World's top bookshops

The world's most beautiful bookshop, the Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht, according to The Guardian. Read all about it here. It's essentially a giant modular bookshop frame erected inside a Dominican church. If they had erected the self-same framework inside an aircraft hangar, and stocked it with the same books, it doubtless wouldn't have won. The prize is going to the church, then, even though as part of the permission to use the building, it was stipulated that the shop would not impinge on the church building in any way.

Brussels also got a mention, in the form of the art bookshop Posada. Choosing a shop that sells art as well as art-books might seem like cheating. But not as bad as voting a church Best Bookshop.

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Poll: Most beautiful children's book

 

A Flemish paper is running a poll to find out the "most beautiful children's book of all time".
As well as Dutch and Flemish titles (only to be expected) the list already contains the likes of Charlotte's Web and The Cat in the Hat, Where the Wild Things Are and The Snowman.
I take it their definition of "beautiful" is as wide as can be, since they include not only Sendak and Briggs, but also books like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which as far as a recall didn't have a lot of beautiful illustrations, if indeed it had any.

So let me throw the question open to readers: What do you think is the most beautiful children's book of all time?

Already noted:
Beatrix Potter (all)
The BFG
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Alice in Wonderland
Le petit prince
Tracy Beaker
Matilda
Narnia
Pippi Longstocking
Guess How Much I Feel Like Throwing Up Love You
Winnie the Pooh

Vote in comments, as often as you like.

Grapes 2.0

"Reading pushes the pain away"

 

"Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer seems important. No matter how ill you are, there's a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind of conversation - with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of something - can be enormously helpful." Others say the same: "I've stopped seeing the doctor since I came here and cut down on my medication"; "being in a group with other women who have what I had, breast cancer, didn't help me, but talking about books has made a huge difference."

The reading cure | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

Blake Morrison in The Guardian on book groups

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.