TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Linklog: Sarah Palin's index, Pamela with vampires, and more A warning to politicians: if you're not going to compile an index for your controversial memoir, someone else will do it for you.• Unspeak on "Unfriend".• The hidden world of book runners.• An attractive-sounding plan for reading all of Shakespeare.• A library of painted books.• Isn't Twilight just Pamela with Vampires? And as materialistic?Peter Robinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Holiday Books: Gardening A stack of books on Japanese gardens, a look at one of England’s most famous estates, reference books and more. feeds.nytimes.com |
Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L Friedman Parallels between financial and ecological crises make a convincing argument for reining in our profligate ways, says Robin McKieHere is a little game to pass the time. Key the words "world population" into Google and add the year of your birth. The results, in every case, will be intriguing. For example, in 1950, when I was born, there were 2.5 billion people on the planet. Today there are around 6.8 billion while the UN predicts there will be more than 9 billion by 2050. Thus, in 40 years, the Earth's population will rise by a figure equivalent to its total population in the 1950s, with most living in the developing world. "If you think the world feels crowded now, just wait a few decades," says Friedman.As for the "hot" of his title, it reflects a future in which the burning of "fuels from hell" – his term for the world's underground supplies of coal, gas and oil – will bring calamitous warming, while the term "flat" refers to the levelling of the world's economic playing fields. This will create a soaring global middle class and a spiralling demand for cars, microwaves, mobile phones and computers that devour "energy, natural resources, land and water and emit climate-changing gases".It is a striking scenario expertly assembled by Friedman, though his is no mere cry of doom and despair. As is made clear in the book's subtitle – "Why the world needs a green revolution and how we can renew our global future" – the author also believes we can get ourselves out of this mess, the lessons of the recent credit crunch being particular important. As a result, Friedman has substantially rewritten Hot, Flat and Crowded for its paperback release to include an analysis – and it's a convincing one – of the 2008 financial crisis and its importance to our survival."The parallels between what has been happening in the Market and in Mother Nature are eerie," he states. Thanks to lack of proper regulation both are being swept by crises – financial and ecological – that should be rare but are now common. Hence, we need to rein in our profligate ways, get rid of inefficient energy sources and invest heavily in renewable power. Easier said than done, of course.Science and natureRobin McKieguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Mayor's Tongue by Nathaniel Rich | Book review An inventive debut novel keeps James Purdon entertainedIn its first pages, before hitting its stride, this debut novel by Nathaniel Rich elicits a sense of mild foreboding. Is it just another young-and-literary-in-New-York novel? Happily, Rich has his own style and his own concerns, which twist playfully around the search for a (fictional) famous writer, Constance Eakins, who may or may not still be alive, living near Trieste and working on a novel called, yes, The Mayor's Tongue. There's a little too much going on here (and elsewhere: the book's exuberance seems to have spilled over into its website, where resides a wealth of information on Eakins, including a faux Paris Review interview.) The proliferating stories prove tricky for Rich to tie up, but the sheer inventiveness is hard to resist.Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Introducing Coleridge Richard Holmes reveals the strange, captivating, haunted poems that lay behind Samuel Taylor Coleridge's magical titlesThe very name Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to reverberate like some mysterious timpani. Those magical titles of his vibrate and echo over an infinite distance: Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Frost at Midnight … Or for that matter the notorious Person on Business from Porlock. Almost unnecessary, one might think, to turn back to the poems themselves at all (do they still do so in schools?). Those proverbial titles seem to hold all the poetry.So it easy to forget how strange, how captivating, how haunted Coleridge's actual poems are. Why is it, for example, that so many of them are set at night? Why do their outer landscapes always dissolve into inner dream worlds? Why are they so full of guilt? And yet why are they also so often suffused with beautiful, healing, glimmering moonlight?One answer to all these questions (especially popular among recent film-makers) has always been drug addiction. Step forward, Coleridge the lyrical smackhead. Coleridge's poems are explained away as forms of drug-induced hallucinations. It is certainly true that Coleridge began taking opium as a schoolboy in London, experimented with it throughout his 20s in the West Country and Germany, and was seriously addicted by the time he settled in the Lake District in 1801 aged 29.Five poems in this selection have a sufficiently bewildering range of traumatic subject matter to be classed (mistakenly) as psychotic. In clinical notes they might be described as follows: the sexual fantasies of a Mongol