Some may remember that a couple of years ago I wrote a piece in The Guardian about small independent bookshops. What I actually said was that although there were many excellent ones, a few let the side down - cross proprietors, poor stock, dingy premises. That was JUST A FEW. Immediately I became the small indie booksellers enemy, a hate figure who had said she loathed small bookshops and they should all be closed down. It continues to this day. Patiently, I refer them to what I actually said but they prefer their version. So much easier to hate someone, so much more fun to swerve away from the facts. Oh yes - hate. You should have seen some of my mail.

Now something similar is happening to that fine writer Duncan Fallowell. Duncan has a new travel book out next month, about New Zealand. Word got out - proof copies will have gone out to newspapers now -that he was rude, nay, vile and abusive about NZ. The hate mail he is getting is something else. NZers have taken this up and are gunning for DF. But almost none of them will can yet have read it and even if they had, they will of course prefer their own version because they want to hate him.

I have read Duncan`s book. I am one of his greatest fans - see some of this blog archive - and TO NOTO, about his journey through Italy, is one of the great travel books of our time. I did not enjoy his NZ book as much for various reasons but I can assure everyone that although he has some negative things to say about the country ( as indeed he has about Italy) I do not recognise him or his book from the version his enemies describe.

If there is an upside it is that no publicity is bad publicity, never mind what they say count the column inches, de blah. But that is actually no consolation for Duncan, who is feeling upset, hurt and misrepresented, as well he may.  My skin is a lot tougher than his and I have long since ceased to worry when I am attacked for what I did not say. So please will you do something kind today ? Go to Duncan`s website (www.duncanfallowell.com) and give him a message of loving support to neutralise all the hate. You don`t need to have read his book, or indeed, pretend to have read it. Just give him a hug.

 

 

 

There is a new post up for students about this novel. Go to the folder on the right for 'GCSE and A Level Students.'

.. not to mention the totalk absence of flexibility. We are moving our mortgage. To do this we have to produce documents to prove we are who we say we are and live where we say we do and are not laundering money. Right. Passport. The SP has one. I do not. A certified photocopy would do. So we photocopied it and he had it certified by someone In Authority. No, it will not do. Has to be our solicitor or a Bank Manager. Bank Managers are no longer allowed to do this. So it will go to the solicitor. As I do not have a passport it has to be  a certified copy of my driving licence. Send this. No good. It is the old style paper driving licence which is unacceptable. Also, we each have to provide a utility bill. We have no has. Electricity is not billed, it is all done electronically by direct debit. Ditto water. Phone  bill is not acceptable. Bank statement each will do. Fine for the SP. But I do not get paper statements, I was asked to be greener, so I do everything online. But it has to be a paper statement to satisfy The Authorities who oversee all this. Impasse.

In fury, I have said that we have supplied what we have and if they don`t like it enough then we scrap everything and leave the mortgage as it is. I do understand the rules but when people manage to launder millions of pounds in drug money every day and get into and stay in the country and even receive benefits without any form of proper ID, I do wonder what it is all about, Alfie.

There is worse. An elderly lady I know locally was told she could no longer have her pension from the Post Office but must open a bank account and have it paid into that. To open a bank account, she must show driving licence or passport. She has neither. Actually, an awful lot of people have neither. Utility bill. There is only electricity or water and they are in the name of her husband only. These are not acceptable. Impasse. She gets no money meanwhile. She is in tears. Goes to The Authorities and asks what she can possibly do. They said helpfully that if she had neither passport nor driving licence she could not open a bank account. But that the utility bill problem could easily be overcome. All she has to do is present a copy of a recent bank statement.

 

There is a new post.

