find anything, at which point I was a pillar of good manners and stopped myself from yelling at him “PICK YOUR FUCKING BOOKS UP AND LET ME SEE THEIR SPINES YOU URCHIN”, instead mumbling something about whether Kurt Vonnegut would be with sci-fi or fiction. In the end, he didn’t have any, but I found a few bits and pieces. Brown stickers on the cover mean that you can get buy 3 for £7.50, which is what I did.

Lorrie Moore - Birds of America (1999)
I’d never heard of Lorrie Moore until I started using Tumblr to host my blogs, and a member of their staff posts about her quite often. Apparently she has a “vinegary wit”, which is my favourite kind of wit.

Douglas Coupland - All Families Are Psychotic (2001)
It’s easy to get bored of Douglas Coupland, because his turn of phrase is quite distinctive and quite, erm, consistent. Which is probably a nice way of saying that his books are all the same. I do love them though, and I’ve had a bit of a break from him recently so am due to hear from some disillusioned young losers again.

Jonathon Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated (2003)
I don’t really know why I haven’t already read this book to be honest.

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid’s Tale I have officially...

Sun, 09 May 2010 16:25:08 +0100

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid’s Tale

I have officially learnt my lesson. There will be no more attempts at reading massive bestsellers from days gone by simply because I feel like I should. I have read A Handmaid’s Tale at a rate of about five words per week. 90% of it is just “oh dear I’m so oppressed oh no do you remember the olden days oh dear sex is so very horrible”.

Yawn.

I’m all for mainstream sci-fi. And I’m all for dystopias. And I’m all for feminism. But I would quite like fewer words about, well, nothing, and more about actual stuff. But when I say that the best thing about this book was the ending, I don’t mean it quite as harshly as it sounds. The final few pages crammed in more happenings than the preceding 250+, and it ended with an ambiguity which I really liked. Was she killed for talking out of turn to the new grocery shopping partner, for sneaking off to fornicate with the old dude, or for sneaking off to fornicate with the young dude? (That’s basically all she did for months and months and months so it couldn’t be anything else…) Or was she actually saved by an underground resistance movement? The ‘historical notes’ that work as a kind of epilogue indicate it might’ve been the latter, because how would her account even exist if she hadn’t had a chance to record it in relative safety? But, whatever happened, what is certain is that it happened at the end of a really fucking boring book.

I’m going back to Nicola Barker and Douglas Coupland.

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid’s Tale
Publication date: 1990
Published by: Virago
Price then: Can’t tell because the cover’s been scratched out - was probably bought as a gift originally
Price now: £2.50
From the synopsis: “The Republic of Gilead allows Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like all dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness.”

My Dad has sent me a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in the...

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:43:49 +0100

My Dad has sent me a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in the post, bought from a book fair in Cheshire over the weekend. I am a very lucky daughter indeed.

Exploding helicopters #12 Joe Boyd - White Bicycles This book...

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:55:27 +0100

Exploding helicopters #12

Joe Boyd - White Bicycles

This book had been on my radar for years, since I’m a devotee of Nick Drake and, even more so, John Martyn, who Joe Boyd produced in the early 70s. I can be a bit snobbish about autobiographies though. Much as I enjoy reading about interesting lives, I can’t help but think that writing fiction is more impressive than writing about some stuff that you did once. I also get irritated when it’s quite obvious that entire careers have been built on being in the right place at the right time.

There’s a fair bit of silver spoon about Joe Boyd’s life. He went to Harvard and had enough money to fly across the world several times while still a student. But he’s more than just some rich hippy, because there’s definitely an entrepeneurial spirit there. He dug up a load of old blues dudes and took them out on tour, and opened the UFO club in London when there was nowhere else for the freaks to trip on a Saturday night. It’s the bits about Nick Drake that were really moving though. I prefer things a little louder now, but I listened to barely anything else when I was 16 and 17, so it’s so tragic to read about him slipping off everyone’s radar before his overdose.

The drug laws of Britain and America are enforced almost exclusively against the underclasses. In the sixties, the authorities were genuinely rattled by ‘respectable’ kids using drugs: it seemed to represent the end of civilsation as they knew it. Now that stockbroker snort coke, millions of kids take ecstasy every weekend and society continues to function ‘normally’, they can concentrate on the ever dangerous poor, using drug laws as another form of intiimidation and retribution.

History today seems more like a postmodern collage; we are surrounded by two-dimensional representations of our heritage. Access via amazon.com or iPod to all those boxed sets of old blues singers - or Nick Drake, for that matter - doesn’t equate with the sense of discovery and connection we experienced. The very existence of such a wealth of information creates an overload that can drown out vivid moments of revelation.

