Anon Magazine
Editors: Colin Fraser, Peggy Hughes
Established: 2003
Based in: Edinburgh
Website: http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk
Submit via: this link
Anon is a very different kind of creative writing magazine. The ultimate experiment in unbiased editing, this publication is all about anonymity, as the name suggests. Writers who wish to submit their work must do so via a top-secret electronic ninja submission form, which means that when the editors receive the poems at the other end, the writer’s identity is totally hidden. Anon pride themselves on judging the submissions they receive on merit alone, but they’re also interested in maintaining a dialogue about the wider concerns that surround editorship in general. Indeed, the magazine has divided opinion. However, although the anonymous approach is not to everyone’s taste, Anon has made quite a name for itself with a new editorial team and a run of successful recent issues that were chock-full of brilliant stuff.
As well as the magazine, the Anon team also produce poetry-related podcasts and are actively involved in a huge variety of literary projects in the wider lit community. The latest issue of Anon is the magazine’s seventh outing, and would be an excellent place to start for anyone wanting to find out more about the magazine. You can buy a copy here. Alternatively, the team are currently running a package deal where you can buy Anon 1 and Anon 6 together — a good way to get a feel for the magazine’s origins but also how it’s changed and developed over the years. Anon is also reliant upon funding and donations, so if you have a few spare pennies and fancy donating them to a very deserving literary cause, head in this direction.
Not really a “Things I’m Reading” — more of a “Things I’m Hearing”, this week. Just for something a bit different!
If you know me, you’ll know I’m very much into music. I recently talked about the poetry-reading lessons I’ve learned from musicians; my poetry is heavily influenced by song lyrics as well as literary works; I’m an obsessive collector of vinyl; I’m always on the lookout for mixtape buddies. I’ve even written a post or two here about the relationship between poetry and music. So I feel I can almost get away with listing music, rather than books, here this week.
(And the truth is, I haven’t been reading anything. Times have been rather tough the past couple of weeks — Boy and I broke up, term is ending in a spectacular dazzle of chaos and paperwork and pissed-off students, and I’ve had to find a new place to live. Sitting down with a book just hasn’t happened. Instead, I’ve been finding solace inside my headphones… and particularly in listening to brilliant lyrics, which almost counts as reading, right?)
First up: Elliott Smith. I know, I know, I’m late to this party. For years I dismissed this guy, because the only people I knew who liked him were obnoxious hipsters… but hey, I have been punished for my snobbery, because I now know how brilliant he is, and what I’ve been missing out on all this time. My favourite albums (so far) are XO for its bittersweetness, and Figure 8 for its quiet ferocity. The lyrics on Figure 8 are absolutely spectacular — so many lines I wish I’d written.
A brilliant, nasty little song.
And Pitseleh, my favourite from XO.
Next up, Dear Winesburg. This brilliant band is fronted by one Mr Chris Kreinczes, whose name you may recognise… he’s also one of the brains behind the South Bank Centre’s Global Poetry System project. Chris was kind enough to send me a copy of Dear Winesburg’s self-titled album, which I can highly recommend. Google the band and you’ll find bloggers and critics lining up to rave about the gorgeous lyrics… and I’m joining that queue. The sound is also pure, unique and lovely. My favourite tracks were “Awake” and “Beneath The Eaves” — handily, you can hear both at Dear Winesburg’s Myspace. There are more details on the album right here, and in the mean time, check these out:
Finally, I have to give a mention to Callel. This brilliant wee Edinburgh band have just been signed to Aardvark Records and they’re destined for stardom, undoubtedly. I’ve known lead singer Craig for a little while as we work together at the star-studded showbiz mecca that is Telford College, and this week I caught Callel’s acoustic show at Leithfest. Again, I can highly recommend the album, Body Discovery, and particularly love “Best Foot on the Ground”, which is also on Myspace. More right here…
Thank you for listening… I’m sure normal TiRT service will be resumed next week!
