OK, time to 'fess up. The editing is going along pretty well but it is becoming all consuming, so here’s one I prepared earlier – like about a month ago - and forgot about! It’s a tag which originated with Nik Perring – I picked it up at Aliya Whiteley and Neil Ayres’s blog:
List at least five things you do to support and spread a love of the written word.. If you list something that touches youngsters, you get a bonus...
One:
I have a house which is apparently spawning books as we speak. Every time we think we have enough bookcases, it seems only to be a matter of days before we discover that books have begun to colonise the stairs, the windowsills, the blanket box in the living room which is supposed to house nothing but DVDs and Wii stuff - you know, you’re not supposed to put things on top of it because you can’t get at the stuff inside easily, so – obviously - there are books on it most of the time. Bedrooms, obviously are full of books, that goes without saying but bathrooms – do other people have stacks of books in their bathrooms – balancing on the side of the bath, stacked next to the loo rolls in the downstairs loo…
So, whenever anybody comes to our house they kind of have no choice but to interact with at least one book on their visit – normally so that they can sit down on anything. They’ve got to be interested in at least one, right?
Two:
For years when my children were small I read dozens of books to them – often many, many times (Cherry Tree Farm anyone? I can probably still do it off by heart all these years later.) And I wouldn’t mind but THEY DON’T REMEMBER A SINGLE ONE. They don’t remember any of the characters they loved so much. Not a word. I mention Cherry Tree Farm and Hairy McLairy and they look at me blankly. And, more to the point, once they became literate themselves they did not start reading books off their own bat. Oh no. They became uninterested in books (unless I was reading to them, which I persisted in until they were 12 and 11) until very recently. Mind you, the Bassist is now talking about reading English at university and does things like hauling off and reading the whole F Scott Fitzgerald oeuvre which is more than I’ve ever done, so maybe Cherry Tree Farm and Hairy McLary from Donaldson’s Dairy weren’t such a vain effort after all.
Three:
Despite the prevailing tendency to listen to iPods on public transport, I persist in reading books whenever I am on a train or a bus. It puts me at a disadvantage in the carrying things around stakes – iPods are little and light and books are heavier and more chunky – but do I care? No. Reading Bill Bryson in public certainly spreads the love of the written word – nobody watching me have silent, I’m-laughing-in-front-of-other-people hysterics at something he’s written could fail to get the message that books are good for you.
Four:
I am forever lending books to friends, whether they want them or not. This may be related to One, above, but I’m not going to discuss that.
Five:
I shovel ridiculous amounts of money in the direction of Watersones and – when we’re particularly broke – the local Oxfam bookshop. The latter is also the recipient of the consequences of One, above – the trouble is, we tend to go in with a rucksack full of books which we leave with them to sort and shelve, only to leave with a rucksack full of books off the shelves. Poor effort.
Anyway, hope that goes some way to making up for the very poor showing in terms of recent posts here. I shall be putting up a few thoughts on the editing process in the next couple of days… be warned.
Showing posts with label Aliya Whiteley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aliya Whiteley. Show all posts
Monday, 9 March 2009
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Light Reading
Like most bloggers who review books, I make it a rule only to review ones I admire, like or – the absolute gold standard – both like and admire. It’s therefore great – and a great relief – when people you know personally have managed to write a novel which you can write about with as much pleasure and enthusiasm as I’m going to write about the book I’ve just read. The fact that it’s by another MNW writer is simply an added bonus. [There will be MNW books which I simply don’t mention here. Whether I have neither liked nor admired them, or whether I have simply not got around to reading them yet, you’ll never know…It’s why I don’t post a ‘currently reading’ list. Cunning eh?]
Anyway, on with the review.
It’s so well known amongst my reading-buddies as to be a joke that if, at page 60 in any given book, I would quite happily see all the characters mown down by a machine gun, I stop reading said book. You see, I get involved with characters – I have to like the people I’m reading about.
Or so I thought until I read Aliya Whiteley’s Light Reading. Her main character, Pru Green is not a likeable person. She seems to go out of her way to be unkind, even – or possibly especially – to her best friend, Lena. I’m always telling my children people who are that unkind are usually deeply unhappy and – hah, I do like being right! – so it proves in Pru’s case. But I’m getting ahead of myself….
So, given that she is unpleasant, and Lena’s not much better, why did I not only read beyond page 60 but scurry through the whole thing?
