Love For Books

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.

Bataille: A little adventure goes a long way

A lot of people are put off the prospect of reading Georges Bataille because they have heard stories about the disturbing, sexually graphic and fetishistic nature of his work. However, my advice would be that reading is much more rewarding if you show a little adventure.

Bataille’s Story of Eye can be described using all the terms used above, but that doesn’t make reading it an upsetting experience. In fact, it represents a literary triumph of technique and storytelling.

Bataille’s mastery of the metaphor really stands out in this landmark piece of surrealist fiction and it is a shame that some of the themes involved make it a controversial choice for study in the world’s colleges and universities.

This is just the sort of profound work that ought to make it onto the curriculum more often just to show students what the creative imagination is actually capable with relation to language and literary devices.