Love For Books

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.

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!

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.

The tricky business of recommending books to friends

Recommending books is really tricky. I have recommended books to people in the past and then immediately regretted it because of a number of factors.

First of all, there is always the possibility that the book will be very much to your taste. It may not appeal widely and you run the risk of sending people out for a book that fits a genre they will hate.

Secondly, you have to make a very risky judgment regarding the critical capacity of the person you are recommending the book to. You might have suggested they read a really tough piece of modernist literature that you secretly suspect will be beyond them. Equally, you could recommend a lightweight read to a real intellectual and then regret it because of how it reflects on your reading habits.

Of course, the best approach is just to take things easily. Give those considerations a passing though and then dismiss them if you are confident in the book and your friend. If they don’t like your recommendation then it’s not the end of the world.

Give yourself a break from pursuing the classics

When you’re working through a huge back catalogue of books you feel you should have read, you sometimes get to a bit of an impasse.

The difficulty lies in choosing what to read next – whether to go for a classic you feel guilty at having missed out on so far, whether to choose something random that you simply like the look of, or whether to return to something you want to engage with a second time.

Tackling all the classics out there is an endless task, but it is a fulfilling one. Having said that, you have to give yourself a break sometimes and choose something for the sheer pleasure of it to prevent reading from becoming something of a chore.

Follow your instincts and don’t feel guilty about putting things off to give yourself some light entertainment every so often.

What’s your nemesis of classic literature?

Even the most committed reader has a list of books they feel guilty for never having gotten around to. The back catalogue of classic pieces of literature is so extensive that it is hard to keep up, especially as you keep discovering hidden wonders along the way.

I consider myself to be well-read for my age, but there are still plenty of books that have escaped my attention for too long. For instance, I read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for the first time just before Christmas – a sorry state of affairs for a 25-year-old English graduate.

Other notable books that have occupied my Amazon wishlist for an embarrassing length of time include the likes of Heart of Darkness, Anna Karenina and Ulysses. I can console myself with the fact that I’ve read other works by Conrad, Tolstoy and Joyce, but the fact remains that in a discussion of these classics, I’d be obliged to stay out of it.

Next time I’m in a bookshop and I notice on of my nemeses, I absolutely intend to transport it to the till. Best laid plans, though, right? Let me know the books that keep avoiding you, or vice versa.

Orange Prize for fiction

This year is the 15th Orange Prize for Fiction and Waterstones are celebrating by deciding which book from the last 14 years’ winners lists is the top of the crop.

The shortlist includes some massive hits, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Half of A Yellow Sun to Carol Shields’ Larry’s Party.

There are prizes up for grabs for voters too, including an HTC Desire Black smartphone and a pair of tickets to the Orange Prize for Fiction Awards Ceremony.

Check online and register a vote for your chance to win, and make sure you keep up to date with this year’s shortlist too, as Waterstones are offering a massive 40% off their RRP!

Austen – Chick Lit for snobs

Chick Lit is widely criticised by people in the writing world. English, Editing and Proofreading graduates are generally sure of one thing: the lack of substance in a Chick Lit novel.

There will be a central character who is probably doing pretty well for herself. Then something happens with her guy-friend, her sister is heartbroken and she doesn’t know who she can trust about what. She will probably end up getting together with a guy she never even considered, in fact, she probably started out hating him.

Sound familiar? Yep, hundreds of books a year are based on this and thousands and thousands of people read it. There are so many literary snobs who would rather burn it than read it as they can predict what is going to happen from the first couple of pages.

Many people like that believe in real women authors: Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen.
But – hang on – haven’t I just described Pride and Prejudice? The plots of Jane Austen are about as Chick-Lit as you can get, but it is the writing which makes it stand a huge way above the tripe. Austen’s characters are three-dimensional, the dialogue is believable and her witty descriptions and original ideas are a wonder to read.

But just remember next time you get on your high horse about someone reading Wendy Holden; if you have Austen in your hand, you should really think about what kind of criticism you’re going to give.