I like...

By Stuart Sharp

I like...

Well, lots of things, really. I quite like fantasy literature, as the more observant among you may have noticed. I like poetry, I like sports books on that most maddening and obsession inducing of sports, cricket. I’m prone to a bit of comedy, a bit of serious literature, and I’ll even admit to reading the odd romance novel if you catch me in a particularly odd mood.

Before this turns into a singles’ advertisement though (Book lover WLTM same, must love urban fantasy and own complete works of Neil Gaiman), I think perhaps we should pause to consider just how wide those claims I’ve made are. I say that my taste runs to fantasy, poetry, and cricket books among other things, but those are categories so broad you probably wouldn’t attempt to jump over them on a motorbike, let alone read everything in them.

Let’s take the narrowest of those categories as a starting point. Cricket based sporting books run the gamut from ghosted autobiographies to novels and back again, often by way of some truly awful poetry. Just because I like Sir Ian Botham’s comedy novel Deep Cover and quite enjoy Gideon Haigh’s latest collection of essays A Green and Golden Age doesn’t mean that it necessarily follows that I should want to read the ‘autobiographies’ of players who haven’t been around more than a couple of years. Nor does it mean that I want to sift through the majority of poetry on the game, just because I might happen to like some of the work of the late Alan Ross.

As for the other two categories, you might as well say that your taste in music is jazz and rock. In much the same way that those musical genres have branched out into so many categories that practically no one can keep track, let alone claim to like everything in between Dave Brubeck and Alan Holdsworth, so too it has become almost impossible to simply say that your taste runs to either poetry or fantasy. If you claim to love the former, do you mean concrete poetry, free poetry, traditional rhymed verse, epic poetry, haiku, or one of the hundred other strands of it? With the latter, do you mean something traditional and epic like Tolkein, modern and strange like Gaiman, hilarious like Tom Holt’s work or maybe something from that weird borderland between horror, fantasy, teen fiction and romance that calls itself urban fantasy?

Even when you’ve settled on a subcategory, it should be fairly obvious that you won’t necessarily like everything in it. Despite being something of a fan of the comic fantasy oeuvre, I haven’t been able to finish a Robert Rankin book in years. I keep getting them out from the library, thinking that because they fall into the genre I ought to like them, but it never quite works out like that. Perhaps it’s just that there are only so many jokes about sprouts I can take.

It isn’t just that I don’t like surrealist fiction, because that would be falling into the same trap from the other end, declaring with wholehearted enthusiasm (or rather, lack of enthusiasm) a hatred for a particular genre. Possibly the best known example of this is the ‘I don’t like classic literature, it’s boring’ syndrome, which seems to affect a lot of readers at some point but again makes the mistake of lumping the whole category together rather arbitrarily. As it happens, I quite like some surrealist stuff, if Jasper Fforde’s works can be considered that.

Which is, of course, one of the biggest problems here. How exactly do you decide what fits into the categories you’ve decided aren’t to your taste? Where exactly do you draw the line between fantasy and horror, for example, given the amount of crossover between the two? More to the point, how do you decide it without actually having to read the books in question, since doing so would rather defeat the object of declaring your dislike? What ends up happening, as often as not, is a reliance upon that tried but not very true combination for finding out about a book, the cover and the blurb. Go on, admit it, there are books out there that you have taken one look at before thinking ‘No way am I ever going to read that’. I know I have.

To a certain extent, of course, this sort of thing is perfectly normal and even useful. It saves us from reading a great many things that we won’t enjoy while redirecting our attention towards things that we probably will. There are, after all, only so many books that we’re able to read at once, though you wouldn’t always know it from the stacks of partially read things lying around my house.

How many times though have you read something you didn’t particularly like because it looked like the sort of thing that you ought to enjoy? How many times have you put up with a bad book just because it happened to be by a favourite writer, or in a genre you like, or because it had a nice cover? Remembering that it doesn’t work like that can save you from a lot of awful prose.

I’d like to think, however, that there’s something more positive to say than simply ‘even your favourite genre will contain books you won’t like’, so let’s turn that around. Somewhere, probably somewhere on the edges, buried under the books that everybody knows about, your least favourite genre will probably contain something you’ll enjoy.

In fact, now that I think of it, there’s probably a quick challenge in that thought. Think of your least favourite genre. Now, if you feel like it, try finding something in that genre that you can manage to get through with something approaching enjoyment. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is.

Who knows, if I really look hard, I might even find a ghost written autobiography that I don’t feel the urge to throw across the room.

Who Reads Classic Novels?

By Stuart Sharp

This article goes out with thanks to five members of the University of Hull fencing club, who agreed to assist me with a quick survey the other night. Or at least, they didn’t run away quite fast enough. Being reasonably used to me doing odd things, they were even quite helpful. The question was a simple one: “What was the last classic novel you read?”

At least, I thought it was simple at the time. After all, I wasn’t asking them for the classic novel they’d read ten books ago, or for a complete list of all the major characters in alphabetical order. Closer examination, however, revealed that it wasn’t that straightforward at all.

What constitutes a classic novel, for a start? One friend asked if the works of Arthur Conan-Doyle would count as classics, while another (probably not entirely seriously) mentioned Stephen King. Between us, we said no to the latter, largely on the grounds of age. We also said no to my other friend’s choice, on the basis that he was thinking of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, and I’d asked about novels. Personally, I might have allowed them, but I seem to have been outvoted. Given that it was my question, I’m still wondering how that happened.

We had two criteria then, for a classic novel. It had to be “old”, however you’re inclined to define that, and it had to be a novel. Thus armed with a vague definition, I expected a torrent of answers. Or possibly a dribble. There were only five of them, after all.

Apparently though, I still needed to make an important distinction. Did I mean the last classic novel that they had read some of, or the last classic novel that they had finished? I meant the last one that they’d finished, as it happened, and frankly I was starting to wish that I hadn’t asked, but they had raised a good point. If you ask anyone for the last novel they started but couldn’t finish, there’s a pretty good chance it will be a classic one. I’d actually go further, and lay decent odds that it’s going to be Moby Dick, Ulysses, or the Farie Queen. It so often seems to be. Usually, the reasons given are that the classic novel in question was boring, odd, or completely lacking in any intelligible plot.

In my case, I will occasionally add “it was due back to the library” and “I do have to do some work occasionally, you know” to that collection, but the basic list is the same. It has accounted for me having to break of part way through Beau Geste and The Catcher in the Rye so far this year, and looks set to put of my re-read of Paradise Lost on hold for a while yet.

To return to my random questioning of my friends, we did eventually get past all the ones we haven’t finished to return to the original question. The answers included Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Lord of the Rings, a collection of short stories (apparently the rule about novels only applied to some of us), Robinson Crusoe and “I don’t know then… none?”

The answers were about what I expected, and tell us a couple of things about both classic literature and the people inclined to read it. The one woman in the group went for what we might be incredibly snobbish about for a moment and refer to as “proper” classic literature. It was literary by design, and hasn’t just acquired the tag with age. She was also the one member of the group who didn’t have to wrack their brains to think of something. It appears, once again, that women generally read more than men, and are inclined to read a more “literary” type of book more often.

That the others went for what we could term “classic fantasy” and “classic adventure” is also fairly predictable. Just as with the novels published today, there are deep genre and style divisions among older works. In much the same way that it is fairly obvious that a bunch of 19-21 year old male students is more likely to be interested in thrillers than in chick-lit, romance or family drama, so too they are more interested in Middle Earth than in, for example, the complete works of Jane Austen.

The two who couldn’t think of anything are perhaps more intriguing. I say two, because the one who went for the short stories did so having been unable to think of anything else. They are both intelligent people. One of them is an astrophysicist, and really quite clever indeed. I also happen to know that they are readers. The extended discussion on minor details of Terry Pratchett’s works that preceded my questioning was a clue.

So this isn’t just the occasional, and more usually male, antipathy to books in general. One of the two owns most of Bernard Cornwell’s works, so it isn’t even an aversion to longish books set hundreds of years ago. Instead, I can only assume that there is something about the very idea of classic literature that puts them off.

Perhaps it is because some pieces of classic literature are quite boring, strange, convoluted, and inclined to use the sort of devices that no modern author would be able to get away with. Perhaps, though I hope not, it is some odd belief in the idea of progress; that the books of today must somehow automatically be superior to those of the past.

More probably, it has something to do with the way such literature is often taught in schools. My own aversion to classic literature lasted several years into university, simply because I saw it as something very dry that you picked apart for meaning and discussion points rather than simply enjoying it.

The point, I suspect, is that classic novels, like any novels, are there to be enjoyed. They aren’t there so you can boast about which ones you’ve finished, or a chore that you have to perform if you wish to be taken seriously as a reader. Like any writing, there will be examples you like and examples that you just can’t get along with. It’s really only when we recognise this, and when we start to go along with our sense of what we really want to read, that the world of classic literature starts to open up a little.

