June 19, 2013 by BookerTalk

Book Review: The Sea

John Banville was the surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 2005 with his lyrical novel The Sea. Literary pundits had put their money on Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George walking away with the prize or a repeat Booker success for Kazuo Ishiguro and Never Let Me Go.

No-one was more surprised than the Banville at his success, particularly because he felt that two of his earlier books were more like the “middle-ground, middlebrow work” that he felt judges tended to choose. By contrast he considered The Sea to be more of an “art novel”. It was a comment which ruffled more than a few feathers among the literary elite.

Banville’s description of The Sea as an ‘art’ novel could be considered a strange term for a novel that relies on the well-used device of a character returning to a place that played a significant part in his earlier years. But that simplified version of the plot doesn’t to justice to a novel that is a richly textured and patterned meditation on the nature of memory and loss and of the bitter-sweet nature of first love.

In The Sea,the widowed art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where as a young boy on the verge of adolescence, he once spent a family holiday. It’s a trip that is at once an escape from the traumatic loss of his wife but at the same time an opportunity to confront a dramatic event that occurred during that summer seaside sojourn. The nature of that event is held back from the reader until the closing pages of the novel, not because Banville is planning a big dramatic reveal but because his real interest is the process of recollection. Morden’s odyssey into his past takes place through a series of vignettes which reveal his relationships with his father, his wife and his daughter. He recalls also the Grace family who also holidayed in the same resort and whose allure he found impossible to resist.

John Banville at Hay Literary Festival 2013

This is a tale that sucks you in; that takes you along meandering lanes of memory only to suddenly detour to a different time and place and then unexpectedly switch direction yet again to bring us back to the here and now. Banville has been compared to Beckett though at the 2013 Hay Festival he told the audience his
hypnotic result coming somewhere close to perfection

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again.a series of vignettes recounted in a non-linear fasion as he remembers the past.

Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.

With an opening like that, I was hooked. And I hope you will be too. This was the first Banville book I had read. I know it will not be the last.

June 16, 2013 by BookerTalk

Sunday Salon: blogging secrets revealed

I’ve been blogging now for more than a year but it still feels like I’m in the primary grade class in terms of what I know and understand about the art of blogging.

That began to change this week as I read through an early reviewers copy of The Blogger’s Survival Guide, courtesy of LibraryThing. It’s a how-to guide written by two women authors who are experienced bloggers using content from a site they established thesocialmediapanel.com.

Some of the content is fairly standard and even for someone as wet behind the ears as I am, it felt like fairly basic guidance about creating content, checking grammar etc. But then we got into the more technical and advanced stuff and some gems of info. Here are the gems I found.

5 Useful Blogging Tips

Be careful about the size of images used or you’ll make the page slow to load which will irritate readers. Avoid pulling the picture into the page and then resizing. Get it to the size you want first
Set up a blogging schedule. Work out how much time you have to spare each week and how to allocate it against the various tasks of writing posts, engaging in social media, search engine optimisation, promotions and (if this is relevant for you) how to use the site to generate income. Now these women clearly have about double the time I have available in an ordinary week to spend on blogging but there were still some great tips about being more efficient with the time available.
Understand search engine optimisation (SEO) extremely well if you want search engines to find you. First step is to discover some key word phrases relevant to your content – use google analytics to see how frequently people search using those terms.
Try to keep your titles to max of 4 words and avoid commonly occurring words like in, we, I, me etc
Follow the tips at GTmetrix.com to learn how to speed up the performance of your site. Remember that readers are impatient and if the page takes a long time to load, they’ll click away

WordPress Users Tips

My other gold mine find this week was a WordPress Tips blog that is packed with tutorials and detailed instructions on how to get your pages to look the way you want. I followed the guide on how to create tables so my list of reviews was easier to navigate (something I couldn’t figure out at all using WordPress’s own instructions). It took me some time to get used to writing code but I got there in the end and was delighted with the result. You can see the effect on one of my book review listings pages. Highly recommend you take a look at the WordPress Tips blog.

June 16, 2013 by BookerTalk

The Edible Woman: Review

Margaret Atwood‘s first novel, The Edible Woman, was considered a landmark novel when it was published in 1969. Although Atwood later described her work as protofeminist rather than feminist, her themes of gender stereotyping and objectification of women, reflected some of the central concerns of the burgeoning women’s movement.

Her protagonist is Marian McAlpin, a young single woman on the verge of marriage who feels torn between the role that society expects her to enact and her desire to be her self. Her body’s rejection of food becomes the manifestation of her rejection of the female normative behaviour. First she discovers that meat – anything with “bone or tendon or fiber” – revolts her, then the same thing happens with eggs, carrots and rice pudding. By the end of the book she seems to exist on little more than a few salad leaves.