Publication date: 2006
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Price then: £11.99
Price now: £2.80
Bought from: Ebay
From the synopsis: “Joe Boyd’s first proper job at 21 was bringing Muddy Waters to Britain in 1964. When Dylan went electric at Newport the following year, Boyd was stage manager. His first session as a record producer was Eric Clapton’s original ‘Crossroads’. A year later, he produced Pink Floyd’s first single and installed them in his UFO club, the heart of psychedelic London.”

Leicester’s Oxfam was on form this morning. It’s...

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:10:14 +0100

Leicester’s Oxfam was on form this morning. It’s generally a cut above the normal Mills & Boon and Richard Hammond fest that appears in most other high street charity shops, and the website’s awesome too, but today it was like the Mr Benn shop, hurling visitors out into untold worlds of vintage porn and drum’n’bass.

Thomas Pyles - Words & Ways Of American English (1952)
I did a language change module in my English Language A-level and was appalled to discover that the American use of z in words like ‘realise’ and ‘criticise’ was actually the original way of spelling those words here in the UK. We’re always so self-righteous about how we coined the English language and therefore we are pure and pious or something. Helpfully, this book’s previous owner has pretty much highlighted every single word.

Catherine Liu - The Abject, America (1993)
This book is apparently published by a company that operates ocean liners, and features articles on everything from, well, pornography and bondage to Madonna and Donald Duck. So far, my favourite article is either ‘The Pandemoniac Junk Shop Of Solitude: Kitsch and Death’ by Celeste Olalquiaga or ‘Theses On The Metalmorph’ by Albert Lin. There is advice on how to please a woman sexually in the section marked Recipes. I’m confused, but in a good way…

Just looked it up on Amazon because I couldn’t help myself; I need answers goddammit. It’s categorised as Art Theory. *lays book gently to one side and vows to uncover its secrets even if it takes a whole lifetime*

John Robb - The Nineties: What the Fuck Was That All About? (1999)
When I lived in Manchester I would often see John Robb cycling around town in his little bubble of punk. They wheeled him out for an In The City panel every year then plugged him back into his Crass albums. I tweeted about buying this book earlier today and my friend James instantly told me I shouldn’t read it because it will “make you stupid and you brains will slither out of your ear”. Sounds like fun to me.

Exploding helicopters #11 Norman Mailer - An American Dream I...

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:37:08 +0100

Exploding helicopters #11

Norman Mailer - An American Dream

I kinda imagined this book as an X-rated Hitchcock movie, with the kind of voiceover that used to be on old public information films. It’s a bit… noir I guess, all police interrogation cells, seedy boarding houses and Mob connections. It was glamorous but massively violent too; definitely felt like I was reading a film. Whether I liked it or not, I still haven’t decided. I like Mailer’s characters, but found my mind wandering every so often, and then then ending was just plain nonsense. An old gangster reveals that he was sexually attracted to his late daughter and then makes her husband walk around on the edge of a tall building? I’m sorry, what?

Something in the deep of that full moon, some tender and not so innocent radiance traveled fast as the thought of lightning across our night sky, out of the depths of the dead in those caverns of the moon, out and a leap through space and into me. And suddenly I understood the moon.

“French mental hospitals are unspeakable. I almost didn’t get out. I had to threaten my family that I would marry the resident there, a funny little old dark French Jewish doctor who smelled like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I swear he did, and my family sprung me. They weren’t going to have some ratty little French Jew slurping up there soup and telling them how to go on a wild boar hunt, you know the French, they tell you everything whether you know it or not. God, I hate the French.”

It had always been the same, love was love, one could find it with anyone, one could find it anywhere. It was just that you could never keep it. Not unless you were ready to die for it, dear friend.

“Why, hello, hon, I thought you’d never call. It’s kind of cool right now, and the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello. We get along, which is odd, you know, because girls don’t swing. But toodle-oo, old baby-boy, and keep the dice for free, the moon is out and she’s a mother to me.”

Publication date: 1994.
Publisher: Flamingo.
Price then: £8.99.
Price now £4.
Bought from: Quinto on Charing Cross Road.
From the synopsis: “Stephen Rojack lived the American Dream, but his enviable life concealed a strange tension, the constant ‘itch to jump’, and when one day he finally cracks and strangles his luscious wife, he unleashes a personality of undreamt-of ferocity.”

I’m sure it comes as no surprise, but I have no idea where...

