50 years a reader |
An exploration of half a century of reading. |
Smashed it! Finished my 50 years a reader project with more than a month to go! That won't be the end of my reading Scottish books though... so many good books still on my to be read list for 2017 and beyond. BOOK 44 Life After Life – Kate Atkinson I really enjoyed this book. I’m not sure of its Scottish credentials, it was on a list of Scottish books but Kate Atkinson is more of an ‘adopted’ Scot than anything. I’m not sure if she would self-define as Scottish. And the book has no obvious Scottishness about it – however, I was loving it from early on, so I just continued reading – one out of 50 with a dodgy pedigree isn’t bad is it? The conceit of this book is excellent. In ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ Kundera states: ‘If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening". This conundrum forms the centre of his excellent book – but Atkinson takes this to another level. Her story looks at the many possibilities of a life (lives as they obviously become intertwined) and really got me engaged and thinking. It’s no criticism to say that it’s the kind of book that gets you hooked all the time you’re not reading it, and it deserves to be read in a couple of sittings, not, as I had to do it, spread out – because it’s easy to lose where you are and not get the full impact. Of it’s type I’d say it’s the best one I’ve read this year since Crumey’s Secret Knowledge and it was a wonderful oasis after a load of crime/thriller and award winning literary fiction types (which I’ve realised are not for me). While they may be clever, it is profound and profoundly moving. I remember reading Atkinson’s ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’ in 1995 and I seem to remember it had a similar effect on me. Certainly I remember it was the last book I read before leaving London, and I remember sitting in the London library reading it. I’m not sure why I’ve not read any more of her work in the interim twenty years (though I will body swerve her detective fiction in my search for more) and I will rectify that next year. For a book that gets you thinking about possibilities of life, this is one I strongly recommend. This is my definition of a ‘gripping’ novel. BOOK 45 Merkland – Margaret Oliphant Oliphant was something of a struggle. J.M.Barrie’s mum may have rated her, but to me it was another example of late 18thcentury aspirational fiction. I couldn’t get fully to grips with who was whom, mainly because they all seemed to be Austeneseque and I’m really not interested in the trials and tribulations of the landed classes – give me a good working class peasant any day – so that kind of washed over me. I couldn’t find sympathy for the feckless heir who squandered the estate. But that said, there was some interesting subversive commentary in it – issues of feminism and equality of the sexes reared its head – enough to keep me reading, and it was a long, hard,read. I’ll try some of her later novels as well, because it’s not fair to judge on one early outing but at present I’d say that Mrs Oliphant, at least in this novel, is a great advert for S.R.Crockett. He does everything she doesn’t, the stories are more exciting, the characters more appealing, the social conscience more ‘real.’ BOOK 46 The Bookies Runner - Brendan Gisby This was the prize I set myself for finishing Merkland. I’ve read it several times before and each time I find something new (and each time it breaks my heart!) This time I wanted to read it this time at the same time as its recently published companion – to see what that brought to the party. The thing about The Bookie’s Runner that always impresses me are the layers of narrative voice, and once again I was not disappointed. What did surprise me (it being over a year since I’d read it) was how much there was about Brendan’s mother and family as well as his father in it. It made me realise something quite profound about the way that relationships exist, the sort of tendrils that entwine so that we cannot always distinguish our relationship (or feelings) for one person from that of another. I love this book and I read it in one sitting, then proceeded straight away to The Rebel’s Daughter, As with Stevenson's Kidnapped and Catriona, despite being some 6 years between the two works, this is, I believe, the most effective and enlightening way of reading them. So without more ado… BOOK 47 The Rebel’s Daughter - Brendan Gisby In ‘The Bookie’s Runner’ Brendan cannot help but hold his mother responsible for some of the consequences suffered by his father. This biography of his mother doesn’t so much as redress the balance, but offers an insight into what made her the woman he knew as his mother. It’s an object lesson in understanding that we are all made of the sum of our experiences and that as children we only have partial awareness or knowledge of our parents and while it is in one sense obvious that we judge them from