Her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. At one point she hides from her fiance under a sofa bed; in another science she runs away from him, triggering a bizarre night-time car chase through the streets of a snowbound Canadian city. As the wedding date gets closer, her sense of her individuality have declined to the point where she no longer recognises herself. Looking into the mirror all she sees is a “tiny, two-dimensional small figure in a red dress, posed like a paper woman in a mail order catalogue turning and smiling, fluttering.”

Will she or won’t she wed is a question that gets resolved in a truly imaginative way right in the final pages. It’s about the only part of the book that I enjoyed. The rest was a plod to the extent I wouldn’t have bothered reading beyond about page 70 if this hadn’t been the monthly book club choice. Accepting that the issues with which it deals have moved on significantly since the late 60s so didn’t have as much resonance as it did for contemporary readers, my main issues were that I didn’t feel any empathy with Marian – in fact I found her passivity tiresome – and I was lacking the sparkle that I’ve experienced in Atwood’s other works.

Here is a woman who knows that her fiance Peter treats her with little respect, almost like a child. He constantly tells her what to wear and how to act, and she is uncomfortable that his love-making gives her the feeling “she was on doctor’s examination table” or that he regularly rests his ashtray on her back as though she were a a table. Yet she doesn’t say anything or do anything to change the situation, just drifts along with the status quo.

The other characters are even less likeable; actually I found them distasteful. There’s her flatmate, Ainsley, who decides she wants to have a baby without having a husband because she thinks they ruin families. So she seduces someone, gets pregnant by him, doesn’t understand why he should be so angry about being used by her and simply tells him she wants nothing more to do with him But when she reads that children raised without fathers are liable to be homosexual, she changes her mind and begins insisting he marries her.

Another friend is married to someone who thinks the answer to the problem that educated women lose their sense of individual personality when they get married, is for her to produce lots of babies and attend the occasional evening class.

The Edible Woman launched Margaret Atwood’s as a prose writer of major significance. I’m so glad that it wasn’t the first I read by her because I would have been highly unlikely to read another. And that would have meant I missed out on gems like The Handmaiden’s Tale and Blind Assassin.

June 10, 2013 by BookerTalk

A future without books?

Artist’s impression of America’s first paperless library

The good citizens of a community in San Antonio, Texas might have beamed with anticipated pleasure when the city fathers announced they were getting a new, purpose- built library.

It was big news for a community that doesn’t have a bookstore and has never had a library to call its own.

Not unreasonably, many of its residents expected that part of the $1.5M cost would go a long way to paying for a few books. Imagine their surprise to learn that theirs will be the first bookless and paperless public library across the whole of North America.

Many libraries around the world are switching funding from the purchase of paper copies of books, to buying digital versions. Just last year Imperial College in London announced that over 98% of its journal collections were digital, and that it had stopped buying print textbooks. Other academic institutions have experimented with this approach, particularly in their science and technology faculties.

But the new BiblioTech facility in Texas will be the world’s paperless public library. Readers will visit the Apple-inspired building to download e-books directly onto tablets, smart phones, PCs and e-readers from an initial collection of around 10,000 titles. If they don’t have their own devices, they’ll be able to borrow one apparently.

The county commissioners and officials are excited about their new baby, seeing it as the first step in a much bigger project that will see similar facilities open in other parts of the state. “We are trailblazing,” said the county’s top elected official, County Judge Nelson Wolff. “…the world is changing and this is the best, most effective way to bring services to our community.”

Traditionalists (and I hold my hand up to being one of them) might react with rolling eyes to such comments. The first time I saw this picture I imagined that using it would be an antiseptic, soulless experience completely alien to the musty, dusty but oh so atmospheric libraries of my formative reading years. Even now, as libraries have modernised and refurbished, I still can’t imagine getting the same thrill from selecting a book from an on line catalogue rather than taking it down from the shelf and browsing a few pages before deciding if it’s for me. Orange walls and green bar stools don’t make the experience any more pleasurable. If they were going to spend a few million dollars, couldn’t they have done something inventive and pleasurable.

Like this new library in Maranello, Italy which seems to float in water.

Or this one in Mexico city where the architects designed a concrete and glass frame around the front of an old house

But once the initial reaction wore off, I began to think that maybe these good burghers of Buxton county are not only smarter than I gave them credit for, they could be considered community heroes. Woolf is a personal fan of the printed book — he owns about 1,000 first editions though not an electronic reader. “I am a guy who likes that physical book in his hand,” Mr. Wolff said. “But I also realize I am a bit of a fossil.”

Faced with rapidly growing populations in suburbs and satellite towns outside the San Antonio city limits he knew the residents of these areas wanted more services. But no-one would be happy to see their local taxes escalate to pay for them. His plan not only gets people access to a library for the first time, he’s doing it at at a significantly lower cost than the traditional approach.

