The Book Tower
debut novel coming soon

From Booking Through Thursday:

It happens even to the best readers from time to time… you close the cover on the book you’re reading and discover, to your horror, that there’s nothing else to read. Either there’s nothing in the house, or nothing you’re in the mood for. Just, nothing that “clicks.” What do you do?? How do you get the reading wheels turning again?

It’s happening now. Help.

After a really good run I’ve suddenly become unsettled with my reading. Nothing is clicking. I tried and failed with Love in the Time of Cholera; it’s a decent enough book but I always found myself staring out of the window whenever I attempted to read it. I also abandoned American Psycho. I just didn’t like it, no matter how much the blurb on the back of the book tried to persuade me otherwise. All this – just in the last week – has send me into a downward spiral, scared to pick up another book in case I make it three failures in a row.

I’ve been here before but thankfully not very often. The mood will suddenly change and I will spot a couple of books on the shelf that grab my attention, read an enthusiastic review or succumb to a spending spree. I might even draw the blinds and get back to Love in the Time of Cholera.

The wheels will turn again, I’m sure of it.

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Following last week’s Reading in Public, a follow up meme from Booking Through Thursday. Where don’t you read?

Although I try to squeeze in a chapter or two at lunchtimes, I don’t read at work. Well, I do in a way, but it’s all work related, which tends to take the pleasure out of it. As I manage a website, I can get away with looking at forums and blogs and internet magazines in the name of research although there’s only a limit that my conscience will allow.

My daily commute to work lasts for an hour each way and because it’s by car I lose a lot of valuable reading time. I miss squeezing onto the underground with my paperback when I lived in London, which is something I never thought I’d say. I’m stuck instead with UK radio, which can rot the soul. I know, I should try audio books.

As I said before, I try not to read where I think it might offend others. Mainly family gatherings, or visits to places where I am meant to be doing something, such as water parks, which – inexplicably – I always find myself in. I’ve cunningly found a way around these situations. If you pack a book with your flask and sandwiches for the family picnic, or slip one in with your swimming costume and towel, you need only produce it momentarily when others are looking. Then there’s always the possiblility of striking up a book-related conversation if someone like-minded is passing round the paper plates, or standing behind you in the queue for the water rapids.

Talking of water, I never read in the bath as I can’t bear wrinkly pages, and logistics prevent me from reading whilst sleeping (although I’ve tried, and often wake up in the morning with an open book sprawled over me). Otherwise, I will try my best to read when and where I can.

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My posts are becoming increasingly serious lately so a meme to lighten things up. From Booking Through Thursday. Reading in public, do you do it?

Oh yes. It’s very rare for me to go out without a book in my bag or in my pocket and I find it very easy to concentrate and read in a public place. I could probably settle down to a few chapters in a football stadium. On a recent visit to Sea World in Florida, when the heaving crowds were approaching football stadium levels, I sat in the shade with my book and let them all barge by. My family have got used to me.

If I’m going out for the day and I’ve less than 100 pages to read in my current book, I’ll take the next book I’m planning to read with me as well. Is this eccentric behaviour? If I’m out for the day without a book and at a loose end, maybe with an hour to spare, I’ll buy a book to read if I’m able to. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing or supposed to be doing. As the parent of an eight year old I can easily concentrate on a book with hoards of children buzzing round me, a skill I perfected recently after spending a day in the Children’s Museum in Chicago.

I can read in parks, on buses, planes and trains, standing up in bars and sitting down in restaurants. Being married to a smoker, this is handy as smokers are now obliged to vanish, either on their own or with other smokers, for periodic ten minute breaks. If it wasn’t for my book, I would be horribly alone. I have even been tempted to read in the theatre, after being dragged to a show I desperately didn’t want to see, but held back not wanting to offend the people I was with. For similar reasons I lay off reading during a wedding ceremony, and the speeches that followed.

I don’t think there’s anything odd about reading in public. It’s a combination of shutting out the rest of the world, not giving two hoots as to what other people might think of you, and remembering to take your book in the first place. Being married to a shopaholic, I’ve never yet been refused in department stores when I’ve asked for a stool so I can at least sit down and read in some comfort. Why just stand there and look bored?

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From Breaking the Fourth Wall.

