Some random and not so random links

The craft lifestyle

Found over at Scarlet Tentacle there was an interesting link to a piece on whether DIY is an affordable or even a fun lifestyle, it’s something I think about quite a lot myself, particularly about knitting, as a knitted jumper in a shop is so much cheaper than a hand knitted jumper, however whereas the author of the piece seemed very down on the whole craft movement as a whole, I can see both sides of the argument. Take the knitting example, yes a hand knitted jumper is more expensive but you’re not only paying for the jumper itself but for the hours of pleasure knitting the jumper is going to give you, also chances are the wool you use to make your jumper will be a better quality (more likely to be actually wool for a start) and if you make the jumper yourself you are more likely to care and cherish for the jumper and wear it for many more years than a ‘disposable’ jumper for £30. However, as much as I believe in the above argument, I’ve never got beyond knitting scarves because I don’t trust my knitting skills on such an expensive project, I strongly suspect I’d personally cock a jumper up.

I came up against the same thing recently when replacing the curtains in the flat, I made the kids’ bedroom curtains as I’d bought the material a while ago but noticed whilst I was making them that I could have bought the same curtains ready made for £1 cheaper. When searching for curtains for the rest of the flat I looked at both options; hand made (by me) or ready made, did the sums and found that buying ready made would be cheaper and by a lot more than £1 (£20-£30 cheaper) and as we were trying to justify buying more expensive kitchen stools than we’d originally planned at the time, we went for ready made. Since getting back home and hanging the home made curtains and the ready made curtains, you know what? The home made curtains are nicer, the quality of the lining I used (which was only £7 a metre) is far better than the lining on the ready made curtains, consequently the home made curtains hang better, block out light better and keep out the chill more efficiently, I kind of regret going for the ready mades (but we were trying to save money in our budget) and have promised myself that if we need curtains in the future and we can justify the money, I will make my own curtains next time. It comes to something though when making your own curtains is the luxury option and in a way I think it’s an example of what this society is becoming; everything is manufactured to be cheap, cheap, cheap, it’s no wonder the cheap(er) ready made curtains I bought were badly lined, it’s because they were ‘cheap’ (ok, they were still frighteningly expensive). It’s no wonder as supermarkets constantly drive food prices down (or attempt to), squeezing more and more out of the manufacturers, that that beef lasagne turns out to have horse in in it. And those £30 jumpers, made with nothing that’s actually been near a sheep and manufactured in a Far East sweatshop. The article I linked to above states that the craft movement is just another extension of materialism, whose got the best hand diamanted shoes, that sort of thing and yes a lot of craft is like that and that crafting is the preserve of upper middle class women who’ve got the money to choose between the cheap scarf and the more expensive hand made one and I agree, yes, if you don’t have that much money of course it’s the cheap shop bought scarf but what the article totally misses is that at least for some the craft movement is about reconnecting with how things are made. Before I started thinking about making my own clothes I did not connect the price of the clothes on the hanger in the shops with what corners must be being cut to get it that cheap. I didn’t think about materials or labour or where the item came from. Crafting has opened my eyes to those things.

I do agree though, some aspects of craft are not sustainable, I look at some of the things showing up on Pinterest and places like that and wonder where on earth all these paper machied whats-its or what evers are going, how do they find the space? Is what’s being created being created with thought, care and at least some aspiration to permanence? Sorry to keep on going on about the lack of space in my own home, but as I continue to unpack it is still very much on the forefront of my mind, I am struck more and more that what I make in the future has to have a purpose (even if that purpose is just to be pretty to look at), I have to cut back on making for the sake of making, I don’t have the space, funds or really the time. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes making for the sake of making can be very important but for me personally, not right now.

Amazon warehouses

Sort of linked in with my thoughts about how the products we buy can be so cheap, this article from the Financial Times about working practices at the Amazon warehouses is going to make me think next time I order something from there and I’ll admit, much as I desperately would like our high streets to continue to exist, I do still shop from Amazon sometimes (particularly craft books, because my local bookstore doesn’t stock many, many good ones that is). Basically the article describes how Amazon ‘lands’ in these towns with low employment, everyone thinks “yay!” and then everyone (or at least most, by the sounds of it) ends up not working for Amazon itself but for an agency, making their jobs far less secure, not great for town regeneration is it, when the populace can’t reliably count on still being employed next month? What was particularly worrying was the case examples where people take sick leave, come back and find their shifts cancelled. So next time I order something from Amazon (which I probably will, I’ll admit it), I’m going to at least spare a thought on the poor person walking miles through their warehouses in ill fitting boots with their blisters, knowing they can’t slow down or risk a sick day.