That enjoyment factor is, incidentally, why I won’t be making huge efforts to correct this odd imbalance among my friends. Attempting to push volumes of the classics on them simply wouldn’t work, because again, it would be linking classic novels to the idea of being something you “have” to read. Until someone makes the connection between some classic literature and truly enjoyable reading, there is little chance that attempts to get them to read it will work.

Besides, it’s never struck me as particularly sensible to start pestering people who have ready access to swords.

I Have to Have That Book!

By Stuart Sharp

I’m sure you’ve run into these six words at some point. I know I have. In my head at least, they make themselves heard on at least a semi-regular basis. They are, as I’m sure you know, about the surest sign there is of a case of book lust.

But what exactly is this book lust stuff? What is it that takes perfectly normal people who might otherwise be going out for walks, or talking to loved ones, or playing golf, and makes them first slaver over cheap paperbacks, and then spend their time indoors devouring them. Is it really doing us any good?

On the face of it, book lust makes no sense. The idea of forming such a sudden and instant attachment to bundle of paper and words just doesn’t seem, well… normal. Of course, that’s not something limited to just books. People lust after all sorts of strange objects, from expensive cars, to pairs of shoes. Usually though, those are what marketing people would think of as “aspirational purchases”, not a few quid’s worth of paperback.

In the same vein, a number of sports people of my acquaintance have formed almost worrying attachments to particular pieces of equipment. Several of the fencers I know, for example, have given their swords names, covering everything from “Brian” through to “Ticklestick”. Cricketers I know spend hours lovingly sanding and taping bats, or fiddling with the arrangement of studs in their boots. But this doesn’t help either. Again, sporting equipment is usually quite expensive, and anyway, this sort of relationship with sporting kit only builds up over time.

With me and books, and I suspect with a lot of other people too, it’s different. There is no build up period. It’s simply a case of knowing that you’re going to read a particular book, because the thought of leaving it on the shelf, not knowing how it ends, is like an itch at the back of the mind. It’s not there to irrational levels, you can ignore it, but really, why would you want to?

The books that spark this feeling will vary between readers, obviously. Just because I absolutely have to read Kim Harrison’s Where Demons Dare means nothing for whether you will like it (though you will, I’m sure). Equally, so will the ways in which these books catch our eye. Sometimes, just occasionally, it’s enough to see a really great cover on the shelf, maybe coupled with a great title. Maybe you’ll flick through a little, or maybe it will be the back cover blurb that catches you. For me, that’s rare. The last book that became an absolute must buy like that for me was probably fantasy epic Kushiel’s Dart, by Jaqueline Carey.

More commonly, a relationship with a book will start on the basis of some prior knowledge. Maybe a friend will recommend something. That is, when you think about it, a little like a blind date, except that you don’t have to worry if you’ve got spinach in your teeth while you’re reading. Closer to something like speed dating is the good old “grab a bunch of books from the library at random” approach. You end up reading a lot of unreadable books that way, of course, but there are usually enough real gems in the mix to make it worthwhile. Without this, I would probably never have read any of Tom Holt’s work. I certainly wouldn’t have been drawn in by the cover art.

From the first unexpectedly good library book, of course, it’s invariably a quest to read everything in the series, or by the same author, or by the author’s best friend Pete. There’s something remarkably voracious about the way the average reader will hoover up every word written by an author the moment one book has given them the bug. In the case of someone like Jim Butcher, this might take some time.

It also suggests that, when it comes to book lust, what we’re lusting after is not the book itself. Obsessing over the other works of a particular author demonstrates that neatly. It’s not the author that we’re obsessing over either, except in a tangential way. Despite the insistence of assorted publishers that they’re selling the author more than the words, it’s the story that we fall a little in love with.

This, of course, is my way of saying that book lust is perfectly acceptable. Lusting after books as physical things is probably a little odd, forming an excessively strong attachment to favourite authors is the sort of thing that the humble restraining order was invented for, but lusting after a well told story? From where I’m standing, that seems like part of what makes us readers in the first place.

We’ve all felt what they can do when they’re well told, making us feel everything from joy to terror, delight to outright disgust. The best can help us see the world in entirely new ways over the course of an afternoon, or force us to question everything we formerly thought. Badly told, of course, they mostly generate annoyance. That is probably why we’re so quick to latch onto those stories that look like they might work, and then onto the series, the author’s other works, their friend…

As that might suggest, there’s still the question of whether all this is really a good thing to consider. Ultimately, I suspect that’s a question of degree, and point of view. I’m sure that the family members who barely see you for a couple of days when the next in your favourite series comes out might occasionally prefer it if you lusted after something else. Them, perhaps. If they happen to be non-readers, they might even suggest alternative hobbies, or possibly some sort of twelve-step program. Anything that gets back some of the shelf space they’ve lost over the years.

But then, compared to so many other things, books aren’t that bad. Books are about the only addictive substance that won’t destroy your brain or body (well, except for eyestrain). They aren’t going to destroy your marriage, assuming you occasionally give in on the shelf space stuff, and they might actually expand your social life if you join a reading group. If we’re going to obsess about something, it might as well be something that’s cheap, that’s probably good for us, and that is never going to do worse than cause us to discuss the Lord of the Rings trilogy in public.

On the whole, it could be a lot worse. It could be golf, for a start.

Where Have All the Goblins Gone?

By Stuart Sharp

Have you noticed that there’s something of a dearth of goblins in fantasy writing these days? No, I imagine you have a social life instead, so you’re going to have to take my word for it. But think about it. It used to be that no sooner had you got through the first couple of chapters than the pages started to fill up with short green chaps whose only real purpose in life was to be cut down by the intrepid heroes.

For a brief period after Tolkien, practically every fantasy book was full of the things. These days, though, there hardly seem to be any, just as there seem to be rather fewer bushy-bearded wizards, arrow-shooting elves, and overly muscular barbarian types who never seem to be able to afford enough clothes despite all the priceless jewels they steal.

The answer to this, of course, is that fantasy writing, as with any writing, is far from static. Just look at how the goblins started out. Before Tolkien got hold of them, they were just a collection of moderately malevolent fairie creatures scattered across a host of folk-tales. They weren’t even green, for the most part. Just take a look at the widely varying goblins of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, with their bestial heads, for proof of that. Just as writing changed to become what we now think of as fantasy, it was inevitable that the style of fantasy would change to meet the imaginative leaps of new generations of authors, and to fill the needs of new readers.

As with so many other areas of writing, one of the obvious reactions to fantasy’s traditional forms was to parody it. The likes of Esther Freisner, Tom Holt, Robert Asprin, Terry Pratchett and countless others have turned the traditional forms upside down, inside out, and every other way they could think of. The main question, though, is what did they do with the goblins? Sadly, they mostly seem to have ignored them. Freisner made some small use of them, and Mary Gentle’s Grunts makes wonderful fun of their usual orcish counterparts, but for the most part they’re absent.

They’re not entirely alone in that, since any straight ahead fantasy component wasn’t likely to last long under a relentless barrage of comic fantasy oddness. The difference is that where most of the obvious elements were easily transformed into something workable, producing, among other things, an almost unending stream of inexperienced, incompetent or simply weird wizards, goblins don’t seem to have merited the same treatment. The major exception is the work of Tom Holt, where they make regular appearances as mildly sinister office workers in such books as The Portable Door and Earth, Air, Fire and Custard.

Perhaps the reason for this is that comic fantasy has largely changed its focus. The shift is readily apparent if you just read the earliest of Pratchett’s Discworld novels followed by some of his more recent ones. Where The Colour of Magic is firmly rooted in subverting the conventions of fantasy, something like Hogfather or Making Money is far more focused on making fun of the world as we know it.

A similar sort of shift has taken place in the more serious sort of fantasy too. Take a look at the relevant section of your local bookshop. Maybe once it would have been filled with books set in unpronounceable worlds and faithfully reproducing every element of traditional fantasy, even if they changed a few of the names. Now though, there’s hardly space for it under the weight of urban fantasy, supernatural thrillers and modern supernatural romances. Not that I have any problem with any of those genres. For anyone who hasn’t them yet, I can heartily recommend the likes of Living With the Dead by Kelly Armstrong, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Swallowing Darkness, and Storm Born, by Richelle Mead. But, except for those that show up as minor characters in Hamilton’s Meredith Gentry series, they don’t really leave much room for goblins.

Ok, I promise that’s enough about the goblins. They aren’t really the point anyway. The point is just how much fantasy writing has changed over the years. Even the more traditional sort of epic fantasy has changed so much as to be virtually unrecognisable. The likes of the late David Gemmell and Joe Abercrombie have taken to writing a brand of fantasy that is much more character driven and gritty than much of the earlier stuff, bringing the unpleasant sides of their characters forward as often as the heroic ones. Even someone like Trudy Canavan, whose fantasy is much more obviously fantastic than either of the others, still seems far more interested in the inner world of her characters than in the spectacular world around them.

