Jenny Diski writes

in the Guardian that snow

apparently has a magnetic power to draw cliche and sentiment. I found it was impossible not to start this article with the phrase 'blanket of snow'. Well, it is, isn't it? Duvet would have done: a better image even, floatier, but blanket is precisely the right word if, like me, you think of duvets as new-fangled 70s' arrivals. Blankets are what we snuggled under as kids, were wrapped in when we were ill. Fur blankets covered the Snow Queen when she collected little Kay in her sleigh, to take him off to her ice palace in Spitzbergen. We listened to Hans Christian Andersen's tale of frozen intellect versus the life-enhancing warmth of the heart, toasty ourselves under our blankets, but, if you were me, pretty disappointed that Gerda melts Kay's icy blood and makes him forget that he was supposed to be trying to make the word eternity out of the jigsaw of a broken, frozen lake. And we know that under the blanket of snow it is warm and sappy.

I love the Snow Queen, and I love Jenny Diski. Her novel Nothing Natural was one of the most mesmerizing books I've ever read, and I like her others a lot too, though they're difficult to get hold of in the US.

I was very pleased

with Michael Simon's Dirty Sally: good-quality noir fiction, set in Austin in the late 80s--I hope that this is the first in a series, I will avidly await the next one.

Over the course of

a staggeringly unproductive weekend that involved mostly excessive sleeping I did read a couple of novels: Hari Kunzru's Transmission (a talented writer, but this book's not so much my kind of thing; too satirical and flashy; there were some things I really liked, but my own life is conducted SO FAR from this glitzy globalized media-ey world that it all seems rather beside the point; reminiscent of Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century, only Andersen has the gift of making characters you really care about); and Greg Bear's Dead Lines (I enjoyed it, though I think the main character could have been more fully and attractively fleshed out, so to speak; probably inferior to Tim Powers, whose books leave me feeling genuinely queasy). I want to write an all-out horror novel sometime.

And also

I just got back from seeing J. B. Priestley's play I Have Been Here Before at the Pearl--good fun--VERY old-fashioned, but in a good way--also b/c it's sort of about spiritualism I felt that it vaguely counted as research. (Am waiting in agonized anxiety to find out what further revisions my agent thinks are needed on the novel.)

And this morning I went and ambled around a few of those Gates so all told it was a day of art--and my friend Nico bailed me out on a mysterious Edgeworth-related emergency. I'm teaching the book on Monday and I looked twice each at home and work to find it & it's nowhere in sight (though I did find, to my great shame, a library book--George Gissing's peculiar book about Charles Dickens--that I swore I'd returned--not just swore metaphorically but have been hounding the library staff to take the $90 fine and replacement fee off my record--I am going to have to skulk in with it & grovel.... I foresee trouble and shame....). Fortunately I've got Nico's now, and the law of lost objects says that tomorrow I will find my own copy sitting in plain view and kick myself for not seeing it before. However that doesn't matter one way or the other...

Though I don't know much at all

about small press publishing I am (for better/worse) one of those people who's ready to give advice about almost anything under the sun, and I will have the opportunity to join the far more knowledgeable and eminent David Rees and Richard Eoin Nash on a panel discussing "the present state and likely future of indie publishing" on March 10 at 6pm at the Small Press Center.

This morning I finished reading

Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin, which was every bit as good as I'd hoped. It is a spectacularly fine novel! Her writing is really, really good--at first this was almost a problem, the language is so witty and wise-cracky and bitter that it distracts you from the more complex emotional stuff that's being built up, but by about 100 pages in I was completely immersed. Eva is such a mix of the impossible and crotchety and annoying and real.... A great, great unreliable narrator novel. Everybody should read it. It's great.

I have this longstanding desire--really I must make this happen, it's silly I haven't done it already--to teach a course that's combined lit-writing called "The First Person" that uses short passages of all the great first-person stuff over the years (things like Montaigne and Bacon and Defoe and Richardson and Hazlitt and Dickens as well as 20th-century things like Ford Madox Ford and Nabokov and various other favorites--and I'd have to squeeze in some Ken Bruen for sure...). Mostly the students would be reading lots of excerpts and writing every week (pastiches, experiments with different first-person voices, etc. and trying to develop things like their own version of a first-person private investigator narrator or a memoir-narrator or a personal essay voice) but then I would have them choose one of two or three great recent novels to read in full & write about the style. And one would be Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled which as far as I'm concerned is one of the great great novels of the 20th century. And one would be this.

I am an Ishiguro maniac

and this summing-up of UK reviews of his latest at the Literary Saloon at the complete review is just making my mouth water. I can hardly stand to wait till this book is out in the US... tempted to spend ridiculously large amounts of money on shipping costs from Amazon UK (and the last time I did that was for a book that I secretly loved and read about four times, but can't seem to find anyone else who reads or has basic respect for....)

Late last night

I read Medicine Road, by Charles de Lint, who I've been meaning to read for some time. It was nice but on the slight side. I will get his other books, though. Any recommendations?