What was particularly fascinating about the article was the comments underneath, they seemed pretty evenly divided between “that’s just so shocking” and “cut the whinging, at least they’ve got jobs, this is the way society is going etc. etc. etc.”. I wonder what all the cut the whingers, sitting snug in their armchairs, enjoying their cheap books (and everything else) are going to say when their children grow up and that’s the only sort of working practice left?

And now for two things completely different

• This post from Wil Wheaton about failures leading to successes in something else is fantastic. I know I haven’t mentioned it here for a very long time, but I still do want to write, I’ve just been caught in the trap that I did pretty much complete the novel I was working on for years and, well, it’s a bit crap, I’m not going to send it to a publisher, I am in no way going to risk my first impression with any publisher to be with that book. However the book has been sitting there, looking at me, going “well you could rewrite me again” “you’ve worked so long on me, don’t give up on me now” and that’s been keeping me pinned, stopping me from working on anything else. However, I’ve been trying to remind myself recently that chances are there are very very few authors who’ve got published on the very first book they’ve ever written, the first book is a learning journey, I know stuff about writing that I did not know when I started that story and that has been its fatal flaw, no matter how much I rewrite it, it’s foundations where laid when, to be honest, I really didn’t know what I was doing. Part of me thinks / hopes, that I will rewrite that story one day, from scratch, so that a version does get out there but for the moment I need to take my failure and use it to build a success with a new story, here’s hoping anyway.
• And finally, read this blog, it’s not for the faint hearted or easily offended and the content is VERY mature (you have been warned) but it’s very funny.

The House of Silk

I am in no means the first person to note that there seems to be a bit of an ongoing craze at resurrecting past, for want of a better word, franchises under new authors, there was Hitchhikers, James Bond (twice – with the Young Bond books by Charlie Higson which I thoroughly enjoyed and then Carte Blanche by Jeffrey Deaver which I thought was ok but so – so at the same time) and now a resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, also twice, with the Young Sherlock Holmes books by Andrew Lane which I thought were even more so – so than Carte Blanche and now The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, which is a grown up Holmes but I think would appeal to the YA market far more than the Young Holmes series, but I am getting ahead of myself. Getting back to the subject of the resurrection of book series under different authors I think that sometimes it’s ok and sometimes it isn’t. If you take the (now not so) new Hitchhikers for example, written by Eoin Colfer, that does not feel as right as say a new Bond or a new Holmes because whereas with James Bond and Sherlock Holmes we’ve been flooded for years with various writers takes on the subject, Hitchhikers was very much Douglas Adams’, considering the radio and TV versions were his to. So all this is my way of saying I have no objection to a new Holmes story. I particularly appreciated how Horowitz handled, at the beginning of the book, why there was a new book, as it starts with a retired Watson in a nursing home, writing one last story that was too scandalous to write at the time and so he says is even too scandalous to publish after he has finished writing (which in the book is sometime during the First World War), so he writes the manuscript and leaves it to his family with the instructions that it is not to be read for 100 years, hence it’s supposed publication now, which I thought was a neat way of getting round why there was another Holmes book.

Horowitz captures Watson’s voice well (aided by me listening to this as an audiobook, which was read extremely well by Derek Jacobi) and he equally captures turn of the century London just as well, with it’s atmospheric pea soupers and all. Horowitz reminds me of an important lesson in writing in that when describing a scene use all your senses, so as Watson entered each new scene you would get the sounds and smells as well as the sights, which helped immensely in getting me totally engrossed.

The plot is interesting, involving American bank robbers and a mysterious organisation, the aforementioned House of Silk. All the regular aspects of Holmes are there, his violin, his depression, his temptation for drugs and there’s the Baker Street Irregulars to. I think considering that this book has been written by such a popular children’s author, hopefully The House of Silk will act as a great introduction to YA readers who haven’t read Arthur Conan Doyle yet. Horowitz leaves plenty of tempting hints about Holmes other adventures in the book and the involvement of child characters would make it a good read for anyone 11+, I wouldn’t recommend it for below that though as there is some violence and the discovery of what The House of Silk actually is, isn’t pleasant.

