Biology of the Worst Kind

lazylibrary

Busy, busy...I give you Lazylibrary , for all of you who have better things to do than read just because you want to read.

Ever read a book that was a few hundred pages longer than it needed to be? Yeah, so have we. Fortunately, there are authors out there that would rather have a concise and effective book than a lengthy and diluted tome, and that's where we come in.

Welcome to the lazylibrary, where you can find books on any topic without having to worry about high page counts. If it's over 200 pages, you won't even see it. Read all about anything, in less time, for (usually) less money.

This goes a step beyond cut versions of books.  Use this website and you are promised you won't even be troubled by having to acknowledge the existence of a book longer than 200 pages.

Of course, the assumption is that books have a point, a practical purpose.  Concise and effective is not how you might describe Portrait Of A Lady but then it doesn't have a purpose, it's a novel.  Put Henry James into the search facility and you get The Heiress, the movie script version of Washington Square, Harold Bloom on James's Short Stories (111 pages) and - actual  prose fiction - various James Bond books (Fleming's no fool, 128 pages).

So forget the made-up stuff.  But you don't want to waste time finding out about the topic of your choice, either.  The quick version of everything will do.   Look up 'death' on search and you'll find Dog Heaven (40 pages) and Tear Soup (56 pages) towards the top of the list.  Masterpieces for all I know. 'Love' gets you Individual Power: Reclaiming Your Core, Your Truth, Your Life (a weighty 192 pages) as well as I Love You Stinky Face (a more manageable 30 pages).  No need to linger over anything.  Try 'Quantum Physics' and you won't be troubled with anything over 192 pages. You can bone up on the 'Cold War' in 196 pages, and get Elizabeth Bishop, strangely. It's a biography, however, not her poetry (in fact a search on Elizabeth Bishop only brings up biogs and studies - short ones, of course.  No actual poetry at all). 

I suppose it's perfectly reasonable in a world where fast information is paramount and rough information will do.  Perfectly reasonable if you're in a terrible hurry.  Lifehacker.com who flagged lazylibrary describes it as a way for those who want 'to get back in the habit of reading but need a light point of entry'.  It supposes that 'diehard literati' (that's likely me and you) will yell travesty.  What the hell, they imply, any reading is better than none.  I wonder if that's true?  I really don't know.  It seems a much more moralistic and pointless position than my moaning about cut and short books.  If you don't want to read, then don't.  A little reading is not necessarily better than none.  I'm up for the pleasure of reading, not as little as it's possible to get away with because it's such a dull thing to do. If you don't enjoy it, don't bother, check out Wikipedia. 

Sod it, let's make long, complex, intricate books really hard to find, available only to those who know the secret password, or who can recite Finnegan's Wake backwards.  If you want to read anything longer than 200 pages or more taxing than The Thorn Birds you're going to have to beg.

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

Reading The Wedding Group by excellent Elizabeth Taylor, and came across this chapter opener, below.  I'm not the only one who worries about birds :

"'I can't think why birds don't get duodenal ulcers,' Midge said to Mrs Brindle. She was standing at one of the drawing-room windows, watching them, her birds, swooping into and away from the ham-bone on the lawn. 'It's terrible the way they have to eat their food, so full of anxiety all the time.'

'Perhaps they do get them, ulcers,' Mrs Brindle said, flicking her duster along bookshelves. 'We're hardly to know.'"

