The Book Tower
debut novel coming soon

A meme to keep things ticking over – if you’d like to join in.

A life. Yours. In six words.

I first heard about this when driving into work one morning and listening to Radio 4. It’s based on Hemingway’s famous six word memoir:

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

You can’t really beat that, but I think it’s in our nature to all have a go. Oddly, Tom Stoppard was dragged in to the BBC studios to judge listeners’ own contributions but put a damper on proceedings in his total disinterest in the idea. Funny bloke Tom Stoppard. However, the one that’s stuck in my mind was this:

Two weddings, three kids. Then cancer.

Which kind of cast a dark shadow over the rest of the day.

I was reminded of the six word memoir by Chartroose and decided to have a go for myself. Here’s mine then:

Can I have a refund please?

The please is very me. But I’m sure you can all do better.

Comments [12]

This time last year a popular meme did the rounds. I liked it so much I’m doing it again. To take part, just quote the first sentence from your first post for every month of the last year. Here’s mine. They say time goes quicker as you grow older; I say it goes quicker still when you blog.

January

Jakob Nielsen has been delivering articles to my inbox for some time now.

February

Stone circles, strange cults, mankind in danger and an alien menace.

March

Steerpike was aware, directly he had entered the terrible room, that he was behaving strangely.

April

After dealing with travel sickness and a neighbour’s over concern about the height of my lawn, I am now back online.

May

My posts are becoming increasingly serious lately so a meme to lighten things up.

June

After looking forward so much to reading Don De Lillo’s Falling Man I’m unable to hide my bitter disappointment in the novel.

July

You may be familiar with my recent frustration on discovering that Microsoft Vista is incompatible with my beloved home wireless network.

August

In Life Class Pat Barker revisits the setting of the First World War, the ugly moment in history she so excellently helped to document in her Regeneration trilogy written ten or so years ago.

September

I’ve been a latecomer to the fiction of Irvine Welsh.

October

The air is crisp and there is a definite chill in my bones.

November

That long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition.

December

This is a segment from the 1972 film Tales from the Crypt, featuring Joan Collins as a murderous housewife who gets her just desserts.

Comment

From Booking Through Thursday.

Do you get on a roll when you read, so that one book leads to the next, which leads to the next, and so on and so on?

I always claim to stumble from book to book, although when I look back at the trail behind me I can usually spot a pattern.

I’m currently reading the latest novel by Clive Barker, which is probably because I’ve been reading a lot of Neil Gaiman recently, although I wasn’t really thinking of anything when I bought the Barker book. I just subconsciously decided to widen my appreciation of the ghostly and supernatural to include a taste of horror. And what probably got me onto this path was Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, which has a supernatural element and was nominated for the 2007 Booker Prize. Because I’d read both this and Ian McEwan’s latest, the Booker theme continued when I bought The Gathering by Anne Enright – the eventual winner. But I must confess that I hated the book, so sometimes rolls don’t work out.

Usually planned reading directions don’t work out for me either. I finished Albert Camus and wanted to read Kafka, but the plan went nowhere. I put Kafka away again for another day. Even when I find an author I love I can’t read too many of their books in one go; their power gets diluted. This year it’s happened with Cormac McCarthy, Graham Greene and Sebastian Faulks. Sometimes my roll goes no further than picking up the next unread book on my shelf, other times it’s picking up a tip from another blog. More often than not it’s just luck and chance.

Comments [5]

From Booking Through Thursday.

How many of us write notes in our books. Are you a Footprint Leaver or a Preservationist?

I was once a Footprint Leaver in a big way, a lot to do with the fact that I studied for an English degree. I made so many pencil notes in margins and did so much underlining that I progressed to sticking post-it notes in pages. It was just quicker than making scribbles. My books would all have yellow pieces of paper sticking out of them, often more than one on a page. I grew out of the habit when I finished my degree, and going back to reread some of the classics I often puzzled over why exactly I’d left a yellow sticker in a particular page. I began to unpeel them all, one by one.

Starting to attempt writing book reviews, I was drawn back to my stickers and note taking but I’ve so far resisted. I’ve attempted and sometimes failed to commit the page numbers of important passages to memory. It can go disastrously wrong, and I recently forgot the part of an 800 page novel that I desperately wanted to refer to. I spent a wasted hour flicking through it to find the part I’d lost. But the reason I don’t like notes in books, especially those written in pen or when a highlighter has been given full flow, is when I find them in other people’s books. There’s nothing more disheartening than buying a second hand book, getting it home and opening it to discover the student vandalism that has gone on inside it. And nothing is worse than other people’s notes. And worse still is bad student notes, where the notes made are not noteworthy, the highlights highlight nothing and the passages marked yes! are definite nos.

So if you make notes in books and give them away, make sure they’re good ones. Or better still make them in pencil and rub them out when you have finished. Or just don’t make them at all.

Comments [9]

From Booking Through Thursday:

The books that you start but don’t finish say as much about you as the ones you actually read, sometimes because of the books themselves or because of the circumstances that prevent you from finishing. So . . . what books have you abandoned and why?

If I could define a meaning for the expression that sinking feeling it would be the mood of resignation I fall into when I abandon a book. When I start something I feel obliged to finish it, especially when I’ve had such high expectations. This year I have abandoned several highly acclaimed novels. Why is this? Is it me? Snow by Orham Pamuk was an early casualty, followed by The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. There are others, but I feel ashamed to mention them. And these are just recent novels; that sinking feeling becomes that sunk and underwater feeling when I give up on a classic. A Tale of Two Cities did nothing for me, and neither did Sense and Sensibility. Visitors sometimes comment on the rich selection of books on my shelves. They do not know that some of them are abandoned…

I excuse my behaviour as natural spillage. After all, I do read a lot so some books will get left by the wayside as I journey on. There comes a point where you have to give in to your instincts. Snow had some great reviews, some from fellow bloggers, but I was peering over the pages and looking at the next book on the top of my pile and dying to read that. And when that happens it’s time to give up. With Philip Roth it was a similar experience, but my treatment of classics is less easier to explain away. I think I have perhaps become a little lazier in my reading, and possibly subconsciously relate the harder books to being a student. Reading becomes as task rather than a pleasure and I’m compelled to make pencil jotttings in the margins of my Dickens and Austen…

Comments [8]