36P

Book 10: What a carve-up! by Jonathan Coe

[where book 10 is really the 8th book I finished, I'm still reading the da Vinci biography and the book about the universe]

I realised that apart from Claire Tomalin's book, most of what I've read has been the orange-coloured books, fiction. And reading Jonathan Coe was reading my first green-backed book. Or was it? No, hang on, I'm starting to doubt myself, let me check. Oh no, it was an orange back. Strange, because it could have been a greenback, a thriller. The story is intricate and everything and everyone's connected to everyone else, which of course I didn't start figuring out til a third of the way in. Although now that I come to think about it, that might have been the intention all along.

Special edition

 
spotted at Foyles at the Westfield shopping centre.

Blurry Penguins in Bath

not the greatest pic, but you get the idea. there was penguin goodness in bath.

I'm a mug

A line-up of Penguin goodies at Foyles in Westfield shopping centre, west London.

Quantum of Solace

spotted in Selfridges

Penguin table at Selfridges

My review

My review of Winter's End got published today here at Blog a Holiday Read. 
Haven't had much time to read lately, due to work and personal busy-ness, started Paul Auster last night, enjoying it lots.

Penguin notebooks

Penguin notebooks on sale here

plus

a talk about Penguin Covers at the Design Museum in London (which I'm ashamed to admit I've not been to yet):

Monday 12 January, 7.15pm £15
PENGUIN COVERS THEN AND NOW

Over the decades Penguin has sustained a reputation for generating innovative and influential cover designs as seen in the work by Alan Aldridge in the 1960s. In this cross generational discussion, early Penguin designers and former Penguin editor Judith Burnley will talk about the factors behind their particular Penguin heyday to be compare with recent achievements and future direction described by current Art Director Jim Stoddart.

Booking
T 020 7940 8783
E tickets@designmuseum.org

Holiday reads

So I was optimist and brought both the Leonardo da Vinci Penguin I'm reading at the moment, and Alistair Cooke's Penguin (I try and read local if I can, so a US book for a US holiday seemed appropriate)... and read neither. Instead I ended up buying a stack of books, some design, some business, some travel, some novels, mostly at Borders and Half Price books (how good is Half Price books! I absolutely loved them, that is my secret tip). Read a few of them (see the bar on the right hand side of this blog), so no progress on the Penguin Celebrations front yet. Must get back into the Celebrations at one point. Oh, and must move sometime soon-ish. I have too many books and too little room to put them. Or I can just stop buying books I suppose.

Penguin chair, spotted in Blackwell's on High Holborn

Book-packing

Over the next few days I have some serious book-thinking and packing to do. Today's my last day at work before my hols, and that means from tomorrow plenty of time to read (well, that's what I think now, the list of things I want to do is so large I'll be happy if I read anything more than emails and signage on the street) and thinking about which books to bring on holiday. One for the flight out, maybe a spare one in case the original one doesn't work or bore me. I'm going to Dallas and am presuming there'll be plenty of opportunity to buy books there, but even so I'm considering bringing my own for the way back too. Once I figure that one out, it's time for the next dilemma: which magazines to bring. Vacation's hard work!

Mark Ritson on Penguin meets Match

One of my favourite professors at b-school has written an article on the Penguin-Match marriage and co-branding here.

Book 9 is on the way

Book 9 is Charles Nicholl's 'Leonardo da Vinci'. Finding myself having to get used to his style a bit, maybe Claire Tomalin spoilt me. But so far, so good.

Book 8: William Boyd 'Any Human Heart'

Book 8. Tick. The Bank Holiday weekend provided ample opportunity for a bit of a reading binge. And then the stack of Celebrations on my desk is more than willing to provide the goods. So book 8, William Boyd's 'Any Human Heart'. It's a diary novel and since I'm quite partial to diaries, I loved the form. Better than an autobiography I think, autobiographies are always written with hindsight, connecting the dots forward, where I think that if you're living your life, there's no way you can do that. So the diary form works better for me. And William Boyd does a masterful trick in aging the boy/student/man over the years. He sounds like petulant teenager, a know-it-all student, a cocky young male, an wise old man. Read the whole book in one go, foregoing a houseparty in Brixton for it. I just couldn't put it down.

