Confessions of a Bookseller

I listened to Simon and Thomas’ most recent podcast at the always entertaining and erudite Book Based Banter about the subject of Bookshops. It’s great hearing an in-depth discussion about favourite bookstores, thoughts about what makes an ideal bookshop and the possible fate of bookshops in the future. Hearing Thomas’ description of working in a bookshop where the staff had specialized knowledge and an enthusiastic interest in reading made me think back to my own brief period of working in a bookshop in Boston. I wish there were fond memories about it as being surrounded by books all day should have been a dream come true, but my experiences were anything but idyllic.

In the summer of 1997 I was nineteen years old and had just completed my first year as a scholarship student at a small college near Fenway. I dreaded the prospect of returning to my parents’ home in Maine for the summer. It was something I could have done but ever since I had come out to my parents we had a tense relationship. My father was accepting and loving (if baffled by the whole thing). He frequently travelled with his job so that left me home alone with my mother who had a really difficult time accepting it. The prospect of going back to a house where we’d be stuck together for long periods that involved shouting, cruel insults from both sides, dish breaking and – even worse – long periods of angry silence wasn’t something I could face so I decided to stay in Boston until my sophomore year started. A brilliant theatre teacher at my college generously offered to let me stay at her place near Forest Hills. While she travelled out of state doing theatre workshops the place was mine as long as I did odd chores for her.

My accommodation was taken care of, but I was broke. Not that I minded. Roaming the city was free. All I was interested in was burrowing away in books and theatre. I acted in an experimental theatre company that put on weird shows in an art gallery near Harvard Square which was brilliant but didn’t pay at all. I could have spent all my time rehearsing and reading. However, after a month and a half of living on scraps and staring into an empty refrigerator I realized that I did need to eat some time. I applied for a couple of menial office jobs but didn’t make it far. I guess it isn’t surprising thinking how I must not have been that presentable with my baggy clothes and shy nature. Even a fast food restaurant I applied to didn’t call me back. Since I didn’t have the money to buy books I sometimes went into bookstores to stand amongst the shelves reading new books that weren’t in the library yet. This was before the comfy chair bookshop culture with in-store Starkbucks. I’d read several chapters a day before I sensed the staff getting annoyed by my presence and move on.

So I was stuck until late July when I went by the Barnes & Noble in Kenmore Square and saw they were hiring temporary staff for August. They supply books for Boston University so needed extra help to stock and sell preparing for the students’ return. I applied and was thrilled when I got a call back hiring me. Working in a bookshop was something I should have thought of before since I spent so much time in them anyway and I liked the prospect of being able to work with staff who I assumed would also be enthusiastic readers.

On my training day there were about a dozen of us who were swiftly taken through an induction that taught us about stocking and learning the computer system. It was hurried and very confusing. I really didn’t understand the process of tracking down books on the computer and the managers training us were really overstretched as the shop was very busy. I asked for clarification but only received angry impatient responses. So I felt a little lost. The guy training us was a big buff guy who I tried to make light conversation with him asking what he liked to read. He looked at me in confusion saying “Read what?” I said I assumed he was into reading since he worked in a bookstore. He just laughed and shook his head, “No way man. I like to work out.” So much for talking about books.

On my third day working at Barnes & Noble I was asked with a few other men to help move bookshelves to a temporary space at Boston University they were setting up to sell course books. Not being very strong this was a struggle. I lugged and pushed shelves while the buff manager stood near me angrily saying “Come on, hurry it up man!” I went home that day worn out and with several bruises. Over the next few weeks the store was increasingly busy as students arrived back in the city and wanted their text books for upcoming classes. I still didn’t understand the computer system so helping them out was really difficult. Huge queues of people gathered at my till and angry teenage faces filled my vision as they thrust course lists with innumerable text books at me. I tried to stretch out my lunch breaks as long as possible hunkered down in the fiction section reading some book or other till they’d call me over the intercom back to the academic textbooks floor.

When it neared time to move back into my dorm and start my Fall semester Barnes & Noble said that I could stay on staff but only be on call if they ever needed me. Unsurprisingly they never called. So my short stint as a bookseller was a bit of a let down. It’s understandable it was a special sort of job as it was aimed specifically at supplying text books for the university. I’m sure if I worked in a general bookshop full time the vibe would have been different. I love going in shops in London like Gay’s the Word, Kennington Bookshop, Clerkenwell Tales or Daunt Books and hearing the friendly knowledgeable staff talk about recent books they’ve read or how they are able to easily navigate the shelves to find what I’m looking for. Not that I think anyone should romanticize it too much; I know it's a hard business. I’m fortunate enough now to be in a financially secure position where I can buy whatever book I’d like. This is something I’m really grateful for thinking back to times when I could barely afford to buy a 99 cent Dover Thrift book. Since living in London I’ve seen a lot of the used bookstores I used to love on Charing Cross Road and other places close down. The enormous Waterstones in Piccadilly Circus used to have a much better vibe with enthusiastic staff and frequent reading events by quality authors. These days their policy seems to be more towards only pushing the top sellers and the atmosphere has changed to being more brisk and businesslike. So I’m very grateful that there are still some fantastic independent bookstores with caring staff here. Long may they continue!

Young Skins by Colin Barrett

Colin Barrett’s writing immediately gripped me with his richly descriptive language and evocative dialogue. It’s a display of real talent when characters can rise fully formed off the page through distinct inflections in the tone of their dialogue so you can almost hear their voices in your ear. The stories in this debut book describe a cast of characters on the margins of Irish society ranging from wild teenagers to dispirited middle-aged men. Pubs are often the spots where these two diametrically opposed sensibilities cross paths – though very seldom do they meet. Each story invokes a particular place and set of characters struggling with internal conflicts which are brought to the forefront through events which are sometimes calamitous and other times subtly transformative.

‘The Clancy Kid’ follows two boys in their mid twenties who take revenge upon a girl for slighting one of them. They seem unable to move on with their lives as they don’t know what they should be striving for so they are trapped in repeating the same behaviour over and over. At one point the narrator remarks “There is the comfort of routine in our routine but also the mystery of that routine’s persistence.” The circular routines they go through night after night reflect their inability to emotionally progress and grow. Only at the end does the narrator seem ready to cross a literal and metaphorical bridge so that he can leave behind him the resentment and things he’s been clinging onto.

‘Bait’ focuses on another couple of close young male friends who stick to a routine. The narrator’s friend Matteen is a pool shark who makes money by luring people in to challenge him at the same pub every night. The narrator is drawn away from the lively pub by a couple of girls who seduce him like sirens and then seize him in a gripping and unsettling scene.

If men in some of these stories aren’t able to progress in their lives the character of Val in the story ‘The Moon’ is definitively left behind by a young woman he’s been seeing as she moves to go to university. There’s a really subtly written feeling of melancholy as he understands their relationship can’t progress beyond a certain point and there are boundaries which will always keep them at a distance from each other.

