Reading lists

I was trying to come up with something new and interesting to write about, which has been proving difficult (my brain has, for the past fortnight or so, been fuddled from strong winds and some pretty reckless all-day drinking), so I distracted myself by swinging by some other of my favourite blogs to see what's going down with them.

Over on my estimed Ask Ben & Clare colleague's own personal weblog, a nattily entitled post The Book Spreader caught my attention, encouraging bloggy folk to list their favourite tomes so other people might share the pleasure of reading them. You can read Ben's suggestions in their original context here, and follow his link to the Nik Perring post which sparked it off.

Anyway, I thought a reading list was appropriate in the run-up to the fast approaching fifth annual Manchester Literature Festival (14-25 October), so I've put together a five-strong selection of modern works I've recently enjoyed. Feel free to pass it on. (It's kind of like a chain letter, but without any guilt, shock tactics, or weird religious undercurrents.) So, in no particular order and without further ado, ta-da...

Two books ago, I read Catherine O'Flynn's debut What Was Lost. I'd been waiting to get to it for a while, and especially since hearing Catherine read at last year's Manchester Literature Festival, but my copy was elsewhere. Anyway, we've been reunited and I can report back that it was worth the wait: an easy read with some interesting twists, and a fancy line in intertwined storytelling. Certain sections reminded me of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time (just because lots of people have read it doesn't necessarily make it bad) and the style wasn't too far removed from my fave, Douglas Coupland.

A bit before that, I read my second Nicola Barker offering. This one, Five Miles From Outer Hope, had been recommended to me by the previously cited Ben (who had her up against the wonderful Elizabeth Baines in his Literary World Cup over the summer), and I can confirm its credentials. I'd previously read her "novella", Small Holdings, which I perhaps prefer, although they are both quite different to each other, despite sharing a certain similar dark humour and dramatic build-up.


Just before Central Library shut down, I managed to pop into the lending library and borrow Gwendoline Riley's most recent (but not that recent being published in 2007) novel, Joshua Spassky. I have to admit I was a little disappointed. It's about a writer enduring some rather cliched writer problems not to mention some equally cliched hardships of the heart. Her previous novels Cold Water (2002) and Sick Notes (2005), however, are definitely worth getting your hands on, with familiar Mancunian sights and nights detailed in abundance.

Another Manchester writer I checked out not so long ago was Chris Killen, who is going to be doing a reading at the upcoming Manchester Blog Awards on 20 October. His first work, The Bird Room, is really well written with some fantastic utilisation of swearwords for effect. Both big and clever. I understand he's in the process of writing a second, so I'll be keeping an eye out for that.

My final pick, Erlend Loe's Naive. Super isn't Manchester related in any way except I bought my copy in a Chorlton charity shop purely out of intrigue in the back cover blurb. It turned out to be a fine purchase and it's a shame that none of Loe's other books seem to have been translated into English from Norwegian. If you've read Room Temperature or The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (not to be confused with the aforementioned Nicola Barker), you too will be pleased with how fascinating the minutiae of mundane everyday life can be made to appear. Lovely obsession with Duplo, too.


So there you go. A few wee ideas. As both Nik and Ben have recommended Like Bees To Honey by Caroline Smailes and Something Beginning With by Sarah Salway, I will put these on my own reading list, along with Armistead Maupin's new Tales Of The City book, Mary Ann In Autumn (above), out across the pond next month.

X marks the spot

This week, Douglas Coupland was the guest on Radio 4's Bookclub, introduced by James Naughtie (which, to me, always sounds like Doherty). Coupland (which Naughtie pronounced "Copeland". I never knew) was chatting about his first novel Generation X (subtitle: Tales For An Accelerated Culture), discussing characterisation and scene-setting, and reading extracts. It was interesting and insightful for a number of reasons, not least because Douglas Coupland is my favourite author, but also because I actually didn't like this particular book when I first read it but I loved it the second time round.