that perspective, there is also another, deeper story. Brendan isn’t playing a blame game here, more seeking to understand the circumstances that created the woman he knew and loved, despite, I sense, the fact that she must have been a difficult woman to love. What we have in both of these biographies is an honest, poignant portrayal and a genuine attempt to come to terms with love and loss and the difficulties of lives lived in pain and poverty. What is beyond reassuring and into the realms of remarkable is that Brendan is able to contextualise and portray these ‘ordinary’ lives with both objectivity and deep emotion. That’s a hard thing to achieve. It also gives something of an insight into the man. While at the end of The Bookie’s Runner the fifteen year old boy determines never to be a soft touch, and we fear, never to fall into the ‘goodness’ he so valued in his father – the sum of both of these books (and the autobiographical The Percentages Men) suggest that Brendan (like his father) was unable, in the final analysis, to be anything other than a good man. Not a hero, not a saint, but a real, warts and all man who seeks to make the best of his lot and to be fair in an unfair world. Respect! Having read so much of his work, I feel like I know Brendan well, when in reality we’ve never even met. Some writers put their hearts into their work and Brendan is certainly one of them. He has the passion of Steinbeck and an honesty I so rarely find in fiction that I am lost for the moment to offer a parallel. But it makes for good reading. BOOK 48 Robert Falconer – George MacDonald I started reading this after coming across a lot of promotion for the ‘english translation’ text. That shocked me. Anyone patting themselves on the back for ‘translating’ Scottish dialect in a book to make it more ‘accessible’ to the English reader deserves a good gubbing in my opinion. Hardly an expression of pride in our Scots tongue. That’s what got me reading it. I had read some MacDonald in my youth –The Princess and Curdie and the Back of the North Wind – but I’ve steered away from him in latter years because of the ‘religious’ overtones everyone goes on about. I decided that with only a couple of books to go in my 50, it was time to find out for myself. I have to say I toiled with it, but not with the Doric dialect, more with the religious message. There were some things that engaged me – and early on I was deeply moved by the burning of Robert’s violin by his grannie, illustrating to me all that is wrong in religion. Now MacDonald isn’t offering an in your face moral tale of goodness, the story is all about people who don’t believe in the standard version of God and there are lots of interesting parts in the life of Robert – how he develops his own theory of goodness and how he practically helps ‘the poor’ and those whom society rejects. It was the underlying but oft repeated theme that God is there, watching and will ultimately win out that got me. Perhaps that’s unfair as a description but I find the whole religious aspect of it so irritating I can’t even be bothered to analyse it properly. I will read more MacDonald and give him the benefit of the doubt but I suspect this zealous, unique view of God will permeate all of his writing so I’ll give myself a decent break before I try him again. There are other writers of the period I find more engaging without the degree of difficulty. However, I can say I still think it’s outrageous that the book is deemed needing a ‘translation’. I mean, if I suggested cutting out the overly religious parts everyone would be up in arms, but the dialect, written that way for a purpose after all, that should be left as it is. It’s for the writer to choose to do the work or not. However, a redeeming feature is that the 'shock' value for me at least of the grannie burning the violin will live long in my memory. So MacDonald has a power as a writer, I just wish he'd used it differently. BOOK 49 The Azure Hand. S.R. Crockett As I’m nearing the finishing line, I re-read The Azure Hand. I couldn’t pick a ‘favourite’ Crockett but it seemed only right to include him at least once in my 50 picks and this is the one I’m working on republishing right now so it was sort of a busman’s holiday. (See Sneak Preview of the new cover!) The reason I’ve read so many (or what felt like so many) crime/detective/mystery books this year is that I have been trying to contextualise Crockett into this genre about which I know so little. I’d read The Azure Hand before and never guessed who it was till it was revealed very near the end. Reading it again, knowing who the murderer is, is of course quite a different experience, and for me actually made me read the book more carefully and enjoy it even more. I guess that for me, reading a mystery type book I focus only on what I think will be relevant ‘clues’. I’m not sure this is a good way to read these kind of books and certainly in the case of The Azure Hand there’s much more to it. It has