To me that seems like a good thing, but it does have one mildly unpleasant side effect. Occasionally, it means that I can read what are considered fantasy classics and not particularly like them. And now for the words that have already caused me at least one argument: I don’t particularly like Tolkien. I really don’t like the main Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s no more than my opinion, obviously, but I find him too focuses on his world and his grand quest, and not enough on those engaged in it. My feelings on Robert E. Howard’s original Conan stories are even more ambivalent, and I can only take Fritz Leiber in small doses.

I suppose the point, therefore, is just how quickly fantasy can date. It’s not the same genre that it was at its inception. Nor is its main focus the same as it was even a few years ago. Of course, if that’s the case, then there’s always the question of what it will look like in another decade or two. Will it just be more of the same, or will it find yet another way to reinvigorate itself. I have no idea. I am, however, kind of hoping that whatever the future brings, it will still have some sort of place for goblins.

10 Bookish Things to Be Grateful For

By Stuart Sharp

Sometimes, we need to stop for a while, just to appreciate some of the things we have. This is no less true with books than with anything else, so I have, naturally enough, compiled a list. You might have other things that you feel grateful for, but these, I think you’ll agree, are mostly pretty great things too:

1. Libraries
Public libraries, when you think about it, are really quite a wonderful idea. Despite the scary looking people who stand in front of the section you’d really like to browse, despite their refusal to get the one book you want to read, despite even the dreaded librarian’s stare that tells you that if you so much as breathe on the stock, you’re in trouble, the central idea is still absolutely amazing. You want to read something, so you go to a library, and you read it for free. For free! Well unless, like me, you happen to have a terrible memory for return dates.
Just think of all the books you weren’t quite certain of that you still read, because you were able to get them out of your local library. Just think of all the things you’ve learned by spending time there. As the brief history of libraries at http://www.history-magazine.com/libraries.html shows, the idea is thousands of years old, but it’s still every bit as brilliant now as it was then. Those of you who agree should probably make the time to go to http://www.lovelibraries.co.uk/ at some point as well.

2. The E-Book
No, I know it will never fully replace the paperback. I know it will never have that wonderful papery feel, or the smell of a really old book (which reminds me rather a lot of a sock drawer that has been kept perfectly dry for fifty years, though I suspect I might be alone in that thought) or the way you can drop a book and not lose more than your place. Go on though, admit it. You want one. Hundreds of books crammed into a space the size of one ordinary one? Is there anybody reading this whose bookshelves don’t need that sort of solution? And it’s kind to trees, which is nice.

3. The fact that you can read at all.
The nobility of the middle ages probably weren’t quite as much of an illiterate bunch as has occasionally been made out, but most of them weren’t big readers either. And the peasants were far worse off. Throughout history, large portions of the human population have been unable to read or write to any kind of high standard. And it’s still a problem even in so called ‘first world’ societies. According to the UK’s Literacy Trust (http://www.literacytrust.org.uk) 1.1 million of the UK’s adults have almost no literacy skills, while 3.5 million have the skills that the National Curriculum would expect of an 11 year-old. It’s a scary thought.

4. Authors Who Publish Exactly on My Schedule
Of course, being able to read is not the same thing as having something to read, which brings me nicely to my next point. There are some authors who, thanks no doubt to some very persistent bullying on the part of their publishers and agents, produce books exactly when I’m running out of things to read. Kim Harrison, in particular, seems to have timed many of her recent releases to coincide with my running-out-of-books moments. There are some authors who are even more predictable than that. For several years, the question of what to buy my mother for her birthday was solved for me by the fact that Terry Pratchett would invariably have something out two or three weeks before it. That this also allowed me to read it afterwards never entered my head. Honest.

5. Small Bookshops
There are a lot of big bookshops out there. They’ll have uniforms, and centrally determined marketing policies, and usually coffee shops where the overwhelming scent of the stuff is enough to put those of us who don’t drink much coffee off browsing. They aren’t always a bad thing. They usually have a wide range in stock, and decent prices. One of my favourite bookshops is my university’s branch of a major chain. It occurs to me though that the things I like about it most, that the staff know me by sight, that a couple of them know my reading habits, and that they occasionally recommend things I like, are actually things resulting from it being quite a small branch. Small bookshops just feel… more comfortable. Odd, in many cases, but comfortable. Rather like the cardigans many of the owners seem obliged to wear.

6. Paperback Novels
Hardback novels undoubtedly have their uses, but really, when you take away the ones that don’t come under the heading of ‘remarkably durable blunt instrument’, what are you left with? No shelf space and a bad back, probably.
Paperbacks are convenient, they’re light. A lot of the time they can fit in a spare pocket. Admittedly, they’ll disintegrate under a spilled cup of coffee, but I’ve already warned you about that sort of bookshop, haven’t I? More than that, paperbacks are cheap. Look at your bookshelves. Imagine how many fewer books there would be if you only bought hardbacks. Imagine how much lighter your bank balance would be. Now feel grateful that the paperbacks are pressing together in some strange, jumbled arrangement that would do the average dry stone wall proud.

7. Small Press Publishers
Otherwise known as those publishers who put out most of the decent poetry collections. Let’s face it, no one else will. Some of them, like Bloodaxe, have gone from being small to being quite a bit bigger, but they’ll still never compete with the truly large publishing houses. Instead, they, and publishers like them, will simply continue supplying almost every poetry book I own. The big names, in contrast, will probably continue to contribute those annoying ‘the nation’s favourite poems about love/trees/mildly concussed penguins’, none of them containing poems newer than fifty years old. I don’t want to read those collections. Except possibly the one about the penguins, which is, sadly, the one I made up.

8. Authors with imagination
To continue being moderately grumpy for a moment, let us consider some of the things that show up on bookshop shelves. There are the ghosted autobiographies, the reality TV tie ins, the utterly awful books that get their place because someone famous, good looking, or merely possessing embarrassing photographs of the publisher happens to have written them. I could go on, but it would depress us, so I won’t.


Let’s concentrate, instead, on the existence of authors who have made a living being as odd, as different and as wildly imaginative as humanly possible. From the realms of ‘proper’ literature, we have the likes of Murakami describing reality in a way that shouldn’t really make sense, and yet somehow does. For my own favoured genre of fantasy, we have Kelly Link, who not only has the ability to write the strangest short stories you’ve ever read, but who also has the peculiar knack of slotting zombies into parts of stories you never thought they’d fit into. I’m sure we can agree that you can never have too many zombies.

9. Buying books online
Which isn’t to say that your favourite small bookshop will necessarily have the particular slab of (maybe) zombie filled joy that you want to read. They are, after all, small, and don’t always have room for everything you might desire. They could always order it for you, but we all know how long that can take.


But the beautiful thing these days is that thanks to the likes of Powells (and some other online bookshop whose name I can’t quite recall at the moment) it’s possible to simply order books online, at three in the morning should you feel like it. Now, I have to admit to preferring real life bookshops, with assistants who are real (but quite possibly alien) people, but even so, there’s something quite remarkable about the thought that these days I could order Kafka’s complete works without ever bothering to change out of my pyjamas. Slightly worrying, but also quite remarkable. Isn’t the Internet a wonderful thing?

10. Book Blogging and Zines
On the subject of which, our last thing worth really appreciating is… well, us. Zines, bloggers and online communities. Random strangers who make up lists of things to be grateful for about books and then put them on the Internet for you to see. Estella’s Revenge and all the marvellous, marvellous book zines like it. Can’t decide if you’ll like the new book by a favourite author? Dozens of online reviews will help you. Can’t decide what to read next? Start a poll on a blog. Have a sudden urge to read a list of things to be grateful for?

Actually, I think we may have just covered that one.

So Many Books…

By Stuart Sharp

What to read? That, more than anything else, more than ‘will I have time to finish this chapter before someone walks in and I have to actually do some work?’ more even than ‘if I put another book on this shelf is it going to collapse?’ is the question that hounds us as readers. There are more books published every year than we could possibly keep up with, even before we start delving into the huge body of classics, second hand paperbacks, and things found stuffed in the back of boxes that don’t look great, but you never know. Somehow we’ve got to choose between them.

Of course, if you mention this little problem to someone who doesn’t read quite so voraciously, it will probably earn you something of a funny look. ‘Just choose.’ they’ll say. ‘Pick something you like the look of.’

If only it were that simple. Don’t they know that judging books purely by appearance is quite proverbially the last thing you should do? Besides, several of my favourite books come with covers that don’t exactly shout across a crowded room. Take Tom Holt’s more recent comic fantasy works, for example. The Better Mousetrap and Barking both feature such plain, line drawing based covers that it actually took me a couple of tries to find them on my bookshelf a moment ago. Most poetry books are even worse, because they invariably follow a cover format dictated by the publisher’s standard design. In other words, they all look the same.

‘So just flick through them’ our bewildered friend would no doubt answer, and it’s true that doing so will at least eliminate a few of the worst examples. It will show up the badly written ones, the ones that desperately need about half the adjectives taken out. What it won’t do is tell you anything about whether you like the book, because that is something that owes quite a lot to pacing, character, setting and all those other things that are far more important than mere style.

