All posts filed under: literature

4. Books of the Year – Andrew McConnell Stott

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Andrew McConnell Stott is an award-winning writer and academic. For several years he was a stand-up comedian, described by London’s Evening Standard as “an absurdist comic with a satirical eye for popular culture.” The world, however, was unprepared for such hilarity and so he decided to give it up. He is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005) and The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (Canongate, 2009). The latter was praised by Simon Callow in the Guardian as a “great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life”.  Jenny Uglow in the Observer called it a “fast-paced, rumbustious biography” and said:  “A round of applause is due to this exuberant, impassioned portrait, for bringing the great Grimaldi, ‘Joey the Clown’, into the limelight again.” You can hear my interview with Andrew by clicking here. Andrew is currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Here is his selection of books he has enjoyed this year: I don’t tend to read that many books-of-the-moment, because …

3. Books of the Year – Louise Foxcroft

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Our third guest reviewer of this year’s publishing highlights is Cambridge-based historian of medicine, Louise Foxcroft. Louise won the Longman/History Today Prize in 2009 for her book Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause. You can hear a podcast in which she discusses the book here. And here are Louise’s favourite books of the year: Brian Dillon’s Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize 2009) is a terrific account of a debilitating but abstract condition. It is told through the experiences of articulate sufferers: Proust, who expired, his fears vindicated, in his cork-lined sick room; Warhol who had a dread of doctors and hospitals but couldn’t avoid them; the glamorous Glenn Gould loved his prescription drugs and medical paraphernalia but died of self-neglect; and Boswell, the London Magazine‘s resident “Hypochondriack”, used exercise, regular dining and lots of sex to help him deal with his bodily fears. All these anxieties were made worse by the fallibility of doctors who had few medicines but plenty of platitudes, and whose knowledge was …

2. Books of the Year – Elizabeth Knowles

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Our second guest to select her Books of the Year is Elizabeth Knowles. Elizabeth spent much of her career as a historical lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. She is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and, most recently, the author of How to Read a Word, a book that aims to make lexicographical sleuths of us all. You can hear my recent interview with Elizabeth by clicking here. And here are her Books of the Year: Since I was thirteen and first encountered M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, I have had an affection for his particular subsection of the genre. The protagonist (generally learned) is drawn through his speciality into an exploration which is as tempting as it is unwise. The background (a country library or monastic church) is solidly evoked, but a crack through which terror can enter opens and widens as too many questions are asked, and warning voices are ignored. Throughout his canon of short stories, James again and again successfully achieves what he himself …

Tolstoy’s bedtime story

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I was in Oxford on Friday to interview Rosamund Bartlett about her recent Tolstoy biography, which coincides with the great man’s death a century ago on 20 November 1910. The interview will appear shortly on the Blackwell Online website, but in the meantime, here is Rosamund reading a short extract from the book itself, in which Tolstoy as a boy listens to his grandmother’s blind storyteller recount a bedtime story… Click here for the reading.

Summer Reading Choices: Maria McCann

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Maria McCann’s first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, set in the English Civil War was published  in 2000 to great acclaim. Her second, The Wilding, appeared earlier this year and was also very warmly received; the Guardian, for example, called it “taut and compelling” and the Independent a “tour de force”. It is set in the West Country during the Restoration, when a reckoning has to be made of acts committed during the turbulent time that preceded it and well-kept family secrets begin to unravel. The paperback of The Wilding is out next month. You can listen to my interview with Maria in which she talk about writing the book by clicking here. And here is her Summer Reading selection: At some point in the eighties, working as a library assistant in London, I came across Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and the surreal image of a glass building floating away downriver has haunted me ever since. In those days, surrounded by library stock and with no work to do in the evenings, I read …

Summer Reading Choices: Marcus Chown

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Marcus Chown is cosmology consultant of New Scientist. His books include Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil and We Need to Talk About Kelvin, which has just been long-listed for the 2010 Royal Society Book Prize. I interviewed Marcus about We Need to Talk about Kelvin for the Faber podcast. You can listen to the interview by clicking here. Here are his summer reading selections: It is probably odd to recommend a book so far only half-read but I knew from the opening page that Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World was going to be special. The story of two orphaned brothers adopted by very different families, set amid the political turmoil of post-colonial Indonesia, its prose is rich and atmospheric. Reminds me of Graham Greene. Aw, a Malaysian writer based in London, deserves to be far better known than he is. I had never before read anything by Rose Tremain but, after putting down The Road Home, I wanted to read more. The novel charts the …

Summer Reading Choices: Graham Farmelo

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Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. His biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won the 2009 Costa Biography Prize and the 2010 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize. You can listen to my interview with Graham about The Strangest Man by clicking here. And here are Graham’s summer reading choices: Summer reading seems to be synonymous with light reading. Not for me. These relatively quiet months often present the best opportunities to read challenging, off-piste books that I tend to put on the shelf invisibly marked “when I have time”.David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas has been there for too long. It took an appreciative review of his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by the notoriously sniffy James Wood to nudge me into taking the plunge. I’m glad I did – though Cloud Atlas is not always easy to read, Mitchell’s virtuosity makes …

Summer Reading Choices: Daisy Hay

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Daisy Hay studied at Cambridge and currently holds the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. I interviewed Daisy recently about her first book, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, which has recently won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. You can hear the interview by clicking here. Here are Daisy’s summer reading suggestions: My summer holiday usually takes me to the same spot each year: the house in the South of France which has been in my family since before I was born. Each year I take with me a new novel, something meaty and absorbing, which is much more satisfying to read in long shady sessions on the terrace than in the snatched minutes available in the working week. Last year I packed A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and spent several glorious afternoons utterly engrossed in it. This year I took David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which I’ve brought home to finish. I’d be further through it were it not for the fact that one of …

Summer Reading Choices: Lucy Worsley

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By day, Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, which looks after The Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace inter al. By night, she is a TV presenter and writer, most recently author of Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace. You can listen to my interview with her by clicking here. Here are her summer reading choices: I have felt like a junkie in need of a fix ever since I reluctantly finished the last page of The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the first time, fifteen years ago, so I was very excited to learn that Curtis Sittenfeld had written a ‘similar’ book about boarding school life. I’m a little slow on the uptake here as it was published in 2005, but after reading about her imagined secret life of Laura Bush in American Wife this year I fell in love with Ms. Sittenfeld, and looked up her back catalogue. Prep is a mind-blowingly clever, funny and brilliant book. Unfortunately it made me a terrible, grouchy, uninterested holiday …