Episode 923, in which I buy the most boring books in the world

A good haul of paper with marks on them today. A couple of Paul McAuley SF novels (400 Billion Stars and Red Dust), Gwyneth Jones's Life because I thought I had everything she's written until I found this, Roots of Desire, Marion Roach's cultural history of red hair (for my Anne of Green Gables work) and the big prize of the day: the first two volumes of Michael Drayton's Complete Works. Drayton's the author of Poly-Olbion, a topographical and mythological tour of England and Wales in Alexandrine verse. It's the most interesting boring (and massive) poem ever written. Or do I mean the most boring interesting poem? I don't know.

Anyway, there's another even geekier book on its way: Cheney's Handbook of Dates for Students of History. Not the exciting dates, just a list of special days (such as Lammas) and charts so you can work out the right dates taking into account changes in how we reckon such things. Never again will I be stuck on the Roman/Gregorian problem, or unable to explain the significance of Michaelmas!

What critics do

One of my favourite writers is Gwyneth Jones, who writes sophisticated, feminist, politically complex literature which some people might call fantasy or speculative fiction or science fiction. She also writes SF and horror for teens, under the name Ann Halam, and has published a volume of critical essays.

She blogs here, and you can find some free e-books of her work here.

This is how she describes her critical work in a fascinatingly weird interview, and it resonates with me.

“I’m an intellectual. I can’t help it, I was born that way. This doesn’t mean, alas, that I’m highly qualified or highly intelligent, it just means when I see something made of words (or images, or ideas) I just have to take it apart, to see how it works, to see how it evolved; how the different parts are joined up. Exactly the same as some geeky kid who has to take the back off his or her toys; ruins watches, tinkers with the software and hardware of any hapless useful appliance. Ever since I’ve been a writer, I’ve been a critic, which is not the same as being a reviewer, because usually I’m not really interested in whether the book should sell or not. I just find the activity of dissecting all kinds of narratives (trashy or literary, I don’t care), completely fascinating. I keep trying to give it up, because it’s trouble. You take somebody’s treasured novel, some revered best-seller, apart, you put it back together not exactly the way it was before, naturally readers and writers are going to get annoyed. . . But somehow criticism keeps sneaking back into my life. I really must quit. 

I'm no great thinker, far from it, but I've always wanted to work out the how and why of a text. I remember graduating, and people saying things like 'I can never enjoy a book again, because now I can see how they work', or 'I can't switch off and enjoy a book'. I can see their points, but I always loved the kind of detective work of tracing how a collection of words becomes a character, how a plot hangs together or falls apart. I'm still capable of reading and discarding a book without a moment's thought, but I do like to re-read, to discover the deep structures and significances I missed before.

Swindon, come in Swindon

At the moment, British SF is the best in the world: M John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod, China Miéville and loads of others are writing future/science fiction which examines the state of the world and humanity in fascinating, mindblowing ways: SF has always been a more profound genre than the literary pages allow. I'm interested in the hard-science and political versions, which is why I love MacLeod's work so much - many of his books represent an anarchist-Trotskyist Scottish galactic civilisation. What's not to love?

The Guardian has a piece on this theme today.

(Post title is from Eddy Izzard's riff on the British space expedition).

More on dead tree media

Talking of things that make you re-evaluate your world, I guess the same criterion can be applied to books: bad ones reinforce your existing positions or make no difference at all, good ones make you re-orient yourself, or at least re-examine your beliefs, tastes and attitudes.

I'm currently reading Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and re-reading some Gwyneth Jones. Wilson's book definitely fits into the 'bad' category, for all its status as great twentieth-century literature. It's not a bad read at all - amusing characterisation and all that, but it's yet another smug set of upper-middle-class characters adjusting themselves to the post-war Britain: neither they, nor Wilson, have much to say. Jones, on the other hand, not only tackles the big subjects: political failure, the dark stirrings of the collective unconscious, feminism, science, our social dispositions, but she does so in compelling, confusing, serious but also exciting and often amusing ways. Kairos is perhaps her weirdest attempt to upset our conceptions of what society means (particularly in relation to sex and gender), while the Bold As Love series uses the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle as the basis to examine the purpose and point of nations and states, amongst other things.

Jones is also gradually posting her earlier books, including Bold As Love, as free (updated) texts on her website - presumably as a response to the gradual death of the book marketing model and as the equivalent of the 'director's cut'.

Books and e-books

Authors in particular and theorists of the media are wondering what's going to happen to the printed word and authorial rights in the Information Age - especially as Google are digitising every book without permission from publishers and authors.

One of my favourite authors thinks she's cracked it. Gwyneth Jones is a literary, feminist, science fiction writer (she's up there with the top writers alive today, regardless of genre). She's releasing re-edited, director's cut-style versions of her books as PDFs on her website for free. She leaves a decent length of time for the physical books to sell, so has the best of both worlds.

Books won't die: you can hand them around, scribble on them, drop them, use them anywhere without power etc etc - but e-versions have their place, something she clearly recognises. What's really interesting is that it rebalances the relationship between author, publisher and public. We perhaps don't realise how many stages a book goes through, with the publisher making huge changes to make a text profitable - sometimes against and author's interests, sometimes providing valuable guidance and advice. Jones's approach makes the e-book a complementary exercise while providing her with the opportunity to present her texts the way she feels they should be. Now we just need an enthusiastic PhD student to compare the two versions…