It’s at this point that the humble review comes in useful, but even this is far from perfect. In the case of reviewers who you trust, such as the ones here hopefully, you’ve potentially got a very useful guide to what to read next. Unfortunately, so has everyone else, which means that the book you’re considering reading but aren’t sure enough about to fork out the money for will have disappeared from the library. A dozen other people read the same review, and they beat you to it.

There are other reviewers out there who you have to learn to ignore. It’s not that they don’t know what they’re talking about, though some don’t. It’s more that they will never, ever read the same types of books you will, and even if they do, they will look for completely different things in them. You care about character and they’re busy rhapsodising about the setting. You want to know about the pacing, and they’re busy talking about how it’s all a clever parody of something you’ve never even heard of. They aren’t wrong, but they see books in such a different way they might as well be.

Of course, for most of us there are a few authors with whose work we won’t wait for the reviews. It always makes it easy to decide what to pick up next when one of your favourites has something new out. Except that it’s never quite that easy. Experience must surely teach us that publishing companies cleverly time their releases so that no one, not one single author, has a new book out when you’re looking for something new to read. Either that, or all your favourites have new books out, making a huge dent in your bank balance while still leaving the problem of choosing between them. Whoever timed it so that Laurell K. Hamilton’s Blood Noir and Kelly Armstrong’s Personal Demon should both show up at my local bookshop on exactly the same day that I took receipt of half of Robert Asprin’s back catalogue probably qualifies as some sort of evil genius.

I think the time has probably come for us to do the sensible thing… and abdicate the decision completely. There are two obvious ways of doing this.

One is to give the decision over to everybody else who can be bothered by putting it to a vote. Stick a poll up on a blog and people who would never vote on such ‘petty’ matters as who their MP is will rush to tell you what you should be reading. Even if they can’t decide what they’re going to read themselves, they’ll suddenly acquire firm opinions when it comes to telling someone they’ve never met what to do.

My problems with this approach are simple. Firstly, the question of whether you will even remotely enjoy the same sort of things remains. Secondly, and rather more importantly, it feels far too much like the sort of reading list I went out of my way to avoid at school. Every time you read something recommended in this fashion, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that you ought to be writing an essay on it at the end.

That leaves us with the laws of chance. I’m something of a fan of the ‘shut your eyes in a library, reach out and see what you get’ method, though it could also work when choosing between a stack of books. Probably not with just two or three though. I suspect even I could remember where I put each book down in that scenario. Drawing titles out of a hat is always an alternative option, while I’m sure the more technologically minded of you are working on random book choosing computer algorithms as we speak. Well, not so much sure as hopeful, because I’d quite like a copy if you are.

The results, naturally, can be a touch hit and miss. Probability knows even less about your reading tastes than the average reviewer, and nothing about judging the quality of writing. The random approach can be quite fun though. I find it works best when you’re prepared to let yourself cheat a little. You come up with a result, decide you don’t want to read that and try again. And again. And again. Just keep going until your random method finally comes up with the book you secretly wanted to read all along. You see, it’s easier to choose than you thought.

Ten Ways of Starting a Literary Argument

By Stuart Sharp

Literature and third pint arguments in pubs have a long and distinguished history. Just look at Christopher Marlowe. On the occasions when no one plans on stabbing anyone else, or on sparking impossibly boring arguments about whether Marlowe faked his own death and became Shakespeare, they can even be fun. After all, if people didn’t love a good, lively debate accompanied by a certain amount of alcohol, there wouldn’t be such things as academic conferences, would there? So, to get things going, a few easy ways of starting a suitably bookish argument. Just remember to have a coffee table sized hardback handy, for if things turn nasty.

1- Insult a Favourite Author: This is the easy one, and in a lot of ways the most childish. After all, there’s only so many times you can really go round the ‘…is great! No, they’re rubbish!’ cycle. The beauty of this, of course, is that almost everyone has a favourite author, and almost all favourite authors have flaws. To allow my argumentative inner self to pick on a couple of my own favourites for a moment-

‘Neil Gaiman? He’s too weird, and he mostly writes comics.’

‘All right, so David Gemmell wrote some good stuff, but he mostly wrote the same story over and over again.’

See, it’s easy.

2- Genre Differences: Why settle for insulting someone’s favourite writer when you can go for a whole genre? There’s always something to start an argument over, whether it’s chicklit’s empty-headed lightness, the thriller’s refusal to believe in deep characterisation, or fantasy’s enduring attachment to goblins. The best bit is that, thanks to sub-genres, even if you happen to like the same sort of thing, it’s still possible to start a lively debate on the relative merits of, for example, vampire focussed supernatural romance versus straight ahead urban fantasy.

3- Hardback v Paperback- When in doubt, take things back to basics. Avoid the arguments over story completely by focussing on what the things are printed on. See someone clutching the paperback? Point out that it won’t last five minutes. The hardback? Ask them when they took up the weight training. Of course, these days, the whole debate has been enlivened further by the joys of the e-book, allowing us not just arguments over the merits of the whole idea, but also over which format is best. Be cautious though. It’s only a short step from debating the merits of the Kindle to waking up and realising you’ve become a computer geek. I, for one, would much rather remain a confirmed book geek.

4- The ‘Literature’ Debate: Go on, admit it; you didn’t finish Moby Dick. Or Ulysses. You were too busy reading something enjoyable. But it might be that you know someone who has. Almost certainly, they’re going to be the sort of person who wouldn’t be caught dead reading the latest Jim Butcher novel. Just happen to mention any genre novel you’ve read recently, and they’re almost guaranteed to come back with ‘yes, but it’s not literature is it?’

It’s almost too easy.

5- The Booker List: Really a specialised sub-set of the above. It seems that the world can be divided roughly into two categories. Those who read everything on the Booker short list as soon as humanly possible, and those who see a book there and vow never to even open the cover. There’s no known way to reconcile the two schools of thought, which means there’s all the scope you’ll ever need for an argument. Alternatively, debate who should really have been on the list, why you would have made a much better judge, or why the whole thing is obviously rigged for picking the member of the short list you least wanted to win.

6- Ok, you love the same genres. You love the same authors. You love the same novels by the same authors. But I bet you don’t love the same characters. They’ve developed a crush on the main character, while you’ve secretly re-read all the sections featuring sub-plot character 3B. They think you’re weird for focussing on someone who just isn’t the point of the novel. You think they’re just being obvious. You see, you’re arguing already.

7- References, Allusions, and Minor Eastern European Plays: The last point is, of course, a reference itself, harking back to Terry Pratchett’s complaint in the introduction to Unseen University Challenge that there are some strange people who write to him explaining that they’ve spotted that the phrase “‘please open the window’ has clearly been taken from a Czech play last performed in 1928.” You don’t need to be that thorough. You just need to have spotted something about the book you’re reading that lets you go ‘Of course, you know where it’s all taken from, don’t you’ at the optimally annoying point.

8- What Does it all Mean? Not the universe, obviously, the book you’ve been reading. You’ve got to save yourself something to argue about in the pub tomorrow. Entire English departments have been built on the fact that two perfectly reasonable people can read the same book and decide it means almost completely opposite things. Entire arguments can be built on the fact that the same thing also applies to unreasonably contentious people too. Though actually, you’ll probably find a fair few of those in the English departments. You might see Alice in Wonderland as a deeply meaningful metaphor for growing up. I see it as a bunch of random silliness. You see, we’re debating.

9- Alternate Endings: DVD extras have a lot to answer for. Specifically, they have to answer for the idea that you might take a story you like, and imagine the possibility that it might end in a dozen ways rejected by the author as too unsatisfying, too pat, or simply too much like hard work. You might even decide that they ending you’ve thought of is better than the original, though anyone you mention it to will immediately disagree. Except possibly in the case of Douglas Adams, of whom it can best be said that he wrote some great beginnings and middles. If you don’t believe me, read The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul.

10- The Book or the Film? The book, obviously. Why are we even debating it? Unless it’s the book of the film, in which case it might be acceptable to question how this stuff comes into being. I briefly met someone who would actually become quite violent at the mention of the Harry Potter films. Suffice it to say that it’s a corner of the North East of England I’ll be avoiding from now on.

Know-It-All Awards

By Stuart Sharp


Since this month is such an enjoyment of knowledge in all its written forms, this seemed like a good moment to celebrate sheer, unadulterated cleverness. In a world of books increasingly dominated by dumbed down nonsense thrown together to tie in with big names and film releases, it’s nice to know that there are still some writers out there unashamed to be unfeasibly brainy. It might have got them bullied at school, but here it nets them respect, not to mention the opportunity to feel slightly smug. So, with that in mind, I present to you my Literary Brainbox Awards. You’ll just have to trust that I’m wearing a suitably spangly jacket.

The ‘And They Still Find Time to Write’ Award

There are, of course, those such as J.K. Rowling who’ve managed to come out with books while struggling along with life, kids, jobs and who knows what else. Those efforts should certainly be recognised, but probably have more to do with good time management and commitment than out and out cleverness.

