Love For Books

Look for books in the January sales

January is often the time when you can pick up lots of bargains on clothing, furniture and electronics, but you can also pick up some bargains on books. Books are pretty expensive to get hold of even if you do find them incredibly rewarding.

All the big book shops and online retailers have large scale sales in early January to boost their own sales figures. You can take advantage of this by making a list of the books you’ve wanted for a while and then checking out their prices in the sales. You might even be able to pick up a load of them half price, keeping you in great literature for the next few months.

Get to know your favourite authors with The Paris Review Interviews

It is interesting to find out more about your favourite writers, but many biographies are difficult to get into because they seem a little speculative. Many writers are very secretive and it is hard to imagine how their biographers could penetrate their private and working lives to any great degree.

However, I would certainly recommend getting your hands on a copy of The Paris Review Interviews. There are four volumes in total and they feature interviews from throughout the 20th century, taking in some of the most influential writers of all time. The interviews promise a much greater insight into the way great writers approach writing and they make wonderful reading for literature lovers.

Delve a little deeper into the lesser known works of Steinbeck

John Steinbeck is one of America’s best-loved writers and books like The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and Of Mice and Men have cemented his place in the history books. However, some little-known works are also incredibly rewarding.

Among those works is a short novel called Tortilla Flat. This wonderful story takes place in the familiar Steinbeck setting of California. The ups and downs and moral twists and turns of a group of friends in a downtrodden part of Monterey provides the plot, which comes in the form of a number of short vignettes that are incredibly easy to digest and yet which feel full of meaning.

If your relationship with Steinbeck only stretches as far as the major works, it is definitely worth delving a little deeper.

Mini Modern Classics range is great news for the short story

The short story is a format that was embraced by American audiences a long time ago and writers from all over the world have produced some of their best work in this form. However, British readers have taken a long time to warm to the format which means they are missing out on some fantastic literature.

However, Penguin produces a number of ‘Mini Modern Classics’ which give readers the chance to discover works in short story format by a selection of truly remarkable authors. This gives people ready access to some great short pieces of fiction and allows them to sample a way of reading that is completely different to the novel.

How Greene balances escapism with intense humanity

A lot of avid readers would count escapism, imagination and depth among the most important factors that make a book a great read. These are factors that I’ve always found Graham Greene to deliver in plentiful supply.

Greene is a master at weaving imaginative stories with a dose of realistic depth thanks to his intensely human characters. The humanity of Greene’s characters in works such as The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American and Brighton Rock (to name a few famous examples) is perhaps their real strength, although the thrilling plots they must negotiate are lapped up by his massive readership.

Few authors are able to make thrillers feel as profound as Greene makes them feel. His studies of relationships and miscommunication lend his works a masterful sense of tragedy and realism whilst retaining much of the romance expected of novels read for pure escapism.

Books to give as presents at Christmas

Christmas is just around the corner and it is probably time to start thinking about buying people gifts. Books are great to give at Christmas provided you steer clear of the cookery books and autobiographies that bastardise most of the high street collections on offer.

Those books just demonstrate a lack of thought. It’s far more touching to pick out a book that you think will appeal to someone’s intelligence or personal interests. Perhaps you could pick out a book you love yourself. You could even give your own copy of a favourite, lovingly dog-eared volume that a friend has always shown great interest in. This is a particularly nice gesture.

Special editions and first editions, of course, represent the greatest literary gift you can give.

Exercise restraint when an author infects you with verbal bombast!

Reading certain authors has an immediate effect on the way you approach language. It is funny to note how reading something by Nabokov, or any similarly gifted author with a great deal of flair and an outrageous vocabulary, often compels you to mimic their style with gleeful abandon.

Suddenly your work emails are awash with grandiloquent phraseology and delicious and tangential metaphorical ambulations, and your sesquipedalian text messaging habits result in frightfully extortionate bills.

There’s no harm in indulging yourself when a great author unleashes a verbal torrent in your imagination, but remember that there is a time and a place for such brazen rodomontade!

Weighing up the advantages of modern e-readers

If you are an avid reader then you’ve probably already faced the question of whether or not to buy an e-reader. Devices like the Kindle are enjoying a certain amount of popularity, but for book lovers they represent a real quandary.

On the one hand e-readers open up all sorts of opportunities. They are perfect for reading books when travelling and they are obviously more environmentally-friendly than physical books – but they evoke none of the romance of reading, render your lovingly amassed collection somewhat redundant and equate fiction with technogeekery.

It’s hard to determine whether the Kindle and its competitors are friend or foe in the literary landscape. A measure of balance is required in the debate. There’s certainly no shame in buying an e-reader for its practical advantages and the selection of free classics at online book shops is a major plus point.

However, you may have to content yourself with the odd snide remark about how it compares with ‘the real thing’, just to stay true to your reading roots!

Collections of short stories are great to keep in your bag

It’s always good to have a book of short stories on you. Whenever you are out and about there are likely to be spells where you have to wait for something to happen. These are the ideal times to familiarise yourself with some great short pieces.

I carry Ernest Hemingway’s First Forty-Nine Stories with me whenever a novel is too much to carry or I don’t expect I’ll get long enough to read a whole chapter. The short story is a fantastic medium for ideas and styles so it is nice to slowly work your way through the works of an author you admire, gradually reading all the stories in a collection before moving on to something new.

Catch up on the classic books you should have read as a child

There are some books you feel incredibly guilty for not having read when you were younger. Books like The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird are timeless classics, but they are really easy to digest even for young minds.

In the case of To Kill a Mockingbird, I have only just got around to reading it at the ripe old age of 26. That’s terrible for a fan of American literature but there are always classics that you miss out for a long time in your search to develop your reading habits.

My only advice would be read these books as soon as possible to make up for lost time and then to encourage younger people to seek them out too. That way you can ensure no-one else misses out.