Talking Of Books. Again. Well, Do I Ever Talk Of Anything Else?

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Following from the delights of co-hosting Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' show a couple of weeks ago, they've been potty enough to ask me back for the coming Saturday's literary extravaganza , in which I'll be their 'book champion'. Basically, I get to spend an hour talking about a book I'm particularly passionate about. Previous book champions have talked enthusiastically about brilliant novels such as Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy, for instance.

We have two problems with this. One is there's no way I'm going to limit myself to just one book. The other is I'm of the humble opinion that an hour's too long to spend talking about a single book, anyway. Especially when there are so many wonderful things out there to talk about. It's sort of like 'desert island books' and I'm not coming along with just one of the things in my satchel. I mean, I've got a Kindle. I can carry thousands of books with me!

So I'm going to try and talk about four. And you, dear reader, as a fully paid-up subscriber to this blog, get a sneak preview. Are you not the lucky one?

Tove Jansson - The True Deceiver
I discovered Tove Jansson when we were in Helsinki last year. I had met her Moomins as a kid and loved 'em, but I hadn't known about her adult fiction. The first thing I read was her Summer Book, a collection of vignettes of an old lady and her granddaughter summering on an island (Finland has a great many islands). Lying on a mossy knoll on Suomenlinna reading her timeless prose is a lovely way to spend a sunny Helsinki afternoon, I can assure you. The book's magical, redolent of the sea and season, effortlessly imagined and gloriously rich. The True Deceiver is another kettle of herring altogether - dark, relentless and burdened down with the perma-dark pressure of the winter snow deadening everything and making men go mad. It's a horrible book, all the more oppressive for its humanity.

Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet
This is one of my favourite books of all time. It's so very lush, filled with colours and scents, characters and the sweeping brilliance of a writer gorging on life. He was a twat as a human being, but God could Durrell write. It's actually four books, written as an interlinear: each book tells the same story from a different perspective (of them all, only the fourth nods to the concept of the passage of time) and it's only when you've read all four you get the full picture. That's a remarkable scope to set yourself as a writer and yet Durrell pulls it off without ever seeming to get out of breath. It's set in Alexandria between the wars and plays with love, gnosticism, betrayal, adultery, poetry and death in equal measures.

John Le Carré - The Honourable Schoolboy
I thunk a lot about this one. It was always going to be a Le Carré, but which one? I happen to think this is his cleverest and also so typical of his work. I think he's massively underrated as a literary figure because he writes 'spy thrillers' rather than literary fiction. I would never hesitate to sit down and re-read any of his books as a reader and I do try (and fail) not to get too distracted by my admiration of him as a writer. But gosh, he's good. He's also dark, devastatingly observed and wilfully cruel and bleak.

Now we're in trouble. I've glibly plumped for the first three and I had William Gibson's Neuromancer down as the fourth but hang on a second is that really what I want? It's pretty important, this fourth book. I mean, what about Mervyn Peake's brilliant Gormenghast trilogy? Well, mostly brilliant. Sort of 2/3 brilliant and 1/3 insane. But I love it and it's stayed with me through re-read after re-read.

What about non-fiction? Fisk's furious polemic, The Great War For Civilisation, the grim necronomicon written by a man who's met the skinny fellow from the village with a scythe too often? Or Dawkin's astonishing The Selfish Gene? Samir Kassir's Beirut, a book I have spent so long with - a sort of old companion. Oh cripes, I'm in trouble. Dalrymple's From The Holy Mountain should be in there, but maybe the solution lies in sticking to fiction?

Michael Moorcock's bawdy The Brothel In Rosenstrasse is one of my favourite lifelong books and Moorcock has been massively influential for me, but let's face it - this one's out because this is Dubai radio and the book's a tad, well, ripe. Oh noes! Iain Banks! I've got all of his books (including two as proofs, thanks LitFest team!), I positively lionised the man. The Crow Road, or maybe The Player of Games.

Oh, lawks.

What about Hunter Thompson? Forget Fear And Loathing, It's The Curse of Lono (I have the Taschen - lavish!) - or The Rum Diaries for me. Argh! Louis De Bernières! The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, just to be awkward, but to be honest Birds Without Wings is the one that knocked me cold. Umberto Eco! The Name of the Rose, easily his finest (and least insanely complex - everything else is pretty much unreadable piffle) novel.

And I enjoy Alan Furst, have always loved Somerset Maugham since I was a kid - let alone Evelyn Waugh - and recently have been lapping up novel after novel by Martin Cruz Smith starting, of course, with Gorky Park, which pal Phillipa Fioretti made me read by taking a guinea pig hostage and threatening to put out its eyes with a knitting needle. These RomCom authors are tougher than they look, I can tell you.

I'm in trouble, aren't I?

But - thank God, I finally get hit by the revelation - we're in Dubai, so there can only be one outcome. It's JG Ballard. And for the show - although any one of Ballard's does it for me (Vermillion Sands or The Crystal World are money well spent, but so is Crash and pretty much anything he's written) - it's Super Cannes. Hyper-planned wealthy expat community in sparkling enclave conceals dark, murderous sex and drugs underbelly should go down very nicely in a studio next to the Dubai Beige cul-de-sacs of Arabian Ranches...

