Andrew Blackman

I’m a bit late to the New Year goal-setting party, but here goes. For my writing, I want to finish my second novel and get it published, and start on a third. I also want to write more short stories and submit them to magazines and contests. For my reading, I want to read a book a week. I think I do this already, but have never really tracked it for a full year to find out if it’s true. So this year I want to make a note of every book I read, and also review it on this site, and I’m aiming for 52 books for the year. I’ve added a new page on the top menu, 2010 reading, where I will post updates.

That’s it. Nothing too difficult – I believe in setting realistic goals and actually meeting them (I only came to this belief after years of pie-in-the-sky New Year’s resolutions that came unstuck by the end of January). What about you? Any goals you’d like to share for 2010?

Andrew Blackman Uncategorized 2010, goals, Interesting snippets, Writing

I had a very relaxing holiday, and had time for lots of reading:

Also read, but not pictured, were:

• Global Shift by Edmund J. Bourne
• Commonwealth Short Stories edited by Anna Rutherford and Donald Hannah
• West Indian Folk Tales retold by Philip M Sherlock

Reviews to follow – I have a bit of a backlog to take care of!

Andrew Blackman Book reviews holiday, Interesting snippets

Well, I’m back – finally! The snow and ice here in England delayed my return, so my four-week holiday turned into five. I am now relaxed and even a little tanned, and trying to hold onto both for as long as possible. More about my holiday later, but I wanted to start the new year by thanking Tania Hershman for providing this excellent list of UK and Irish lit mags. I plan to subscribe to several of them, and also submit some short stories I’ve been hoarding for a while.

Happy New Year everyone! What have you been up to lately?

Andrew Blackman Uncategorized Interesting snippets, list, magazines, short stories, submissions

Some interesting analysis of US and UK reading habits, courtesy of the summer edition of The Author magazine:

• American readers prefer romance; British ones prefer literary fiction
• Men make 35% of book purchases in the US; 42% in the UK
• In both countries, two-thirds of books are bought by people over the age of 42
• In fiction, mystery and romance account for 58% of purchases in the US, compared with 31% in the UK
• In non-fiction, religious books do well in the US; celebrity biographies in the UK.

Original source was a presentation at the London Book Fair by survey companies BML, who surveyed UK readers, and Pub Track/Bowker, who did the same in the US. At first I was quite struck by the fact that two-thirds of books are bought by people over the age of 42, and was going to start writing about how young people don’t read etc etc. But then I realised that probably two-thirds of adults are over 42 anyway, so actually it’s the sort of proportion you’d expect!

I guess the real question is why men don’t read very much. Certainly when doing publicity for my book, I’ve noticed that most of the people who turn up to readings and speaking events are women, and on sites like Goodreads or in book blogs, I’d say there are more women than men. That’s just my own experience, though – what do you think? Are there more women than men involved in reading and talking about books? If so, any idea why? (No need for proof or data of any kind – wild speculation is more than welcome here!).

Andrew Blackman Interesting snippets, Literary news book buying statistics, Interesting snippets, reading habits, UK, US

Just read a great article by Rita Carter in the Spring edition of The Author. It’s not available online, but it makes reference to, and explores many of the same issues as, this Atlantic article by Nicholas Carr. The basic issue, hinted at in the title: reading on the internet is different from reading a book. In fact, the way we think may be different. Less sustained, more scattered. Faster but more superficial. We skim, click around, get interrupted, start again, follow a tangent. We learn quickly, but in an unfocused way.

The article title is a little provocative – neither author really argues that Google is making us stupid. But they do raise real concerns about whether our brains are being “re-wired” by online reading. Unfortunately there’s not much scientific research to draw on yet, so the conclusions are mixed. In fact, Carter points out the positive side of online reading – the active, “search-and-find” rather than “sit-back-and-receive” state. So, she concludes, “perhaps the cerebral tinkering that alarms Nick Carr and others is actually a kind of neural upgrade which will allow old brains to function better in the future.”

I am definitely aware of a big difference in how I think, read and behave online as opposed to, say, a library. I’ve always been a quick reader, and at university when I had hundreds of books on a reading list for a term, I frequently skimmed them, for example just reading the first chapter and last, and the first and last paragraphs of each chapter in-between. But that was the exception. In general, I always read quickly but methodically, from beginning to end.

Online, it’s a different story. I go on to check a fact for my book, and an hour later I have eight tabs open in my browser, have replied to a load of emails and am chatting with someone on Facebook while skipping between an article on child slavery in Cote d-Ivoire and a blog post on Gordon Brown, while simultaneously checking the football scores. What did I go online for again? No idea, so I close down, go back to my writing, and find there was a fact I was supposed to look up a while ago.

I have now recognised that I am simply unable to write while the internet is on. But more worryingly, I am also unable to write AFTER I’ve been on the internet. Even if I switch off my wireless card and have nothing open but Microsoft Word, I find my mind is less focused. It’s as if, having been foraging all over the internet for a million pieces of information, doing ten or twenty things at once, my brain doesn’t want to be tied down to the slower, more prosaic, isolated, demanding but decidedly one-track task of writing a novel.