What we’re looking for instead is a good, old fashioned polymath. Someone who manages to excel in other fields while still finding time, not just to write, but to write with the sort of underlying cleverness that seems almost designed to invite envy. Since it’s me doing the choosing, there’s really only ever going to be one winner of this. Step forward Stephen Fry- Comedian, Actor, Presenter, and also the author, not just of great non-fiction like his Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music and The Ode Less Travelled, but also wonderful works of literary fiction such as The Liar, Making History, and The Hippopotamus. Envious, me? Well, maybe a bit.

The ‘Inexplicable Maximization of Polysyllabic Linguistics’ Award

Otherwise known as throwing in obscure words for the sake of it. There’s a case for just sticking a pin in a pile of poetry books and calling whatever it comes out with the winner. However, that sort of approach might be seen as an attack on the sort of love of language that should be at the heart of good poetry, and is also contrary to the spirit of celebrating cleverness that I’m looking for here. Besides, the only pile of poetry books close at hand is out from the library, and I doubt they’d appreciate pinholes in them.

That means this one’s going to have to go to another of my favourite writers, Gideon Haigh. From The Big Ship to The Summer Game, his exquisitely researched pieces float along nicely before suddenly presenting the sort of word that leaves even those of us who’ve read the poetry books reaching for a dictionary. And then for a bigger dictionary, because the word in question isn’t in the Collins Gem one nearby. The best bit is that this is not a man showing off, or rubbing in the fact that he knows something you don’t. Rather, the occasional baffler comes completely naturally, with the apparently sincere belief that everyone will know exactly what he means.

The ‘You’re Going to Learn About This Whether You Want to or Not’ Award

Of course, there are some writers who know that you can’t possibly know exactly what they mean, because their books are on such obscure areas of knowledge. As such, they know that they’re going to have to enlighten you.

I’m not talking about non-fiction here, though it’s easy enough to find books things that the average person hasn’t even heard of with even a brief searches. Instead, I’d like to concentrate on those authors whose fiction pulls in obscure areas of knowledge, and who then have to find ways of explaining them while still treating them as completely normal areas of the background. Historical fiction is an obvious example, since the author can’t necessarily rely on you knowing all about their favourite period, while crime fiction is another. Consequently, I’m calling this one as a draw between Paul Dougherty and Kathy Reichs.

In books like Murder’s Immortal Mask, Dougherty’s depictions of ancient civilizations make full use of his training as an historian to complete the background to his mysteries, while thanks to Reichs I now know rather more about the decomposition of the human body than I ever really wanted to. Since I’m also an historian, Dougherty would have just shaded this one except for him being a little less subtle in the explanations, particularly with his annoying habit of stalling sentences to reddere verbum Latinus, or translate Latin words. Annoying, isn’t it? As it is, a tie seems fair.

The ‘Strange Allusions’ Award

While there’s a temptation to go for Shakespeare at this point, or possibly Byron, I’d like to think that there have been writers a little closer to our own time who have managed to cram their work full of clever references. The obvious candidate is Terry Pratchett, with so many twisted variations on elements from our own world in his Discworld that he has on occasion had to remind people that not everything in his books is supposed to be one. There is, however, a writer who goes even further. I mean, of course, Jasper Fforde, who has managed to build his books around parodies of literature, legend and nursery rhyme while still producing clever, inventive mysteries. Since novels like the Eyre Affair and The Fourth Bear are crammed with exactly the sort of references that might have been designed with the readers of this zine in mind, it seems only natural to make him the winner.

The ‘Smartening Up’ Award


Which leaves us with only one more to pick, and in some ways it’s the most important category, because it’s the one that fights most directly against the tide of dumbing down so prevalent in modern literature.

There are, undoubtedly, a lot of very clever writers out there, demanding a lot of their audiences, but for this ‘Smartening Up’ award, I’m looking for something slightly different. I’m looking for someone who has taken an undemanding, relatively simple story and re-written it with more social commentary, more politics, deeper characterisation, and a more complex plot.
I’m looking, in short, for Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, which has taken the frankly two dimensional world of the Wizard of Oz and turned it into something nuanced, layered, and deeply relevant. That seems, to me at least, like a very clever thing to do indeed.

Reading Outside

By Stuart Sharp

Summer’s here, and the reading is… well, quite difficult, really.

Some of us might have fewer commitments in the summer, maybe a little more energy, possibly a little more time, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to spend that time reading. There are so many other temptations in summer that it’s easy to ignore the written word in favour of going to the beach, or travelling abroad, or (in my case) playing a succession of sports that take up hours at a stretch. Even our most basic images of reading are challenged by the changing seasons. Curling up with a good book in front of the fire is definitely easier in winter than in the heat of mid-summer.

Presumably, though, we’re not just going to give up on books for the next few months. Even the idea of having to cut back to make room for everything else isn’t ideal. What we need instead are ideas for fitting reading in with all the things we plan on doing in the summer. And that means reading outside.

The first thing is to start reading something you’ll actually get through. That might sound hugely patronising, but the distractions of summer probably mean a shorter attention span and less inclination to finish those books that go out of their way to be difficult. This is not the time to start reading James Joyce, or to decide that it’s finally the moment to give Satre’s Being and Nothingness a go. Instead, it’s time for something that flows beautifully, making for easy reading. Something, in fact, like Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, or Judi Hendrix’s The Baker’s Apprentice.

That’s not to say that the summer demands staying away from great literature. Far from it, but even among the classics, some will make for an easy read on a summer’s day, while others are just a recipe for drowsiness. The combination of Spencer’s Faerie Queen and a hot day is almost a guaranteed way of catching up on lost sleep. Shakespeare’s comedies and sonnets, on the other hand, seem almost to have been designed with a summer day (or possibly a midsummer night) in mind. Personally, I find that Christopher Marlowe’s plays work just as well in the summer, with the likes of Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta being easy to read and perfectly paced.

Poetry also seems like a natural choice here. After all, the classic image of the poetry reader is of them reading outside in a secluded, sunny spot, not huddled inside against the cold. The poems of some of the best known poets, like Yeats and Wordsworth, almost demand to be read outside, while even something a little newer, like Alison Brackenbury’s Breaking Ground, seems to work better outdoors than inside.

Of course, exactly what you choose will be influenced to some extent by where you’re going to read it. That brings us nicely to the second main point; make sure that what you’re reading is something you’re happy for other people to see.

It sounds like a frivolous point, doesn’t it? After all, reading is just supposed to be about you and the author’s words. Sadly, it doesn’t work out like that. On a summer’s day, when you’re reading outside, reading is about you, the author’s words and every annoying passer-by with an opinion on what you’re reading (which is, let’s face it, most of them).

Usually, something even vaguely literary works as a way of avoiding odd looks. Sometimes, though, it can become a hindrance, particularly once sport becomes involved.

A few of us will probably spend much of the summer vaguely involved in assorted sports, either as a player or spectator. It might seem that you’re not exactly getting your money’s worth if you have to take a book with you, but there are some occasions when it’s absolutely necessary.

For the not quite willing parent or partner dragged along to watch a loved one play a sport that isn’t exactly spectator friendly, a good book is essential. Even for players involved in longer tournaments, there will be dead periods where they aren’t doing anything. As someone who once made the mistake of forgetting to take a book to a fencing tournament, I can tell you that these periods can seem like a lifetime without something to read.

But what to take? Particularly as a participant, taking the wrong book with you opens you up to weeks of (reasonably well-intentioned) abuse. Unfortunately, with the average sporting team ‘the wrong book’ can include just about everything that’s perfect for summer.

This is where books vaguely connected to the sport in question come into their own. Not only do most sports have some highly entertaining books tucked away if you look, but your loved ones/team mates think you’re taking more of an interest as a result. For my favoured sports of cricket and fencing, Deep Cover by Ian Botham and Dennis Coath, and By the Sword by Richard Cohen are both good places to start. For other sports, the main thing is to stay away from the awful ghost written autobiographies that take up so much space in bookshops. Don’t let them take up space in kit bags as well.

Which brings us, finally, to the third major component of reading outside, the practicalities of it. Space is only one concern, and is quickly followed by a host of other questions. Is this valuable first edition going to get mud on it, or the contents of the picnic hamper? Will walking around with the hardback edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost under one arm result in one arm longer than the other by the end of the day? Can I fit all the Harry Potter books into my backpack, and will I topple over backwards if I do?

The key question here is that classic for book lovers: hardback or paperback? Outdoors, the extra durability of the hardback seems almost essential, right up to the point where you realise that you’ll have to carry the thing around with you. At that point, the humble pocket sized paper back looks like the better bet. It stays that way right up until the point where dirt, rain, or any of the other things nature seems to have designed with books in mind come into the equation.

One answer is to start investing in dust jackets for the summer. As a cheap alternative, a layer of clear sticky back plastic works perfectly well. So long as you manage to avoid the bubbles and air pockets that plagued my school textbooks, it doesn’t even do anything to spoil the looks of the thing. The result is paperbacks that are at least a little resistant to the things the outside world throws at them.