300 Readers Minus a Novel

Bloomsbury Publishers have seen a 72% drop in their profits in 2006, because in that year there was no new Harry Potter book.  Managing Director Nigel Newton called it 'a challenging year'.  And after the next volume there will be no more Harry Potter books.  Newton said the firm now had a growth strategy in place that included developing new authors, internet-based initiatives,and acquisitions, "all of which we believe will enhance and strengthen our position as a leading publisher"
This is from the business section of BBC Online News rather than the books section (is there one?).  Notice the 'growth strategy' and 'enhance and strengthen our position'.  Bloomsbury is one of the few independent publishers left in the UK.  But when it, instead of Kellogg's or Heinz Publishing, accidentally hit pay dirt with Harry Potter, it behaved just like them.  The money came in and they sighed happily and quietly dropped off to sleep.  Now they are going to develop new authors, notice the Internet, and buy more books in order to raise the profit level.  I wonder if much of their Harry Potter profit has gone on literary fiction, on keeping books in print rather than dumping them as soon as the sales drop, on developing new authors who will not be writing best sellers, and whether those are the kinds of writers they will now start developing.  There was a time when economies of scale  were not an essential part of the book business.  Some books sold very well and they subsidised the ones that the publishers felt were interesting or important but that would not sell 'more than three hundred' copies.

A friend of mine in Sweden has just written a novel (she has had others published previously) and been told by her publisher that it's a remarkable book, but one that only 300 people will read.  It will therefore not be published.  Never mind (actually I do mind) the 300 people who will not get to read the novel.  Will my friend have the stomach to write another book, likely not to be published?  It is deadly being told that a book is good but not commercial enough to be in print.   It wouldn't  matter so much, perhaps, if there was a climate  where writers could publish in magazines or small publishing houses that were interested in writing not profit, but that culture seems to have died too.  People really do need time and encouragement to write.  They need to feel that there are 300, even only 30, people who would find their work interesting and get a chance to read it.  This is not as important as the millions who are malnourished or who have no chance of education or who are dying by violence, but it strikes me that it is a small part of a world where these things are allowed to continue happening because much the same greed runs rampant.

Seriously Uncool

                        

At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches  by Susan Sontag ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump · Hamish Hamilton, 235 pp, £18.99

A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005  by Annie Leibovitz · Cape, 480 pp, £60.00

Susan Sontag intended something like the book which is now published as At the Same Time to be her final collection of essays. After that, says her son, David Rieff, in his foreword, she intended to get on with what she most valued, writing fiction. Edited by her, somewhat differently no doubt, this would, then, have been her next book. As it is, published two years after her death, and put together by Rieff and her assistants with an eye on her preliminary sketch of its contents, it is her last book. Or rather, it is her first posthumous book, since Rieff plans to bring out further collections of her letters, diaries and unpublished writings.

A next book and a last book must be read in different ways, even if they are identical in content and in either case written in the shadow of a cancer that she surely knew was going to kill her sooner rather than later. None of these introductions to other people’s books, contingent newspaper articles and speeches written between 2001 and 2004 was intended as last words. Rieff is adamant about that. And to underline it he speaks of her ‘unalloyed fear of extinction – in no part of her, not even in the last agonised days of her ending, was there the slightest ambivalence, the slightest acceptance’. But it is very hard for the reader, knowing it to be her last, rather than her next book (and coming to it via Rieff’s elegiac foreword) not to see these writings as valedictory – a round-up of Sontag’s thought and work. We may know that death is always an arbitrary interruption of a life, but with us here and her not, and our narrative-hungry brains being what they are, we bind death to life by assuming a summation rather than allowing life to spill pointlessly over the edge into oblivion...

This is a new review in the latest London Review of Books of Susan Sontag essays and an Annie Leibovitz photo book, the rest you can read here.

(...Just seen that you can't read the rest at the LRB site. Sorry.  The piece is restricted to subscribers - which of course it's worth doing if you can afford it.  On the other hand there are some excellent articles in this issue available to read for free.)