Many years ago an Anglican priest I knew was sent by his foolish Bishop to a new church on a new but desperately angry and deprived housing estate in the Midlands. He had a young family, he was Cambridge educated and a classical musician and composer, a slight, pale, meek, gentle, charming man. It killed him. Literally. He suffered illness after illness, all serious, all stress-related, plus a plague of boils which lasted for three years. It was possibly the worst placement ever made by a Bishop. I have been thinking of him while reading CRUSADERS by Richard T Kelly (Faber.)  This is a rough-hewn stone of a book with many huge flaws but it is also ambitious, truthful, perceptive and heart-breaking. In it a priest, John Gore, tries to make a church work at the heart of a housing estate not dissimilar to that of my friend - but the one in the novel is in the North East of England a the time of New Labour. The story is not the same but the struggle against hopeless odds is and I admired this novel more than I can say for tackling some big, important, impossibly compliex issues boldly and full-on. I like novels which are ambitious and which, if they fail, fail for the best reasons. There is nothing namby-pamby, nothing smooth and finely-tuned and carefully-wrought here. It is a book with a heart and a soul and courage and conviction and I commend it to you. Not an easy or a light read. But a New Year read with a vengeance.  It has sat well alongside THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV on my bedside table. We forget that in the 19th century people liked their novels very long and they also required detailed descriptions of what people looked like, wore, ate, what their  facial expression was when they said something. We are not used to it because we are surrounded by visual images and because on  the whole we like to supply the faces and physique of characters in fiction for ourselves. Slow reading is rewarding me with Dostoeivesky as it did with CRUSADERS. And I find that as it is 45 years ago since I last read Karamazov, I have forgotten absolutely everything about it. Whether this is good or bad I find it hard to say.

 

There is now a Slow Food movement. I do not fully understand its point but it is about the joys and benefits of eating food which has been grown and prepared, er, slowly as against 'fast food.' 

Well I am a Slow Reader. True, I have a little pile of books on the beside T. and some are dipped into as I read a few pages or one essay or whatever. Some books probably deserve only a quick read but I rarely go for them. I read slowly and more so as I get what my hairdresser always says in a stage whisper... 'O...er..' It does not necessarily mean I read fewer books than most people, given that I have no idea how many that is but it does mean I read what I read with great attention. It pays. Reading slowly is reading deeply and attentively and it is very satisfying. I am reading The Brothers Karamazov, for the first time in 40 years and it, par excellence, is not a novel to read fast. The nuances and subtleties give themselves up when you read slowly. The plethora of characters no longer become muddled and confused. The Nobel Prize essays need to be read slowly because most - not all - of them contain challenging sentences about which you need to think carefully or they slide over the surface of the mind leaving not a wrack behind. You can`t argue with a carefully thought-out premise if you have not actually taken it in and you cannot, in general, take these things in on the wing.

Last night the novelist A.L.Kennedy won the Costa award, ( used to be the Whitbread) and made a characterisatically challenging speech. She believes we are losing, or destroying, our literary culture. I don`t think I agree with her but I never do agree with those who cry 'Woe !' People have been crying 'Woe!' since time began, because they think everything is being ruined but somehow it`s all still here and although, like ALK, I worry about the decline of the public library service, I do not believe we are destroying our literary culture. People are reading more than for a long time, thanks to Reading/Book Groups and 2 for 1s which tempt one to experiment with something different one would not perhaps have read otherwise - not to mention the Richard and Judy Book Club which has done more to encourage reading over the past few years than anything, ANYTHING, else. Except for J.K.Rowling, who is single-handedly responsible for the huge surge in the numbers of children reading books.

If we talk about losing our literary culture for long enough we might begin to believe it is happening. Which would be a pity, because it is not. Still, we`re very good at this sort of thing. I am convinced we have been talking ourselves into a recession for the last few weeks. The media can`t wait. Today I heard that the Footsie dropped a zillion points again on RUMOURS - was there ever a rumour-mill like the City ? - that the Bank of England would cut interest rates. Or would not. Doesn`t matter which. Any old rumour will do and the Footsie plunges. Go on, have fun. Start a rumour. How about 'More people are reading good books than ever before. Our literary culture is being rebuilt at an amazing  rate.' See what happens.

 

.. of Peter Quince and his new best friend Orlando.

Bonded in no time at all.