Of course, even that solution to the paperback versus hardback debate isn’t perfect, at least not outside. True, it gives you a nice, lightweight book that will survive, but it does rob you of one of the most useful tools for the summer; a nice heavy hardback with which to squash all the bugs that summer invariably brings out.

A Sense of Place

By Stuart Sharp

Every story happens somewhere.

It’s something that authors occasionally forget, but readers rarely do. Great characters, great plotlines and excellent pacing all help to produce books worth reading, but a sense of place is just as essential. Where would Wuthering Heights have been without its moorland, or The Lord of the Rings without Middle Earth for its Hobbits to traverse? In these, as with countless other novels, a strong sense of the world in which the novel occurs is absolutely vital.


Detail helps. Tanya Huff’s horror/modern fantasy novels seem different as much because of her ability to convey the detail of Toronto and Vancouver as anything else. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods reads as much like the oddest travelogue ever written as it does a normal novel.


Detail, however, isn’t the same thing as accuracy. Nowhere does this show as much as in fantasy writing. No one is going to claim that Middle Earth, or Discworld, or the lands around Lankhmar are real. It is, therefore, pretty difficult to argue that they’re being portrayed accurately. How would you check? On the other hand, Tolkein, Prachett and Fritz Leiber all portray their imaginary places so vividly that it’s hard to consider you might not be able to find your way around. This applies to real world authors almost as much. According to Bill Bryson’s excellent biography of Shakespeare, the Bard appears to have had serious difficulties when it came to geography. In particular, the geography of Italy seems to have given him trouble, causing him for example to have sailors come from land locked towns. At the same time, I think it’s fair to say that he also managed some amazing evocations of place with just a few words from his characters.


There are, in contrast, works of genuine travel-based writing that fall flat despite accurately detailing the places the author passes through. I’m thinking particularly of the sub-genre of the outlandish quest. Some of them manage to tell us little beyond the bare facts in their hurry to be funny. The better ones, like Robert Twigger’s Angry White Pyjamas or Dave Gorman’s Googlewack Adventure, pass on something that seems both less tangible and more important. They convey a sense of each place’s unique feel.


It’s hard to deny that one place will usually feel different from another. If you need proof, think about your hometown for a moment and then about somewhere that you’ve visited. The memories will probably have a very different tone, and not just because you’re less familiar with one of them. Different towns, villages and cities will have different rhythms, different skylines, different patterns of speech, different landmarks and different people. They will also have particular quirks that stick in the mind more than anything. My personal favourite is the tendency of the city of York to creep up on people, so that they end up in the middle of it before they quite expect it.


Conveying this difference in feel is the real test of how well a particular book puts across a sense of place. To return to Neil Gaiman for a moment, his novel Neverwhere spends a lot of time moving through a London that is unreal and fantastic, yet he always manages to maintain something of the feel of that city even in his strangest deviations from it. By the same token Douglas Adams, in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, evokes a feel for Cambridge that chimes perfectly with the place, even though the details are changed.


Of course, this can work the other way around as well. Choosing to set a book in one place rather than another changes the feel of the work dramatically. Jasper Fforde’s decision to work with fictionalised versions of Reading and Swindon, for example, provides a dramatically different feel than London might have. Even though he plays around with the world considerably in the various Thursday Next novels, and is working with a deliberately fictional version of Reading in The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear, the choice instantly provides a less built up, less hectic feel in the background.


In some cases, a place gets so bound up with a particular novel or series that it’s hard to imagine it set anywhere else. The obvious example would be something like James Joyce’s Dubliners. Would Geordies have worked? Could anyone really imagine it set in, for example, Barnsley? That’s just as true when you move a little way down the literary scale. Try to imagine Inspector Morse’s cases set outside of Oxfordshire and the mind draws a blank. Try to imagine P.G. Woodhouse moving Jeeves and Wooster outside of a series of country houses and it works, because he did it on occasion, but take the same characters and throw them into the middle of a major industrial city and it’s a very different story. Again, the feel of the thing is wrong.


Nowhere is this emphasis on the feel of a place so important as in poetry. There just isn’t room for more. There isn’t space to note every detail, or to explore every street. Often, a few details have to stand for the whole place, when the poet bothers with a place at all. That, of course, is one of the differences between prose and poetry. While a story might have to look out of the window and give the reader a setting, a poem can be so focused on something else that the reader never thinks to ask.


When they do look, though, the results can be wonderful. Alan Ross’ collection Death Valley is one of the best examples of this, taking the reader along with him on a tour of the USA in a series of poems that evoke the places he passes through in sharp, biting images. Julia Copus, in her collection In Defence of Adultery, approaches landscapes in a way that is broader and yet somehow also very personal, not connecting images with specific places as overtly, but drawing on personal links to them in a hugely effective way.


I suppose the ultimate demonstration of the power of place within both poetry and prose is the way some locations have stuck in readers’ minds so much that they have to visit them. It’s common enough to visit the birthplaces of authors, to tour past Ann Hathaway’s cottage in search of some connection to her husband, or to think for a moment about the authors who have worked in particular coffee houses, or libraries, or galleries. When we also have people visiting Baker Street after reading Arthur Conan Doyles’ books, or searching ‘Bronte Country’ for every landmark the sisters mentioned in their works, you know they’ve created a sense of place that has been impossible to shake off.


Mind you, I suspect that also has something to do with the palatability of the locations concerned. Trekking through beautifully bleak countryside after reading Jane Eyre is one thing, but you won’t catch many people reading Larkin and then rushing to visit Hull.

The Middle Ages: A User’s Guide

By Stuart Sharp


Since I am, nominally, an expert on all things historical (feel free to laugh) this month’s theme seemed like an excellent opportunity to introduce you to my own little corner of history, the Middle Ages. As corners go, it’s a little on the large side. If you start talking about the ‘Dark Ages’ as ‘the Early Middle Ages’ there’s upwards of a thousand years of history to deal with.

It’s possible that some of you may have learned rather more than the rest of us about them in school, and to those I apologise if I’m repeating the sort of thing you spent your formative years trying to avoid. If, on the other hand, your school was much like mine, you didn’t get many lessons on medieval history. Even those who did may well find that their lessons only skimmed the surface, or that they were staring out of the window and thinking about a coming PE lesson at many of the crucial points.

‘But that’s not a problem’ I hear you say ‘I can always go and find a book on it.’ At least, I assume you’re saying that, given where we are. If you’re anything like me, when you don’t know something, you reach for a book. But which book? Most likely, you’ll end up reading a ‘popular history’ book, since they make up the contents of most bookshop shelves. In some cases, that’s fine. They’re well researched, well written books that just happen to be on a subject a lot of people are interested in. The work of Alison Weir springs to mind.

In far more cases they are utter rubbish. I know how snobbish that must seem, but they are. The worst are cobbled together out of spare parts to try and tie them in to whatever happens to be on TV, with no original research, no awareness of what’s going on in the debates surrounding the subject, and often more interest in telling a good story than getting their facts straight. The problem is, where else do you go? If you go looking for more academic texts, how do you avoid something impenetrable, overly boring and ultra specialised? And what do you do if what you’re actually after is some medieval literature, not just modern histories?

In answer to both these questions I have compiled a pair of lists. They aren’t definitive. They certainly aren’t comprehensive. Essentially, they’re just lists of a few books on the subject that I happen to have found enjoyable and/or helpful. I’ve mostly tried to stick to history books that are well written as well as authoritative, though in a couple of cases, I’ve assumed that you’d rather have a comprehensive boring book than an entertaining useless one. I have also tried to limit the lists to things I’ve read, which explains any skewing in the subject areas. The first list is of useful history books, the second of books from the Middle Ages.

Finding these books might take a little effort. A local university library will probably have most of them, if you have access to one. Failing that, there are friendly librarians, bookshops, and the Internet. Even if you can’t find these titles easily, hopefully looking for them will point you in the direction of many more serious but readable history books.

Enjoy.

List 1: Modern Books on the Middle Ages

1- David Crouch, Tournament- Although I should probably admit to knowing David, that doesn’t make this any less the definitive statement on the medieval tournament scene. He’s managed to take an area that can attract the very casual ‘lots of pretty pictures but no depth’ sort of popular history, and then produce an important work of social history that fits the tournament squarely into the lives of the medieval aristocracies of Western Europe. His biography of William Marshall is also well worth a look.

2- P.Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation- Death and the afterlife were such central concerns for so many people in the Middle Ages that it would be odd not to include something on this subject. At over ten years since publication, this is possibly getting a little out of date, but it is still one of the best of the specialized works in the area. C.Zaleski’s, Otherworld Journeys includes quite a lot in the area of medieval vision literature (of which more later).

3- Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe- Probably the least readable of the books on this list, but only because he makes such an effort to be comprehensive that he occasionally forgets to be comprehensible. G. Duby, France in the Middle Ages- It’s seriously out of date by now, but as a general introduction it works well. Included mostly because Duby was one of the most influential medieval historians around.