In ‘Stand Your Skin’ a man nicknamed Bat is haunted by an act of senseless violence perpetrated upon him by someone who “couldn’t stand being in his own skin, and couldn’t stand the rest of us neither” which has left Bat slightly impaired and his face scarred. He’s a solitary figure that has let his hair grown very long and is cautious in his social interactions – the horrendous attack upon him having been reduced to a barroom anecdote.

A seedier side of a small community is shown in ‘Calm with Horses’ where Douglas (nicknamed “Arm”) acts as a thuggish guard or “loyal skin” to a drug dealer named Dympna. This is the longest story in the book and it builds tension slowly where the threat of violent retaliation seems to hide around every corner. Points of horrific violence are paired against tender scenes where Arm cares for his mentally-disabled son Jack who likes to regularly go to a stable to spend time with horses as part of his therapy. Barrett beautifully describes nature and the sky particularly as a reflection of the character’s moods. When a man’s life is being threatened he looks up “at the scratchy stars and that cute old sphinx-faced cunt of a moon, up there watching and still keeping schtum after all these years.” This conveys all the anger and feelings of helplessness living in an impassive world that he experiences in a moment of high distress. Later on when Arm is in a state of crisis “the night sky looked like something precious and crystalline had been smashed repeatedly against it.” Here he perfectly evokes the state of mind of his character whose ordered life has been destroyed while giving a vivid portrait of the environment he inhabits.

Barrett describes the heart-crushing weariness of alcohol addiction in his story ‘Diamonds’ where a man’s best convictions to go sober are undone after an encounter with a woman he meets at AA. The mechanics of sliding back into the habit as well as engaging in an affair with a married woman whose husband spends most of the year away working in a mine are told in a way that seems so natural as to seem inevitable. All emotion and regret seem as totally blunted as his senses in his alcoholic state. Only wistful memories of an adolescence filled with athletic promise offer any brightness in his life, but hope now seems like an anonymous stranger. The tragedy of his fate is portrayed in stark realistic detail.

Two men sit in a pub drinking and try not to think too much about the funeral procession which will soon be passing by outside in the story ‘Kindly Forget My Existence.’ Feelings of loss hang heavy in the air as they make awkward conversation with the foreign barman who recounts his time engaged in the Bosnian war. While the men have a complex relationship based on years of being in a band together and sharing a lover, all feelings of resentment and bitterness seem not worth fighting for and can be left behind like the jacket one leaves behind as they depart to join the funeral march.

Each story in “Young Skins” explores masculinity from a different point of view. Raucous emotions often simmer beneath the surface and only find expression through violence or surly disengagement. However, melancholy is also often superseded by surprising turns of humour expressed in the characters lively dialogue. The image of skin – the surface of our bodies which is forever changing but always with us – repeats in varied and surprising ways throughout the book. The cumulative effect of this made me ponder the boundaries between our social lives and inner private lives. This is one of those books whose stories are so skilfully crafted and engaging I found it difficult to put down when going to bed at night.  

Here is an interview with the author published in a county Irish newspaper where the stories are set: http://www.mayonews.ie/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18947:interview-author-colin-barrett&catid=51:staying-in&Itemid=145

Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas

It’s interesting having read Tsiolkas’ first novel so recently to now read his fifth and most recent novel and see the common themes which he still carries through. ‘Barracuda’ is also about a teenage boy with a fluid sexuality rebelling against the world, yet it carries his story further than the protagonist of ‘Loaded.’ The central character of Danny is extremely ambitious and seeks to become an Olympic champion swimmer. However, his dreams are dashed leaving him bereft of purpose: “without my dream, I was just a hole, an absence, that’s all I was.” The novel charts his journey moving back and forth in time from his headstrong adolescent years training at a prestigious private school he hilariously nicknames “Cunts College” to his downfall and the long hard process of finding value in his life again. While I felt large parts of the first half of the novel was like treading water as it was mired in Danny’s arrogant belief in his own abilities, his growing maturity and deepening complexity really hooked me and kept me reading till the end.

I think what I find frustrating is that, despite trying to engage with issues of capitalism and this fragmented antagonistic society, Tsiolkas’ arguments don’t progress much further than an adolescent level. The stance which comes from this book and his first novel ‘Loaded’ feels very much like a teenager stomping his feet, calling out all of society’s problems and slamming the door instead of offering any solutions. The petulance is true in some parts of ‘Barracude’ as well: “let the world burn and choke itself in greenhouse gases: no one wants to give up anything, no one wants to sacrifice anything for anyone else.” Maybe this is because Tsiolkas chooses adolescents as protagonists for these two novels so he’s reflecting their character or perhaps the author himself doesn’t have the optimism to think beyond resolutions other than petulantly shrugging his shoulders and giving up. I wouldn’t be so bothered by all the harsh judgements being made about practically everyone in society if it didn’t come with a sense of entitlement and a smug feeling that the protagonist is better than everyone else. I think that’s why Tsiolkas’ writing feels so abrasive. Of course, these are sentiments really typical of teenagers and I don't feel it's necessary to like characters in books in order to appreciate them. In Danny’s case I know that his inflated sense of self is a sort of strategy for survival because he’s looked down upon by so many people at his college. Perhaps if the character was more self-deprecating in an endearing way I would feel more empathetic. I was drawn closer to him the more the book progressed and when he was humbled. Danny is harsh on himself. When his dreams of being a championship swimmer fizzle he struggles with issues of weight and self esteem. The book says a lot about the dangers of ambition. His discipline and single-minded goal left no room for his personality to become fully rounded. It takes a while to get there, but the journey is worth it.

Danny is a fiercely independent and solitary person. He finds great strength there, but it's a sign of immaturity that he refuses to engage with other people. Tsiolkas makes a striking remark when he observes “There was no loneliness in silence. Loneliness could be found in conversation, it lurked in words.” I can really sympathize with this statement in that I only feel really myself when alone and when in social conversation sometimes feel lonely and misunderstood. However, it feels like for Danny there is a lack of development and self-absorption that he shuts out people who love and believe in him. There are frequent scenes where someone is talking to him but he doesn’t even listen to what they’re saying. This changes slowly as he gets older and shows his development when he’s finally brave enough to at least try to listen and communicate. Similarly he’s often unable to say what he really wants to and holds in how he's really feeling. “Words. The words inside are not the words that come out into the world.” As a consequence he blocks people out with silence or pushes them away with violence. This partly has to do with his issues with language itself. Encouragingly it’s through reading that Danny is able to reconnect with the world through words. “Dan had discovered that he had been mistaken, that books did not exist outside of the body and only in the mind, but that words were breath, that they were experienced and understood through the inseparability of mind and body, that words were the water and reading was swimming.” He’s able to connect the process of reading with the vibrant enthusiasm for life he used to find when swimming. After this he really comes into himself and pursues what he truly wants.