warlord; the hallucinations of a paranoid sailor; the hysteria of a young woman assaulted by a lesbian demon; and the masochistic mutterings of a suicidally depressed lover. They end with the first ever – and truly terrifying – poem of drug withdrawal, The Pains of Sleep, dated 1803.It is also true that Coleridge, like many addicts, was incapable of domestic stability. He abandoned his wife and three children in 1804 and travelled restlessly for some 12 years to Malta, Sicily, Italy, London, Leicestershire, the Lakes once more, then back to London again, finally washing up in 1816 on Highgate Hill – in the attic room of a kindly physician, Dr James Gillman. The last four poems in the selection, all disturbingly autobiographical, were written at Highgate. You can still walk under his colonnade of lime trees outside No 3 The Grove, and look up at his top-floor window.But opium is a feeble explanation of Coleridge's genius. Born in Ottery St Mary, Devon in 1772, the son of a doting clergyman who died when Coleridge was only nine, he grew up as a lonely, intellectually precocious and astonishingly talkative child. Coleridge was quickly thrown out of both university and the army ("Discharged, insane"), made an unhappy marriage, and failed to establish promising careers in either in journalism or the church. Instead he met William and Dorothy Wordsworth in 1797, and became a poet.Coleridge's subsequent career was marked by intellectual brilliance, financial chaos and painful emotional dependence on the Wordsworth household (or later versions of it). That household included Wordsworth's entrancing sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson, with whom Coleridge fell desperately and unrequitedly in love. This part of his story is still little known, even to the film-makers. Sara is the secret subject of Dejection – but also of dozens of his later poems, including the one written 30 years later when he was 61, Love's Apparition. This emotional dependence, and the extreme ideas of being bewitched, possessed, enchanted, outcast, damned or redeemed which it involved, were far more significant for his poetry than any drug dependence.Like all the Romantics, Coleridge was interested in exploring such extreme states of mind and feeling, "the dark groundwork of our nature" as he called them. But he was unusual in that he combined this with a lifelong fascination with philosophy, psychology and the physical sciences (especially chemistry, through his great friend Humphry Davy). These gave extraordinary range, authority and depth to all his writing. In a memorable snub to the philosopher Godwin (an early proponent of the Two Cultures), Coleridge announced: "the activity of science being necessarily performed with the passion of hope, it is poetical". He was never sentimental in his poems, though frequently so in both his life and his letters. He proved himself a heroic weeper and moaner on many occasions. But he was also very funny and self-mocking; and, one should add, immensely lovable.Coleridge was fascinated by the way the imagination works. He distinguished it from what he called superficial "fancy", and described it in a wonderful phrase as "the esemplastic or shaping power". He invented the influential notion of the "willing suspension of disbelief". He cultivated the impression that his poetry was uncontrolled and spontaneous ("a waking dream"), but in fact his astonishing notebooks show that it was brilliantly crafted and structured. There are at least two separate versions of Kubla Khan, three of The Ancient Mariner, and perhaps five of Dejection. It is not known how many versions of Christabel he attempted, and left unfinished.Coleridge defined poetry not as an uncontrolled hallucination, but as an act of supreme attention. He wrote this superb definition in a letter of July 1802. "A great poet … must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child."He was technically skilled and versatile. He turned his hand to sonnets, ballads, elegies and songs as well as the memorable, intimate blank verse of Frost at Midnight, one of a whole series of Conversation Poems like The Nightingale and This Lime Tree Bower My Prison, which could have easily filled this entire selection. So too could his other ballads, including The Three Graves, The Dark Ladie, Love (which inspired Keats's Belle Dame Sans Merci), and Alice Du Clos.His gift for releasing the musical and rhythmic qualities of language was almost preternatural. It is possible to hum Kubla Khan out loud without the words, and still recognise it. In 1816 Charles Lamb remarked that when Coleridge himself recited the poem, "it irradiates and brings heaven and Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it."His psychological use of symbolism deeply impressed Baudelaire (see Baudelaire's poem L'Albatros). In his little known later poems such as Limbo, Coleridge's sense of human powerlessness and despair are subtly and deliberately undermined by the use of the natural, active symbols of nature. Perhaps for this reason he has remained a favourite of some of our most powerful modern poets – notably Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion and James Fenton.Finally, it should be said that Coleridge is often paired with his great friend and colleague, William Wordsworth. But they are utterly unlike each other, both as men and as poets. In my experience, you must either love one, or the other; and I have made my choice.Samuel Taylor ColeridgePoetryRichard HolmesRichard Holmesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |