Authorship

 

Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts––two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten––and he was unnerved to the point of desperation. A recovering alcoholic and a fragile spirit, Carver wrote that he was “confused, tired, paranoid, and afraid.” He feared exposure before his friends, who had read many of the stories in their earlier versions.

Life and Letters: Rough Crossings: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

I've read much more by Raymond Carver than about him, so this article was a real revelation to me: basically, Carver's famous and much-imitated bare-bones style was not his own, but was imposed on him by an editor, Gordon Lish.

While of course it's not at all the only thing he had going for him, nevertheless the Carver style is a major feature of his work. It shocks me slightly that it was something he not only didn't produce himself -- Lish cut out over-writing, lengthy descriptions, sentimentality and so on -- it was actually something he disagreed with and tried to counter.

The article in the New Yorker's winter fiction issue, which is out here at any rate but which is all online, is accompanied by a selection of letters from Carver to Lish. From this:

July 15, 1970

Hombre, thanks for the superb assist on the stories. No one has done that for me since I was 18, I mean it. High time I think, too. Feel the stories are first class now, but whatever the outcome there, I appreciate the fine eye you turned on them. Hang tough.

To this:

July 10, 1980

Please look through the enclosed copy of “What We Talk About,” the entire collection. You’ll see that nearly all of the changes I suggest are small enough, but I think they’re significant and they all can be found in the first edited ms version you sent me. It’s just, not just, but it’s a question of reinstating some of the things that were taken out in the second version. But I feel strongly some of those things taken out should be back in the finished stories.

There's also a case-history of one of Lish's edits, showing the original Carver and the changes made by Lish. It doesn't sound especially fascinating, but it is. And like it or not, every single edit is an improvement, making the story more Carver-like.

Altogether an excellent piece of coverage, very detailed and very revealing. And it made me want to go back to the stories again, whoever was responsible for them.

The reading community

 

More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.

The Department of Education found that reading skills have improved moderately among fourth and eighth graders in the past decade and a half, with the largest jump occurring just before the No Child Left Behind Act took effect, but twelfth graders seem to be taking after their elders. Their reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent.

The steepest declines were in “reading for literary experience”—the kind that involves “exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works,” in the words of the department’s test-makers.

Twilight of the Books: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker

Bella Italia | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

Her book is a grand buffet of curious delights. Riley writes to entertain as well as to inform, and never holds back when there is a choice anecdote to relate. We are told how to create a table-top rocket by applying a match to the rolled wrapper of an amaretto biscuit, and how the fettuccine Alfredo that appear on every Italian restaurant menu in the US were invented to charm Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford on their Roman honeymoon.

Understandably, there are also times when Riley seems to get lost in her own erudition. The notion of tipicità, literally "typicality", is fundamental to the way Italians think about their food: it means the way a dish typifies or embodies its place of origin. Riley uses it, in Italian, without explanation and without an entry of its own. She also refers constantly to the great cookery writers of earlier eras. Figures such as Platina, Scappi, Corrado and Artusi have fascinating stories of their own, and they are hugely important in the long history of Italian food. But repeated cross-referencing to these and other names will probably become tiresome for the uninitiated.

Bella Italia | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

Casterbridge hotel for sale

 

A hotel immortalised by Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor Of Casterbridge is expected to sell for around £3m, an estate agent said today.

The Kings Arms Hotel in Dorchester, Dorset, has played host to Queen Victoria and George VI since it was built in 1720. But it is most famed as the central location for the action in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Michael Henchard, the eponymous mayor of the novel, carries out most of his official business at the hotel and finally faces his debtors and creditors at a bankruptcy meeting there.

Hotel immortalised in Hardy novel up for sale | News | Guardian Unlimited Books

Oliver Sackbut

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain - Oliver Sacks - Books - Review - New York Times

In his earlier collections of clinical tales — most famously in “Awakenings” (1973) and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (1985) — Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. The genre could have been an exploitative sideshow: a parade of misfits whose brains have been weirdly affected by disease, trauma, congenital defect or medical treatment. But Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry. The result is a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul.

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Censorship by theft

Kids' Sex Ed Book Under Fire in Maine - 9/21/2007 7:44:00 AM - Publishers Weekly

JoAn Karkos of Lewiston was so offended and “horrified” by the children’s book It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex & Sexual Health by Robie Harris, illus. by Michael Emberley (Candlewick, 1993) that she took matters into her own hands, aiming to keep the books away from children. She checked out the copies from local public libraries and is now refusing to return them.