a lot of the classic Crockett elements to it – social commentary – he attacks racism head on – and romance – there are several parallel romances going on so that if there weren’t a few murders you might well think that it’s a romance novel out and out. There are familiar type characters (though of course they are all individual enough to be interesting) and Crockett’s familiar 4 girls which he employs in several of his earlier novels. I’ll be reading it again at least another couple of times before it goes to print and I know I won’t get bored of it on the re-reading. While there are shades of others – Sherlock Holmes, The Red Thumb Mark and the like it also in some way presages Agatha Christie, showing I suppose that Crockett played his part in the ‘journey’ of crime fiction and had something to offer the ‘Golden Age’ in terms of innovation. Certainly, in my opinion it can hold its own with others of the time and emerging genre. Book 50 Brand Loyalty - Cally Phillips
Ending with a book that never will and never wants to be ‘bestselling’ or ‘award winning’ because if it could be it could never have been written! I long ago promised myself that I would read one of my own books as number 50. I had been a reader nearly 25 years before I became a writer and while I must have read somewhere around 100,000 books in my life (as a conservative estimate) I have written only around 10 (probably up to 100 if you include screenplays/plays and various ‘treatments’ and aborted projects). I’ve discovered that writing and reading are quite different experiences. I enjoy both, but if I could only do one it would be read. Writing one’s own story is quite different to reading anyone else’s story and it takes quite a distance before one is able to read one’s own work in any way objectively (by which I just mean reading it as if it wasn’t written by oneself, so that the ‘insider’ experience is less important than the narrative itself). I lived with Brand Loyalty in one form or another for some 15 years before I wrote it in novel form and it’s been a good 5 years since I read it at all. But recently I gave it to someone else to read and they raved about it, and wanted to discuss its nuances with me (something that is as rare as hen’s teeth in readers it seems – though I can think of nothing finer than talking to a writer about their own books!) I thought I should re-read it if for no other reason than to be able to talk about it sensibly, not just from a dim memory of the whole narrative (by which I mean that beyond what made it to the pages of the novel). So as the final days of the year come along and I’m going to ‘smash’ my 50 books in a year target with more than a month in hand, I sat down to re-read Brand Loyalty. With some trepidation as I always have re-reading my own work. Stories do have a tendency to change with one’s own life experience and this is nowhere more true than with one’s own stories. I was, I’m glad to say, pleasantly surprised. The editor in me has obviously ‘grown’ in the last five years as I can spot a lot of editorial changes I’d like to make (nothing major but just typesetting issues mostly) but that aside, I found that I still rate it. I still feel proud of it. I still feel that George Orwell wouldn’t have turned his nose up at it. I still feel it has a unique perspective and says something quite important if that doesn’t make me sound too self-important myself. In fact, it feels like myself, living in the pages of a book. You want to know me – read this book. Written before Twitter and smartphones became ubiquitous, technology has progressed in ways I didn’t imagine, but the basic issue of ‘productive work’ seems more real than ever in our contemporary social media world. I still feel that it’s a good exploration of a post-dystopia world – this year there’s even a word for it ‘post-truth’ which has gone into the dictionary. It was a good way to end my 50 Scottish book reading experience. And it may kick me into progressing with the novel that’s been sitting idle for the past four years while life got in the way. Aptly titled ‘The One that Got Away.’ In 2017 I hope to finally reel it in. So the 50 Years a Reader project is complete, but the reading goes on...
2 Comments
Jim Page
12/16/2023 06:55:06 pm
Hello Ms Phillips. I beleive you are the same CP I climbed the Sgur an Gillian with a very long time ago. If you are not, my apologies for disturbing you. If you are,, and are inclined to reply, I would enjoy catching up. JP
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Cally
12/17/2023 05:23:51 am
Hey, Yes it's the same! I've emailed you from my personal email directly (so look out for it and potentially in spam. It is [email protected] . Look forward to catching up.
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AuthorIn 2016 I will have been reading for 50 years. I'm going to celebrate this by reading even more and sharing what I'm reading. Archives
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