Where the story comes alive the most are in short passages about Danny’s later job as a care worker or his time in prison which are interspersed with the main narrative of Danny’s teenage struggle for stardom. This line seems to sum up Danny's dilemma in the novel: “He couldn’t think how anyone but himself could be the hero of his own life, but he knew that he wasn’t a hero.” When he realizes that he's not the star he always believed himself to be he has to find a way to go forward. It felt to me like the book could have been cut down in places to remove some repetition and superfluous detail, but the story of Danny's struggle is moving  and I admired the way the author told it moving back and forward in time to create a greater emotional impact. It's heartening to see a maturity having taken place between Tsiolkas' first novel and this new one.

Bobcat and other stories by Rebecca Lee

I received Rebecca Lee's book 'Bobcat and other stories' as a Christmas present. One of the ways my boyfriend and I like to relax in the lazy time between Christmas and New Year is to lounge on the rug in front of the fireplace having mince pies and reading short stories aloud to each other. Usually they have to be quite short short stories or one of us will get dozy and fall asleep before it comes to the end. I'd started reading this book of stories and was quite eager to read some aloud to him despite most of the stories being around thirty pages. Reading them aloud really emphasized Lee's talent for writing gorgeous meaningful sentences and creating witty dialogue in social situations. Many of the stories in this book have at their centre a woman in her 20s or 30s who is often associated with a university. Only one story in the book is written from the perspective of a man. Beyond these overarching similarities the stories are all strikingly unique and many present very funny or uncomfortable situations.

In 'World Party' an academic single mother must decide the fate of a teacher who is politically motivating his students and might be dismissed from the university. In 'Bobcat' a woman decides how to handle a dinner party that includes her male colleague and his wife who she knows is being cheated on. In 'Min' a woman accompanies her male friend to Hong Kong and must sift through women applying to be his wife. In 'Slatland' a woman is determined to find out if her Romanian finance is secretly already married with children back in his native country. In 'The Banks of the Vistula' a student copies an essay out of an old book and then desperately tries to cover up her act of plagiarism. In 'Fialta' a group of ambitious young architects put on a production of 'Angels in America' for their mentor. In 'Settlers' a woman is working over time on a script for a new tv series of Wonder Woman. Many of the stories take surprising turns and reveal details of the characters' fates at startling times.

What I admired most in Rebecca Lee's writing is the way she writes about desire and relationships. If it's true that desire and sex mostly happen in the mind it's artfully demonstrated in these stories where the characters frequently play out romantic scenarios or breakups in their heads before any action happens. A small suggestion can lead the character's imagination to spin fantasies of heightened intimacy or fearful suspicion of betrayal. In dramatic scenarios she conveys characters emotional fragility and the way they guard themselves against being hurt.

Lee frequently ponders the use of language itself. I'm always sympathetic towards writers who are always aware of the limitations of words themselves. A narrator in one story observes: “This is the whole problem with words. There is so little surface area to reveal whom you might be underneath, how expansive and warm, how casual, how easygoing, how cool, and so it all comes out a little pathetic and awkward and choked.” Language is only capable of approximating what we're thinking and can often leave out the deeper feelings brewing, the personality really lurking within. When speaking to someone in person it's often more the expression on someone's face and the tone of their voice which tells you how they are really feeling rather than what they are actually saying. Of course, this is open to interpretation and can lead to misunderstandings so it's easy to feel misunderstood. At least, that's certainly how I feel in many social situations. It's part of Lee's great talent that she's able to convey what's really going on underneath the surface with her characters despite what they say and think. She's an incredibly talented writer I'd highly recommend.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

It’s terrifying to place yourself in the shoes of the protagonist at the start of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. One night Akhmed looks out his window to see his neighbour Dokka being dragged from his house by officials. The house is burned as the man is taken away to some unknown fate and his 8 year-old daughter is nowhere to be seen. This is in the middle of war-torn Chechnya in 2004. Anthony Marra continues to describe the events which led to Dokka’s disappearance and the lives of a small group of characters whose communities have been ravaged by battles and deceit. The subject matter is very heavy, but completely absorbing. Marra’s writing is beautifully composed and the characters feel so immediately real I felt a strong desire to know what happens to them.

Marra heads each chapter with a timeline scale spanning a decade and demarcates the year being dealt with by highlighting it. In this way he slides back and forth in time between chapters showing the way the past influences the present. However, within each year he frequently provides flashes forward for different characters explaining how they flourish or perish in the many years which follow because of what’s occurring at the present time. This produces a curious effect where the repercussions of actions resonate throughout the present causing a swirling interconnected range of consequences. One elderly character named Khassan has spent his life writing a history of Chechnya which numbers thousands of pages. He can never complete it because of the constantly changing political landscape of the country. Marra cleverly offers an alternative understanding of the country based on these individual characters whose lives effect each other in ways unexpectedly and shape the future.

A country that is under siege operates in ways terrifyingly different from the everyday life of developed politically-stable countries where there is a presumption of justice and order. Marra intelligently explores how this affects the psychology of the people. At one point it's observed that “War is unnatural... it causes people to act unnaturally.” It's a state of life that is ruled by fear and suspicion. Friends inform on friends. People disappear. Sometimes they return with fingers or other body parts missing. Or they don't return at all. Rules for civilization are twisted as order breaks down. People who act egregiously can console themselves with the knowledge that “a land without law is a land without crime.” Here people are only guided by their own sense of morality – something which is tragically rendered pointless under the grinding fate of chance and circumstance. When it come to survival the values that people consider an essential part of their humanity can disappear. As the character Ramzan observes: “We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.” 

Amidst the devastation of war life comes to mean very little. A brilliant Russian doctor named Sonja works faithfully in a nearly-deserted hospital seeing to the hundreds of people who need limbs amputated after stumbling upon land-mines. For someone who must deal with pain and loss on such a large scale a part of her must remain stoic when faced with so many deaths. Akhmed is at first alarmed by this: “In her indifference he saw the truth of a world he didn't want to believe in, one in which a human being could be discarded as easily as pocket lint.” In these circumstances entire communities of people are swept into larger historical events. Individual lives are grouped into impersonal figures reported as casualties as it is easier to dismiss them and avoid facing the true horror of many personal losses.

What Marra does beautifully in this novel is elevate individual lives giving them a nobility and honouring them in a way that the statistics of war leave out. In a way similar to how the character of Akhmed memorialises the “disappeared” of his village by drawing portraits of those who have been taken and posting them around the streets and forest, Marra presents dynamic descriptions of striking individuals who would otherwise be ignored and forgotten. The author also shows the connections which join people together even in the most desolate circumstances. There is a distillation of feeling so that people understand what is really necessary. “Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed.” There is a tenderness found between some of the characters in this novel more believable and hard-won than in many other books I've read.