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:15:09 +0100

I’m sure it comes as no surprise, but I have no idea where I bought this book. Actually, I don’t recall ever seeing it before, but in my annual rearrangement of the piles of books I have on my bedroom floor, it’s turned up between Edith Wharton and Andrea Levy. The pages are gloriously orange and smell a bit damp. It is my new favourite.

The Thumb Galleries #4 Kurt Vonnegut - Cat’s...

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 20:22:00 +0100

The Thumb Galleries #4

Kurt Vonnegut - Cat’s Cradle

I’ve been a complete tool this week, and bought a copy of Cat’s Cradle despite having not only already read it, but also owning a copy which was but a few feet away when I placed my Ebay bid for copy number 2. Still, let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. Is this or is this not the brilliantest most fantastic cover you have ever seen for anything ever in the history of Vonnegut?

His face is solemly looking out as us from a fiery cloud of smoke. If I ever get a book published I am going to demand that my face be on the cover, PhotoShopped into a towering inferno, hopefully with flames coming out of my nostrils. You can almost hear the babies screaming.

Publication date: 1983
Published by: Penguin
Price then: £1.95
Price now: £1.85
Bought from: Ebay
From the synopsis: With chill, deadpan humour the author splatters the targets of religion and science as the hunt for the three children of Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, draws towards the end that, for all of us, is nigh.”

John Updike - Couples For the fist half of this book I...

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:37:38 +0100

John Updike - Couples

For the fist half of this book I couldn’t work out who was married to whom, and the love trysts were confusing the hell out of me. Then halfway through all the peripheral characters just kinda drift off and it’s all about Piet and Foxy. It felt a bit like Updike just started writing one day and decided to let his pen decide who the main characters were going to be. Reading it, I felt a bit like I’d taken on too many extra-marital affairs myself, and was panicking about letting things slip by arranging to play tennis with the wrong woman.

The couples in, erm, Couples have the kind of lifestyle that I imagine my grandparents had in the 60s; lots of gin and tonic at the golf club, tennis and wife swapping at the weekends. For that reason it fascinates me even more so than normal, but it also menas that every character gets super-imposed with the face of either my Grandpa or my Gran. Considering how Updike likes to write about sex, that’s just plain weird. Last chapter was just lovely though. Things didn’t really work out the way I would’ve wanted them to, but Updike writes sexual resignation better than anyone else in the world.

Publication date: doesn’t actually say - I’m guessing the 90s sometime from the biog…
Publisher: Penguin
Price then: £7.99
Price now: FREE
Bought from: Swapped on Read It Swap It
From the synopsis: “They are sociable, articulate and unhappy; they enjoy sailing, basketball and skiing; they play word games in the evenings… and adultery all the year round.”

David Kyle - A Pictorial History Of Science FictionPublication...

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:37:34 +0000

David Kyle - A Pictorial History Of Science Fiction
Publication date: 1986
Publisher: Tiger
Price then: no idea
Price now: £3.99
Bought from: Oxfam, Market Street, Leicester

I just had to give this book a post of its own. I bought it today and have so far only looked at a handful of the pictures, but it is brilliant. There are flying saucers and giant insects and super-heroes and robots and aliens and monsters and some of the most ridiculous inventions I’ve ever seen. Apparently humans are going to evolve to have larger chests because the air won’t be so dense in the floating city pods we’ll all live in once the planet has been nuked to death.

This book pushes so many of my nerdy buttons in glorious unison.

Alfresco booksellers #4 South Bank Book Market, London I...

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:27:00 +0000

Alfresco booksellers #4

South Bank Book Market, London

I turned up on the South Bank just as everything was being packed away last night, but that proved to be financially prudent. Second hand books in the capital have an obvious London tax added to their price; more so in such a touristy area, and along with the mandatory copies of The Beach and at least one of everything by Nick Hornby, there were a good few political history bits and pieces that I could have bought. Despite the price hike, you generally find less Catherine Cookson or Mills and Boon shite in London.

The Portable Nietzsche edited by Walter Kaufman (1966)
I’ve been getting more and more interested in philosophers like Nietzsche, Kant and Sartre since I started reading them for uni. This book has the added quality of being perfect for posing with by the banks of the Thames on a spring evening.

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid’s Tale (1987)
I’ve always found the title of this book to be really irritating. Doesn’t it seem like it should be The Handmaiden’s Tale? Still, this is another example of a novel so ubiquitous that you just have to pull your finger out and get it read. Here’s hoping it doesn’t turn out to be another Lovely Bones…