Stuff I've Been Reading - A Shameless Copy Of Jeremy Gordon

Books bought

None. About 3 or 4 months ago, I made a pact to myself that I would not buy another book until I had read every unread book I own. This was borne out of a combination of ambition and lack of funds. Okay, admittedly, mostly lack of funds. Since, I have read about three of the books I already owned, which I had not read previously (poor effort from me). Somewhere along the line, I also made the decision that e-books were not books (rogue) and so started purchasing those. So, maybe not none.

·       The Underground Storyteller – Alex Day

·       The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying – Marie Kondo

·       Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart – Carrot Quinn

The Underground Storyteller was good. I wished it had been more historical and less anecdotal but I enjoyed it all the same.  Carrot’s book is epic. I felt like I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail despite reading it mostly while on the tube. It made me postively hungry for a nice long walk. It is an authentic and plainly written account of what I can only imagine to be a life-altering experience. The feeling of just wanting to climb a fucking mountain is still deep in my bones.

I wrote a full post on The Life-Changing Magic for a blog called INSPIRE, which you can read here.

Books read

Those mentioned above along with:

·       The Secret History – Donna Tartt

·       Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

·       Daily Rituals: How Artists Work – Mason Currey

·       The Opposite of Loneliness – Marina Keegan

The Secret History is definitely top ten in the best books I’ve ever read, perhaps even top five. This is going to sound whatever but the characters in this were so compelling. The plot could have been entirely different and it would have been just as good as far as I’m concerned. I was that into the characters. Americanah was good. Not amazing. I enjoyed the experience of reading about a culture I knew nothing about from the perspective of someone native to that culture. It felt somehow voyeuristic. I read this straight after The Secret History, which may have marred it slightly since I enjoyed that so much. Daily Rituals is a bit different. It is a non-fiction collection of the daily routines of famous artists. Not dissimilarly to Day’s book, this was more anecdotal than I would have liked. I am weirdly obsessed with daily routines and thought I would fly through this but it would have been better if it had been pared back. Finally, The Opposite of Loneliness. I have explained what this book is to so many people at this point that I’m just going to let you google it. It made waves in the publishing world when it was released and I expected to really enjoy it. The book is split into short stories and personal essays. I found the stories far superior to the essays but ultimately saw the book to be overshadowed by its context. It is also worth noting that Jeremy seriously enjoyed the essay 'Even Artichokes Have Doubts,' though perhaps just for its title. 

Also this poem in the Foyles in Waterloo whilst waiting to take the train home for Thanksgiving, which was written by Don Patterson, one of my university lecturers

Books left unfinished

The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron (I was enjoying this but it has just fallen by the wayside. I fully intend to pick it back up soon! I’m also going to get back in the habit of my Morning Pages soon.)

The Shelter’s of Stone – Jean M. Auel (This is book five in an amazing series called Earth’s Children, which I recommend super highly. However, the books are all quite long and quite repetitive. I’ll get back to it at some point.)

Books recklessly lent

The Essential Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks) to Sam who prefers a rhyming translation

The Secret History and The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes to Gareth who read one while on holiday in Copenhagen and has not made great progress on the other. Unrelatedly, I saw Julian Barnes speak at the University of St Andrews last year and found him to be both likable and interesting. He spoke about being a novelist like it was a regular day job and I was envious.

The Opposite of Loneliness to Nikki who agreed with me that the first two stories were the best

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts to Ellis; I’m never going to get it back, am I?

Ma's note: Also, Americanah to my pa's mate, Geoffie, who is lovely but lives abroad and will probably never get it back to me. 

Books to read next

The World According to Garp – John Irving

Stuff I’ve Been Reading - A shameless copy of a Nick Hornby column (Jeremy since Japan edition)

This post is modelled on Nick Hornby’s monthly column in Believer magazine. The only excuse I can offer is that it is done so shamelessly.

(The columns from September 2003 to November 2004 were, in fact, compiled in a book called The Polysyllabic Spree. At the time I read this I was too young to understand what a bloody great gig this was for Hornby. In the unlikely event anyone from The Believer is reading and Nick is ever late with his copy, hit me up.)

Books Bought (from wordery.com)

The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (trans. John Rutherford)

The Creative Writing Coursebook—Ed. Julia Bell & Paul Magrs

Good Books Left in the Flat I Inherited

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet—David Mitchell

The Remains of the Day—Kazuo Ishiguro

Slaughterhouse Five—Kurt Vonnegut (Also Cat’s Cradle)

Candide—Voltaire

Some translation of Beowulf 

The Sense of an Ending—Julian Barnes

Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Volume 1—Arthur Conan Doyle

Purple Hibiscus—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Other books

Books Read

Slaughterhouse Five—Kurt Vonnegut

The Silent Cry—Kenzaburo Oe

War Music—Christopher Logue

Tabloid Secrets—Neville Thurlbeck (review forthcoming in Hinchley Wood magazine!!)

The Yellow Wolf—Grant Tarbard (my review on Sabotage Reviews: http://sabotagereviews.com/2015/09/03/yellow-wolf-by-grant-tarbard/)

Books in Process of Being Read

Don Quixote—Cervantes

Ulysses—James Joyce (Gabler edition)

New Life—Dan O’Brien

I can’t help it. I adore books left behind in houses by anonymous people. Just like I adore messages in second-hand books like this: 

This is what’s written on the inside of the copy of Ulysses I purchased from abebooks.com. Did you enjoy Ulysses Mark? I hope so. I remain on the hunt for the Christmas ’88 Finnegan’s Wake.

