Re-reading Margaret Drabble

Similar to Muriel Spark, I had a Margaret Drabble period when I read everything I could get hold of, which wasn’t easy behind the Iron Curtain – it wasn’t just the matter of popping into the nearest book shop. I had The Summer Bird-Cage on my 2020 re-reading list, but it wasn’t available on Kindle, so I chose The Millstone instead although I am not sure I read it back then. I know I read The Garrick Year and Needle’s Eye. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because The Summer Bird-Cage and The Millstone are thematically similar, and since both are Drabble’s early novels I would guess they are similar in other ways too. And I only have a vague memory of the former.

I can see what was attractive to me in Drabble’s novels then. They are set in a time almost contemporary with mine, in a place I was curious about. They have female characters of a background similar to mine: educated, intellectual, high aspiring women. At the time I read them, I was a single mother, but I never experienced the shaming Rosamund in The Millstone went through. She and I shared some human – female – experience, but otherwise lived on different planets. And I think mine was nicer.

I finished the book because it was part of the challenge, but otherwise I would have stopped early. I guess it wouldn’t be labeled chic lit because it is Great Literature, but then I am not well read in chic lit. I found Rosamund repulsive, which perhaps was intentional, but if so why would the novel be praised as feminist? When she finds herself pregnant after her first and only casual sexual experience – isn’t it one of the most banal plots in literature? - she first tries to get rid of the baby, and failing spectacularly with the totally inefficient method of hard liquor and a hot bath (another literary cliché) decides that she will keep the baby and love it beyond measure. I think the narrator is trying to convey her emotions, but it is mostly external events of a most trivial kind. Which in itself can be interesting as documentation of its time, but I was mainly irritated. The ending is pathetic, but I believe it is exactly a tear-jerker that I would have liked fifty years ago.

I will definitely not re-read any of Drabble’s early novels that I enjoyed then, but I may try one of her latest to see whether she has become more to my current taste.

Re-reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

 

Curiouser and curiouser! I will never again claim that I have read a book if I read it more than three months ago. I know for sure that I had a Muriel Spark period in my early twenties, meaning that I read as many of her books as I could get hold of. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, I recognise the titles The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Abbess of Crewe, but couldn’t say what they are about, and I have a vague memory that The Mandelbaum Gate takes place in Jerusalem and the main character has doubts about her Jewish identity. I chose The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for my re-reading challenge because I thought I remembered it well, and I didn’t. I didn’t remember it at all so, as with some other books on my list, I now wonder whether I had read it back then. Maybe yet another book I thought I had read because it is one of Spark’s best known. Sometimes I made a point of not reading an author’s most famous book that everybody else read.

Anyway, I read this novel as if for the first time or perhaps indeed for the first time, and I enjoyed it very much, certainly much more than I would have when I was young. If I did read it, it's unlikely I was familiar with the concept of flashforward, which is its most prominent narrative trait, alongside omission. I first got a bit concerned when the narrative was told predominantly through one schoolgirl’s point of view: I have read far too many girl school novels. But of course it is not a girl school novel; if anything, it is a parody on a girl school novel, and fifty years ago I wouldn’t have recognised it as such. The irony and sarcasm would have been lost on the young me.

So if you like stories elegantly told, with all characters equally horrible, but each in their own way, give this novel a chance. It has aged well.

Re-reading The Sound and the Fury

My re-reading project is getting more and more revealing. I chose The Sound and the Fury of all Faulkner novels we read fifty years ago because it is perhaps his most famous, and I have referred to it repeatedly in my research as an example of mission impossible: giving verbal expression to something that a character cannot express by words. Benjy as this impossible narrator features in every work on narratology, and I wonder whether I have done the unforgivable: cited someone else rather than going to the source. For I hadn’t re-read the source when I was referring to it, and now I wonder whether I have read it at all. Maybe it is one of those books you believe you have read, but actually haven’t. I cannot be sure, because this re-reading exercise has clearly demonstrated that I had no memory whatsoever of books I had definitely read. So maybe I did read The Sound and the Fury fifty years ago and not only pretended I understood it, but pretended I liked it and went on pretending, to the degree that I gave it five stars on Goodreads when I was building my shelf about twelve years ago (it was called Shelfari then). Maybe I did read it, but I am totally confident after re-reading it now, that I could not have understood much of it. Not just because of Benjy, since all other narrators are just as incoherent, and although this time I was reading slowly and carefully, I cannot claim that I was able to reconstruct the course of events. I didn’t enjoy the language enough to ignore the plot, and I wasn’t too engaged with the characters. If I hadn’t been reading for my challenge I think I would have given up, just as I have repeatedly given up on Ulysses.

Re-reading A Clockwork Orange

 

I am resuming my re-reading challenge after a long break as I was reading Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light – slow read of many, many pages that took me over two months. Goodreads points out to me that I am behind schedule.

I included A Clockwork Orange in my list because it seemed an obvious choice, and now I cannot remember whether I read it before I saw the movie or after. I saw the movie in 1975 at the very earliest (a pirate black-and-white copy), and I haven't watched it since so I have just glimpses of episodes and no memory of whether the movie follows the novel. Not unexpectedly, what I remember is the worst scenes of violence and the worst scenes of Alex's therapy. I don't remember how the film ends, actually don't remember the rest of the plot after therapy. Likewise, my memory of the novel was extremely vague.

My current copy has a foreword, from which I learned that the novel was published in the USA without the final chapter and that the film was based on the American version.

Since I was prepared for the violence, it didn't shock me, and it is possibly less shocking because it is narrated by Alex matter-of-factly in his idiosyncratic language. I was much more disturbed by the moral and political messages which I find far two explicit and therefore less effective. Maybe it is the spirit of the early 1960s.

