A Common Reader . . .

Review: Granta 105 - Lost and Found

Many publications come through my letterbox but none pleases me quite as much as Granta, and I can't help but think of the many serious readers who would appreciate it if it was more widely known.  Granta 105 lives up to the usual high standard of this excellent magazine and like many readers I am grateful that the new editor, Alex Clark, is doing such a good job. 

The production values of the magazine remain consistently high.  Very clear typeface on high quality paper, well-produced photographs and an overall satisfying look and feel.  The cover price is high (£10.99) but subscriptions will take £3.50 off that and are excellent value.

Granta 105 contains the usual mix of in-depth reporting, quality fiction and photographic features. 

Jeremy Treglown reports from Spain on the slow recovery of memories of the dead from the 1930s Civil War.  Exhumations of mass graves are under-way as grand-children and great grant-children seek out the histories of their relatives.  But this process is not without pain and Treglown describes the divisions in Spanish society which rumble on to this day.  Once more I find myself thinking that these must be difficult days to be Catholic, as I read that the overthrow of the democrats was called for by the bishops and once accomplished, was greeted by Pope Pius XII "with immense joy".  This article is classic Granta, probing in far greater depth than most newspapers would bother with and discovering the human stories behind the news.

A L Kennedy, winner of the 2008 Costa prize for her novel "Day" contributes a short piece of fiction, less a short story, more a nightmarish vision of dentistry gone wrong.  I sympathise, having suffered much at the hands of dentists over the years.

Andrew Martin decides to take up pipe-smoking and meets a lost and dwindling tribe: "the brotherhood of the briar".  While the article is amusing, I'm left wondering why he bothered.  To deliberately decide to adopt an expensive and health-harming habit for the sake of a piece of journalism is slightly bizarre, and it turns out that "the brotherhood" are as we expected, a group of old duffers who seem to live in the past.

Bruce Connew visited China last year and bought a copy of National Geographic magazine from a bookstall.  He took it back to his hotel room and found that it had been censored, with pages clumsily glued together to hide photographs of Mao and articles referring to Taiwan.  He looked into the background to these changes and has produced a fascinating artwork which is reproduced in the magazine.

My favourite article in Granta 105 is Don Paterson's, "If with his skirt he do not touch bread or pottage", a biographical account of growing up as a fundamentalist Christian in Northern Ireland, full of scorching prose describing the sheer stupidity of the belief system to which he adhered.  This is followed by a fascinating study, "Faith of our Fathers", by Maurice Walsh which looks at the state of the church in Ireland and the demise of priests.   The extent of the collapse of Catholicism in Ireland is startling to say the least and Walsh fleshes out the statistics with some insightful human stories. 

There is much more to Granta 105 than this short review can contain, but already Granta 106 has arrived on my doorstep and looks equally interesting, if after all these years, the cover has turned from white to a cobalt blue colour.  I know I shall enjoy reading this as much as the many preceding issues which fill my shelves.

Review: Slightly Foxed, No.21, Spring 2009

It is always a pleasure to receive Slightly Foxed in the morning post. The current edition (Spring 2009) of Slightly Foxed magazine specialises as usual in short articles by a variety of writers and book-lovers on authors of the past century.   Such is the pace of book publishing that it is very easy to forget good writers of even a few years ago and Slightly Foxed provides a place where their work can be rememberd and commemorated.  

For example, the current edition has excellent article by Jenny Erdal  on the writer Peter de Vries, whose 1960's book Blood of the Lamb is a modern classic, recently republished by the University of Chicago press.  The article, "A Serial Offender" reminds us of Arthur Koestler and his book Darkness at Noon, which is based on one man's experience of the Stalinist show trials.  I did not know until reading this article that Koestler himself had suffered in a Spanish prison during the Civil War where random people were being taken out and shot week after week. 

After the last edition's article by Robin Blake on Anthony Buckeridge, the author of the Jennings series of stories set in an English Preparatory school, the Spring edition contains an article, "The Prunes are Revolting" about Willans and Searle's Molesworth series which includes the Down With Skool, How to be Topp, and Back in the Jug Agane.  

Slightly Foxed is a magazine for book-lovers.  Few of us read only serious or literary novels, and I am pleased to see that this month there is even an article on Lee Child's Jack Reacher series - which I find very timely because as I mentioned in my last post I am currently reading the latest volume in this gripping series, Nothing to Lose.  I agree with Karen Robinson that after eleven books, Reacher "still hasn't lost his allure".  Robinson notes Lee Child's amazing attention to detail, where the smallest items can be highly significant to the plot and are followed up a hundred of so pages later.

Immediately after reading about Jack Reacher's trail of mayhem and violence we turn the page and find a highly erudite article on the Japanese Classic, The Tale of Genji.  Lesley Downer brings her own personal perspective to the book setting it in the context of her childhood, where her father could be found sat in a deckchair reading books in oriental languages "while other Dads mowed their lawns or fixed their houses". 

