blogbook - a blog about books

A Thousand Dogs - beautiful dogs, amazing photography...

2010-01-30T19:17:00.001Z

via taschen.com

I borrowed this book from my boyfriend, and if you like dogs or photography I can highly recommend it.

It's got some stunning pictures and it's done chronologicaly, tracking the development of photography, changes in society and the close relationship between dogs and humans over the years. It would definitely appeal to anyone who enjoyed the Horizon programme, 'The Secret Life of Dogs' on the BBC, (you can still watch it here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pssgh/Horizon_20092010_The_Secret_Life_of_the_Dog/) which was one of the best things I've seen on TV in ages.

Posted via web from Lauren's posterous

Stillness: Stories of Life in War-torn Yugoslavia by Courtney Angel Brkic

2010-01-25T18:19:00.001Z

I started reading Stillness by Courtney Angel Brkic this morning on the train. It's a collection of stories about the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia and I think it's really outstanding.

Brkic worked as a forensic archaeologist in Bosnia after the war, and in the prologue she speaks of photos she found, rendered a foggy white by water damage. The book seems to be trying to restore the detail to these 'photos of the dead' - the people killed, displaced or scarred by the war, even the animals left starving in the zoo. If you're interested in literature about the Balkan conflict, I can highly recommend Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic, Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic and for a completely different take, Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazade and The Fixer. I'd be grateful for any other recommendations of books by Croatian, Bosnian or Serbian authors - it's not something I seem to stumble upon often.
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Look what I got...

2009-12-10T18:01:00.003Z

I had a bit of a splurge on Oxfam's online second hand shop (which is brilliant by the way) and I got Under Milk Wood, read by Richard Burton. On tape. Tape - what was I thinking? I don't think I've bought one since that East 17 single when I was 10. I can't even remember the last time I bought a CD for god's sake. Hope we've still got a tape player in the house somewhere...

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What I'm reading...

2009-12-07T17:52:00.001Z

I'm reading Igort - 5 Is The Perfect Number. Yes, another graphic novel. I just can't seem to really get into anything without pictures at the moment!

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Careless twhisper

2009-12-03T17:49:00.001Z

First of all, sorry about the pun, I genuinely can't help it, it's a disease. It doesn't even have anything to do with what I'm going to write about.

Apology out of the way, this is a reply of sorts to Laurence from Fabrica Gallery's blog post about the game of 'Twhispers' he started a few days ago and in which I took part.

The idea was that an initial Tweet would be passed down a chain of people, who would each change two words - a bit like the very un-PC Chinese Whispers you might have played as a child. It was an experiment of sorts to get people thinking about the themes behind the most recent exhibition at Fabrica - Chameleon by Tina Gonsalves which featured digital portraits which responded to your behaviour and emotions by either witchcraft or technical wizardry - I'm not sure which.

I thought it was a nice exercise on the idea of passing something on, and action and reaction, that was very much in the spirit of the exhibition and also a good way of playing up the way Twitter works and the ways people use it to communicate and share information, while imprinting something of themselves on it at the same time. As Laurence points out, it was also free to do, and a way getting people involved by making them feel part of something. It seemed to create a bit of buzz and interest, which is great and has got me thinking about how I might be able to use something similar for a project I'm working on.

On another level, as a lover of words, I thought it was really interesting how the Twhispers changed:

Whisper 1 - She smiled happily at the man who had sold her the amazing shoes and he smiled back, shyly.
Returned - She shocked everyone, for the man had given her piercingly sharp scissors, and she bled on them.

Whisper 2 - Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
Returned - Celebrate after the river turns to custard, swim if you feel lucky

Whisper 3 - The shouting outside in the street was making them tense
Returned - Brown flying pterodactyls over the turkey was faked for Xmas

The first one didn't really change too much, it got a bit darker with the mention of blood, but the structure and story behind it stayed fairly similar - an exchange takes place between a man and a woman, and basic words like she, the man, had, her, and remained the same throughout, when they could possibly have made the biggest change. With the second one, I like that the rhythm and punctuation stayed the same, because it still sounds like a saying or motto, albeit a ridiculous one. The third one is awesome (and the pterodactyl was my addition, not to blow my own trumpet or anything) - it changed beyond recognition from something quite innocuous, to something utterly surreal yet seasonal and almost political too!
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La Perdida

