Books I've actually finished* lately: 53

[F]or whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers?

- JM Coetzee, in perhaps the least guarded moment of his literary career

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* Re-finished, in this case, for at least the second time.

No. Just NO.

Big, hairy, and in your house

[photo by Patrick Belton]

Or, on a lighter note...

(Un)Intentional symbolism

Answers to some light anecdotal research, undertaken by 16-year-old Bruce McAllister.*

Featuring - surprise, surprise - some pretty good examples of bad writing along with the sort of I'm-much-too-busy-for-this dickishness you get more often than you ought from big literary figures.

There are, of course,** one or two good remarks about symbolism.

__
* Fuller answers (along with interesting typed originals) available from the Paris Review Daily blog section.
** ...

'Thinking cannot be done without words.'

Therefore, grammar.

'Following The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, a novel set on a Greek island in 1940 about the eternal triangle that develops between a doctor's daughter, her fisherman fiance and a young officer who is billeted in the doctor's house....' WHAT?

Facebooks - VIII (bonus round)

Because 10 books a day for a week turned out not to be quite enough either!

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The Prophet - Khalil Gibran
Wiliam Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies - John Carey
Jim Davis - John Masefield
"The Fighting Business" [childhood history compendium, feat. Light Brigade on the front cover. No idea what its real title was]
The Road Stops at Nowhere - Denis Beckett
Messiah - (GF Handel and) Charles Jennens (and others)
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernières
Collected Poems - WB Yeats
Bamboo - William Boyd
Annals of the Former World - John McPhee [not started]

Facebooks - VII

The Complete Librettos of - WS Gilbert
Beau Geste - PC Wren
Engineers of the Soul - Frank Westerman
Five Go to Smuggler's Top - Enid Blyton
Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution - Simon Schama
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
Collected Poems - WH Auden [in progress]
Ancient Egyptian Literature (3 vols.) - Miriam Lichtheim
Asterix [all] - R Goscinny & A Uderzo

Facebooks - VI

Collected Poems - Roger McGough
The Three Musketeers (and several of the sequels) - Alexandre Dumas        [in English, for the record]
The Complete MAUS - Art Spiegelman
Consider The Lobster: and other essays - David Foster Wallace
The Unquiet Grave - 'Palinurus' (Cyril Connolly)
Complete Works - Oscar Wilde [the poetry is mostly terrible, but I                didn't know that then]
Whale (or any other) Adventure - Willard Price
Translations - Brian Friel
Regeneration / The Eye in the Door / The Ghost Road - Pat Barker
'Books v. cigarettes' - George Orwell

How not to use commas*

Have downloaded a copy for the widow of Pte XXX of XXX who died in the 1970s and who has just donated items to the Airborne Museum at Duxford.

- [irrelevant; but dated 17/09/2014]

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* in fact, how not to not use them...

How to use commas

Let it be, for all I care, someone else's wife who rang, barely a minute earlier, while he was sauntering houndstoothed up Charing Cross Road to his sun-filled offices in Bloomsbury, to announce, 'Enough, over, it's been wonderful, but something more wonderful has come my way.'

- Howard Jacobson, Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It

Facebooks - V

Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions - Martin Amis
The Cripple of Inishmaan - Martin McDonagh
Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler [abandoned]
'The Book of Emma' [in Small Hours] - Lachlan Mackinnon
The Psalms - 'David'
Markings - Dag Hammarskjöld (transl. WH Auden)
Rorke's Drift - James Bancroft [I think; but possibly another work.             They all look the same] / The Day of the Dead Moon - David Rattray     [audiobook]
Three Men in a Boat / on the Bummel - Jerome K Jerome
Vertigo - WG Sebald
Lost Oasis: A Desert Adventure - Robert Twigger

Books I've actually finished lately: 52

I'm not sure which I prefer: the prose (and perhaps also a little prosaic) poetry of Letter Composed... or the (sometimes slightly over-)poetic prose of The Yellow Birds. Both have a great many gleaming moments - but neither is 100% successful.

