A Week or Two in Books [2]

Okay, so I might have fallen a little behind in wrapping up. Here’s what I’ve read up to February 4th.

The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain

I finished this book and I was so furious that I threw it. I couldn’t believe that I had enjoyed it. It felt like I had betrayed myself in doing so.

It’s texts like this that remind me that historical fiction can work. I’m also considering immersing myself in the Tudor period again as a light break from the Italian Renaissance.

In short: read this. Don’t even think about touching Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer.

Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers

Mary, Mary, quite conceited.

I didn’t expect Mary Poppins to be so mean, given the recent release of Mary Poppins Returns I’d painted Mary Poppins as a darling nanny. Sure, she was somewhat astute and firm, but she was never cruel. The two stand in stark contrast, not unrecognisable but certainly of different worlds.

Despite this, the book remained charming and delightful. I’ve gone back to a lot of the classic children’s books recently with Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz being the most recent, and they’ve produced visceral reactions. I’m not usually one to talk to myself whilst reading, but as I’ve worked through these I’ve found myself responding as the characters do.

I loved the way the novel came together, the language was fascinating and one of my favourite recurring phrase was ‘in the bus'[p.43].

Andrew helping his pal out was sweet. I really am a sucker for dogs.

Hopefully one day I can read the rest of the stories in the collection. Boy oh boy do I need to know more about Mary Poppins and Bert!

 The History of England Vol 1: Foundation, Peter Ackroyd

Technically, I didn’t read the first ten or so pages of this; they were read to me. In a (not so rare) moment of luxury, Matt read them to me as I settled down for a nap on Sunday. A nap that was rather unsuccessful as it’s just too cold to even sleep at the moment. So, I got up and began Mary Poppins as a lighter read before dinner. I then returned to this after finishing Mary Poppins at work on Monday.

I’ve spent a week reading this on and off and at times it has been so infuriating I’ve considered launching it out of the window.

The Otterbury Incident, C. Day Lewis

This book was tucked away on a shelf at my local Oxfam, and was the bargain of the year for just 29p !

It was worth every penny, and perhaps a few more had Lewis forgone the racism and antisemitism. It was a well-paced whodunnit once we got to the point. I also liked the illustrations throughout.

The line ‘you’ve got another think coming’ [p.63] reminded me of the recent twitter debate on think vs thing.

East, West, Salman Rushdie

I took this book with me to Oxford alongside Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. I’d previously read ‘The Courter’ which is one of the short stories contained in the ‘East, West’ section of the book as part of my studies at University. I remember enjoying it but never having the desire to pick the book back up as I was unsure if I would enjoy the other stories as much.

I was wrong to do so.

Whilst these stories cannot be called delightful, the syntax certainly is. Fay Weldon’s review on the back cover conveys this; Rushdie’s work is, for the most part, ‘Literary magic’.

I say ‘for the most part’ as the stories set in the West are tiresome. The East and East West were much more engaging and their flow much more natural. I’m sure I could write an essay on the reasoning behind this and provide it with a wealth of meaning, but if they’re taken at face value, they’re rather dull.

I would consider reading more of his work, but I would like to further investigate his politics as I remember my mom being outraged when it was said that I would be studying him.

A Week in Books

This week has been exhausting. I’m sick as all shit and I’m supposed to be taking Matt and I’s sisters to see The 1975 this evening.

This is first time I’ve had the chance to do nothing though, so naturally I’m doing something. I’ve missed writing. All week I’ve been mentally planning posts and trying to figure out how to get into the thick of it and just blog, but writing feels foreign, especially in this format.

So, to ease myself in, I present to you, you who are currently unknown to me, everything I’ve read on my commute to work this week.

This weeks books with two small dinosaurs

The Pearl, John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck, ‘The Pearl’ in The Short Novels, (Great Britain: Minerva, 1997)

Part of a larger collection of Steinbeck’s novellas, this story takes on the form of a parable, insisting that greed will lead us astray. However, to leave the analysis of the tale here is to do it a grave injustice; Western readings of the text over simplify it. Following the completion of the collection, I looked to academic essays to try and figure out what felt so off about my initial reading of The Pearl as a story of the cost of colonisation. It was upon reading Stephen K. George’s ‘A Taoist Interpretation of John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl”‘ that everything started to click into place.

George selects ‘four Taoist ideas’ to examine the text: ‘anti-materialism, anti-intellectualism, acceptance of what is, and being at one with the Tao’. Whilst Westerners reading the The Pearl are able to condone the lust for the pearl, and the hardship that comes with its protection, a Taoist reading cannot. This reading expects misfortune to follow Kino and his family whilst they are in possession of the pearl, as prior to it’s existence they led a harmonious life; each morning was ‘perfect among mornings’. ^ As the novella progresses, ‘The Song of the Family’ once ‘clear and soft’ is overtaken by ‘the Song of Evil, the music of the enemy, of any foe of the family, a savage, secret dangerous melody’ until the two seemingly unite, and the Song of the Family becomes ‘as fierce and sharp and feline as the snarl of a female Puma’.* Puma’s are notoriously solitary animals, except for when they are protecting their cubs, all ‘warmth’ and wholeness has been removed from the song.¬ What will happen if Coyotito, Kino and Juana’s child does not survive? Can the Song of the Family recover? Would they be able to?