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The Dirty Old Dog of the Baskervilles

Adultery, my dear Watson | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle betrayed his dying wife for a younger woman. Now his letters have finally been made available after more than seven decades, his biographer Andrew Lycett pieces together the affair

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Nonno Nouve

The Literary Life: First at Ninety: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker

Millard Kaufman, a début novelist whose book “Bowl of Cherries” comes out this month, has been described by his publisher, McSweeney’s, as quite possibly “the best extant epic-comedic writer of his generation.” This is high praise, and would be higher still were it not for the fact that there are few, if any, epic-comedic writers extant from Kaufman’s generation. Kaufman, who turned ninety in March, is seventy-six years older than the hero of “Cherries,” who, through a number of compelling, if implausible, twists of fate, winds up in prison in the fictional southern Iraqi town of Coproliabad, so named for its specialization in turning human excrement into a kind of cheap, durable concrete.

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Alan Bennett on Royal reading

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett | The digested read | Guardian Unlimited Books

Sir Kevin was not at all happy. "Her Majesty is letting her standards slip. She would rather read than open a hospital."

The prime minister shook his head. "It's very worrying; reading is not an inclusive activity. She even asked me if I had read Hardy. Seakins will have to go."

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Louis Menand on biography

Interesting New Yorker article on the prying prurience of biography, even in this age when people spend half their day putting their private lives online for one and all. Extract:

The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No one
realized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down the
duckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographies
are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically
forward, they are composed essentially backward. It’s what happened
later, the accomplishment for which the biographical subject is
renowned, that determines the selection and interpretation of what
happened earlier. This is the writer’s procedure, and it is also the
reader’s.

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Women and fiction

The title "Women and Fiction" might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write, or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback: I should never be able to come to a conclusion.

I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer - to hand you, after an hour's discourse, a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point: a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions; women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

Part of a great lecture (given in two slightly different forms on two separate occasions, it says here) by Virginia Woolf in 1928. Reprinted, I know not why (other than perhaps Why Not?) here.

Birthday

Jerome, Jerome Klapka (1859–1927), novelist and playwright,
was born on 2 May 1859 at Bradford Street, Walsall, Staffordshire, the
fourth child and younger son of Jerome Clapp Jerome (1807–1872),
nonconformist lay preacher and Staffordshire coalmine owner, and
Marguerite Jones (d. 1874), daughter of a Swansea solicitor.

from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's daily lives.

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Different strokes

The greater part of valor was choosing what to leave out. It's not a memoir in the strictest sense, because it's not really about us, it's about food production and local economies. The largest emotional events of the year, for us personally, are hardly mentioned, if at all: the death of Steven's sister; my slow recovery from a crippling accident; our family's adjustment after Camille moved to college -- these were not the domain of the book.

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them. "Because it really happened" is the worst reason to write anything, leading directly to ramshackle prose and the painful American custom of oversharing. I suppose 10,000 bloggers would disagree with me on that point. Perhaps here we've hit upon the distinction between blogger and author.

Barbara Kingsolver commenting on her new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, in Salon.

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Obituary: Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood (her Mum)

globeandmail.com: Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood:

"LIVES LIVED
Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood
Mother, dietitian, ice dancer. Born June 8, 1909, in Kinsman's Corners, N.S. Died Dec. 30, 2006, in Toronto, of natural causes, aged 97.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Someone said to me recently, 'You must have had an unusual mother.' True enough.

Margaret Killam was born in 1909 in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. Her father was a country doctor, and she grew up as a socially shy but physically brave tomboy. Unlike her academically brilliant sister, Kae, she was not a natural student. Her father refused to send her to university because she was 'frivolous,' so she taught school, saved the money for her own fees, and won a college scholarship, just to show she could.

More at the above link.

Spotted on Google's blog

In addition, we've just added our most important location yet: an online home at google.com/talks/authors with a video archive
of our events on YouTube. Just this year, we've hosted a great variety of authors, including Martin Amis, Strobe Talbott, Bob & Lee Woodruff, Jonathan Lethem, Don Tapscott, Senator Hillary Clinton, and Carly Fiorina. The subjects of their talks range from literary fiction to science fiction, sociology to technology, politics to business.

