Inspired by Pornokitsch’s book porn post earlier today, I have decided to share some of the older, and perhaps less obviously the sort of books I would buy, books in my collection. And here they are…
I bought The Life and Works of Jahiz on abebooks after reading and enjoying Robert Irwin’s The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, but I’ve, er, never got around to reading it. It was published in 1969, so it’s not especially old – in fact, it’s younger than me. But I suspect very few people I know also possess a copy. (I see there’s a single copy for sale on Amazon… for £129.99.)
I’ve tried my hand at poetry, and a few of my attempts have been published, but I’ve found the poetry that appeals to me most is that of the 1930s and 1940s, such as by the Cairo poets. Here I have three collections by Terence Tiller: Reading a Medal (1957), Poems (1941) and The Inward Animal (1943); Richard Spender’s Collected Poems (1944); and John Jarmain’s Poems (1945). They were bought at antique fairs, on eBay, or from Abebooks.
And here are two poetry anthologies from that period. New Verse (1939) features photographs of the contributors at the end and appears to have been annotated in pencil by a previous owner. Poetry of the Present (1949) has a review slip in it, giving the exact publication date as April 28th 1949 and price as 10/6.
I first came across the Cairo poets via the Lawrence Durrell connection. During WWII, there were two groups of poets and writers in Egypt – both serving in the armed forces and civilians. Durrell and Spencer were in the Personal Landscape group, centred around a journal with that title. The other group was called Salamander after its magazine, and later published three collections of poetry by armed forces personnel: Oasis (1943), Return to Oasis (1980) and From Oasis into Italy (1983). (I can’t find any copies of Oasis online to link to, unfortunately.)
Middle East Anthology of Prose and Verse (1946) is, er, exactly that. It includes Lawrence Durrell, John Jarmain, Bernard Spencer, Keith Douglas and Olivia Manning, among others. The book lacking a dustjacket is Personal Landscape (1945), like Oasis above, an anthology drawn from the pages of the magazine of the same name, which includes, er, Lawrence Durrell, John Jarmain, Bernard Spencer, Keith Douglas and Olivia Manning, among others.
From verse to prose – three novels from the 1930s and 1940s. Priddy Barrows (1944) is Jarmain’s only novel – he was killed in WWII. I wrote about it here. Copies of both Priddy Barrows and his poetry collection are, it seems, now impossible to find. At First Sight (1935) is Nicholas Monsarrat’s second novel, and This Is The Schoolroom (1939) is his fourth (but my copy is a 1947 reprint).
Finally, a couple of books about bathyscaphes. Seven Miles Down (1961) is the only book written specifically about the voyage of the Trieste to the floor of Challenger Deep in 1960. I wrote about it here. 2000 Fathoms Down covers descents in a bathyscaphe by the two authors during the 1940s and 1950s.
I took this meme from David Hebblethwaite’s Follow the Thread blog, and he says he found it Story in a Teacup. It’s fifty-five questions about your reading. I think some of my answers are pretty much the same as David’s…
1 Favourite childhood book? I started out in sf reading Dr Who novelisations, but I can remember virtually nothing about them now. I don’t recall any specific books that I loved prior to that. I just read voraciously.
3 What books do you have on request at the library? I don’t use the library.
4 Bad book habit? Buying more books than I can read, and starting books when I haven’t finished the current read.
5 What do you currently have checked out at the library? I don’t use the library.
6 Do you have an e-reader? Nope.
7 Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once? I prefer to read serially, but sometimes – often – I end up reading several books in parallel.
8 Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog? Yes. Since starting SF Mistressworks, and contributing to Daughters of Prometheus, I read far more fiction by women writers. I’ve also used this blog to challenge myself to read books I wouldn’t normally read – see this year’s world fiction reading challenge here.
11 How often do you read out of your comfort zone? Regularly.
12 What is your reading comfort zone? Science fiction and/or literary fiction. Also non-fiction about space exploration.
13 Can you read on the bus? Yes. I commute to work on a tram and read on it every day.
14 Favourite place to read? I usually read for 30 minutes to an hour in bed every night.
15 What is your policy on book lending? For my collectible books, never. Others, I’m happy to give away – and visitors have occasionally left with piles of paperbacks.