So, a very strange week this week. Assessment season is in full swing at work, so I’ve been marking papers and invigilating exams left, right and centre. That in itself doesn’t leave a great deal of time for reading, but add into the mix my relationship ending and you have a recipe for total meltdown.
Yes, those of you know know us… you read that right. Boy and I have decided to call it quits after five years together. It seems strange to “announce” it here, but Boy has been heavily involved in helping to run One Night Stanzas and Read This Magazine from the very beginning, so he’s definitely a part of “the team,” as much as any of my fellow editors are. It’s all been very amicable and we’re still good friends (we’re even still flatsharing at the moment!), but it has meant I haven’t had much time for reading books!
So I’m still working my way through The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike… but because I didn’t write anything about it last week I kind of feel like that’s OK. It’s my first experience of Updike, and I was inspired to go out and buy it after reading Margaret Atwood’s review of it in Curious Pursuits. It really is like no other book I’ve ever read. I really like Updike’s style, and I particularly love the depictions of his women. Not just the three witches, but the wives and daughters of Eastwick, too — his insight into the female psyche is so spot-on that it’s bordering on creepy. Because I haven’t got to the end yet, I’m still waiting for the big (and, I suspect, catastrophic) payoff that I know is coming… but I’m also dying to finish the novel so I can move on to the sequel, The Widows of Eastwick. It really is brilliant stuff. Read it, no matter what your taste in fiction… it’s that good!
War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times by Linda Polman
I’ve also just started reading Linda Polman’s newest book, which looks at the history of humanitarian aid and examines its effectiveness in various recent conflict and disaster zones. The book basically asks “does aid sometimes do more harm than good?”, and questions the rules of impartiality by which almost all humanitarian aid agencies are bound.
I’ve only just started the book — I’m about halfway through the second section — but it’s already an eye-opener. It’s garnered some unfavourable reviews for being one-sided, but since “the other side of the story” is told every day all over the mass media (do you ever hear any message about humanitarian aid other than “it is good. Donate to Oxfam already”?), I’m inclined to think that’s OK. Polman just wants to push against the popular misconception that all aid agencies are whiter-than-white and all humanitarian aid is distributed fairly and wisely. Personally, I see nothing wrong with that; and from what I’ve read so far I think she does it pretty effectively, too.
Sure, at times it sounds like “a rant”, as one rather anal Amazon reviewer claims. But if you’d been to the refugee camp at Goma and seen aid agencies feeding, pampering and enabling the fallen genocidal government from their plush hotel headquarters, you’d probably feel pretty ranty about it too, no? And the same anal Amazon reviewer also seems annoyed that Polman hasn’t really covered His Particular Favourite Conflict here… but one of the book’s better qualities is that it’s part-memoir. Polman recounts her own experiences working as a journalist in various conflict and disaster zones. The ones she never went to don’t get as much coverage as the ones she spent a lot of time in… this strikes me (and probably anyone else with half a brain) as common sense.
I don’t know why I feel so keen to spring to this book’s side and defend it. It’s not a book I would normally have chosen to read, but after reading a review of it in the paper I impulsively ordered a copy. And I like Polman — I like her unashamed rants, and I like the accessibility of what should really be a very difficult book. Sure, if you’re very informed about the subject already you might feel able to pick holes in this choice of approach, but since I always just wholeheartedly bought into Big Charity’s PR, I’ve been surprised, dismayed and captivated by War Games… and I only started it yesterday. Definitely a recommendation if you’re even vaguely interested in such things.
It’s crazy time at work right now — assessment season is in full swing which means I have pretty much no time to sleep, let alone post to ONS! So this is a short one. However…
It’s a pretty rare occasion that my dear, devoted little sister presses a book into my hands and says “you have to read this.” Usually, it’s the other way around — normally she’s trying to do some freaking amazing painting or drawing or something, and I’m standing over her with a copy of Margaret Atwood’s ‘Good Bones’ yelling STOP THAT RIGHT NOW AND READ THIS BOOK, WOMAN. However, since December ‘09 when she first read Sum, she’s been practically throwing the book at my head every time we’ve been in the same room. And in the interest of avoiding a concussion, I’ve finally got round to reading it.
