meish dot org: life, unfolding

In 1989, I made a birthday card for the second red nose day, and ran around collecting signatures and money for it, with visions of being able to present the card live on air – you know, like they do with those big charity cheques.

(In this archive photo, above, you can see me aged 15 – I think Red Nose Day was actually on my birthday that year, which is why the birthday card seemed appropriate), my friend Melissa holding the card, and my sister Anna (who would have been 12), raising money by being sponsored to wear her uniform backwards for the day. As you do…)

After school, a couple of friends and I tramped down to BBC television centre in White City (about 5 minutes away from school) where we hung around the front gate, trying to blag our way in to the telethon/live show/star-studded extravaganza.

It didn’t work, and a chauffeur-driven car containing Rik Mayall nearly ran over my foot.

Eventually, we despondently sloped off home, and I had to persuade my mum to write a cheque for the charity, in exchange for a carrier bag jangling with pound coins and other loose change.

Happily, since then it’s become much easier to give money to Comic Relief – and this year, you can do it from the comfort of your keyboard, and get a funny book into the bargain.

Pop on over to shaggyblogstories.co.uk and order a special edition book, compiled of 100 funny bits by british bloggers including the great, the good and the gigglesome -people you’ve heard of, people whose blogs you read all the time (including, er, me) and people you haven’t yet met. Compiled in just a week, all profits after Lulu takes its cut go to Comic Relief.

Go on. Do it.

When I travel, I like to read things which are set in the location I’m visiting. I enjoy travel guides, personal travelogues and social histories, too, but I also look for books which will suit the landscape and culture I’m going to be reading them in – even if only slightly.

Given that we’re off to the Bay Area and Northern California this weekend, I’m looking for recommendations of books set in or around (or loosely based on) San Francisco, wine country and the Northern California coast, extending as far as, well, basically any of the Pacific Northwest.

Also, works by authors who are from those areas would be equally useful…

You know, I’m surprised there isn’t a site which does this already….

Update: Let me correct that: There IS a site which does this already (but it’s not very extensive yet).

The other day, sitting on the bus while it crawled towards home in a traffic jam, I was reading my book:

Said and Done – Roger McGough

I reached the end of a chapter and looked up from the page, through the window of the bus. We were sitting in traffic outside a pub, and in my seat, I was right next to the window of the bar, with a direct view inside. And who should I spy through the window, quietly supping his pint?

The author of the book I was holding in my hand, Roger McGough.

Odd when worlds collide and align like that. Like when you’re reading the paper and listening to the radio and the announcer says the exact word you’re reading at that moment.

Serendipitous synchronicity. Synchrondipity.

I was having a conversation the other day with some friends about what you do with books once you’ve finished reading them.

This is a pertinent and passionate subject for me, because I’ve got a lot of books – a LOT – and while I plan on keeping most of them, there’s a whole subset which is relatively disposable – or rather, which don’t need keeping for a long time, really.

My books fall into three main categories:

1. Books which I’ve read and enjoyed, but which I might re-read again, or otherwise want to keep (to lend to others, or because they were hard to get hold of or are now out of print)
2. Books which I haven’t read (or haven’t finished) but fully intend to at some point
3. Books which I’ve read (or not) and may well have enjoyed (or not), but don’t want any more

So I have to find methods of getting rid of unwanted books. Some reasonable solutions:

1. Take them to charity shops
2. Take them to Notting Hill Book Exchange and try to get some money for them (frustrating because they pay a pittance, a fraction of the value) and besides, the counter staff are horribly arrogant (and WAY cooler than you, in case you were in any doubt)
3. Sell them on Amazon marketplace (possible, but a total pain in the arse when it comes to dealing with post office queues)
4. Auction them on eBay (see above, plus chances are your listing will lapse before anyone buys)
5. Take them to one of multitude of charity shops
6. Give them to friends
7. Leave them scattered around town in a Bookcrossing style

There is another option, and that is to stick them in a Book Exchange.

