{"id":4352,"date":"2020-08-13T11:02:46","date_gmt":"2020-08-13T11:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/?p=4352"},"modified":"2020-08-14T11:45:07","modified_gmt":"2020-08-14T11:45:07","slug":"holiday-reading-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/holiday-reading-9\/","title":{"rendered":"Dystopia Avenue: Not on Holiday Reading & what should have won the Booker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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For me, as for many people, it\u2019s been a summer of reading. I\u2019ve not had the brain space or inclination for creative writing and preparations for next term\u2019s online teaching have taken a toll. For the last eleven days, Sue and I were meant to be travelling around Norway by train. Instead, we\u2019ve visited my dad in Colne, shortly before Pendle was locked down again and made a fleeting visit to Sue\u2019s family in Stevenage. The only thing our holiday has had in common with the one we should have had is that a lot of reading has been done. Since my lockdown blog, I have finished Hilary Mantel\u2019s Booker winning (spoiler alert) The Mirror and the Light<\/em>, which is decidedly longer than its two predecessors but more digestible when split into three books, (200, 300 and 400 pages long), taking breaks in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been dipping into a well researched and well balanced history of the experimental novel, Francis Booth’s Amongst Those Left<\/a> <\/em>(title taken from an unwritten BS Johnson<\/a> trilogy), while dipping into recent JH Prynnes and Tracy K Smith’s selected, but I\u2019ve not had much time for poetry, apart from the excellent new Leafe Press collection by Martin Stannard, Reading Moby-Dick<\/em>. He\u2019s an old friend, so I won\u2019t go on about its many qualities, but this is a wide ranging collection that showcase just about every side of Martin\u2019s highly distinctive work, from prose poem to long sequences to daft jokes. It\u2019s an absolute joy. All credit to Leafe for such a handsome book (and do check out Pippa Hennessey\u2019s YouTube interview with Martin, available from Tuesday 18th on the Five Leaves YouTube channel<\/a>. He’ll be online from 7 that evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continued my Ross MacDonald reading project, but have paused the novels to work through the short stories and It\u2019s All One Case<\/em>, an excellent coffee table type book featuring nearly fifty hours of interviews with the author by the late Paul Nelson. It\u2019s outstanding on the craft and history of crime writing and, if you think \u2013 as I increasingly do – that MacDonald was the best crime writer of the last century, you\u2019ll be in heaven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a long time, I used to say that Elmore Leonard was my language\u2019s best living crime writer. I started reading him in 1985, which was also the year that I began writing seriously (by which I mean, most days, for hours at a time). I\u2019m rereading the first one I read, which was published in paperback that year, LaBrava <\/em>(photographer falls for ageing film star who has become embroiled with low lifes), and it takes me right back. What style! What humour! The plot barely matters, but the novel, which is a loving homage to American Noir cinema of the 40s & 50s, holds up really well. I was lucky that, back then, I knew John Harvey. He lent me Leonard\u2019s earlier crime novels. Recently, another friend, Graham Caveney, gave me copies of some of those early novels and I look forward to rereading them, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who\u2019s now my favourite living crime writer<\/em>? I hear you ask, now Leonard\u2019s long gone. In English, I would say, Lawrence Block, still going strong at 82. He just published one of his best (but nastiest) novels, a compelling noir narrated by a serial killer: Dead Girl Blues<\/a><\/em>. (I have an e-edition so no image above). It\u2019s not something you often say of writers in their 80s, but I hope there are more to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Delighted that Bromley House Library<\/a> has reopened. I\u2019ve visited twice already and met friends in their garden. They have a big range of new novels on display. I borrowed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman\u2019s Antkind<\/em>, but it didn\u2019t pass my fifty page test (to be honest, I started skimming after ten pages, which is rare for me, but I found it annoying). They also had a book I\u2019d ordered before lockdown, AD Miller\u2019s Independence Square.