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Literary birthday

Oxford DNB: Lives of the week

Fielding, Henry (1707–1754), author and magistrate, was born on 22 April 1707 at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somerset, the eldest of the seven children of Colonel Edmund Fielding (1680–1741), a veteran of Marlborough's wars who would rise to the rank of lieutenant-general, and Sarah Gould (bap. 1682, d. 1718), daughter of Sir Henry Gould (1643/4–1710), judge of the king's bench, and his wife, Sarah (c.1654–1733), daughter of Richard Davidge, a wealthy London merchant with property in the west country, whose estate at Sharpham she inherited.

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"Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can."

That's from Jude the Obscure, obviously. By Hardy, natch--what are you, illiterate? Of course I haven't actually read the book, but no matter.

A distinguished French literary professor has become a surprise bestselling author by writing a book explaining how to wax intellectual about tomes that you have never actually read.

Pierre Baynard, 52, specialises in the link between literature and psychoanalysis, and says it is perfectly possible to bluff your way through a book that you have never read - especially if that conversation happens to be taking place with someone else who also hasn’t read it. All of which just goes to confirm what I’ve always thought about French academics, which is that mostly they are oversubsidised frauds.

Read the rest of Sarah Vine's amusing article here.

Book Report: A Million Penguins

One of the most persistent memes affecting the writing newsgroups in their heyday -- alt.writing, misc.writing and rec.arts.prose in my own experience -- was the recurrent invitation to take part in an exercise of communal composition, where people would join in to write a story either together or serially.

These days we know that such things are called wikis, and it was only a matter of time before the meme found its natural home in a wiki. That it should have happened under the auspices of Penguin Books is a surprise, and not a pleasant one.

Penguin explains the idea here, and you'd be pushed to find a more witless piece of wittering. After comparing the art of novel-writing to software development and scientific research, the piece goes on to remark how Holbein and Titian used apprentices (they actually say "students" as if the master's studio was some summer job) to help make their paintings. The utter stupidity of that analogy will be immediately plain.

And the drivel goes on:

• But what about the novel? Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door? Typically, a writer will acknowledge in print the efforts of their book’s editor, copy editor and agent, since they each will have read the work in draft form. But such acknowledgments regularly include a disclaimer along these lines : “Any errors that remain are, of course, my own”. So the majority of published writers depend on collaboration, but only up to a point. After all, there is usually a single name on the jacket of a novel.

Can writers leave their egos at the door? Excuse me? When did that become a requirement for any type of artistic endeavour, even a collaborative one? Film-making is as collaborative as it gets, but do you suppose Alfred Hitchcock ever left his ego at the door? Did Balanchine check his ego just because some lithe youngsters had to execute his choreography for him?

As for the acknowledgements, does the cretin writing this for Penguin have the faintest idea how books are made? How "typical" is it for a writer to acknowledge a copy editor? And when it's done, does that mean the writer is giving up any measure of creative ownership? What a nitwit idea.

But whatever idiocy the project lacks in theory, it more than makes up for in practice. The wiki -- A Million Penguins -- went live last Thursday, and already there's a great steaming heap of text on the site, beginning with a list of characters that would have had me heading for the door immediately (without stopping to retrieve the ego I'd checked previously) were it not for my responsibility to readers of TTOO.

Eventually we get to the prose itself. I'll quote a passage picked more or less at random, and then bring this sad chapter to a close. Penguin, whose innovations in the past have done more to bring good writing to a large public than any other company, should dump this trash and wash its hands very thoroughly. Leicester De Montfort University, which is also involved, should be looking forward to a purge, but it most likely won't happen.

Here's the extract (Wikipedia-style links stripped out). I've put it at the end so you can move on now if you want, and not miss anything important.

"Ever wondered how bird flu is spread to humans? It begins with a big bird being given a silly name and the virus spreads without any means of stopping it. Even just reading a word of the story about the bird can be fatal."
As he said this, Big Bababoobey Ooby flexed his pinky, gazing at the raggedy nail as though it were a distant mountain chain, clouds massing behind it. He held a straight flush and so did his poker face. Cigar smoke built its own dull mass in the club's close darkness and hung like an undissipated mushroom cloud over the pool table. Big Bababooey Benjy came here all the time, like the weather, only unchanging.
Just then someone broke into song and Big Babooey Benjy turned toward the sound.
It was Big Big Babooey Benjy himself that been singing and Big Babooey Benjy came here often. Truth be told, the Big Baboobey Barbecue Dinner that they served was the best in town. Everybody here knew Big Babooey Benjy as the bird that once lived with Bernard Matthews, though it was a reputation he had tried to live down by dressing as an albatross.
"Big Babooey Benjy," a voice said, "There's a call for you."