So we're talking of books on Dubai Eye Radio (103.8FM anywhere in the United Arab Emirates or www.dubaieye1038.com for streaming) on Saturday from 10am. I'm on from 11 (8am UK time) and if I'm speaking with unusually defined pace and gravitas it's because I was at the Ardal O'Hanlon gig the night before.

If you know what I mean.

PS. I know. I posted. Life's busy and I'm taking things one at a time. 

PPS: Do feel free to leave your book suggestions in the comments. I'm constantly on the lookout for a good read. If you nominate your own book, the guinea pig gets it. Kapisch?

PPPS: Friday - Had a major wobble today and I'm going with Fisk instead of JG Ballard.

Book Post: Talking Of Books

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm co-hosting Dubai Eye Radio's Talking of Books tomorrow and so 10am to 1pm will see me sitting in the studio and partaking of all sorts of booky shenanigans. It's on 103.8FM if you live in the UAE and the live stream is linked here if you don't. Don't forget the time zone thingy - it'll be 7am to 10am in the UK.

One part of the show, the first hour, is devoted to discussing the 'book of the week', to which end I am reading 'The Collected Works of AJ Fikry' by Gabrielle Zevin. Apparently an earlier incarnation was titled The Storied Life of AJ Fikry and went out as an ARC, so marketing has obviously been playing about with this one right up to the wire. It's a book about a book shop owner and a sales rep and I have to confess I approached the whole exercise thinking it a highly cynical gambit to get into the good book into reps' good books. But then that probably speaks more to my cynicism than Gabrielle's. How it turned out in the end is something you'll have to tune in to find out.

Having done lots of book clubby talky things, as well as having had a number of reviews one way or another, I know how it can feel to meet readers' and reviewers' opinions head on. It doesn't particularly bother me, I'm not one of those sensitive artistic souls who quiver as if struck by hammer-blows at every word that isn't fulsome praise. Once you put a work out there for review, you're gonna get it - informed, uninformed, insightful, drive-by - the whole gamut. And so it is with reviewing books for TOB - I feel the best thing to do is just get on with it and be honest about what I felt as a reviewer. That is, funnily enough, somewhat different to what you felt about it as a reader, because you don't normally read books with having to talk about them on radio for an hour in mind, so you end up looking for things you may not have been quite so cognisant of when you're reading purely for pleasure.

Or something like that.

We're also going to be talking poetry, specifically Lebanese poetess Zeina Hashem Beck being discussed with Frank Dullaghan. It's no secret I am much enamoured of the city Beirut and Zeina's poetry brings it to vibrant, visceral life.

Other than that, life's quiet on the book front and right now that's just how I want it...

Book Post: Interviews And Big Days Out

There's an interview with li'l ole me over at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature blog, if you're interested in reading interviews with me. If not feel free to skip clicking on this link to the LitFest blog!.

Tellingly, my original answer to the question "What got you interested in writing?" was "I suppose it all started with reading, I’ve always been a voracious reader. But I gave up smoking in 2001 and had to find something publicly acceptable to do with my hands."

The LitFest team thought that was a tad controversial and omitted it from the final interview. That's okay with me, although I think it is possible to be a little too fastidious in these liberal days of ours. We all decide where we want to fight our battles and what we're comfortable with.

As we're talking about links to book stuff, I can't remember sharing this, although it's been up for a while now, but here's a piece on the Bubblecow blog about my journey to self publishing. It's a question I get asked quite a lot, one way or another. Bubblecow, BTW, is a leading British editorial consultancy and it was them what edited Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy for me.

Another link in a post of links is to the Expatwoman Big Day Out, which takes place tomorrow from 10.30am at the Arabian Ranches Polo Club. I'll be there signing - and hopefully even selling - books so do feel free to drop by and say hello, hurl abuse or whatever floats your boat. I'll have paperbacks of Olives and Beirut, but sadly have now run out of my little store of Shemlan paperbacks and have to order more from CreateSpace. So far I haven't missed the pleasure of paying a print bill at all, thank you!

And, finally, here's a link to buy your very own paperback or ebook of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. I mean, it wouldn't be a book post if I didn't end it with that, would it?

Game Of Thrones. I Am Clearly Unbalanced.

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The Kindle has turned me - a lapsed bookworm - once again into a voracious reader and it's touch and go whether I've made more money from Amazon than I've spent on there. I'm constantly on the lookout for new reads, but it's hard - there is so much dross out there, it's not true and I'm not just talking self-published dross, either.

It's hard to get to the good stuff sometimes. I need a literary Hillary Briss...

I've just finished re-reading Frank Herbert's Dune, a book I read back when I first starting working in the Middle East. It's just as amazing now as it was then, although the 'writer' in me did unearth no fewer than three lazy instances when a sandstorm was described as being the colour of 'curry'. Jalfrezi or bhuna?

In hindsight I probably shouldn't have approached an unknown from such a high, but that's the breaks.