The most fascinating aspect of the novel is the language, much of which is obviously missing in the film. I haven't counted, but I would guess at 5 to 10 slang words per sentence, and I wonder how many make sense unless you know Russian. You can always figure out the meaning, but for me part of the joy of reading was recognising the Russian words cleverly disguised by English spelling and grammar. I am not referring to “gulliver” and “horrowshow”, but to much more subtle and imaginative usage. In some cases it took a few instances before I got it - “oddy knocky” was one, not straightforward to get from the context.

What Burgess and his critics perhaps didn't know is that at the time the novel was written, Russian nadsats, or teens, were actively using a similar kind of jargon where you not only needed the knowledge of English, but also a good deal of creativity. So you could hear phrases such as: “Я митингую с герлой в восемь клоков” (I am meeting a girl at 8 o'clock), ”У меня трузера штатские” (My trousers are from the USA) or ”Чилдренята, напутонивайте шузы” (Children, put on your shoes”), which is exactly the way Alex uses language. I have tested these examples on some Slavic scholars, and they didn't pass the test. I wonder whether Burgess would have passed it.

I got curious about how the novel was translated into Russian, and the translator used this very same kind of slang, spelling – and misspelling – English words in Cyrillic and inflecting them by Russian grammar. So Alex's droogy becomes his frendy, mesto becomes pleis, litso becomes feis, and deng becomes mani. No Russian reader today would have problems with this language, it is common currency.

In terms of language, A Clockwork Orange is compared to Finnegans Wake and Ridley Walker. I never got past the first page of Ridley Walker because I am not a native speaker, but in Finnegans Wake it helps to be multilingual.

Re-Reading A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust was my random choice for 2020 re-reading challenge out of many novels by Evelyn Waugh, although I probably read more of them than my friends, and definitely more than my parents and their friends, because I could read them in English. Inexplicably, Waugh's novels in paperback were sold among a handful – no pun intended – English-language books in a major bookstore in Moscow. The price was 5 or 6 rubles – my salary was 100 rubles (for comparison: a kilo beef was 2 rubles; a pair of tights was 10 rubles). I bought as many books as were available, maybe spending a month's salary. That's what you did. The reason those paperbacks made their way into Russia was that a couple of Waugh's novels had been translated into Russian, including A Handful of Dust. In a handbook of British literature, written by an esteemed Russian scholar, Waugh was presented as ultra-reactionary, so it is surprising he was translated at all, but there was never any logic behind what was or wasn't acceptable.

I remembered merely one detail from the book, which I also believed happened in a totally different book. A young boy is learning to ride a pony and gets kicked off. His coach tells him it happened because he ”opened his bloody legs and cut an arser”. The boy dutifully reports this to his parents. This was the first time a rude word was published in a Russian book, and my father was delighted. He read it outloud for my mother and me, and later to several guests. Maybe this is why I remembered this particular episode, because I didn't remember anything else, and it didn't come back as I was reading. So I can almost say I had never read this book before.

It is one of those books where all characters are repulsive, but unlike many books with repulsive characters I was curious about them and wanted to get to know them better. Against all my convictions as a reader, I wished I could warn them: Don't be a fool, stop doing this! I wished I could change their destinies.

My scholarly self prompts that Waugh's sarcastic writing goes back to Jane Austen, although he would probably deny it. Anyway, the book is brilliantly written, and I may re-read it again soon. Warmly recommended.

 

Re-reading The Little Lady of the Big House

I have included this, frankly, mediocre and unremarkable novel in my re-reading challenge because for some reason it was exceptionally significant for me and my friends, and also my parents' generation knew it well. Jack London was a popular author in Russia, maybe the most popular American author after Mark Twain. We had his collected works in 10 volumes in my childhood home. I wonder why he was acceptable for the Soviet regime, probably because of his socialist views and support of working class movement. Martin Eden, a Künstlerroman featuring a protagonist with a working class background, was introduced officially as his best work. I don't think I ever read it (anything officially introduced as good was perceived as bad). We read The Call of the Wild and White Fang, but they were never my favourites, because there were other, more powerful animal stories I liked. We were greatly fascinated by The Star Rover, an early sci-fi novel, and my father's favourite was John Barleycorn, an autobiography focused on alcoholism.

But why The Little Lady? In my case, I was so obsessed by the novel that I would cast people in my surroundings as the characters, and this was probably the closest I ever came to having a crush on a literary character. The reason, as with so many other books from the same stage of our lives, was love. The love triangle in the novel was the attraction, and the tragic outcome only amplified it. Remember, we were not familiar with romance, not with with any kind of trash, but particularly not romance since it had nothing to contribute to the formation of the new socialist citizen. Therefore any book - or movie – with any kind of romantic plot worked as a substitute for mass-market romance.

As with most books on my re-reading list, I had rather vague memories of my once great favourite that I certainly read over and over again, first time probably when I was thirteen. I remembered some key scenes, I remembered there was a lot of horseback riding. Some details came back as I was reading, others didn't ring a bell. What I had completely forgotten, most likely because I didn't pay attention to it before, was the extensive focus on Dick's agricultural projects. Actually, the title character does not appear in the first quarter of the novel. However, Dick's fixation on his business provides an essential background to the central conflict, whether intentionally or not. Every time Paula comes in visit her husband in his office, he is in a hurry, looking sideways at his spreadsheets while she is trying to catch his attention. They have separate quarters and meet at lunch and dinner, seldom on their own as the house is always full of guests. Their marriage is explicitly presented as happy, while it is quite clear that it is a disaster, which makes Paula's fascination with handsome, exciting Graham much more plausible. Her dilemma is not between two men she loves – even though she says so – but between love and duty. Dick himself admits that she never loved him the way she loves Graham. A detail I had completely forgotten was that Dick eventually decides to commit suicide, staging it as an accident, so that Paula is spared the choice. Hearing a gunshot, he says: “She beat me to it”.