My sister isn’t the only person to sing the praises of this strange little book. It was published by Canongate, so the Scottish literary community went all-a-flutter over it when it first appeared, and it’s been recommended to me by many people across the Twitter- and blog- spheres. And don’t get me wrong — it’s a great book. It deserves all the hype and praise it gets. In theory.
What do I mean by that? I mean, this is a bloody fantastic amazing brilliant idea for a book. Forty different theories on what the afterlife might be like? Hell yeah! Who doesn’t want to read that? Who doesn’t wish they thought of that first? Who couldn’t write forty of their own? Buy this book now, everyone!
Except, I’m a nitpicker… I’m a poet, after all. So yes, the idea is great and I hate David Eagleman for having had it before I did. But what about the execution?
To be honest, the writing itself has not blown me away at all — in fact at times I’ve been frustrated by its wrong-headed plainness, its refusal to incorporate more than a few occasional flashes of linguistic interesting-ness (”velvety blue angel” was genius, Eagleman… why did it shock me in amongst the surrounding monotony?). I’ve also been frustrated by its repetition, and Eagleman’s over-dependance on clichéd ideas about the afterlife — seriously, I’m on page 90 (which is nearly the end) right now, and if I find one more reference to harp music, I’m going to scream. Some of the stories/chapters/theories are just plain confusing to read; others haven’t been thought through desperately well (an afterlife that builds a copy of you based on birth, marriage and death records… so oh yes, the afterlife didn’t really exist til records began a few hundred years back. What?!). Don’t get me wrong — some are brilliant. “Absence”, in which Heaven is actually a warzone reminiscent of the Vietnam jungle, is really poignant, a very clever satire. But all too often I found myself thinking “great idea! But I could have written about it so much better.” Is that arrogance? If so, apologies — I couldn’t help it! I just couldn’t bring myself to like Eagleman’s style. It’s sparse, and in places feels careless — but it’s not well-done carelessness, like James Frey’s loose rattle, for example. It just feels… average. Three stars out of five. I liked it, but I couldn’t love it. Which is a shame, because as an idea, this book is exceptional.
What did you think to Sum? What are you reading this week?
Less reading, more scribbling, really… but as a compulsive list-maker I was overjoyed to discover Lisa Nola’s Listography books. Beautifully illustrated, the former is a journal of your life so far (a pretty cool idea in itself), which offers up challenges like “list all your former addresses” or “list the most important friends from your past.” Not only does it get you wracking your brains, once filled in it will also serve as a nostalgic time-capsule to which you can return later when you’ve forgotten, say, the name of that girl you used to sit next to in Higher English. It feels rather odd to temporarily climb inside the cave of your memory and write down everything you can see — but odd in a good way. Music Listography also hugely appealed to me, as a geeky vinyl-hoarder and creator of mix tapes. In this case the challenges are seemingly easier — “list your favourite jazz and blues”; “list bands that you do not like” — but in my humble opinion, they’re actually harder. I was driven into a frenzy trying to remember which side of 1980 The Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket” fell on (the far side, by the way), and tied up in knots trying to pick just twenty all-time favourite records (I’m still deliberating, in fact). However, these books have given my bus journeys to and from work a whole new meaning — I’ve loved filling them in. They’re also things of beauty — each list is laid out on a lovely thick cardstock page with hand-drawn type and gorgeous (and sometimes weird) illustrations. If you’re a journal-writer, a list-maker or just plain nostalgic, you will absolutely love these books.
