Joe Sacco, Margaret Atwood, Filippe Bologna - & the difference between gulls

I've had to spend half of the last week in bed so, it was lovely to get to the book festival - literally a hop and a skip from me by taxi - to see Joe Sacco, so charming and interesting. I was given Palestine as a gift ten years ago, I still dip into it. I opened it last night and a bookmark my nephew had made a few years ago fell out (that is the loveliness of a paper book). The festival has deckchairs in the garden with authors' quotes: I liked Margaret Atwood's from The Blind Assassin: 

 'The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.'

I've finished Filippo Bologna's The Parrots, a shortish book, harder to tell on Kindle, but I was stopping and starting in my usual way, so it took me a couple of weeks. A long time since a book has made me laugh out loud so much. And I feel like David Attenborough as I can now tell a herring gull (pink legs) from a lesser black-backed gull (slightly smaller, darker, yellow legs) from watching the birds in the garden.

The Parrots by Filippo Bologna

This made me smile: an extract from The Parrots by Filippo Bologna (Pushkin Press), which I've just started reading on Kindle:

“I read your last book,” she said. “It was very moving.” Then she added, “There’s something I have to know.” “Go on.” “I’m the main female character, aren’t I?” The Writer smiled without replying. At the beginning of his literary career, every time someone close to him saw themselves in one or other of his characters and demanded an explanation, he would give a reply of an aesthetic and literary nature, to the effect that novels are works of fiction, it’s all a process of casting a critical eye on reality, even in an autobiography the narrator doesn’t exactly correspond to the author, you always start with a real event and transfigure it through your imagination… and so on. Then, as time had passed, he had given up. Not so much because he didn’t find such replies satisfactory (although that was part of it, of course), as because the others found them unsatisfactory. The only thing, the ultimate thing that you could do when someone asked a question like that was to say, “Yes. It’s you.” Even though this could provoke a quarrel or bring a friendship to an end, it was the only possible reply. The only one capable of satisfying that morbid curiosity, that sordid voyeurism, the only truth that people really wanted to hear. For some unknown but human reason, recognizing themselves in a character in a novel made it possible for them to recognize themselves as individuals in the real world. It was like a literary Eucharist that signified their rebirth, their transition to a new life.

Bologna, Filippo (2013-07-04). The Parrots (Kindle Locations 360-372). Pushkin Press. Kindle Edition.

More on the writer here.

Free ebook and a review!

Summer give-away by The Friday Project: the ebook version of The State of Me is available as a free download for a limited period! I was pleased to see this new, rather lovely,  review (4 stars) on Amazon yesterday:  I love the honesty of the review and that the s/he feels bad about pointing out the 'negatives'. 

This chatty, funny and insightful book was thoroughly absorbing. Nasim has done a wonderful service to people with ME, by being very open about all aspects of the illness but never self-pitying nor boring! The reader can only cheer her on whilst she snatches what life she can out from under the debilitating illness. All the characters are written well and the writer has a knack for portraying relations deftly but true. It was truly a joy to read, if sometimes a little heartbreaking.The only reason I haven't given the book 5 stars is that I felt it could have done with editing down a little of some of the inconsequential chatty detail. The author plays with form, which is wonderfully entertaining, but I would have liked to have seen it used more consistently which I think would have made it more affective. For instance the author swapped between first and third person for the first part of the book, but at some point that was just dropped. Perhaps it could have been used to great effect later on, or perhaps that needed to be edited out altogether? I feel mean writing the above though, because this book has been my constant companion for days and I've read it every chance I got.      

I felt I wanted to respond to the points made, not as criticism (a reader's views are a reader's views) but more for clarification. The 'inconsequential chatty detail' made me smile, having just ploughed through Knausgaard (see previous post) where the dialogue is often inconsequential. A favourite scene of mine (in A Man in Love) is a New Year party where the dialogue suddenly comes 'alive', there are conversations dripping with meaning, long sentences, which contrast sharply with the previous, often static, 'purposeless' dialogue. Knausgaard's point is that dialogue *is* often boring and inconsequential, he is not concerned, and in The State of Me,  pared down dialogue (that doesn't move the plot along) is to reflect the utter tedium of chronic (at times, severe) illness.

