Freewheeling Andy

Well, I feel no shame in having abandoned it and hidden it at the back of the bookshelves. I'll feel no guilt about not reading it. I've now started on the fascinating "Unspeak" by Steven Poole, about the use of heavily loaded language to spin what people are saying without explicitly spinning.

Turns out I might be in New York on Thursday, but I'll probably stay wednesday night out somewhere in Jersey Hell, and Thursday night will be many miles across, in Rhode Island.

I like all kinds of things. I was thinking about starting a favourite non-fictions thread. Mine would go something like Travel writing: The Road to Oxiania by Robert Byron Personal memoir: Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean Book about food: The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten Science: Genome by Matt Ridley History: one of Black Sea by Neal Ascherson and Byzantium by John Julius Norwich Atlas: The Times Comprehensive Not quite sure what category, but maybe autobiography: If This Is A Man by Primo Levi

I've started on a book called Raven's Exile which is a description of a season on the Green River by the wife of a ranger, the couple spending their summers repeatedly running the river in Desolation Canyon. It should be fascinating, given that I've just come back from a week rafting a (different) section of the Green River. But 25 pages in and I'm about to abandon it; it's my least favourite kind of travel writing, the stuff that uses 25 adjectives when one will do, that fills the pages with the most tediously flowery writing, and it feels like this is being done because, well, there's no content. There's been a little description of geology and, well, that's it so far. Lots of words about fluttering, flowing, shimmering , whispering rivers, and all that rubbish, but nothing actually worth reading. I may give her 120 more pages, but she's driving me mad - not only the writing style, but the author yammering on about sprituality in ravens or the search for the inner soul in desolate landscapes or some such drivel. Argh!

I finished Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You. A really enjoyable book; not particularly highbrow but very enlightening. The author is a bit sleazy, but that's part of the fun - you go through his occasionally sordid romantic past in parallel with his internet dating experiences. I think it would probably be a reasonable book for most girls to read to get a bit of an insight into the male brain (in the way that perhaps High Fidelity once was, too). And it has a world of sensible pointers for anyone about to embark on internet dating, even though that's not really what it's trying to do. And it still could almost all have been written by me, as it's all set around where I work, and the author has so many of my tendencies (particularly terrible commitment-phobia). I have no idea what I'm reading next.

Ah, no. It doesn't put me off now. The two books I've read that I know have been R&J books, Cloud Atlas and Time-Traveller's Wife, are both great.

Well, yes. But I was going through a Murukami phase, and will get excited by anything with "Atlas" in the title. The connection was one that appealed, whereas the connection with R&J is one that instinctively turns me off, being the pretentious pseud that I am.

I almost refused to buy Cloud Atlas because it had a Richad and Judy sticker on the front. Fortunately, the cool name and the fact that it was linked to Murukami in some kind of "exciting Japanese influenced fiction" display in my local Waterstones, overpowered the R&J badness. Right decision by me. But I can't be the only one who is actively put off books that are recommended by determinedly low-brow daytime TV presenters.

I really enjoy this style of book. A couple of note are Philip K Dick's masterpiece, The Man In The High Castle - one of the "If Germany had won the second world war" books; and Pashazade by Jon Grimwood, set in a world where World War I ended differently. It's a sort-of-cyberpunk thriller set in a world still dominated by Ottoman values.

I think these comments on Catch-22 and War and Peace are fair. But I didn't feel AQOTWF as being too literary or aloof. To me it was very resonant.

I think it's true that War-time makes for great literature - the way people are thrown together is part of it, as is the extreme nature of the environment which forces people to behave at the limits of their natural behaviour. It this, too, which allows writers to push the envelopes of characters' experiences and examine how people react to extreme conditions. I think I'm probably a little biased right now given that I've just finished War and Peace and All Quiet on the Western Front, both fantastic books. And many of my other favourite books, like Catch-22 and so on are also set during war.

I bumped into it ina bookshop at bought it for the girlfriend as we'd met on the on-line dating thing. It's just so very, very, very disturbingly familiar. And funny. So far, I'd recommend it to anyone who's ever tried internet dating.