Marra also meditates on the philosophical meaning of love. There is often an assumption that the person we love is someone we discover. However, he counters that “Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.” I've meditated a while on this statement and I think it has multiple meanings. You could take it as having a romantic notion that the person you love was always a part of you. Or it's possible to interpret it as meaning that love reveals something about one's own essential self that the self doesn't understand without this connection. In any case, it's a fascinating way to think about the interplay between love as a projection of feeling and an emotion that leads to personal revelation.

As well as showing the deeply-felt personal stories of the individuals Marra also hints at the mercilessness of life in the grander scale of things. In one chilling statement he surmises “There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren't even a memory, you're only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.” No matter how much anyone strives to leave their mark on the world through accomplishments or progeny we'll all eventually be reduced down to the essential elements which are recycled and distributed again throughout the universe. It's only when considering the agonizing pain people are capable of causing each other as cited in this novel that such a cold hard truth can be considered consoling rather than horrifying. 

Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas

Approaching a book like Loaded feels in some ways like revisiting my teenage self. Although he's not at all like me on the surface there is all the familiar adolescent cynicism and rebellion which is still so easy to taste. The story takes place over roughly a 24 hour period of partying, sex and drugs in Melbourne. The protagonist Ari is a 19 year old Australian boy of Greek heritage who would scoff at being so neatly classified as he detests labels. “You're either Greek or Australian, you have to make a choice. Me, I'm neither. It's not that I can't decide; I don't like definitions.” Of course, his resistance to classification and being slotted into place is something that he hypocritically does all the time when viewing other people. He continuously defines the people he meets by their nationality or sexuality or their class (his most sneering contempt saved the married, employed, suburban people he defines as Wogs). For Ari labels like this are curiously hollowed out: “I want to tell her that words such as faggot, wog, poofter, gay, Greek, Australian, Croat are just excuses. Just stories, they mean shit. Words don't stop the boredom.” Like many teenagers he feels exceptionally bored by everything and his time is spent more in trying eradicate the self rather than nourish it (with culture, building substantial relationships with friends/lovers or working). When out and about he frequently listens to music to be “caught in a magic world of harmony and joy, a truly ecstatic joy, where aching longing to be somewhere else, out of this city, out of this country, out of this body and out of this life, is kept at bay.” Rather than be truly present he wants to escape the world immediately around him which he perceives to be corrupt and mediocre.

In addition to listening to music and taking a large amount of drugs to remain constantly high Ari has a phenomenal amount of sex. Because he's young and cute sex with men and women is never too difficult to find in bars, alleyways or at house parties. Tsiolkas' descriptions of the way gay bars and cruising functions is eerily accurate: “we hesitate in our physical communions. Testing each other, not wanting to be the first to admit desire. The first to be the faggot.” The environment is charged with sex, but there is also a wariness for fear of being hurt and rejected as well as a masculine homophobic pride in not wanting to be the first to admit you want it. Ari's blunt attitude towards calling it like he sees it applies especially to the gay people he encounters. “No matter how many hours spent at the gym, no matter the clothes he wears, the way he cuts his hair, the way he talks, a gay man always reveals himself as a faggot.” Ari is nothing but savage in the way he condemns people for being what they are and looking down at them. Typical for a teenager. In doing so Tsiolkas also highlights a particular problem for many gay men who have to wrestle with concepts of masculinity they've inherited when growing up. Our sexual nature is often aggressive especially when having casual sex. At two different points when Ari has sexual encounters pleasure is taken and given only through violent grappling. This attitude is something which especially arises when cruising: “He was a momentary figure in my life. That's what I like about casual sex with men; there's no responsibility towards the person you fuck with.” The anonymity of the encounters gives a kind of freedom where raw desire can be expressed without apology or consideration for the other person. This is because contempt runs closely alongside that desire. Ari has internalized all the anger and disdain he feels from society and projects it back out. At one point he states “insults have formed me, they have nourished me. In latrines and underneath piers I have enjoyed pleasures that are made sweeter by the contempt I know they bestow on me in the eyes of the respectable world I abhor.”

Ari sees that a society based on capitalism creates a competitive environment where some flourish while others are winnowed out. Therefore he can't feel any sort of fellowship with those he judges to be Wogs: “It is impossible to feel camaraderie if the dominant wish is to get enough money, enough possessions to rise above the community you are in.” He stubbornly resists having any sort of direction or purpose in life because of this. Better to get fucked on drugs and sleep around than join in what he sees to be an inherently corrupt and flawed society. Worse than wishing to join in with it he'd rather see the human race eradicated for its competitive machinations: “Pol Pot was right to destroy, he was wrong not to work it out that you go all the way. You don't kill one class, one religion, one party. You kill everyone because we are all diseased, there is no way out of this shithole planet.” To side with a dictator and root for the annihilation of humanity is both a strong statement and an empty pathetic statement. It feels too easy to project your pain out to the world which you haughtily judge and wish to see it levelled out. This is the same logic applied in the story of Noah's Ark or any disaster movie like 2012; wash the world of its sins by eradicating the human race except for a few who survive through chance in order to start over. Except Ari would rather the population be brought down to zero. When contemplating the complex frustrating way society works it's really attractive to imagine these stories and I do love a good disaster movie. But it's not really useful when going forward day to day and it doesn't take into consideration the individual's private pain or their inherent right to live life the way they want to. Ari can't see past his contempt for the world because he is “loaded” - not just strung out on drugs, but loaded with history and all the injustices of society. So where to go from here? It's telling that Loaded only takes place over a single day. As an accurate portrait of a teenage grappling with these difficult issues Christos Tsiolkas does a superb job and the novel is successful in conveying Ari's intense painful feelings. I wonder what could happen to Ari next (although it's clearly not the author's intention to try to answer this and it's certainly not his responsibility to do so.) There is only so long Ari can continue having this attitude towards life before he loses all his opportunities. Either he'll run out of money, favours with his family and friends, get arrested or die from over-indulgence in drugs, violence and/or promiscuous dangerous sex. Or he'll have to compromise his ideas and turn into the kind of Wog he so despises. Ari makes it clear he'll take the former option. I like to think there is a middle ground which many of us tread where we can sustain ourselves while maintaining our ideals and a healthy amount of skepticism but also having a good time and not causing too much damage. Maybe I'm just dreaming.

I haven't read anything else by Tsiolkas yet. Based on his in-your-face themes I'm not surprised he's a controversial writer. Books with unlikeable characters are difficult for some people to read. I grappled with a lot of feelings reading this novel, but isn't that the point? In terms of presenting points of view in a painfully honest way I think he's extremely effective.

