What to read, what to read

The mountain of books I want to read gets bigger, the time, inevitably gets shorter. There is no possibility of reading them all - I am going to have to get super selective, so much better at forecasting whether this is the one to read , not that one. Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is one that I saw reviewed in the New Yorker Magazine and thought I have to read this book, and my instinct was right. It's a - well I was going to use the word coruscating, because I like the sound of it, and it has, in my mind a connection with pouring hydrochloric acid into a filthy toilet bowl and cleaning it out, taking away the dark faecal stains and limescale - which is a horrible image and, in fact, has little connection to the real meaning of the  word, which is "flashing, sparkling, glittering, twinkling [twinkling!!] brilliant, dazzling, scintillating, exhilarating, stimulating, invigorating"  Serendipitously this all describes my reaction to the book and the book itself, because the book does glitter with thinking and feeling along with this undercurrent of cleansing and eating away at the pain with acid. It's a complex thing, it's a complex book.

But there are still more books I want to read. Here's the list as it stands at this actual moment, just after reading and skipping through the Guardian review pages where I awlays find books I want to read, mentally note them, and often forget until I see them again. 

1. Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot, Mark Vanhoenacker -= the review soeaks of the books beauty in terms that make me see this as a must read - but when? how.  Because there is also:
2. Criminal: The Truth about Why Bad People Do Bad Things, Tom Gash - "disproving the 11 most commonly believed myths about crime", from left and right wing points of view - it's not just about morality, it's not just about poverty. I've got form here - I used to work in juvenile justice, and we always used to say about our alternative to custody program that we had kids (16-18 year olds) who did bad things, not bad kids per se. So this is a "must read" - I am going to have to put "must read" in inverted commas now, because it's just a euphemism for "want", and the fact that wanting to read something is almost as beautiful as actually reading it sometimes better when the rad doesn't live up to expectations. (More about wanting and reading later). 

3. Then there's China Mieville - I don't really like his books, have tried to read Perdido Station twice and put it down, - even thrown away the copy that had its cover ripped off in some bookish accident, but every time I see someone praising his writing I think I must go back and try again, read another of his densely plotted and written novels of future dystopias because otherwise I will miss out on a brilliant writer. (More about wanting and reading, and missing out later). So I want read The City and the City - or do I?

4. Kazuo Ishiguro - there';s an article on him reading Proust while ill and imagining the novel that became The Artist of the Floating World, and I think I only have that book in an electronic copy and I would like to read most of  Kazuo Ishiguro's novels again.

And I haven't finished reading the Guardian review this week. More to come.

Is there anyone? Incompleteness - Rebecca Goldstein 2, Gödel, Einstein

So is there anyone out there (preferably in Brighton, but hey we've got the internet)  who deeply understands Gödel's Incompleteness theorems, and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity enough to explain them to me in depth (I have a superficial understanding only) AND then to collaborate on a play or short story something like Michael Frayn's Copenhagen that imagines the conversations between Godel and Einstein as they walk between buildings at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in New Jersey in the early 1940s and on to Einstein's death in 1955. The play will concentrate on the platonic versus the logical positivist philosophical approaches, with references, of course, to the Bohr/ Heisenberg's rejection of physics being descriptive of actual reality( as explored in Copenhagen). Provisionally titled "No Dice". Any takers?

Of course the play will also be about friendship and insanity and their limits.

"When the random permutation of genetic blending produce an offspring whose intelligence far outstrips their parents that child faces a special type of predicament: he both recognises his utter dependence, being after all only a child; and he also clearly perceives the severe limits of his own parent's understanding. .... ... the reaction of the young child is more likely top be blind terror(how can they be trusted to take care of me)"

p56 Incompleteness - Rebecca Goldstein 

Or as Gödel was apparently diagnosed with at five years old, a mild anxiety neurosis ("leichte Angst Nuerose"). That does feel familiar, that sense of helplessness against the world, which is large and threatening (as well as full of opportunities and wonders) and which you know your parents do not understand and therefore they are quite unable to protect you unless you are held deep inside the family. And to be held deep inside the family is constricting and stifling in itself, because again the arbitrary rules of the god like parents are harsh and unknowing of their effect.    