It was illuminating, once again, to consider what might have been attractive about this book fifty years ago when I clearly see that at least half of it would be of no interest to a seventeen-year-old, at least not the seventeen-year-old me. The more I re-read, the more I wonder whether I used to skim-read, slowing down at more “interesting” passages (read, “about love”) because some I remember by heart.

I started by stating that The Little Lady was a mediocre novel, and I stand by this judgement. The plot is trivial and not really convincing, the characters are flat (the external descriptions are so stereotypical you could puke), there is a lot of political and philosophical discussions among secondary characters, that feel pointless. The writing is not particularly good. Still, I am glad I re-read the book so that I am now rid of the distorted image I had from my youth. I would not recommend anyone to read it. If you want romance, there are so many other books that do not pretend to be anything other than romance. 

 

Re-reading 2001: A Space Odyssey

I wouldn't call myself a voracious science-fiction reader, but I was obsessed with space since I was a young child, wanted to be an astronomer and until certain age firmly believed that I would one day travel to Mars and Saturn and beyond. Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke were my house gods, and not only mine – they were highly regarded among my friends and my parents' friends. I never saw the movie until I came to Sweden, so my memory of 50 years ago is of the book alone.

Even today there are certain images and verbal passages describing deep space that give me the creeps. Maybe it's true about everyone – it's just too overwhelming. I remember reading the chapter in which Bowman is falling through the shaft, me feeling nauseated and intoxicated at the same time. Otherwise, as with most books on my re-reading list, I did not remember much. I did not remember the first, lengthy part in pre-historic time that is so marvellously transposed into screen. I must say, it didn't quite work for me now, narratively, but not to the degree I was disturbed by it. It was the same with later chapters told from the point of view of the superior aliens that had planted the monoliths on Earth, Moon and Japetus. The omniscience of the narrator was a bit problematic for me as a professional reader. I am sure I didn't notice it back then.

I believe that we are all highly affected by the movie and cannot “unwatch” it, therefore my memory of Hal the computer was that he – it – was an evil rebel, malicious AI in conflict with humanity. It has been a while since I saw the movie but as I remember this is the way Hal is portrayed in the film. In the book, he – yes, I will refer to Hal as he – is presented as a more ethical being than the humans. He has a moral dilemma because he has been programmed to lie to the crew about the true nature of the mission. But he also needs to complete the mission, and the imperfect and mendacious humans are in the way. I fully empathised with Hal and felt unhappy that he had to be destroyed. He was only doing his duty.

The detailed description of Bowman's isolation resonates in a weird way today. And I wasn't at all disturbed by outdated details, as I know I might have been with a less engaging story. I started reading with apprehension: what if the book felt hopelessly obsolete? It didn't.

And I wonder whether Clarke had read The Magician's Nephew and referred to it, consciously or subconsciously, in the depiction of interstellar Grand Central Station.

Now I want to re-watch the movie.

Re-reading The Group

I included The Group in my 2020 re-reading challenge because it fit the criterion of a book that was important fifty years ago and that I hadn't re-read since. It was important to me and my female friends as a source of information we could not obtain elsewhere; it was also enticing in a way few other books were. Remember: we were behind the Iron Curtain where anything even remotely hinting at a possibility that human beings practised sexual reproduction was outrageous. Unlike the other books I have re-read, The Group was obviously not translated into Russian, so someone smuggled paperback copies from the West at great risk, because it was certainly on some top-secret list of banned pornography. It was pornography in our eyes because it was the closest we had ever seen or read of explicit sex. It also depicted glamorous life we were denied.

I remembered two details from the book. First, that one of the girls went to get a pessary. We had heard vaguely that there was such a thing; rumours had it that the Bolshoi ballet dancers were given them. There is a detailed description in the book of the procedure, which triggered our imagination. The second episode was another girl being shocked to see her friend's naked baby. I don't know why it made an impression on me. Even at that time I had seen naked male babies.

As young readers in the Soviet Union we were multiply displaced from the story and its protagonists. The USA was another world, a galaxy far far away. We didn't know what Vassar was, and although it is clear from the book that it is a women's college the connotation was lost on us. We didn't understand that the girls and their families were privileged because we thought everybody in the USA was rich. We probably didn't notice that the novel, published in 1963, takes place in the '30s. I definitely had no memories of the extensive political discourse. Today, I winced at some male characters being Communists, clearly with the author's sympathy.

The preface to the Kindle edition I have now read, written by someone who is presumably famous and of whom I had never heard, states that the novel, despite repeated claims, is not a forerunner to chick lit because it has literary merit. If so, I failed to notice it. Now, I am not an expert in chick lit. At the same time as The Group, we also read Valley of the Dolls, which puzzled me, since I just didn't get it. Some years ago I tried to read a couple of chick lit novels my daughter had recommended, and again, I didn't get it. The lifestyle, views and aspirations of the girls of The Group are totally alien to me and not interesting enough to want to know more. While whatever was attractive fifty years ago isn't any longer. I finished the book because it was part of the challenge, but it was painful.

A friend has told me that their grandchild loved the book. I wonder what it offers to the young generation today.

