genre bending

There's something that's been bothering me for a while, and I think it's probably time to give it an airing here. There's no point tiptoeing round the subject, so I'm just going to come straight out and make a statement here: I identify as transgenre.

Well, that's fine, you'll be saying, and we're obviously all keen to be as supportive as we can to you on your life journey, but can you be clear what you mean? Well, OK. I read quite a lot of fiction, as documented on this blog, and I like to think my novel-reading habits span quite a bit of a range in terms of subject matter, from Proper Literary Classics to science fiction, fantasy, utter filth both ancient and modern, historical fiction, murder mysteries both home-grown and foreign, big books, small books and all points in between. But all fiction, right? Now I'm not (clearly) one of those people who will feign some sort of incomprehension at wanting to read something someone just made up, nor do I make the claim that you can't learn useful things about the real world from reading fiction, as that would be nonsense - and I mean actual concrete stuff like history, not the more nebulous stuff like insight into the human condition and interpersonal relationships, which I take as read, if you'll pardon the pun. 

But nonetheless it is all squarely within the fiction genre, although occasionally straining against the fuzzy boundaries, and I wouldn't want you to think that that's all I read, nor that I am closeted in my little novel-reading garret oblivious to the goings-on out in the real world. My concern - and a bit of self-knowledge is key here, as it is in all parts of life - is that my slightly nerdish interest in the statistical minutiae of my reading habits might induce me to reduce the frequency of reading stuff that I don't document here, out of a (perhaps subconscious) desire not to skew the stats.

So I have come to the momentous decision to live as my true self in all its glorious messy rainbow diversity and include some non-fiction books in the list of stuff that gets documented here. I am absolutely not going to make any sort of commitment to quantity or frequency, and it will very likely be a lowish percentage of the overall numbers, but what I want is the freedom to widen the list of available choices for my next book and basically just do what the hell I want when I want; again, a reasonable aspiration for life as long as what you want isn't hollowing out people's heads and putting them in your fridge. 

Just for the record, this absolutely isn't a choice I've made because I'm running out of fiction choices in my unread pile; that remains, and always will given my book-acquisition habits, a healthy size giving me more than enough choice. I am very uncomfortable with the fashionable concept of tsundoku, because as used by a lot of people the term seems to imply the practice of buying lots of books and never reading them, rather than having a healthy and varied to-be-read collection that you haven't read yet offering a mouth-watering diversity of choice. Personally I find the selection of the next book to read from the available list to be one of the most delicious aspects of the whole process, something I might not find if I instituted a strict regime of only having, say, a maximum of five unread books on the shelves at any time. It's highly variable, but my current practice of having somewhere between 50 and 70 unread books at any one time means I never feel restricted or constrained by the range of choice on offer. 

Aaaaaanyhoo, there it is; my current book is still a regular old novel but once that's finished (and documented here, obvs) the one single commitment I will make is that the book after that will be a work of non-fiction. This is just to test-drive the process, and if I find the whole experience brings me out in hives or is otherwise unsatisfactory in some way then I'll knock it on the head. 

all right, Tiger, me old c***

Another example of the slightly counter-productive effect of prissily asterisk-ing out relatively innocuous words from news articles - here's a piece in the wake of Tiger Woods' latest car-related mishap. This one features an interview with David Duval, former world number 1 and apparently one of Woods' closer friends on tour during their brief period of serious rivalry between about 1997 and 2002. It's all fairly bland stuff, to be honest, carefully skirting round any speculation about Woods' intake of prescription (and indeed non-prescription) drugs or any future legal action, but does include this snippet:

Join me, if you will, as we mentally step through at least two words that could be in the asterisked place in the sentence, both of then considerably ruder than the "crap" that Duval presumably uttered, and respectively referring to items of female and male genital furniture. 

Duval, incidentally, now plies his golfing trade rattling around mid-leaderboard on the lucrative PGA Champions Tour, where he's making a perfectly decent living thank you very much - $86,000 from five events so far this year despite his best finish being a tie for 14th at the Hoag Classic a couple of weeks ago. Nice work if you can get it. 

me my shelf and I

I tweeted a photo of my bookshelves the other day, after doing the painstaking up-shuffling of everything to incorporate the various books I'd got for Christmas and my birthday. It occurred to me afterwards that I'd put a similar picture into a blog post a while back (that turned out to be here) and that maybe I should do another one. Part of the motivation for this is just to illustrate the slightly expanded shelfage area following our house move in mid-2022, but also for me to do an updated heat map of where the currently unread books are, as always just for my own amusement.

