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Six degrees from the tipping point
Time for another round of Six Degrees of Separation in which the idea is to form a chain of connections from a starting book. This month Kate who organises the meme, has chosen a non fiction work as the trigger book.
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is one of the few business books I’ve read (rather than just bought and left on the bookshelf). Even more remarkable I enjoyed reading it and found it helpful in my own line of work. Gladwell defines the ‘tipping point‘, as the moment when an idea, a trend or a form of behaviour crosses the threshold, tip and spreads so extensively it becomes a noticeable phenomenon. His first example is about the sudden popularity of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s but he also goes on to talk about a battle between a director of the New York subway and the graffiti artists who are intent on spoiling the look of his trains.
Gladwell sees how the involvement of different types of people with particular sets of social gifts are essential for change to happen: some are “connectors” who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions; “Mavens” are information specialists, the people who delight in gathering information and sharing it. Then there are the “salespeople”, the ones who are great at persuading others to a point of view or to a particular action.
It’s one of these “salespeople” that features in the first book in my chain.
Nelson Mandela was one of the most significant and influential political leaders of our time. His autobiography Long Walk to Freedom profiles his early life, his political awakening and the 27 years he spent in prison for acts of terrorism. But it also shows his ability to persuade people to a different point of view – most notably to the need for reconciliation and not recrimination in post apartheid South Africa. In the final chapters of the book, Mandela — now President of his country — looks to the future and his belief that the struggle against apartheid would continue.
It’s in a post apartheid South Africa that my next book is set.
The Whale Caller by Zakes Mda takes us to a town on the south coast of the Western Cape. It’s become famous as one of the best places from which to watch the migration of Southern Right Whales during the spring and winter. The Whale Caller develops a an affinity with these whales, calling to them using his kelp horn. Much of the book is about the relationship of man to nature but it also has a theme of betrayal. One of the ways this is played out is through a set of characters called The Bored Twins who start off as being playful but they take their games a step too far, with tragic consequences.
The twins in The Whale Caller are not anywhere as endearing as the pair in my next book: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The Kochamma “two-egg twins” are a mischievous pair, loving nothing more than to indulge in word play, where they read backwards take words and phrases uttered by adults and twist and distort them into their own version. They’re also a jealous pair whose noses are decidedly put out of joint when another young girl comes to stay with the family.
All that talk of twins puts me in mind of a classic in the science fiction genre.

Still from the Village of the Damned
John Wyndham’s The Midwitch Cuckoo gives us more than one set of twins. We get a while village of identical children born within a few days of each other in the same small village. They all appear normal except they have unusual, golden eyes and pale, silvery skin. As they grow up it becomes increasingly clear they are far from humanThese children have none of the genetic characteristics of their parents. As they grow up, it becomes increasingly apparent that they are, at least in some respects, not human. This is one of the few science fiction novels I’ve enjoyed along with the film version called Village of the Damned.
Wyndham’s novel was creepy rather than shockingly scary. If it’s the thrill of the later you’re looking for, then Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is more likely to suit. It’s written in the style of a traditional Gothic novel using the familiar device of a storywithin a story. This tale of a mysterious spectre that terrifies a small English town, because it heralds the death of children, proved to be a huge success when it transferred to the stage in 1987 becoming the second longest-running play in the history of the West End after The Mousetrap. I didn’t care for the book at all — I thought Hill’s prose was overblown (it’s so tedious when an author loads up the narrative with adjective upon adjective) but the stage play is superb. Daniel Radcliffe’s film version, felt to me like a very pale imitation.
For brilliance in the Gothic vein, we have to turn to a much earlier novel. For my last link I’m chosing a book with a similar title. The Woman in White was the fifth title published by Wilkie Collins and generally regarded as an early (if not the first) example of the sensation novel. Collins ingeniously hit on the idea of telling this story of an heiress caught up in a deadly conspiracy, through multiple narrators. The effect is akin to hearing witnesses in a legal trial with the reader given clues to help solve the case. The plot does stretch credulity but Collins is such a ace storyteller that you get swept along anyway. But the book wouldn’t be half as good without the character of Count Fosco, a larger than life villain who hides his menacing nature behind a mask of intelligence and urbanity. Early critics of the novel were uncomfortable about this character however, fearing it could corrupt susceptible women readers.
