London, love it or hate it?

Apart from the kind of excitement which I wrote about on Saturday, London generally depresses me. I’m not talking about tourist London – the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the leafy parks etc – I’m talking about the streets, even supposedly posh shopping streets, where homeless people and desparate beggars shuffle, eyes averted and inadequate layers pulled around them as they try to get through the day. The kind of streets beyond the glitzy centre where rubbish collects in the gutters, shops are boarded up and where you see people walking the pavements looking blank, as if life has nothing to offer them and they nothing to offer it. Not everybody, of course not, but sufficient numbers of individuals to register on the richter scale of misery.

London – well, possibly any big city – seems to me to dehumanise people. Nobody looks at you, everybody wanders around in their self-protective bubble. If you were – God forbid – to smile at somebody they would undoubtedly think you were mad or at the very least dangerously strange. And don’t even get me started on the effect the tube has on me people.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in the country. Maybe it’s the effect of living in a small town from whose centre you can walk into countryside in less than twenty minutes. Maybe I just don’t like crowds. But London depresses me.

Is there any fiction out there which will act as an antidote to my rather bleak view of the metropolis? As I sit here I can’t think of any books I have ever heard about, much less read, which actually celebrate and eulogise city living. Lyrical passages about one’s surroundings and the uplifting effects thereof tend to be confined to descriptions of countryside, at least in my mind and reading experience. Can anybody recommend a book I can read which wholeheartedly and without either ironic or romanticising intent portrays city living in the kind of elegiac way which, for instance, Sue Gee writes about the countryside. Don’t know the work of Sue Gee? Can I urge her books on you? They are truly beautiful. (Some are also gripping – The Last Guests of the Season had me in a sweat of anticipation.) See here for a bit in my books of the year on her The Mysteries of Glass.

Films occasionally manage to aspire to lyricism, though I’m suspicious of the romanticising tendency mentioned above. Notting Hill, for instance, must have done wonders for the estate agents’ business in that part of town, even when people shook the fairy dust out of their eyes and realised that neither Julia Roberts nor Hugh Grant’s lovely bookshop would be there in this quasi-village which just happened to be joined up to one of the biggest metropoli on the planet.

And before anybody says it, I know film-makers romanticise the countryside too. You’ve only got to watch the current BBC version of Lark Rise to Candleford to see how true that is. Lark Rise looks as spit-and-polished as young Freddie’s shoes in last night’s episode, without a puddle or a cowpat anywhere, much less any poverty-stricken children with rickets and chronic upper respiratory tract infections.

So, can anybody help me with a lyrical look at life in a city? Any city will do, though preferably a British one as the only cities whose dehumanising effects I’m familiar with are British and I don’t want the sunniness of disposition of any other nation to muddy the waters of whether it’s possible to be poetic about urban environments. Oh, and the book should preferably be set within the last twenty years. I’m perfectly prepared to believe that pre-Thatcherite British towns were nicer. Not quite sure why, it’s just a feeling.

So, any suggestions for improving reading?

Nice author, nice book?

I’ve just left a comment over at the Mostly Books blog which made me stop and think about my reading habits.
I was responding to the lastest post about a visit to the shop by author Julie Hearn. I said:
She sounded so fab that I went straight to her website. Then, because she still sounded lovely and her books sounded very much like the sort of thing I love, I to went to my local bookshop and bought the only one they had 'The Merrybegot'. It's already been promoted to the top of the 'to be read' pile!
Which it has.

But would I have bought Ms Hearn’s book if I’d thought it sounded great but she, personally, did not come across as the sort of person I would like to find myself stuck on a desert island with? [Or as a friend of mine from the former Yugoslavia says, darkly ‘in a bunker with’…] Do I, in other words, only read/buy books by people I like?

After racking my brains and casting an eye over the bookshelf pile which contains all the most recently read books in the house, I think the answer has to be ‘yes’. If I hear or read an author interview and the subject comes across as pretentious or misogynistic or objectionable, I probably wouldn't buy their books. Not because I wouldn't want to contribute to their bank balance (although...) but because reading something written by somebody whose basic attitude to people was so different to my own would probably lead to me feeling out of sorts and at cross purposes with what I'm reading. And life's too short, and I read too slowly, to spend time on novels which make you feel like that.

But what if the book was in a genre I really liked and that particular book seemed fantastically interesting?
Hmmm. Would I give up reading Minette Walters’ books if I found out that she was anything other than lovely? Or Philippa Gregory’s? Or Tracy Chevalier’s, Joanne Harris’, Sue Gee’s…

I suppose the cop-out answer is that these authors could not write such humane and engrossing books if they were unpleasant, narrow-minded or mean-spirited.

So, do I like books because I intuit, somehow, that their writers are nice people? Or because they give me an insight into other lives, other worlds and take me on a journey of discovery?

Perhaps it's just that the way my favourite writers look at the lives of their subjects and the world in which they live chimes with something in me.

Do other people read and enjoy books by authors whom they know they would dislike intensely if they actually met them? Or am I alone in my strange reading prejudices?