Current read: The Beautiful Machine
Where / how acquired: See below - very thoughtful Xmas present from...myself
Vibe: Velo-riffic
Finished the Roger Deakin last week, which forced me to muse upon posthumous works and what responsibilities an author's heir or executor has to publish, or to avoid publication. I mentioned that I feared Penguin, in publishing these notes of Deakins', might have done to him what they did to Sebald, and sullied his reputation by posthumously publishing bits and pieces that really weren't meant to be published, at least not just like that.
The Guardian definitely took the best bits of Notes from Walnut Tree Farm for their extract; clearly some of the notes in Deakins' notebooks were just that - notes, marginalia, destinded to germinate and sprout forth fuller works perhaps but not to be to let out of the greenhouse just yet. Having said that, it was a lovely read: by turns melancholic, learned, modest and poetic. Maybe there should just be some breathing space once an author has died before their unpublished stuff is allowed out. I must read Waterlog again...actually, I must get Waterlog back from whom I lent it...
So now onto, as it says (in quote marks but unattributed, oddly), on the cover, a zen-like paean to the beauty of cycling, Graame Fife's The Beautiful Machine. I really didn't like it when it kicked off - I thought it was sloppy and rather clumsy, like a retired sportsman who'd started writing his memoirs while reading Will Self, and thus started to randomly insert unnecessary verbosity. But, like a cyclist 'getting his legs' it picks up soon enough and lives up to that strapline on the front. It's basically Fife's autobiography, his tales from the handlebars of life, and he does make riding a bike seem (even more) magical, fundamental, earthy, essential and as if it really the vehicle on which true existential peace, happiness and serenity will be found...which it is of course. I'm really enjoying it and will probably finish it soon. And it's likely to prove a pricey read - it makes me even more determined to get down to Condor on Grays Inn Road and place my order for my £1500 2009 Squadra so that's it's built in time for spring...I'll ask for a Fife-related discount, they must get that a lot...
Monday 26 January 2009
Tuesday 6 January 2009
Books for Christmas 2008
A pretty decent haul, albeit one supplemented by presents to me from...me:
Roger Deakin's Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
Predictable perhaps, given my adoration of Deakin's previous books, but no less delightful because of that. I'd read a pretty extensive taster in the Guardian and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was completely lovely, just as good as previous work. I feared, it being posthumous, that Penguin might have done to Deakin what they did to Sebald and well, if not ruin, then tarnish his reputation after his death by publishing half-finished work that wasn't up to the usual standard.
Fredrick Spotts' The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation
Will no doubt be a contender for most academic book read this year (it's published by Yale UP) but hopefully will be a good read too - a history what the Parisian intellectuals did under the Nazi occupation (and it wasn't all free love and the Resistance, apparently).
Graeme Fife's The Beautiful Machine: A Life in Cycling, from Tour De France to Cinder Hill
Book on bikes innit. One from me.
Stefan Zweig's Chess Story (New York Review Books Classics)
This is one recommendation from librarything to do with German literature - I was checking out what fans of Sebald liked...
And finally I've been reading a proof of Everything Ravaged Everything Burned
by Wells Tower. I've a real love/hate thing with short stories. I'm a huge fan of Jorge Luis Borges and there's really no one better than he at this particular art, and I've had periods reading lots of short stories - Jay McInerney is another author who does them well who springs to mind. But Wells Tower does them differently...I'll review here properly soon.
Roger Deakin's Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
Predictable perhaps, given my adoration of Deakin's previous books, but no less delightful because of that. I'd read a pretty extensive taster in the Guardian and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was completely lovely, just as good as previous work. I feared, it being posthumous, that Penguin might have done to Deakin what they did to Sebald and well, if not ruin, then tarnish his reputation after his death by publishing half-finished work that wasn't up to the usual standard.
Fredrick Spotts' The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation
Will no doubt be a contender for most academic book read this year (it's published by Yale UP) but hopefully will be a good read too - a history what the Parisian intellectuals did under the Nazi occupation (and it wasn't all free love and the Resistance, apparently).
Graeme Fife's The Beautiful Machine: A Life in Cycling, from Tour De France to Cinder Hill
Book on bikes innit. One from me.
Stefan Zweig's Chess Story (New York Review Books Classics)
This is one recommendation from librarything to do with German literature - I was checking out what fans of Sebald liked...
And finally I've been reading a proof of Everything Ravaged Everything Burned
by Wells Tower. I've a real love/hate thing with short stories. I'm a huge fan of Jorge Luis Borges and there's really no one better than he at this particular art, and I've had periods reading lots of short stories - Jay McInerney is another author who does them well who springs to mind. But Wells Tower does them differently...I'll review here properly soon.
Sunday 4 January 2009
Current read: The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray
Where / how acquired: From Book & Comic Exchange, Pembridge Road, Notting Hill
Vibe: A darkly comic stream of consciousness from the now late playwright
I started reading this a couple of weeks before Xmas but really got stuck into it as soon as I had some free time in the holidays. It's a book impossible to read out of its context, namely, that the author is now dead, killed by the habit that makes up his title. But stranger still that the book opens with a dinner between Simon Gray and Harold Pinter, where the latter reveals that he has cancer - the cancer that finaly killed him on Xmas eve, I think it was. Pinter plays more than a bit part in The Smoking Diaries so these are mediations from beyond the grave in more ways than one.
It was billed as laugh-a-minute and really isn't, which isn't to say I back track from the darkly comic description above. Gray meanders around all sorts of subjects, mostly quite personal ones, and his honesty, and indeed the bravery of the editor at Granta to (at least seemingly) print the author's diaries simply as he writes them, even with his ridiculously long sentences, is what's really touching. In many ways his is a tale of failure, despite his obvious outward successes - towards the end he catalogues a series of financial cock-ups which had left him (comparatively) penniless - which makes him frankly a much more interesting diarist than someone whom led a life of unmittigated victory. The only dilemma though is - does that mean I've just read and enjoyed a misery memoir??
Where / how acquired: From Book & Comic Exchange, Pembridge Road, Notting Hill
Vibe: A darkly comic stream of consciousness from the now late playwright
I started reading this a couple of weeks before Xmas but really got stuck into it as soon as I had some free time in the holidays. It's a book impossible to read out of its context, namely, that the author is now dead, killed by the habit that makes up his title. But stranger still that the book opens with a dinner between Simon Gray and Harold Pinter, where the latter reveals that he has cancer - the cancer that finaly killed him on Xmas eve, I think it was. Pinter plays more than a bit part in The Smoking Diaries so these are mediations from beyond the grave in more ways than one.
It was billed as laugh-a-minute and really isn't, which isn't to say I back track from the darkly comic description above. Gray meanders around all sorts of subjects, mostly quite personal ones, and his honesty, and indeed the bravery of the editor at Granta to (at least seemingly) print the author's diaries simply as he writes them, even with his ridiculously long sentences, is what's really touching. In many ways his is a tale of failure, despite his obvious outward successes - towards the end he catalogues a series of financial cock-ups which had left him (comparatively) penniless - which makes him frankly a much more interesting diarist than someone whom led a life of unmittigated victory. The only dilemma though is - does that mean I've just read and enjoyed a misery memoir??
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