I’m also working my way through this strange little book, which (as the title may suggest) is a collection of writings on sisters, siblings and sisterhood (genetic, platonic, political, and so on). I bought the book for two reasons: one because I was in Sam Read’s bookstore in Grasmere in the Lake District, a bookstore so charming and fabulous that I find it impossible not to buy something every time I visit and b) because I thought it might be useful for my PhD thesis. I made the mistake of thinking this was an anthology of literary criticism. In truth, it’s just an anthology of STUFF, and it can never quite seem to make up its mind.
There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of structure. You get an excerpt from Antigone, in which Antigone scolds her hapless sister for refusing to help her bring justice to their slain brother; then on the next page you have a section of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals in which she describes the fateful Spring day that she and her brother discovered the famous “host of golden daffodils” whilst out on a walk. Elsewhere there are ‘also-in-the-news’ type newspaper snippets — a Siamese twin who had to put up with her conjoined sister’s smoking habit for forty years — and extracts from scientific research papers on things like hymenopteran female bees who share more genes with their sisters then with their own offspring. Palmer interrupts occasionally to give her thoughts on what constitutes sisterhood, to talk about her relationships with her own sisters, and to speculate on what life must have been like for previous generations of sisters in her family and elsewhere. It really is a mental book… but’s it’s chock-full of gold. Every new page brings a new weird and wonderful fact or opinion, a new snippet from a book you suddenly feel the urge to go and read, a new brilliant stanza from a poem or verse from a song. My thesis is all about women’s voices, women speaking through other women, and the desire for female predecessors to show us how to go about things. However, I’m also a devoted sister, an aspiring feminist (it’s one of those things where I’m never sure if I’m doing right or not), a teacher and a writer… so this book captivates me on many levels. It was a chance find, it’s utterly nuts, and I’m only about a fifth of the way through… but I’m already glad this odd little book crossed my path.
Firstly some final thoughts on the Sentinel Literary Quarterly poetry contest! The top three winning poems are now up at the Sentinel website, and I’m very pleased to announce that they are: The Real Red Riding Hood by former London Poetry Festival Poet-In-Residence Christian Ward, Acting Blackbird by Roger Elkin and Aquarium by Michael Conley.
Some of the Highly Commended and ‘judge’s choice’ entrants have been in touch to ask why their poems haven’t been posted — never fear, those have been saved for the next print issue of SLQ, which will be available in August. Keep an eye on the SLQ blog for updates!
Finally, you can read my judge’s report, which gives a bit of insight into why I picked out the poems I did, right here. I absolutely loved judging the contest so if anyone wants me to do another one…? I’m also thinking of running a One Night Stanzas poetry contest now I’ve had an insight into how it’s all done. All those in favour, please say ‘aye!’ in the comments box… I’d like to be able to sniff out how much interest it might potentially get!
So what else have I been reading this week?
Curious Pursuits by Margaret Atwood
If you’ve been here before you probably know by now that I’m a massive Atwood fangirl. My first experience of her writing was when I was about fourteen and had to write a book report for my high school English class. My high school library was pretty small and the selection was limited… there was also an age-band system in place (which I just accepted at the time but which now shocks me to the core), so some sections were off-limits to anyone under 16. I wandered aimlessly into the library and picked up the first novel whose cover design appealed to me… and that book was Lady Oracle (this particular edition had a picture of a woman’s long, bright-red hair with sunglasses tangled in it. I’d just dyed my hair red for the first time, so that’s probably what struck me). I utterly loved the book, and moved on almost immediately to The Blind Assassin, which had just won the Booker Prize that year, and I now count it as one of my desert-island, all-time top five novels.
My favourite book of Atwood’s (so far) though is Negotiating with the Dead, a series of lectures on writers and the writing process that later became a printed critical work. It’s the cornerstone of my ongoing PhD thesis and the best book about “being a writer” that I’ve ever read. I’ve been meaning for ages to write a post about it here, and would encourage you all to go out and buy a copy immediately. It was my much-read, much-creased copy of Negotiating with the Dead that Atwood signed for me when I met her (and greatly embarrassed myself) at Edinburgh College of Art a couple of years ago.