So I’ve made a rule. On writing days, the internet stays off until I’ve done my writing for the day. If I need to look something up, I write it down and look it up later. It’s the only way I can function.

Does anyone else feel that they read or think differently online? Can you read long, serious articles online, or do you have to print them out? Can you stop and think deeply about something online, or do you find yourself engaging in a kind of “staccato” thought process? Do you think our brains are being re-wired? If so, is it for better or for worse?

Andrew Blackman Interesting snippets brain, google, Interesting snippets, online, stupid

Came across some good back-to-basics writing advice over on How Publishing Really Works. The bottom line:

Just write every day, and read more often than you write, and your writing will improve.

I am a keen reader, but sometimes when faced with the competing pressures of finishing a manuscript, paying the rent and occasionally having a social life, reading can slip down my list of priorities. I thoroughly agree with Jane, though – it’s absolutely indispensible for a writer to read widely. It’s good advice to keep in mind.

Andrew Blackman Interesting snippets Interesting snippets, Writing

In the course of researching my speech at Leicester University earlier this week, I discovered that last year 120,947 new books were published in the UK (source: Nielsen Bookscan).

I found this quite depressing, not just as a writer but as a reader. As a writer, of course, it makes me worry about how hard it will be to get my book noticed among 120,946 others, and also about whether the world really needs another book at all. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised its implications for me as a reader.

I don’t count how many books I read, but I’d guess it averages out to a couple a week, so possibly a hundred in a year.  A hundred out of 120,947. Of all the knowledge contributed to the world in the UK each year, I am accessing less than 0.1% of it. And that’s only books published in the UK.

And when I thought about it some more, I realised that a lot of the books I read are not newly-published. I spend a lot of time catching up on the millions of books published in the centuries before I was born. The British Library helpfully estimates that to get through all 14 million books in its collection would take about 6,000 years.

My point? I don’t know anything more than a tiny, tiny slice of what there is to know. Of course that doesn’t mean that I can’t have opinions. But it does mean that I should be humble, and always be willing to admit that I’m wrong, that there’s a lot of stuff I just don’t know about.

There is a bright side, however. Actually, two bright sides, if that’s metaphorically possible.

For one thing, quite a lot of those 14 million books in the British Library are ones I could quite happily do without reading.

For another thing, nobody else knows anything very much either. Even an avid reader couldn’t get through more than a few hundred books a year, still a tiny fraction of the whole. So all anyone can hope for is either to be an expert on some tiny subject or to have a broad knowledge with lots and lots of gaps. It’s heartening for me to remember that just as I have a deep insecurity about all the things I don’t know, so must Salman Rushdie. So must Barack Obama. So must all the critics, all the journalists, all the TV talking heads. Even Tolstoy and Goethe and Proust must have had the odd moment when they wondered if they really knew what they were talking about.

Somehow I find that heartening. It’s like the old trick of losing your fear of someone who intimidates you by picturing them on the toilet. It’s a reminder that we’re all human. No matter what we say or how many pretences we go through, we’re all human, and none of us knows very much at all.

Andrew Blackman Literary news books, british library, ignorance, Interesting snippets, knowledge

This was a good, quick read. An interesting story that explores several moral issues such as euthanasia and privacy rights. Another theme is the yearning for greatness and the sacrifices involved, often in vain. For example, Clive is a famous composer trying to create a “Millennial Symphony” and struggling with the pressure. He feels on the verge of creating a work of genius but keeps being interrupted just as he is about to create a crucial part. Vernon is a newspaper editor who thinks he has created a truly great front page, one that will restore the paper’s declining circulation and will become so iconic that it is used in journalism school one day. Julian Garmony is a right-wing Tory foreign secretary on the verge of a leadership bid but threatened with oblivion by the exposure of his cross-dressing habit (the subject of Vernon’s great front page).

One thing the novel captured really well was the fickleness of public opinion: at several crucial points, there is a sudden swing and people who supported one view before suddenly say the complete opposite and maintain that they always believed that. Reminds me of the death of Princess Diana, when the same newspapers that were exoriating her before her death suddenly started idolising her. This novel was written in 1998, a year after Princess Diana’s death, when this issue, and also issues of press invasion of privacy, would have been very current.

There was a real let-down for me, though: in several instances, the characters just didn’t feel real. The ending, particularly, was a disappointment. (Major spoiler alert!!) The ending just seemed inconsistent with the characters, much too dramatic compared with what had gone before. Clive and Vernon had argued, had a disagreement, each thought the other was morally at fault. Fine. But it’s the kind of thing you can get over, or just not bother to call the person again. The thing is, they end up killing each other! It’s just bizarre. There’s a bit of a setup in that the woman they both loved, Molly, the woman whose funeral opens the book, died very slowly and painfully, and they’d both agreed that if they were terminally ill, the other one would assist in their suicide. References to Amsterdam’s relaxed assisted-suicide laws are sprinkled through the book as foreshadowing. But still, when they end up killing each other, I just didn’t buy it.