Copycattery not so bad after all?

Jonathan Kirsch reviews The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard Posner.

Posner points out that T.S. Eliot's masterpiece "The Waste Land" is "a tissue of quotations (without quotation marks)," a fact that Eliot himself seems to have acknowledged when he elsewhere observed: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." To illustrate Eliot's point, Posner traces a memorable passage from "The Waste Land" ("The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne ... ") to Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra." He reminds us that Shakespeare borrowed and adapted this description from Sir Thomas North's translation of the work of Plutarch.

Posner rails against the current notion that nothing can be creative unless it is wholly original, and argues that copying has always been an important part of the creative process.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Led by the nose

Continuing with our reflections on smell, a fascinating article in the New York Times on lethal smells. Oddly enough, though you have to be a Times subscriber (or pay) to read it there, you can see it here at the IHT for free. Go figger.

The article is by Luca Turin, probably the world's most famous nose, and deals with stinks rather than scents. And the lethality of no smell at all -- some of the most dangerous compounds have no smell at all, such as carbon monoxide, sarin gas (as used in the Tokyo subway attack in 1995) or nuclear waste. Turin writes:

• Consider that on a beautiful stretch of beach near Hartlepool, England, sits a factory that manufactures the smelliest flavors, those that make the instant noodle soup in the office microwave smell of leeks. Next to it is a nuclear power station. When the wind is from the northeast, the guys producing nuclear waste phone to complain about the smell of noodle soup.

Phosgene, according to a 1939 book on gases used in wartime, smelled of hay. Dichlorodiethyl sulphide smells of mustard (hence the name, mustard gas).

More on vile smells over at Scientific American (subscriber only) with an article on how researchers are cleaning up what are called (by Luca Turin, apparently) the "Godzilla of smells" -- a group of compounds called the isonitriles, which can cause you to heave your guts up at the slightest whiff.

Now here's a fine coincidence: the New York Times has a review by John Lanchester (author of the disappointing gourmet murder mystery The Debt to Pleasure) of Luca Turin's book, The Secret of Scent. He makes it sound enthralling:

• Turin has an extraordinary gift for writing about smell. Before he became interested in the science of smell, he was that rare thing, a brilliantly readable perfume critic. He is a biologist by training, based in London after a peripatetic career that eventually led him to the business of fragrance chemistry. He first fell in love with perfume while working in France, via an encounter with a Japanese perfume called Nombre Noir: “halfway between a rose and a violet, but without a trace of the sweetness of either, set instead against an austere, almost saintly background of cigar-box cedar notes. At the same time, it wasn’t dry, and seemed to be glistening with a liquid freshness that made its deep colors glow like a stained-glass window.”

And then what do you know? Up pops a review, in The Guardian this time, of a book by Lanchester himself, and its title? Fragrant Harbour.

To be fair, the book came out in 2002 (which is when the review dates from), and Lanchester's book is about Hong Kong (the title is the English translation of the city's name). So there's no connection between the various strands of this post at all, in reality. But I rather like the way the pieces tumbled out onto the table, giving the illusion of a pattern.

Wodehouse in the house

Someone on a blog I was reading quoted one sentence of PG Wodehouse, and as always happens, I LOLled. Is there now or has there ever been another writer who so consistently has that effect on people?

The someone was John Baker, who maintains a writing blog that's well worth keeping an eye on. What I like best about him is his cat-burglar approach: he's in and out in a matter of minutes, and before you know what's hit you, your mind has been rifled -- or something. That metaphor may require some work. As it happens, a recent post is on metaphor and simile, where he quotes John Cooper Clarke and Alexei Sayle. You have to admire a man with a frame of reference like that.

My point was, too many bloggers go on for too long, probably because they have no editor within or without. And now I'm in danger of infringing my own law.

On this day

Last year on Sour Grapes (there have been no other years on Sour Grapes) I locked myself into the duty of providing one quote every day on a particular theme, and soon found it such an onerous task I almost abandoned it, and was only saved by the ability to pre-write posts and arrange for them to be posted automagically on the day required.