The points about the shifts from third to first person are a little more challenging  as a great deal of time and energy (I view everything in terms of energy)  was used on these shifts. The technique was not simply 'dropped' as the reader has observed, it was deliberate. I shift between first person and third person throughout the book, third person to show her most ill, isolated times, and of course, the third person narrator has a knowingness that Helen doesn't. ie that 'chronic fatigue' will come to be the tragic misnomer for Helen's illness a decade down the line, that myalgic encephalomyelitis, the neuroimmune process that has punched into her life, will be endangered as a diagnosis, hijacked by psychiatrists. The flitting between third and first was mostly intuitive, it just happened. I also use asterisks a lot - and present tense - to slow down the pace, though the asterisks have been lost in the Kindle edition, but I'm told it hasn't detracted from the experience of reading the novel, but I still prefer the paperback version for this reason, while delighted that people can also read the e-version. Still, re. the shifting views  being 'dropped', it is always interesting to hear how your writing is perceived. That is the whole point!

Enjoy the free ebook, it is only for two weeks. Please do write a review on Amazon or Goodreads or blog or Twitter if you can. Reviews are hard to write  (at least, I find it hard) and I always appreciate when people do write a review, even a very short one.

*Just to say the book is only free via Amazon UK and iTunes UK.

Dissecting Edinburgh; dissecting nonsense

I have only done readings very occasionally so am very pleased about this (free!) event in a couple of months' time, part of the 'Dissecting Edinburgh' series at Surgeon's Hall, Edinburgh - 'Literature and Medicine in the Scottish Capital'. I will enjoy thinking back to the process of writing and editing the novel, much of which I did in bed, getting red felt pen on my pillows. I very much hope those who are running the new  'ME-CFS' Astley Ainslie Clinic in Edinburgh will attend - and those in the Scottish government who are funding this 2-year pilot project. The new 'CFS-ME' clinic or 'ME-CFS'  - or whatever thay happen to call it on the day - charmlessly and ludicrously continues to conflate neuroimmune illness with mental illness. This invented hybrid-illness label benefits no one, but still the biopsychosocials persist, in spite of the mountain of biomedical evidence worldwide; in spite of the Scottish Good Practice Statement caveat that ME patients claim to be made worse by graded exercise; and in spite of the PACE trial being unmasked as la la la nonsense.

And am aghast at the wording in the job description last year for a psychologist at the new 'CFS-ME' clinic, (you have to scroll down), which someone on Twitter sent me: This caseload will include a proportion of complex cases eg. Patients who have experienced previous sexual abuse, have active suicidal ideation or have pre existing mental health problems.

Do people with MS and lupus also usually share clinics with those who have 'complex medical histories, suicide ideation and experienced sexual abuse'?  I think not. Of course such patients need huge support too, but why are they told they have a neuroimmune illness when they don't? (And I would bet thoughts of suicide come to anyone dealing with serious, abject chronic illness at some point, whether it is ME or not, and that the proportion of those with ME who have also suffered abuse is no higher than any other neuro/physical illness.) As has been said a million times - and will continue to be said - it  is the massively flawed criteria (yawn yawn yawn) that result in over-diagnosis of ME in the first place. The people behind setting up this clinic obviously haven't read the International Consensus for Criteria on ME (2011). Or have chosen to ignore it (one  suspects they ignore a lot of what doesn't fit with ther flawed views). And they honestly wonder why people with my illness are 'hostile' when faced with this crap?

