Breakfast At Libraries

"Is be, or is be not, is be one big damn puzzler."

Love, loss, Shakespeare, anthropology, subterfuge, globalism, language, obsessive-compulsive disorder and cheerful communal defecation - really, does a book need anything more? Having just finished One Big Damn Puzzler, a novel by John Harding in which a remote South Pacific island plays host to an uptight American lawyer intent on righting the past wrongs of his countrymen, I'm inclined to say not. It's common for hyperbolic reviews to claim a book 'will make you laugh and cry', but One Big Damn Puzzler did absolutely that, and sometimes in the most unexpected of ways.



The title comes from Hamlet, of course. If you don't remember Shakespeare writing that line, that's because this Hamlet has been translated into the local pidgin English by Managua, the enigmatic tribesman whose literacy (and cunning) gives him the edge over his fellow islanders. The startling ways in which the islanders use their form of English to render certain concepts is often played for laughs, although never in a way that patronises the speakers; often, it's the islanders' language itself that seems to draw us into the book and creates the world in which the events take place - rather as Florence's idiolect did in the last of Harding's novels that I read, Florence & Giles. The vivid simplicity of their language, and the way that words are turned about to give them a whole new perspective, seems to echo the islanders' lives and beliefs: sometimes familiar, sometimes incomprehensible, and sometimes simply working to a different, but entirely valid, logic.

William Hardt, the fastidious, wary but ultimately well-meaning lawyer who inadvertently shakes up the status quo, is at first baffled and frustrated by the islanders' firm belief in magic, as most of us would be, and yet his OCD behaviours are simply a set of private magic rituals of his own. Similarly, his taboos - he's less than delighted when he's expected to make a daily public trip to the communal 'shitting beach' - are really no more rational than those of the islanders, who believe you can sleep with pretty much whoever you like before you're married, but sharing a meal in a partner's house is a dangerous no-no. The way that William gradually comes to value the island, its people and its culture is touching and convincing, albeit ultimately bittersweet: One Big Damn Puzzler is often moving, but it's never sentimental, and there's often a sting in its tail.

Full of echoes of Shakespeare - boys dressed as girls are a recurring theme, for instance, and sometimes even boys dressed as girls dressed as boys, as are ghostly fathers and comic love spells - One Big Damn Puzzler is a rich and multi-layered novel full of endearing, larger-than-life characters, many of whom I'm sure will stay with me for a long, long time. This book had me weeping like a baby at a scene in which a pidgin-speaking Hamlet addresses the exhumed skull of his late 'she-boy' admirer, such is the author's skill in making us absolutely a part of the islanders' topsy-turvy world. I would heartily recommend it.

Anyone interested in old churches (where he often appears) or pre-Christian folklore may be familiar with the Green Man. He usually has a face either made from or entirely framed by leaves and twigs, and symbolises all manner of indeterminate things like fertility, the lifecycle of birth, death and rebirth, or even just luck. As it happens, I have a Green Man face hanging up in my house, but, you know, that's just me.

The Green Man of Kingsley Amis' novel is, in fact, a pub. If the book hadn't been written in 1969, it would doubtless be called a 'gastropub' or even a 'restaurant with rooms', but I would imagine Maurice Allington, the owner of the establishment, would be appalled. Allington doesn't like having guests and has no interest whatsoever in food, so, given that running an upmarket pub is his career of choice, it's no surprise that he's a long-term alcoholic. The real question, though, is whether his drink problem is serious enough to make him hallucinate, or whether The Green Man really is playing host to a particularly vindictive, unscrupulous ghost.

I can't deny that The Green Man is a darkly comic read, almost laugh out loud funny in places and peppered with biting satire, and some of the haunting scenes are genuinely sinister and remarkably well-executed. Moreover, the plot thickens as the self-loathing Allington, who is dangerously obsessed with Dr Underhill, the man he suspects is haunting his house, and strives to uncover his secret. It's when this secret turns out to be the ability to invoke the Green Man, a grotesque and ancient folkloric monster, that the real trouble starts.

However, although it had all the ingredients I usually love - dark humour, ghosts, weird pagan imagery - I found The Green Man to be a strangely sterile sort of book. Amis has deliberately made Allington an almost wholly unpleasant man, and although much of the comedy stems from this, it also means I struggled to care what happened to him. Most of the female characters are stereotypes, and the tedious trendy vicar crosses the border from comedy into caricature. Admittedly, this may be because we're viewing the characters through the clouded lens of Allington, an obsessive womaniser, misanthropist and snob, but even so, I found the lack of depth to the characters detracted from my enjoyment. A scene with a certain mysterious unearthly visitor, with whom Allington has a long conversation one night while time stands still around them, is clever and ambitious, but also seems too contrived, too self-conscious.