I haven’t read any Conan Doyle for quite some time (I read most of the Sherlock stories when I myself was a teenager), so I’m not sure if the one difference I thought I detected in the book is actually a difference at all, as it may have gone over my head a bit when I read them. There is quite a strong streak of rage against injustice, particularly injustice towards children in the book, with several monologues about how could children fall through the gaps in society in the way they had in the book (and in a way, sort of similar to how children can fall through the gaps in society today). Like I say, I can’t remember the same (just) moralising in Conan Doyle, have I just forgotten it?

All in all I hope Horowitz writes some more Holmes books, the book leaves with the retired Watson sad that he has finished writing because he enjoyed transporting himself back in time to his old friend, here’s hoping Horowitz will think of a few more stories that were ‘too scandalous to tell at the time’.

Related articles

• Digested Read: The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz (guardian.co.uk)
• Anthony Horowitz resurrects Sherlock Holmes (bbc.co.uk)
• The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz – review (guardian.co.uk)

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is one of those books, that at least for me, creeps up on you and before you know it the books gone from “mmmm it’s ok”, to total utter adoration, I absolutely loved this book. Set on a small trading island off the coast of Japan at the turn of the 19th century, it tells the story of Jacob de Zoet, a clerk from the Dutch trading company, who has signed up for 6 years overseas in an attempt to make his fortune before returning to marry his sweet heart. At first I found de Zoet to be a little annoying, he whinged a bit and was behaving like a love sick puppy (and the object of his attention was not his Dutch sweet heart) but I guess that’s the beauty of books like this, to be totally swept away by the transformation of a character, the character can’t start out from page 1 as being perfect.

I love how Mitchell has written this book, told from the point of view of many different characters, you often don’t see key events, instead you stumble upon them alongside a minor character as that character comes across a main character at the tail end of doing something significant. Or you don’t see the event at all and are drip fed clues about what happened from another character’s recollections.

I loved how Mitchell portrayed the two clashing cultures of the Dutch and the Japanese; the Dutch on the island are dependent on the guild of interpreters and when we see the interpreters from the viewpoint of the Dutch characters the interpreters seem clumsy and two-dimensional but de Zoet himself is clumsy in his dealings with them as he doesn’t bother to think about some of the things he asks them to do. Yet in the chapters told from the viewpoint of the Japanese characters they are much more fluent and heroic.

I think there are probably many types of scenes / characters in books that are difficult to do well, one such type of scene is the death scene, it must be so hard to strike the level as just right, too melodramatic and it’s just stupid and yet not enough emotion and it feels like the character meant nothing after all. In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet there are several death scenes and Mitchell does every single one of them beautifully, I don’t want to say which one was my ‘favourite’ as I really hadn’t been expecting that character to die, not like that anyway, so I don’t want to spoil the surprise for anyone else, but it’s the first major death scene (for anyone who’s read the book and knows what I’m talking about), that scene haunted my thoughts for days after listening to it.

Another thing I think must be difficult to write well is the bad guy, a good bad guy must think whatever he’s doing has perfectly legitimate reasons (I can’t remember the origin of this quote, which I’m probably paraphrasing really badly, it may be Neil Gaiman, but the bad guy must be the hero of his own story). Mitchell’s bad guy thinks he’s perfectly justified in his actions and consequently it makes him chillingly and deliciously evil (and again I’m not going to be more specific than that because I think Thousand Autumns really is one of those stories where you need to go into it knowing as little as possible as to what is going to happen).

I listened to this as an audiobook, I am now very tempted to get this is an actual book now, which is only the second time I’ve loved an audiobook that much to want to do that. So, as you may guess, I’d highly recommend this one but with a caveat, it is one of those books that does take a little while to truly get into, but patience with it is highly worth it.

I love this quote from Neil Gaiman

I tend to put images I love on Pinterest and often quotes to, if someone’s made a nice picture out of them, but this is a too recent quote for someone to have gone all typographically interesting on it, so I’m going to put the quote here instead because I think it’s important and true.

This is part of quote that never made it to the Guardian on Neil Gaiman’s response to being placed for the second year running for the Astrid Lindgren Longlist. The quote ended up on Gaiman’s blog instead, here’s part of it.

Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn’t something you do for money. It’s something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we’re going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we’re gone.

Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it’s true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.

Books nationality

After finishing listening to the very excellent Horns it struck me that all I seem to read / listen to is American books, so I thought I’d go back and search through this blog to see if I was right in that feeling. I searched back up to the beginning of the year and found that yes, recently it has been pretty much just American books but I have read some British books this year to. The results were UK books read this year (so far) – 7 1/2, American books read this year (so far) 10 1/2 and books set elsewhere – 2 (by the way I’m not talking about the nationality of the author, just where the book is set, although often they’re one and the same, oh and also if you’re wondering about the 1/2 bit, A Discovery of Witches was set pretty much half and half in the UK and the US, with a bit in France to).