And he’s given the new facility a very strong community education focus through partnerships with local schools, digital literacy courses and late opening hours.

The new BiblioTech site is due to open later this summer. Whether it will get the positive reaction the officials are hoping for, therefore remains to be seen. There was a public outcry in Newport Beach, California in 2011 when residents learned their city was planning a bookless library. Eventually the city fathers backed away from the plan. Will Buxton become a failed experiment or will convenience and the preferences of a new generation of readers prevail?

One comment from a local father could hold the key.

I’m not likely to use a library containing only e-books, but my kids probably will. I really hate those little screens. But my teenage kids—that is the only way they want to read now.”

June 9, 2013 by BookerTalk

Sunday Salon: An Experiment with Blog Readers

Do you ever get times where you feel like you’re drowning in information?

These days I seem to have more and more of what I call White Rabbit moments. Moments where no matter how much I try, or how fast or I, i feel I’m always behind. My email in box at work is constantly on the verge of its maximum quota. The stack of unread magazines and newspapers on the kitchen table gets higher by the minute it seems. Days have elapsed since the last time I checked the Linked In groups I joined in the hope they would keep me in touch with the latest thinking in the world of public relations and communications. And then of course there are friend’s Facebook and Twitter conversations I’ve missed because I’m too late to the party.

And I haven’t even mentioned blogs yet have I?

I’ve been finding and following sites by other bloggers ever since I started BookerTalk. It started in a fairly small way with just five or six blogs that I visited regularly and left comments on. For me, it’s the feeling of being part of a community that’s the most appealing part of blogging. It’s the chance to discover new authors or titles that I wouldn’t have found myself and also to discuss ideas with people from around the world. But the list of interesting blog sites seem to multiply at an even faster rate than mice. One blogger introduces you to another ‘must read’ site and that one recommends yet another and another.

In the beginning it wasn’t difficult to keep track of them all. As the number I followed grew, I began using the WordPress RSS feedreader. Unfortunately it’s now got to the point where I urgently need a different approach. WordPress Reader I’ve discovered has it’s limitation I’ve discovered.

So I’ve been trying to find a feedreader that would help me aggregate all the blogs I follow in an organised fashion.

WordPress Reader: I like the option to have updates via email as a weekly or daily summary or the instant something is posted. Disadvantage is there’s no way to categorise the blogs stored in the reader. When time is short I just want the option to read updates from the blogs I appreciate the most or ones that contain particular types of content.

Bloglovin: updates are delivered via a daily email. It’s more of a photo stream than a news feed since the update has a picture of the blog and just the first few sentences. To read more you just click on the link. But as with WordPress, there isn’t any option to use categories.

Feedly: this one seems much more sophisticated. It came highly recommended by the techno experts at The Verve. Feedly lets me store feeds into folders, and even pick a different view for each one. So I can separate magazine style blogs from publishers’ blogs for example. I can save individual posts to read later. I can share via Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites should I get that savvy. So far it’s proving a good option though not a perfect solution. For one thing I can’t seem to get the app version on my iPad to synch with the version on my laptop. And despite multitudes of icons giving options to share , email, mark as read etc, the only way to see comments or to make a comment is to click through to the blog itself.

Does anyone have recommendations for other readers I could try?

June 8, 2013 by BookerTalk

Crime and Punishment: Review

Are there ever any circumstances under which it’s acceptable — permissable even — to commit a crime ? It’s a question that lies at the heart of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

The criminal in this novel is Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the Russian capital of Saint Petersburg. Raskolnikov sets out to kill a pawnbroker with an axe but is disturbed in the act by her sister so ends up also killing her. His rationale for his action is ambiguous but the effect on his mental state is dramatic.

He descends into a cycle of anxiety-fuelled periods of delirium alternating with periods in which he is hyperactively lucid, much to the alarm of his closest friend and his mother and sister. His mental anguish is intensified by a psychological cat and mouse game with the magistrate in charge of the investigation, Porfiry Petrovich. Petrovich’s penetrating questions force Raskolnikov to at last give shape to the ideas that led him to kill the women.

He believes there are a few “extrordinary people” who may have the right to commit crimes in certain circumstances. It’s a theory (known as the Superman Theory) closely connected with the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, which according to Raskolnikov means that an extraordinary person may act without fear of consequence.

…. if it necessary for one of them, for the fulfillment of his ideas, to march over corpses, or wade through blood, then in my opinion he may in all conscience authorise himself to wade through blood — in proportion however to his idea and the degree of its importance.

In essence Raskolnikov argues that he murders the pawnbrokers to prove that he is himself one of the members of this elite group, a man of genius like Napolean Bonaparte, absolved of legally mandated punishment as long as he acts in pursuit of his great ideas. But what he cannot escape is the feeling of torment, ‘the darkness and confusion in his soul’ which is more of a self-inflicted punishment that will not diminish unless he can acknowledge and atone for his actions.