It is genuinely true, despite sounding slightly mental, that one of the big selling points (to me, anyway) of the house we now live in was the front reception room featuring a long straight side wall uninterrupted by windows or doors or fireplaces or other inconveniences. There was a radiator, but one of the first things we did after moving in was have that moved to a different wall. The motive here, of course, was to accommodate the long IKEA shelving unit holding all the books; I was very excited at having done some measurements and thereby determined that this wall was longer than the one in the old house by a sufficient amount to accommodate a whole extra horizontal span of shelving, with the giddying prospect of extra book-storage space. The other main advantage of this new library area was that it wasn't in our bedroom; not the best place for an area that you might want to make accessible to others. 

So anyway, compare the new shelving arrangement with the old one by looking at the pictures below (old one first). One probably obvious point to make is that while the extra fifth shelf span in each horizontal row moves the numbers around a bit, those numbers will also refer to an intersecting but non-identical set of books, since I've read quite a large number in the four years since the old photo was constructed and also acquired quite a lot of new books.

Things to note:

• one of the things the new layout has done is bring the Stephen King section occupying D3-E3 directly under the Dick Francis section in D2-E2; this accounts for the very low numbers in that section.
• two 6s and a 7 in the old picture, nothing higher than a 5 in the new one. We've flattened the curve!
• to generate even more extra room I reduced the vertical spacing of the shelves slightly when reconstructing them; as a result while the shelves still accommodate the old A- and B-format paperbacks they no longer accommodate the occasional "trade-format" outliers like House Of Leaves and The Road Home. Books of this size (and you can see there's only a handful of them) occupy the far-right end of the very top shelf above E1. It's a bit unsatisfactory but I decided it was worth it for the extra space it made available. 
• having constructed this new image I'm now loath to ever read anything from column A given the pleasing ascending sequence occupying it; in fact I might buy a couple of new books in the T-Z range just to bump up the counts by one in the two lowest sections.
• if I were to ignore that and just try and whittle the numbers down by attacking the highest-numbered sections first I would be spending a lot of time in the bottom-left corner, as that seems to be a heavy area for unread books; maybe because it's furthest from the door?

getting my oats

I assume literally everybody had a go at making some sort of bread during the COVID-19 lockdown, right? There was a whole subculture (no pun intended) that sprang up around sourdough bread, including the best ways to ensure the capture of the airborne yeast that makes sourdough starter work. Other, if you will, avenues (what, your hairy avenue, etc.) are available for yeast acquisition, for instance if you are lucky enough to be the owner of a vagina you can harvest yeast from there, especially if you happen to be suffering from a conveniently-timed yeast infection. Intriguingly, it does appear to also be possible for the process to run in reverse, i.e. for you to catch a vaginal yeast infection from bread-making, although that does raise some interesting questions about how the yeast transference occurred. 

As an aside, if you want an even more extreme method of making bread rise, try making some gangrene bread.

Anyway, as much as I like eating sourdough bread I am far too lazy to get into the minutiae of starter fermentation and all that malarkey. We did nevertheless have a couple of goes at making bread during lockdown, firstly some fairly standard white bread (i.e. the sort that you make with the yeast that comes in a packet) which was fine, although we were a bit cavalier with the proving process so it was a bit denser than it might have been. 

The bread-making process isn't that onerous, honestly, but the yeast thing plus the multiple provings, putting a towel over it, leaving it in the airing cupboard, etc., is a bit time-consuming, so I was interested to hear that you can make bread with beer. The relevant paragraph from that linked page is this one:

There are two kinds of beer bread, both of which are incredibly simple. In fact, my favourite way is so simple a child could do it (disclaimer: don’t let a child do it). All you need to do is mix a 330ml bottle of beer, 375g of self-raising flour and 3 teaspoons of sugar in a bowl with a spoon. Pour it into a bread tin, top with a drizzle of melted butter and bake at 180°C/360°F for about 50 minutes, or until golden and crisp on top.