Don't Believe A Word I Write

  When I was in Ireland a few years ago, I found a bookshop in Bantry that had a wall of fiction divided into two.  The left section was headed BOOKS BY MEN, and I bet you can guess what the right section was.  I don't know what the expectation was here - the bookshop owner was very grumpy (a man, but he needn't have been) and I felt disinclined to ask.  Were men supposed to gravitate to the BOOKS BY MEN half and women to the other  on the grounds that each gender would find what suited them best written by their own sex?  Or was it the other way round?  That men would read books by women and women books by men, and thereby we would learn about each other and sexual harmony would be encouraged?  Or was the bookshop owner simply an obsessive compulsive who owned a bookshop because what better job is there for the ordering and categorising of its elements?  I'm very partial to Daunt Books which shelves books not according to author alphabetically, or fiction and non-fiction, or subject, but by geography.  All books on or concerning themselves with or by the French are shelved under France.  Camus and the history of the Wars of Religion live happily side by side with Escoffier and tourist maps of Paris.  It has a certain gaiety even if it sometimes it leaves you a bit baffled: where do you look for a book on the history of the footnote?  The Bantry system of book cataloguing is more troublesome.  It assumes, and I suspect that it's generally true, that men and women do read different books.  I once had to get a signature for a contract from a solicitor who, when he saw I was a novelist, asked me if his wife would have heard of me.

These thoughts are prompted by a letter from a reader telling me that his men's book group have been reading a novel of mine: Happily Ever After.  Reading groups in general strike me as a slightly strange way to read a book.  I know there is fun to be had from talking about something you've read, but I'm much more taken with the idea of the private reading of what has been privately written.  Still, reading groups are big.  There are writers who include on their websites Discussion Tips and Questions for reading groups about their latest books.  All life as a GCSE class.  I am not the world's most sociable soul, so I am no authority on group activity.  But a men's reading group is an odd thought.  It's almost daring - as if they might be uncomfortable in a mixed group - women having the upper hand in the fiction reading stakes.  Or it's a less objectionable way to get together and exclude women than joining a working men's club.  There were mixed reviews of my novel from the men's reading group.  It (partly) concerned a middle aged man, Liam, who falls sexually and passionately in love with a woman of 70.  Some of the men  didn't like the book because they didn't believe in the possibility of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman whose wrinkly old body is vividly described in terms of his desire.  The man who wrote to me said he thought it was because they were threatened by the idea of the sexuality of an old woman.  I don't doubt that.  But there's something else here that interests me that has nothing to do with gender, but with what people want and expect when they read.

In fact, many women had the same reaction.  Maybe because they too dislike the idea of an old woman's sexuality.  But always this point was made by saying that the situation and the characters were unbelievable.  Doubtless this is true, it is an unlikely scenario.  But the novel wasn't an attempt to reveal that all over the place younger men were besotted with haggard old women.  For all I know, it never happens.  None of my novels (or my non-fiction) is predicated on presenting a simple, recognisable picture of reality.  Here's the thing: it has never crossed my mind when writing a novel that it should be 'believable' to the reader.  I've always found it odd when a book is praised because its characters and their doings are 'totally believable'.  I don't think that novels have to be (and am not interested in writing novels that are) reproductions of the world.  There are novels written as realistic portraits, but by no means all and there's no reason why they should be.  It is certainly not the only task of a novelist to reproduce reality.  A novel is not good just because it looks to you like the world you know.  Nor bad because it doesn't.  There are other kinds of truth (or even untruth) that a writer might want to get  to.   Pictures they might want to paint of what is least likely.  Some of us want to play with ideas in the form of narrative.  Only the narrowest of views demands that novels must be believable and that novelists have to conform to their readers' notions of the way the world is.

Or

Or, if you're really keen, you can read the whole damn first chapter of On Trying to Keep Still on my New Zealand wanderings here.  But that's it, definitely it, if you want any more you've got to buy the book.

Self Advertisment (Shameless)

The paperback of my last book, On Trying to Keep Still, is about to come out.  Published by Virago, and available here  since you ask.  Make my publisher's day - at any rate, surprise them - and buy a copy.  This is the Introduction to the book:

Something about the idea of being a travel writer distresses me.

