What follows is a slightly edited version of something I wrote for my friend Katy’s blog Making Them Readers, which encourages childhood literary, earlier in the year.
I’m not a fluent reader. Yes, I can read anything, am highly educated, have a good grasp of (basic) grammar and a huge vocabulary. But although I’m not dyslexic my spelling is, even now at 62, rather shoddy and I read slowly – it takes me about three times as long to read a page as it does most people. I don’t know why, it isn’t that I especially struggled to learn to read.
But the upshot of this is that I got turned off reading voraciously for pleasure and grammar school killed any enjoyment I might have had of the classics. Half an hour of homework (read the next chapter of Great Expectations) became a two hour marathon. So I was always behind. School absolutely killed the classics for me.
I must have read a certain amount at junior school otherwise I would not have got through the 11+ with ease. But my memory of what I read is hazy at best.
I remember we had a series of Janet and John books when I was learning to read and I remember reading Orlando the Marmalade Cat with my mother. And I must have read at least parts of Alice in Wonderland while still quite young.
I do remember, probably at about the age of 7 or 8, reading TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. This started because it was something my father read to me at bedtime and before long I knew “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat” off by heart.
Along the way someone obviously gave me a copy of A Puffin Book of Verse and Four Feet and Two. I know I read a lot of the former, dipping into it repeatedly over many years, but could never really get on with the latter.
Once I got to about 10 or 11 I started reading WE Johns’s Biggles books and over a period of about 5 years I devoured every one that our local library could throw at me — much to my parents’ disgust that I wasn’t reading anything “better”. Biggles became my alter ego.
Once past the age of about 14 I don’t recall reading anything much that I didn’t have to — I probably did, but it was unlikely to have been fiction and it hasn’t stuck in my memory. I remember trying War and Peace but soon found it turgid and heavy going. However I did buy John Betjeman’s High and Low when it was published, and this remained my “go to” book if ever I had a sleepless night, even into my student days. (I still have that first edition.) I must have read a chunk of Sherlock Holmes at about this time too.
And, oh dear, I think the whole school, read Peyton Place when it came out in paperback in the mid-1960s — incredibly boring. I also ploughed my way through my father’s copy of Ulysses at about 16 (why?) and about the same time decided that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was boring and gave up on it halfway through.
At 18 I ploughed my way through a large amount of my father’s copy of Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex in an attempt to keep one step ahead of my girlfriend!
I didn’t really return to reading fiction, or indeed anything much outside my academic (scientific) sphere, until I was a post-graduate student when I discovered all sorts of oddities (Langland, Gower) as well as people like Evelyn Waugh, Laurie Lee and Don Camillo.
Although I’m now the Secretary of a literary society, I’m still not a great reader of fiction and to this day I cannot abide the classics.
And the moral is? Even if a child is not a fluent reader, don’t give up, don’t worry about it and don’t despair. Keep ensuring they have access to a wide range of interesting things to read (we had a lot of books at home and were always in and out of our local library), let them read whatever they choose, and there’s a good chance they’ll pick up on what they really like as they get older.
Category Archives: books
National Novel Writing Month
November is National Novel Writing Month.
Can you write a novel in a month? That’s the challenge for all you budding authors. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in just thirty days. The deadline is 2359 hrs on 30 November!
What can you write? Any type of fiction you want! Horror, romance … erotica! Whatever you feel passionate enough to tell a story about. So far over 150,000 potential novelists have signed up to take part.
You can sign up to take part, and get support, on the National Novel Writing Month website at http://nanowrimo.org/.
And no, you won’t see me there. I know I don’t have an original story in my body, so I’m not going to stress myself even trying. Sorry!
Something for the Weekend
This week’s amusement is especially for you, Katyboo!
Book Review
Marian Bantjes
I Wonder
(Thames & Hudson; 2010)
This is an odd book which I bought almost on impulse having seen it mentioned somewhere. It is so odd, and for me so unreadable, I merely skipped over large sections of it.
According to the cover blurb Bantjes is a “world-renowned typographic illustrator” who clearly also does some writing, journalism and graphic design. If this is an advertisement for either her writing or her design work then I fear the lady is doomed to failure, for the book is written and designed by her to be totally unreadable.
The chapters, which are really only extended blog posts, are mostly quirky in content, although the opening chapter on “Wonder” is quite an interesting excursion into something to which we give very little thought. And the final chapter about her mother’s scribbling pads-cum-notebooks, around which she ran her life, is a curious and poignant insight into how a clearly intelligent but quixotic mind can work. And how such a system can also help ameliorate the vicissitudes of dementia.