I didn't dislike The Green Man as such ... but there was just something lacking, for me. It's hard to define what that something was, but there's a coldness to this book, as if it's just missing that little spark that would bring it to life.

Most books about depression are, well, a bit depressing. Or they're written by people who can't help coming across as if they secretly think that being depressed makes them somehow extra-sensitive special people who, you know, just feel things more deeply than lesser, happier mortals, which always makes me uncharitably wonder if they've ever really been depressed at all. And I'm always amazed when people with depression seek out novels to read about the subject anyway. I suffer intermittently from depression, and I generally find it about as interesting as a puddle of vomit in the street.

Bearing all this in mind, then, Mr Chartwell is an truly impressive feat. Rebecca Hunt's novel is about Esther, a young widow who, in 1964, advertises reluctantly for a lodger. The only applicant is Black Pat, an enormous black talking dog. Put off by, well, by the fact that he's a giant talking dog, Esther is reluctant to let Black Pat stay. But once he's got a paw in the door, she finds it extremely difficult to get rid of him, and soon comes to realise that he may have been part of her life before. Winston Churchill, you may be aware, famously described his depression as 'the black dog' that hounded him (and indeed other members of his family) throughout his career. And it's no coincidence that just as Black Pat arrives to stay with Esther, Churchill, whose estate is a short drive away, is just about to announce his retirement.



Mr Chartwell is a brilliant, absurdist, tragicomic exploration of living with depression. At times sinister, at times deeply sad and other times, full-on, laugh-out-loud funny, it's the only book I've ever read that even comes close to describe what it's like to be genuinely depressed, but never once descends into self-indulgence  or melodrama. Mr Chartwell is absolutely not one for the emo kids: it's not angsty, it's not full of despair, and although yes, it's deeply touching, it's not even really very emotional, as such. It's simply about the sometimes absurd condition - because it is absurd, in my experience - of living with a sly, persuasive, intrusive guest who makes everything you want to do infuriatingly difficult, but whom you don't quite have the strength to dismiss.

Comically creepy and hilariously disturbing in that peculiar manner of Edward Gorey's The Doubtful Guest, or a more mournful and less punchable Cat In The Hat, Mr Chartwell is an outstanding first novel. Esther is realistically imperfect and occasionally frustrating; her friends are sometimes infuriating but ultimately well-meaning; Churchill is an intriguing mix of vulnerable elderly man and stubborn British bulldog. Even Black Pat himself, who only really needs to exist to symbolise depression, is an intriguingly complex and frequently sympathetic character.

There's very little plot, but it doesn't need one: it's a compelling and, despite the subject matter, an ultimately heartwarming read. This is probably the only book about depression that I've ever felt remotely comfortable in reading, and, despite being about a giant talking dog, by far the most realistic description of the condition I've ever come across. All books about depression should be like this one.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Phil Rickman, having picked up his first Merrily Watkins novel, The Wine Of Angels, some years ago shortly after it was published in paperback. The Secrets Of Pain is the eleventh of Phil Rickman's books to feature Merrily Watkins, a vicar and single mum of a teenage daughter who, as the Church of England's official exorcist (yes, they do have them) for the diocese of Hereford, is regularly embroiled in various local mysteries and tensions, often with a supernatural edge and frequently connected one way or another with the ancient history and rural folklore of the area - although these are really mysteries more akin to crime novels than horror or spec fic, they do expertly blend genres. Characters and locations recur throughout the series, and for that reason, I would suggest that someone who hadn't read any of the books would be best to start with the first in the series, or at least one of the early ones, rather than The Secrets Of Pain.

Like the previous books in the series, The Secrets Of Pain was remarkably hard to put down, not least because as well as concocting intriguing mysteries with multiple points of view, Rickman also has a particular habit of giving his chapters cliffhanger endings. With plot elements involving the murder of a prominent local farmer, the Hereford-based SAS, the sudden death of a regular character, extreme team-building bootcamps banker boys, migrant farm workers and Mithraism, there's plenty going on, and that's before you've factored in the pleasingly complicated personal lives of Merrily, her angsty daughter Jane, folk musician Lol Robinson and 'incomer' from urban Merseyside struggling to identify with the inhabitants of his decidedly rural patch, DI Francis Bliss. It's thoroughly absorbing, often thought-provoking and like all Phil Rickman's books, The Secrets Of Pain is well-structured, fast-paced and far from the cosy read you might expect from a mystery set in a village with a priestly protagonist.