So this is not a travel book, though it contains some journeys. It

is a book on travelling and keeping still. Primarily, it is about the

wish to keep still. Something about the distinction between being

a fiction and a non-fiction writer distresses me, too. So I think of

myself as a writer. Period. I suppose that curiosity, the need to

know, is at the heart of it – at the heart of us. Writers (and others)

might qualify as that dreadful child frozen in time who repeatedly

asks ‘why’ in response to every answer to every previous question.

That’s curiosity, but it’s also the good sense a child has that she is

being lied to. Mostly the answers to her questions are wrong, or

at least insufficient, sometimes because of ignorance, sometimes

laziness, but often because the question was impossible to answer.

The problem about not knowing is that the question which is

supposed to elicit enlightenment is difficult to frame precisely,

because you don’t know. Perhaps the point of asking questions is

not to receive an answer but to reiterate and refine the question

itself. I’m inclined to think that there is, essentially, only one

question. It is ‘What is the point?’ and in some form or another

it is asked over and over again by those of us who have failed to

mature enough to stop asking it.

Another question is: what is it like when something or nothing

happens? Something or nothing happens all the time. The same

question has been asked – more or less consciously, with more or

less precision – by many others; let’s say just about everyone, but

notably for me by Michel de Montaigne in his Essais, along with

Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe, St. Augustine in The Confessions,

Nietzsche in his Notebooks.

In 2000 I made a millennial move from London (where I was

born, brought up and always lived) to Cambridge, for no other

reason than that someone I loved – the Poet – lived there. Not

quite travelling, not quite keeping still. But it can’t be said that

now I am alone most of the time. It troubles me no end – I worry

about it while delighting in the company I chose, and choose. In

the past year I have spent periods alone – in various ways, but

usually deliberately – in New Zealand, in a farm cottage in

Somerset, in Lapland. You are never alone with a mind, of

course. I am, therefore I think – remember, wonder, obsess. You’re

never alone with a world. No man is an island – if only. The past

and the present state of the world and of my regular life press in,

no matter how I would wish my private space impenetrable.

Levi-Strauss declared of totemic systems that animals are good to

think with. Irritants and interruptions are also, much as I dislike

them, good to think with. Anyway they are there, in and outside

my head – memories, inconsequentialities, and the doings of the

world.

Much worse, more alarming than anything else, there is also in

solitude emptiness: a mind devoid of thoughts, or rushing away

from them, which is more shocking than outside interruption. No

peaceful blankness, but a mad, skittering nothingness. The perfect

image of aloneness collapses into trivia and pointlessness.

Boredom, perhaps, but I don’t think so. It is more like a flat

refusal to think. A compulsion to subvert the circumstances I

have provided myself with. Not stillness, but a fretful pacing in

my cage. This may be an altogether more authentic will to oblivion.

A sorry truth that shines a light on my narcissistic notion of

blankness and turns it inside out. Take travelling and keeping

still, fiction and non-fiction with a pinch of salt.

Jowls Are Available

This is a new article of mine in the new issue of The London Review of Books.  The whole thing can be found here.

Most religions suggest that we get at least one other go at being. Christianity offers an afterlife, Judaism suggests an altogether better existence once the Messiah arrives, while Hinduism and other Eastern religions try to deal with samsara, the terrible burden of having to do life over and over again until you get it right. But I don’t think any of them offer much help with the alarming notion of multiple worlds, which quantum theorists have arithmeticked to prove entirely possible. As far as I can understand it, Many Worlds Theory proposes that there are n zillion worlds like this one but marginally different, operating in parallel to the only world in which we think we exist. There you’re wearing pink kitten heels not Hush Puppies, there you had sausage for breakfast not muesli, there it so happened that you took a left turn not a right one and became a fashionistic, carnivoracious arch-criminal instead of the peace-negotiating, vegan, style wasteland you are in this world. We might each be living out all our possible lives, through all the variations of what we could possibly say or do, in an infinite number of worlds where everyone else is living out their variations, each at some weird angle to this one that my sorry, innumerate and spatially challenged brain is unable to comprehend. If this sounds like hell on earths to you then you probably haven’t signed up for Second Life....