This is the paperback edition I read fifty years ago

Re-Reading The Sun Also Rises

It was a natural move from Fitzgerald to Hemingway, and I chose The Sun Also Rises for several reasons. I re-read For Whom the Bell Tolls, for me his best work, some time ago, so it does not qualify for my haven't-read-in-fifty-years challenge. We had to read A Farewell to Arms in my senior year in college, and inevitably books you are forced to read feel less attractive for re-reading. But the main reason was that The Sun Also Rises was an enticing and disturbing book for a seventeen-year-old, in inexplicable ways. Of course it was about love, and impossible love, which is irresistible for a young intellectual. It was also about the kind of life we tried to emulate, moving between the three available coffee shops in the multimillion Russian capital; travelling to Leningrad or Riga and feeling we were in Paris or Pamplona; claiming that life was pointless and that we were the lost generation. Playing Hemingway was our favourite game.

Once again, I did not remember much of the novel. I remembered the plotline, or rather the absence of a plotline; I remembered that Brett was married to a lord, but was getting divorced and about to marry someone else, but fell in love with a bullfighter who could be her son. I remembered that Jake was injured in war and therefore could not be with Brett (although I only guessed what exactly the injury was and why it was prohibitive), but comforted her when she was upset. A friend of mine said, with a wisdom of a seventeen-year-old: “Every woman should have her own Jake”.

I remembered that there was a large party going to Spain for bullfighting, but I did not remember that prior to that Jake and his friends go fishing, which of course is less dramatic. I did not remember the character of Robert Cohn at all, not even that Brett runs away with him for a while. And of course I didn't notice the numerous antisemitic comments about Cohn. It isn't particularly significant that Jake is a Catholic, but I definitely did not reflect on that.

And again and again, I wonder what I saw in this novel then, apart from the love plot. I probably read it quickly, skipping the long, wonderful descriptions of bus rides and fishing sessions. I probably even skipped the seemingly meaningless dialogues that do not contribute to the plot and not much to character either, and very little to the “message” if there is such a thing. We were taught that Hemingway's style was called “iceberg technique”, perfected in his short story White Elephants. It is also prominent in The Sun Also Rises: the characters talk about something irrelevant, while the reader is supposed to infer what they really think and feel. Similarly, the lengthy descriptions obviously have the function to convey obliquely the character's state of mind, but the reader must work hard to get through. Was I able to do this at seventeen? Hardly. And I am sure I could not simply enjoy the beauty of these descriptions, or the marvellous alternation of pace: sometimes a sentence that goes over three pages, sometimes three pages of sentences of three words. And I don't think I appreciated the neverending record of Paris street names that didn't say me anything.

I believe The Sun Also Rises hasn't aged very well (unlike For Whom the Bell Tolls). Precisely what fascinated us as Russian teenagers irritates me now. Young Americans in post-war Europe, with enough money and spare time to go on long vacations and get pathetically drunk. Jake at least has a job. The others are spoiled lazybones. To be fair, like so many other literary characters.

I am glad I have re-read this book, but I don't think I will read it again. 

 

Re-reading The Great Gatsby

During my final years in Cambridge, my college would run a Great Gatsby themed formal dinner, which of course offered marvelous opportunities for dressing up. I even went to a costume party shop and asked for a suitable head band. But I wonder how many people at those dinners, students or Fellows, had actually read the novel. I had read it, I read it when I was very young, and I had vague memories of it. Therefore I included it in my 2020 re-reading challenge.

What I remembered was what anyone might know even without having read the book. It takes place in the 1920s, Gatsby is tremendously rich and gives huge parties, there is a romantic mystery, and he dies in the end. If you had asked me a week ago how he dies, I would have claimed with confidence that he commits suicide. (No spoilers, but he doesn't).

In many works of literary criticism The Great Gatsby is used as an example of witness-narrator: a first-person narrator who tells someone else's story. I have repeated this false statement many times. Nick Carraway is a highly self-centered narrator and occupies significantly more space in the novel than Gatsby. I was surprised to notice that Gatsby is only present marginally in the first third of the book, as a neighbour with a dubious reputation. Encounter with Gatsby shatters Nick's worldview, makes him abandon his career – Nick is doubtless the main character in his own story, while Gatsby is what narratologists would call a catalyst, a character who affects the protagonist's fate. A substantial bit of the plot also revolves around Nick's romantic involvement. In other words, Nick is in no way an objective biographer. It is his story, not Gatsby's. And as a narrator, he is totally unreliable, not least because he repeatedly admits that he dislikes Gatsby. What I did, however, notice and appreciate with my critical, narratological eyes, is how the narrator accounts for something that someone else tells him, but not in direct speech, and not in reported speech, but as if he really witnessed it, suddenly interrupted either by direct speech or abrupt temporal shift. There are also recurrent flashforwards of the type: All this I learned much later…

My memory of Gatsby was of a romantic figure. I think the reason is the unhappy love story. As readers we are conditioned to emphathise with unhappy lovers, and although I did not remember the details, I had the sense of his actions justified by love. Yet as it turns out, he is a liar, a hypocrite, a financial criminal and ultimately a murder accomplice. Nick has all the reasons to dislike him.

I had completely forgotten Gatsby's father who comes to his funeral. The pathetic funeral episode made me in a way reconcile with Gatsby; I felt genuinely sorry for him.

It is brilliantly written, and I enjoyed every page. I may re-read it soon again. 

Re-reading Salinger

I have re-read The Catcher in the Rye dozens of times. I have taught it in every course I could squeeze it into, even in the USA where I soon realised it was just as controversial as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And I re-read it for every course I taught, and I still find it one of the greatest novels ever written. But it does not fit into my 2020 reading challenge so I have chosen a different Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour, An Introduction. I read it soon after The Catcher in the Rye – once again, everyone I knew was reading it at the same time; we also read Nine Stories, and some of us read Franny and Zooey. I was, as many friends then, fascinated by Zen. My mother was a Japanese scholar, specialising on Zen gardens, so I knew quite a lot about Zen, probably superficially, but enough to at least start understanding Seymour Glass and his siblings.