As a writer, Phil Rickman has a keen ear for dialogue and his style overall is generally vivid and casual.  He knows how to create a disturbing atmosphere - before embarking on the Merrily Watkins series, he wrote horror, and this often shows in the best of ways. The exploration of Mithraism and why it might have become an attractive cult for soldiers was fascinating, as I would expect from one of Rickman's books: each one tends to focus on elements of folklore or history that he weaves deftly into the story. Rickman is also very perceptive in his character development, and The Secrets Of Pain is peopled with characters that are entirely believable. Those who have read other books in the series will want to greet many of them like old friends.

I did feel that this particular instalment in the series contained less of Merrily than we're used to - DI Bliss probably deserves equal billing, in fact - and the paranormal elements were perhaps played down a little more than usual. Not, however, that it matters: I still found it to be a damn good read and look forward to more.

There's more that I could say about this book, but most of it has been perfectly summed up in someone else's review - visit Amy Cockram's blog Stuff And Nonsense and check it out. She's got it spot-on.

... although I've only got one, No.4. But that doesn't work as a Two Ronnies pun, and of course it was important that I went with a Two Ronnies pun. It's always best to give a blog post a title that means nothing to anyone who a) not British or b) was born after 1985, right kids?

Anyway. For a long time, I didn't want an e-reader. I tried a few demo models, and the screens never seemed quite right and the page 'turn' was far too slow and distracting. And I love books. Real, paper books that smell nice and can be dropped in the bath and dried out again, or thrown into a handbag with my keys. My birthday is the day after Valentine's Day; the year before last my boyfriend asked me if I'd like to go away for a couple of days to celebrate both. I got him to take me to Hay-on-Wye, bookshop capital of the UK. I spent the whole of Valentine's Day and my birthday looking through secondhand bookshops. I like lovely, beautifully made illustrated hardbacks (I'm a particular sucker for the Folio Society) and I like tattered, musty, damp-speckled paperbacks. I smell the pages of books and hold their covers against my cheek. I like my hardbacks to be kept in perfect condition, and I like my paperbacks battered and bruised.

And this is the problem. Because I love the printed word so much, there are a lot of books in our house. My boyfriend's no stranger to Waterstone's either, which doesn't help. Eventually realising that the buckling old Ikea Billy bookcases in our living room were far from acceptable and that having a bedroom in which the stacks of teetering, dust-gathering, spider-harbouring books on the floor are three or four deep from the wall is just unhealthy for a couple beset with insomnia and allergies. Moreover, watching a film in our house meant embarking upon a treacherous game of DVD Jenga if we wanted to watch something that happened to be in the middle of the unsupported tower next to the telly. Cascades of shelf-overspill CDs would slither off the top of the stereo on a regular basis with a plasticky clatter.

So, we spent a frightening amount of money - the most we've ever spent on anything, ever - on getting custom-made shelving fitted on all the available walls. Everything's been shelved now. In alphabetical order. I gazed at the shelves almost daily and marvelled at the satisfying neatness and the serenity it engendered. Space. We had space. We had places to put books that weren't the floor, and we had a nice clean tranquil bedroom again.

That was in December 2010. Those shelves are now full.

Fortunately, my realisation that we might be about to start drowning in books again like a pair of bibliophile Mr Trebuses (Trebi?) coincided with my mother-in-law, fond of gadgets, remarking that she would like a Kindle for her 70th birthday. When I saw it and tried it out, I was impressed. More impressed than I thought I'd be. The page-turn seemed faster than the previous demo models I'd tried, and was definitely much faster than on any other brand of e-reader I'd looked at. I gradually began to come round to the idea of one day investing in a Kindle. A few months later, Amazon released the Kindle 4.

Cheaper, smaller and lighter than the Kindle Keyboard, it seemed better value for money. It lacks a keyboard - you enter text by selecting characters with a five-way control button - and there's no 3G, but frankly, I didn't think those features were worth spending (or asking someone else to spend) £149 for when the Kindle 4 is a much more affordable £89. I believe the Kindle Keyboard plays audiobooks, but I've already got an iPod that does that, and most persuasively, reviews seemed to suggest that the all-important page-turn on the Kindle 4 was the fastest yet. So, it was the Kindle 4 that made it to the top of my Christmas list.

I was fully expecting to have to spend some time persevering with the Kindle. Getting to know it. I could picture us circling each other nervously like a couple of wary dogs. I imagined that I'd have to force myself to keep using it until I eventually forgot I was using a Kindle and became transported into the text as I do when I read a 'real' book.

I was so wrong. I loved my Kindle within minutes.

It's incredibly easy to use and immensely unobtrusive. It's slight, slim and remarkably pleasant to hold. You can easily hold it and click the page turn button with one hand, and I speak as someone who has been known to buy gloves from the children's section. The screen isn't backlit, so there's no glare. That's ideal for me as I'm prone to eye-strain and tension headaches - I could never, for instance, read e-books on an iPad.