So, to cut a long story short, Curious Pursuits has been on my to-read list for a long time. It’s a collection of funny little bits and pieces of writing that Atwood’s collected up and stuck together to make a strange — and of course brilliant — collage of a book. Dating back to early writings, Curious Pursuits includes book reviews, obituaries, critical essays and articles of all shapes and sizes. My copy, which was pristine when I bought it only a few weeks ago, is now a well-used fan of post-it-note page markers. Atwood’s review of The Witches of Eastwick made me want to go out and read some Updike RIGHT THEN; her recollections of travelling in Europe and her relationship with her aunts suddenly made so much stuff from Lady Oracle slot into place, which sent me whirling back to the bookshelf like a dervish, wanting to re-read it. It’s a pretty special book that starts a chain-reaction of MUST READ THAT NEXT AND THEN THAT AND THEN THAT. So er, while you’re out buying Negotiating with the Dead? Better grab yourselves a copy of this, too.
So last week I spoke a bit about the hundreds of poems I’ve been sifting through in my role as judge for the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Contest — last week I had only just received the hefty envelope and was still feeling rather daunted by the prospect of choosing a winner! Now, however, the winner and two runners up have been chosen, along with three Highly Commended poems and nine others that narrowly missed out on a prize, but which I chose to be published in the magazine alongside the winning pieces.
The results of the contest should go live sometime tomorrow on the Sentinel website, and I’m very excited to see who wrote the pieces I chose. Judging “blind” was actually really hard — I had a lot of anxieties about it. The main one was a worry that I’d award a prize to a poet I know well, and that people would then wonder if the judging had been biased (it really wasn’t. The brilliant Sentinel editor, Nnorom, was very thorough in making sure all the poems looked identical, without any identifying marks). I was also worried about the fact that I didn’t know how many poems each poet had entered, and I was terrified of the prospect of giving 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize to the same person, for example. The first worry was really overpowering — I know a lot of my friends, acquaintances and ONS readers entered poems, and I “know” a LOT of poets, both in real life and online! Every time I came across a line that sounded even vaguely familiar, it was difficult not to start worrying. However, I got over it, and I’m confident that I gave the prizes to the best poems, without being influenced by my anxieties. I’m also confident now that the three prize-winners are all different people — if they aren’t, then the person responsible for the three poems has a deft sleight-of-hand when it comes to switching voice, style and tone!
In fact, the most difficult part of judging “blind” was the fact that I’d never previously realised just how differently you read a poem when you have no idea who wrote it. As part of my undergraduate degree I took an incredibly dull module in Critical Practice, the only highlight of which was a lecture on “blind reading,” given by the brilliant Professor Colin Nicolson. He gave us a Margaret Atwood poem to read, without saying when, where or by whom it was written, and we had to give our impressions of who the author might be, just from reading the text. We were all way, way off. Reading these poems was the same, only on the grand scale. Of course, knowing who wrote a poem doesn’t change it’s quality — it’s still a strong poem, still a poem that needs more work, etc. but you find yourself looking at a poem about, say, childbirth, and thinking “I assume a woman wrote this. But what if it was a man? That would be really interesting.” You develop a bizarre nosiness about the author — the more poems I read, the more I came to disagree with Roland Barthes!
So what about the poems I chose? Well, I obviously can’t reveal their identities before they are announced, but I have written a report on why I chose each and will probably post those reports here in the next couple of days. But I was surprised by some of them — particularly the winning piece. In my first post about the contest I gave a few clues about what I was looking for as a judge — a strong voice, an original take, and “excellent wordsmithery.” The second prize poem had all of these in spades, but the first prize winner was more difficult to analyse. The voice is strong, yes — and well maintained — and the poem is a parody or subversion of a rather tired genre, done well, so it’s also original. But the wording was very simple, as was the conceit. I found that I had given first prize to a funny poem, and that its funniness was key. I realised — from reading so many pieces in the pile that were obviously trying to be funny — that finding a balance between laughs and strong writing is actually really damn hard. The winning poem had an effortlessness to it that made me curse my own tendency to over-think my poems. When a piece makes you look afresh at your own work, makes you think something new about the writing process, that’s a pretty big deal.