Tsiolkas talks here about his novel The Slap but elaborates on his feelings about Australia, masculinity, the middle class and violence which are all themes heavily dealt with in Loaded.

Valve III

Valve is a literary journal which publishes fiction and poetry that (in the words of the editor) “uses form, language or techniques in unusual ways, often generating an essential set of rules within a piece through which to channel creativity.” This is its third issue and many of the pieces contained within it succeed in their experimental mission to express something in a creative new way and adhere to their own internal logic while breaking away from traditional form. The editors carefully pair different pieces within the journal usually bouncing two distinct stories or poems off each other which are variations on a similar theme. This transforms meaning in itself. Of course, the pleasure of flipping through a journal like this is that pieces can also be taken at random whether in a hurry on a morning commute or steeped in a warm bed on some sleepless night.

One of the pieces of writing that struck me most was Lucy Ribchester’s story ‘The She-Squid’s Embrace’ where intense desire is expressed in a squid’s taking possession of a shipwrecked sailor. She takes him down to her lair and tries to coddle him though he’s slowly being devoured by sea creatures and disintegrating on the ocean floor. While presenting a warped version of passion the story expresses something very true about love and the longing to hold onto someone who is falling apart.

More radical experiments with form itself take place in other pieces. Some are composed of lists such as Andrew Blair’s funny and vivid numbered reasons in his piece ‘you cannae shove your granny.’ Harry Giles gives indications of gruesome and tragic scenes occurring while only providing impersonal lists or an announcement. These highlight the way we are screened away from the horrors of reality by the mechanical processes of a regimented society. Bjorn Halldorsson gives ‘A Swimmer’s Guide to the Front Crawl’ which is a set of instructions that trail down the page like words riding currents in water. This transforms a physical activity into a metaphysical meditation. Katy McAulay’s ‘Important news for lifeguards’ presents another list purportedly for instruction, but which really takes on a graver meaning in the way people may be experiencing an internal crisis though they look alright on the outside. David Greaves ‘Boulders’ presents text with additional groups of words in the margins on either side of a primary text that can be left out or inserted into the main body of words to elucidate the central meaning. Another piece by Martin Schauss uses repetition of the second-person “you” to create a poetic sense and give a suggestion of being romantically transfixed by another. Poetic repetition also occurs in Lynsey Cameron’s ‘The Man Holding Flowers’ where a profusion of possibilities and a torrential downpour of past experiences bloom out of the single image of a man holding flowers.

I was once in a creative writing class where someone passed me a hand-written piece which she’d revised a lot. She intended only the words which weren’t crossed out to be read but I felt all the deleted (but still visible) words highlighted different meanings and emotionally expressed someone grappling towards what they wanted to really say. Kirsty Logan’s ‘Love in Centralia’ is an impersonal description of a town where the text is mostly slashed through with black lines. Only a few essential words are left unmarked to give a radical new meaning. There is a tremendous amount of power in writing which is crossed out so the process of selection and editing can be seen. For this reason I’ve loved looking at holograph editions of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Jacob’s Room’ and ‘The Waves’ which present drafts of these novels which show where she crossed things out and inserted other things into the text.

Some pieces in Valve enter into a self conscious dialogue with other artists to elaborate on original ideas or ricochet concepts off others to provide entirely different meanings. Clair Askew takes issue with Wordsworth’s view of the Lake District offering her own poetic view of a starker more reality-laden landscape. Scott Morris pays homage to the surrealist poet and photographer Paul Nouge with short sharp quips that expand upon a world inverted by speech and offers transformative ways of seeing.

There are flashes of the way popular competitive events inveigle their way into our consciousness making us care one moment and forget the next in the form of a Masterchef challenger in Graham Fulton’s ‘Larkinesque’ and a hotdog eating race in Charlotte Turnbull’s ‘Hotdogs.’ We’re swept into a voyeuristic sensitbility witnessing the triumphs and failures of individuals, our hopes for them dampened by a sense of superiority when they blunder. In the case of Fulton, Welsh competitor Larkin’s plight is likened to the raw reality of the cosmos. Turnbull plays much more with form in her story brazenly shouting at us with text enlarged and bold like a commentator’s irritating blathering.

One of the longest pieces in this issue of Valve is Elaine Reid’s ‘Trees for Africa.’ This story follows a call centre director over the course of a day where she receives lewd responses from a man she contacts about helping to maintain forestlands in Senegal. The worker traces the call to the home address where she meets a harried lonely woman caring for a number of children. The story expresses a sense of how we are disconnected from one another and gives a haunting feeling of good intentions being swallowed by shorthanded emotion.

In David Manderson’s ‘On the Beach’ he portrays a European holiday beach resort overseen by a tourist with his head full of the impending doom for the European economy. His pleasure of the holiday and his emotional investment in the beauty and grotesqueness of his surroundings is hollowed out by his sense of societies’ failing and feeling like “A silent man trying to scream.” Destruction comes in a more literal form in Chelsea Cargill’s poem ‘Tsunami’ which expresses a deep desire to leave a personal mark upon a world that is being washed away.

Afric McGlinchey transforms the domestic privacy of a bed into a tangled forest landscape where the body becomes tree. There is a sensuous physicality to the descriptions and deeply intimate associations are produced in small details. Ryan Van Winkle includes an Untitled poem about living surrounded by snow. Here I felt the heft and persistence of snow is likened to the way our best efforts and hopes are buried by the weight of reality. In another poem of his ‘The Duke in Pines’ an experience of listening to the jazz musician sparks an imagined dialogue between the narrator and someone who the narrator has designs upon.

Two poems by Mary McDonough-Clark are filled with such raw emotion that it feels like the pared down phrases contain a heft of feeling that expands voluminously to fill the whole page. An elaborate scene of torrid violence is summarised in a few pointed words “I retreat, you accuse, I ask, you deny: she feeds.” She gives a powerful sense of the riotous scenarios which are mentally played through amidst the actual disintegration of a relationship.

Valve is a great platform for writers to push the boundaries in what’s possible with both language and form. These pieces don’t dally with experimentation and reconfigure structure for the sake of it. They have something immediate and meaningful to say which can only be expressed in formats which aren’t traditional. I've read many of the pieces several times and find them richly rewarding. The work within this journal teases, surprises and illuminates.

Alligator Blood by James Leighton

This is something of a guilty confession, but playing online poker is a hobby of mine. I know it’s a waste of time and sometimes I end up losing money at it so it’s something I try not to indulge in too often. Online poker is something that underwent a massive boom several years ago and it still continues to be big. However, there are big legal and moral battles over online gambling. Coming across this new non-fiction book Alligator Blood by James Leighton I was fascinated to get more of an inside scoop to the industry. It’s not the kind of book I usually read, but given that it’s the festive season I’m feeling a bit more indulgent with the books I’m choosing. This book is an account of Australian Daniel Tzvetkoff who started a payment processing company which became the popular choice for many of the top poker sites in the world. Earning these top contracts gave a meteoric rise to Daniel’s fortunes turning him from a man working in Pizza Hut to one of the richest and most promising businessmen in the world - practically overnight! However, online gaming is an extremely volatile and risky industry. His rise in power and massive fortune all came crashing down a few short years later when he found himself hounded by the US government, placed under a witness protection program and made into a death-threat target by the poker community.