16 Do you ever dog-ear books? Never.
17 Do you ever write in the margins of your books? Never. But I will probably buy an ereader of some description soon because it’ll allow me to annotate what I’m reading.
18 Not even with text books? Nope.
19 What is your favourite language to read in? English.
20 What makes you love a book? Beautiful prose, it says something important, engaging characters, interesting structure… rigour, beauty, insight and depth.
21 What will inspire you to recommend a book? I’m happy to recommend books I both enjoy and admire; and often do.
22 Favourite genre? Science fiction.
23 Genre you rarely read (but wish you did)? I’ve read just about every genre there is, but… The genres I don’t read I generally have no intention of reading. Like urban fantasy.
25 Have you ever read a self-help book? No. I’ve no intention of ever doing so.
26 Favourite cookbook? I don’t have one. I prefer eating to cooking.
27 Most inspirational book you’ve read this year (fiction or non-fiction)? I don’t think of books as “inspirational”, or read ones that describe themselves as such.
28 Favorite reading snack? I don’t usually eat while I’m reading.
29 Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience. Probably The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. It was good, but not as good as I’d expected it to be.
30 How often do you agree with critics about a book? Depends on the critic, obviously. But quite often. Award shortlists, on the other hand…
31 How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews? Not giving a negative review to a bad book is dishonest. And dishonest reviews are next to useless.
32 If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you choose? I’ve tried reading in French, German and Arabic, and I’d like to improve my facility in those languages. But I also quite like the idea of being able to read Russian classic literature in Russian.
33 Most intimidating book you’ve ever read? In terms of sheer size, probably Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle. It proved to be excellent.
34 Most intimidating book you’re too nervous to begin? Possibly House Of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. Ian McNiven’s biography of Lawrence Durrell is also intimidatingly big, especially in hardback.
35 Favourite poet? Bernard Spencer or John Jarmain.
36 How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time? I don’t use the library. When I lived in the UAE, I was a member of a subscription library and would generally take out four books every fortnight.
37 How often have you returned books to the library unread? In the UAE, I did it a couple of times. One such book was… The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. I later bought a copy and read it, and subsequently became a huge fan of his writing.
38 Favourite fictional character? I don’t know. There are characters I admire as writerly creations; there are characters who are little more than placeholders for the reader. I prefer the former.
39 Favourite fictional villain? See above.
40 Books I’m most likely to bring on vacation? Big fat ones that require sustained bouts of reading, such as I’ll enjoy on a plane flight or long train journey.
41 The longest I’ve gone without reading. A week, maybe slightly longer.
42 Name a book that you could/would not finish. Most recently, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.
43 What distracts you easily when you’re reading? The television, the internet, the cat…
44 Favourite film adaptation of a novel? It used to be The Right Stuff, but after a recent rewatch I found myself disappointed by the film. Now it would be Fahrenheit 451 – though I love the film but hate the book. Irony in action…
45 Most disappointing film adaptation? The Sylvia Kristal adaptation of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover? It’s a bad film and it’s an adaptation. But the same could be said for a lot of sf adaptations… I don’t really know. I rate David Lynch’s Dune as a flawed masterpiece (and I’d have paid good money to see Alejandro Jodorowski’s film of the book had it been made). And Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is vastly superior to the book…
46 The most money I’ve ever spent in the bookstore at one time? No idea. I’ve spent around £100 on a single order at Amazon a number of times. The most money I’ve spent on a single book is $500, for a first edition of Pied Piper of Lovers, Lawrence Durrell’s first novel. See here.
47 How often do you skim a book before reading it? Very rarely.
48 What would cause you to stop reading a book halfway through? Blatant racism and/or sexism. Offensive sensibilities. Eye-stabbingly bad prose. An inability to plot. Despicable characters.