More on William Boyd on his homepage, on Wikipedia, a review of the book in the Observer, and the Wikipedia page on the novel which has an elaborate plot outline and the Penguin page here. 

In a weird synchronous serendipitous way, I read this obituary in the New York Times today, this guy could've been the model for Logan Mountstuart.

So why am I doing this?

What possesses a person to order a series of 36 books and read them, and then write about it? I don't really know. The best I can come up with is because I can. Because the mountain is there. But that's not enough. It's an exercise to discipline myself into reading consistently, and to reflect and record what I read. Also, it's a great way to veer outside the narrow confines of my own natural reading tastes. Not all of these books I would've chosen myself if I had to buy them seperately, either out of ignorance or out of prejudice. But it's good they're here. I enjoy having them around.

Dazed and confused

Just finished Pat Barker's Regeneration (what a great way to start a weekend, reading a good book in bed), and not quite sure what to think. The book felt and still feels slightly out of my reach. Slightly beyond what I understand, I couldn't quite grasp it. Like one of those arthouse movies that I never quite seem to get. Does that mean I didn't like the book? Not at all. I loved it. But more on a feeling level than a comprehension-rational level. Dr Rivers I took too immediately. I know him, more than I know some people in real life. He is real to me. Sassoon remains aloof, distant, I couldn't get to him, he never emerged from mists. Or maybe I'm supposed to know more about him (painfully racking my brains to remember my secondary school English lessons, where I remember reading Sassoon and Owen), it's this conspiracy, if you're English you'll have some innate knowledge that as a foreigner I just don't have. But Dr. Rivers, now there's person I felt I'd known for a long time, I understood him, knew why he was thinking what he was thinking. I think I felt I read about part of me, weird as that sounds.

Maybe this is what good art is supposed to do. It left me feeling dazed and confused, and even though I finished the book, this is one of those books that will never finish with me.

Newsflash: Penguin Dating went live

Just saw on Twitter (you have to love Twitter) that Penguin Dating (using Match.com database) has launched, haven't had a chance to check it out properly, but will do so over the weekend.

[edit to add that the Penguin blog has more info on Penguin Dating]

Halfway through book 7: Pat Barker's Regeneration

Decided to climb back on the Celebrations-reading-horse. Oh, that sounds like it's a chore, but it's not. I was actually looking forward to the next book. So far, I've enjoyed all my Celebrations-books (yes, even book 1 which is slow going, but that's more my fault than the author, I'm being lazy about it, I promise I'll return to it), and I couldn't wait to see what was next. And this is what's next: Pat Barker's Regeneration. So far, so gripping.

I love this jacket design

spotted at the bookshop behind security at City Airport in London

Reading desert

After what was a veritable reading binge a few weeks ago whilst I was cooped up in bed trying not to sneeze my brains out, the reading now has dwindled to a small trickle. And as I'm typing that, I remember that I actually read a book over the weekend. Ahum. And I read Winter's End, my BlogAHolidayRead, for which I need to write a review (will do over the weekend). Just logged onto BlogAHolidayRead and saw that the first reviews are up, I'll have a little browse and see what my 'colleagues' are doing. And I've been a good reviewer so far, I haven't checked what other people are saying about 'my' book. I can't wait to dive into my stack of Celebrations again though.

More Penguins in the wild

Book 6: Claire Tomalin 'Jane Austen'

A biography is the legal way of voyeurism. Taking a peek into someone's life whilst they're not watching (or dead). I have an ambivalent attitude to biographies (and outright usually don't like autobiographies): I am like every other human being not averse to a spot of voyeurism, but at the same time, I hate the linearity with which autobiographies are written. You travel through someone’s life from birth to death and before you know it, events seem inevitable, and are interpreted in hindsight. Real life just ain’t like that.
Having said all that, I love Claire Tomalin’s biographies, perhaps because there’s as much the personality of the biographer in there as well as the life of the subject. Her biography of Pepys was the best biography I’ve ever read (when Pepys died at the end of the book I felt like I had lost a friend), and her Jane Austen one, which is part of the Celebrations series, is pretty darn ok too. It’s well-written, engaging, and sensible, which are all good attributes in a biography, indeed in any book. I loved it, and hope Ms Tomalin continues to write biographies, and I’ll continue reading them.

Practical info on Claire Tomalin: from the Penguin website, an interview with the Guardian, a detailed review on My Weekly Book.