And the wording on the patient leaflet is simply bizarre - only patients who have 'been given, and accepted, a diagnosis of ME-CFS' are invited. 'Accepted', what on earth does that mean? The GP leaflet is even worse: We will not be able to consider domiciliary visits or extremely entrenched, complex patients. So basically they can't help severely ill, housebound/bedbound people with ME, but only those who are mobile and open to brainwashing. The leaflet states that the service will be over-subscribed so not everyone referred will be accepted, but not to worry, I won't be asking for a referral any time soon (being entrenched and all.) And note the symptoms, 'persistent, excessive tiredness or fatigue', nothing about post-exertional malaise or post-exertional neuroimmune exhaustion - the cardinal feature of ME - or viral trigger. So GPs are unwittingly (or not) colluding in the whole hybrid-illness charade.

I used to be comforted by the fact we didn't have any of these GET/CBT - pretending to help but actually challenging false illness beliefs - clinics in Scotland. But alas, the Wessely school has come to roost in Edinburgh. Sadly, NHS Lothian are myopic in the extreme if they think people with my illness will be helped a jot by this. What a waste of money! Anyone and everyone with idiopathic chronic fatigue is simply thrown into the 'ME-CFS' bucket. I'm so glad I didn't have a crystal ball in 1983, sitting on the orange chairs of the neurology clinic in Glasgow, so wretchedly ill. Really, is it too much to ask that in 2013 we can have just an ME clinic for people with ME? Apparently so. (And how about offering something useful  like therapeutic massage instead of  goddamn aerobics. Then I might go.) I am so very, very, very tired of this adding on of any and every unexplained fatigue handle to ME; it's a kind of blasphemy. This clinic is a fatigue clinic, nothing else, so please let's not pretend it is for my illness (Ramsay-defined ME for anyone who is curious).

Anyway, back to the writing: the day Helen Fleet is diagnosed in 1983 by consultant neurologist, chapter eight of The State of Me:

*

A week before my twenty-first, I was summoned to Bob’s consulting room for the second time. He was expressionless as I sat down on the orange chair.

You have a whole range of abnormalities, he said. Your muscles aren’t producing energy normally.

Why not? I said.

We think you have ME, myalgic encephalomyelitis. It’s a post-viral syndrome, triggered by the Coxsackie virus, in your case. There’s no cure and it can last for five years. We’re doing some clinical trials which we would like you to take part in. We’ll be in touch. Can you ask your mother to come in now?

I came out and Rita went in. Someone had left a Daily Record on the chair next to mine. I picked it up and looked at the front-page photo of Princess Diana with her six-week-old baby.

When Rita came out of Bob’s room, her eyes were watering.

On the way home in the car, I hoped we’d crash and that I’d be killed instantly and Rita would walk away without a scratch. I kept thinking of the David Bowie song ‘Five Years’: . . . five years left to cry in . . . steady drums, louder and louder and louder . . . five years, stuck on my eyes, high violiny bit.

*

Helen has a diagnosis! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! She has blah-de-blah-de-blah, it’s official! She’s got Malingerer’s Elbow! She’s chronically fatigued! She’s a yuppie with flu! Whatever your point of view, she’s fucked.

 *

I shift between first person and third person throughout the book, third person to show her most ill, isolated times, and of course, the third person narrator has a knowingness that Helen doesn't. ie that 'chronic fatigue' will come to be the tragic misnomer for Helen's illness a decade down the line, that myalgic encephalomyelitis, the neuroimmune process that has punched into her life, will be endangered as a diagnosis, hijacked by psychiatrists. The flitting between third and first was mostly intuitive, it just happened. I also use asterisks a lot - and present tense - to slow down the pace, though the asterisks have been lost in the Kindle edition, but I'm told it hasn't detracted from the experience of reading the novel, but I still prefer the paperback version for this reason, while delighted that people can also read the e-version.

And back to the event (sorry, but this CFS nonsense in Edinburgh is just upsetting and distracting). There are two other writers, Tracey Rosenberg and Alison Summers, also reading,  about cancer and Pick's Disease, respectively. I don't think I've ever been  inside  Surgeon's Hall, trying not to think about how big it might be, I imagine a big draughty lecture hall, but maybe it'll be a wee cosy room, and I've told them I'll need to sit down to read. More than ever the truth of this illness needs to be told, and my novel does just that. I am delighted to  be part of this Medicine and Writing event.