One of the things that makes Kindles so brilliant is whim. At a whim, I can have pretty much any book I want. So I downloaded George RR Martin's Game Of Thrones. Not because I've seen even one minute of the HBO series, but because I'd seen such intense praise for Martin's original books. The Kindle has made me considerably more catholic in my reading, I'm more up for an experiment than I would have been at £9.99 and 2 Kg of paper. I had Game Of Thrones in my hands within the minute.

Three days later I've finished reading it. I haven't finished the book, just finished reading. I got bored. Terribly, dreadfully, terminally, mind-numbingly bored. It's like The Bold and the Beautiful on horseback wearing leathers, a sort of two-dimensional fantasy version of a slightly dumbed-down version of English history with obvious situation played out over obvious situation in a sort of millefeuille of obviousness. The baddies are clearly bad, the goodies are clearly going to get into trouble. It's Punch and Judy on a lavish budget with some legendary dragons.

I can't finish it. The world's raving about it, glued to its TV sets with purple drooling faces, slack-jawed and wide-eyed as each trite event plays out on that flat backdrop painted by a four year old with wax crayons, a sort of medieval history lite with one-cal fantasy trimmings.

I am obviously alone in this, the only person still alive in a planet of shuffling, brain-eating zombies. Either that, or I'm simply unbalanced.

Game of Thrones is a Dorothy Parker book - not to be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force...

What Earthquake?

Iran: Caravanserai (Photo credit: Erwin Bolwidt)

And... breathe.

It's odd to be back. It always is. There's a surreal quality to it all, wrenched away from the sunny cold of the unseasonably late UK cold snap and the bustle of family and friends back to the warm air and glitter of glass.  As usual, I didn't sleep at all on the 'red eye' flight, watching The Hobbit (quite fun) and Jack Reacher (woeful) instead.

We got home, unpacked and turned in. And proceeded to sleep through what was, today's media breathlessly assures us, the biggest earthquake to hit Iran in fifty years. The 7.8 magnitude quake shook the UAE, causing buildings to be evacuated - Gulf News found an expert who estimated the tremors that shook the UAE were equivalent to a 4.5 quake here, which does seem rather implausible, but an expert's an expert.

On the Pakistan/Iran border, near the city of Zahedan, the quake is said to have killed and injured many in both countries, although official figures appear sketchy (Iran says anything between zero and fifty dead, depending on who you listen to, while Pakistan says between four and thirty-five killed). Twitter was all a-flurry, of course.

Not that we cared, all we felt was zeds.

Meanwhile, I'm catching up with emails and clients (the day job) and contemplating tonight's 'More Talk' taking place at the Dubai International Financial Centre's More Café. Saturday is going to be busy, too - I'm doing two workshops and a reading as part of The Archive Dubai's 'Day of Books' all-day event as well as appearing on Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' programme.

That upcoming radio appearance explains why I found a copy of Edward Rutherfurd's forthcoming novel 'Paris' on my desk when I got to work (the building was, I was glad to see, still standing). I can't say the sight filled my heart with stuff - my last 'Talking of Books' read was Jack Whyte's appalling 'Rebel', 600 pages of awful cod-Scottish dialogue and pointless meandering plot that I waded through with a black heart and weary eyes.

It's not just earthquakes I'm good at missing. Being back in the UK I managed to miss last week's TOB broadcast, which is a shame as Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was their 'Book of the Week'. I can only hope it didn't cause the programme's reviewers the pain having to read 'Rebel' caused me.

Now I've got Rutherfurd's 670 page epic to digest in a little over two days. Worst of all, the book's not published yet, so I can't get a Kindle copy. I've got to read it as a papery thing. What larks, Pip...

Why Narrative Matters

Melchite Hirmologion written in Syriac Sertâ book script (11th century, St. Catherine's Monastery, Mt. Sinai. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's, for rather obvious reasons, quite a booky week this week. I started it by attending the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature moderators' training session last weekend at the rather wonderful 'Dar Al Adab' (house of literature). It was good fun and we all learned stuff, which is as good a combination you'd want in return for an investment of your time!

The week's obviously ending with the launch of the Middle East edition of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. I've been hearing snippets of the performers' plans and I think we're in for some treats. The nice people at Apres are throwing in a welcome glass of bubbly to get the after party started, too.

I've been doing the day job as well, but I'm taking tomorrow afternoon out to travel up to Ras Al Khaimah, where I'm giving a talky/workshoppy thing at the Al Qasimi Foundation Reading Roadshow, which is backed by the LitFest, British Council and all sorts of other good people.

I'll be taking a room of a couple hundred teachers on a journey of discovery. I'll be exploring my theory that the importance of narrative in maintaining and communicating cultural identity is under-estimated in the Middle East. That the region has allowed itself to be defined by voices other than its own. I'll be asking them if that's right - and if so, why? And if we agree that it matters, I'll be trying to find out what they think we can all do about it.

I think it's going to be fascinating. It'll either be a train crash or a triumph - my idea of a fun way to spend an afternoon. And, who knows, if we all have good fun and learn stuff, we'll have all invested our time wisely!

More information and registration for the roadshow is linked here.