Facebooks - IV

A Beautiful Mind - Sylvia Nasar
How Fiction Works - James Wood
Living Dangerously: The Autobiography of... - Ranulph Fiennes
The Viceroy of Ouidah - Bruce Chatwin
'Art' - Yasmina Reza
The Horse Whisperer - Nicholas Evans
The Broken Word - Adam Foulds
Solo - Rana Dasgupta
Growing - Leonard Woolf
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S Thompson

'Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times'

it declaims in his Spectator byline.

I wonder what it says in The Times.

The translator's victory

Once, during work on Calvino's great comic novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, a running battle ensued over use of the word 'feedback', which Weaver repeatedly struck out of the typescript, and Calvino repeatedly re-inserted. (In the end, Weaver won: Calvino died before he was able to see the final proofs.)

- Ian Thompson, in his Guardian obit of the legendary William Weaver

Books I've actually finished lately: 51

Men went to Catterick with the dawn,
Their ardours shortened their lives.

- Y Gododdin, c. 7th century

Facebooks - III

Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence / Anglo-English      Attitudes - Geoff Dyer [I don't remember which came first. Most              probably read concurrently]
God Is Not Great: the case against religion - Christopher Hitchens
Flashman - George MacDonald Fraser
Chinaman: the Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Shehan Karunatilaka [in      manuscript]
Apocalypse Now (Redux) script - John Milius
Histories - Herodotus [partial]
John Clare: A Biography - Jonathan Bate [unfinished]
In Ethiopia with a Mule - Dervla Murphy
Collected Poems - Zbigniew Herbert
Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie

Facebooks - II

Because Tuesday's child is also full of books.

--

Leonard Woolf: A Life - Victoria Glendinning
The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry - ed. The Enthusiast (Ian Sansom     and others)
An Historical Relation of Ceylon... (etc.) - Robert Knox
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Iliad - Homer
V for Vendetta - Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Shah of Shahs - Ryszard Kapuściński
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
Collected Short Stories - Roald Dahl
The Libertine - Stephen Jeffreys

Books I've actually finished lately: 50

I am keen to know why Macfarlane-Deakin took 'two hipflasks (one of whisky, one of arak)' - and where they got their 'arak' from, in Dorset.

Facebooks - I

So, this thing is going round that you name ten books that had a major impact on you.

Ten books is not enough.

--

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Disgrace - JM Coetzee
Oscar Wilde - Richard Ellmann
One of the many biographies of The Doors [I will endeavour to recall         the particular volume]
The New English Hymnal - various
Tintin [all of] - Hergé
Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis - Wendy Cope
The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto - David Shields
The Collected Stories of... - Lydia Davis

--

Notes / Self-imposed Rules:

1) No particular order of importance.
2) Links are to editions read, where possible.
3) One book per author.
4) -ish. Book stipulated is either first read or first enjoyed.

Crap

that will surely set you back a fortune.

Although I do quite like the Prufock mug.

Today's post*

- John Felstiner, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu

--
* as Brother Christopher was rather fond of pointing out...

"A passion for writing"

French man jailed for phoning and texting his ex 21,807 times

In which I particularly enjoyed the elucidatory photo of a man texting - rather politely, one might add - in English.

[with thanks to Frank MacMillan]

Frumious Bandersnatch, orator

Unfamous last words - GUEST ENTRY

Books I've actually finished lately: 49b

Even if I do think that my super-advanced reviewer's pre-print copy (unsigned)

is just that teensy bit cooler.

Books I've actually finished lately: 49a

Salman Rushdie: As Saleem Sinai says, 'What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same'.
Francis Plug: Sure. But he also calls his penis a soo-soo. [Laughs.]

- Paul Ewen

Sartre dans le karzi

As at Caffè Nero, St Martin's Lane. (You get a higher class of graffitist in the West End, obviously.)

Good lads,* themselves!

Jack Durand (UK) wins World Youth Scrabble Championships.

Some mortifying stats:

--
* (?) Not many girls appear to have been harmed in the making of these Scrabble Championships...

Exit, fucked by a bear

and other sweary animal-kingdom revelations, from Rufus Lodge, in Slate.

It was going to happen eventually

As in this month's Literary Review.

Things one is not typically asked

while trying to download a free PDF:

[Author's note: see following post.]