I’ve written about competitive reading lists a couple of years ago. That sport has been given a new tweak by the retiring headmaster of Eton, who in addition to a long list of books on subjects other than literature, has said that by the age of 16 he would expect on of his students to have read the following:

Gulliver’s Travels – Swift
David Copperfield – Dickens
The Age of Innocence – Wharton
Atonement – Amis
Never let me go – Ishiguro
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Wolfe
L’elegance du herrison
La sombra del viento
The Master and Margarita
O Crime de Padre Amaro
Boiled Wonderland and the end of the world

Some book bloggers award the books they review marks out of five or ten. Others use a star system. I’ve always resisted doing this – it seems a bit simplistic – but having racked up a hundred or so reviews I think I have developed a scoring system of my own. It goes a bit like this:

• Brilliant. A classic. Will be read for many decades to come. I don’t think any of the books I have read this year fall into this category,but of course some of the “interesting but flawed” books might get promoted after a few years.
• Interesting but flawed. Quite a few of the books I have read and reviewed this year fall into this category, including Will Self’s “The Book of Dave”, Richard Flanagan’s “The Narrow Road to the deep North” and David Mitchell’s “The 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet”. These are all books that have something interesting to say, and try and look at the art of novel writing with a fresh perspective, but at the same time have weaknesses that are hard to overlook. Over time some of these weaknesses fade, and the reader comes to appreciate the strengths even more. This has happened to me (to a certain extent) with J K Rowling’s “The Casual Vacancy”, where a bit of perspective has allowed me to appreciate what she was trying to do, and forgive some of the crasser aspects of the novel.
• A dropped ball. A bad book by a good author. For example “Children Act”, Ian McEwan; McEwan doesn’t stop being a great author by writing a disappointing book, but it’s still a disappointing book
• Lionel Asbo. A book with no redeeming features whatsoever – “Lionel Asbo” is the only book in this category, but it deserves one of its own just to emphasise its awfulness
• Why? Books that leave me puzzled as to why the author bothered writing them. Books usually go into this category shortly after I finish them, but often don’t stay there, as I slowly (or otherwise) make my mind up about them.
• Dialling it in. A mediocre book by an author who has proven that he or she can write so much better, and where the unavoidable suspicion lingers that the author wasn’t trying that hard, or had other things on their mind, such as a possible TV/film adaptation – examples include “How to Build a Girl”, Caitlin Moran, “The Black-eyed Blonde” Benjamin Black.
• A guilty pleasure. Books that I ought to be embarassed to enjoy, but which I nevertheless did. Terry Pratchett’s work used to be in this category, until I was joined by other adult readers.
• Irritating. “Moab is my Washpot” annoyed me immensely.

More useful than stars or marks out of ten?

In an interview on Monday, Ed Miliband used the phrase “shuffling the deckchairs”. This is a conflation of two phrases. “Shuffling the deck”, a dead metaphor originally from playing cards of course, but now just meaning “changing things about”. It is usually used to describe an attempt to refresh a situation, and is therefore a mildly positive action, a first response to a not so serious situation. “Re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” on the other hand is negative, futile activity – defined online as “saying that someone is wasting time dealing with things that are not important, and is ignoring a much more serious problem”. (Bit of an understatement). Interestingly, this phrase seems only to have gained currency in the late 1960’s.

I think it is obvious what happened here – Miliband’s brain suggested to him the original phrase – shuffling the deck – but he realised halfway through that it wasn’t quite what he intended to say, so he changed tack (dead metaphor alert) adding the “chairs” suffix, leaving him with a neither Arthur or Martha phrase. Was it just me, or was there a quick flash of puzzlement in his eyes as he said it – “did I get that right, it didn’t sound quite right?”. The second phrase obviously was suggested by the coincidence of “deck” and “deckchairs”, and interestingly Miliband isn’t the first to have done this – the online Urban dictionary gives some other examples of the use of the phrase, although doesn’t acknowledge its complex origins.

This happens all the time – people misremember or misunderstand phrases or idioms, and create new ones in the process. This undoubtedly happens with individual words, the best example being meld quoted by Stephen Fry on QI a few years back. “Meld”, by its similarities to both “mix” and “weld”, came to be used to mean (and then to mean itself) “combine”, despite its original meaning being very different. Examples of new idioms being coined by the accidental collision of old ones are rarer, but I haven’t been able to find a word for this – is there one?

Incidentally, these only work if they are accidental, where the associations between phrases are allowed to float to the surface of someone’s consciousness – trying to force them doesn’t work e.g. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket before they hatch”. See what I mean? 

More on yesterday’s entry re Amazon selling race hate material. This story was first broken in 2013, and received some national media coverage, as a result of which (it is claimed, but I cannot confirm) that Amazon withdrew these items for sale, albeit temporarily. They seem to have sneaked back without any publicity.

Much of the response to the media coverage took the line that if these books aren’t illegal, then why shouldn’t Amazon sell them? Fair point, but there’s two qualifications on this. First, these books are illegal in some countries in Europe, most notably and obviously in Germany. Despite this Amazon will happily post these books to you irrespective of where you live. There was no “not for sale in Germany” warnings on the site for these books. So is Amazon breaking the law? Secondly, while you can buy many things aren’t technically or actually illegal, soft porn for example, the conditions in which they are sold are controlled by responsible sellers, if not by the law itself. So soft porn goes on a top shelf. Even Viz has a “not for sale to children” label. But Amazon ignores these rules. I just checked – even highly explicit content such as the Fifty Shades series contains no warnings about the nature of the content. With these “novels” at least you get reasonably accurate reader reviews – almost 2,000 of them! – but with the holocaust denial books the descriptions give no hint that what you are getting is racist bilge.