A stack of Penguins, waiting to be read/shelved

Winter in summer

So this is a first for me, reviewing a book. In a kind of semi-official kind of capacity. Penguin have got a Blog A Holiday Read blog going at the moment, you could sign up and were randomly allocated a book if you were one of the first 500 people to sign up. I got allocated 'Winter's End'. My copy came in the mail on Saturday, and I dove in yesterday. It's a thriller, a good old fashioned, macho, leather jackets and '69 Corvette Stingrays (see here for an image) and steaks and beers. I swear, I can almost smell the aftershave from the pages of the book. And I *love* 1969 Stingrays, they're one of my favourite cars. So, so far, so good.

Penguin pencils at Waterstone's on Piccadilly

The back of the book

Celebrations in the wild

Book 5: Meg Rosoff "How I live now"

Reading the blurb, I thought I was settling in for a WWII novel, 'a heartbreaking story of children in war'. Interesting, isn't it, that you mention war, and I think of WWII. All of a sudden mobile phones and email appear. Hang on, they didn't have those in WWII, and unless this is serious sci-fi, timetraveling stuff (and I thought I had the time-travel down with book 1), we're not in the forties. We're in the noughties. Right here. In this time, in this country. And we land right smack bang middle in a war. All of a sudden I realised how I'd never thought I'd live through a war, but how easily it could happen. And what havoc that would create, how easily it could be done (or at least how easy Meg Rosoff makes me believe it could happen). I almost threw the book down. Do I want to know? Do I want to think about this? It's easier not to. But I loved the writing, the vividness of the descriptions and most of all Daisy/Elisabeth, the main character, and Piper, her younger sister. I was rooting for them. I wanted them to be ok, I wanted all the kids to be ok. I wanted the war to be over. 

Favourite quote:

I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.

Meg Rosoff on the net: her website (and this section specifically devoted to How I Live Now) a 2006 interview in the Observer, Meg's blog at the Guardian (hurray, an author with a blog!).

Rules

So I can't help but think about this, and I know it's slightly disconcertingly control-freakish: what happens if I run across a book I really don't like in the Celebrations series? I normally have a policy of not finishing a book if I think it's really really crap (as you can tell by the star system on the books I've read), since there are too many good books out there, good books I'd enjoy. So far everything I've read in the Celebrations series has been enjoyable, diverting, made me think or laugh or both, and not for once did I consider putting the books down. However, with 5 books down, there's 31 still left and what if I don't like some of them? Will I finish them anyway? Don't get me wrong, I trust the folks at Penguin, but what if not 100% of the time our tastes overlap? Will I finish the book anyway? Hmmm. Let's cross that bridge when we get to it.

On an unrelated note, I'm on the mend from my summer cold, feeling tons better if still a bit tired. Not sure if I'm up to Brian Greene yet, I might squeeze in one other book before I return to mr Greene.

Book 4: PD James, 'A certain justice'

I used to read thrillers almost to the exclusion of any other books. If I look back at my reading (I've been keeping track since 1997 of every book I've read) in my early twenties, I was the queen of thriller reading. But somehow from one day to the next, I completely dropped thrillers. No idea why, I just did. I picked up a thriller again last year and was reminded how good a well-constructed thriller can be. Just on the right side of exciting, of tantalisingly easy to solve but you can't really be bothered because you want the writer to do it for you. Enter from the left: PD James' 'A Certain Justice'. Still feeling poorly, I wanted to be taken along a ride, in my beloved London, where I would know where I was without ever having actually been to some of the locations in the book. A thrilling ride, to keep my mind of my sniffling, sneezing and coughing. But not too exhausting, I didn't have the stamina to think too much. An intellectual ride, an intelligent one, but not overbearing. Take me into a different world, yet not completely unlike my own. 'A Certain Justice' delivered all that. Cleverly written, engaging, unputdownable.

This quote struck me in particular (connected to a project I'm working on for my degree on identity, location and psychogeography):

The family moved to London. Perhaps, she thought, her father, like so many before him, had seen the great city as an urban jungle where loneliness at least walked with the safety of anonimity, where no questions were asked unless invited, and where the predators had more satisfying prey than a disgraced schoolmaster. (p. 46)

The official PD James website is here, the wikipedia page here, and the Penguin Celebrations page here.