And with that we have reached the end of a chain which has gone from a book that caused a sensation when Gladwell published it in 2000 to one that caused a sensation in 1859. A bit of a strained connection maybe but I shall let you all judge.
Snapshot December 2015
Another 1st of the month today and once again I forgot to mark the occasion with the traditional saying “pinch, punch, first of the month”. This custom seems centuries old, coming from a time when there was a strong belief in the existence of witches. It was thought that salt would make a witch weak, so the pinch part is pinching of the salt, and the punch part was to banish the witch. The witch would be weak from the salt so the punch was to banish her.
I have my own little tradition to mark today however which is to capture what I’m reading, listening to and watching.
Reading
I’ve been riding the Booker Prize wave recently. Last week I finished The Sea The Sea by Iris Murdoch which was so much more enjoyable than I ever expected. Now I’m half way through The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje which was the joint winner of the prize in 1992 (only the second time in the history of the prize that it was split between two novels.) Set in 1945, it features four damaged people who take refuge in a damaged villa north of Florence as Europe emerges from the war. In an upstairs room lies a horrifically burned man. His name is unknown but his memory is intact and it takes him back to the North African desert and the woman he loved. Every page of this novel is a delightful experience of witnessing a masterful writer at his best. One to savour slowly….
Listening
My journey to work has been in the company of a couple of trembling, over excited women over the past few weeks. Throw in a ruined mansion, an overbearing servant, a blind man and the result is a sensation novel which turns on a secret involving illegitimacy. Dead Secret was the fourth published novel from the pen of Wilkie Collins. It’s the novel that immediately preceded his acclaimed Woman in White and what a difference between the two works. Where Woman in White is meticulously constructed and has some memorable characters (including the magnificent Count Fosco), Dead Secret is considerably over-written and the secret is very obvious to readers even if the characters themselves are not quick on the uptake. The only enjoyable aspects are the characters of the vicar’s friend (a man so feeble a slight breeze gives him palpitations) and a villainous male servant.
Watching
The energetic figure of Simon Scharma is bouncing across the screen in the BookerTalk household as we re-visit his superb series A History of Britain. Schama wrote and presented the episodes himself. His jocular style and very mobile facial expressions don’t appeal to everyone but I enjoy his story-telling, thematic approach. Much more engaging than dusty professors in tweed jackets that used to front BBC programs in decades past or the celeb presenters who turn up frequently now (reading everything to camera since they have no clue about the subject personally).
Classics Club – ringing the changes
Hooray, the Classics Club has reinstated its monthly question after a gap of many, many months. Although sometimes they were a bit tough to answer, they did make me pause and think about what I was reading from my list and why.
The latest question is:
“Have you made changes to your list since you first created it? If you added any new titles or removed some, why did you make those changes?”
The simple answer is that I seem to be constantly tempted to fiddle and tweak my Classics Club list to fill in gaps in my reading experience (often the result of a reference in another blog). I’ve also removed a few that were, on reflection, titles that felt more like work than pleasure
This year I’ve made two revisions, adding far more than I removed. Added to the list were:
- Basil by Wilkie Collins ( I liked most of Collins’ work but have never come across this before)
- All Passion Spent – Vita Sackville West . One of her most popular works
- New Grub Street – George Gissing. One of the Guardian’s top 100 novels
- Frost in May by Antonia White. The first novel issued by Virago Books I believe. A re-read from many years ago.
- Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett. A coming-of-age story set in the Midlands of Victorian England, this is the first in a series written between 1910 and 1918. Bennett is an interesting author because in his lifetime he wasn’t rated by contemporaries like Virginia Woolf but he underwent a bit of a revival in the 1990s.
I deleted from the list The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov after hearing details of this book in Andy Miller’s A Year of Reading Dangerously. I’m not a great fan of the kind of magical elements found in that book.
I may well make further changes before August 2017 which is the date by which I’m meant to have read 50 of the titles.