The Book of Dave - Will Self, War & Peace - Tolstoy

It's always difficult when you're reading a book that is more or less, begrudgingly, keeping your attention, but you know with that sinking feeling in your heart that you don't want to read any more, that it just isn't doing it for you, and it's a purgatory to continue. It's not the same as when you read something that you take an instant dislike to in a few  pages and then put it down - I'm talking here about having put some considerable investment in the reading, maybe a quarter of the way through maybe even a half way through, and although its "OK", although the writing is "good" you know that you don't want to continue any more. Especially now - sixty years old, so many more books to read, maybe not even enough time to reread all the re-reads that you want to encounter again. So it is with Will Self's Book of Dave. I've tried to read it twice now. Twice! I'm giving up this second attempt before I even got as far as I did in the last one.  It's  because I just haven't got the interest in the story . He is a great writer, his language bounces off the page in satisfying nuggets, but I just don't care for the narrative, I really don't care that much what happens, there isn't a hook pulling me through. I guess I'm still stuck in the ordinary novel, stuck in dreamy reading where you are transported into something. 

So I'm re-reading War & Peace, the quintessential big novel, for the third time - why? Well the TV series obviously. And because there was probably so much that I missed last time, and I can't remember any of the detail - I mean I first read it in the Pyrenees in 1978 in a long indian summer turning to autumn, underneath an almond tree, on the alternate days when I wasn't picking grapes on the mountainside. And the second time? I can't remember, probably twenty years ago - maybe the late nineties? So I finished the first volume (I've got an old Folio edition, different from the Constance Garnett translation that I still have in the original paperback from the 1970s, although the only thing I'm noticing is that the German characters are depicted as talking in "foreign accents", a kind of "vat do ve have veer" touch that I don't really appreciate)). It's still breathtakingly good. It is weird reading it after watching the new TV series as all the pictures in my head are from the TV, but then I kind of drill down into the detail of the sentences and get something different - a more fine grained intelligence perhaps, or a difference in emphasis.

Essentially I am ending up with a bastardized complex mish-mash of the interpretation of the TV series, my interpretation, the translation. Tolstoy seems to survive this mangling but it make me think about how much our surroundings and our feelings permeate and filter what we take from what we read. Is that what makes a great novel - something that can withstand all the interpretive pressure we bring to it and stil stand out on its own? And maybe that's why I can't finish The Book of Dave, I'm too caught up in wanting to have it my way, to get some kind of self-regarding sustenance and wisdom out of the book without being pushed too far. 

Roadside Picnic - Arkady & Boris Strugatsky,Stalker - Tarkovsky, Stalky & Co - Rudyard Kipling

Roadside Picnic - Arkady & Boris Strugatsky,Stalker - Tarkovsky, Stalky & Co - Rudyard Kipling - who would have thought they were all linked so closely - one of the most astounding and wonderful discoveries of my reading life. All beautifully knitted together in an afterword written by Boris Strugatsky in my new addition of  Roadside Picnic on Saturday, that replaced the old Gollancz version I lost years ago. Cut short, Arkady Strugatsky made a rough translation into Russion of Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co ( a tale of public schoolboys at school and so much more : read it) for his brother Boris, translating Stalky as "Stullky". Then as they began the writing the story of these "prospectors", or "trappers", who raided this strange, dangerous,  incomprehensible zone left behind by incomprehensible aliens, long since gone, they invented this new word "stullker" in Russian  to describe them, a word whose resonance Tarkovsky picked up on - and so, in english, the film is entitled "Stalker".  Read the books, see the film.

This was something of an epiphany for me, the yoking of Kipling with the  Strugatsky brothers (and thence Tarkovsky's Stalker), two books and one film that I have reread, rewatched. It's a proof ( for me), well evidence anyway, that Kipling had this wonderful subversive edge - he wasn't all Empire and colonialism, he was a deep and meaningful writer. I only recently read Kim, and that book is a strange and beautiful  beast, with a deep love and understanding of India, Afghanistan and its many peoples, and its centre the eponymous Kim, this half Indian, half English boy whose strength and wonder grow throughout the book.

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.