I had vague memories of the first novella and none at all of the second; maybe I never read it then. Of the first, I remembered that it featured a cancelled wedding and started by stating that at the time of narration the bridegroom had committed suicide. I also remembered the scene in which Seymour reads a Zen text to baby Franny. I remembered that Seymour's brother Buddy is the narrator, and that their sister Boo Boo writes a message for Seymour with a bit of soap on a bathroom mirror: “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters...”

I cannot imagine what I could have appreciated in this little gem when I was seventeen. For it is a gem. It evolves in real time or even in a stretch (a temporal pattern in which it takes longer to tell an event than it takes place). Nothing, absolutely nothing happens. Buddy the narrator and a party of the bride's guests are riding a taxi in Manhattan, get stuck in traffic, go to Buddy's apartment. They have insignificant conversations, interrupted, discursively, by Buddy's reflections and memories. The characters are hilarious. The atmosphere is brilliant. I was sad when I finished because I wanted it to go on for a while yet. (I believe I will re-read it again soon).

Seymour, An Introduction was, if possible, the opposite. A long and rather pointless reflection by Buddy, many years after Seymour's suicide, ostensibly trying to create a credible portrait of his much admired brother. I was about to give up halfway when it suddenly turned more interesting, becoming what narratologist Seymour (coincidence?) Chatman calls “comment on discourse”. Buddy the narrator, by this time a published author, conveys the pain of writing, the very process of transposing memories on paper, addressing his potential reader. I guess it was a kind of self-reflection by Salinger, but I am not really interested in real authors, all the more in fictitious authors, and Buddy eventually turned out to be a fascinating storyteller, not least in contrast to the subdued narrator of the first novella. I probably won't re-read Seymour, An Introduction, but when I am finished with my re-reading challenge I might want to re-read more stories about the Glass siblings. 

 

Book decluttering

This article caused some discussion on my Facebook feed, but even before the flood of responses I had decided to write a blog post.

First, neither the declutter guru nor the author of the article seem to be the kind of book owner that I and most of the people I know are. Books are neither single-use items nor ornaments of sentimental value. Instead, they are our working tools, supplies and frequently results. Books we purchase – or occasionally get for free from authors and publishers – may or may not be read; we can keep them for later, or we may read the introduction and realise that the book didn't meet our expectations. In many cases, we will re-read a book many times, for various reasons. Sometimes we teach a book, and personally I re-read books I teach every other year. Sometimes we write about a book, and we may write about the same book repeatedly, from different perspectives and for different audiences. Some of us are collectors: of a particular type of books, specific genres, specific authors, first editions, various illustrated or translated versions, and so on. Most of us, I would guess, have two separate book collections: one at home and one in the office, and they are likely to be very different.

Almost nothing argued in the article is relevant for people like me.

But even people like me are very different. Even younger me is very, very different from current me. The younger me grew up in a country where attractive books were in short supply. Where it was not unusual to pay a month's salary for one single highly desirable book – yes, I have done so on several occasions, and they were not incunabula.

In my first professional life, I collected fairy tales, translations of Scandinavian fiction and children's books in English. The latter were particularly hard to get hold of: random books brought from abroad and sold in the only second-hand bookshop in Moscow that kept them. They cost 5% of my monthly salary. No wonder they were dear to me. (A pair of tights cost 10% of my monthly salary, so abstaining from a pair of tights would buy two books).

When I moved to Sweden, I had to pay a 100% export tax on every book I wanted to take with me. This forced me to make some hard choices. I sold my huge fairy-tale collection and my substantial Scandinavian fiction collection, but I paid taxes on Puffin books, which in hindsight made no sense at all since they were easily accessible in Sweden, even before amazon.

I still have some of those Puffins with stamps from the second-hand bookshop in Moscow.

In Sweden my book collection started to grow again, this time only limited by money. I could no longer save by giving up tights.

I like to own books that I work with, so I justified my book purchases by needing them for current research projects or future research projects or maybe-some-time research projects, and expensive encyclopedias that were easily available in libraries. I used to review books a lot; I made friends with authors who would send me their new books. We added bookshelves at home; when I eventually got first a shared and then my own office, I moved work-related books there.

Still we were running out of space. I donated my large collection of Russian children's books to a University library in Finland where I hoped it would be used. Then I donated, to the same library, a very large collection of children's books in English, including all those first signed editions and many books from Australia, Canada and South Africa that I had bought during professional travel and that are not available anywhere else. In both cases, I received nice letters from the Head Librarian.

When we moved to Cambridge and realised the spatial limitations of British housing, we reluctantly admitted that it was time to get rid of books we had bought and never read, books we had read and would never read again, books we had bought for specific projects that were finished, and so on. I donated another huge collection of fairy tales because by that time I knew I would never write about them. I gave most Swedish children's books to my grandchildren. I gave heaps of critical books to my department. At the end, we just told friends: come and take whatever you want. They did. Bags after bags after bags.

Still we brought seventy boxes of books with us. And then we started buying more books. This was the beginning of amazon, and buying books had never been easier. I also had generous book allowance.

Then, five years ago, there was an accident with a happy ending. It made me think about the value and purpose of books sitting on my shelves. I donated my collection of Alice in Wonderland, 250 volumes of various illustrated and translated editions, to the Homerton library. This noble act left a couple of empty shelves in my office, but I continued to declutter and donate to libraries and give away to students and simply put books on “Please take whatever you want” table at work. Interestingly, someone would always take them.