Some beautiful writing, good scenes – the Lake District one was particularly memorable - and it kept me reading all the way through. There was some great description of the act of creation in the parts where Clive is trying to write his symphony, and a good exploration of the moral dilemmas of the newspaper industry. But it was a big problem for me that at several points I just didn’t believe the characters would really do what the writer said they were doing. McEwan has written much better books – Atonement was fantastic. This was just OK.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews amsterdam, assisted suicide, composing, euthanasia, Interesting snippets, mcewan

An elderly, celebrated artist, Masuji Ono, is living in retirement in Japan just after the end of World War Two. His daughter is having trouble in her marriage negotiations for reasons he can’t understand: gradually he realises it’s because he is associated with the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, a period now discredited and blamed for bringing disaster on the country.

The theme of the book is the role of the artist in the world, and this is what old Masuji Ono gradually explores. As with many of Ishiguro’s books, memory plays a large role. Ono thinks back to his apprenticeship with an artist who devoted his life to paintings of the city’s night life, the “floating world” of the title, temporary and transient. Ono follows him initially, but then wants to do something more meaningful with his life and his art, and reacts against this decadence with his first rebellious painting “Complacency”, later reworked as “Eyes to the Horizon”, a propaganda painting used to exhort the country to go west into Asia. His motivations were good, though – his friend Matsuda showed him the poverty in the city and said that the only way to stop the people’s suffering was to make Japan into a great empire like that of the European nations. It was the wrong course, but as Matsuda says as an old man, “There’s no need to blame ourselves unduly. We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost. It’s just that in the end, we turned out to be ordinary men. Ordinary men with no special gifts of insight. It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times.” Or as Ono says, “Of course, we took some bold steps and often did things with much single-mindedness; but this is surely preferable to never putting one’s convictions to the test, for lack of will or courage.” This is contrasted with a character called The Tortoise, a slow imitator: “His kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeeavour to rise above the mediocre.”

Clearly we are meant to sympathise with Ono, even though he made the wrong choices. Ishiguro seems to be saying that an artist has to choose, cannot simply ignore life and paint pretty pictures. But by making public choices of allegiance, you lay yourself open to criticism and even ruin when times change. What is patriotic in one situation can come to seem treasonous or murderous in the light of later events.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews Interesting snippets, ishiguro, japan, novels, war

The writing grabbed me from page one: there is a real rhythm to it, and the description is beautiful. The first story in the collection is the sort of “lazy childhood summer holiday” tale that you expect to be idyllic, until the writer throws in really gruesome details, like a dog killing a mongoose, dead fish caught in hooks, a tourist vomiting in the sea, a dead bee swirling in the boy’s coffee, etc., etc. Then old Uncle Julius, who smells of pine cologne with a whiff of rot and decay, starts telling stories about his time in Soviet gulags. Then they get home to find the plants have all died because the neighbour who was supposed to water them died of a heart attack. And the near-starved family cat now looks at them with irreversible hatred.

So the tone is set. The stories are all separate but interlinked: images like the starving cat and details like the family’s history of bee-keeping recur later and remind you of the earlier stories. Much of the book seems autobiographical, as it ties up with known events in Hemon’s life: he really did leave Sarajevo for America in the early 90s, just before the siege started. So despite the apparent randomness of the stories and wide variation of writing style, the book is coherent. Hemon, however, plays with fact and fiction, leaving you unsure what, if anything, is true. In the story that struck me as most likely to be heavily autobiographical, Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls, Hemon’s character is called Pronek, and Hemon makes a minor appearance as a Dominican immigrant who wants to play soccer. A “Herr Alexander Hemon” also appears briefly in one of the lengthy footnotes to the Sorge Spy Ring as a researcher at the German Foreign Office Archives.

The overall effect reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges, a writer I admire a lot. There’s a sense of knowledge accumulating not logically but gradually, through the recurring images and symbols and the threads of stories running through each piece, even though individual facts themselves are distorted and played with. The contrast of the horrors of Sarajevo and the triviality of life in Chicago is handled very well, by focusing on the guilt of the narrator who has escaped, rather than adopting an accusatory tone of which Americans, I’m sure, are tired. The contrasts between a family dodging sniper fire in Sarajevo and a man in a Chicago restaurant demanding romaine lettuce instead of iceberg lettuce on his Turkey Dijon are striking enough and don’t need to be laboured. Thankfully Hemon doesn’t labour anything. His prose skips quickly on, letting the images speak for themselves.

Not everything worked – sometimes the similes were piled on too thick and sometimes they just didn’t work for me (how can pot plants on a step look like “servants with candles”?). And I didn’t see the point of the story The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders at all. But overall I loved the book, and definitely want to read his latest, The Lazarus Project, as soon as I can.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews bosnia, fiction, hemon, Interesting snippets, sarajevo