Who controls the story?

I've been not particularly well this last week and reading Joseph Anton in bed, it's a long book - 600 pages, which on a Kindle can seem endless, you don't get the same sense of progress you get with a paper book - but compelling even though Salman can be a bit up himself. Whatever you think of the man, he can write, and this book is like a banquet of Michelin food and junk food (the bitchiness, the gossip), on which you gorge and have indigestion afterwards and need to take a break. It is also repetitive, necessarily so, and lots and lots of detail. 

I feel linked with Salman's books as I read Midnight's Children when I was very ill in mid-eighties. I had to stop and start, stop and start, but persevered. Reading this novel was my window on real life when my own life was suffocating and claustrophobic, bedridden as I was with ME. Then five, six years later when all the hullaballoo started I was in London trying to find part-time work, heading (unknowingly) for a catastrophic relapse and the news on TV was of books being burned and I recall watching with my flatmates and feeling baffled, and so very ill (for neuroimmune reasons). Fast forward another six years, and I saw him speak in Edinburgh, I think the Traverse Theatre, and we had to go through airport security (as usual, I had to sit while others kept my place) and  afterwards we left with signed copies of The Moor's Last Sigh (which I still have not read, but I will). Salman says in his memoir that when he was writing TMLS he was annoyed he could not travel to India to do the research and was worried about 'authenticity', but many writers have to imagine the places they are writing about (and he already had much experience of India). I would love, for example, to have the option to go back to Pakistan, I have family there, but I can't risk the vaccinations, or not having the vaccinations, and so I have to rely on memory (of a 6-week trip as a child) and my heart. (Salman's exiled Somalian writer friend Nuruddin Farah advised him to write from what he'd kept in his heart.)

My favourite line so far  is: 'At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses, he said, behind all the accusations and abuse, was a question of profound importance: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told?...'

I am struck (not for the first time) by this concept of 'who owns the story', who is in control of the narrative, and while I am trying not to write about ME as I am so fucking bored with it, this is what happened with my illness, the narrative was stolen and distorted by a clique of medics/health editors, and the story has been spun and spun like a spider's web. Thankfully, science is the opposite of these 'purveyors of untruth' and is making headway in spite of it all. This from Open Medicine Institute is encouraging.

And, this is good, an essay on why writers should use Twitter. I used to hate Twitter, thought it was bollocks - and there is a lot of bollocks on there, like the internet in general - but it is also a lovely thing, for many reasons, not least  because it takes hardly any energy. I recently came across this short interview with Dr John Chia via Twitter, he researches treatments for ME triggered by enterovirus (as mine was). And unlike the purveyors of untruth he is very interested in the  original virus that has actually caused ME.

And if anyone is interested, here is Zoe Heller's review of  Joseph Anton, shortlisted for hatchet job of the year. I think she is a little hard on him. And a more sympathetic review here from writer Laila Lalami.

Being grabbed by one sentence

This spring and summer I've been reading fiction and non-fiction from Pakistan and India. As I've said before,  I feel slightly 'fake' mixed race but, at the moment, I feel very pulled to writing from South Asia. I have the books above on my side table and others I'm reading/have read include Mohammed Hanif's brilliantly cheeky and dark satirical novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (am impatiently waiting for the paperback of Our Lady of Alice Bhatti to be released); Aboard the Democracy Train by Nafisa Hoodbhoy (very factual non-fiction, taking me a *long* time, I dip in and out on Kindle) and Alok Bhalla's Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home, which I'm eagerly waiting for from Amazon. I watched this wonderful interview with Alok Bhalla a few weeks ago and was struck by his statement that 'the function of art (culture) is to imagine spaces where we can live differently from the way we have been'. By differently, he means better, more ethically. (approx. 20 minutes in)

This weekend, I learned The Friday Project had published an e-book version of British novelist Niven Govinden's Black Bread White Beer, already published in India. I downloaded the sample and immediately downloaded the whole book, something I seldom do. I was grabbed, particularly by one sentence in the opening pages: Amal, the day after his wife's miscarriage, is in conversation with a Polish car mechanic who says that in his country this is 'something we do not speak of. It is kept in the  preserve of women'. Amal replies: "'My country too'. Automatically, he bows to the Indian gene. Though he thinks of himself as educated and enlightened, it is always the pull of the genes that navigates him through crisis, as if there was a state of sense-making that comes solely from the combined force of his parental cells". I still have to read the rest of the book, but for me a novel or short story often spins on one sentence,  above all, and those words stay with me long after I've finished.

