Sabine Baring-Gould has long been my hero and for three main reasons. Firstly, for his extraordinary achievements in the preservation of English folk music; secondly, because he was a man of great intelligence and energy who made a major contribution in a number of widely different fields, with about 1200 publications to his name; thirdly, well, because I’m an old sentimentalist. More of this third reason later.
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I came home from my 2012 Iceland holiday very impressed by both the country and its people. I blogged about the holiday on 30th October. Several books of Icelandic folklore came home with me and as I’ve read my way through them my fascination has grown.
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A rather belated Happy New Year! May 2013 bring you peace and happiness.
2012 was a difficult year in many respects. The weather, of course, made normal life all but impossible for thousands of people whose homes were flooded. The terrible weather didn’t just affect the UK, of course, with communities across Europe and Asia also being hit. As I write this news is coming in of floods claiming lives in Brazil. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, South Australia is suffering stifling heat and forest fires are sweeping Tasmania. Continue reading
Through Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon has provided the means for anyone to publish their writing free of charge. With Amazon’s wide range of Kindle readers, plus the facility to upload a Kindle app to other devices, that published work can now be read by very large numbers of people.
Every month thousands of writers are publishing their own work, all hoping to catch the eye of those thousands of potential readers. When we throw into the pot all of the books being made available in ebook format by mainstream publishers, the choice for readers becomes overwhelming.
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Having just returned from holiday I thought I’d record some impressions of this extraordinary land and its people, with a few comments along the way on the place of women in Icelandic society, their love of books, ghosts, their horses – and the Northern Lights.
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I haven’t yet read the book, so this blog isn’t about the book itself but about the extraordinary reaction to it. It was inevitable that after the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter series whatever JKR published next would be subject to intense scrutiny. If the book itself provides me with half of the entertainment I’ve enjoyed from witnessing the reaction to it, then it will be a very good read indeed.
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These two authors, both enormously successful in their own way, probably represent the opposite extremes of fiction writing. One advantage of the eBook format is that it gives the reader inexpensive access to both.
The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf is currently available on Kindle for only £1.95 – and if it hadn’t been so cheap I wouldn’t have bought it. From time to time over the years I have had another look at Woolf’s work. She has such a reputation as an influential, modernist writer that I can’t help feeling that my inability to appreciate her books must be due to some failing in me. So, I grabbed the £1.95 bargain and had another go.
It’s no good; I simply can’t cope with the 250-word, oddly-punctuated sentences and the strange perception of what is important. She can spend pages describing the trivial and then deal with the death of a central character in a single phrase. It’s time I accepted that I really am afraid of Virginia Woolf.
John Locke could hardly be more different. An American writer, who sold well over one million copies of his eBooks in five months, has shown what digital publishing can do for independent publishers if they are prepared to totally embrace the new technology. Before taking up writing Locke had already made himself a millionaire. He started selling life insurance door-to-door and was so successful that he grew his own life insurance agency to 7,000 salesmen. He expanded into property and owns a dozen shopping centres. He has applied the same hard-nosed business practices to eBooks.
He decided on a genre that he thought would be popular (thrillers about an ex-CIA assassin) and wrote several books with the same central character before really launching his marketing campaign which basically relied upon efficiently working the social networking websites. He has gone on to write in two different genres, but all being undemanding, pure entertainment books. Locke has turned down a conventional publishing contract, but has entered into a distribution agreement so cheap paperback copies of his books will appear in retailers like Walmart. His eBooks are cheap – he has the stated ambition of being ‘the world’s greatest 99c author’.
His reviews show that readers either love him or hate him. He certainly isn’t bothered about making a contribution to the arts.
Given a choice of novels between a John Locke or a Virginia Woolf, I know what I’d choose.
Wilkie Collins was a very popular Victorian writer with 30 novels, 60 short stories, 14 plays and a very large number of non-fiction articles to his name. Those non-fiction pieces cover a very wide range of subjects and reveal him to be a highly intelligent and thoughtful man.
He was a long-term friend of Charles Dickens and they worked together on projects: Dickens’ magazines carrying Collins’ stories, and Dickens’ theatre company putting on some of his plays.
Collins studied law (somewhat reluctantly it seems) and was called to the Bar in 1851, the year he met Dickens. Dickens regarded lawyers with contempt and ridiculed them in many of his books, so it’s interesting that Collins never practised after qualifying.
Many years have slipped by since I last read The Moonstone. I was reminded of it when it was suggested as a Book Club read and thought it must be time to take another look – particularly as it is now available as a free eBook. The book tells of the disappearance of a rare diamond, the Moonstone. The events surrounding its disappearance are related in turn by a number of individuals, each of whom is involved to some extent.
The book is a delight. There is a lot of humour, particularly in the first half when it feels like a combination of P G Woodhouse and Charles Dickens. The characters are captured perfectly; even those on the fringe, such as Ezzra Jennings, or the street urchin known as Gooseberry, left me wanting to learn much more about them.
A couple of things caught my eye this time around. The book is frequently referred to as the first detective novel, but the detective in it says, ‘It’s only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake.’ So, presumably, detective novels were already well known.
We may think that the cult of celebrity is an invention of our times, but writing in 1868 Collins says, ‘In our modern system of civilisation, celebrity (no matter of what kind) is the lever that will move anything.’ It seems that we can’t even invent our own idiocy.
A beautifully written book that gives a fascinating insight into attitudes of the time, as well as being an entertaining ‘whodunnit’. The only downside lies in the eBook version. The formatting is dreadful and is a distraction that is hard to ignore, but it’s difficult to complain when the conversion has led to the book being available free of charge.
George Grossmith was an extraordinary man. He was born in London in 1847. His father was chief reporter for The Times and other papers at Bow Street Magistrates Court, but he was also an entertainer and came to spend more and more time touring as a performer. His son started out wanting to be a barrister, but like his father was drawn to the stage. George also trained as a reporter so he could cover for his father when he went away on his tours, but he was soon joining his father on stage. In between his court reports George started writing humourous articles for magazines and also became an accomplished pianist, photographer and artist. Continue reading
Because authors can directly upload their work free of charge for sale on Amazon’s Kindle platform, there is an awful lot of rubbish out there. Among all the dross some good books sit, waiting to be discovered. Finding the good ones is rather like the Australians fossicking for opals in the outback – huge areas to be covered, not many gems to be found. Very rarely a real gem is uncovered. This book is one of them.
It is an extraordinary book, written with humour, sensitivity and compassion about a topic that is rarely tackled so convincingly in fiction – mental health. The central character, Simon Gregory, is a 50-year-old alcoholic with a history of schizophrenia and a passion for Beetles music. Snippets of Beetles lyrics pop up in the text.
The first half of the book is populated with strange characters and curious events. We know that we are not in the ‘real’ world, but we have no idea where the story is taking us. All becomes clear in the second half and we go with Simon into his Brave New World.
The tale is evocatively set in Tollesbury on the Essex coast and the tang of the salt marshes wafts from the digital pages.
I found this a truly exceptional book. It’s currently available on the Kindle Bookstore for only £1.53.