It was a sad note to end the collection on, and parallels can be drawn with today’s society. The effects of colonisation continue to permeate our societies and so called ‘civilised’ first world countries define what is a normal existence. This week Marie Kondo has been attacked online due to suggesting that you should only keep books that spark joy. Arguments against her are methods are steeped in racism; they demand that people view her through a Western lens and so her KonMari method is aligned with minimalism despite it being a mindfulness tool to help determine what is useful and meaningful in your home. Jonah Venn’s thread on Twitter dissects this reaction, and the implications that it has.

^John Steinbeck, ‘The Pearl’ in The Short Novels, (Great Britain: Minerva, 1997) pp. 507-568, p. 508.

*Ibid., pp. 507-564.

¬Ibid., pp. 508.

Jaws, Peter Benchley

Peter Benchley, Jaws, (London: Book Club Associates, 1974)

I’ve had this book hidden away for the past few years, it’s lain dormant under a bed in my parents house almost forgotten until a recent decluttering episode. I intended to bring it home after Christmas but blanked on it, so last week I collected it and brought it back to London.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the text; I haven’t watched Jaws in years, so the story was hazy at best.

Jaws could be summarised as a neat shark based detective novel with a whole lot of background noise. It’s got that classic but oh so sweet homophobic edge paired with a quick rape fantasy because that’s obviously the only situation a woman could conjure up when she’s trying to get off. Evidently, there’s nothing more sexually fulfilling than wondering if you’re going to survive an attack. Thanks Peter, that’s good to know!

Despite this, it’s readable. I got through it at a rate of knots because I love sharks. I have to say though, my delicate vegan sensibilities were certainly upset.

Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne

Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days (USA: Lancer Books, 1968)

The last time I read a Jules Verne novel was in my first year of university. I read (read: skimmed) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for a course called Popular Fiction, which was surprisingly very unpopular. After all, does anyone want to pay over £9,000 a year to be forced to read the likes of Mills & Boon and Robinson Crusoe? Had this book been set a week or two later I might have actually read it, but I was busy stressing over essays that had no real weighting in reality.

Anyway, to the text at hand. I began reading Around the World in Eighty Days during my last shift at Odeon. It had become a habit of mine to keep a book in my back pocket whenever I was sent to work on the bar as there are periods of up to three hours where I don’t see a soul. I was thrown at first as I wasn’t expecting my copy to have the largest font I’d ever seen, but I pushed on.

It was an enjoyable story, and it was delightful to read of the upset of Detective Fix as he failed to capture Fogg on numerous occasions. However, there were a few moments that marred the novel aside from the overarching colonising tone; ‘the colonising genius of the English’ is an unsettling sentence to read.^

Aouda is presented as a prize, rescued and conquered by Fogg he takes her around the world. She is described as being of ‘European acceptation’, having ‘white and delicate cheeks’ and speaking ‘English with great purity’.* Would Fogg have responded to her in the same way if she did not meet European standards of beauty and behaviour? Would he have been interested in saving her, or would she have been abandoned deemed a ‘wretched creature’.¬

Verne’s intentions in featuring a ‘suttee‘ should also be interrogated.| To what extent was its presentation a device to further dehumanise the people of India rather than to highlight the maltreatment (to put it lightly) of widowed women?

The book has inspired a want to challenge myself. In the future, depending on finances (as I’m unlikely to have £20,000 to spend frivolously any time soon) I’d like to give myself eighty days to travel the same path. Hopefully I’d get a significantly larger amount of sightseeing done though, and take far fewer voyages by sea. I’m unsure if I will ever find my sea legs.

^Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days (USA: Lancer Books, 1968), p. 131.

*Ibid., p. 96.

¬Ibid., p. 83.

|Ibid., p. 82.

The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain

Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper, (USA: Dover Publications, 2000)

I re-started this today, having abandoned it a few months ago because boy oh fuckin’ boy do I loathe Mark Twain. I read two of his most famous texts (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) at University and had some severe arguments with one of my lecturers regarding their dismissal of the racism present.

White academics have a tendency to be far too forgiving of racism in historical texts. They utilise context to define racism as an outdated opinion of the time and through they suggest that racism is a thing of the past. They don’t want to accept that they only hold the position in society that they do because of imperialism. If things were different, maybe I would’ve been taught about diaspora, racism and colonialism by people who have been affected by it, rather than just those with a theoretical knowledge.

Whilst I don’t think that banning books or censorship is the way forward, we should be holding authors and academics accountable. Anyway, this is about The Prince and the Pauper, so let’s get back on track.

The book brings us into the world of my favourite King of England, Henry VIII. He’s a complete and utter dickhead, but he’s fascinating. I even have a phone case with him on. It was a gift to myself when I visited Hever Castle with Matt. We also have to thank Henry for the experience that is SIX – The Musical. If you’re interested in seeing women brought to the forefront of the story, then this is the musical for you.

It’s so far readable, and a simple enough story. The original Princess Switch if anyone has recently viewed that mess (read: film I cringed through but enjoyed) on Netflix. Tom Canty, the pauper, switches places with Prince Edward. I assume that it will all wrap up nicely, Edward seems a rather determined fellow.

Hopefully you can all forgive the butchered referencing, WordPress doesn’t seem to have the option to effective reference. If anyone has a better work around, let me know!

-Matt