<\/em> It\u2019s a gripping, complex account of the fall of a near ambassador in the Ukraine, with a political reporter\u2019s understanding of the complexities and corruption involved. Right up there with his Booker Prize shortlisted Snowdrops<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve kept buying books from Nottingham\u2019s Five Leaves Bookshop<\/em>. I wrote at length about Graham Thompson\u2019s excellent John Martyn biography<\/a> already. The next book I got from them was David Mitchell\u2019s Utopia Avenue<\/em>. I\u2019m a big Mitchell fan, and have read everything he\u2019s done. But, in opening this one, I was also aware that there has yet to be a single satisfactory novel about rock music, never mind a good one. So, OK, Utopia Avenue <\/em>is a romp, and best enjoyed as such. Characters from Mitchell\u2019s other novels (eg Luisa Rey from Cloud Atlas<\/em>, Marinus from The Bone Clocks<\/em> and, in particular, The 10,000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet<\/em>) reappear, rewarding the faithful with their consistency. Less consistent is the portrayal of famous musicians, which is often done with a name-dropping disregard for accuracy. At a party, Syd Barrett sings a song that he only played once, in private. Musicians I\u2019ve met and spoken with, such as John Martyn and Leonard Cohen, sound nothing like themselves. Indeed, when I read \u2018Lenny\u2019\u2019s dialogue, I assumed it was meant to be Lenny Bruce \u2013 though wasn\u2019t he dead by then<\/em>? But Mitchell mostly gets basic timeline details right so it feels churlish to complain about cartoonish versions of real people. That said, I hated the bit where Janis Joplin directly quotes from a song about her that Cohen wrote after her death. I was irritated when Brian Eno is referenced as a friend of Mitchell\u2019s fictional band three years before he even moved to London, never mind came up with the concept of \u2018scenius\u2019 (sorry, muso trivia, but my Twitter biog does out me as a \u2018music nerd\u2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musical enthusiasts will spot lyrical anachronisms, Mitchell notes in an afterword, as though his conceding the point in advance makes his playing fast and loose acceptable. This is a novel with some serious content and some great writing, but it isn\u2019t a novel to be taken seriously and will undoubtedly lower Mitchell\u2019s literary reputation, should he care about that. I thought he was better than this. But, hey, he\u2019s written a romp for boomers and it\u2019s selling like hot cakes. My pre-publication copy is a fourth edition, which tells you something about its popularity. And Mitchell fans with no interest in music will still need to read it for the sections about the madness of Jasper De Zoet, which ties up storylines from The Ten Thousand Autumns of\u2026<\/em>and The Bone Clocks<\/em>, and are also the best bits of the book. On the whole, I\u2019m with The New Yorke<\/a>r.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My final purchase from Five Leaves was the first I was able to make in person (after sanitising my hands and congratulating Simon on his recent marriage). It was also the best book I read during my holiday. I loved Colson Whitehead\u2019s The Underground Railroad<\/em> but The Nickel Boys<\/em> is even better. Shorter, tighter, it feels like an American classic that\u2019s bound to be studied for generations. The novel\u2019s set in The Nickel, a segregated reform school in 1960s Florida, to which the idealistic Elwood is sent after being wrongly accused of stealing a car. It\u2019s utterly absorbing, occasionally heartbreaking and superbly constructed. This review<\/a> sums up its qualities well, should you have already read it. If you haven\u2019t, I urge you too. It\u2019s in paperback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To return to my opening spoiler (if you\u2019ll forgive me a conspiracy theory) the only reason that The Nickel Boys <\/em>can have been left off the Booker shortlist is that they\u2019ve decided to give it to Mantel and, rather than insult people like Whitehead (whose book, to my mind, would be a worthier winner) they\u2019ve filled out the longlist with newcomers, mostly American citizens, who\u2019ll be grateful for the leg up (and Anne Tyler, who\u2019s used to being a bridesmaid). I hope to be proved wrong. My final day\u2019s holiday reading is a causticly autobiographical graphic novel by Adrian Tomine, purchased from Page 45<\/a> and two new collections from Shoestring Press: rich, very enjoyable work by Alan Baker and Jo Dixon. All are pictured above. Please support local authors, publishers and bookshops. Lastly, thanks to Five Leaves Bookshop for hosting our (Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature<\/a>) series of online author interviews and discussions, Building a Better World with Words, <\/em>which I\u2019ve enjoyed enormously. All are now hosted on YouTube.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For me, as for many people, it\u2019s been a summer of reading. I\u2019ve not had the brain space or inclination for creative writing and preparations for next term\u2019s online teaching have taken a toll. For the last eleven days, Sue and I were meant to be travelling around Norway by train. Instead, we\u2019ve visited my dad in Colne, shortly before Pendle was locked down again and made a fleeting visit to Sue\u2019s family in Stevenage. The only thing our holiday has had in common with the one we should have had is that a lot of reading has been done. Since my lockdown blog, I have finished Hilary Mantel\u2019s Booker winning (spoiler alert) The Mirror and the Light, which is decidedly longer than its two…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4352"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4366,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4352\/revisions\/4366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}