Douglas Coupland's work is great because his prose is so incredibly easy to read yet it's full of deep metaphors and crazy complex ideas. I also really love the way he uses tradenames to give a sense of place and time, so I thought I'd share the part where he described receiving his first copy from his publisher:

"I was living in Montreal - I was living in a basement suite and I was living on hotdogs and oatmeal, I had no income - and the book arrived... And the actual birth moment of any book is when the Fed-Ex box arrives and you open it and like, 'Ah, there's the book!' - and the cover doesn't cover the book and the pages are sticking out by a quarter inch and everything was wrong about it and it was just the worst getting your book experience you could possibly have. It's not like 'Kaboum!'..."

Such a bookish girl...

It's my birthday, so I've been buying myself presents. No, I didn't wrap them up; that would be stupid. I got a nice stripy Christmas jumper (you get used to it, this Christmas shit), some angora over-the-knee socks, the Florence & The Machine album, tickets to see Blithe Spirit at the theatre, and The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland. Happy birthday, me.

Regular readers among you will perhaps remember that Douglas Coupland is my favourite author. What you may not know is that I have every one of his novels (plus Polaroids From The Dead, which is classed as non-fiction), except Generation A. I was pleased to just happen upon this one random copy of The Gum Thief knocking about in Fopp as somehow it had totally slipped my mind. So, just because I can, may I present each work in backwards chronological order. The covers of Coupland books seem to change with the seasons; these are the versions I have.



(I'll let you in on a secret: I haven't read them all. I like to drip feed myself so I don't run out.)

Battlestar Helvetica

Today, we're revisiting the Helvetica typeface; it seems to be quite the de rigueur topic.

Some background to the font, learnt this morning. Helvetica was developed by the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland in the 1950s, under the leadership of Edouard Hoffmann. (The Basle foundry had dominated Swiss typography since around 1580 and became the Haas Type Foundry after the punchcutter Johann Wilhelm Haas joined the company in 1718.)

Freelance graphic designer and type designer Mark Simonson has written an article called The Scourge Of Arial (Arial isn't very popular among purists, it turns out), in which he reveals:

An icon of the Swiss school of typography, Helvetica swept through the design world in the ’60s and became synonymous with modern, progressive, cosmopolitan attitudes. With its friendly, cheerful appearance and clean lines, it was universally embraced for a time by both the corporate and design worlds as a nearly perfect typeface to be used for anything and everything. “When in doubt, use Helvetica” was a common rule.

I found all this out as a consequence of checking out the quiz So You Think You Can Tell Arial From Helvetica?, on photographer David Friedman's blog, Ironic Sans. This, in turn, was brought to my attention by my favourite author and Twitterer, Douglas Coupland, whose latest novel, Generation A, features Helvetica on the cover (the G and the C are dead giveaways).


So there we go. Arial v Helvetica: let the battle commence!

Font of all knowledge

I love fonts. It must be something to do with being a sub and having to make sure words are emboldened when they need to be, or when text should be in italics when Art say it should, and so on and so forth. (Alternatively, if you're a Grauniad sub, you could just totally ignore the usual rules, and halfarsedly bold some stuff up then ignore the rest so it's all over the show and the reader has no chance of spotting any kind of pattern or be helped to read more easily in any way. I mean, what does the reader want? Bloody hand-holding?)

If you also love fonts, I suggest you go and have a look at Lars Willem Veldkampf's thumbnails for more of your favourite typefaces and their subliminal meanings. It's a quarter of an hour well spent this rainy Friday afternoon as you wait for the weekend to get a shift on.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/larsveldkamp/sets/72157607710779069/

Incidentally, yesterday at the ICA, the author Douglas Coupland did a companion talk to the film Helvetica (which I have yet to see) on what words look like and the power of text as an art object. It was he who alerted me to this Veldkampf fellow's Flickr fonts; not because DC is my mate, but because I follow him on Twitter like the sycophant I most surely am.