Sometimes the mood is for the short form and for non-fiction. So not the short story but the essay or 'piece.' How do we know why the mood is not for a 600 page Victorian novel  ? It is something  to do with what my friend Jeanette Winterson is always emphasizing to me ' the need for ' a balanced life.' Well then, a balanced reading life and I recently came to the end of a long Victorian novel so the balance is a pile of books containing the short but by no means simple. I opened Adam Philipps, one of those writers I turn to when I not only want to think, I want to be made to think in a new way, by being shown this as against that in conjunction with the other in a most unexpected conjunction. Philipps is a psychoanalyst and as widely and well and interestingly read a man as you might meet and he finds wonderfully unlikely parallels and balances and contrasts and puts to them you in a way that makes you start. And then think. His collection SIDE EFFECTS  (which, by the way, is one of the most beautifully printed and produced books I have had the pleasure to handle in many a day )  is not to be read at a sitting. It is too dense, too rich, there is too much to respond to. You read a couple of pages, go back, re-read. Stop. Think. It is a most satisfying sort of reading. Last night, he made me stop and think for ages. In a piece about the holocaust, he talks of the need to remember but not to harp on, endlessly re-live, worry ceaselessly because we are afraid of forgetting. But if we are afraid of forgetting because if we do someone might do the same thing all over again one day, we should not be because they will not; they will do it again but they will just do it differently. Indeed, they already have. Genocide did not end in 1945. Say Rwanda. Say Vietnam. Say Cambodia.

Instead, Philipps suggests tentatively that as well as Museums for the Remebrance of.... there might be Museums for Forgetting.

From this to NOBEL LECTURES. 20 YEARS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE Introduced by John Sutherland. Each speech ( I almost wrote Each Peach...) is by a writer so completely themselves and so unlike all the others that these, too, need to be read one by one and digested, thought about, responded to. I began to V.S. Naipaul and experience that wonderful moment of recognition. The biography of the novelist, he says, is irrelevant. Yes. And then he leads us to two great French writers one of whom, Sainte-Beuve, 'believed that to understand a writer it was necessary to know as much as possible about the exterior man, the details of his life.' And the other, Proust, who completely disagreed with him and in a book, Against Sainte-Beuve, picked his argument apart. So from Naipaul I must go to them, as Adam Philipps took me back to Great Expectations, to Freud, and to a writer I have never dared to tackle, Wittgenstein. This is not random dipping into a series of books, this is following Ariadne`s thread - though the analogy is not quite right, as that thread was a means of escape, this thread is leading one ever and deeper inwards on a intellectual journey.

My third book is a most beautiful one called THE PLEASURES OF READING edited by Antonia Fraser and has  essays, each with its own specially commissioned illustration, on just that by writers as diverse as Catherine Cookson and J.G. Ballard, Ruth Rendell and Simon Gray, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Judith Kerr. It is my idea of a Book of Delights and I am about to curl up with it under the duvet.

Someone said, 'I don`t know how you can spend so much of your time living with people who don`t exist, living with them in your head. Don`t you think you should live more in the real world ?' I wondered about that this afternoon as I was clearing out a couple of cupboards, the ones which are always used to hide the Christmas presents and store the wrapping paper and gift tags. That was real life. Christmas. An old card from five years ago was stuck at the back. A small gold bell. A present I bought and then couldn`t find the right person for. One I bought in the wrong size and have forgotten to exchange. Half an angel. Real life.

Outside it is windy, wet and wild. The trees are bare. The garden is under water. A  stray tabby cat has taken refuge in the wood barn. Real life.

Every morning I take my notebook and a newspaper and go to one or other of my coffee shops. I work. Read. Drink. People watch. I like my own company. Coffee out with a friend is not the same thing as this sort of coffee  out. Which is real life ? The gossip with the friend, the people in my head talking to me, walking about, while I look out of the window onto the street and then make a note of about the headgear an old man is wearing as he cycles by and record a bit of the conversation the people in my head are having. Which is real life ?

I read the news. A columnist. Disagree with them. Look in amazement at an especially horrible handbag which costs £1,350. And at quite a nice pair of shoes which cost £25.  Real life.

A good deal of what is other people`s real life is not mine. Commuting into a city every day on a crowded train. Chatting at a water cooler, office talk. Meeting other yummy mummies for a skinny latte before yoga. Wandering along the street looking in the gutter for spare coins. Learning Holiday Spanish. Arguing daily with a husband or a wife or a neighbour.

So much of my own real life is spent alone. Is this bad for me ? How bad ? I like my own company better than anyone else`s apart from members of my family and that is that. I can`t help it. I neither like nor dislike the people in my head. They are just there, telling me about themselves until I write it all down and then they go away.

Real Life. I suppose  it is a sort of madness. But so many things are, and it is at least a productive madness. I think.

January. Brings on philosophizing. And two small, bright tin drums attached to bits of gold wire from the back of the cupboard.

A new post has gone up

I am sometimes asked by publishers for my recommendations as to which book bloggers they should take notice of and which ones to whom, in my opinion anyway, they might usefully send catalogues and/or books. The old scatter-em-about principle was both inefficient and expensive.