When I read Christopher Robbins' article All Washed Up, I was pleased to be reminded of George Orwell's novel Down and Out in Paris and London.  As with so many Slightly Foxed articles, Robbins manages to describe what the book meant to him at a critical time of his life.  He also worked as a scullion in a Paris restaurant, and witnesses to the accuracy of Orwell's account of the demeaning life of poverty shared by so many even today.

This other-worldly deck-chair reader is almost a metaphor for Slighly Foxed readers, for these are people who love books because they are books, the feel and smell of them, the cluttered book-shelves and the pencilled margin notes from previous readers which form such a precious part of the current reading experience.  The magazine is anachronistic in some ways, and will appeal to those who prefer AbeBooks to Amazon.  However, it is beautifully produced on gorgeous cream paper, with lovely cover illustrations worthy of being framed in their own right. 

Review: The Reader magazine

I occasionally review literary magazines, and was pleased to receive this week through the post a complimentary copy of The Reader.  The Reader is a quarterly magazine covering (according to its strapline) new writings, book talk and news and views. The magazine is published by the charity The Reading Organisation which runs workshops and events aimed at encouraging people to read and enjoy literature.  

The magazine is attractively-produced, being not much more than a paper-back book in size with thick card covers.  The edition I have contains 128 pages.  It is very well designed with clear type-scripts, enough white space to save the magazine from looking too dense, and photographs where required. 

The magazine is edited by Phil Davis of Liverpool University, and in fact is published by the English School at the University.  The Reading Organisation seems to be very active in that part of the country and I think provides work experience for students on the English Literature course.

The contents page shows a good mix of articles about books and poetry, interviews, news, extracts from current work, reviews and recommendations.  Although The Reading Organisation is aimed at encouraging new readers, I would say the magazine would appeal to already enthusiastic readers who would appreciate a literary magazine with a wide-range and a good variety of features.  I can't help but compare The Reader with Granta which is similar in format and content.  The Reader would be more populist and accessible than Granta, but Granta would be more challenging I think, with rather more of a coherent theme or message to each edition.  I make comparisons with other magazines later in this review.

Review: Granta 102

Resubscribing to Granta earlier this year turned out to be a good idea. I had forgotten what a good read it can be, and the new series under editor Jason Cowley continues the high standards I find in old copies on my book shelves. 

I think the reason I stopped subscribing to Granta in the past was the lack of time to read it.  Each edition is quite a substantial read, and the pieces contained in it are not the sort of thing you can flick through while eating lunch.  You need to settle down with Granta, and perhaps I found the most perfect situation for reading it with the last edition when I was on a cross-Channel ferry to Le Havre, a journey time of five hours.  It seemed to fit the mood perfectly, allowing me to complete an article then wander on deck for a while and mull over what I had read, then go back and read another.  By the way, in writing this review, I find myself struggling again with what words to use to describe Granta (magazine? journal?  book?), and the "pieces" it contains (articles? items?). 

Granta 102, The New Nature Writing contains a wide selection of items including several from very well known writers, such as Jonathan Raban, Richard Mabey and Roger Deakin.  The edition is far from being exclusively filled with articles about "nature", although the Mabey and Deakin pieces fit the bill perfectly.  I rather enjoyed extracts from Roger Deakin's notebook, such as

I can't bear to mow my lawn because it would mean mowing the blueness out of it, the vanishing blues of self-heal, bugle and germander speedwell.

As I work, all the robins in the neighbourhood gather on the cut grass and begin feeding and hunting for flies.  The both cats come out and sit in the new-mown hay, observing robins with feigned indifference. All of them are following deep instincts, attracted by the smell of hay, the sounds of me working, and the smell of fresh-cut herbs.

Second Nature - the de-landscaping of the American West by Jonathan Raban is the strongest item in the whole volume as far as I'm concerned.  I've enjoyed Raban's writing for a long time, with Badland, about the disasters which came from "homesteading", being one of my favorite books.  In Second Nature, Raban describes a radical environmentalism at work in America which seeks to return large tracts of land to their original wild condion. In Britain we hear so much about George Bush's government's refusal to bow to environmental pressures that we forget that at state level the story is sometimes very different.  A string of court victories has greatly restricted logging, mining and livestock grazing on public lands and near Seattle for example, 200 square miles of land is being added to existing wilderness areas.  In his 30 or so pages, Raban travels around north west America looking at the consequences of these policies and it is heartening to read of their successes. 

I enjoyed the short story Phantom Pain by Lydia Peelle, about an elderly taxidermist who recently suffered a leg amputation and his response to stories of a mountain lion at large in the neighbourhood.  The writer manages to get across the frustrations of ill-health and the tiresomeness of chronic pain.  I will look out for her debut short-story collection when it is published next year.