And on the subject of African writing, this is one of my favourite pieces on writing about Africa (and one, it seems, that Achebe might sympathise with), from Granta a few years back. http://www.granta.com/extracts/2615

I've never read anything by him - something I must fix - but I'm delighted that the Booker International people have, for the second time, chosen an interesting novelist who won't be familiar to most people, rather than that "towering shortlist" that appears, well, just a bit safe and comfortable.

I think other people have covered why I don't really go for these kinds of books. The formula is a problem - the "dead body - investigation - red herring - solution - unmask villain" line means that you often pretty much know where the book is going, and the interest then rests solely on whether you can work out whodunnit. Clearly, this is a gross characterisation, but there's something fundamental in crime novels that means they inevitably follow something like that form. The other thing, I think, that winds me up, is the repeating of characters. The fact that it's another "Cycling Detective" novel starring "DCI Andy", who has all his usual traits of being obsessed by food and being terribly lazy, begins to feel like I'm watching an episode of 'Allo 'Allo and just saying "I shall say zis only once" is viewed as funny. The familiarity that some people like is something that drags, for me.

I've been intrigued by a bloke called Donald Harrington since I read about him in another novel. Apparently his "Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks" is the great novel of Arkansas. It's weird to call myself obsessed, though, as I've never read anything of his. All the other stuff that interested that might have been obscure once is now more widely popular like Ismael Kadare.

I'm quickly through All Quiet On The Western Front. It's interesting alongside War and Peace, because both describe the horrors of possibly the two nastiest wars ever fought; but the contrasts are stark in the simplicity of All Quiet, and in the fact that it's all from the point of view of the infantryman, rather than from aristocracy. Anyway, it's really easy to read despite being very, very grim in places, and an incredibly strong anti-war novel. I really can't think of any obvious criticism. Excellent stuff. I'm now reading the much easier still "Millions of Women Are Waiting To Meet You", which is an internet dating memoir thing, and is disturbingly, worryingly familiar, and my girlfriend asked me whether I was the author when she read it.

Carrying on, on the same theme, we started this talking about a problem with reading classics. It could be that I've defined "classic" as a book I have difficulty reading. And it could be that I have difficulty reading books that aren't informed by modernism, and by the impact of the first world war which, in my mind, was really the dividing line between the slightly gentrified Victorian world, still in awe of monarchs and empire, full of traditional romance, a world of horse and cart, and a strong divide between those in nice country mansions, and salt of the earth peasants. The first world war really seems to bring in a world of invention and machines, of cars and planes, and of a far more cynical, far less deferential attitude; and (possibly brought about by the Russian revolution of 1917), a place where the peasants and the gentry mixed far more, where there was much more social mobility. I guess the attitudes to the way that the (largely aristocratic) generals completely screwed up the war, and how they treated the common man as cattle, as cannon fodder, with no thought to the individual, massively accelerated the views from the middle classes that it all had to change, and in literature, as in other art forms, the war accelerated massively the push to try and view the world differently. I think the way that all this began to inform writing is where I begin to read stuff that I can get a grasp on, that I can begin to understand and enjoy; it's where I find the hook, that is missing in earlier literature. Even though earlier books clearly have some of the elements I'm talking about (such as Dickens compassion for the working classes, and so on), so it's not a completely hard line. But I guess it's the combination of events, of political changes, and changes to literary style, that lead to me finding that as the place I begin to enjoy books. The more I think about it, the clearer it seems; because the pre-war stuff I've read and enjoyed is broadly early-SF, either Frankenstein or HG Wells or Jules Verne, which also takes on the modern world and change; or it's pre-Victorian stuff like Swift, which is far more cynical. Anyway, that's just some thoughts, really.

But as a counter, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_literature really defines a "classic book" as (a) Good ( Famous © both good and old (d) both famous and old (e) famous, good and old (f) the best of its kind in a particular form - But, as far as I'm concerned, my little rule of thumb works pretty well. As for modernism itself, I probably struggle as much with a lot of early modernism as I do with classic romantic fiction, but I'm instinctively more sympathetic to it because it rejects the traditional form, and is deliberately playing with techniques of fragmented structure and trying to fix only certain strands in the narrative and so on.