Because Aliya Whiteley has written a highly successful book. A highly enjoyable book. A book which must have been horribly difficult to pull off. Because I think black comedy is difficult to pull off. I mean, is it just me or is 99% of ‘black comedy’ actually just groanably bad comedy about stuff people don’t (shouldn’t?) actually find funny? Neither funny nor really black, it usually just feels as if it’s missed the mark, only with added misery.
But Light Reading is that rarest of beasts, a truly good black comedy. It’s funny. And it’s pretty dark, both in terms of the mystery at its heart, and the psychology of the two central characters. Not to mention Allcombe and pretty much every resident thereof. Not for nothing does the strapline on the Panmacmillan site say ‘Welcome to Britain’s most sinister seaside resort.’
Aliya says (can’t remember where, but either on her blog or when I met her in Cambridge) that she finds it difficult to reconcile herself to Light Reading being classed as a crime novel. And it’s not by any means bog standard crime fiction. Think Rosemary and Thyme meet Edgar Allen Poe. With bad detecting.
Has Aliya set out consciously to subvert the genre? (Cool, v. professional writer-type question, huh?) I don’t think so as I very much get the impression that this novel is entirely character driven. In fact, if you read the interview with Aliya over on the Macmillan New Writers blog here, she says that she wrote the book around Pru, who started out as a character in a short story called Spitting Wasps (ouch, you really wouldn’t want to be Pru’s boyfriend – check it out) and created Lena as her foil.
And she’s created a brilliant double-act. You don’t just want to uncover the mystery at the heart of the book (did child star Crystal Tynee really commit suicide and, if so, how does it relate to the deaths of both her grandmother and her mother’s cat?) you want to uncover the mystery of Pru. Why is she as she is?
You know why Lena is who she is – she’s into self-analysis and analysis of others, she tells you the whole time. But Pru has about as much to say on the subject of her past as your average garden slug.
I wonder – has Aliya managed to pull off the black comedy thing because sci-fi/fantasy writers always look at life from slightly left field? They’re always thinking of what’s beneath the real, the ordinary, the given, and wondering what life is – or could be – really like?
In the interview on the MNWriters’ site, Aliya says of Light Reading ‘Mainly it's about sex and death. Actually, it's completely about sex and death.’ And it is. But it’s also about female friendship.
How not to do it is shown quite clearly by the self-serving hypocrisy of the RAF wives with their utterly grim, depressingly aimless, gin-drinking, cake-eating and back-stabbing. But what might be possible is shown in the Pru ‘n’ Lena double act; what their friendship might have become had Pru been able to accept Lena’s clumsy but heartfelt offering of genuine understanding is glimpsed in one of the darkest scenes in the book.
There are crimes in Light Reading (why it’s called Light Reading is the only question I was left with at the end of the book – I have a nasty suspicion that I’m being thick and that the answer is really obvious) but that doesn’t mean that it’s a crime book.
Detecting (of a highly dubious quality) takes place but that doesn’t make LR detective fiction.
There is the aforementioned sex and death – but it’s not erotic. In fact the sex in LR is quite deliberately and magnificently unerotic. Boy George’s famous line ‘I’d prefer a nice cup of tea’ springs to mind as never before.
What Light Reading is is a highly successful novel, written with a light touch but deep understanding, about people.
The events may pull you along, but it’s the people who make you want to know what happened.
Anyway, on with the review.
It’s so well known amongst my reading-buddies as to be a joke that if, at page 60 in any given book, I would quite happily see all the characters mown down by a machine gun, I stop reading said book. You see, I get involved with characters – I have to like the people I’m reading about.
Or so I thought until I read Aliya Whiteley’s Light Reading. Her main character, Pru Green is not a likeable person. She seems to go out of her way to be unkind, even – or possibly especially – to her best friend, Lena. I’m always telling my children people who are that unkind are usually deeply unhappy and – hah, I do like being right! – so it proves in Pru’s case. But I’m getting ahead of myself….
So, given that she is unpleasant, and Lena’s not much better, why did I not only read beyond page 60 but scurry through the whole thing?
Because Aliya Whiteley has written a highly successful book. A highly enjoyable book. A book which must have been horribly difficult to pull off. Because I think black comedy is difficult to pull off. I mean, is it just me or is 99% of ‘black comedy’ actually just groanably bad comedy about stuff people don’t (shouldn’t?) actually find funny? Neither funny nor really black, it usually just feels as if it’s missed the mark, only with added misery.
But Light Reading is that rarest of beasts, a truly good black comedy. It’s funny. And it’s pretty dark, both in terms of the mystery at its heart, and the psychology of the two central characters. Not to mention Allcombe and pretty much every resident thereof. Not for nothing does the strapline on the Panmacmillan site say ‘Welcome to Britain’s most sinister seaside resort.’