The results don't look massively different from the regular bread, and taste pretty similar too. I can't remember what sort of beer I used for the one in the picture, but you can imagine getting very different results from a lager or a light dry IPA, and a malty winter ale, or Guinness. 

The upside here is that it's incredibly easy to make and doesn't require any proving; just mix, in the tin, in the oven, done. The downside, of course, is that you'll have to sacrifice a bottle or can of beer to the process that you could otherwise have enjoyed in the proper traditional God-fearing way, i.e. by drinking it.

Anyway, it was perfectly nice, though I haven't repeated the experiment, partly for the reasons above, and partly because post-lockdown we now have nice convenient access to bread shops and the like. But I am always intrigued by a recipe that seems to bypass the sorcery and voodoo incantations associated with making regular bread, and I was therefore intrigued by a recipe that flashed past my eyes in a YouTube short (or possibly a Facebook reel) the other day. It's basically this one but I'll reproduce it here as it's very simple:

• 300g porridge oats
• 500g Greek-style natural yogurt
• mixed seeds
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1-2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• a pinch of salt

Seed-wise my current preference is a generous couple of spoonfuls of chia seeds in the mix, and then a generous sprinkling of pumpkin and sunflower seeds on top. Some recipes with near-identical ingredient lists appear to produce pale bread with a darker crust; mine is quite dark throughout. 

Essentially it's a variant of soda bread with the yogurt substituted for the more usual buttermilk and the flour/oats combo adjusted so that it's 100% oats. Anyway, the important thing is that the method is simple: chuck everything in a bowl, mix well, scrape it into a loaf tin and bake at around 180°C (gas mark 4) for about 45-50 minutes.

It's very tasty and lends itself to sweet or savoury applications: I've had it with goat's cheese and houmous on it, but also toasted with some honey on and both were equally nice. You'll recall that we have done bread-making using yogurt here before, but that was flatbread which is generally easier. 

the last book I read

Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban.

William G. (not this guy, just to be clear) is a quiet unassuming type of guy; lives alone in a flat in a shared house, works in a bookshop, keeps himself to himself. We learn that he was previously married, or at least in a relationship that lasted long enough to produce two daughters, who we gather he doesn't get to see any more for reasons that are never elaborated on.

Neaera H. (I would go with something like knee-airer pronunciation-wise) is an author of children's books, most notably the ones featuring cute anthropomorphic character Gillian Vole, and is nervously contemplating a move to writing books for an adult audience. 

Both of these two solitary people randomly end up at London Zoo at separate times, and moreover both end up gazing at a tank of sea turtles, contemplating the clarity and precision of their lifecycle in the wild (swim thousands of miles round the world's oceans, return to a specific beach to lay and bury eggs, philosophically accept that most of the hatchlings will get eaten before they ever reach the sea), comparing that with the aimlessness and stagnation of their own lives and considering the crazy idea of stealing the turtles, taking them to the sea and freeing them.

William and Neaera eventually meet and realise that they've been having the same thoughts about the turtles, and gradually hatch a plan, with the help of George Fairbairn, the surprisingly amenable guy at the zoo who takes care of the turtles. And so they build some makeshift turtle crates, hire a van, spirit away the turtles - no small feat as the adults weigh more than an adult human and you can't just walk them out of the zoo on a lead - drive to Polperro and release them into the sea there. 

And so, the turtles liberated and the two protagonists' quest fulfilled, the book ends, right? Well, no, actually - it turns out that while the turtular quest was both exciting and satisfying, and gruelling and frustrating, it hasn't been an instant fix for all the deep-seated problems in the two main characters' lives. That said, maybe some of the turtles' relentless and instinctive sense of purpose has rubbed off after all - Neaera finds herself having a relationship with George the turtle guy, and William has a brief fling (which doesn't last) with his fellow bookshop employee Harriet and then finds himself resolving some domestic disputes with house-mate Sandor with some uncharacteristic physical violence. Bizarrely, this seems to thaw William and Sandor's previously wary relationship and they start to become friends, and just as well, as they soon have to help deal with another in-house domestic situation - their quiet house-mate Miss Neap has hanged herself. 