My list of the best book bloggers is not long, given the number out there, and it does change quite often as some blogs fall silent. It used to be headed up by Grumpy Old Bookman but he  has ceased blogging, which is a great loss.

I cheer on all book bloggers. Word of mouth promotes books better than any other method of publicity and on the whole,  book-bloggers are word-of-mouthers, amateurs who want to tell not only their friends but a wider circle about what they are reading and enjoying. Their role is different from that of the professional book critic.They are self-appointed and they may not know as much as they think they do. They are also unedited and unregulated. I rarely review in the media now but during the forty years I did so, I often had to be, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about a given title. When I blog about books, I only mention those I admire and have enjoyed. If I can`t praise, I do not write abut the book.

But if it true that book bloggers are unregulated, there is an unofficial set of rules which seems to be forming itself around the best of them and the first rule is the above rule - write about it only if you can be positive.

Another 'rule' is simply etiquette. The best book bloggers give a  quick credit to whoever has drawn a title, an author, a bookseller or an internet book -related link to their attention. Of course you don`t have to do it - but people will notice. Grumpy Old Bookman never put up a notice about a link or a book that was passed on to him by another blogger without a quick 'thanks to X for the heads-up.'  Copy-catting other bloggers threads is unacceptable unless you acknowledge them. In the internet world, where everything can be misinterpreted and also at the same time both very impersonal and chatty-friendly, a bit of courtesy helps to civilise the place.

I have just been reading another book by the remarkably civilised Alberto Manguel, and found a pertinent little paragraph. It was not intended as a piece of advice to book bloggers but it serves as just that - I think it is the best advice anyone could offer, for the worst fault of so many of the book blogs I come across  ( and do not recommend to publishers )  is prolixity. It comes of being self-edited and unregulated of course. Manguel says this.

'I don`t like people summing up books for me. Tempt me, with a title, a scene, a quotation, yes, but not the whole story. Fellow enthusiasts, jacket blurbs, teachers and histories of literature destroy much of our reading pleasure by ratting on the plot.'

The key words in his paragraph are 'tempt me.'  Any book blogger who writes about a book succinctly and skilfully enough to tempt others into reading it is  getting it right.

And if you want to see my list of the best book bloggers - you can`t. It`s very confidential.

 

There will be a new post in the next couple of days.

There will be a post up tomorrow. Sorry for the delay.

Please note, the blog admin withholds your comments for my approval at random - it often witholds my own comments for my approval. I try to check every so often and approve the ones waiting but in the past few days I have not because of being unwell and today being offline thanks to a faulty server. Everything is up to date as of now.

Though not up to going downstairs. The SP is in charge of the kitchen (!) and the rest can wait.

THE BATTLE FOR GULLYWITH  

My new children`s book which comes out on April 7th. I thought I would tell you about some of the rather fun and exciting things that will be happening. I have long believed that authors should not sit back and expect their publishers to do everything, sales and marketing-wise but in the past the author being involved has meant flogging round the country on a tour of bookshops and other venues, which is wearisome and very expensive. But nowadays publishers and authors, have to think sideways, as it were and come up with fresh ideas - which I enjoy. The usual stuff has its place - reviews, author interviews - but a far smaller place than it once did and very much smaller in the children`s book world.

COPIES

I will give away 20 COPIES OF THE BOOK - first come, first served - but though you can read it yourself if you like what I want you to promise to do after that is give the copy to a school -the book is suitable for readers from about 8 or 9 up to, well, 89, so you could give it to the top end of a primary or the bottom end of a secondary school.

The book is going to have its own website, on which there will be competitions, puzzles and very special offers and children can help to SAVE GULLYWITH and receive special badges and certificates.

More later.. plenty of time and nothing will unroll till late March but I like to get everyone all excited.

 

 

Completely felled by vile virus. It seems to have affected my brain too. Back later.

The first school has been chosen and has now received their books. They were

THE MAGIC BED by John Burningham

GEORGE, THE DRAGON AND THE PRINCESS by Christopher Wormell

THE HUTCHINSON BOOK OF FAIRY TALES

and THE TWIG TRILOGY Vol. 1 of the Edge Chronicles by Stewart and Riddell. 

All in hardback for longer life.