But the rest of it I found unreadable. Party because the chapters and subjects didn’t work for me. But mainly because the design is so intrusive that it submerges the text into illegible incomprehensibility — as the above illustration I think amply demonstrates, despite the small size.
This is a shame as I suspect there are nuggets of gold amongst the words. But they’re so well hidden that I couldn’t face mining them. It is also a shame as a great deal of thought has clearly gone into the book which is rather well produced, even if I personally dislike the feel of the glossy coffee-table book paper.
So overall, this was a massive disappointment. And I hate disappointments.
Towel Day
Saturday 25 May is Towel Day.
What, I hear you exclaim, is Towel Day? Yes, that’s right it is the day on which we are encouraged to carry a towel in tribute to the late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. On 25 May 2001, two weeks after Douglas Adam’s untimely death, his fans carried a towel in his honour. And they have done so every year since.
If you’ve already read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy you’ll know the importance of your towel. If not, the book will explain why a towel is the most important item a space-travelling hitch-hiker (indeed probably any of us — just ask Linus!) can have.
Your towel is extremely practical: you can use it to keep warm, to lie on, to sleep on and to use as a mini-raft as you sail down the River Moth! Of course your towel is also a trusty companion and thus extremely important for a host of psychological reasons.
Towel Day isn’t just a day for doing the obvious: carrying a towel. There are also lots of events, all listed over on the Towel Day website at http://towelday.org/.
Book Review
Michael Barber
Brief Lives: Evelyn Waugh
(Hesperus; 2013)
When Michael Barber first told me he had a biography of Evelyn Waugh being published, my first reaction was “Why?”. Why do we need another biography of Waugh?
But then when I got a copy I realised this isn’t really a biography but more a dozen or so quick sketches of the man, for what Hesperus are doing is creating a series of “short, authoritative biographies of the greatest figures in literary history; written by experts in their fields to appeal to general readers and academics alike”.
Given that this is the aim, then Barber and Hesperus have largely succeeded. This is a short work which is well and amusingly written, while remaining interesting, light, accessible and, I found, quite hard to put down.
Yes, the book lacks detail — but what does one really expect in 120 pages? However, although I am no expert on Waugh, it did seem to encapsulate the essence of the man and his life: idiosyncratic, snob, arriviste, poseur, spendthrift, drunk, intransigent bore and grumpy old man (even when quite young); but also both an excellent novelist (I’ll except Brideshead Revisited which never worked for me) and often highly amusing.
As a bonus, at least for me, Anthony Powell gets quite a few mentions. Powell and Waugh, although in some ways rival writers, were friends and admired each others’ work — both publicly and privately — often writing to say how much they had enjoyed the other’s latest volume. Waugh always wanted to live to see Powell complete Dance, but sadly he died halfway through. Wouldn’t it have been interesting to have heard his views on the second half of Dance? How the war trilogy compared with his Sword of Honour? And what would he have made of the denouements of Temporary Kings and Hearing Secret Harmonies?
As Anthony Powell so often did I shall conclude this review with two gripes. While understanding that publishers need to keep costs down, such awful cheap paper is horrid to handle and isn’t going to stand the rigours of time; I would happy to pay an extra 50p to £1 on the price of a book if it meant more aesthetically pleasing paper.
Finally I deplore the lack of an index. I know this is a short work, but any non-fiction book without an index becomes unusable as a reference source. And that, to my mind, is inexcusable in an environment where we must do everything we can to encourage the use of books as a resource. Again I have to lay the blame on cost-cutting publishers, rather than the authors, most of whom I suspect would (privately, at least) agree.
An excellent introduction to the man and a highly enjoyable and interesting read.
Overall rating: ★★★★☆
Book Review
Mary Roach
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
If there is one thing Mary Roach does well it is write. Her style is light, airy and humorous while being informative. It needs to be because she has made her stock in trade writing about taboo subjects like sex (Bonk), death (Stiff) and now our guts. For instance in writing about the biblical story of Jonah and the whale she says:
While a seaman might survive the suction and swallow, his arrival in a sperm whale’s stomach would seem to present a new set of problems. (I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow and any homophone of seaman.)
She takes us on a journey through the gut — from top to bottom. Well, except that she doesn’t; it’s a journey through the top half, as far as the stomach. There’s a black hole of the small intestine should be. And a fast water chute through the colon. So despite the good writing I felt short changed by Gulp. I wanted more, and I wanted a bit more in depth science.
Sure, Roach talked to all the right scientists and medics. But this wasn’t as in depth as either Stiff or Bonk — at least it didn’t feel that way. And as I say the really interesting bits (well, to me, at least) beyond the stomach were too quickly glossed over.