I don't really know what the definition is. Part of me wants to argue that "classics" is Ovid and Demosthenes and the like. But clearly the "modern" definition is different. In my mind the "Classics" are books from the canon - the widely talked about, widely read books that are often referenced - that were written before modernism. So in my mind I use James Joyce's Ullyses (written around 1915 or so) as a dividing line. The advent of modernism and the end of the first world war appeared to thoroughly change "literary" writing, so for me its a convenient dividing line. I wouldn't necessarily suggest anyone takes this as a sensible definition; it's merely one that I've created in my mind.

War and Peace was actually pretty damned great. It romped along nicely, only annoying me when interrupted by too much analysis of history. Although that's part of the key to the book. My thoughts are mostly on the Tolstoy thread, but I'm very very happy to have read it at last. I'm now on to All Quiet On The Western Front, which is much much shorter, and very readable, although has the same dark and graphic and unpleasant battle scenes.

I've finished War & Peace now. I'm not sure it makes sense to do a "review", as the book has surely been reviewed more times than it needs to have been. Anyway, my thoughts are that as a historical family romance romp kind of thing, it was fantastic. As a description of wars and battle scenes, it was also fantastic. It may be one of the best novels ever written. But it is deeply, deeply flawed. There are too many pages discussing the flow of history, discussing how events happen without the control of people. The whole of Epilogue 2 is redundant and incredibly dull, too, being full of only this stuff. Tolstoy needs to discuss his views on history a bit, as he tries to explain how the war of 1812 flowed, how the French won almost every battle yet lost the war, how the inaction of the Russians led to the greatest success. He wants to explain how "Great Men" don't change wars and history, that the flow of human history will happen irrespective of Great Men. A view with which I strongly differ. But Tolstoy appears to be trying to contrast that with the love and happinness you can make in your own life, and to those closest to you. He's talking about the contrast between how you achieve personal redemption, and why that is what you should focus on rather than focussing on the bigger stage where neither you nor anyone else will genuinely change anything. So the discussions on the nature of history are clearly relevent to the book, but they are just too long winded (and, to my mind, wrong). The other thing that drags, for me, is a typical tendency in Victorian novels for the characters to spend too long on introspection, and have moments of epiphane when they suddenly change their entire outlook on life; to me neither of these things seems particularly realistic, although perhaps that's because of my modern sensitivities. But, these criticisms aside, it's still a wonderful book once you battle past the swarms of characters and determine who is who. Something that's pretty inevitable in a 1400 page novel.

Kell, I wouldn't really pin my problem down to one of genre. It's just that most of the genre-fiction that I've read, from Sherlock Holmes to Jules Verne, is basically aimed at teenage readers or was written originally in magazine form for a mass market. It's not "serious" fiction. What I feel is that my pre-1910 problem may actually more be a problem with 19th century fiction. When I've read pre-19th century stuff then although the language is a problem, the books themselves aren't. I may just have a problem with the Victorian mentality.

Well, clearly Animal Farm points at the innate failings of Napoleon's vision, and Snowball's vision - or, hypothetically, other pig's visions, although we can view Snowball as an implicit position that no other pig's visions are testes - is not subjected to any analysis, and therefore isn't considered to have failed. It's interesting that Snowball/Trotsky is considered a hero by Orwell, mind. A position that I always felt was slightly odd, considering that in his essays he's hardly complimentary about any of the extreme left.

I'm loving War & Peace, but I think it's more because it's got so much history and substance as the basis. I've always struggled against all pre-1910 "normal books" (which means Frankenstein and Dracula and HG Wells and Robert Stephenson and Jules Verne are excepted). There's something in the language I really struggle with; and there's something in the action (or more, perhaps, both lack of action, and in the highly-strung reaction) that I rail against. It's particularly how much characters react to what in the modern idiom seem like utterly trivial events; and how much the author focuses on the psychological aspect of this reaction. My feelings my be completely unfair, being based on very little as I struggle to read too much pre-1920 book, but that's what they are.