How long can you wait before sewing a severed body part back on?

I do like the Slate Explainer feature--this one by Daniel Engber is especially good (and who knows, potentially very useful...)

The best severed-limb novel I know of is Colin Harrison's spectacular
Afterburn. A must-read if you like crime fiction; it's got a truly memorable scene involving an emergency-room visit and a cooler with an unexpected surprise inside...

Some pretty lame

late-nite trashy reading (but then it's my own fault for not reading better-quality stuff instead). Truth or Dare by Jayne Ann Krentz (flimsy as well as trashy; I already read one book last week in which a controlling husband faked his own death, and this was one too many...); The 37th Hour by Jodi Compton (completely lame; looked promising, but turned out to be incredibly weak; RIDICULOUS plot--in fact, there's no real story at all... and various gross implausibilities); the latest Matthew Scudder novel from Lawrence Block, All the Flowers Are Dying (well, he's a good writer, and those early Scudder books are so excellent, but this one has a RIDICULOUS serial-killer thing going down and I can't help but feel that Scudder should have been gracefully laid to rest some years ago); and a mixed bag of an essay collection called Tales from the Couch: Writers on Therapy (a few good essays, several of which I'd read elsewhere; on the whole, though, it is extraordinary how formulaic the essays ended up being. You would have a funnier and more revealing collection if you did a volume called "Writers on Dentistry").

ENOUGH! Now I am going to read some non-trashy novels for a change. Also must finish getting ready for the talk I'm giving on Thursday. I'm giving another talk next week too, and that one's more or less open to the public, if anyone's interested.

In an alternate universe this could be a back-cover blurb

but not in this one, I'm afraid. My friend Nico and I share an obsessive love for the novels in The Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper. This is his comment on the latest version of Dynamite No. 1:

I have always felt that those Susan Cooper lacked a certain something, and now I realize that, of course, it's epilepsy, lobotomy, bondage, and naked dead ladies.

So there! (Quoted without permission.)

Making and unmaking

Last night I saw a superb production of Endgame at The Irish Rep. I urge you to see it if you get the chance--it is an amazing play of course but the acting here is really magnificent. It's funny and touching and bleak and pretty much everything you could hope for. I do love Beckett--there is something about his sensibility that calls to me. Writers like Woolf and Joyce and Conrad leave me pretty much cold (isn't that an awful confession? I am full of admiration for the technique but ...)--my heart is much more with the novelists of older generations, Dickens and Austen and Burney, and then further back with the prose of Burke and Swift and such. Highly experimental writing is something I don't often turn to--while I do have a soft spot for Gertrude Stein and Georges Perec and a few others, I don't miss it if I'm not reading it. But Beckett is the one for me--I would kill to have written his novels and plays! Must go and reread the trilogy soon, it's years since I last looked at it.

There's a great piece

in this week's New York Review of Books by Gabriele Annan about Richard Wollheim's memoir Germs, a book I must get & read as soon as possible. Here's a taste:

The Waverley novels became the scene of an imaginary life and [Wollheim] would sit on the lavatory as on a throne, being 'a king, King Canute, or a great prince, though also a bard' while he waited for someone to come to wipe his bottom. This phase ended when he was at last allowed to do that for himself; and one of the poker-faced comic high spots in his memoir is the detailed lesson in paper tearing and folding that preceded his new freedom. 'This small incident was probably the greatest increase in personal responsibility that my childhood had in store for me. It is what I think of when I hear moral philosophers discuss responsibility.'

Another good haul

at the public library. If I get $$$ for a book deal I am so going to write a check to the public library--for the branch libraries--they are a most excellent thing. First of all, a very high-quality Dublin crime novel, Ingrid Black's The Dead. Don't read it if you're sick of serial-killer thrillers, but the writing here is excellent: a really vividly characterized first-person voice, good settings etc. I much enjoyed it. And then I read Divided in Death, by Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb. I find these books very enjoyable--the best kind of light reading--this woman is a consummate pro, I doubt she would claim that her fiction has the intensity of the most memorable novels but her novels are still super-well-written and the characters very vivid. I haven't read any of the straight romantic ones, not so much my cup of tea, but it is really a pleasure to see someone so prolific hold herself to a high professional standard in the writing.

A nice short notice

in the Independent for Heredity (the reviewer's Emma Hagestadt):

Noirish, fast-talking and slightly pervy, Jenny Davidson's transatlantic fertility farce reads like Fay Weldon on a hormonally-charged high. The novel's moody heroine, New Yorker Elizabeth Mann, is in London researching a travel book. Within days of arriving she's had sex with her father's best friend, the bizarrely named, and slightly asthmatic, Gideon Streetcar. She wants a baby, but doesn't want to pass on her family genes. Her solution? To take DNA from the skeleton of 18th-century criminal, Jonathan Wild. A dark and fantastical novel about medical curiosities, curious Englishmen and in vitro love affairs.

I am glad of the Fay Weldon reference, I love her books and of course I secretly had in mind The Cloning of Joanna May when I was writing my novel.