100 RPM - stories inspired by music

100 RPM, a gorgeously designed ebook anthology, is released today, the project of Caroline Smailes,  whose enthusiasm is irrepressible and inspiring.

All money raised goes to One in Four charity, which supports victims of sexual violence.

And an  introduction by Nik Kershaw!

Caroline has explained all on her blog.

There are a hundred stories and every story is one hundred words or less and has been inspired by music on You Tube. The playlist is here.

My own story was inspired by Scottish band Glasvegas' version of 'Silent Night'.

I hope you enjoy the book and pass on the word! I'm off to download my copy.

I'm finding I like microfiction more and more, the possibilities as a writer and the little energy required as a reader. Perfect!

* Review of my story here.

** And thanks to Glasvegas for RTing the anthology.

Different states

I've just ordered  paperbacks of The State of Me, and State of Wonder  by Ann Patchett as gifts. I enjoyed both Bel Canto and Truth and Beauty. I have the Kindle sample of State of Wonder; these samples are overflowing, I download them and forget to read them. I imagine them as brightly coloured scraps of fabric that caught my eye, I have no real use for them but can't throw them away (literally, I don't think you can delete a Kindle sample, can you?). Also, just downloaded a sample of The Submission by Amy Waldman which I saw reviewed here. I love learning of novels I'd not yet heard of.

*And here we are, courtesy of Amazon's 3-5 day supersaver delivery:

Lipstick turns into green eyeliner

ME gives me crazy dreams, cinematic, and it's a boring sin to tell your dreams to others - unless they are actually in them - but I'm telling you anyway. I was enrolled at an Italian university and needed photos, there was a booth across the road, and I put on lipstick but it was not lipstick but green eyeliner, no matter how many times I tried to smudge it off and reapply. Eventually, I said to the booth woman, I don't care, please take the photo anyway and she was not happy. I've started reading The Stranger in the Mirror by Jane Shilling, perhaps the dream comes from there. She was 47 when she started writing the book, a year younger than I am now (well, I'm only 48 and four months, I do, sadly, count the months now).

I love the cover, Shilling herself, posing naked, she looks fabulous.

I don't look my age - and I'm glad of that - though it's all down to genes and having to sleep a lot, not by being virtuous in any way. Still, I am my age and, in truth, the thought of middle-age creeping up horrifies me quietly, I think because it underlines that much of my adult life has been shaped by illness and it's honestly depressing to think back to what could have been - that's why I don't. I often think these days I have one foot in the well world and one foot in the ill world - am sure I've said this before - and I hop between them, constantly losing balance (although it probably appears that I am balancing more easily than I actually am).

I'm told The State of Me Kindle version is going up from 99p to £2.99, so if you want a bargain now's your chance (you can barely get a cup of coffee for £2.99, so it's still a bargain). My brother just gave me an Amazon voucher (he gifted me the Kindle, he's a real convert) and said - only half-joking - it's for e-books not shiny hardbacks. I've (slightly) guiltily just bought a shiny hardback cos it's not available in Kindle (and the paperback is not out 'til autumn). I've ordered 'On Being Ill', the essay by Virgina Woolf.

Shilling's book is full of lovely literary references - she speaks of the importance of the comfort to be found in reading fiction - and I was struck by Virginia's words, which she quotes: Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed . . . when we think of this . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

I was trying to say something similar here.

Goodbye, Penguin Book of English Verse!

This is why Kindles are good: there is no glue.