This is the seventh Russell Hoban book to appear on this list, the others occupying a period of roughly six years between Kleinzeit in August 2010 and Pilgermann in December 2016. Those six books cover a pretty wide range of subject matter but all have in common a sort of ineffable strangeness, and Turtle Diary (one of Hoban's earlier works of adult fiction, published in 1975) is no different, despite the relative prosaicness of the subject matter and lack of supernatural elements. Is it actually about two people rescuing turtles? Well, sort of, but not exclusively: it's also about middle age, coming to terms with who you are and being comfortable with that, even if that means consciously limiting how much interaction with other people you do (with Miss Neap's suicide presumably intended to illustrate the consequences of never quite coming to terms with all that stuff). The turtles, as well as being actual turtles, act as a sort of metaphor for freedom and adventure and purpose. Neaera's career arc going from author of anthropomorphic animal tales for kids to adult fiction is of course a mirror of Hoban's own. 

My favourite Hobans are probably the early-1980s pair of Riddley Walker and Pilgermann, both set outside the contemporary London setting of most of his other novels (Turtle Diary included) in both space and time. But they're all good, very readable, fairly short and recognisably the product of a singular style and vision. The seven Hoban novels that feature here equals the number of books by William Boyd on the list, joint second only to Iain (M) Banks with eleven. 

Turtle Diary was made into a film in 1985 starring Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley (the whole thing seems to be available here). That makes it (as far as I know) the second book on this list whose film adaptation stars Ben Kingsley, the other being House Of Sand And Fog. It's also (again, as far as I know) the second book on this list whose film adaptation was written by Harold Pinter, the other being The French Lieutenant's Woman. The cover art of my Penguin Modern Classics edition is by Eduardo Paolozzi, who also got a mention here. 

problems with the the printing

Following on from my complaints (reasonable I think) about printing and/or binding errors in previous books on this list - Bluesman, Lolita and The Lay Of The Land, and related complaints about the frequency of typos in The Falls and Eternity, here's a little oddity in A Question Of Upbringing, prominent and worthy of note mainly because it's literally in the first line of the first chapter of the book. Have a look:

If you're struggling to see it, here's a similar screenshot from this video, of a version of the book that doesn't have the error:

If you still can't see it (there are two successive a's in the first sentence), that will be for the same reason that people sometimes struggle to see the deliberate error here:

I would assume that's the reason why it slipped through the proof-reading process for my 1980s Flamingo paperback. 

The linked video above, which I will confess to not having sat through the full hour of, also touches on a subject that, for instance, Powell's Wikipedia page is a bit silent on, but seems like an obvious question that one would want to ask: did he know before writing A Question Of Upbringing that he was embarking on a 12-novel cycle, or even a multi-novel cycle, or did it evolve as he went along? It's surprisingly difficult to find any related information, but this page has an explanatory paragraph:

Powell started writing the first novel, A Question of Upbringing, in 1948. At that stage it was intended, according to Spurling, to become the first part of “at least a trilogy”. By 1956, when Powell was writing the fourth novel, “what was originally planned as three volumes or a little over had grown to eight or nine.” In early 1962, when Powell was beginning the seventh novel, “he finally made up his mind to allocate three books to the Second World War, and complete the entire sequence in twelve volumes.” Apart from mentions of two scrap-books of scribbles and ideas, these scattered references are the only information Spurling imparts of how Dance was conceived and planned. This is a huge disappointment.

The references to "Spurling" there are to Hilary Spurling who wrote a biography of Powell in 2017, to generally more complimentary reviews than the implicit one in the quoted paragraph above. Note that the Guardian review I linked to there is written by Claire Messud, who also features on this blog. 

the last book I read

A Question Of Upbringing by Anthony Powell.

Ah, schooldays. It doesn't take much for one's mind to be cast back there: the endless Latin verbs, trying to find one's best tails for evening prep, fagging for Blenkinsop major and getting a good thrashing if his crumpets weren't toasted to perfection, trying to grind various future Prime Ministers into a wall in the name of recreation, all the usual stuff.