I set up a book exchange at work last year – it was something I remembered being very handy when I worked in a youth hostel, and although people aren’t backpacking around Scotland, it’s a similar sort of environment – people of a roughly similar (broad) age and education, most with commutes, most sick of metro and its ilk.

I stuck a bookshelf in the shared kitchen with a sign on it, with a seed stock of my own old stuff, and people leave books and take other ones. They’re mostly relatively low-impact paperback commute-type reads, as well as travelogues and some classics, but it seems to work out well. There’s a few new books added every week. Some get borrowed and returned for someone else to take out, others disappear completely.

The only rule we started out with was that books always get added to the right (whether new stock or being returned). That means all the books on the left aren’t getting any attention, so every couple of months we can take a big armful from the left end down to one of the charity shops in Hammersmith, and because of the self-sorting that goes on, the books that don’t get attention tend to be the ones which the charity shops aren’t already saturated with (which stay in circulation in the exchange).

A few months ago, I left a pad of post-its and a pencil taped to the shelf, and was pleased and encouraged to see a few people starting to add mini anonymous reviews to books – “good for beach”, “tedious, don’t bother” etc. Cool!

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A very good friend of mine, Frank Wynne, has just had his first book published: I was Vermeer: The Legend of the Forger who Swindled the Nazis.It’s the story of “a paranoid, drug-addicted, alcoholic, hypochondriac painter whose journey from zero to hero earned him $50 million, the acclamation of the world’s press and the satisfaction of swindling the Nazis. Half a century after his death, his handiwork is still suspected in at least four Vermeers in major galleries, and the ugly daub sold last year at Sotheby’s for $30 million had long been attributed to him. The book takes a wry, sometimes scathing, amoral and irreverent look at forgery, the expert, and the career of a second-rate painter who became the world’s greatest forger.”

There was a nice full page feature in the Telegraph on Saturday, review in the Mail on Sunday yesterday, there’s one in the Standard today plus serialisation begins on Radio 4 on August 14th (9.45am 11.45pm) (woohoo!)

So why am I telling you this? You may well ask.

Reason 1: I thought you nice people might like to know about the book. The subject matter is interesting, plus Frank is a talented writer who has been dedicated and influential in publishing for years in various contexts: he was the Editor of Deadline Magazine for a long time (Tank Girl, anyone?) and more recently did the English translations for Michel Houllebecq’s novels including Atomised and Platform

Reason 2: What else are social networks for, if not to generate viral marketing? Basically, we’re trying to give his book a boost on the day of launch and if you’re interested, you can help.What would be great is for those of you who can to buy the book direct from Amazon (or via this page: www.frankwynne.com/books.html which means Frank gets another small cut via Amazon’s referral scheme) on Monday August 7th, between 5pm – 7pm (or on Tuesday 8 or Wed 9) (the timing is important).

Feel entirely free to leave a short review. Yeah, I know you won’t have read the book yet. You don’t have to give it five stars, any number will do since, as we know, one review will encourage other reviews. If you need inspiration, check out the Observer review.

You will be rewarded by not only having a great new book to read, but also by being showered with my appreciation and experiencing for yourself the warm fuzzy glow of helping a talented author to achieve literary success in his own right after years of graft in the shadows of others.

I’m going to be away for most of next week on a business trip to the US. The trouble is, coming hot on the heels of last week’s jaunt up to the Ross of Mull, I’m at a loss for what reading matter to take.

What I’d really like is a site into which I could plug the names of various books I’ve read (and enjoyed), and which could then generate a list of books I might enjoy based on them.

Amazon’s system of recommendations based on purchase behaviour doesn’t quite do it – because after all, what good is knowing that people who bought X also bought Y if you don’t know that the same people loathed Y once they received it?

AllConsuming doesn’t fill the void either, because while you can search for books and see what other people said about them, and then see what else those individuals have read (and with effort, find out if they enjoyed them), it’s very linear, which means you’re seeing relationships between books and readers and other books, not recommendations. They’re not the same.

Even if last.fm/Audioscrobbler was about books instead of music, the folksonomic base and focus on relationships (fans, definitions, related works by artist e.g. song P appears on albums Q and R) makes it not exactly what I need either.

