Poll finds 20% interested in getting a Kindle some

via guardian.co.uk

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."

Posted via web from lauren's posterous

Wetlands, Charlotte Roche

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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Posted via email from lauren's posterous

Amazon mulls in-book advertising on Kindle

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...

Posted via web from lauren's posterous

The Book Seer...

I just tried The Book Seer, a neat little tool that recommends a book for you to read, based on what you've been reading.

I like the styling on it - a distinguished, whiskered gentleman appears on your screen - complete with a speech bubble, saying something along the lines of 'Salutations. I've just finished...... by......What should I read next?' You fill in your details and the Book Seer makes its recommendations.

I put in Wide Sargasso Sea, and among others, it came up with Jane Eyre, (which I was going to read next anyway) Things Fall Apart, Foe, Midnight's Children & Heart of Darkness - I've read all of them, which I thought was quite impressive!

I'll definitely have to give it a try next time I can't think of what to read next.

Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre

I picked up Jean Ryhs's Wide Sargasso Sea again reaently (I'm going through a rereading phase at the moment) and I got think about how although each time I've read it, I've thought about Jane Eyre, I've never read them in succession.
So I'm going to do it now. It's going to be an odd experience, and a bit like a weird kind of time travel - Rhys wrote her book long after Bronte, but chronologically, it pre-empts Jane Eyre as it writes back in time to it. Also, like most people, I read Wide Sargasso Sea as an adult, long after I first read Jane Eyre - which my grandmother bought it for me and I loved when I was younger. Rhys's novel was also one of the first texts to bring home the concept of the postcolonial to me - perhaps because it made me completely rethink a text that I thought I knew so well. Why had I never thought about 'the madwoman in the attic' before? It's unsettling to have your literary map upset like that, and I suppose I'm wondering if rereading the two texts in succession will do it again.

The book that changed reading for me....

I read an article a while ago in some woman's magazine or other (I hate buying them by the way - it makes me feel so shallow, but I like looking at pictures of beautiful clothes I can't afford and would never wear. So there.) with 'celebrities' describing the books that changed their lives. the only example I can remember was Pamela Anderson said that Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own changed her life because it made her feel intelligent and reminded her that she was capable and could be independent.

I don't think I can honestly say that I've read a book that has changed my life, which shocked me when I first thought about it. I've read some books that have had a profound effect on me - reading No Logo when I was 16 definitely had an impact on me, Sunday at the Pool in Kigali was so powerful it made me physically sick and there's a poetry anthology that I don't go many places without. I can't honestly say that there's anything I've read that has really affected the course of my life in a major way - there's plenty of things that have had a subtle and culminative effect on me.

There's one book that definitely changed reading for me though - Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I read this when I was doing my A-Levels and I'd never read anything like it before, and I also read it in a different way to how I'd ever read anything else. I thought about the meaning behind the storyline, I was amazed at how Atwood played with words and built layer on layer of meaning in the text and I was also able to look at it as a comment on the time that I lived in, where in the immediate wake of September 11th, the world was becoming increasingly divided. I can pinpoint the exact point in the text where I saw for the first time what the written word could do - Offred is playing an illicit game of Scrabble that would cost her her life if she was discovered, she says:

'I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling in voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp, I spell. Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint, cool like that. Humbugs, those were called. I would like to put them into my mouth. They would taste also of lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious.'

I'm still tempted to suck a Scrabble tile every time I play.

E-readers - friend or foe of the bookworm?

Some interesting chat about e-readers on the Beeb this week - an article by Michael Fitzpatrick here and a video of Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) talking about the Kindle 2 here if you're interested...

First lines...

I love Iain Banks - but I bought Complicity months and months ago, but read the first page and decided I wasn't into it and put it back on the shelf.

I picked it up again a couple of days ago, and looked at those first lines again, and still felt disinterested but shrugged and ploughed through it because I was on my daily commute, so the only other option I had for reading material was the Metro - which isn't really an option if you actually like reading.

Complicity is a great book, classic Banks in its dark, disturbing, gritty Scottishness - I was thinking what a shame it was that those first few lines could have stopped me from reading it. I looked back to try and pin down what it was that put me off - but now I've read it, I don't know what it was. (If you click on the link you can see the first few pages - maybe you can see what I couldn't). Perhaps I got used to the tone of the novel, or I can view it in the context of the book as a whole, who knows.

There's a saying about how you can never step in the same river twice, and perhaps you can never read the same book twice. How you read and interpret text is shaped by how you feel, your situation, even where you are - for example, the experience of reading reading Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde and The Fixer before and then again after I had visited Bosnia was like reading different books.

Perhaps it's also why we can reread books we love time and time again, year after year, because at different stages in our lives, we can draw something new from them.

I think I need to keep this in mind, as I'm now struggling with the first chapter of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things....

Twittering a whole book? Really?

The author RN Morris is serialising his crime novel A Gentle Axe through social networking site Twitter.
Apparently the 'Twitterisation' is only a slightly abridged version of the full novel but I can't help but wonder who on earth would want to read a novel in 144 character chunks?

Alex Holroyd, press officer at Faber, Morris' publishers told The Bookseller: “His intention is to do the whole thing online, although it will depend on feedback and interest. It’s a bit of an experiment – he is already a keen blogger and has quite a presence on the net, so we are hoping it will transfer over.”

Sounds like a bit of a PR stunt to me, featuring the much talked-about buzzword of the day 'Twitter'...which I too was briefly conned into thinking was the future, before realising it was mildly diverting and kind of useful, but not the earth-shattering technological revelation it's made out to be...

I had a look at Mr Morris' Twitters - as a PR stunt it doesn't seem to be working that well, so far he's got just over 200 followers, a low number in Twitter terms, but then perhaps this is a literary experiment rather than attempt to court the press with a gimmick...

The benefit of reading a novel 144 characters at a time I suppose is that you really get to focus on the words, what they mean, the subtext behind them. The process also displaces you as a reader, making what would otherwise be a normal text strange - each individual line is rendered in a completely different light by being Twittered - "But what did they know of the cost to her soul, or of the tears she had shed over the years?". But then again, you have to wait another hour to get the next few words and how can you remember what came before and get engrossed in the plot in the same way you would if you could read the text normally?

I don't think the novel and Twitter are going to best friends - to be honest, I can't see much replacing the book. In the printed paperback, literature has found an amazing format that has stayed almost unchanged for decades, and for good reason too - its perfect. I can't imagine reading any other way - although I would secretly love to test out e readers although part of me would feel like I was betraying my books...

Reading in bed

There are few things better than reading in bed. Ever since I was a child, being tucked up in bed with a book has been one of my greatest pleasures and it's something that I took for granted until pretty recently when I've been so knackered that all I can think about when I get to bed to cramming in as much sleep as possible before I have to wake up and get on the train to work again.
I'm taking a stand and promising to go to bed earlier and read because it is a simple indulgence -especially in the winter on cold dark evenings. The experience is made even better by a cup of tea, clean, crisp sheets and as many pillows as possible to prop yourself off.
Right, I'm off to bed, with my book (Half of a Yellow Sun, if you're interested). Good night.

Do you remember the first time?

My first post.

I read a lot, and books play a big part in my life, so I wanted to find a way to keep a record of what I feel when I'm reading something.

Some posts will be about what I'm reading now - others will be retrospective, because I find that there are some book that I can remember reading incredibly vividly...and rereading them can almost take me back to that time.