Hmmm, well actually perhaps not everyone's schooldays were exactly like this, but those of our narrator here (who we eventually discover is called Nick Jenkins) definitely were. Cast back by a wafer-thin framing device (a page and a half or so at the start of chapter one) into a reverie of his schooldays, at an unnamed school which we're clearly meant to infer is Eton, he recalls friendships with his old chums and room-mates Stringham and Templer, various hilarious scrapes involving their po-faced housemaster Le Bas - including the arguably less hilarious prank of making an anonymous phone call which resulted in Le Bas' arrest - and some out-of-school socialising during the holidays including meeting Stringham and Templer's respective families and navigating complex hierarchies of relative wealth and social class, as well as some more primal stuff involving the first stirrings of feelings, you know, Down There. Nick decides, for instance, that he is in love with Templer's sister Jean based on no more then a couple of mumbly teenage conversations.

Nick also encounters another schoolmate, Widmerpool, during a holiday in France. Previously something of a figure of fun and target for derision, Nick starts to see Widmerpool in a new light after he brokers a truce between two of the other residents of the house they are staying in, a Swede and a Norwegian who have been refusing to speak to each other after a disagreement over a game of tennis, a girl, or possibly both.

And so, schooldays over, it is time to put away childish things and proceed to university, seemingly without having to do anything as tiresomely proletarian as pass exams or undergo any form of entrance selection process. Again, the university is coyly unnamed but is clearly Oxford. Nick is re-acquainted with Stringham, and also encounters Sillery, one of the dons, who seems to have a limited interest in his students' academic progress but instead focuses on establishing political connections, easing his various protégés into influential positions in politics and business. These protégés include Stringham, who, with some behind-the scenes string-pulling (no pun intended) from Sillery, lands a plum (if somewhat ill-defined) job with a prominent industrialist. Templer, who has skipped going to university, pops in to visit with a couple of his London friends, and Nick's sense that his school friendships are gradually unravelling is reinforced when Templer drives a tightly-packed car (Templer, his mates, Nick, Stringham and a couple of random girls they've picked up) off the road and into a ditch, thankfully without seriously injuring anyone. 

Nick, recognising that a fresh start is required, heads off into London to meet his Uncle Giles, the slightly murky black sheep of the family. Will Uncle Giles be able to help him redirect his life?

Well, the answer to that specific question is a shrug and a "dunno", because the book ends at this point. That will be no surprise to anyone vaguely-acquainted with 20th-century literature and Powell's work in particular, as A Question Of Upbringing is the first book of the twelve-volume sequence A Dance To The Music Of Time. In other words if you want to find out what happens next, check out book two (which is called A Buyer's Market). I'm not conclusively ruling out ever doing this, but if you view A Question Of Upbringing as a stand-alone novel in its own right you'd have to say that not a lot of note actually happens. And fair enough, it's not that sort of novel, and if you want explosions, freaky sex and zombie Hitler that stuff is all available elsewhere. It's dryly witty, and there are some sly observations about wealth and class here, and just a sense that our narrator is slightly less rich and posh than some of his schoolmates, although these are just inferences since we never get to meet any of his family. For all that, there is also the sense that Nick is somewhat blind to his own privilege, drifting from Eton to Oxford, and probably subsequently into a nice job somewhere, nice and comfortably without having to sweat too much or wonder where his next meal is coming from. Whether he is deliberately written that way or whether these blind spots are just inadvertent reflections of Powell's own blind spots (he too went to Eton and Oxford) I couldn't say, at least without reading another eleven novels to find out. Beyond this it would be hard to say we actually know anything much about Nick at the end of the book, something noted by John Crace in his Digested Reads column. 

A bit like The Alexandria Quartet, the A Dance To The Music Of Time sequence, whose publication dates range from 1951 (this book) to 1975, has faded a bit in critical regard over the years, though it was still well-regarded enough in 1997 for a four-part (i.e. three whole novels crammed into each episode) TV adaptation to be made. While the general theme here of oblivious posh people going about their daily lives, borne safely aloft on a cushion of unexamined privilege, raises my lefty hackles a bit, it is very readable and pretty short at a whisker over 200 pages. I'd always thought of it as a sort of upper-class English condensed (or perhaps summarised) version of Proust, and maybe it is, although I am ill-qualified to comment, since although I own a copy of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (in an English translation, obviously) I have never read any of it. Maybe this year? Well, maybe. Having now, after just over 19 years of this blog, cracked part one of A Dance To The Music Of Time, will I now plough on and finish all twelve? Check back in 228 years to find out!