Something else that struck me was the weird and wacky nature of a lot of the poems I picked out. I realised that the pieces I liked best were the ones that took risks, found unusual ideas and ran with them, poets unafraid to boldly go (ouch, split infinitive!) where no poet has gone before. I thought I’d built a reasonably clear idea in my head of the kind of thing I was looking for. The poems I whittled down out of the hundreds of entries totally hit that for six. Which is really, really, really cool.
Check back tomorrow to find out who won! In the meantime… what are YOU reading this week?
Yes, I’m still alive! I took a bit of a break from ONS over Easter, as I was away chasing the Muse in Wordsworth country. But now I’m back and normal service will (hopefully) be resumed!
You may remember that a while ago I was asked to judge the Sentinel Literary Quarterly’s latest poetry competition, which closed at the end of last month. Hopefully some of you entered! Well, this week my reading has been mostly dominated by sifting through the hundreds of anonymous contest entries. The results won’t be announced til next week, and I’m still working on my final decision, but it’s been such a fascinating process that I thought I’d share my initial thoughts (as a judge, but also just as a reader) with you here… hopefully it’ll be helpful to those of you entering contests in the near future!
When I was first faced with the huge pile of contest entries (hundreds and hundreds — the response was pretty amazing), I thought I’d be fine. I assumed that two years at the helm of Read This Magazine had prepared me for anything, that I’d seen the best and worst that poetry could throw at me, and that the judging process would just be something like a particularly large chunk of magazine submissions — the only difference being that I was going it alone, without the help of my editorial team, which I felt shouldn’t be too difficult. I was pretty much totally wrong on all of these counts.
Firstly, the process so far has made me value my assistant Read This editors, past and present, in a whole new way. When you’re faced with a huge swathe of poems that could all easily be called “good” or “strong” but couldn’t really be called “great” or “outstanding,” it’s so useful to have five other people to bounce your thoughts off in order to pare down the list. I was also wrong in thinking that, like with Read This submissions, a good 75%-80% of the poems would be quite easy to put into the “no” pile, for whatever reason. In fact, I ended up pulling out hundreds of those aforementioned “good” poems and feeling rather lost as to how to choose between them.
Don’t get me wrong, I did soon build up a sizeable slush pile… and I suspect that this is what you’re all secretly interested in. There are various things a poem can do to trigger my “just no!” response, which of course includes going over the 40-line limit (apparently you’re either within the limit, or you’re WAY over it. Very few people came in at 42 lines, for example) and containing offensive, graphic or unsuitable material (I do have quite an open mind about this stuff, I promise… it’s relatively easy to fly under my prudish-ness radar, but there has to be a limit). Mostly though, it’s clichés that get my goat. If you can’t think of anything more free than a bird or more blue than the sky, chances are you’re not going to get too far. But there were weird recurring ideas too — I was really surprised (and eventually just wearied), for example, by the numbers of poems that used a flower or flowers as a metaphor for, um, lady parts. The number of poems about sex (and the number of weird and wonderful extended metaphors used to describe it) really threw me, in fact. I’m left wondering if I’m naive… are all poets secretly Byronic sex-maniacs and I just didn’t know?
There were also a lot of poems about black souls and bleeding hearts… something I had been prepared for by submissions to Read This. Don’t get me wrong, depression is a serious issue and one that certainly can and should be explored via creative writing. However, all too often “depression” is actually just short hand for self-indulgence and wallowing; spilling your anguished thoughts/words/tears onto the page under a full moon while some suspicious-looking ravens flap overhead etc. But mostly, the thing that unites the majority of the poems in my “no” pile is the fact that their authors have obviously read very little (if any) in the way of decent poetry. You can tell when someone’s writing an imitation of what they think a poem should be from fifty paces. It’s my favourite old chesnut, but reading really is the key to good writing.
