The Shore - Sara Taylor, The Scent of Dried Roses - Tim Lott, The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro

Every so often you come across a new writer who is just such a damn good storyteller, always a good thing. I bought his after reading the Guardian review (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/18/the-shore-sara-taylor-review-kate-clanchy) - a great review, fair and well-written, enough to make me hit the search and buy button on my Kindle and start reading straightaway - such a strange feeling of decadence still,  seeing a book like that and then reading it within seconds - no more waiting, no more searching book shops - no more ordering of books that "should be in next week". The corollary is that there is so much  less browsing though actual bookshops, although I still do that. That's how I bought The Sleeping Giant - a book I wanted but I was seduced as well by the sheer size and weight and glory of its presentation - it felt good to heft it over to the counter even though I was paying quids and quids more than I would via Amazon. 

The Shore though, is housed in quiet electronic bytes and bits, the colourful cover  only really viewable on my Nexus, and I can't weigh it in my hand like I can a paper book - it's joined the other invisible unless I search books, books that do not sit on my bookshelves to be pulled out just when I catch sight of them, to be flicked through. That is a loss - there's a bit in Monique Roffey's With the Kisses of His Mouth where she describes a party that we were at, but it would be difficult to find - I'll have to search for the book, search through the pages - [perhaps use a search term like "Night of the Senses" then  trawl though all the false hits, and then at the end not a well-thumbed page, but a few arrangements of pixels on a screen. Which is not to mistake the form for the content - I still like reading books on a Kindle or anywhere, but there is that loss of some of the experience, the ability to wearily toss the book aside and see it waiting reproachfully for you to pick it up again. The other book that springs to mind is Tim Lott's  The Scent of Dried Roses: One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy which is a very well written account of his upbringing in the sixties and seventies in Ealing, his tales of past family that led to their Ealing home, his descent into depression and his slow climb out of it, and then the brick in the window, so to speak, of his mother' suicide just as he was recovering. I started reading his column in the Family section of the Guardian a little earlier and found I was enjoying his familiar, likable, warts-and-all confessional style, so bought the book. His writing lifts up several levels in the book - I enjoyed it for the sheer pleasure of his storytelling and prose, as well as the heady dose of nostalgia that it instilled. (Nostalgia for what I ask myself - I wouldn't want to go back in time any more than I am sure that he would, but it's that elegiac sense of a past that has been lost, which had a quieter less knowing feel to it). Now I'd love to be able to flick though the pages and flick through bits without all that harsh, clinical computery stuff. Well there's only one answer - I'll have to buy the paperback as well.

Fifty five years a reader... part 3

In the best traditions of writers like Karl Ove this will not be a linear account. Sitting anywhere - at breakfast, in a cafe, in a waiting room, or standing anywhere come to that, I always get a little edgy if I can't find anything to read. This means I end up reading the backs of cereal boxes,  packets of sugar, menus when I didn't want to eat,  bus shelter adverts, the sides of vans, left behind newspapers and magazines that I wouldn't normally give house room or any attention to. Today it meant that I read the University of Sussex Alumni magazine while eating scrambled eggs with chilies, chive and smoked salmon - that should have been enough to keep my attention focused on eating, but I still have that addictive habit of wanting to cast my eye over some kind of text.  Today I had to hand The University of Sussex Alumni. The University of Sussex Alumni magazine is a publication that I deeply and unfairly resent for its smug self declaiming mish-mash of smiling students or smiling people who once were students, all saying how really fucking successful they have been which has made them deeply grateful to Sussex, grateful enough in many instances to hand over the dosh in considerable amounts. Leaving aside - no not leaving aside the issue of how you might feel "grateful" to an institution that is nothing like it was in the seventies, is now a vast corporate enterprise, the likes of which we would have scorned from our lefty perspectives that long time ago, and which we would not feel "grateful" to, because it's just too big and anonymous a beast to be "grateful" to, and smacks of gratitude for the poorhouse soup. Nostalgic, wistful, angry, amazed, incredulous, now those are the feelings and emotions that people (well me anyway) might actually have. There was one tiny little bit of nostalgic memorabilia that did strike me, as I skipped my way bad-temperedly through its cheap but substantial matt pages( why are all these alumni magazines printed on a cross between cardboard and paper? Do they think that way we will keep and treasure them for ever?). It was a memory (spoilt by a punning headline so bad that I can't even repeat it here), of being able to hear cows from the East Slope residences, in 1975/6 my first year at Sussex. It instigated a gush of nostalgia that made me feel breathless and inescapably frightened of death, like the nightmares I have where I can't breath, because I spent such an intense and beautiful summer on that gorgeous campus, with its rooks cawing, its honey bricks , its idyllic pastoral setting, sweet scented air, my first proper relationship with a fresh faced and beautiful girl, blonde hair and blue eyes. It was that endless hot summer of'76, and like all endless seeming summers the grass went brown and it was all over for ever.  I got glandular fever, plunged into clinical depression, lost all sense of where I should be going and what I should be doing.  Well nothing new there - and of course it's not the whole story, but that little reminiscence made me literally feel ill with nostalgia -ahh what a poisonous emotion it can be.

PS. The damnedest thing is that without Sussex I wouldn't be the fairly successful person that I am, I'm sure, but gratitude, gratitude is something I reserve for people, not institutions.  Anyway, Bretton Hall was the best place I ever went to, although, although when I think about that long hot spring and summer at Sussex, I am, fuck it, I am grateful it happened.