I persuaded my significant other, who is a worse book hoarder than I, to part with some books he definitely would not read or use for work again. Believe me, it is not easy to find places that will take a special collection, even for free. But we managed to find a home for all Swedish fiction and non-fiction, for a huge collection of Judaica, and a substantial collection on Russian history. Still, this did not leave much space in our bookshelves.

I gave all my first editions of Harry Potter (British, American and “adult”) to a colleague obsessed by first editions.

Most recently I donated four shelves of literary criticism to Homerton. I realised I will never need those books again, and if I do in the near future I can just go downstairs to the library. Last term I taught my very last class on fairy tales, after which I donated all my remaining fairy tales. In a couple of weeks, I will teach my very last class ever on picturebooks, after which I will offer all my remaining picturebooks to the library.

I still cling to some favourite children's books and a few shelves of criticism, but not for long. I have seen enough retiring collagues sit frustrated in the middle of their offices that they need to vacate, surrounded by piles of books. I don't want to be in this situation.

I know that I will be moving again soon, and I will only take a small number of books with me. Kindle has made life easier because lots of books do not take any physical space. I will take the books I re-read regularly; I will take a few remaining signed books I value. I will take a copy of each of my own books, but probably not the books I have contributed a chapter to. I will keep all books on dollhouses and miniature-making because they will be useful in my future life as I plan it. Literary criticism or even children's books do not feature in my plans.

This process is a part of my bigger decluttering project. I don't want books – or anything – to be merely ballast. (Admittedly, the purpose of ballast is stability…)

I respect people who happily declare that they own twenty thousand books. I guess if I put together all books I have ever owned I would easily come close to this order of magnitude. But to everything there is a time and a season. A time to keep and a time to throw away. 

Books of 2018

Goodreads tells me that I have read 36 books this year out of 30 I had as a a goal. I set my readings goals low nowadays because I choose long, slow reads, and I almost don't read any quick-paced YA novels or picturebooks, and I read very little criticism for work.

Once upon a time I read several hundreds of books every year, particularly when I was on the national book award jury (120-150 books in just a couple of months) and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award jury (too many to account for), and of course I skim-read a lot of professional literature. I am glad I don't have to do it any more. I still have to read books that my students write about, but that's different than reading for pleasure. As we all know.

Here are some books from 2018.

Best book: Touch, by Claire North
Next best book: Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson

Best book with many sequels: Cazalet chronicles, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Best nonfiction: Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker

Quickest (and highly enjoyable) read: In Paris with You, by Clémentine Beauvais 

Old favourite re-read: Mary Poppins, by Pamela Travers 

Book on which a movie I had seen was based: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Book I had been planning to read for a long time: The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass

Book I should have read long ago: The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett

Weirdest book: Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami

Author I have read most: Claire North (seven books!)

Biggest disappointment: Bookworm, by Lucy Mangan

To see all my 2018 books visit my Goodreads.

 

Book challenge 2015

Since I love challenges (including all those silly Travel challenges on Facebook) I could not resist this list on my daughter's blog.

If I understand the rules correctly, the challenge is to do it within a year. My daughter is a fast reader, and I have recently become a slow reader. I checked Shelfari that told me I have only read six books this year. It cannot be true. I must have failed to register what I have read. I checked Goodreads and added some books. I also checked my Kindle. But I still have a definite feeling that something is missing.

I am not going to read according to this challenge, but I can go back a year, to August 2014. Apparently, you are allowed to list one book in several categories. Anyway, here we go:

A book with more than 500 pages - I have no idea. I read most books on a tablet, and I don't know how many pages there are. I assume that The goldfinch is more than 500 pages. If not, The luminaries is.
A classic romance - What is classic? What is romance? No idea.
A book that became a movie - The remains of the day, Kazuo Ishiguro. I haven't seen the movie
A book published this year – The buried giant, Kazuo Ishiguro
A book with a number in the title – Five children on the Western front, by Kate Saunders
A book written by someone under 30 – The royal babysitters, by Clementine Beauvais
A book with nonhuman characters – Flora and Ulysses, by Kate DiCamillo
A funny book – Britt-Marie var här, by Fredrik Backman
A book by a female author – H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald
A mystery or thriller – The silkworm, by Robert Galbraith, aka J K Rowling
A book with a one-word title – Sapiens, by Yuval Harari

A book of short stories – Suspended sentences, by Patrick Mondiano
A book set in a different country – The new policeman, by Kate Thompson
A nonfiction book – A time of gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
A popular author’s first book – Go set the watchman, by Harper Lee
A book from an author you love that you haven’t read yet – The tightrope walkers, by David Almond (also qualifies as book published this year)

A book a friend recommended – The tightrope walkers, by David Almond
A Pulitzer-Prize winning book – The goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
A book based on a true story – Alan Turing, by David Boyle
A book at the bottom of your to-read list - The bunker diary, by Kevin Brooks
A book your mom loves – my mum is happily dead, and thinking back, I cannot name a book she loved
A book that scares you – Sapiens, by Yuval Harari
A book more than 100 years old - The red and the black, Stendhal. Maybe it qualifies as classic romance?
A book you can finish in a day – Mary Ware's promised land, by Annie Fellows Johnston
A book with antonyms in the title – The white darkness, by Geraldine McCaughean. I re-read it for work
A book set somewhere you’ve always wanted to travel – An artist of the floating world, by Kazuo Ishiguro
A book that came out the year you were born + The borrowers, by Mary Norton (I know you expected it to be Charlotte's web, but I really dislike it)
A book with bad reviews + Go set a watchman, by Harper Lee
A trilogy - Chaos walking, by Patrick Ness. Re-reading for work
A book from your childhood - Alice in Wonderland. Inevitably this year
A book with a love triangle – I cannot think of any.
A book set in the future - A book of strange new things, by Michel Faber (very bad)
A book set in high school – The rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton
A book with a color in the title – Red shadow, by Paul Dowswell
A book that made you cry – The buried giant, Kazuo Ishiguro
A book with magic – The wise man's fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
A graphic novel – The adventures of the princess and Mr Whiffle, by Patrick Rothfuss
A book by an author you’ve never read before – The miniaturist, by Jessie Burton
A book you own but have never read – Mini knits for the 1/12 scale dolls' house, by Linda Spratley
A book that takes place in your hometown – I re-read The Master and Margarita every year
A book that was originally written in a different language – Suspended sentences, by Patrick Mondiano
A book set during Christmas - A time of gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. At least some of it
A book written by an author with your same initials – Poetic justice, by Martha Nussbaum
A play. I don't read plays
A banned book - I actually re-read To kill a mockingbird
A book based on or turned into a TV show – Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
A book you started but never finished - The queen of hearts, by Wilkie Collins