4- Anyone who finds themselves interested in medieval France might like to try J. Bradbury’s, Philip Augustus: King of France 1180-1223. It’s one of those rare occasions where a biography works well as a general history, and Phillip II doesn’t get the recognition he probably deserves. Anyone wanting a more general history should try J. Dunbabin’s, France in the Making 843-1180. For those more interested in the links between the developing France and England there’s John Gillingham’s The Angevin Empire.

5- C.H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism- One key aspect of medieval history was the birth of a number of new monastic orders in the central Middle Ages. This book offers an effective guide to them and the influence they had. For anyone who likes their medieval ecclesiastical history with fewer monks in it, there’s always Kathleen Edwards’ The English Secular Cathedrals.

List 2- Some Medieval Books

1- Chansons de Geste. Raoul de Cambrai- The translation I have is by Sarah Kay, and this is probably my favourite of the medieval chansons de geste. For anyone who can’t find it, the Song of Roland is probably better known, and is also definitely worth reading.

2- Medieval Vision Literature. The Vision of the Monk of Eynsham. Before Dante ever got the idea, medieval writers were coming up with long visions of the afterlife. Actually, the English version of this is quite late, but still just about qualifies. Other examples include St Patrick’s Purgatory and various shorter examples in Bede.

3- Medieval histories. Talking of which, his Ecclesiastical History of the English Speaking Peoples remains the best of an entertaining bunch. For the crusades, try Guibert de Nogent’s The Deeds of God through the Franks or Fulcher of Chatres’ A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem. Suger of St Denis’ Deeds of Louis the Fat is an even more blatant piece of propaganda when dealing with medieval France, and is all the more fun for it.

4- Medieval Poetry- Of course, practically everything above was laid out as verse, particularly in the chansons de geste, but here I’m trying specifically to direct you towards the Lays of Marie de France. Finding a translation might take a bit of effort, but they’re more than worth the effort.

Why I Suddenly Love Poetry

By Stuart Sharp

After a bit of a clear out, my bookshelves are now largely empty of the detritus I’ve collected over the years. For the first time in I don’t know how long, there is very little on them that I haven’t read fairly recently. It’s funny how many things seem like the greatest books in the world when you first read them, then fade into being half remembered space fillers, and finally reach the stage where you can hardly remember why you read them at all.

It’s not a complete overhaul. A quick trawl through what remains reveals a battered copy of Miyamoto Musashi’s Book Of Five Rings, an obscure sourcebook on Ancient Egypt (when was I ever interested in Ancient Egypt?) and a copy of One Hit Wonderland by comedian Tony Hawks (Who recently answered questions on Mastermind about his skateboarding namesake). When did I buy them? More to the point, why did I buy them? They don’t seem much like the sort of things I’m reading at the moment. Actually, I’m not sure I even fully read the last of them, since it acquired a bookmark about half way through before falling foul of my tendency to forget where I left books. The books I was probably enjoying a year or two ago are now no more than curiosities. I don’t particularly feel like re-reading them.

But it works the other way too. That’s why my bookshelves are currently full of books of poetry.

To set this into context, up until less than a year ago, I didn’t much like poetry. That is to say I didn’t like the idea of poetry; I hadn’t really read enough to make a proper decision on it. In particular, I didn’t like the idea of the poetry of Philip Larkin. That may seem a little specific, but you have to remember that, in Hull, any building not named after William Wilberforce is probably going to be named after the city’s most famous poet. Between researching in the library where he worked and spending most of my degree in a university building bearing his name, the part of me that dislikes being told what I ought to read was making it clear that we were not going to be reading his collected works any time soon.

With poetry in general, it didn’t help that my few attempts to dip a toe into the waters of verse ran into quite a lot of bad free poetry. Done well, it can be powerful, but it’s risky stuff. Without metre or rhyme to hold the poem together, the poet has nowhere to hide if they run out of genius half way through. And too many of those I read did.

So what changed? Why are my shelves now bursting with Blake, Milton, Charles Murray and Alan Ross? More importantly, what does this have to do with anybody else? Why should you care that I have managed to overcome this strange aversion?

One reason is that I suspect many of those reading this will have their own irrational dislikes, whole areas of fiction, non-fiction or poetry walled off on the basis of a few forays into crime, or horror, or family drama. Another is that most of us will know people whose reading habits amount to not doing so at all, having decided that books are boring, overly demanding and out of date. So, at the risk of sounding like a twelve-step program for recovering non-readers…

First, I made a decision that I was going to at least try and like poetry. This was mostly based on a sudden urge to write the stuff. Apparently it’s not uncommon. It’s said that more people in the UK write poetry in some form than buy it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I like the mental image of a country being a net exporter of verse.

Having made that decision, the next stage was to try and find a poet, (just one, it shouldn’t be too hard, should it?) whose work I actually liked. So many to choose from, and all I had to do was read until I found one. Of course, to find that one, I had to wade through another mixture of the weird, the free, the uninteresting and the utterly closed off. This is where the humble library card comes in useful. Not having to buy things is a great incentive to try a wider range of writers.

I found what I was looking for in the work of Sophie Hannah. Modern but using the techniques of poetry to full effect, without them ever being obtrusive, her poetry struck me as simply amazing. It still does. As far as I’m concerned, collections like The Hero and the Girl Next Door and Hotels Like Houses are absolutely essential reading.

From there, the next stage wasn’t, curiously enough, to slowly expand outward, looking for similar things. I read the works of other poets, certainly, but in a trickle in among the things I’d normally read. This wasn’t the point for any kind of total immersion. The next stage, in fact, was to try to find out a little more about poetry. Maybe it’s just me who always wants to know how everything works, but somehow I find that learning what authors/musicians/sportspeople are actually doing makes it easier to appreciate the depth of what they’ve produced.

Which brings us nicely to Stephen Fry. In case word of his work as a writer/presenter/actor/half a dozen other things hasn’t got beyond the shores of Britain, I can only assure people that he’s done considerably more than appear as a psychologist in Bones. The relevant thing here is his book on poetry, The Ode Less Travelled, which taught me quite a lot of things about poetry that I dimly remembered from English lessons, and rather more that I’m fairly certain were never mentioned. There are other books on poetry out there, but somehow this is the one that does the most to convey a sense of enjoyment about the stuff.

So I’d found a poet whose work I liked and I’d found out about what makes it work. All that remained was to dive right into the rest of it. I read Spencer and John Donne, secure in the knowledge that if I didn’t like it (I did) I had more modern stuff to return to. I read the work of poets like Brian Patten and Len Murray, knowing that if I didn’t like their free poetry that wasn’t the same thing as not liking poetry. Perhaps because of that, I actually found myself quite liking Patten’s work.

There were coincidences too. It came as news to me that Alan Ross, the author of a number of the cricket books in my collection, is in fact better known to the majority of people as a poet. I found this out after picking up a copy of Death Valley at random in a library, then glancing at the list of the author’s other works to find The Cricketer’s Companion.

But what about Larkin? Did I finally get round to reading his collected poems? Actually yes, but not in Hull. I read them while visiting a friend, about a hundred miles away, in a flash of nostalgia for my ‘beloved’ city. Having done so, it’s hard to believe I put it off for so long, and I’d recommend them to everyone else if that wasn’t what put me off in the first place. But my finally reading Larkin isn’t the important thing here. The important thing is what you’re going to read next, and what it could change about your own reading habits.

New Things from Old Favourites

By Stuart Sharp

I’ve just finished reading some Arthur Conan Doyle. It didn’t feature Sherlock Holmes, still less Dr Watson. It didn’t have dinosaurs or strange expeditions, though it did involve a certain amount of Egyptology. ‘The Ring of Thoth’ is one of the many short stories he wrote, and one that most people don’t get to read, because it’s not in one of Conan Doyle’s most popular works.

As it happens, he wrote a great many things most people won’t know much about. Obviously more ardent fans will know about these works, but for me it was still something of a shock when, in search of his obscure cricketing short story ‘Spedegue’s Dropper’ I ran his name through my university library’s records. It came back with novels I’d never heard of, short story collections such as The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport, a couple of serious works on the Boer war and a volume or two on fairies.

In the end, I ran out of time before I got to the short story I was looking for, but I did learn something. With even a little looking, it’s possible to find all sorts of unexpected things by favourite authors, things that are often every bit as good as their better known work.

Searching for short stories is usually a good place to start. Most authors will have written them at some point, and thanks to the wonders of the net, it’s often easy to find lists of where they can be found. With a relatively popular author, you might not even have to do this, because they are the one group of people who can tell a publisher that they’d like to put together a short story collection and get a positive response.

Given that we’re dealing with favourites, it’s probably no surprise that I’m going to mention a couple of collections by Neil Gaiman at this point, namely Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. Some of the stories deal with characters from his novels, as with the piece featuring Shadow from American Gods, ‘Monarch of the Glen’. Far more, though, take us down paths that don’t show up in his novels in a mixture of strange prose and equally strange poetry.

