Art Researchers' Guide to Edinburgh edited by Kerry Eldon and Rose Roberto

Other Guides

Okay, so this book didn't win a Booker Prize, and it's only just been published, so we don't have that many sales yet. But I'm putting it here so everyone can see what I've been doing when not working, and not reading, and let's face it, if I don't market it, who else will, since it's not with a major publisher?

My co-editor, Kerry, based at the National Galleries of Scotland, and I have been working on this book for the past year.  It is the second in what I hope will be a good series of little guidebooks around the UK.  Last year I did a similar one for the city of Leeds.  There is talk about doing a guide to Dublin next, but when it will come out will depend on the sales of this book.

You can find out more about the series here, and order a copy online. [Edit: this is now sold out, but the latest one on Liverpool is available here.]

The book launch for this book was on Thursday night, at the ARLIS conference reception at the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology. We've been getting lots of praise for this little book, so I encourage everyone with any interest in art, design, or architecture to ask your local library to purchase one, and if you are planning a trip to Scotland anytime in the next few years, please get your own copy.  It's light, fits in the pocket, and it's very useful.  The index is pretty unique, so if you're interested in painting, or sculpture, or 18th century botanical illustrations, you will know exactly where to go.  (Yes, it is that detailed). And it's a good price at only £6.50 that won't break your bank.
This guide is now sold out, but more guides are available for Manchester and Liverpool.

Famished Road by Ben Okri

This was an extremely long novel, and I must say will not be to everyone's liking.  The quote on the book said, "It's not like anything you've ever read."  Ominous. If you are a fan of magical realism, you may like it.  I liked it for a little bit, but I'm not convinced that it needed to be more than 500 pages.  I did manage to finish the whole book, but I only accomplished that by reading it in bits on the train ride home.

I was getting very depressed with some of the other titles on the Booker list, particularly where the plot involved violence or abuse towards children.  This novel was very depressing, dealing with poverty in an unnamed post colonial country in Africa, and the main character constantly nearly dying.

The story is told in a dream sequence style, and begins before  the main character is born.  The main character, a boy named Azaro, is in the spirit world, and promises his spirit friends he will return to them shortly.  But after he is born and has lived for a bit, he decides he to stay in the world and live despite the abject poverty, first because of love for his parents, then eventually because he is fascinated by the beautiful and terrible things he sees in the world.

In general, I think I like magical realism in novels.  I certainly liked the novels from authors such as Isabel Allende.  But, I found myself getting a bit bored between the truly depressing parts of this particular novel.

Here's a link I found to someone else's review of the novel in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jan/20/booker-club-famished-road

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

I've been on the waiting list for this book from the Sheffield Public Library and I was finally able to pick it up on Saturday.  I started reading it this morning, and finished it an hour ago.  I think it's excellent.

The book is divided into two parts.  Part One is narrated from the main character, Tony Webber about what he remembers his last year in school and his first 2 years at University.  He talks about his relationship with a high school friend named Adrian Finn and later a girlfriend, Veronica Ford, at University.  Then about the way he remembers a tragedy, 40 years later when he is in his 60s.

Part Two begins when he gets a letter from Veronica Ford's mother leaving him something in her will.  This letter causes him to re-establish contact with Veronica and re-examine how he remembers the past, and what might have actually happened.

At some point in the story he re-reads a letter he sent to Adrian, his last contact with his friend before the tragedy.  He has forgotten what he wrote, and the bitterness he felt at the time.  This is a clever novel, as the memory sequences go back and forth between the present and the past.  It also makes readers ponder: Is there is a way we see ourselves, a narrative we write about ourselves, that is different from how others see us? And is what we think at the time what actually happened? 