2009-12-01T18:34:00.001Z

I've just started reading La Perdida, a really beautiful graphic novel by Jessica Abel. It's about a Mexican-American who goes to Mexico City to 'find herself' and 'get in touch with her roots'. Abel seems to recognise all the pretension and negative sentiment attached to these ideas and takes a fresh approach. I love the illustrations and the mix of Spanish and English too. Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Commuter reading

2009-11-23T18:54:00.001Z

I'm on the train home and the people sitting around me are reading:
Woman to my left - Ben Elton, Blind Faith.
Woman to my right - Twilight, Stephanie Meyer.
Man opposite me - Daily Mail
Man a row in front of me - a copy of Psychologies allegedly 'the thinking woman's magazine'. Me - Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49.
What a bizarre cross-section. Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

What I'm reading now...

2009-10-09T18:15:00.002+01:00

I've just started reading Suspended Sentences by Mark McWatt, a collection of short stories which a group of sixth-formers in Guyana were 'sentenced' to write as a punishment for trashing a club at the end of their exams.

Not all of the stories were written in the 1960s when the punishment was issued - but after the death of one of the group years later, McWatt reminded them of the punishment, called in the stories and created this collection.
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Poll finds 20% interested in getting a Kindle some

2009-10-07T17:31:00.003+01:00

Some of the comments in this article are spot on if you ask me:

"Too expensive - and far more likely to become obsolete than a book."

"I look at a computer screen all day long...why would I read a book on it."

"It's too big and ugly looking and on top of that it seems pricey. Maybe a couple generations down the line it'll be worth it, especially once I'm done reading the thousands of books I have got already."

"Call me old-fashioned. Love the feel of a book, the excitement of putting a new hardback on the shelves. Lending to a friend. Taking a Kindle to bed just seems wrong."

Not the Booker prize: the winner and the future | Books | guardian.co.uk

2009-10-06T16:04:00.001+01:00

the guardian announce the winner of their 'Not the Booker' prize - '

Unintentional lunchtime purchase

2009-10-01T13:52:00.003+01:00

I've been trying not to buy books and to go to the library instead, but I couldn't help myself. I love Margaret Atwood! Review to follow in a few days I guess...
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Wetlands, Charlotte Roche

2009-09-16T18:17:00.002+01:00

I'm not sure why I wanted to read Wetlands - I'm a very squeamish and repressed person when it comes down to it, so it might not seem like the most sensible choice of reading matter for my daily commute. The Mail described it as 'profoundly unsettling'(but to be fair the Mail sees most things this way) while the Guardian reviewer wrote 'if you ever wondered what you'd be like if you weren't shy, polite, tolerant, modest, sexually repressed, logical and constrained by modern standards of hygiene, this may be the book for you.' That's a slightly crude description of what I think is a clever text, but it does give you a good frame of reference if you haven't read it.

The protagonist and anti-hero Helen Memel is completely without the sense of shame with which most women inhabit their bodies. We often talk about people who dare to say what we're all thinking, but Helen takes it further and says and does things that most women don't even dare think, because of the attitudes we have about our bodies, what it is to be female and about cleanliness and purity. Helen has none of these taboos. No bodily function or discharge is strange or unpleasant to her. (I shuddered just writing the word 'discharge' by the way.)

Roche says that in Wetlands, she wanted to 'write about the ugly parts of the human body. The smelly bits...in order to tell that story, I created a heroine that has a totally creative attitude to her body'. To me, it seems like in Helen, Roche has created a character to play with the biblical archetype of Eve. Helen is simultaneously both without sin and full of sin; she breaks every female taboo in the European-Christian tradition. Her lack of shame seems like something from before the Fall - she has the kind of understanding of and appreciation for her body and sexuality that women might have were it not for so many years of society shaping how we all imagine what it is to be female, based on the idea of Eve as the mother of all sin.