Not everyone appreciates short stories. I know at least one person who finds this sort of short story collection annoying, on the basis that you get glimpses into fictional worlds without any of the follow through found in a full length novel. Personally, I find these brief glimpses fascinating, but anyone who shares my friend’s opinion isn’t totally stumped. Take Laurell K. Hamilton, for example, another of my favourite authors. While I enjoy her short story collection Strange Candy, those who don’t and still want to find something interesting away from her main series still have options. They could try the novel Death of a Darklord, for example, or they could go for her first novel, Nightseer.

Both of those are still at least vaguely within her normal genre. Other authors though, stray a little further from their roots, because they want to try something new, or because they’re trying to write in a particularly popular area, or just because they’re very easily distracted.

I’m not entirely sure which of these explanations is responsible for Terry Pratchett’s book The Unadulterated Cat, and I’m not sure I want to guess. The idea of one of the world’s most successful fantasy authors sitting down and writing a book about cats jars somehow, but the book works. Presumably that’s because good, funny writing works just as well whether applied to the Discworld or to issues such as exactly how cats always manage to be on the wrong side of a locked door.

More commonly the change is less offbeat. With her novel, Exit Strategy, Kelly Armstrong took a brief break from writing supernatural thrillers to write… a thriller. A very good one, as it happens, and again proof that good writing usually transfers pretty well between genres. The best part about switches like this, it seems, is that they provide a good way of combining that ‘start of a series freshness’ with the knowledge that you’ll enjoy the author’s work. At least, so long as the switch is temporary. I doubt if anyone would appreciate it if their favourite author announced that they were abandoning their normal books permanently.

Occasionally, just occasionally, a favourite author doesn’t have to do any of this to provoke surprise. For those who don’t know his work, Robert Twigger is principally from the ‘do something that’s equal parts stupid and heroic, and then write about it’ school of writing. I’ve included him in this article on surprising favourites because 1) He is one of my favourite authors and 2) The appearance of one of his books on the shelves of my local bookshop always comes as something of a shock.

That’s not so much a comment on anything about the books as it is on the perils of discovering that a lesser-known writer is one of your favourites. With writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, we lose track of their lesser-known works through a combination of time and an over-concentration on their most popular stuff. With popular modern writers, the surprise comes with works for fans, things that don’t get pushed as much as their regular work.

With less popular writers, the surprise is for different reasons. Partly it’s because each book doesn’t have the build up that more popular authors get. Partly, it’s because it doesn’t necessarily hit the shelves of your local bookshop as soon as it comes out, the owner never having heard of them. Occasionally, it’s because it takes them a while between books. In that case, you start to worry that you were the only one buying the books and their publisher has dropped them.

Whatever the reasons, there’s plenty of scope for surprise with a favourite author whether they’re well established or not. Take a moment to think about your own favourite. Are you sure you’ve read everything they’ve written, that there aren’t a couple of odd volumes of poetry lying in some corner of a library? Take the time to check, and you could be pleasantly surprised. As for me, I’ll be off back to my own library, to see if I can’t finally read that short story.

The Comfort Zone

By Stuart Sharp


Some books are better than others. Some are more sophisticated than others. Some are more serious. But are some books more comfortable than others? And if so, what is it that makes them so comfortable?

The idea that some books are more comfortable than others is fairly easy to prove. First, picture the last book that you read in a couple of sittings; preferably something that made you feel nicely warm and fuzzy. Now picture the complete works of Emile Zola. It’s not a foolproof method, because there’s always the possibility that there’s someone somewhere who thought of La Debacle for the first part of that experiment, but I’d bet that most people didn’t for the simple reason that it’s a hugely uncomfortable book.

There are, as this experiment shows, books out there that are difficult, awkward and spiky; books that don’t so much pull you along as grate their way across the brain. That doesn’t make them bad books. Kelly Link’s short story collection Magic for Beginners is as weird and uncomfortable as you could wish, but it’s still the best such collection I’ve read in years. Tricia Sullivan’s Someone to Watch Over Me is the same, almost painful with its twisting awkwardness, but still an excellent novel nonetheless.

In contrast, there are other books that are like a warm fluffy pillow to the brain, soft and comfortable and rarely any difficulty. Most chick-lit aims for this, as indeed does romance, family drama and even a lot of thrillers. Yes, thrillers. Dan Brown, Chris Ryan and company have made careers out of comfort, putting together books that for all their violent moments never make the mistake of forcing the reader into any painful thinking. They’re unlikely to be accused of great literature, but they have got the knack of putting together very readable books.

But how do they do it? What exactly is it that makes one book comfortable while another seems to work to keep the reader out? The writing’s readability is one part of it. As someone more than a little in love with the sub-sub-sub-clause, you’d think I wouldn’t mind a bit of slow pacing, clunky sentence construction and stilted dialogue. You’d be wrong though. Like most people these days, my reading brain demands sentences pared to the bone, plot that starts instantly and keeps moving, and absolutely no paragraphs that have to be re-read three times to be understood.

Perhaps this explains why many books seem to become less comfortable over time. Writing conventions that made absolute sense to Hardy or Spencer now seem less helpful. That doesn’t make their works any less great, though I’m inclined to think that Hardy got it right when he gave up prose to concentrate on his poetry, but it does move them from the category of ‘handy beach read’ to ‘push through it because it’s one of the classics’.

The curious thing though is that not all books are affected the same way as they age. Marlowe’s work remains compelling, while medieval chansons de geste like the Song of Roland or Raoul de Cambrai are actually quite readable (so long as you don’t make the mistake of trying to work through the original Old French). From Ian Peebles’ writings on cricket to the fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, some older writing seems more like a favourite old teddy bear than a forbidding elderly relative.

Of course, all this is subjective, and never is this more apparent than in the field of poetry. The strong rhymes, consistent rhythms and formal approaches of some of the great poets strike some people as comfortable reminders of the past, and others as simply out of date. Predictably enough, I can’t make up my mind, finding the work of Keats, Wordsworth and Milton inspiring and annoying by turns.

Lord Byron’s work tends to produce a slightly different reaction in me; not because of his epics or even his reputation, but because of his habit of rhyming eye with eternity. It’s a habit shared with Shakespeare, and one that has me fighting to avoid reading the poetry with the strongest Birmingham accent I can manage.

These are largely questions of style, but substance has a role to play too, as the example of the thriller writers above suggests. If the idea there is to keep things moving quickly, then there often isn’t time for the reader to start thinking. Other books aren’t looking to move so rapidly, but stay away from awkward thoughts anyway if they want to stay within the comfort zone. After all, a little light reading quickly becomes a lot heavier if the author starts asking important questions about life, the universe and so on.

And it isn’t just the weight of the words that’s an issue here. Reading is a physical experience as well as a mental one. The way a book feels, and even the way it smells, has an important impact on the pleasure of the reader. Unfortunately, being occasionally a little too clumsy for my own good, six-inch thick hardbacks also tend to have an important impact on my foot when I drop them. It’s not uncommon to see the complete works of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and others bound in coffee table format. It probably makes sense from a price point of view, but not from a comfort standpoint. If you’re planning on curling up with a good book, then you want something that won’t crush you when you do.

Where you curl up with it is important, too. Reading in your favourite spot will make almost any book seem more comfortable, but I think there’s also something to be said for matching books to places. Books set in wide open spaces probably deserve to be read in the outdoors that inspired them, provided it isn’t raining or, as in my garden, frosted over. Other books deserve to be read in bedrooms, dining rooms, the half forgotten section near the back of your local library. I have to admit though that I’ve never understood the apparent connection between books and coffee shops. I’ve just never seen anything comfortable about overpriced coffee, a jittery caffeine buzz and occasional stares from owners impatient to get you out of there to make space for the next customer.

Having thought about what makes a book comfortable, I suppose I should finish by suggesting what I consider to be the most comfortable books, if not in the whole world, then at least in the mess that calls itself my bookcase. I’ve chosen three. The first, The Cricketer’s Companion edited by Alan Ross, is a fairly idiosyncratic choice, since it’s hard to find, about a sport many people find painfully odd, and also about half full of exactly the sort of poetry I complained about just a little while ago. On the other hand, it has charm, and besides, where else are you going to find Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Byron and P.G. Wodehouse side by side?

Second is Another Fine Myth, by Robert Asprin, although really most of his books in the series could have filled the role. Some books in the comic fantasy sub-genre manage to be uncomfortably silly, or strange, or a little too clever for their own good, but Asprin’s work is warm, enjoyable, and very funny indeed.

The final selection is something that, when I thought of it, struck me as unexpected. Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, ought to have at least one thing stacked against it in the comfort stakes, and that’s Gaiman’s name on the cover. Don’t get me wrong; he is, by almost any definition, a brilliant writer. I love his novels. But he is almost the definition of the writer who produces books that manage to be weird and uncomfortable and amazing all at once. The collaboration with Pratchett softened the effect just enough though, and the two managed to produce a story about the apocalypse that manages to be funny, charming, and not uncomfortable at all.