The Head Teacher of this school asked me if I knew a source of inexpensive furniture - shelves and tables and chairs/beanbags, for their new library. If anyone can help with info about this area please let me know. It isn`t one I am remotely informed about.

This little book is causing a stir and no mistake. It is by a French academic, Pierre Bayard and the uber-eminent Professor John Sutherland has done a fine review of it in The Times today. I think he almost gets the point but at the last minute, after lifting the corner of the veil, as it were, he drops it and leaps back. He says Bayard might not be entirely serious. I do not think he is serious at all. I think this is a very, very clever book which asks a lot of very clever and rather important questions - and not just about books  but it has been taken as a shocking confession of a Professor who ought to be defrocked or whatever they do to naughty Professors, that he has talked about, nay taught, books he has not read and is proud of it. Is this what the book is about ?

I can take it further. To begin with, there is 'talking about' and 'talking about.'  If  a teacher stands in front of a class and says,  'You should all turn to page 60 where you will read  that  John proposes to Mary using very flowery language. I would like to talk further today about the use of flowery language in literary marriage proposals. Can any of you think of another example ? Jenny ? What is your example ?'

Clearly this is bad teaching if the teacher has previously confessed that he has never read the book in hand. But he might have read P 60. Or the first and last Chapters and the blurb at the front. He will almost certainly have read a lot of learned articles in scholarly journals about it. If this is the case, is he still guilty and should he still be sacked ?

I can talk about James Joyce`s Ulysses at length and with some sense though I have never read it. I can talk about how I have tried to read it. Tried hard. Many times. I can talk about why I have failed and speculate about why others not only succeed but re-read the novel. I can talk about Joyce, about whom I know a fair bit, and about the Joyce Museum in Dublin and about why I have read other books of his but not Ulysses. I don`t think there is anything wrong with this sort of 'talking about' a book you have not read.

Pierre Bayard is trying to show us to ourselves. We have all lied about books we have not read so why not say so and see if we can discover why. Some people say they have read Kafka, in order to impress other people. Turn this on its head. Some people say they have certainly not read those silly children's books about a boy called Harry Potter, when in truth they threw a sickie the day every one of the books was published in order to devour it. But they did so alone and threw the copy into a distant litter bin afterwards. It is for these people that the publishers misguidedly brought out parallel versions with more grown-up dust jackets. What High Court Judge is going to confess that he reads a novel by Barbara Cartland one a week ? Or paperbacks about bosomy girls wearing black lace ?

This can be carried further which I think is what Pierre Bayard means us to do. We all talk about other people, nicely or unkindly. We spread gossip, we tell spiteful little stories about one another. Oh come on, yes you do. We make excuses for the stupid things people we like or even love have done and put the best light on their actions before talking about them. Yet 99 times out of 100 these are people we haven`t read. We know what their covers are like and we've skimmed a bit of their conversation- we may even have inside knowledge about their strange opening chapter. But we cannot say we have read them all the way through, as we have read ourselves.

Hang on a minute. Have we even done that ? Do we know what we are really like ? Have we read between our lines and understood our motivation for behaving in a certain way ? And how many of us go about wearing a grown-up looking dust jacket when really..

You see what I am getting at I`m sure. But as far as books not read, do you remember the time a tv interviewer asked a Booker Judge, live, at the Prize Dinner, if she had read all the books ? There was shock and outrage and whoever the interviewer was got a lot of flak in the the higher-minded literary pages for asking, duh, a really stoopid question.

I`m not at all sure that it was.

Back for a moment to Trollope`s The Last Chronicle of Barset which I have been re-reading. It is not the plot that makes it a masterpiece and yet the plot is masterly. It is the plot that urges you on. Did Mr Crawley really steal the cheque ? Will the Archdeacon disinherit his son Major Grantley if the latter marries Grace ? Will the Bishop stand up to Mrs Proudie ?  Will Conway make a fool of himself again and with which woman and does Lily Dale finally come to see that Johnnie Eames is a fine young man in spite of his flaws ? And what about the man with the red nose in the pub ?  We so want to find out the answers to these questions that we read urgently on. But in the end, when it is all sewn up satisfactorily, we realise that the narrative, the plot, has been the least of it. What counts is the depiction of pride, greed, love, vanity, falsity, loyalty, steadfastness and Trollope`s profound understanding of how those motivate men, shape them, make them behave wisely and well or foolishly and rashly, and of how, even so, the redeeming power of love can change them into something better.  Without this, the plot would be a romp with some suspense but not much else. But without the PLOT, any delineation of character would be dull in the extreme. For it is precisely how their qualities, good and bad, make them behave in life and towards one another for good or ill which matters and turns a well plotted but essentially light novel into a great one. The novel is full of good people flawed, sometimes fatally and bad people redeemed by a glimmer of goodness - and bad people always understood and forgiven, by the author if not by the other characters or even the reader. Trollope is a compassionate novelist. He understands precisely what is meant by the French phrase which translates so poorly ' tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.'