Some things don't work so well.  I've never liked transcripts of interviews and even in Netherley - Returning to Liverpool, I feel Paul Farley and Niall Griffiths would have benefited from editing and conflation. On the other hand, the somewhat repetitive photographs in Donovan Wylie's photo essay Demolishing the Maze work well, even though some are almost identical at first glance (incidentally, uUsers of photo-editing software or cameras with advanced manual functions will appreciate the effective use of colour accenting, where only one colour is allowed to emerge from a black and white photograph - see my attempt to the right).  

I won't describe any of the other 18 items in this edition of Granta, but will just mention Sean O'Brien's lovely poem, Elegy.  So often I find published poems little short of incomprehensible (you seem to need the skills of an expert cryptic crossword solver in order to understand them), but in Elegy, O'Brien economically and movingly captures the qualities of his father in ways which will speak to all his readers.  

For those who would like a taste of Granta, the website provides a good starting point, containing selected articles from back issues.  Robert MacFarlane's Blitzed Beijing from the previous edition might be a good place to start. 

Review: Granta 101

After a break of a couple of years, I decided to resubscribe to Granta, prompted perhaps by news of a new editor (Jason Cowley) and a re-launch. Not that there was anything much wrong with the magazine (book?), before, but somehow, Granta was something that didn't fit in easily to my book-reading schedule and tended to end up on the shelf un-read for some months after it arrived. Let's face it, Granta is not exactly something that can be skimmed through, and to read it cover to cover takes quite a commitment of time. Anyway, Granta 101 arrived just in time for me to take it to France for a short holiday, and what better to take on the lengthy ferry crossing to Le Havre?

Sailing to France on the rather fine ship operated by Transmanche was, as expected, just the place to read Granta - with a five hour journey, you have no alternative other than to settle down to something substantial and by the time I returned to England a few days later I can only say that resubscribing to Granta was an excellent idea. 

The Paris Intifada by Andrew Hussey is what Granta is all about. Hussey, is highly qualified to write this article on the Paris Banlieue, which lie around the peripherique.  We have all read newspapers articles or seen television pictures of the rioting in "the suburbs", but Hussey gives us an in-depth tour of the area and encounters the people who live there.  He bravely meets people who by the sound of it could easily lock him in a lost apartment and torture him to death (this has happened to one unfortunate in 2006), and manages to engage them in conversation about their alienation and their feelings about the city on the other side of the ring-road.  Because Hussey knows so much about the political and cultural predicament of the Banlieue he is able to set what he finds in a broad context and help his readers understand what is really going on in this deeply troubled community. 

Review: Slightly Foxed, No. 17, Spring 2008

Slightly Foxed, "the real readers quarterly", is a magazine for people whose reading is not confined simply to what is new or popular.  As their website suggests, the magazine will suit "people who don't want to read only what the big publishers are hyping and the newspapers are reviewing".  Any enthusiastic reader, will be all too conscious of the way in which tastes are manipulated for commercial reasons, especially  to recoup the huge advances paid to authors, and it is refreshing to find in Slightly Foxed, a magazine which is free of glossy adverts for the latest literary fashion accessory. 

The Slightly Foxed website poses the questions:

• Do you carry elderly Penguins in your pockets?
• Do you panic if you find yourself on a journey with nothing to read?
• Do you linger in the book sections of charity shops?

Well, the second question is one to which I can answer a definite "yes".  I have even been known to take a book to the supermarket in case I am held up at the checkout, and the thought of being in the dentist waiting room with only the surgery's Daily Express to read is the stuff of nightmares.

The first and third questions, while relevant to Slightly Foxed are slightly misleading because the magazine is definitely not the sort of thing you'd find in a charity shop and the production values of the magazine bear little relation to "elderly penguins" (mine tend to be falling apart with thin, yellowing paper - "slightly foxed" in fact!).   

Review: newbooks magazine

newbooks is one of the few British independent book magazines.  It is "glossy", with many full colour photographs and illustrations, and in appearance would be more in the style of Waterstone's Books Quarterly rather than say London Review of Books or Times Literary Supplement.  It covers a wide range of books, mostly from the popular end of the market, perhaps catering to the Richard and Judy book club audience, although more serious historical books are also covered. 

Its publisher, Guy Pringle, was HarperCollins Publisher's Retail Marketing Manager before branching out to start Newbooks and other ventures, and has a wide and deep knowledge of the publishing industry (as a quick Google of his name will reveal).  Guy is very committed to promoting reading and has worked with libraries to set up reading days up and down the country. His knowledge of the industry has enabled him to market newbooks with a unique selling point - free books.  Every month, five books are featured and readers can select one to be sent to them, for £2.95 to cover postage and packing.  The selection is quite broad - the current issue is offering:

• A Golden Age - Tahmima Anam
• South of the River - Blake Morrison
• Radiance - Shaena Lambert
• Can Any Mother Help Me? - Jeanna Bailey
• Secret - Philippe Grimbert

(OK, so nothing there for me, but 10 out of 10 for trying).