Plus all these things are monodimensional – they look for specific relationships between one item and another, rather than looking at an array of inputs and increasing the accuracy of any recommendations based on all the information.

I suppose I’m looking for something a bit like the movie recommendations I get from my DVD provider (I know Amazon provides something similar to “improve recommendations”, but AFAIK, it’s still heavily influenced by items you’ve viewed (but not necessarily purchased or indeed enjoyed – if someone sends me a link to a book about Architecture they’re thinking of buying, that doesn’t mean I want to see recommendations about buildings forever after!

I think I’m looking for a combination of What to rent, TIVO-like suggestions (based on viewing/recording behaviour, but overrideable to take anomolies into account), movielens (which is pretty experimental) and requires ratings rather than like/dislike) and ratingzone, which isn’t comprehensive, and takes forever to churn out recommendations.

In the absence of such a magical recommendation engine site, I’m turning to you, dear reader.

See, usually, I have two strands of reading matter (well, five if you include work-related things, web things and newspapers/magazines): bus reading and journey reading.

Bus reading tends to be things I can enjoy in a series of short bites: my twice-daily commute is about twenty minutes, which usually isn’t quite long enough for a chapter, but is long enough to get into something. However, because of the disjointed nature of my reading sessions, I tend to gravitate towards lighter things, collections of factual stuff. I’ve recently consumed (and enjoyed) on the bus:

• The Mma Ramotswe ladies detective agency series by Alexander McCall Smith
• Stiff by Mary Roach
• The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup by Susan Orlean
• My Life in Orange by Tim Guest
• Barrel Fever by David Sedaris
• Cod by Mark Kurlansky
• Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Journey reading is a different beast entirely. For journeys, I like to get stuck into a book and plough through it in one or two sittings – ideal for long plane or train trips. Because when I travel I try to travel light, there’s not much room for getting it wrong, which means that I like to be sure that I’m going to enjoy a particular book in order to take it. If I can’t guarantee that, I can tend towards the slightly trashier end of the scale (though never anything with gold embossed lettering, somewhat secure in the knowledge that the book selected will, at least, be addictively readable, and thereafter disposable.

Some books I’ve enjoyed on long journeys are:

• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold
• Dry by Augusten Burroughs
• Past Mortem by Ben Elton
• Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman
• Last Places by Lawrence Millman
• Attention all Shipping by Charlie Connolly
• Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

I also love Douglas Coupland and have read and enjoyed everything by him, and get very impatient waiting for the next. I’ve read most of the Patricia Cornwell books, but I’ve gone off her recently. Dan Brown is laughable, but easy to read on a plane.

So….any suggestions for a couple of books to take to Washington DC next week, based on that lot?

For further context, I have also recently enjoyed watching Lost, Huff, West Wing and lots of M*A*S*H. I don’t watch any soaps, and don’t watch a lot of TV, but I’ve seen a few episodes of Arrested Development and liked what I’ve seen. I read The Guardian, listen to Radio 4 for at least an hour a day, and am very unlikely to read things just because everyone else has done (e.g. Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, etc). I don’t go to the movies much, but watch a lot of DVDs (mostly new releases). If I don’t enjoy a book, I’ll put it down and walk away – I won’t labour through something just because I think I should or something.

Your suggestions would be very welcome indeed!

I didn’t realise that Glen David Gold (author of the highly enjoyable Carter Beats the Devil) is married to Alice Sebold (author of the highly harrowing Lucky and the highly compelling The Lovely Bones). What a creative pairing.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris.

I’m on a real American-humourist-autobiography thing at the moment – recently finished Augusten Burrough’s Running With Scissors.

Life of Pi – Yan Martel. Just finished reading this. The first half (on land) dragged, but I enjoyed the second half (at sea). Not sure what to make of the ending, though, and have to wonder how long before someone options the story for a film. Possibly not long at all.

Bon anniversaire to the plucky boy reporter. Snowy/Milou is of course only 15.5 years old.