So I'm anxious about the ability or determination of Brian Sholis to keep going on his new blog, Today in Letters. As the name suggests, and as the tagline makes clear, the aim is to provide "letters and diary entries from this day in literary history". It's going great so far, with entries on Alan Bennett, Pushkin, the Goncourts, Faulkner and Proust to name but a few (it's only been going since 8 January). I'll certainly be adding his feed to my feed thingy.

To give a taste, here's just a snippet of a diary extract from Alan Bennett:

• Even the most ordinary remark would be given her own particular twist, and she could be quite camp. Conversation had once turned, as conversation will, to forklift trucks. Feeling that industrial machinery might be remote from Cecil's sphere of interest I said: 'Do you know what a forklift truck is?' She looked at me. 'I do. To my cost.'

Classic Bennett. The ear is faultlessly tuned, but there's not only the found art of the lady's remarks, there's also that "as conversation will" which reminds you he was a colleague of Peter Cook.

Writers pick their favourites

What do you get when 125 of today's writers are asked to nominate their best books of all time? The answer is, something like the unwieldy 544-title list included in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, on sale now. If you buy the book, you get a more detailed breakdown of who chose what, as well as some advocacy from some writers for their picks. But in the absence of an actual copy, some observations about the list itself:

• Overwhelmingly American, which is only to be expected since the writers list is, too. From a European point of view, most of the Big Names are included, but aren't they being slightly over-represented? Some of these titles are minor works. Who would put them in their all-time favourites list? Is this suspicion a reflection of my ignorance of the field of American writing? Or are American writers being either chauvinistic or provincial? Only someone more familiar with AmLit can say.
  
• Of the foreign writers listed, the French seem to me to prevail over all other combined. With only one or two exceptions, this involves classic authors: Proust, Zola, Balzac and Flaubert. I was again surprised to see dodgy listings in Flaubert's case (A Simple Heart?) and the inclusion of The Three Musketeers (I cannot imagine anyone who managed to finish this book also enjoying it). The first of those anomalies is explained by the presence on the panel of Julian Barnes. The second has no explanation: perhaps the writer who voted has had his memory affected by seeing one of the several film versions, let's hope the one with Olly Reed.
  
• So does nobody read modern literature in translation at all? There's one nod to Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk. The most recent French novel I can see is one of the Marguerites, Duras or Yourcenar. Borges and Garcia Marquez get a mention, neither of them terribly recent.
  
• A certain amount of log-rolling. This always comes up when writers nominate their favourites, and gives great pleasure every year when Private Eye magazine reveals the back-scratching that's been going on in the year-end choices. Most unscientifically, I have controlled for the fact that these are prominent contemporary writers, and must therefore be held in some regard. But really, how else do you explain the presence of two titles by John Banville, who also happens to be on the panel? Who was trying to suck up to Chuck Palahniuk, author of the execrable Fight Club? And while Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale can justifiably be described as a major novel, who in their right mind would vote for Oryx and Crake, which was just rubbish?
• There's probably a bit of national favouritism too. I was amazed to see two titles by Alisdair Gray: 1982, Janine, a very slight romance; and Lanark, an trilogy whose influence was greater than its sales, in that dead-end that was English provincial magical realism, when everyone decided they were going to do a Midnight's Children for whatever their own personal backwater was. I was also taken aback to see the far more deserving Sunset Song, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. There are to my knowledge two Scottish authors on the panel: Ian Rankin of the Rebus mysteries, and AL Kennedy. Mystery solved. Likewise, I'd imagine most of the French excesses are Julian Barnes' fault.
  
• I'm not sure I'm in favour of the wholesale ignoring of boundaries in this list. Novels are intertwined with poems like The Divine Comedy and Don Juan, which in turn are mixing with plays by Pinter and Shakespeare, which rub shoulders with short stories by Alice Munro, Raymond Carver and Anton Chekhov. Anthony Powell has his entire Dance to the Music of Time cycle represented in one entry, while Anthony Trollope has to make do with The Last Chronicle of Barset representing his first great cycle, and Phineas Finn the second. It simply makes no sense to separate one of the parts out from the whole.
  