And Education with Half the Mind

Still, it's not entirely the fault of publishing houses and book selling.  Some weeks ago a friend who teaches English Literature at a one of the new universities told me (despairing) that her department had decided to take To The Lighthouse off the syllabus for 3rd year undergraduates because it was too difficult.

Never mind what you think about Ms. Woolf's work, To The Lighthouse, or what this tells us about the educational standards in the UK, how can people teaching English at university (or school for that matter) deem any book too difficult to be read?  What are they there for?  What is a course in English Literature intended to be? 

There will be English graduates who have not read certain books because they are too difficult, and literature teachers who think they have done their job.  And supply and demand being what it is, now there is a publisher who will provide for them.   

 

Great Books In Half the Time

Almost all publishers are now just small segments of great corporations (think tapeworms), and like supermarkets and breakfast cereal manufacturers they are required to provide product that makes a profit.  The smart modern way to make a profit is to tell people what they want and then give it to them. It's not difficult, it's capitalism.

And so, great news: Weidenfeld & Nicolson are launching a new list in the Spring.  As a result of market research, which has brought us so much of value over the years, Weidenfeld and Nicolson have come up with 'Compact Editions'.  Tag line: Great Books in Half the Time.  According to their market research (quoted in a small note Saturday's Book's section of the Guardian) many readers are put off by the 'elitist' image of classics and by their 'daunting length and small print'.

'What is it about Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick that puts you off reading them?' enquires the nice young man running the focus group.  'Oh, they're elitist, of daunting length and the print's too small.'  Or were there hoards of angry demonstrators charging through Weidenfeld's offices with placards complaining that they had been alienated by Tolstoy and Melville and demanding their right to buy large print bowdlerisations?

So in the first series of Compact Editions Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick along with David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Vanity Fair and Wives and Daughters will be 'sympathetically edited' down to fewer than 400 pages.  But don't fret - so sympathetic are these editors that they will keep the central plot, characters and historical background.  Pity really, I could get quite excited about a 21st century Anna Karenina set in Chislehurst and renamed Paige Simkins (she doesn't die in the end - the train's cancelled on account of engineering works).

Who are these people who want to read scalpelled classics?  They are very, very busy, but they're just as entitled to feel cultured as anyone.  For some reason (a hangover from their grandparents' education perhaps) they want to be able to say that they've read the classics, but they don't want actually to read them.  A novel's just a story, isn't it?  Just the gist, please, I'm busy, very, very busy.  It's odd, this: a long book of say 800 pages is the same as two gutted books of 400 pages each.  So they're in a hurry to get as many titles under their belts as possible, and sod the structure, subplots and descriptive stuff.  Leave out the complexity.  This  creates a new definition of well read.  She read not wisely but too much.

This new list will cost Weidenfeld money , of course, for the sympathetic editing and production, though being classics the books will be free of any copyright, so no author will benefit.   I wonder if the profits from the enterprise will be channelled into publishing and promoting living novelists who are not specifically writing for the market.  Probably not.

The justification for simplifying and eviscerating books, as well as for inventing category nonsenses such as teenage fiction, is that it's better for people to read those than to read nothing.  I don't think so.  A sympathetically edited Moby-Dick is nothing.  At any rate, it isn't Moby-Dick.  You can screw around with the novel to make a film or a play if you like, even to make a new novel of your own.  It could be wonderful.  But the book that Melville wrote remains intact.  It's available to be read as it was written and as generations have read it.  It was written the way it was for a reason.  For Melville's reason.  That's what a novelist does.  It's what the publisher ought to publish.  It's what a reader should take or leave.  For Weidenfeld & Nicolson to offer cut-down versions is to disgrace publishing, to give up on writers and on the possibility of literature.  Actually to give up on anything except making money.