Enlightenment reading

So much time is spent bemoaning the tiny things that irritate or depress that I suspect far too little is spent celebrating those tiny things that increase joy by a quantum.

So.

Downstairs, in the main room, there are four ceiling height bookcases, all down one wall. This is the first pleasure.

The end ones were already here upon arrival. I fabricated the middle two to match, though I fear not from the same riotously expensive old wood. They look, however, about right.

On each bookcase sits one of those pebblish lights from Habitat. This is very much the second pleasure.

In fact, the lights are what Habitat called ‘Pebbles’, and are just the sort of off-round that invites an appreciative stroke of the hand. Habitat, in their wisdom, replaced ‘Pebbles’, with ‘Eggs’ a couple of years ago: taller and clearly ovoid, the new shape exudes a slightly pointy unapproachability for reasons I can’t really pin down.

Thus, the awareness that the pebbles are not eggs, coupled with the wrongness of the decision to replace one with the other, invests the former with all the additional qualities lacking in the latter. This is, if we’re counting, pleasure 2 b).

The third pleaure, however, is simultaneously the smallest, and the one we’re gathered here to discuss.

One of the pebble lights is cunningly set up to light up at the gentlest nudge of a book. This childish joy is no doubt the product of too many childhood hours reading stories of espionage, or watching venerable horror films in which creaking bookcases open onto vistas of wonder.

The cataloguing of the tiny delights is nearly complete, but the alert among you will have already leapt ahead to the final joy, the ever-important Pleasure No. 3 b).

The identity of the book.

The initial set-up was, of course, accidental, and I took an appropriately incidental pleasure that the volume involved at that stage was The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing. This foursquare acknowledgement of the effect’s proper place gently amused me for a few months. Finally, a wholesale rearrangement of the bookcases was required, resulting in the shelf in question housing slightly smaller books.

This left an interesting question. Where, thematically, to go from here? I quickly ruled out the most obvious candidates: anything about the Enlightenment, the Bible (forcing the internal pantomime of “fiat lux” every single bloody time).

The second round of choices were far more interesting.

First up, I spotted my copy of Harry Houdini’s fraud-busting Miracle Mongers and Their Methods, which appealed for its Wizard of Oz implications, but slipped by because the book itself featues intemperate expositions of fraudsters long since forgotten.

Then, I looked to see what blind chance had provided, as I had stacked along the shelf books that were simply of the right size. The historically inevitable consequence was that Collected Writings of Karl Marx had control of the means of illumination. Hm. Workable, and useful for winding up the neighbours, but otherwise dubious. In fact, anything political, up to and including Blair’s Wars is just not a good long-term bet.

Swiftly, the ground seemed to open up. What about Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World for its spotlight on flannel? Leprohon’s The Italian Cinema because cinema is all about shining a light into the darkness? What about sheer illumination: Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (I swiftly discovered that I had no Hume). Darwin’s On the Origin of Species? Gibbon, Plato, Randi or Popper? Borges, Sciascia, DeLillo or Nairn? Science or art? Ancient or modern? A work of philosophy or one of Alan Moore’s comics?

A decision had to be made, not least because it was becoming increasigly difficult to explain why, with piles of books almost if not literally everywhere on the floor, I was dithering endlessly over the precise position of one. Ultimately, I plumped for the book which seemed to fulfil the demands of thematic aptness while being the least immediately obvious choice to hand.

I chose John Man’s Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection, because Genghis is a lazy byword for the bringing of darkness, when he was more like the Alexander or Napoleon of his time, the builder of an empire nearly twice the size of Rome’s. I also chose it because I have a primitive joy in the way the very name Genghis Khan is recolonising the Mongolian lands: as families forcibly dispossessed of their tribal names three or four generations ago are encouraged to pick them up again, where they simply can’t remember they almost inevitably decide that they must be Khans. The equivalent is every Arthur in Britain deciding that his surname should be “Pendragon”.

Finally, because the book is the right size, and let no man ever deny the progress of a good book when it is made to be the right size.

Picture me pushing Genghis Khan’s nose every evening, and smile as I smile.

Novel without words

Word reaches us of the most Oulipan project imaginable: a novel consisting entirely of punctuation. Woops are heard from the direction of the last resting places of Calvino and Perec.

On closer examination, the ‘novel’ by Hu Wenliang consists of 14 Chinese punctuation marks. Barely a novella, you would feel, but I suspect that the standards in word-free writing are rather different. There is one stunning advantage to this brevity, of course, news reports can carry the novel in full:

：？
：！
“‘……’”
（、）·《，》
；——

Hm. Really. Hm.

Hu is offering a prize to anyone who can get the novel (which, he says, has character descriptions and a proper plot - a love story) 80% right. So, leaving aside the fact that we’re looking at an English transliteration of punctuation in one or other Chinese script, let’s give it a crack:

Colin says ‘Well?’
Coleen says ‘Well really!”
He talks, she talks, he talks. Once inside, sex, full, stops. Gradually they fall silent.
Her parent(hese)s are com(ma)ing back with a bullet - she(v)runs one way, she(v)runs the other.
See my Colin? He too dashes.