Aliya says (can’t remember where, but either on her blog or when I met her in Cambridge) that she finds it difficult to reconcile herself to Light Reading being classed as a crime novel. And it’s not by any means bog standard crime fiction. Think Rosemary and Thyme meet Edgar Allen Poe. With bad detecting.
Has Aliya set out consciously to subvert the genre? (Cool, v. professional writer-type question, huh?) I don’t think so as I very much get the impression that this novel is entirely character driven. In fact, if you read the interview with Aliya over on the Macmillan New Writers blog here, she says that she wrote the book around Pru, who started out as a character in a short story called Spitting Wasps (ouch, you really wouldn’t want to be Pru’s boyfriend – check it out) and created Lena as her foil.
And she’s created a brilliant double-act. You don’t just want to uncover the mystery at the heart of the book (did child star Crystal Tynee really commit suicide and, if so, how does it relate to the deaths of both her grandmother and her mother’s cat?) you want to uncover the mystery of Pru. Why is she as she is?
You know why Lena is who she is – she’s into self-analysis and analysis of others, she tells you the whole time. But Pru has about as much to say on the subject of her past as your average garden slug.
I wonder – has Aliya managed to pull off the black comedy thing because sci-fi/fantasy writers always look at life from slightly left field? They’re always thinking of what’s beneath the real, the ordinary, the given, and wondering what life is – or could be – really like?
In the interview on the MNWriters’ site, Aliya says of Light Reading ‘Mainly it's about sex and death. Actually, it's completely about sex and death.’ And it is. But it’s also about female friendship.
How not to do it is shown quite clearly by the self-serving hypocrisy of the RAF wives with their utterly grim, depressingly aimless, gin-drinking, cake-eating and back-stabbing. But what might be possible is shown in the Pru ‘n’ Lena double act; what their friendship might have become had Pru been able to accept Lena’s clumsy but heartfelt offering of genuine understanding is glimpsed in one of the darkest scenes in the book.
There are crimes in Light Reading (why it’s called Light Reading is the only question I was left with at the end of the book – I have a nasty suspicion that I’m being thick and that the answer is really obvious) but that doesn’t mean that it’s a crime book.
Detecting (of a highly dubious quality) takes place but that doesn’t make LR detective fiction.
There is the aforementioned sex and death – but it’s not erotic. In fact the sex in LR is quite deliberately and magnificently unerotic. Boy George’s famous line ‘I’d prefer a nice cup of tea’ springs to mind as never before.
What Light Reading is is a highly successful novel, written with a light touch but deep understanding, about people.
The events may pull you along, but it’s the people who make you want to know what happened.
Great book.
Monday, 4 February 2008
A little Light Reading?
Drat, drat, drat. As if the to-be-read pile wasn’t already threatening to engulf most of the known universe (sorry about the hyperbole, been reading Bill Bryson) I just had to follow the link from Aliya Whiteley’s interview on the Macmillan New Writers’ blog to the first three chapters of her new book Light Reading. I had already had a quick look at it last week when we were in Cambridge with Faye and thought it looked very much like my cup of tea but I hadn’t sunk three chapters deep into it.
I wanted to read it before. Now, I want to read it now, today, preferably this minute and to hell with all the problems with my own work in progress.
The characters have snared me and I wonder if the short-story writing which Aliya does and which I have been moaning about here (not hers, my own inability to do same) helps in the almost instant creation of character. We’re barely a dozen pages in to the book and already I feel like I know Lena and Pru. Little details quickly add up to a feeling of depth and these RAF wives are already real to me.
Add to that the definite flavour of the ‘dark side’ which has already developed (I’m not sure how without going back and analysing the text, but it’s there) and I’m hooked. The kind of Royston Vasey undertone which Allcombe had already acquired in Aliya’s first book Three Things About Me is clearly going to be a bigger feature in Light Reading (which has got to be an ironic title).
Anyway, I shall be off to Wottakars later in the day after I have tortured the w-i-p until it confesses and shall curse them roundly if they haven’t already got a copy of Light Reading.
If you don’t regularly read the MNW writers’ blog, do go over and have a look here at Aliya’s interview which will take you on a link to the book.
Thank goodness I’ve almost finished (without pulling too many rib-muscles) The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, because – unlike lots of bloggers – I’m not good at having more than one book on the go at once. Random Acts of Heroic Love will just have to wait…
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