As I approach 40, I do find myself looking back at events 10 and 20 years past.  There are certain, strange details that you remember with clarity, and through the prism of time understand them better than you did then.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I read this book a few years ago shortly after it won the Booker Prize.  I'm taking a short break from reading them, because most of the ones I've picked up lately, while good stories, seem to have some form of child abuse or neglect as the main story-line.  As I have a young child and there is another on the way,  I doing some "lighter" reading at the moment. This may be of interest to some.  An article about how to spot bad books: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=418955

That being said, Wolf Hall does open with the main character, a 15-year-old boy, who will grow up to be Thomas Cromwell, being beaten to a pulp, before he runs away.  However, at least this character is somewhat in charge if his own destiny, unlike some of the past titles I've read recently, where once a mistake or tragedy happens the main character is forever affected by it.  We as readers, or at least I personally, don't completely like Cromwell, but I do feel like we have a  good understanding of what makes him tick and why he does what he does in his rise to power as one of Henry VIII's most trusted advisers.

Interestingly enough, in the article that I refer to above, one of the contributors mentions Wolf Hall as a very bad book.   Says Susan Bassnett, from the University of Warwick,
"High on my list of Really Bad Books are two best-sellers: Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, both of which I rate as dreadfully badly written. Brown wrote to a computer game formula: solve one level and move on to the next, whereas Mantel just wrote and wrote and wrote. I have yet to meet anyone outside the Booker panel who managed to get to the end of this tedious tome. God forbid there might be a sequel, which I fear is on the horizon."

I think Bassnet is being overly harsh... I don't think Wolf Hall was that bad.  It was a bit long, and it is not the Tudors (TV series of recent years) by any means... some people may like that about the book.  However, I thought it was worth reading.  Interestingly enough that same year I did read Hilary Mantel's much shorter An Experiment in Love.  As I now live in the north of England where many of the flashback scene's take place, I did find it very evocative of a certain time and place, though for the life of me I still didn't understand the meaning of the title.  An Experiment in Love centers on the first year of two female students in 1970 (the first in their respective families to undertake university degrees).  As in Wolf Hall, I think Mantel is very good a creating scenes and interactions between her characters, but again, I didn't completely like them as people, although I felt like I had a good understanding of what was going in their heads.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

This is a compelling and disturbing novel centering around 3 people who clearly love each other but who have deep problems.  Set in the South Island of New Zealand, and incorporating Maori myth and language, the reader is immediately thrust into a realistic story that at the same time has a dream-like quality about it.  The story opens when Kerewin, a hermit, falls asleep outside on the beach.  When she wakes up she finds a little sandal.  Upon going home she finds an 8 year-old boy, the owner of the sandal, perched in a high window in her house.  The boy's name is Simon, he's mute, and he has in fact injured his foot.  Kerewin finds herself, as the novel progresses, intertwined in the life of Simon and his adoptive father, Joe 
This is a very well-written novel, some of it was difficult for me to get through, I must admit, because there are scenes of violence against children.  But I think an author that gets you into a novel enough to make you feel quite strongly about her characters has managed her craft very well.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Just finished this book on the train ride home today. It is quite a tome, but I enjoyed reading it.  The story centers on two sisters, Laura and Iris Chase.  One of them died shortly after WWII by suicide, the other is an old woman in 1999 recalling her life and the life and death of her sister.  Within this novel are two other narratives: the first one follows two lovers (one of the sisters and a young man) meeting clandestinely in the 1930s;  the other narrative is a story that the lovers are sharing with each other.  This story shared becomes the title of the actual book, The Blind Assassin, as well as the title of the fictional book written by Laura Chase and published after her death by her sister. 

This was a very compelling, intriguing book that slowly reveals family history and has a couple of surprising twists.

I think it is one of my favorites from this Booker prize list, so far.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This is a fascinating novel.  It centers around two twins, Rahel, the sister, Estha the brother, their dysfunctional family and the repressive society that they live in.  The story unfolds in two time periods, the present, when the twins are 31 years old, and in 1969 when the twins were 7 years old and tragic events occur which transform their lives and propel them into wounded adulthood.
The characters are complex, the main villain, Baby Kochamma, the aunt of the twin's mother, is a bully, but also  the victim of mistreatment herself.  None of the characters escapes the small things that together bring ruin, but they are all defined by their own experience of lost opportunity, personal endurance, and love.