The tale isn’t quite so simple and Leighton goes to great lengths and has done a large amount of research to disentangle the complex story which led both to Daniel’s downfall and the twists in online gaming's history. Tzvetkoff was no innocent in his business dealings and did collaborate with authorities after his arrest, but he became a kind of scapegoat for narking on gambling websites which led to thousands of players being frozen out of their accounts and losing their money. Of course, this book isn’t just to do with poker. It’s also a tale which is very emblematic of our time. Fantastic fortunes can be obtained through savvy online business enterprises although hitting gold in this way is extremely rare. Daniel’s story is a high-octane example of how accumulating a fast fortune can sometimes lead to only more greed and grasping for power. Parallel to his journalistic investigations of the present day Leighton uses a novelistic approach to narrate the key events of Daniel’s rise and fall from success. At times he takes liberties getting inside Daniel’s mind to guess at his probable emotional state. Unsurprisingly, when his fortunes fail it’s friends and family who truly love him that count.

Alongside recounting the dramatic story of Daniel Tzvetkoff, Leighton makes an argument for possible ways in going forward with online gambling. He quite rightly identifies that (like prohibition) outlawing this risky recreational activity will only fuel the desire to participate in it through more illicit and pernicious means. If the industry is properly regulated then it can lead to a much safer online gambling experience (with safety checks in place to identify and provide help for possible gambling addicts) as well as generating a substantial amount of tax revenue. Of course, those who don’t like poker will no doubt see things quite differently. I would only add that rather than outlawing it completely the US government might consider playing a more active role in running and overseeing the industry with the understanding that the profits will go to charitable causes in a way that is analogous to the way the National Lottery is run in the UK.

Alligator Blood is a very entertaining and somewhat chilling read which sheds light on an extremely lucrative hidden industry.

Back when I used to gamble with the big boys...

My Top 10 Books of 2013

Richard Ford - Canada

Tony Hogan Bought Me An IceCream Float Before He Stole My Ma – Kerry Hudson

Flight Behaviour - Barbara Kingsolver

Union Atlantic – Adam Haslett

Black Bread White Beer – Niven Govinden

The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt

Artful – Ali Smith

Harvest – Jim Crace

The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

The Wasp Factory – Ian Banks

My top books of the year are mostly new releases with big Booker winner “The Luminaries” taking a prominent place. It’s such a complex, rewarding and intelligent novel it did really deserve to win the Booker. Speaking of award winners the book that I think should have won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction was Kingsolver’s “Flight Behaviour.” It’s a really heartfelt story of a woman making difficult choices in her private life as well as a moving meditation on environmental issues. I know many people are tired of reading the nearly-universal and never-ending praise for Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” but it really is one of my top reads and totally mesmerized me. Another acclaimed writer whose book I absolutely loved was Richard Ford’s novel “Canada” which peters out somewhat towards the end, but has the most heart-breaking opening section. A book that totally swept me away was Ali Smith’s novel-ish book “Artful” which redefines the limits of what can be done in fiction while making every page feel immediately important and relevant to my life. "Harvest" attacked my subconscious and made its way into my dreams to leave me haunted and wondering. I’ve read Adam Haslett’s powerful stories before so was very excited to finally get to his novel “Union Atlantic” which is a really fascinating story about a few very different central characters and also a novel that critiques the causalities and pitfalls of capitalism gone mad. Two British books that captivated me are “Black Bread White Beer” and “Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma.” They explore areas of society and issues not often covered in contemporary fiction. Sadly, the author Iain Banks died this year which prompted me to reread “The Wasp Factor.” It’s so unbelievably original and has so many interesting things to say about masculinity and human nature. Now I must get to his other books.

It’s been interesting how starting this blog has prompted me to read more although I always have been an avid reader. I’m not sure anyone actually reads my posts (if you do thank you), but I’ve been enjoying the way writing about books helps me organize my thoughts and put them down someplace so I won’t forget them. Hopefully I’ll continue on all throughout next year. I know there are so many great books I didn't get to read this year. As always, I'm trying to catch up.

My Top 10 New Films of 2013

Violette

Compliance

Blue Jasmine

Frances Ha

Gravity

Inside Llewyn Davis

Philomena

The Great Beauty

Rush

The Place Beyond the Pines

I see more films than the average person because my boyfriend is a huge moviegoer and works in the film industry. So here is yet another list rounding up my top new releases in 2013. Two fictional films which are largely based on real life events ‘Compliance’ and ‘Philomena’ really moved me with their shocking cruelty and disturbing truths. ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ felt in many ways like a novel in film-form since it straddles two periods of time and generations. While not a perfect film, it's ambition is admirable and it made a really powerful emotional impact. The decadent roller-coaster ride that is ‘The Great Beauty’ is so original and entertaining it’s a film that haunts my dreams. Another foreign language film that captivated me and which I’ve written about before is the powerful ‘Violette’ exploring the life of the feminist author. One big blockbuster that took me by surprise was the historical racing double-bio pic ‘Rush.’ I didn’t think a film about car racing could grip me so much or speak so strongly about rivalry, friendship and ambition. A critically-acclaimed film that I had the biggest expectations for and it lived up to all of them was ‘Gravity’ which terrified and thrilled me watching it in IMAX. I never thought a Woody Allen film would make its way into my top ten of the year again but ‘Blue Jasmine’ was excellent. Blanchett and Hawkins really brought it to life. However, I also loved the way the script moved from present to past gradually revealing Jasmine’s tragic downfall. The Coens’ film ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ is a collection of clever powerful vignettes which come together to form a whole with the entire film looping back on itself like a mobius strip. The incredibly talented Oscar Isaac makes you follow and really care about Llewyn though he is oftentimes unsympathetic with his high-minded artistic ideals and tempestuous nature. No other filmmakers draw such powerfully comic and haunting performances out of their supporting actors. A film which made me feel sheer joy with its humour and humanity was ‘Frances Ha.’ Frances is another character with artistic pretentions, but who is all the more loveable for her foibles as she awkwardly stumbles into full adulthood.