49. Do you like to keep your books organized? Yes, though the collection is getting a little bit out of hand…
50 Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you’ve read them? Depends. Collectibles I keep. Likewise books that were hard to find. Others I get rid of as soon as I’ve read them. I’ve also purged my book shelves several times – for example, I saw no good reason to keep the Stainless Steel Rat novels I originally bought back in the early 1980s…
51 Are there any books you’ve been avoiding? Urban fantasy novels. Anything with zombies in it. Many of the books that have appeared on recent Hugo Award shortlists…
52 Name a book that made you angry.Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey. See my review here.
53 A book you didn’t expect to like but did?Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence. My father was a big fan of Lawrence’s writing, but I never bothered trying any of his books. And this despite Lawrence Durrell being a big admirer of Lawrence. But after watching Pascale Ferran’s excellent adaptation, Lady Chatterley, in 2009, I decided to have a go at the book. And loved it. After my father died, I promised myself I would read all of Lawrence’s fiction, and recently finished The White Peacock. Structurally it’s a bit odd, but there’s some lovely prose in it. And it is sort of “local” fiction for me as I was born in Nottinghamshire. I am now becoming a bit of a Lawrence fan.
54 A book that you expected to like but didn’t?Bodies by Jed Mercurio. I loved his Ascent, and thought American Adulterer very good indeed. But Bodies was just too gruesome for me.
Christmas is over for another year, and life can now return to what passes for normal. Once again, I was in Denmark for the festivities, but this year it was wet and windy rather than the usual deep snow. There was a lot of eating involved, and a lot of walking. The day after Boxing Day, we went to see David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the cinema (English with Danish subtitles, fortunately). Though I’ve not read the book, I have seen the Swedish version of the film. To be honest, I’m not sure which of the two versions is the better.
The flight back from Denmark was… interesting. On the approach to Manchester Airport, the plane was thrown around by turbulence and we almost touched down… before the captain decided to abort and up we went for another go around. Fortunately, the second attempt was much smoother and we landed in one piece. I first flew in 1968 and I’ve flown at least once a year since, and that was the first time I’ve ever been in an aircraft that took more than one attempt to land. Having said that, I’ve never been a big fan of air travel – and less so these days than I used to be. All that “security theatre” is just unnecessary palaver – how many terrorists has it actually caught? We certainly know it failed to catch two bombers… And while airlines seem to want us to believe that air travel has become easier and more convenient, the reverse is actually true. Also, budget airlines appear to hold their customers in complete contempt. They ask you to queue at the boarding-gate for an hour but don’t provide anywhere to sit. Aircraft are not buses – and given all the hoops passengers are forced to jump through before boarding at present, they never will be. The entire industry needs over-hauling.
Santa brought me some books and some DVDs: William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters and Tariq Ali’s Shadows Of The Pomegranate Tree, the first book of the Islam Quintet; and Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition, Fringe Season 3 and Caprica Season 1 Volume 2. I read the two books before returning to the UK. Of Men and Monsters was better than I expected, though I’m in two minds whether it belongs in the SF Masterwork series. Shadows Of The Pomegranate Tree is set in Moorish Spain in 1500 CE, and chronicles the Spanish Catholics’ campaign to wipe out Islam and its practitioners on the peninsula. It’s strong stuff, though Ali’s frequently inelegant prose didn’t do the book any favours. I’ll probably read the rest of the Quintet at some point, but I’m not going to dash out and buy them immediately.
I’ll also read a number of books during the holiday – in fact, I was averaging one a day. The books were Engleby, Sebastian Faulks (2007), which was a definite improvement on the longeur-packed On Green Dolphin Street. A working-class scholar at Oxford University fancies a female student from afar, but one day she disappears and is never found. It’s not difficult to work out what happened to her, though it’s hard to tell if Faulks thought the reveal was an actual plot twist. The final third of the book is a character-study of the narrator, which not only means Engleby is not a murder-mystery novel but also means it’s unsatisfactory as either murder-mystery or literary fiction.
The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry (2009), I remember seeing an approving review of in the Guardian by Michael Moorcock when the book was published. As a result, I’ve kept an eye open for a copy in charity shops ever since. It is… an odd beast. The story seems better-suited to a comic or graphic novel and, as a result, doesn’t work all that well as prose. A clerk for the Agency, a huge detective agency which seems to be the most important company in a 1950s-style city, is promoted to detective when the detective whose reports he files disappears. He soon ends up out of his depth in some weird conspiracy between the Agency and a villain based in a carnival, and it’s all to do with the way the Agency actually operates. The missing detective is called Travis S Sivart, but nothing is actually made of the fact that the name is a palindrome. It makes you wonder why the author bothered.