[Translators note: I can’t guarantee that the characters will represent properly on this page. Please refer to the China Daily news article for the definitive English punctuation. By far the most difficult line was the third. I was determined that I could get something like ‘everything points to sex(six)’ from six full stops in a row, but it proved intractable. So I fell back on a cheap pun, sexual frisson and some poetic license. Who would have thought punctuation could get so explicit? For the fourth line, I couldn’t determine the correct name for “、”, so I lazily went for ‘comma back’. I knew you wouldn’t mind. Improvements most welcome. For what it’s worth, this could well be a hoax. The China Daily hack’s name, you will have noted, is Ng Ting Ting. For that on its own, I hope this is real.]

Like a fiery envelope

Given that I (reputedly) have about four books on the go at once, I really ought to love exercises of turning books into blogs. There’s a new one out of Stoker’s Dracula. The gimmick is simple: post novels in diary form as diaries, with the posts synchronised to appear on the date they’re supposed to in the novel. You can try your own too.

It’s a charming game, and I applaud it for pushing some classic works (such as Pepys’ Diary out in a fresh format. However, the novel-as-diary format just doesn’t work well for me. It may be that Pepys’ Diary, which is appearing with helpful annotations, is better suited to daily installments. A novel surely is not; Alexander McCall Smith’s recent attempt at a daily novel for The Scotsman is typically elegant, but rather unsatisfactory in novel form, and I suspect was unsatisfactory for parallel reasons in its original newspaper version.

Dracula is surely not meant to be read in daily paragraphs. The momentum of the story will not take it. The intensity of the thing, let alone the reader’s retention of storylines, will be stretched beyond reason.

Perhaps I am being unfair. I can only comprehend reading the thing in batches in the monthly archive: I haven’t reset my world to accommodate reading daily dispatches from these sites, although perhaps I should give it a sincere effort.

Surely, though, Dracula, with its mix of journal items and letters from different hands, would be better served by being emailed: subscribe to the email-novel and you will receive a chronologically arranged stream of emails from the various narrators over the course of the novel. I’d far prefer to spot a little envelope in the corner of my screen alerting me to an urgent missive from Mr Harker. If you’re going to do it, do it properly.

I say that, and I know that Andy in particular will now be thinking of the logical extension. Reset the novel as a series of letters, postcards, phone calls, emails, parcels containing journals, anything and everything necessary.

Imagine a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses that arrived as a keepsake box full of letters.

It would be the devilish offspring of Dennis Wheatley, Nabokov, Nick Bantock and BS Johnson. It would be tremendously expensive, tremulously arcane and terribly good fun.

Only one question remains: which novel to do first?

The unintentional joy of bookshops

When I have time to kill, I like to sacrifice it in a bookshop. I always rather thought that this was an active choice on my part: I’m a reader, and unexpectedly upturning a joyous title can make my day. One recent acquisition, Ben Macintyre’s Josiah the Great is just so promising that I dare not read it for fear of spoiling its current bookshelf perfection. I’ve come to believe, though, that killing time in the bookshop is not a simple desire: it’s a practical response to the problem that ten minutes in a bookshop is wasted time. It requires at least half an hour to puncture the gaudy surface of bestsellers and find the meats within.

In fact, I suspect that my bookshelves are just a bookshop manqué. I am more than happy to buy books in the knowledge that they will sit on the shelves for years before being read. I am frequently surprised to find books I’d forgotten I’d acquired on my shelves, providing that authentic moment of bookshop discovery right at home.

Conversely, like any book-lover, I can confidently put my hand on almost any book I know I possess, making redundant any need for a cataloguing system. Books are grouped possibly by size, cover or indeed colour, but rarely by any kind of librarian logic. Book lovers will recognise too the seamlessness with which an hour can slip past just browsing your own bookshelves. My eyes tickle over the spines of a hundred titles on my way to doing some petty, important task. I am constantly refamiliarising myself with them, opening them, tending them with my attention like a gardener stroking the leaves of his plants. No wonder I can find them all. They are, in the argot, part of an ongoing conversation in myself, as objective and sensible as friends in orienting the world around me.

There is also here, I suppose, the idea of reading by osmosis. There are books with which you settle onto a cushion of some type and read. Then there are titles that float around you for so long, fall under your fingers so many times, are browsed, ruffled, index raided, delved into, that they become effectively read. At that, they are read in a less trustworthy, more insinuating way; read without an opportunity ever to formally reject them. There is no putting these books down, because you are always putting them down, and picking them up. They are replaced in the bookshelves so many times that they will never be thrown into the corner of the room in digust, no matter how deserving.

Anyway, anyway. My bookshelves inform my feelings towards bookshops so deeply and perversely that I am foolishly disappointed when I spend time in a real bookshop. As I indicated before, ten minutes in a bookshop is wasted time, because there is barely time to browse past the rubbish and start seeing what is really there.

So, today, I had a thunderstruck few minutes when I entered the bookshop, comprehending just how much chaff has been created by Dan Brown’s bloody book. This takes the form of four types of book:

1. The (unacknowledged) inspiration
2. The laborious commentary
3. The deathly parody (and if it requires the subtitle “A Parody”, you know there’s trouble)
4. Other books by the author that nobody bought the first time round
5. Last, and certainly least, books with a similar cover

I ran, ran past the bestsellers and spent my time in the shop keeping out of beady eyeline of the pile-em-high tables at the front. This meant I was in the gloomy lowlands of the history, science and art sections, but I was happy enough.

Remind me, next time, to outline my theory that books can be chosen according to a careful analysis of their cover against strict criteria. It is a little like card-counting, but altogether less likely to get you kneecapped in Las Vegas.