September 24

The project visited Kyiv International School, where the brilliant 8 and 9-year-old Ukrainian students not only wrote their own imaginative stories, but did it in English.
 
The two classes chose as titles: Vini the Penguin and The Tiger & the Witch.
 
Huge thanks for the invitation and support to undaunted school director Rachel Geary, volunteers, the Demchenko family and to Polina Orlichenko for the fabulous illustrations.

Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia Project came to life in Spain for the first time in the mountain village of Pitres.
 
Local children came to three workshops where they wrote and took home 55 wonderful stories entitled: Los Animales Futbolístas Mágicos, El Lince Caraguay and La Muerte Más Bonita.
 
Many thanks for their support go to the Ayuntamiento de La Taha, Colegio Rural “Los Castaños, volunteers, the AMPA parents association and Hanna Malinka for the illustrations. And to César González-Calero and Gabinete de Historias in Buenos Aires for the inspiration.

A circle of hell that a modern Dante would have added to his collection without a doubt.
 
I finished it on the slow boat to Luang Prabang a couple of years ago and was glad to pass it on to another traveller, not because there was anything wrong with it, the writing pulls you like a sense of dread, but that’s what made me so uncomfortable. The way that Mae Holland is sucked into the corporate tech interface (not “world”: that would suggest a depth it knows nothing of) is tragically disturbing.
 
Ultimately, the multiple screens that demand Holland’s conscious attention are akin to a giant parasite attaching its bloodsucking larvae to a body in such a way that the brain, also, is infected and taken over.
 
The unpleasant reality, though, is that Mae is allows it to happen, as a result of which I found the lead character rather unlikeable. Just because all the others also put greedy ambition before sincerity and humanity doesn’t excuse her.
 
Eggers devises for The Circle a perfect Orwellian motto, “Secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft.” He portrays the horror of fakery and abuse on the corporate scale only too well and I shuddered in the balmy air of the Mekong.

I picked this one up for a euro at the English store in Órgiva.
 
It’s a delightfully humorous account of a 1950s Dublin family from the viewpoint of the youngest of three sisters. When they let a room in the house to bring in some much-needed income, it opens the door to a series of interesting and curious women who will become significant influences on the girls. Minnie, especially, is a terrific character.
 
My favourite snippets from the book:
 
While everyone is at prayer in church, Rose, still a toddler, empties her mother’s old handbag onto the floor of the aisle. “No one took any notice until the priest held up the host and I held up the powder compact.”
 
When Miss Queenie “invited us to have a ‘Nice’ biscuit, we thought this was a polite, Protestant pronunciation of ‘nice’.”
 
Sissy’s throwaway comment: “Reality is immemorial to men.” To the young girls, Sissy is charismatic, glamorous, exciting. “It seemed as if all the adults we knew had failed some examination early on and been disqualified from participation in real life.”

Venus on the Half-Shell – Kilgore Trout
 
Yes, I know, Philip José Farmer’s book is inane and worse, in fact it’s the epitome of SF pulp. I add it here simply as another appealing title that produced some predictable but fun cover art.
 
Why not?

At the same time that Le Guin’s League of Worlds was maturing into the Ekumen, many space years before Banks’ Culture, on the theme of inducting a planet and its inhabitants into a more mature, benevolent confederation, here is Gurnil and the Interplanetary Relations Bureau.
 
Dunno about you, but I am fond of science fiction with an unlikely hero and an arresting title.
 
Biggle wrote this in 1968 and I read it on travels in Nicaragua in 2000, when the portrayal of its female character was already dreadfully dated. Move past those three pages and Biggle will give you a satisfying read via an intriguing SF imagination and packing a lot into a short novel. You just have to feel a certain admiration for a people with no interest whatsoever in politics but a deep love of the arts (the people of Kurr, I mean, not Biggle, although maybe him, too?)

The girls might be sparky and game, but what very little they had going for them. Nell Dunn’s snapshots at least made these young women visible, but what a sad story is theirs, what absence of prospect. The crude bleakness of 1960s Battersea, factory jobs, a shag in a ruined house and a botched abortion.
 
If you like reading just for local voices (I do), you get proper London alright; life is day to day, a missed payment away from destitution; muck and sickness on every street, prison as the price to pay for chancing your luck, innocence undermining the survival skills of the young, the power station “puffing mauve clouds into the cloudless summer evening.”

It’s not often I’m impatient to get back to a book. This was A Good’un.
 
Unsworth’s tender hand depicts the travails of travelling players in medieval England and the loose, strange solidarity that drives them onward. Your very likeable narrator is a by no means unethical, yet scurrilous young priest. On joining the company, he changes the group dynamic, though not its soul.
 
The troupe’s guiding star is an integrity tempered by the needs of day-to-day survival. This produces such a creative tension in their acting as to conjure up (figuratively speaking) a spirit of intelligence that enlivens and spins the tale forward. Their spontaneity surprises even them.
 
The story gets truly interesting when, for reasons of necessity, the actors take a step over a line drawn by church and custom and perform a secular play about real, local events in which they themselves have become involved.
 
It made me think of the shift in painting in the same era away from religious themes towards humanist and realistic subjects. At the time, such decisions were not made for ideological motives. The artists suddenly had middle-class patrons who wanted something different. All the same, the choices both produced and portrayed a profound cultural change.

In “Morality Play”, the performances themselves turn into the real action of the tale, and the entwining of art with individual lives becomes political, provocative, subversive and real.
 
Unsworth is very skilled at visual narrative. There’s one trick I really liked that he uses on more than one occasion. By the subtle device of describing a gesture, especially during a performance, a particular meaning is conveyed to all those concerned and watching: fellow players, theatre audience and reader. And with a few deft touches, you also get a feel for period and place.
 
That’s the more academic lowdown. More to the point, the story is gently gripping, nicely paced and amusing. Perhaps my favourite book this year.

One that I never read as a kid and have quite enjoyed as an older guy. I wonder what others there are?
 
It’s the dialect that does it with Huck Finn, and boy, what a radical move by Twain! It must have been like classical music listeners hearing pop for the first time.
 
If you haven’t read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and might be interested, don’t let The Cancellers who want the book banned deter you. Worse still are The Sanitizers who sift through a book and remove or replace any word that they disapprove of. These sanctimonious butchers do the reading public a serious disservice, not least because books that contain outdated attitudes and prejudices represent rare opportunities for education.
 
Huckleberry Finn is a fundamentally anti-racist (or at least non-racist) story stock full of the n-word. In its day, 140 years ago, when the book was published, some considered it overly progressive for its portrayal of a black man, a runaway slave, as an honest, sympathetic character. If we learn where our present-day worldviews have evolved from, we will gain in understanding, and maybe even refrain from thinking of ourselves as better. Seriously, people: what do you think the generation of 2164 will say about us?

A lone voice in the literature of the dusty wilderness, a howl in the cold night under stars.
 
 McCarthy brings the reader coddling in a self-indulgent comfort zone face to face with bare facts.
 
Real courage happens when there’s no one else there to see it. Death is a stone’s fall away and we are always on our own.