On the surface Crime and Punishment belongs to the crime fiction genre where a crime is committed within the first few pages and the rest of the novel is devoted to the question of whether the police will catch the person responsible and bring him to justice. But since we already know the identity of the killer the reader’s interest is much more closely directed to the psychological dimensions of crime. It’s a novel based on a deep and relentless examination of the murderer’s psyche as he tries to reconcile his anguish over the deaths and his fear of arrest with his belief that he was justified in his actions.

Dostoevsky gives us a double voiced perspective, switching from omniscient narrator to interior monologues so that reading the novel, I felt I was both an observer of the effects of Raskolnikov’s actions but also part of his own consciousness as he borders on derangement.

It’s a novel that grabs your attention and doesn’t let it go at any point. Dostoevsky demonstrates a superb grasp of the reality of human nature in its most dire and bleakest form. As depressing as much of it undoubtedly is, the darkness is counterbalanced by the pure goodness that Dostoevsky suggests can be found in the most humble and desperate of circumstances. The self -sacrificing young prostitute, Sonia, embodies hope for Raskolnikov, showing him that there is a chance for his salvation if he can follow her example of a life lived with compassion for others. As the novel ends on a note which indicates the possibility of redemption, forgiveness and regeneration.

A five star read!

June 6, 2013 by BookerTalk

Do bookstores need a rescue mission?

Part of the advert placed by James Patterson

Blockbuster author James Patterson created a stir recently with a hard hitting advert in two of America’s most prestigious magazines. In it, he challenged government leaders to take urgent action in support of the book industry which is finding it increasingly difficult to keep the business afloat. Faced with dwindling sales for printed books many publishers are reducing their catalogues, taking fewer risks with new authors, restructuring and consolidating with their rivals. Meanwhile the bookstores are engaged in a belt tightening exercise by closing poor performing outlets or expanding into associated areas like gifts and stationery.

Without help from the US government, Patterson fears the trend means future generations will be denied a rich vein of potential classics and works of great literature. It would be a dramatic intervention but one Patterson says has a precedent. In an interview with the online magazine Salon he argued that some countries in Europe already provide protection for their publishing industry so why not America?. This is the country after all that paid out millions in aid to prop up the ailing automotive industry in late 2008 when it faced calamitous decline as a consequence of a world-wide recession. But no such helping hand has been proffered to the publishing industry, he said, despite the pressures exerted by rapid uptake of e-reading. Nor are the longer term consequences appreciated.

E-books are fine and dandy, but it’s all happening so quickly, and I don’t think anyone thought through the consequences of having many fewer bookstores, of libraries being shut down or limited, of publishers going out of business — possibly in the future, many publishers going out of business.

(Quote from interview in Salon)

Is he right to be worried about the future of publishing and books?

There are certainly clear signs that all is not well in some sections of the book world.

Since 1997, around 2,500 stores have closed in the US (almost 12% of the total number of outlets across the country) with the demise of Borders in 2011 an indicator that even large chains were not immune.
This isn’t a uniquely American problem however. Across the Atlantic, the number of high street bookshops has more than halved in just seven years. At the end of 2012, analysts at Experian reported that in just one year almost 400 bookshops in the UK had closed, a seven fold increase on 2011. As an indicator of just how bad things have become, there is just one regular bookshop left operating in the centre of Cardiff, the capital city of Wales (Cardiff).

Popular opinion puts the blame on the perfect storm of E-books, Amazon and the prolonged economic downturn. While sales through traditional bricks and mortar stores slumped, e-book sales in the US grew nearly 10 fold between 2008 and 2010. And sales via web retailers like Amazon are booming as a result of the combination of lower prices, free shipping and the ease of searching ordering. In 2011 it was estimated almost one in every four books in the US was bought via Amazon.

What that means is that if you look purely at the number of empty retail units, it would appear that Patterson is right when he describes an industry in crisis.

As emotive as the pictures of empty retail units undoubtedly are, the decline of the high street it’s misleading to use that as the only index of the viability of the industry. Sales figures show the industry is actually doing well overall. The Association of American Publishers reported sales revenue in 2012 was up more then seven percent on the previous year, helped by the Fifty Shades phenomenon and a booming erotica market, coupled with Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy,

So even though many parts of the world have been in the throes of economic turmoil for the last five years, it seems we consumers haven’t lost our book buying habit entirely – we’re just buying them in different ways. We’re picking them up in supermarkets and the motorway services petrol station. We’re ordering them on line. We’re downloading them to e-readers and tablets. And yes we are continuing to browse and buy from the high street shops even if we do have to navigate between the shelves of games and novelty mugs to get to the books.