There's something distinctly rabble rousing about Wetlands it gets you angry and fired up at how we've become strangers to ourselves. It's seductive even as it repels you. At times you can't believe what Helen is doing/thinking/ saying and you screw up your face in disgust, but you simultaneously wish that you could be even a fraction as at ease with her body as she is.
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Can't imagine Pete Postlethwaite as a gangster, but still excited... #brighton rock

2009-09-04T14:44:00.002+01:00

Pegg in a hole
Simon Pegg will play one of the graverobbers in John Landis's new version of Burke and Hare. The veteran comedy director begins shooting in London and Edinburgh this autumn and told me he's thrilled to be working with Pegg. "He's a fabulous comic actor and he immediately 'got' the script and what we're trying to do - a black British comedy in the Ealing tradition of Kind Hearts and Coronets, laughs with poison in them." Although unconfirmed, I understand it's possible that Pegg will reteam with his Shaun of the Dead co-star and former flatmate Nick Frost. Their self-styled zom-rom-com was a success in America as well as being an instant classic here, one that made it into the Observer's list of the best 25 British films of the last 25 years, as revealed in our Film Quarterly magazine today. Landis meanwhile is preparing a surprise for the audience at tonight's FrightFest - the director will world premiere a Leicester Square screening of a new HD print of Michael Jackson's Thriller video, and a "making of" doc.
Brighton rockers
As a new film version gets under way, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock will be updated to 1964 and set among the famous seaside battles between mods and rockers. Originally filmed, by John Boulting, in 1947 with Richard Attenborough as teenager Pinkie Brown and no mods or rockers, Greene's 1938 novel is receiving the modern make-over "to refresh the story". According to director Rowan Joffe: "We're making it as contemporary as possible because it feels so modern. It's too vibrant, too alive, to be contained in the late 1930s." As I revealed in my Cannes column earlier this year, Joffe has signed up actor Sam Riley to recreate Pinkie, one of Lord Attenborough's signature roles. Riley was a charismatic Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division in the biopic Control. Sam will be joined by rising star Andrea Riseborough - see her in Sam Taylor-Wood's short Love You More - as well as Helen Mirren and Pete Postlethwaite, who will play Brighton gangster Phil Corkery.
Turgoose on the telly
News of another British classic (also appearing on the Observer's Top 25 list): Shane Meadows is making the sequel to This Is England - as a four-part television series. The show will move the action on four years from the end of the film and bring back many of the main characters, including Thomas Turgoose as wannabe skinhead Shaun. Entitled We Were Faces, the series will be set in 1986 and finds Shaun preparing to leave school and enter the grown-up world.
It will be co-written by Meadows with Jack Thorne, who penned The Scouting Book For Boys, which has just been filmed with Turgoose in a major role. Meadows revealed his plans for the project while promoting his latest low-budget film, Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, a mockumentary starring Paddy Considine. This Is England of course, suffered from an 18 certification, due to some racist swearing and violence. The certification angered Meadows as he believed it prevented many young people, for whom the film might have contained useful lessons, from seeing it. The TV sequel will thus open the characters and themes up to an even wider audience.

A culture of fear | Books | The Guardian

2009-08-17T20:04:00.003+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/15/eurabia-islamophobia-europe-colonised-muslims - "Europe is at risk of being 'colonised' by its Muslim populations, argue a number of bestselling new books, acclaimed across the political spectrum. How has such hysteria gone unchallenged? Pankaj Mishra on the 'Eurabia-mongers'."

A number of new books are promoting the idea that Europe is at risk of being 'colonised' by its Muslim populations. Photograph: Christopher Thomond
This article in the Guardian this weekend got me thinking - I try not to condem books I've never read, but its hard when you hear about something like Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the 'Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It?' which apparently states that Muslims are "conquering Europe's cities, street by street", despit statistics clearly showing that that's far from the truth. Mishra picks out one line in particular of Caldwell's that made me feel deeply, deeply uneasy - about how he thinks that "advanced" cultures (ie the 'West') "have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to 'primitive' ones". It reminded me of the same outrageous bigotry being promoted about 400 or 500 years ago about the Muslim 'infidel' and all the fears and anxities about ethnicity, race and religion that bubbled under the surface of colonization.
Should I read books like those by Caldwell, Mark Steyn or Bruce Bawer, in order to 'know the enemy' and be able to rip them apart with the benefit of first-hand knowledege? On the other hand, I don't want to buy these books and give the people who wrote them my money...

Exit wounds: Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy commissions war poetry for today | Books | The Guardian

2009-07-26T16:45:00.002+01:00

guardian.co.uk poem of the week: Martial Diptych by Glyn Maxwell

2009-07-20T14:24:00.003+01:00

I love the strange rhythmn of this poem - the line break comes before you expect and it just chnages the whole feel of the poem somehow. I'd never heard of Glyn Maxwell before - I'll definitely try and find some more of his petry.