I am sorry I have come to the end of it again. But the joy of the book is that it is there to be read again in five years time or ten and the joy of the masterpiece is that then Trollope`s greatness will reveal itself not only again but in ways I have not so far had the sense to see.

There is a post about this novel for students and teachers, under the FOR GCSE AND A LEVEL STUDENTS category - click on the right.

Darts. The perfect sport for television after Snooker and not difficult to understand. But whereas the crowd at, say, Sheffield`s Crucible for the Snooker world matches is subdued and only dimly visible in the semi-darkness, the crowd at Lakeside for the current darts championship games is in your face and for people watching there is not a lot to beat it. It is like being in some huge Working Men`s Club de nos jours - i.e. women are allowed and are there in abundance. Children too. As the play goes on up at the front on the brilliantly lit dais, you catch glimpses of sturdy men bearing trays of beers aloft - and the beer, naturally, is in pint glasses - to the tables. The darts players and a large proportion of the  male spectators would challenge any medical team as I do not use the word 'large' metaphorically. Beer bellies with shirts draped over them are the norm. A thin darts player looks out of place. Until recently a pall of cigarette smoke would have been laid over the room but it is still packed and I daresay the smokers have a big outside area for their convenience. The WAGFs of the players are as you would expect - often a good deal younger than their men, generally blonde with Dolly Parton nails and make-up. They stand by their men, stand up to cheer when they do well, look anguished when they do not - they are here for the game not to be seen, though they are all pretty glamorous. The best bit, repeated a lot last night, is when a player achieves top score, the caller puts on a special slow up-rolling voice to intone One Hundred and EIGHT-EE.. and up goes a sea of white cards from the audience  with 180 written on each.  I have played darts a lot - nay, I was Drats champion of Lewknor Village Fete three years running, after which they made me retire - and I can only wonder at the sheer perfection of the play in last evening`s match. Time after time a particular score was required and Darryl Fitton obliged, making it look sooooo easy, while his opponent could only shake his head in admiration and bemusement. It would be good without the added bonus of the great people-watching. I long to go to Lakeside though possibly the actual game is best seen on television.  Someone should write about a murder committed at a World Darts Championship.

Someone definitely should.

(No,no, I`m fine thanks. ) What this means as a term in literary criticism is in a nutshell once an author has finished a book then that book exists in its own right, the author is irrelevant and above all, the author cannot - purists would say 'should' not - change anything or provide retrospective explanations, comments, interpretations or elucidations. Or rather, if s/he does they have exactly the same validity, no more and no less, than those of anyone else.

To a point I agree with this. When finished, he book does, must, go off into the world to seek its fortune alone. Students write asking me for my interpretations of certain passages, they require explanations as to what I 'meant' and I tell them that if their interpretation is as valid as mine, if they can justify it from the text, after having read it carefully. And I write stories, I do not insert meanings into them consciously, though those stories may 'mean' this or that to different readers. Fine. If it is there it is there, even if I did not put it there.

I said 'to a point' though. I wonder if I am right. Recently, J.K.Rowling said that her character Dumbledore is gay. She does not say so in any of the HP books though and there is a movement to invalidate her comments, based on the 'death of the author' theory. She says he is gay. Other people agree with her. Yet more 'other people' disagree, some of them vehemently.

Should JKR have back-dated Dumbledore`s sexuality ?  Is it valid now or are the opinions of the not-gay fraternity equally valid ? Another point is that as Dumbledore does not exist, he cannot be gay or not-gay. The SP would say it is essentially the same question as 'How many children had Lady Macbeth ?'

Er. Pass.

 

Getting to know all about you...

But I`m staying out of all this chumminess

 

As you see, on the whole kitten(s) and BTs are now on speaking terms - almost.

