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.

Rumble in the jumble

They're very with it these days, you know, museums and art galleries. No longer are they the stuffy spaces of yore; all low lighting and subdued murmuring, shuffling visitors and stewards hiding in the shadows. No, nowadays it's all about chi-chi launch parties, and trendy workshops and lectures, and touchy-feely interactivity with the exhibits, and free cake with your cappuccino.

Perhaps it's because they need to keep up with all the trendy young things that have been busily getting in on the curating act; influential establishments like Tate Liverpool (getting on a bit now with its coming of age this year) and Tate Modern in London (established 2000) or upstarts like Hoxton's White Cube (est. 2000) or Manchester's Urbis (est. 2002). Or perhaps it's just the way things are as we prepare to enter the second decade of the 21st century. I mean, who'd've imagined high-street banks would ever pipe pop music into their banking halls, that bookshops would tout coffee and muffins, and that local libraries would host slam contests?

So in this context, perhaps it's not surprising that museums and galleries are big on the social media scene and looking to digital developments to extend their reach (promoting exhibitions through Twitter, for example), to increase participation and involvement (such as the Britain Loves Wikipedia museum exhibit picture hunt, launching 31 January at the V&A), and even to offer greater accessibility to collections.

At Social Media Cafe Manchester last Tuesday (yes, I know that's nearly a week ago, but you'll have to bear with me; I've been a bit busy!), Manchester City Galleries' web manager Martin Grimes (with the help of his glamorous assistant David Edmundson-Bird from MMU Business School) led a discussion called Crowdsourced Treasures, exploring the idea of using social media tools to open up access to the hidden exhibits that the public never gets to see. We learnt that only about nine per cent of the collection is on display, although, after many years of painstaking cataloguing by some very patient staff, you can at least now check out the online collections database where there are records for 175,000 objects.

Martin, however, was very keen to pique our interest in (and presumably get us blogging about) what has been dubbed The Mary Greg Project. Mary Greg was something of a hoarder, it seems, and kept pretty much everything that passed her way during the late 1800s and early 1900s, later donating it to the people of Manchester. There's already a dedicated blog, Mary Mary Quite Contrary, which delves into the drawers and boxes containing the weird and wonderful items in the collection and presents some gorgeously detailed close-ups (check out the Flickr feed for these).

I like the tab inviting you to "have a rummage". (What a great onomatopoeic word rummage is.) Take up the invite, anyway, and you're immersed in a bonkers world of bygones, bric-a-brac and bits'n'bobs. There are spent matches and birthday cake candles, scraps of letters and lists of nonsense, pieces of thread and herringbone-patterned thimbles, chatelaines and bodkins, more spoons than you could ever practically need and a thousand keys to a thousand doors that most likely don't exist now. The financial value might not be great, but you can't really put a price on that nice warm feeling nostalgia causes, and writing this post has given me more pleasure than I could ever have dreamed of, especially when I dismissed the seminar somewhat cynically last week.