One final point. Amazon uses clever algorythms which trace what you buy and also which items you browse. Because of these searches Amazon is now convinced I am a neo-nazi, and keeps trying to sell me more of this garbage.

Reading the Amazon reviews of a book I intend to blog about sooner or later, I came across one review which recommended another book, controversially entitled “Enoch was right”. In case you haven’t come across Enoch Powell before, he was a conservative politician who promoted racist ideas in the UK in the 1960s and later. This was captured most memorably in his “Rivers of Blood” speech, and appealed to a racist, anti-immigrant tendency within the UK at the time, which of course has some worrying parallels with the rise of UKIP today.

Following the link to “Enoch was Right” Amazon’s helpful site told me that customers who bought this book also bought these others, and gave a list of recommendations.  Each of the recommendations were, to be blunt, Nazi filth. Holocaust denial material which in other countries it would be illegal to print, sell or promote are being sold on Amazon without any warnings or qualifications of any kind.

I don’t expect Amazon to censor what its readers can buy, but there have to be limits on this freedom. Amazon wouldn’t sell child pornography would it? So why sell holocaust denial material? Worst still, why allow this material to be sold unfettered, with descriptions eulogising about the scholarly and authorative nature of the books, and supported by clearly placed “reviews” confirming how wonderful the books are, and recommending others of the genre? I will write to Amazon and ask for details of its policy on this issue, and keep you my imaginary readers posted.

Difficult though it is to admit, I often read novels and then forget what they are about. Not just minor details – whole novels slide past my eyes, to be quickly forgotten. Novels from the same author merge in the memory, and even relatively recently read books which I have written about here resist more detailed recollection. I am not sure this is just about quality, although that obviously is a factor – there are plenty of books I wish I never had to forget, quietly pressing the delete button in my brain minutes after the last page has been turned.


Why is this, and does it matter? I am not going to try an amateur dissertation on human memory here – that would be both arrogant and futile. I think we all understand at a basic level that the more carefully we read and consider a book, the more likely we are to remember it. Blogging about books I read is in part an attempt to anchor them in my memory and prevent them fading away, a bit like repeating one’s lines in a play. But I also think that the way we read is more important. To illustrate this, an anecdote:

Stuck on a train recently I fired up my Kindle, and turned as I so often do the comforting arms of Stella Gibbons. I have written before and at length about the glories of Cold Comfort Farm, and it is probably the novel I would most like to read as I leave this earth, in the unlikely event I get that choice. Flora, as I am sure you know, goes to live with her bizarre relatives in darkest Sussex, and arrives to find the place largely deserted. She is shown to her bedroom, and describes it thus:

“She dressed in pleasant leisure, studying her room. She decided that she liked it.

It was square, and unusually high, and papered with a bold though faded design of darker red upon crimson. The fireplace was elegant, the grate was basket-shaped, and the mantelpiece was of marble, floridly carved, and yellowed by age and exposure. Upon the mantelpiece itself rested two large shells, whose gentle curves shaded from white to the richest salmon-pink; these were reflected in the large old silvery mirror which hung directly above it. The other mirror was a long one; it stood in the darkest corner of the room, and was hidden by a cupboard door when the latter was opened…..One wall was almost filled by a large mahogany wardrobe. A round table to match stood in the middle of the worn red and yellow carpet, which was covered with a design of big flowers. The bed was high, and made of mahogany; the quilt was a honeycoomb, and white.”

So far as I can recall, for what that is worth, we don’t revisit this rather sweet welcoming room again. Flora has an adjoining sitting room she uses to while away her time, but not this bedroom.

When I read this paragraph the other day what struck me was that I had never read it before. More precisely I had no memory, not the faintest echo, of having read this description before, despite the fact that I have read Cold Comfort at least once a year for more than thirty years – obsessive I know. How could that be? Had it been craftily inserted by some unscrupulous Kindle editor for reasons unknown? Unlikely. Was this a case of the Eyre Affair coming to life? Even less likely. Or was this the first sign of early onset memory loss? My best guess is that I had read this paragraph before, but never really paid it any attention.

Why did it not stand out? The description is detailed and well written, and is noteworthy because it is not in the mock heroic form used for many other descriptive passages, nor the humorous style used for much of the rest of the narrative. It is not clear whether the narrator here is Flora or the author – the gentle appreciation of the room could come from either. There is nothing arch or judgemental about the description, which there usually is from Flora’s descriptions of the farm. It occurs to me it might even be text from an abandoned alternative novel that Gibbons is recycling here. I have however edited out for reasons of brevity some comments about mirrors found in commercial hotel bedrooms that might give a different perspective.

I can only conclude I didn’t remember this section because I have never read it properly. It doesn’t matter that Flora has a nice bedroom at the farm, so I have mentally skipped this page to move on to the wonderful “porridge breakfast confrontation with Adam and his clettering twigs. 

What other gems might there be lurking unappreciated in CCF – I will have to re-read it to check……