Looking at this list, I must say that I have read more than I remembered. And some books I have read I could not place in any category. 

Books of the year

Shelfari tells me that I read 26 books this year and that I am behind my pace, because last year I read 52 books. The year before I read 84 books. I am not sure whether this is reliable statistics to show a trend, but I feel that I am reading less and that I am reading slower. There is a correlation. I think I read more books for pleasure this year than in many, many previous years. I read considerably less children's books than usual. I read very little criticism because I am still recuperatring from a four-year research project. Contrary to my habits, I read several very recent books. It seems I didn't re-read any books this year. So this is not a typical year – unless this is how it is going to be in the future.

Anyway:

Best novel: Children Act, by Ian McEwan

Another best novel: The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

Best historical novel (with some magical realism): The Miniaturist, by Jessie Burton

Best thriller: The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

Best fantasy (if it is fantasy): The Name of the Wind, and sequel, by Patrick Rotfuss

Best humour (of the dark kind): A Man called Ove, by Fredrick Backman

Best children's book: Flora and Ulysses, by Kate DiCamillo

Best historical children's novel: Eleven Eleven, by Paul Dawswell

Best sequel: Hollow City, by Ransom Riggs

Best literary criticism: Entranced by Story, by Hugh Crago

Simply the best: Slow Regard of Silent Things, by Patrick Rotfuss

Books I will never read

A blog post from Guardian has caused some discussion on Facebook, and I have challenged my young colleague to list – and justify – a hundred books we will never read.

To be fair, I must say that I never read chick lit, true crime and all kinds of stuff too numerous to mention. So this will be things I ought to read, for various reasons, but won't.

The easiest thing is sequels to books I disliked, such as

Twilight

Lightning Thief

Divergent

Uglies

Maze runner

Ender's game

To make sure I am not a snob, I will add:

The portrait of a lady, volume 2

Then sequels to books I like and therefore don't want to read a sequel, particularly if written by someone else

Oz sequels. I have read a couple, and they were all rubbish

Books by writers whose books I have read and didn't like. This, however, can be tricky. I didn't like the first two books by John Green, and then Julia made me read The Fault in Our Stars, and it is one of the best books ever. It made me read yet another book by John Green, and I put it aside after five pages. But, nothing by

Balzac

Zola

George Sand

Flaubert (hmm, I seem to have a bias against French literature)

Paulo Coelho

P. G. Woodhouse

Shel Silverstein

Dan Brown

Books that we were supposed to read in school

Theodor Dreiser (ironically, they are now banned in Russia as unsuitable for young readers)

Upton Sinclair

Books I don't want to read for no obvious reasons

Game of Thrones

Paradise Lost

The Bell Jar

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Atlas Shrugged

The Naked and the Dead

The Awakening

The Illiad

Quo Vadis

Color Purple

Beloved (started severla times and could not finish)

Stephen King

Thoreau

E.M. Foster (but I love his criticism)

Emerson

Marquis de Sade

Not sure whether I am up to a hundred yet, but could easily go on.

My list of books I want to read is much shorter.

Close encounters with children's writers, part 6

This year marks the centenary of Tove Jansson, the author of the Moomin books. It will be celebrated worldwide, I believe, with new books, conferences, festivals and exhibitions. I have contributed to the academic bit with an edited special issue of a journal, to be published in summer, just in time for the actual hundredth birthday. But I'd better hurry with my personal reminiscences before the web is drowned in Tove Jansson stuff and nobody has energy to read more.

As I have mentioned many times, I am not particularly interested in flesh-and-blood authors, and I have seldom actively tried to meet them unless I had a good reason (such as an interview). Since Tove Jansson lived in Helsinki I couldn't meet her at publisher receptions or the Children’s Book Institute events, where I met many Swedish authors. But it so happened that Staffan wrote a musical together with Vivica Bandler, a famous theatre director and producer, once upon a time Tove Jansson's partner and subsequently a good friend. We were invited to Vivica's birthday party in Helsinki, featuring the cream of Finland's culture, which made me feel very special indeed. It was a relatively small private party, following a huge celebration at the theatre, so inevitably everybody was introduced to everybody else, and when I was introduced to Tove Jansson and explained that I had read her books in Moscow, she clapped her hands and kissed me. She was like that.

About a year later, my colleague Boel Westin defended her doctoral thesis on Tove Jansson, and the study object was the guest of honour. It was a horrible winter day, with sleet and wind, and after the defence and the sparkling I offered to take the defendant and the object home in my car. For some inexplicable reason, I thought that Tove was staying with Boel and drove to her house, opening the back door for Tove and her partner Tuulikki. Tove looked at me with horror: “Are we to go on foot from here?” I realised I'd made a blunder and took them to their hotel. In the evening, at the banquet, I asked Tove to sign three books for my children.