I do seem to prefer books set in America though, I think I prefer their tone, I read (or listen) pretty much for entertainment (although I hope to learn something along the way to) and I seem to be of the, maybe stereotypical opinion, the American books are ‘fun’ whereas British books can be prone to being dry and worthy. Also, as I’ve said often in this blog, I love books where I’ve felt like I’ve lived for a while in someone else’s shoes, learnt a bit about their lives (be it a tunnel digger or a medieval lawyer) and maybe that prompts my decisions when book buying to, I look for ‘different’ and when I see a book set in the UK it’s not different enough. I think my problem is I don’t read anywhere near as much as I used to anymore, I just don’t have time (which is pretty scandalous for someone who would still like to write), so I’ve become more stereotyped in my book buying, going for set patterns of stuff I know I’ll like just because I don’t have the time to be risky.

Having said that my current read (as opposed to listen) which is going very slowly (due to lack of time, not because I don’t like the book, although it’s not as good as the author’s previous work) is set in Scotland and definitely doesn’t come under ‘dry and worthy’. Also, although I may be coming over all americo-phile right now, wait till you see the blog post I’m going to get round to writing about this current series of Torchwood.

Anyway, does where the book is set influence your book buying decisions? Does it matter?

Graveminder

Graveminder by Melissa Marr was my latest audiobook listen, an adult supernatural fantasy set in a small American town. I don’t want to give too much away about this book because part of the thing about reading (or listening) to the book is discovering what is going on alongside the main character, but I will say if you like Stacia Kane’s Downside series, you’ll also probably like this, as it has similar aspects, although Graveminder is less gritty and the romance element also isn’t quite as good, as I like how Stacia Kane’s characters have an on – off again aspect, whilst Marr’s characters are pretty much stuck on one setting, which can get annoying at times and made me want to yell at the characters to get over it as it was getting boring. However, the romance aside (and a few moments where the scene jumped leaving me feel disorientated as to what scene exactly I was listening to now, as Marr had leapt straight into the scene, without any setting up, I know it’s ok to do that occasionally, but it felt like it happened to often in this book), there are some good scenes, particularly the book opening, which was subtly very chilling. Overall though, the story, although not one of my favourite stories I’ve read or listened to this year by far, it was still perfectly entertaining.

The Lost Gate

I listened to The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card as an audiobook and it was a pleasant enough listen. It tells the tale of a boy Danny, who lives on a family compound in America and pretty much all his large extended family are magical, descendents of our ancient gods, except for him. As well as being ancient gods, Danny’s family are descendents from the planet of Westil, they and other families had travelled between Westil and Earth by magic gates until 1400 years ago a Gate Mage called Loki stole all the gates, stranding the families on Earth. From that point on, none of the families wanted a Gate Mage in their family, so if one was born, they were killed.

The Lost Gate also tells the story of Wad, a kitchen boy who lives on Westil and becomes embroiled in the politics of one of the planet’s kingdoms. Danny’s and Wad’s stories, although not immediately connected, intertwine quite nicely.

The Lost Gate is a good example of telling and not showing (I read a lot of ‘how to be a writer’ books and websites and one of the most common pieces of advice is to show – through action, not tell). The world Orson Scott Card has created is so complex that to have shown everything through action would have resulted in a much longer book and it would have lost some of its pace. There is an interesting afterword at the end of the book where Orson Scott Card describes how long it took to write the book and how many stages it went through and he does say that he likes imagining himself as a story teller around a camp fire and before even hearing the afterword that is what The Lost Gate so reminded me of, a good traditional camp fire story, which when you think about it, often has more telling than showing.

I have some criticisms of the book though, The Lost Gate has a very clear message running through it about the trials of growing up into being a responsible young adult and that message is not at all subtle and at several points it veered towards being preachy, not good for a young adult book. There is also a whole section where Danny goes to high school and at that point (I won’t say why for not wanting to spoil the point), I lose all sympathy for the character and if something had happened to him at that point I’d have sat up and applauded, I really didn’t care about him at all, whereas Wad does some nastier things but his motivation for those things were far more understandable, so I kept my sympathy for him. But all in all, it was a good book, I’m not sure if it’s good enough to make me want to read the next in the series though.