• Go to Wikipedia and search for your birthday but leave out the year (mine is June 16th)
• List 3 events, 2 births, 1 death and 1 holiday that happen on this day

Events

1. 1487 Battle of Stoke Field, the last dying breath of the Wars of the Roses
2. 1884 The first roller coaster in the United States begins operation at Coney Island, New York
3. 1911 A 772 gram stony meteorite struck earth near Kilbourn, Columbia County, Wisconsin damaging a barn

Births

1. 1890 Stan Laurel
2. 1962 Arnold Vosloo (actor, him in the recent Mummy films)

Death

1. 1979 Nicholas Ray, American film director ( Rebel Without a Cause )

Holiday, and a literary one

1. Bloomsday, in honour of Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses set on 16 June, 1904.

Also I’m sure it was the night of June 16th 1816 that Mary Shelley had her dream that inspired Frankenstein?

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With the Oscars fast approaching, I thought it was time for a sequel of sorts to last year’s Favourite Films meme. I quite like the Q and A memes, although it’s not so much fun when you’ve made them up yourself. Anyway, there’s fourteen questions in all.

The Oscars. Are you bothered?

Not really, although I’d love it if Peter O’Toole got one. I haven’t seen Venus yet, but I hear good things about it.

A really good film you’ve seen recently, although nobody else has seen it or even heard of it

There’s a film called The Assassination of Richard Nixon starring Sean Penn. Although depressing, I thought it was one of the best acted and most moving films I have seen for years.

The worst film you’ve paid good money to see

The second Bridget Jones film. I thought it was so dreadful, a film devoid of any charm or humour. I hated it and declared so loudly as I left the cinema.

Most pretentious film you’ve paid good money to see

There’s so many. The Piano probably. And Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.

A film you’ve rented on video or DVD and turned off very quickly, shouting “this is awful!”

The second Matrix film. I’d really been looking forward to it as I loved the first Matrix but this was just terrible, terrible. Most of my DVD rentals are disasters. A friend of mine is an actor and he was in The Libertine with Johnny Depp. I only rented it because I knew he was in it, but couldn’t watch more than half an hour of it.

A film you know you should watch but you’ve never quite got round to seeing

I had The Mission starring Robert De Niro on video for exactly ten years before I gave up and taped over it. Most recent films by Ken Loach I always state loudly that I want to see, although secretly I don’t. I usually do quite well with serious, acclaimed or worthy films though. I’m a great fan of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Earliest cinematic experience

My parents took me to see Oliver! at the Wimbledon Odeon when I was four or five. I loved it (and still do).

Teenage memories

When I was 14, I rented a video of An American Werewolf in London with some friends when my parents were out. The main reason was because we’d heard about a rather raunchy sex scene with Jenny Agutter. We weren’t disappointed.

Strangest cinematic experience

I went to see The Passion of the Christ on my own. The only other people in the cinema were a man who walked out and a woman who wept uncontrollably throughout the film. I kept thinking “leave woman! Leave if this is so painful for you!” but maybe that’s partly the point of the film.

Is there a film that you’ve been waiting to see again for years that’s just vanished from the face of the Earth?

Bartleby, based on Herman Melville’s classic, made in the ealy 1970s I think. It’s about an office clerk who goes slowly mad. He keeps saying “I’d rather not, sir”. Paul Scofield is in it. I’m hazy on other details. I saw it once on TV when I was about 15 and I’ve been waiting for it to be repeated again. There’s a recent remake but that one’s to be avoided. Also a film of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich starring Tom Courtenay that’s completely vanished.

Your cinematic obsession that bores everyone else to tears

Horror films from the 60s and 70s. My wife hates them, even ones that are now considered classics like The Wicker Man. I tend to watch them on my own now, or with a friend – although he’s now gone to live in Cambodia. Perhaps he was trying to tell me something.

Someone else’s cinematic obsession that you’ve gone along with

Years ago, a friend was obsessed with Russ Meyer films and was always dragging me along to see them. If that wasn’t bad enough, a woman I used to work with was equally obsessed with John Cassavetes films and would drag me to see them. Meyer won out probably, at least his weird audiences were always amusing to observe.

Anyone from the world of cinema that you have a real love/hate relationship with?

Woody Allen. He’ll hate me for this, but I really do prefer his earlier, funnier films. Also Quentin Tarantino, who I can love, hate or be indifferent to depending on my mood.

I was going to end with favourite movie, but I can’t decide! So I’m going to narrow it down by picking a particular genre out of the hat:

Favourite romantic movie

When Harry Met Sally. Or Annie Hall. Or, for the ending at least, The Graduate.
An American Werewolf in London.

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