• Pedantic it may be, but I would urge compilers of such lists to do a better job of proof-reading. And while typos are one thing, there's simply no excuse for getting Guy de Maupassant's name wrong. Henri was his proper first name as far as the parish register is concerned, but there's not a soul in the world who knows him by that name.

You can also post your own Top Ten, if you like, and read what others have suggested. There's no clear consensus, with Anna Karenina and War and Peace topping the charts, but not by many votes. There are also a lot of titles mentioned that the professionals didn't vote for. All of this is a Good Thing. There's no need for too much uniformity.

My own list would be a lot less adventurous, and far more provincial: one continent represented, with one exception. Two works only from the 20th century, six from the 19th, one from the 17th and one from the 16th. Pathetic.

I should say that I abhor such lists, because literature is not a beauty contest. You'll point out, quite rightly, that nor is beauty. And here's the list I drew up:

Labyrinths
Middlemarch
Great Expectations
The Barchester Chronicles
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov
Thérèse Raquin
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Pride and Prejudice
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Try it yourself. A most infuriating exercise.

Art for Art's Sake

Here is a list of all the books Art Garfunkel has read since 1968. Yes, that Art Garfunkel, of Simon and Garfunkel, and Bad Timing, and Bright Eyes. There are 967 of them, bringing us up to January 2006 or an average of 26 books a year, or one every two weeks. That's not a particularly voracious schedule, despite what the website says. Let's face it: in his years with Paul Simon he never really had much to do, did he? Get up and sing, erm, that's it.

He also provides a list of 135 favourites here, which seems like rather a lot. The list includes some I'd agree with wholeheartedly: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Pride and Prejudice, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Bleak House, The Red and the Black, Tales from Shakespeare, Perfume and Post Office. His list is clearly not only longer than mine would be, but visibly broader and perhaps even deeper.

It's a very presentable list, but is it too contrived? Did he really read all of those books? We'll never know, and that's in the nature of such lists. You have to at least admire his industry and dedication in keeping the list going, or making it look as if he had. In the end, it doesn't matter. It's an entertaining browse in itself. One or two things on there that might be worth looking up, had we but world enough, and time.

So, gentle reader: what would be on your list of 135 favourite reads of the last 37.5 years?

The power of jargon

Robert Fisk has a bit of a rant in The Independent about the rise of jargon and the corruption of words.

Key paragraph:

• Some newly popular phrases, such as "tipping point" - used about Middle East conflicts when the bad guys are about to lose - or "big picture" - when moralists have to be reminded of the greater good - are merely fashionable. Others are simply odd. I always mixed up "bonding" with "bondage" and "quality time" with a popular assortment of toffees. I used to think that "increase" was a perfectly acceptable word until I discovered that in the military sex-speak of the Pentagon, Iraq would endure a "spike" of violence until a "surge" of extra troops arrived in Baghdad.

Okay, it's a pretty tired and overworked subject, but Fisk gives it his own spin.

Admitted a sizar?

Banging on about Pepys once more, but yesterday's Life of the Day from the Dictionary of National Biography was his, and included a paragraph on his education:

• St Paul's gave Pepys a leaving exhibition in 1650, and on 21 June he entered his name at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where his uncle John Pepys LLD was a fellow. Several members of the family had distinguished themselves in the law, and Samuel seemed to be headed in the same direction. But it was at Magdalene that he was admitted a sizar on 1 October, and where he took up residence on 5 March 1651. On 3 April he was advanced to a scholarship on the foundation of John Spendluffe. Perhaps an invitation came from the new master, John Sadler, a neighbour of the Pepyses in Salisbury Court; another influence may have been Samuel Morland, who became Pepys's tutor, and who knew the Montagus. Whatever the circumstances, it was a move which Pepys and the college only once had occasion to regret (when he was reprimanded for drunkenness in hall on the night of 20 October 1653). Pepys retained fond memories of the college beer and the 'town tart'; he also made many lasting friendships. In the first year he kept with Robert Sawyer, a third-year man and a future attorney-general. Richard Cumberland, later bishop of Peterborough, had been a contemporary of Pepys at St Paul's, but it was at Magdalene that they became close friends. On 4 October 1653 Pepys was elected to a Smith scholarship. He took his BA in March 1654, recording his new status in a book of cabalistic hokum which had taken his fancy. After he left Cambridge Pepys regularly visited his old college; he proceeded MA on 26 June 1660.

So how many of those terms in orange were you familiar with?