As schools are only back this week I am going to repeat the gist of this new enterprise here and keep it on top for a while. I am proposing to give away a book a week - 4 books a month, to a primary school. ANY primary school which does not have enough money for books, which encourages reading and the love of books, which has some sort of library and which would welcome the gift. This is the age where a love of stories and books and reading begins. Please let me know if you are a teacher or school librarian or parent or someone who just knows of a school which would welcome these books. Each school will get a month`s worth - i.e. 4 books. I will be happy to accept requests for titles or I will choose myself - I do not want to push books onto unwilling recipients.

e-mail me at mail@susan-hill.com

 

That is the title of a very fine long article in today`s Guardian Review section, by Blake Morrison. And yes, I know I have suggested before  now that readers here go straight to The Guardian and no, I do not have a vested interest or shares in the paper. The article is about literature bringing healing, hope, help, interest  to those with many forms of illness including primarily, mental illness.  I agree with everything that is said and I know a little about it because I have been involved with the Wordsworth Trust's activity in bringing the study of poetry to a group of serioiusly depressed patients. I will not try to synopsise Blake Morrison`s long piece but I will quote a passage from near the end. A young woman write to Doris Lessing after Lessing`s novel SHIKASTA had had a profound and disturbing effect upon her. Lessing replied and offered financial help with buying more books as she said the young woman needed to read more.

Now listen to this.

'I was a single mother living on social security but in the end I decided  what I needed wasn`t Doris`s money BUT A PUBLIC LIBRARY.' (my caps.)

I would say that I rest my case. But I`m not going to do anything of the sort, I am going to bang on and on and on about it until a lot of people with power and money start to listen and to do something.

 

A former student of the SP has just started a Facebook Group called Give Stanley Wells a Knighthood. It has 101 members.

I joined but I had to declare an interest.

 

 

The first post of 2008 has gone up.

Thanks to my friend Duncan Fallowell for telling me that tonight`s Evening Standard Londoner`s Diary has picked up on my piece about libraries. I`m pleased. But although I took minister Ed Balls to task, I am not sure it was accurate to say I launched into a  'tirade of abuse' against him - because of course it is not Ed Balls's personal fault that there has been such harm done to libraries nationwide over the past ten years. I just wanted him to pick up on that and do some joined up government in terms of trying to get the tide turned and kick a few backsides so that children get the new books they deserve in every public library but most especially in deprived areas where parents cannot buy the books Mr Balls is encouraging them - rightly - to read to their children every day. I am sure he agrees with me.  I mean, would he dare not to ?

 

This post relates loosely to the one about Libraries immediately below. I have been thinking about the matter for some time and have come up with this. I need your help. NOT your money, your help as my eyes and ears. I call this venture THE MAGIC BOOK in deference to The Magic Breakfast, the wonderful small charity I highlighted before Christmas. I hope they will not mind. (Mine is not technically a charity - not going through those hoops.)  I propose to give a minimum of  a book a week to a school library. It could be a class library within a school. That would be for them to decide. The schools should be those which do not have much, if any, book-purchase money. They will therefore probably be in deprived areas but not necessarily inner-city. Plenty of distant rural areas are poorly off. So, need the names and details (if only an e-mail address) of Twelve schools as each one will get books for a month. At the end of the year I will review. When I started the free Creative Writing Course, I suggested participants might, if they wished, send a book to the librarian of a school in Essex which had approached me. They were the delighted recipients of some nice parcels.

You do not have to put up the details on this blog - please e-mail them to me at mail@susan-hill.com.

I can`t really do this without your help and those of any friends and acquaintances and etc. you have who have suggestions. I do of course have some ideas but I want to spread the books about a bit.

I WOULD BE MORE THAN PLEASED TO HEAR FROM TEACHERS AND SCHOOL LIBRARIANS

Age range -primary. Start them young. So 4-11 and I will make sure I give a good selection across the ages. I know four books is not many but it`s better than no books.

I am a great believer in our ability as human beings to make a mess of things, recognise what we are doing in the nick of time and however belatedly repair at least some of the damage. We need every ounce of this ability now  because there is a very serious crisis indeed in the UK and it concerns public libraries. The government has been to blame for demanding that local councils make swingeing financial cuts. Libraries are easy targets and 40 have been closed in the last year. Few buy new books, few spend money on making their buildings warm, comfortable and welcoming - or even waterproof. Books have been thrown out by the thousand and not replaced. So, libraries have become in the main unwelcoming places which do not have many books and almost no new ones. Naturally people have stopped visiting them so borrowings have declined, which makes it easy for councils to say 'there you are, we told you so, no one uses them so we can cut their budgets even more.'