So I was left feeling as though I’d had a decent starter, followed by some sorbet and coffee, but without a main course. Which is a shame because Roach writes too well for this.
Overall rating: ★★☆☆☆
Book Review
Dr Geoffrey Garrett and Andrew Nott
Cause of Death: Memoirs of a Home Office Pathologist
For over 30 years Geoffrey Garrett was the senior Home Office pathologist for NW England. This means he got all the juicy jobs, like working out how some notorious murders (like one of the Moors Murders) were committed and the actual cause of death.
Most of it would have hardly been routine, even for an experienced pathologist, but you would never think so from reading this book. Garrett makes the job sound absolutely mundane and boring most of the time. And that’s a reflection on the book, because clearly the job wasn’t at all routine on the ground and Garret says this in a few places.
But I found the book dull. So dull I almost gave up reading it. The style is to me very flat and lifeless — like the corpses Garrett is so often examining. Not that we get much detail of those examinations, beyond a few bare medical facts: so many wounds, such and such internal damage, a few broken ribs and skulls. And a lot of it obfuscated in medical terminology which is hardly ever explained.
Indeed the book is so bland it is not at all gruesome. Surely it should be gruesome? OK we don’t need great detail of the basic autopsy method every time (Garrett covers that once in the introduction, though even that is a bit sketchy) but we would benefit from more on the methods specific to the cases. For instance, what is the test done on blood to determine the level of carbon monoxide present; and how is it done? We’re never told. As a scientist, I wanted to know.
Yes, I wanted a lot more. More on the tests which are done, but also more on the forensic investigative process; more interesting puzzles to solve and how they were solved. I had expected this and that I didn’t get it left me feeling somewhat short-changed.
This should have been an interesting book, illuminating a world which, thankfully, most of us are never involved with. But sadly for me it failed.
Overall rating: ★★☆☆☆
World Book Day
Today is apparently World Book Day — but only in the UK and Ireland.
I have just two observations:
- If it is only in the UK and Ireland it isn’t WORLD Book Day is it!
Apparently the rest of the world celebrates World Book Day on 23 April — which is Shakespeare’s birthday, and hence a much more appropriate day. But of course we can’t do that because (a) it might clash with Easter holidays when children (at whom this is largely aimed) aren’t in school and (b) it is St George’s Day (which never mattered to the English before). - And anyway, who knew? I’m a book-o-phile, and I didn’t know. Which shows just how well publicised it has been.
Come on guys: must do better! Let’s get this together. It’s especially important that we engage kids in reading — reading anything will do! So let’s get together with the rest of the world, celebrate a single day and get the publicity working.
Book Reviews
I don’t actually get through many books these days. When I get to read — usually in bed — I usually find I need something lighter or shorter to read, or at least a book I can dip into at random; something to sample for amusement and interest. So reading a book from cover to cover is relatively are for me these days. This has never been helped by the fact that my natural reading speed is that of a snail, and have never properly mastered the art of speed reading. Given that my spelling is also fairly crummy I wonder if I may be, say, 10% dyslexic. Or, as my handwriting is also abysmal, maybe it is something to do with eye, brain and hand coordination.
Anyway I’ve decided that when I do finish a book, or have sampled a major part of one, I’ll write a quick review note here. So we’ll start with the book I finished a couple of days ago …
Peter Silverton
Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing
Peter Silverton is a journalist who cut his hacking teeth on writing about punk music and interviewing the likes of the Sex Pistols. So he’s in a good position to know something about foul language. He takes us on a journey through the development and use of the whole gamut of swearing: what the words are, what they actually mean, where they come from, when did they arrive and how has their meaning changed over time.
We’re taken on various journeys. Not just that of language used on the street or in the pub; nor just that written (or more usually not written) in the papers, dictionaries and books, but right across the spectrum of language use including pop music, TV and radio.
Having said that the book is a bit of a mix. Some chapters approach the subject from the point of view of the content: sex, genitals, excretion, family relations, sexuality. But others approach it from the direction of the medium: music, newspapers, football etc. I found this split approach rather unnecessary and repetitive. Intertwined with this there are, however, some interesting diversions into the relationship of our swearwords with those of other languages.
Despite my interest in language I have to admit I found the book slightly tedious going. Yes, for someone interested in language, it was interesting in parts. But I found Silverton’s style somewhat pedestrian, stodgy and very “same-y”. I also wanted more detail; greater depth.
This is a book to interest the averagely intelligent reader, which is actually no bad thing. It is not a book for someone with a deep interest the English language and a thirst for esoteric knowledge.
Overall rating: ★★★☆☆