Great interview with Reif Larsen http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_06_014543.php#

2009-07-17T20:20:00.003+01:00

Just came across this great interview with Reif Larsen, author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (one of my favourite books of the year so far) in Bookslut.

I couldn't believe that Larsen said he didn't include the illustrations, map and diagrams until after he'd written the first draft - the seem like such an integral part of the text.

Video: Nick Cave reads from The Death of Bunny Munro | Books | guardian.co.uk

2009-07-14T16:28:00.002+01:00

DavidHudson.tv Blog ©: D-Fuse: Endless Cities - Redux

2009-07-14T06:53:00.001+01:00

via davidhudson.tv

I thought this was a really interesting video - and I loved the split screen shot where they man from the man washing at the well to the swimming pool.

Rutu Modan 'Exit Wounds' Interview

2009-07-11T10:48:00.002+01:00

via youtube.com

I've just finished Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds. I felt that it ended really abruptly - I had that weird feeling where you turn the page for more and experience the shock of the blank space of the inside of the back cover.
As a reader you come into the story long after it began and you leave before it ends - as you might expect from a comic, this is just a slice of the story, except in this case there's no preceding or following editions.
It wasn't a cliffhanger by any means though - the plot is ordinary, but in a good way (if that makes sense!). It narrates one episode from Koby's (the central character) life - and it seems that there will be great mystery and tragedy, with a soldier secretively revealing that she thinks his father may have been killed in a bombing. The truth as it unfolds, is less dramatic, but full of the emotion of a difficult father-son relationship and all the sadness and secrets there are in every family's history.
I also admired the way Modan deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Exit Wounds. The conflict shapes the text, it is never explicitly discussed. In this BBC interview, she says 'It's in the background, but it's my life' and explains that this is 'a very narrow view of life in Israel'. I found an interesting tension between the political and the everyday in this. I think Joe Sacco, one of my favourite graphic novelists and the author of Palestine, says it better than I can, describing Exit Wounds in Drawn and Quarterly as "a profound, richly textured, humane, and unsentimental look at societal malaise and human relationships and that uneasy place where they sometimes intersect."

The Elephant Bed @fabricagallery

2009-07-10T20:58:00.002+01:00

I Popped into Fabrica on my way home for the preview of John Grade's The Elephant Bed. It's beautiful - the rubbish picture I took on my mobile really doesn't do it justice. I will definitely have to go back for another look over the weekend.

Book of the week podcast: Roma Tearne on Brixton Beach | Books | guardian.co.uk

2009-07-10T15:20:00.002+01:00

The Sri Lankan-born author talks about how her life and fiction have been informed by a mixed heritage on both sides of a brutal conflict

Twitter 'should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize'

2009-07-07T12:24:00.002+01:00

via brandrepublic.com

According to Mark Pfeifle, a former aide to George W Bush, Twitter should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize (former winners include Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama) for it's recent role during civil unrest in Iran.
And I thought it was dubious when Al Gore won it...

DC Comics' superheroes join forces with characters inspired by Allah | World news | The Guardian

2009-07-06T21:47:00.002+01:00

Islamic superheroes 'The 99' to appear alongside American characters in a new collaboration between the US-based DC Comics and Kuwait's Teshkeel Comics.

Amazon mulls in-book advertising on Kindle

2009-07-06T16:14:00.002+01:00

via revolutionmagazine.com

'Amazon is hoping to further monetise content on its Kindle ebook reader, revealing plans to place ads within the electronic books it publishes....The ads, which will be related to content in the book, such as ads for a restaurant when a character in a novel is dining out, may be in the form of one or a few descriptive advertising words, pictures, or symbols, which direct the reader to a website when an internet connection is available.'

I don't think anyone would be happy about being hit with ads while they're reading...

Online catalogue of books is the library that never closes | Technology | The Guardian

2009-07-03T14:33:00.002+01:00

The Open library attempts to bring together the printed word and the electronic word with a web page for every book

BBC - Confessions of an Opium Eater

2009-07-02T17:14:00.001+01:00

via bbc.co.uk

Confessions of an Opium Eater - listen online with the BBC

RT @FabricaGallery AudioBoo: Next in our series on The Elephant Bed, Fabrica's summer exhibition http://boo.fm/b35151‏

2009-07-02T17:05:00.002+01:00

Have a look at this AudioBoo on The Elephant Bed, the upcoming exhibition at Fabrica in Brighton - http://boo.fm/b35151‏