My Top 10 New Music Albums of 2013

5 Star – The Remix Anthology

Evening Hymns – Spectral Dusk

Goldfrapp – Tales of Us

Haim – Days are Gone

John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts

Tegan and Sara – Heartthrob

Janelle Monae – The Electric Lady

Kelly Rowland – Talk a Good Game

Solange – True

Woodpigeon – Thumbtacks and Glue

I had difficulty narrowing down which albums released in 2013 would really be my top picks of the year. When it comes down to it, I had to mainly choose on the basis of what I listen to repeatedly. Although I’m getting into several songs on 'ArtPop' I can’t really say I’ll be listening to it as much as some of these other albums. Popular music still takes a prominent place with Kelly Rowland and her endearing confessional album where she lays out her feelings about “B” and pretty much everyone else who has ever pissed her off. Janelle Monae is someone I’ve been entranced with ever since seeing her perform a couple years back giving one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever seen. Her new album took a while to grow on me, but with some excellent collaborations and quirky lyrics she got my attention. I mean, who else would sing about Mia Farrow as a modern-day Joan of Arc? Still I think Monae could usefully learn from Solange’s example of releasing a mini-album of only quality music. She is another artist I got to see give an excellent concert earlier this year with lead song ‘Losing You’ being incredibly catchy and ‘Lovers in the Parking Lot’ heartbreakingly sad. My favourite blast from the past this year was 5 Star’s Remix Anthology which is irresistibly danceable especially ‘All Fall Down.’ My favourite new group would have to be Haim whose Fleetwood Mac sound make me want to clap along particularly with their track ‘Forever.’  Talented queer artists who’d already released a few albums but who I didn’t discover till their breakout albums this year include Tegan and Sara whose album is full of catchy angst-soaked songs and John Grant with his confessional, bitchy, wholly-original tunes. Another amazing new discovering for me is the Canadian group Woodpigeon with leading man Mark Andrew Hamilton giving a series of haunting powerful melodies. Goldfrapp mellows out even further than her last album with her newest Tales of Us filled with hushed songs that make a loud impact. Some singles like Martha Wainwright’s ‘Can You Believe It?’, Daft Punk’s ‘Lose Yourself to Dance’, Annie’s ‘Ralph Macchio’, Timberlake’s ‘Mirrors’ and Sparrow and the Workshop’s ‘Valley of Death’ got a lot of listens from me but their albums didn’t make as big of an impact.

Drawings of Joyce Carol Oates by Lefteris Koulonis

Since starting this blog I've really enjoyed the interactions about books and writing I've made with people both here and on twitter. I've made connections with people from as close as my own London borough and as far as the other side of the globe. That people who have never met, but who are no longer virtual strangers can inspire, give companionship and encourage each other is incredibly heartening to me.

The Greek artist Lefteris Koulonis was inspired by my passion for Joyce Carol Oates expressed in this blog to create these original pencil, pentel brush and pen drawings of the author. Each captures a different aspect of Oates' personality and gives a sensitive interpretation of the complex intelligent individual behind such great books. The fourth is composed entirely of titles and quotes from Oates showing a woman literally made of words but also recognizably individual. There have been many great photographic and artistic portraits of Oates over the years - especially by Gloria Vanderbilt whose paintings convey Oates' soulful nature and studious sincerity. Portraits such as these are like touchstones linking the individual and the words.

You can see more of Lefteris' artwork at his blog http://koulonis.wordpress.com/

Feminist Sundays - Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

Recently Elena over at BooksAndReviews invited me to participate in her new project Feminist Sundays. The idea immediately excited me as a lot of the fiction I read is by women. Dare I say it? Women write better than most men. Oh controversial! It's a silly sweeping generalization, but in my experience it is mostly true and a point worth pushing forward to provoke and change people's ideas as the established cannon of “classic” literature is dominated heavily by male authors.

So for this project I’d like to discuss Joyce Carol Oates’ novel “Blonde”. This is a 960 page “re-imagining” of the life of Norma Jeane Baker/Marilyn Monroe. The novel follows Norma Jeane from her early life in an orphanage all the way to her tragic death. The narrative is so closely aligned with Norma Jeane’s consciousness that we feel her impressionistic picture of the world and learn about it through her inner voice - thoughts streaming along like ticker tape. As the fictional personality of Marilyn takes over Norma Jeane's essential understanding of herself is confused and the book becomes more fragmented and hallucinatory. In creating this fictional portrait Oates points to the nobility of Norma Jeane who was really a hard working intelligent actress trying to find acceptance and recognition from a studio and celebrity culture that only wanted to exploit her. She was someone who had no support network to protect and advise her and fell into the trap of performing to receive public affection (especially male affection) rather than maintaining her authenticity as an artist and professional. Marilyn was a product created by Norma Jeane to please the male gaze and she became lost in it. This isn't surprising since it was such a successful one - an icon whose images and estate earned $15 million between Oct 2012-13 alone. It's sadly ironic and disgusting that the legacy of Marilyn has continued to make so many people rich when Norma Jeane earned only fifty dollars for her first nude photo shoot and died relatively poor. Although this novel uses the historical example of Norma Jeane Baker, Oates is really only invoking her example as an extreme case of how personality can become distorted through artifice (hair dyed blonde as a way of selling oneself as a product) and the fatal compromises a woman can make in trying to achieve the American dream.

I wanted to highlight this novel specifically because I had a strange conversation with a colleague once. Somehow we started talking about Marilyn Monroe and he instantly said “Oh, that slut.” I flinched in shock that he’d be so disdainful and answered him angrily. He tried to justify himself by saying that she basically slept with everyone and that’s the only reason she had a career. I have no doubt his opinion is shared by many people. It’s this sort of casual dismissal and thinking about women in only simplistic misogynistic terms which is the reason why feminism and the promotion of women’s writing is especially important.

“Blonde” is a monumental achievement and one of my favourite novels. It’s well worth reading.

Generally I try to stay out of discussions about feminism - not that I don't find it interesting but it seems to me women have had to listen to what men think about them for centuries so when it comes to feminism it ought to be a conversation between women only. However, since I was invited to participate in this meme I thought I'd add my own thoughts about a book in this context and it's a novel I truly love.

Feminist Sundays is a weekly meme created at Books and Reviews. The aim is simply to have a place and a time to talk about feminism and women’s issues. This is a place of tolerance, creativity, discussion, criticism and praise. Remember to keep in mind that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, although healthy discussion is encouraged.

Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn

Edward St Aubyn is another writer I’ve been meaning to get to for ages because of the many personal recommendations I’ve received about the Melrose novels and the high praise he’s received in reviews. Of course, I came to it knowing that this sequence books are roughly autobiographical but this fact doesn’t influence my reading that much. It seems to me all writing skirts around the circumference of truth for every author whether it’s directly taken from their past or psychologically real to them. This first book in the series introduces the reader to a boy named Patrick living in a privileged household with an alcoholic mother Eleanor and an abusive monstrous father David. It follows this family and the friends who come to dine with the parents over the course of a day dipping in and out of each character’s perspective. Aubyn does this with startling grace giving equal weight and sentiment to an array of characters’ points of view. He can be very funny and cruelly cutting when dissecting the laborious social banalities of the adults interacting with each other. But he can also be breathtakingly moving when describing the painful humiliations and abuse which David inflicts on his wife and son.