I hate throwing out my uni books, but this was getting ridiculous.

Osamu Dazai, La Vie Murmureé

Some things just speak to you and you want them straight  away, having discovered they exist. This is how I felt seeing the trailer for La Vie Murmureé (The Whispered Life), a French documentary about the Japanese writer Dazai. I'd never heard of Osamu Dazai. I watched the clip a few times, it just hypnotised me. I wanted to know more about this writer, who killed himself when he was just 38. I could find no info on the DVD in France (or UK or USA). I know Scott of The Friday Project - my publisher - loves Japanese writing so I asked him, and also emailed Rick, a Canadian teacher who lives in Japan (Rick takes brilliant photos by the way). Scott had not heard of the documentary but was going to see what he could find out. Rick then told me there's no DVD released in Japan, and he couldn't unearth any other traces. How frustrating, to see this gorgeous teaser-trailer but nothing more accessible! I have meanwhile downloaded The Schoolgirl onto my Kindle. I know little about Japanese literature apart from Banana Yoshimoto (I loved Kitchen) and Murakami (whom I've, shamefully, never got into) and I also loved Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et Tremblements, set in Japan (she's a Belgian writer born in Japan).

Damp

Writing on the good and bad of Kindle, Fictionbitch says: My whole life has been wedded to the physicality of books and their shelves, the way they sat beside my bed on the little white bookcase my parents bought me, or on the planks and bricks I set up in my first-ever flat...' I love this, it resonates so much, the connection we have with the physicality of books (and book shelves!). This weekend, I was reading Teju Cole in the bath and afterwards the book was damp with crinkled pages, and although I'm having a troubled relationship with this novel, the damp book was beautiful lying on the floor, and I thought this is a thing of the past, crinkled books in the bath, when we have given up on our books altogether, what will we put on our shelves instead? A friend recently told me 'her dream house would have shelves with a Kindle and perhaps a shell or one perfect candlestick'. I do like this image - I hate clutter. Except books, I don't really mind 'organised' book clutter and I think - I know - I would miss my books as a backdrop.

'Birth of a book'

Wonderful: old-fashioned book printing, almost makes you want to throw away your Kindle!

Compelling, disturbing, bleakly funny

There has been much buzz around 99 Reasons Why because of the choice of eleven endings, however, I quickly forgot about this quirk when I was reading the novel, I was so drawn in to 22-yr-old Kate’s world, a world that would be unremittingly grim were it not for Caroline Smailes' voice - she is brilliant at broken, abused lives, with just enough  humour to keep you from turning away. I laughed out loud a few times. Kate’s Princess Diana fantasies (her collection of eBay memorabilia heartbreaking ), her ‘job’ of spying on the nursery across the road, and the extreme lovelessness she experiences don’t add up to much of an existence, but the narration is compelling, and the chapters are wonderfully titled - and short (I love short chapters!).  At one point Kate describes a police visit to her home: ‘The blue lights are going, bouncing into me bedroom.’ A gorgeous image for a grim situation.

When the choice of endings came, it felt slightly dislocating as I’d been so engrossed in the story - but it also made me think about what we expect - and need - as readers. Then I felt excited. I tried three endings, the third one satisfied me most, I felt it was the rightful piece in the jigsaw. I decided not to try the rest, it could become addictive (though I don't want to miss any of them, and  will  go back). I think Caroline is to be congratulated on the boldness and cleverness of this novel. I loved it.

99 reasons why I should go back to my Kindle

I keep almost forgetting I've got a Kindle but on Monday I will be eagerly downloading Caroline Smailes' innovative ebook 99 Reasons Why. The eleven endings have caused quite a stir, some people getting their knickers in a right old  twist.  You can read one of the endings here.

I am excited and  want to read them all! 

Update* Just saw this Reuters video, where both Caroline and Scott Pack (our publisher) talk about  99 Reasons Why.