Some have invested everything in computers and internet access. But computers are now relatively cheap, as is internet access, and you do not need a new computer as often as you need a new book to read. Most people have PCs at home, and few who have one do not also have internet access. Libraries assumed that people would use the library computer rather than buy their own. They do not - and in any case, to save money library opening hours have been slashed.

Some  librarians have set their face against books altogether - indeed, they rushed like gadarene swine to do so years ago. They embraced Technology, said that the book was dead, and spent what money they had into changing the nature and name of the altogether - one Chief Librarian in Hampshire is so against the book and literature that he has excelled himself by changing the name of his libraries to 'Discovery Centres' and saying that fiction should not be bought. This Mr Gradgrind has just been rewarded for his philistinism with an MBE. 

Ah, but now what happens ? 2008, has been designated The Year of Reading, and the minister for it, Ed Balls, has said everyone should read to their children every day. Read as in Books. As in Stories. As in Fiction. Now the people whose children need to be read to most are generally those who cannot afford to buy new books - indeed, at the rate children get through stories once they discover their charm, who can afford to buy them all ? The schools try their best but they have scant resources to buy library books. If the public  library in a given area is either closed, does not buy books any more or has turned into a Discovery Centre, complete with video and PC games, banks of computers, cafe and yoga classes, then where are parents to go for these books they are told to read ? In my local town we have a very splendid small library with an excellent children`s section and it is always humming with young readers and parents. We are lucky. So very many are not. I am all for Discovery Centres- as I am for places where mothers can meet and have  coffee, take language classes and do that funny Tai Chi arm waving stuff.  These should be AS WELL AS libraries with books, not instead of. Town Halls, mainly old ones, usually have huge underused spaces. So put the Discovery Centres and the classes in those.

I was made a member of the children`s public library when I was 5 and went twice a week to browse and borrow when my mother did the same, until I was old enough to go alone. Public Libraries educated me until I was in my 30s and could afford to buy books. They also entertained me and enriched my life - and if I had not been able to borrow books by the score which taught me  by example how to write myself, I would never have learned.

Why should the present generation of children be deprived by government cuts and the idiocy of some librarians - LIBRARIANS, for God`s sake. Like the one in Hampshire who has got a bauble for destroying his libraries. It makes me weep.

If Minister Ed Balls has got any, he will not only tell people to read to their children, he will help to restore the libraries and get them the resources to buy the new books to be borrowed, not just spout yet more high-flown hot air. Put your money where your mouth is Mr Balls - or at least make your boss do so.

And while you are at it, OBLIGE librarians to spend money on books and on making their libraries welcoming, warm and comfortable places. If they want coffee shops, great, they can make a bit of money leasing out the spaces to Starbucks or Cafe Nero or Giovanni`s Cappucinos or whoever. 

We are good at clawing our way back from the cliff edge. Let`s do it now. But beware - some of those who arrive wearing jackets emblazoned with Life Saver on are really hell-bent on pushing us right over the cliff. Make sure every Librarian is a book-friendly librarian. My God, you wouldn`t think it needed saying would you ?

As in, writing two books. I have spent the holiday period brooding about which one I should start first. Here`s the choice.,

CORRUPTION. The first in a new crime series set in the Met in the late 70s/early 80s and starring Detective Sergeant Rick Bradshaw going undercover at the behest of Those in High Places to investigate a group of organised criminals which include someone else in a High Place. Lots of meetings with anonymous men from Special Branch in beige raincoats at dismal pigeon-infested outdoor cafes overlooking the Thames.

or

THE CLOCKWINDERS OF WITHERN.  The next book in the series which began with THE BATTLE FOR GULLYWITH (out in April from Bloomsbury). I can`t tell you anything about this one though.

I know exactly where each one will start and where they are both heading, in the vague general misty way I always do know - leaving a lot to chance. And I don`t know which I want to write first.

So shall I start then both, one chapter of one one day, one of the other the next ?

Is this folly ? Shall I fall off the tightrope and hurt my nose ?

All advice welcome.  I may ignore it but it`s fun to get.