Book Reviews – Page 9 – Interesting Literature

Well-Versed: Joe Nutt’s The Point of Poetry

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a fun new book about the point of reading and studying poetry

What is the point of poetry? Do we read it because we enjoy it? Some do; many are still waiting for that one poem to come along and transform their opinion; many more keep well away from it with the exception of funerals and buying greetings cards with emetic verses inscribed within. Many claim it has saved their life, or at least made them feel a little less low during dark times (Stephen Fry once picked Philip Larkin’s depressing poem ‘Aubade’ as one of the poems he turns to when feeling down, because simply seeing your own grim feelings expressed so deftly and movingly lifts the spirits by showing you what human beings can achieve with words). Many hapless students struggle through Shakespearean iambic pentameter or Wilfred Owen’s war poems without ever having that moment where it all ‘clicks’ for them.

So Joe Nutt, a former English teacher who

The Best of Early Wyndham

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys some vintage science fiction courtesy of The Best of John Wyndham, 1932-1949

I’ve blogged before about my discovery of John Wyndham’s science fiction in a local charity shop, which had a number of old paperbacks for 99p each. That initial book haul yielded, among others, The Seeds of Time, one of a number of short-story collections published by the master of what Brian Aldiss called (perhaps a tad unfairly, if not reductively) the ‘cosy catastrophe’. But John Wyndham had served a long apprenticeship by the time he became a household name in the 1950s thanks to The Seeds of Time, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes, and, first and chief of all, The Day of the Triffids. The Best of John Wyndham, 1932-1949 showcases the best of John Wyndham’s early stories.

Fantasy Book Review: Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads an enjoyable and high-octane fantasy from one of the genre’s most original voices

Here’s a question for you. Have you heard of the poet William Ashbless? He has his own Wikipedia page. Yet he doesn’t exist. He never has. Ashbless was the creation of two writers, Tim Powers and James Blaylock, in the 1970s when they were college students. Unimpressed by the terrible poetry being published in their school magazine, Blaylock and Powers decided to invent their own poet and submit ‘his’ work to the magazine as a joke. It was enthusiastically accepted.

A Highly Readable History of What It Means to Read

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new short history of literacy and reading by Belinda Jack

For Rene Descartes, ‘Reading all the great books is like a conversation with the most honourable people of earlier centuries who were their authors’, while for John Ruskin, ‘Reading is precisely a conversation with men who are both wiser and more interesting than those we might have occasion to meet ourselves.’ These two opinions are quoted in Belinda Jack’s Reading: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions), one of the latest titles in the Very Short Introductions series produced by Oxford University Press. And Jack does a superb job of summarising the history of reading in this slim volume.

Jack organises her exploration of the history and main aspects of reading and literacy into seven short, readable chapters: ‘What is reading?’, ‘Ancient worlds’, ‘Reading manuscripts, reading print’, ‘Modern reading’, ‘Forbidden reading’, ‘Making sense of reading’, and ‘Pluralities’. Each chapter offers some wonderful insights into the way reading has altered and developed over the centuries and millennia. Among the gems I especially relished was Jack’s short history of the invention of the printing press: contrary to

Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads a rare but revealing extended interview with one of fantasy fiction’s greatest writers

When John Steinbeck was once asked how he went about writing, he replied, ‘With a pencil.’ Some writers are reluctant to give away too much about their inspiration, their influences, their thinking and writing and editing processes, as if wanting to perpetuate the Romantic fallacy that genius and inspiration just strike and that the lucky, ‘gifted’ individual is driven to pick up a pen and write down what the Muse dictates.

Despite his prodigious gifts and his long-standing success as a novelist, Michael Moorcock is only too happy to share the secrets of his craft. In a 1992 book, Death Is No Obstacle, which is essentially a long transcript of interviews the writer Colin Greenland had with Moorcock in 1990, Moorcock happily reveals some of the ‘tricks of the trade’ of writing genre fiction, as well as thoughtfully exploring his own relationship with various genres of popular fiction. The book isn’t easy to get hold of – copies tend to go for around £50 online. I’m indebted to my university library, which owns a signed copy.