(And I should really go back to Tim Winton's Dirt Music which I think I started end of January on Kindle,  was enjoying and stopped for no good reason (I wonder if the paperback at my bedside would have lured me back sooner, the Kindle can seem inert by comparison, it's just not as seductive if you need a bit of  a push). Though I admit chapter two of The Return of Captain John Emmet  - the paperback - didn't really grab me -  I was reading it at the eye clinic, maybe that's why - I loved the first  chapter - so I've lent it to my mother in the meantime. Two chapters is certainly not enough to dismiss entirely. I will go back, I usually do.)

Silly billies

Delighted for Caroline Smailes that her new ebook 99 Reasons Why is creating such a buzz. Having Karachi roots, I was especially chuffed to see her in The Daily Times in Pakistan. In 99 Reasons Why, Caroline plays with  the possibilities of endings and you the reader can choose which one you would like. However, being playful and imaginative - surely, the job of a writer - has its downside, she is apparently threatening the future of literature, and, according to one reviewer in the DT, doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. The DT also brought us silly billy media doctor Max Pemberton last year talking nonsense about my illness, and at the weekend we learned that Richard Dawkins has a penchant for slaves. Yes, you couldn't make it up, so it's great we have such high quality journalists to do it for us.

'E-books can't burn': essay by Tim Parks

'Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in.'

Interesting article on e-books by Tim Parks.

Dickens, vitamin D & Prof B

Probably a jailable offence but I'm not a huge Dickens fan, I still recall having to read Martin Chuzzlewit at uni, it ruined my Easter holidays. Of course, he has great characters, the names stay in your head, Mr Pecksniff, Magwitch, Miss Havisham (and we've all had our Miss Havisham moments), but given the choice, I would not choose Dickens (though I know I am probably missing out). And I have failed spectacularly (again) to finish The Hare with Amber Eyes, meant to at weekend (started it Jan 2011). I have however started Dirt Music by Tim Winton on my Kindle. Still getting used to Kindle, and though I can now see the point, when I see someone on  the bus reading one I get annoyed, it still feels they are showing off a bit. Am at page 55 of the paperback of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's Lorsque j'étais une oeuvre d'art, it reminds me of Candide, the absurdity. And I downloaded his Oscar et la dame rose onto Kindle. So I'm still primarily a reader of paper  books but am slowly nudging myself into the e-zone.

I've stopped blogging about ME for the time being but this is an interesting article about vitamin D and Scottish ill health due to lack of sun. I am going to start taking a supplement of D, I already take 1 gram of C daily.

*update Just saw this news about Prof Behan. He is to become a patron of MEA.

You've got the sea in your eyes

Had lovely few Christmas days (and birthday!) with my family. My favourite time, bedtime, bantering with my nephews who I was sharing a room with. I asked  if they would visit me when I was old and in a home, the 10-yr-old said of course he would, the 7-yr-old said he would write on a checklist 'have to visit my auntie', that's how he would remember. I'm still bemused that I now have a Kindle, a gift from my brother. I've downloaded Alan Hollinghurst (The Stranger's Child) and Mischa Hiller (Shake Off), I tried to download The State of Me, but apparently I cannot download the revised e-book (I downloaded the original in 2010 to my laptop when it was first released and it says I have already purchased). Since I now have a Christmas cold, the kind where the sneezes start in your feet and make their way up to your head, shaking you like a spin-dryer when they eventually happen, I will not be reading e-books or p-books (though I would like to finish The Hare with the Amber Eyes before Dec 31 as I started it in Jan this year). When I sneeze I look like I'm crying,  and yesterday the wee 7-yr-old said, You've got the sea in your eyes.  Though when I asked him later how to say in German - my sis-in-law is from Hamburg - I love you very much, Auntie N, he made a funny face and said Scheiße! before collapsing in hysterics with his brother. Not the only swearing going on, we got my (Danish) stepdad to say For helvede! a few times as it sounded like it was right out of The Killing.

The Opposite of Kindle

Some days ago, I saw an elderly man on the bus reading an old, battered blue hardback - it had no jacket. He was mouthing the words to himself as he read. The pages were loose. I actually craned my neck to look, but I didn't manage to see the title.