(Incidentally, I have only just learned that AbeBooks, which I love, was purchased by Amazon way back in 2008. Fuck you Amazon. Henceforth, I will try to use Wordery, which offers free worldwide delivery - a perk you’ll just have to forget is probably already factored into their prices.)

I am doing/participating on/etc. the JET Programme which is what has facilitated my move to Nagasaki, Japan at the beginning of August. My apartment has housed a long line of ‘JETs’ - in the semi-epic cleanup I found a ‘Nagasaki Jet Revue 1999’ programme - and my predecessors left quite a lot of good books. 

Slaughterhouse Five  was great. It’s a powerful book, and short, which in a roundabout way is about the firebombing of Dresden. I believe Vonnegut does get some facts wrong about Dresden (particularly in comparison to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but it doesn’t matter. 

Dresden after the fire-bombing: one of the arresting photographs ever taken

Kenzaburo Oe’s The Silent Cry I purchased some time ago but neglected because the opening was difficult. Oe is the 1994 Nobel Laureate for Literature. This novel, which is very highly regarded, is about a couple who’s son is born retarded (as was Oe’s son Hikari). The protagonist, Mitsu, is a translator who’s blind in one eye. The wife has taken to drink, the marriage become sexless. They meet Mitsu’s magnetic younger brother Takahashi, returning from America, and two young disciples of his at Tokyo airport, before journeying to their family home in Shikoku (the smallest of Japan’s four main islands) to finalise a property deal with a Korean supermarket magnate. I’d say it’s both a troubling work and quite Japanese, its plot centrally concerning uprisings preceding the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Korean-Japanese relations, infidelity, disability, the intrusion of modern, urban life into rural Japanese communities and the formation of a football team. It’s a visceral book, full of human sadness and cruelty although it felt to me like Oe did not totally know how to end what he’d unleashed.

Also of great interest to me is The Silent Cry’s relation to the works of Haruki Murakami, who I love. Mitsu recurrently refers to himself as the rat - Murakami’s opening three novels are known as the trilogy of the rat and feature a character with the same nickname. The Silent Cry’s Japanese title, which roughly translates as football in the first year of Man’en (March 1860 - February 1861), is mirrored by Murakami’s second work Pinball, 1973. It is overwhelmingly likely that I will read Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 at some point, particularly considering a new, combined translation, Wind/Pinball, was released in August. I could wait until my Japanese is good enough but I’d probably be waiting about four years. 

Christopher Logue’s War Music is “An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad ”. Suffice to say, I won’t be able to do justice to it here. I do a lot of reading in bed and long, narrative poems can be quite difficult to focus on in that setting. But it’s brilliant. I read the Rieu’s prose translation of The Iliad sometime before Christmas and, to be honest, it was pretty boring. Logue, who can’t read Greek, is extremely liberal and daring with his source material. He makes use of almost cinematic cuts (“Reverse the shot.//Go close.”). The imagery is highly original, many of the smilies and epithets modernised but not at all in a forced way. It’s visually interesting, with a lot of free experimentation with typefaces and line lengths:

Patroclus fought like dreaming: 

His head thrown back, his mouth – wide as a shrieking mask –

Sucked at the air to nourish his infuriated mind

And seemed to draw the Trojans onto him…

– Kill them!

My sweet Patroclus

– Kill them!

As many as you can,

   For

Coming behind you through the dust you felt

– What was it? – felt Creation part, and then

APOLLO!                             Who had been patient with you

Struck. 

It’s difficult on screen (particularly on bloody Blogger) to give due to the visual impact this stanza, which falls across four pages, has. Try to imagine turning the page and seeing "Apollo!" in size 200 font. 

War Music was a very enjoyable read, and one I’d like to return to (maybe with a more critical, less sleepy eye). Logue worked on the project for more than 40 years and you can tell, sometimes because of how densely worked it is but more often just because of how good it is. The Iliad, despite being at the foundation of Western Literature, is a surreal, crazy work for the modern reader. Logue embraces this in a way that perhaps conventional prose works just cannot.

Currently, I am double-handing Ulysses and Don Quixote - a hilarious act of literary sincerity and hubris. I have read just 80 pages of the first and 50 of the second so far - leaving a rough total of 1500 to go - although the Don I did just start on holiday. It is entirely possible I will never finish these books (though the Cervantes is funny so I probably will finish that). I am taking it seriously though and reading the Joyce in tandem with Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated - naturally, the “revised and expanded edition”. At the very least, I expect to see benefits of increased arm strength, size and stamina, and to kill a lot of time. 

Books definitely to be read after that (are you serious?)

Love in the Time of Cholera—Gabo (bought with me from Britain)

The Temple of the Golden Pavillion—Yukio Mishima (ditto)

Maybe the David Mitchell, set in Nagasaki, though I’d much rather read Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, also set in Nagasaki

Some Ryu Murakami - a ‘Nagasaki author’, in the prefectural sense - he’s from Sasebo. Coin Locker Babies, which sounds dark as dark, has been recommended to me by a teacher at my school 

Candide

Wind/Pinball