The text is clear and sharp and the font size, line spacing and margins can be altered, as can the font itself: there are condensed and sans serif options. The pages 'turn' gracefully and quickly. You can mark your place, make notes and highlight passages. And with a wireless connection (syncing with my Orange wireless box took three attempts, but those three attempts took less than five minutes in total, and it's worked like a dream ever since) you can register the Kindle to your account, browse Amazon and have books delivered to you in a matter of seconds. And I do mean seconds. So far, the longest it's taken to deliver a book to the Kindle is still under half a minute. Oh, and you can email yourself PDFs, once you've verified your email address to your account. That means I now have my Open University coursework book, a heavy great lump of a thing in the flesh, easily accessible in a portable format: invaluable for lunchtime learning during the working day. A lighted cover (expensive but worth it) means I can also read in bed without disturbing my other half. Again, invaluable.

In other words, I'm a Kindle convert. I won't stop loving real books, and I'll continue to buy them. I bought one today, in fact. But I just can't afford the space to buy every book I want in paper format, and the Kindle is a brilliant solution to that problem. I didn't used to like e-readers much, but now I've found one I love.

So far, so normal.

However, before and after getting my new Kindle I did some research and found lots of reviews and discussions online. Reviews were helpful, and overwhelmingly positive. But one thing the discussions revealed were some very strange attitudes towards e-readers. And the very day after I got my Kindle, someone who follows me on Twitter, and who I'd followed back largely out of politeness, embarked upon a lengthy series of anti-Kindle tweets. Fair enough. It's no surprise that different people have different reading preferences. But what is peculiar is not the preference, but the tone in which some people choose to express it. There's a lot of... snobbery.

It seems that there is a certain type of person who hates the Kindle not primarily because its battery might run out before the last page or because it's killing high street bookshops or because you can't safely drop it in the bath or for any other of the many perfectly valid reasons, but because deep-down, whether they care to admit it or not, they just think adopting new technology is a little bit common. They proudly bray about what Luddites they are, knowing full well that a lot of people who read their comment probably won't know what a Luddite originally was anyway and probably with only the vaguest idea themselves. They claim that they're the only person they know who still writes real letters on paper with a fountain pen. They say they only have a television 'for BBC4 and the news', and shun parents whose kids own games consoles. They sneer at those of us who are constantly goggling at a screen, just as they probably sneer at those who buy hummus from the supermarket instead of standing in the kitchen spending hours soaking chickpeas and mashing them by hand to arrive at a substance which is almost, but not quite, as good as the one from Sainsbury's.

They believe that people who have Kindles simply don't like books. They imagine that we Kindlekids only download Dan Brown, Andy McNab and self-published erotic romances secretly written by morbidly obese middle-aged women from Ohio. Because the anti-Kindle people - you know, the ones who don't just dislike Kindles but also want to show off about it - like to tell us that they love books. Real books, from bookshops, with paper pages and a nice smell and all the other blindingly obvious things. Things that frankly, everybody likes about books, but the anti-Kindlers always forget that. They tell me they love owning thousands of books (and funnily enough, unlike me, they usually seem to have big expensive sprawling houses with endless space in which to keep them: I refer you back to my accusation of snobbery).

In fact, the only thing they don't ever say they love about books is the words.

As far as I'm concerned, someone who really loves reading cares primarily about the text. Not the quality of the paper, not the picture on the cover, not the weight of a 900-page novel in their hands, but the text. The only thing that truly defines a book is its content; the only thing that defines a reader is their love of reading, not the fetishisation of objects with pages. Most people who read love physical books; that alone is no big deal and there's nothing wrong with it at all. What's peculiar is the sneering elitism of people who simply can't accept that other people might ultimately be more interested in what an author wanted to say than the paper on which it happened to be printed.

When I puzzled over this on Twitter, a follower remarked that snobs don't like Kindles because a Kindle doesn't allow others to see what you're reading, thus leaving certain types of person with the nagging doubt that others can't immediately see how terribly well-read and clever they are. If the Kindle displayed the cover of the book being read on the back, or somehow projected the spines of its contents on to the walls of one's house, sales to sneering Telegraph readers would, he believed, increase dramatically, and the smell of a nice secondhand hardback with a charming fountain-pen inscription in the front would suddenly become less significant in their lives. I think he's probably right.

I have no problem whatsoever with people who don't like e-readers. There are plenty of good reasons to see the disadvantages of e-readers, which I can absolutely understand and with which I often quite agree. How other people want to read books is their own business and not something I'd ever want to make judgements about. But please, don't scoff at me because I've run out of shelf space. I'm not some kind of second-class reader because I've dared to move with the times.