Blog Friday

I wrote a song for the Hop:


If you walk like a frog
You're doing the Hop
If your socks come in ones
You're doing the Hop
If you stepped on a stone
That cut right to the bone
And you're bleeding profusely all over your clothes --

You're doing the Hop.

You can't say I never do anything for you.I hope you are all very grateful indeed.

This week at Learning To Read has mainly been about SOS -- Summer Of Strangers. That's the name for my resolution to spend my summer in the company of authors I've never read before, and it has so far has been something of a success. We've had Peter Stafford at the New English Library, and the glorious Christopher Brookmyre.

There has also been a piece of trivia.

Coming up soon are some more SOS reads (anybody heard of Sean Dixon?), maybe some more trivia, and a week without blogging because I'm away at the Treehouse Festival.

See you around!

Did You Know?

Before he wrote thrillers, Len Deighton was the Observer food writer, and he also designed the first ever cover for the UK version of Jack Kerouac's On The Road.

Attack Of The Unsinkable Rubber Ducks

by Christopher Brookmyre

If I was in any doubt about my resolution to only read new authors this summer (I wasn't) I wouldn't be now (I'm still not.)

If you think that sentence is convoluted, then you've never come across the plot of Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks (particularly with that word 'doubt' floating about.)

First off, this book is brilliant. Once this SOS business is over and I can raed books by familiar authors, reading another Brookmyre is going to be a high priority. It's funny, clever, and peopled with more than a few excellent characters, and more than one compelling narrator.

The plot is built around the (ridiculous) ongoing debate between rationality and mysticism. Such is its intelligent switches of perspective, deliberately (and apologetically) misleading narration, and sheer twisty intricacy, that you're never quite sure which side of the debate the book is going to finally land on. The raging, sweary skeptic telling us most of the story is speaking from beyond the grave.

It's that narrator, who occasionally hands the tale over to a very able supporting cast of slap-deserving journalists and Firefly-watching geeks, who really shines. It's his self-aware, ranting-Scot angle on events that had me laughing out loud, and it's his feats of reader-deception that would have had me gasping in wonder, if I was the gasping-in-wonder type. I'm not.

I would love to be able to plot a book like this. Honestly, I've no idea how Brookmyre goes about it. I'd love to ask him how he gets from an initial thought to this plot. Working backwards, there doesn't seem a viable path... it's a miracle! That's not the dreaded 'where do your ideas come from?' question, remember, but 'how do you develop and construct the idea once you've got it?'

What really turns the complexity up to the level that would have Creationists shouting about (Very) Intelligent Design is the central role of charlatry in the story. (Okay, that's not a real word, but it should be.) Everyone is at some level a con-artist or a cynic or a gullible fool, and mostly a hard-to-guess mixture of the both. ANd that includes the reader. Or at least that's what you're meant to think, so you're constantly second-guessing yourself. Or I was. Or was I? Argh.

And that's pretty much how I ended up thinking by the end of this book, alongside one other thought. The other thought was: this is so good.

I'm pretty sure I've not actually, actively recommended a book on this blog yet. I've talked them up, but never made that extra step and told you to go out and read them. Even though I've talked about Chabon and Lodge and Pratchett and VONNEGUT.

So it should be with that in mind that you, awestruck reader, take this recommendation very very seriously:

GO OUT AND BUY/BORROW/INHERIT THIS BOOK.

The Man Who Loved To Blow Up Trains

by Peter Stafford


This is the first book in my SOS -- Summer Of Strangers. The point of the idea (to only read books by authors I've not read before) is to mix up my reading habits a bit, make new discoveries, et cetera et cetera, to infinitely-ridiculous-sickness (bad Latin joke?)
Not every new author will be a new favourite -- some may well be terrible -- but it's that spirit of taking a risk that SOS all about.

This book is perfect for that intent. I found it in a small campsite shop in Roskilde, Denmark. I'd only brought one book with me on my trip (see okay) and finished it sooner than I'd expected. I needed something else to read, but most of the second-hand books were in Danish, and there weren't even that many of those. So when I saw the Trains cover -- and the title -- I knew I had no choice.

It was a... fun book. The amazing blurb promised parody levels of pulpiness, but it stubbornly remained a proper book. Not literary, and with caricatures in place of characters, and exciting things happening in place of a plot, but still a proper book.

It might be too far away from what I am trying to do as a writer for me to learn much from it, but it does hammer home a point I tend to gloss over.

That point regards intention. It's always awkward when intention outstrips execution. When you see what the author was trying to do, rather than them actually doing it, you are drawn out of the world of the novel, into the world of the writer. And as David Lodge always shows, forgetting about the author is really important to a reader.

Trains is singularly unambitious in terms of character development and telling details, and by doing so never falls into that trap of showing us the author at work. I don't think that means I shouldn't try clever things, but it's a good argument for making sure I only try them when I can pull them off.

And how about SOS? How was spending a few hours in the company of a stranger?

Well it might not be the best book for disciovering new authors. Peter Stafford is most probably a pseudonym, and I can't find anything about him -- or anything else by him -- online. But it's a new discovery in another way.

The Man Who Loved To Blow Up Trains is a New English Library publication. It didn't take much Googling to learn that the NEL imprint was prolific in the 70s for a certain class of pulp novels, and it still has a cult following today.

So I'm going to keep an eye out in charity shops and second-hand bookshops for any book with the little NEL gate logo on the spine. And if the cover is amazing enough, and the title preposterous enough, I know I'll be in for a fun read.

Blog Friday

Greetings Hoppers!

It's not been a busy time here at Learning To Read, mostly because I've been away. There's been reviews of new favourite Toby Litt and old favourite David Lodge, but that's it.

Expect posts on my super-fun trip to Denmark, some talk about the New English Library, and lots of new-to-me authors in my SOS (Summer Of Strangers) reading challenge, over the next few weeks.

Other than that I have one thing to say: GOOGLE READER. Why have I only just discovered this? If I follow your blog, expect to see me actually keeping up with it from now on. Fingers crossed.