Aubyn has an incredible way of describing his characters physicality in relation to their emotional state of mind. In particular Eleanor’s lethargy for life is shown in the sluggish detached way she deals with the world. “She settled into her body, like a sleepwalker who climbs back into bed after a dangerous expedition.” This suggests that Eleanor is often mentally removed from the world and only returns to her body to passively observe what’s happening around her. At one point when she’s told Patrick is sitting on the stairs in distress she doesn’t go to comfort him although she considers doing so. Patrick is also described as becoming detached from his body when experiencing abuse from his father as a method of surviving the atrocious horror of his situation.

Patrick’s complex psychology is described with the most beautiful detail. The relation between his inner world and the way he perceives the world around him is described using startling figurative language: “After a while, he no longer recognized what he was thinking and, just as a shop window sometimes prevents the onlooker from seeing the objects behind the glass and folds him instead in a narcissistic embrace, his mind ignored the flow of impressions from the outside world and locked him into a daydream he could not have subsequently described.” Patrick’s sense of self is displaced from what he sees around him and even his own thoughts. In this way he is shown as protectively retreating from the world in a way he can’t control.

Even with characters who really repulsed me like the grotesque womanizer and atrocious snob Nicholas there were aspects of his personality that the author movingly describes to draw my sympathy and make me feel a connection. In one scene following Nicholas’ point of view it is asked “Why was the centre of his desire always in a place he had just deserted?” This sense of never being able to capture exactly what you want and never feeling truly satiated with what you have is something a lot of people can relate to. Great writers like Aubyn know how to illuminate the inner workings of even monstrous characters to show why they might act the way they do. In the case of David, this is a man who is so disappointed by life and diminished by the fact of being a titled person who is financially dependant on the woman he married that he can only get pleasure from inflicting torture upon others – whether that be the ants marching through his garden or his own wife and son: “what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about.” Mired in his own self-loathing and pain David makes a game of controlling and causing suffering for others. Although it’s difficult to read about such characters and their actions, it feels important to know about this kind of conflict – not to forgive evil actions, but to understand how pain reverberates through time and is given as a sort of inheritance.

There is an air of melancholy cast over this whole novel – a sense that people can’t really be changed. This sense of futility seems to even be expressed in the very title of the novel – Never Mind. The nature of human relations and psychology is openly discussed at the Melrose’s luncheon with a number of characters. These musings are underpinned by the remark that “Perhaps people were just born one way or another and the main thing was not to interfere too much.” This novel comes down heavily on the side of nature over nurture as the characters are locked in their way of being. The circular dysfunctional actions of the adults mean they are unable to progress. A scholar named Victor remarks at one point that “the compulsion to repeat what one has experienced is like gravity, and it takes special equipment to break away from it.” The Melrose family seem particularly incapable of moving on because no one would dare disrupt them. The fact that no one steps in to intervene when Eleanor is so obviously psychologically and chemically dependent on alcohol or when Patrick appears so visibly traumatized speaks to the indifference people can have and their unwillingness to stir the waters when observing dysfunction.

One of the most distinctive things about this novel is the way it uncovers the contradiction between the highly sophisticated setting and attitudes of the characters and their vile and debased actions. At one point a rather frivolous character named Bridget observes “What a civilized life you have here” Yet Aubyn shows that the lifestyle of the privileged can just be a veneer covering the most perverse actions and poisoned relations. Too often we accept what is on the surface as reflecting how things really are, but with a little digging depths of untold conflict are evident everywhere.

Aubyn seems to playfully hint at the powerlessness he feels as a writer haunted by pain which cannot be undone. When referring to Victor he writes “Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.” The act of writing or thinking about ideas deeply may feel futile at some points as it all takes place internally. However, this book proves that these fictional characters can make an impact upon the real world and how people think about it.

What are your most treasured books?

If your house was on fire and you could only grab one book to save what would it be? Okay, unfair question. I don’t think I could answer it either. I’d probably be found by the firemen stumbling out of my apartment building coughing smoke, arms loaded with charred books and begging them to go in to save the rest. Books don't just contain their own stories, but the story of our relationship to them. I really value so many of my books, but if I were asked to pick out my favourites then these would be some at the top of the list.

This special shortened bookshelf houses most of my most treasured books. All of them are signed and many are special limited editions and many have sentimental value.

The Color Purple was the first book I ever had signed by an author. When stopping in a bookshop in Boston one day I noticed an ad for an Alice Walker reading at the Boston Public Library happening right now. I quickly bought this copy and rushed over catching Walker right before the end of her signing.

The signed Eugene Ionesco was one of the first expensive books I bought when I was earning enough to be able to afford it as he is one of my favourite authors.

The Lord John Ten anthology is signed by many prominent authors including Ray Bradbury, Raymond Carver, Derek Walcott and many others.

I bought the signed copy of Austerlitz only a couple weeks before W.G.Sebald’s tragic death. Since it was published so shortly before he died very few were signed and it’s now apparently worth hundreds of pounds.

Most of the hardback novels I’ve kept have been ones I’ve been able to get signed by the author in person when attending readings – many at the Royal Festival Hall in London. I have fond memories attached to the times I bought each of them.

Michael Downing was my first creative writing teacher when I was an undergraduate at Wheelock College in Boston. He was a tremendous inspiration and this fine novel which is a tribute to the importance of grammar was published while I was studying with him.

When I first arrived in London I noticed the Waterstones near Trafalgar Square was hosting a reading by Joseph Heller. I rushed over and listened to him speak as well as getting him to sign this copy of his novel Something Happened.

Jean Rhys is one of my favourite writers and this copy of her story My Day is part of a limited lettered edition of only 26 books.

Edmund White is a phenomenal writer and an incredibly generous human being. I’m very lucky to be able to call him a friend. His historical novel Fanny: A Fiction is one of my favourite books by him. It's a tale of two very different women from history that formed an unlikely friendship and who tried to establish a utopian community in America.

This is one of my top books in both monetary and sentimental value. It’s a proof of Joyce Carol Oates' novel Do With Me What You Will and inserted into the back is a typed revised ending from Joyce. However, both the ending printed in the proof and the new typed ending inserted within differ from the ending as it appears in the final published edition of this novel. It's a brilliant novel and well worth reading.

I’ve been lucky enough to see Joyce Carol Oates read several times. This copy of her published Journals means so much to me and is one of the few books I’ve read several times in its entirety.

As part of my own personal tribute to my former teacher, the deceased author and critic Lorna Sage, I’ve been getting several authors to sign the tops of sections in which she wrote about them in this critical book about women and literature.

So what are some of the most treasured books you own?