Black Swan Green, David Mitchell (2006), is Mitchell’s fourth novel, and is told entirely in the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy living in the eponymous Worcestershire village in 1982. He’s being bullied at school, his parents’ marriage is on the rocks, and an act of petty revenge leads to a tragedy. Everything in the book struck me as a little clichéd, but perhaps that’s because I remember the early eighties quite well. Mitchell handles his narrator’s voice with skill and it’s a very readable story, but it all felt a bit soap-opera-ish in places. It’s not as successful as Cloud Atlas, though it is better than his first two novels, Ghostwritten and number9dream.
Of course, in the weeks leading up to Christmas the postie was also busy. Since my last book haul post, the following books have landed on the mat:
A few sf paperbacks. I used to correspond with Mike Shupp, and I’ve always wanted to read his Destiny Makers quintet, but it’s taken me a while to find decent copies. Now that I have the first book in the series, With Fate Conspire, I can make a start, although I still need to find a copy of the third book, Soldier of Another Fortune. Eye of Terror is Barrington Bayley’s only Warhammer 40K novel, and by all accounts is especially mad – even for him. The Chessmen of Mars almost completes my set of 1970s NEL editions of the John Carter books – because, of course, I have to have a set that all looks the same, and the ones I already had were NEL paperbacks from the 1970s. City of Pearl is November’s belated read for the reading challenge. I doubt I’ll read it before the end of the year, but never mind.
My father owned quite a large collection of Penguin paperbacks. I found an invoice in one, and discovered that he’d actually ordered them direct from the publisher. This was back in the mid-1960s. Though he read and admired all the Penguin books he bought, for the past few decades his reading had mostly been thrillers. Some of his books I want to read myself so I’ve started bringing them home a few at a time, and so… Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier; Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, a short story collection by Malcolm Lowry; Clock Without Hands, The Member of the Wedding and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, all by Carson McCullers; Albert Camus’ The Plague; Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister; and The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner.
Finally, two books for the space books collection. Falling to Earth is the autobiography of Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden. It’s signed. The Story of Manned Space Stations was ridiculously cheap on eBay – about £3.50 compared to £18.99 on Amazon.
It’s been a while since I last did one of these, so here’s a nice photograph of the books which have arrived at my humble abode over the past week or so:
Quite a mixed bag. There’s the second of Mike Cobley’s Humanity’s Fire space opera trilogy, The Orphaned Worlds (and no, they don’t orbit Barnardo’s Star…); a new collection from one of my favourite short story writers, Helen Simpson, In-flight Entertainment; and a signed edition of Lucius Shepard’s latest Dragon Griaule novella, The Taborin Scale, from the excellent Subterranean Press (the novella is already sold out). There’s a bunch of graphic novels – two by Alan Moore: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (I had Volume 2, but had never read Volume 1), and Promethea Book 2. Plus the latest of the Black Widow collections from Marvel, Web of Intrigue; and a back-issue of Spaceship Away!, a magazine dedicated to Dan Dare. The huge book to the left is The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80, edited by Ian S MacNiven. That’s Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller. And yes, Miller appears to be naked on the cover. To the right is The Twist in the Plotting, a rare numbered chapbook of twenty-five poems by Bernard Spencer, published in 1960 by the University of Reading. Lastly, there’s a book for work: Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals, which I plan to read when I’m having trouble sleeping…
Something else arrived a few weeks ago, so I thought I’d include it in this post because, well, because it’s damn cool. It’s the signed limited edition of Postscripts 20/21 ‘Edison’s Frankenstein’. It comes in a nice slipcase:
… which looks like this inside:
And here’s my story, ‘Killing the Dead’:
The first few paragraphs go like this:
Inspector Dante Arawn stepped out of his house, pulled the door carefully shut behind him, and looked up at the sky. The dark had spread. He had expected as much, but it still pained him to see it. Each day, the lit areas of the sky shrank. There was nothing to be done about it. Nothing, at least, for many decades yet. As the population aged and died, so the sky grew darker. It was a fact of… life.
Not everyone accepted that fact. Constable Amrit Supay waited impatiently beside a police cart in the lane for that very reason.
“What do we know?” asked Arawn. He clambered into the cart and settled into the passenger seat.
“South Green Necropolis, sir,” replied Supay. “Another dead body.”
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