Tove Jansson's eightieth birthday was celebrated loudly in Finland, with a big international conference in Tampere, the location of the Finnish children's books institute. The object of research was there, sitting literally on a throne, crowned with a wreath of flowers. People queued as if in front of royalty, invited one by one to approach, speak and be ushered away. I looked at this and told myself: I have met this wonderful person privately, she has sat in the back seat of my car. Do I really need to stand in line to say some pointless words? And I didn't.

Childhood reading: Final reflections

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I have now done what we ask our masters students to do, although I have cheated and haven't used any references, and I am not sure about my word count. Some of our harsh markers would probably give me a very low grade for not engaging critically with the sources and spending too much time on plot summaries.

Nonetheless it was a very useful exercise. I had not previouly realised that most of my childhood books were Russian. I read the Great Classics of English-language children's literature later, as a professional. It is interesting to contemplate, with my students' experience as a background, that it is fully possible to develop as a reader without Enid Blyton – in a generic sense, without series fiction with its repetitive plots and stereotypical characters. In fact, I didn't, even as a child, like sequels and was always disappointed by them. It is fully possible to grow up without Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, but, I have to admit, I didn't like these when I had to read them for my children's literature course in Sweden. I guess the books I enjoyed most as a child were fairy tales of all kinds, imaginative books, and when in my late teens I read another wave of foreign classics, including Mary Poppins, Peter Pan and the Moomin books, my preference was confirmed. It is not until I came to Sweden and discovered Maria Gripe, Gunnel Linde and Peter Pohl that I reluctantly conceded that realism was also a legitimate mode of writing. Obviously, I was spoon-fed by realism of the worst kind in the Soviet Union, and the aversion stayed for a long time. That said, look how many social-realistic books I read and loved.

Yet I am still trying to identify the moment when I knew that children's literature was not something I wanted to leave behind. I never stopped reading children's books even when I was grown-up enough to read Vonnegut, Pasternak and Thomas Mann. Half of my ten desert island books are children's books. In my early twenties, in my close circle of friends, we would read children's books aloud, we would give each other children's books for birthdays. So it wasn't just me, but from that circle, only I made children's literature my profession, and it could only happen because I moved to Sweden.

Most of the books in my reading memoir are unknown outside Russia, and although I have written about many of them in my academic piblications, they will remain unknown. I am not sure I should be upset about it. After all, most of the wonderful Swedish children's books are unknown, even if they are translated into English, and many Swedish books that were great and important when I started teaching in the mid-80s are also gone. Yet somehow they have all added up to what I have become, and who knows whether I would be where I am without The Book About Masha.

Childhood reading, part 10: Romance

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As I mentioned, one of the attractions of adventure and historical fiction was romance, “about love”. There wasn't any trashy romance available so you had to find it wherever you could. There was one book that ruined generations of Russian girls' expectations of romantic love, because we all waited, not for a prince on a white horse, but a prince under scarlet sails. This is the title, Scarlet Sails. It's about a girl with a strange, exotic name, Assol, who grows up with her father, a former sailor, now a toymaker. One day Assol is taking some toys to sell in a shop in town and on the way plays with a toy boat with scarlet sails. She meets an old storyteller who is inspired by a pretty innocent child with a toy boat and tells her that when she grows up a prince will come in a boat with scarlet sails. Many years later a rich young skipper comes to the town, hears the story, equips his boat with scarlet sails and collects the girl from the beach. Presumbably, they live happily ever after. Of course, after this story, who would be satisfied with anything less?

There was, however, a counterweight, which I think was the only Russian book from that time I would call a teenage novel, called Wild Dog Dingo, or The Story of First Love. I haven't re-read it so I probably should before I say something about it, but my memory is of piercing sorrow and despair. Except for the title, the word love isn't used much if at all, but we witness how the main character, fifteen-year-old Tanya, falls in love with a boy whom she is furmly determined to hate, while she fails to notice the faithful admiration of a classmate and old friend. And because nothing is said explicitly, the reader is just as confused as Tanya: why doesn't the story follow the familiar script, why is love unrequitted, why is it so painful. As I say, I need to re-read it, but as I remember it, it is one of the great novels of adolescence ever.

Because there were no teenage novels, by the age of twelve I was reading adult fiction, particularly Turgenev, which is all “about love”, but different from Dingo because Turgenev's characters were grown-ups, while Tanya's story made us believe that love can happen when you are fifteen, and then maybe even earlier? I read War and Peace at thirteen, again, looking for love and skipping war, and generally not getting much out of it. I read Dickens at the same time, and there was enough of love there as well. For some reason, I never read Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte; perhaps because my snobbish mother disapproved of them. (Many years later she saw my husband read Pride and Prejudice and sneered at him for reading “girls' books”). But she gave me Gone with the Wind for my sixteenth birthday, because she knew I wanted it desperately. And it wasn't just ordering it from amazon: it had to be smuggled to Russia from the West and cost a small forture at the black market.

The status of Gone with the Wind in the Soviet Union is a separate story which I will tell one day (it was, for instance, President Gorbachov's wife's favourite book). My history teacher, an intelligent and educated man, referred to it as the American War and Peace and recommended it warmly as complementary reading about the American Civil War (!). This may contradict what I said above about smuggling, but life in the Soviet Union was full of contradictions.

My English was good enough to enjoy Gone with the Wind, and after that I read lots of romance in English, such as Forever Amber, again smuggled in by privileged travellers. This stream also brought Salinger and Vonnegut, but these go beyond childhood reading, so I think I'd better stop here.