My main problem now is all these poems I’m left with — each of them undeniably “good”, but none of them particularly leaping out at me as better than any of the others. There are loads of them — some that are a nice idea, but linguistically not that interesting; others that have flashes of wordy genius, but don’t really work as a whole… etc. None of them deserve to be dismissed out of hand, but none are leaping out and grabbing me by the throat, as a truly great poem really should. Fortunately though, I have been able to build a (small) pile of Instant Yes! poems, too. It’s much harder to analyse these than the “just no” poems or the “just good” poems… they’re slippery and sparkly as fish. Maybe once I’ve picked a winner, I’ll be able to say more. Watch this space…
What are you reading this week? Get thee to the comments box!
As I begin this post, my clock is saying 23:27… so the chances of me actually managing to post this before Thursday is out are slim to none. And to add insult to injury… I haven’t actually read anything this week that didn’t appear in last week’s post. I finished the first first-year thesis draft, though, so hopefully I can get back to reading things I want to read rather than things I have to. So because I have nothing new to tell you this week, I thought I’d share some books from my to-read list (aka, Amazon Wishlist!)… so if you’ve read any of them, please do tell me what you thought!
A Disaffection, or actually pretty much anything else by James Kelman
I first discovered James Kelman in my second year of undergrad, when I was given this really damn weird book called The Burn to read for class. As an impressionable young twenty year old, I had never come across anything like it before — it totally blew me away. A couple of years later, I decided to read How Late It Was, How Late, and again, I was just totally overwhelmed by how brilliant it was — it’s now one of my all-time favourite novels. I’ve also dipped in and out of Kelman’s collection of essays And The Judges Said…, but for ages now I’ve been meaning to get back to reading his novels. A Disaffection has been recommended to me, but then so have all his books. It seems he just can’t write a bad one. Anyone have a favourite? Is there a particularly obvious one to read next?
Paint it Black by Janet Fitch
I basically just want to read this book because I loved Fitch’s White Oleander… you know the one, huge bestseller, Oprah’s Book Club recommendation, made into a fucking awful movie, etc. I really DID NOT want to like that book, trust me. But it was recommended to me by a friend who reads A LOT and has never yet suggested a book to me that I didn’t come to absolutely love, so I read it, against my own better judgement. It is annoyingly brilliant — huge bestseller for a reason, Oprah’s Book Club pick for a reason. I actually did something with White Oleander that I’ve never done with any novel before or since: immediately after I finished it, I read it again, cover-to-cover. I have no idea why, to this day, as the language is sticky with metaphors and the snippets of poetry Fitch writes into the narrative are genuinely horrendous. But I was compelled, to the point where it unnerved me! So I want to see if Paint It Black can live up to its predecessor.
Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos ed. Kim Addonizio, Cheryl Dumesnil
If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time you’ll know I have a slightly unhealthy interest in body art… I even edited a book about it myself! I also love Kim Addonizio, so I’ve been wanting to buy this book for bloody ages. Worth it, tattoo fans?
With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E Grant
I know it’s a huge student-y, Brit-hipster cliché to list Withnail & I among your favourite films, but tough, I do. It’s one of the funniest films ever made, and one of the best, so there. Also it features a youthful and lovely Paul McGann, which is an obvious bonus. I’ve already read Kevin Jackson’s Modern Classics take on the movie (which is really damn good, by the way), but I’ve heard that With Nails is brilliant, so it’s been on my wishlist for ages. Anyone else as much of a geek as me? Read it?
Hey, it’s 23:58! I made it!
What are you reading this week? What’s at the top of your to-read list?
