Well. One week in to our read-it-before-Christmas challenge and (*spoiler alert*) we’re 90 pages in. It might not seem like a lot, but bearing in mind that’s roughly 10% of the book done and dusted, and that we’ve achieved it with little more than a ten page session on the way to work each morning, we’re feeling pretty pleased. Surprisingly, this challenge we’ve set doesn’t actually feel much like a challenge at all; at no point has reading this frankly ginormous book felt like a chore. Ok, so you can’t pack lightly for a weekend away while you’re reading it, but your journey will be all the more interesting.

What’s more, you probably can’t have failed to notice that the film adaptation is now playing at a cinema near you, and conversations about whether it measures up to this treasured novel have already begun. Does it have the right cast? Are the key aspects of the plot emphasised? Even if you’ve seen it and you already know exactly what happens, now’s the time to get reading so you can draw your own conclusions and join the debate. If you haven’t here’s a link to the trailer to whet your whistle.

So, what have we made of the first 90 pages? Well, let’s start at the very beginning with the novel’s opening line:

    “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

To the unsuspecting reader, this ominous idea hits you square in the face. Which is precisely why it’s so brilliant. It cuts to the core of the novel’s critique (which is of the values of a very specific period in Russian society) and yet the making and breaking of families is universal enough to strike a chord with readers today. That’s probably why when you read it you can feel something happening; like you’re pulling the thread that causes everything to unravel. Virtual show of hands please: anyone else wish they’d written that?

You don’t even have time to digest this before Tolstoy picks you up and throws you into the confusion of unhappy family number one: the Oblonskys. Mother of five, Dascha Oblonsky, is distraught, having discovered her husband, Stepan, has been having an affair with their former governess. A fashionable man about town, and a liberal thinker who sees marriage as an institution in need of reform, Stepan can’t even deceive himself into feeling guilty about giving in to what he sees as an “infatuation” that is fundamentally at odds with his familial obligations:

“...there are two women: one insists only on her rights, and these rights are your love, which you cannot give her; and the other sacrifices everything for you and demands nothing. What are you to do? How to act? There’s a terrible drama here.”

Then there’s Levin, a great friend of Stepan’s despite their differences; Stepan a confident and good natured city-slicker, Levin an insecure country bumpkin and natural sceptic, in town with plans of proposing to Stepan’s sister-in-law Kitty. When we finally meet Kitty, it’s clear she has a great fondness for Levin, but that there are other forces at play: namely, social politics in the form of Kitty’s mother, who wants her to marry the eligible Vronsky - one of the gilded youth of Petersburg. To complicate matters, Moscow society is undergoing a shift:

“The French custom - for the parents to decide the children’s fate - was not accepted and was even condemned. The English custom - giving the girl complete freedom - was also not accepted and was impossible in Russian society.”

When Levin’s proposal does come, the pressure is too much for Kitty, and although she is overwhelmed with happiness, she refuses it, and with that we have the makings of unhappy family number two.

Ironically Vronsky, the only character so far who “had never known family life”, is at the centre of all this heartache, but we get the feeling that his relations with Kitty are little more than a young man naively going through the social motions, none of which matter any more when he meets Anna.

And it’s easy to see why. Anna appears bursting at the seams with passion, energy and feeling:

“It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile.”

The animation that so clearly longs to burst out of her is evident in the way Tolstoy writes about her so that with her arrival the book seems to come alive, and we, like Vronsky, fall quickly under her spell, even though there is also “something terrible and cruel in her enchantment.”

At the end of these first 90 pages, we leave her dancing the mazurkha with Vronsky, who has asked her right in front of Kitty, at the very ball that was supposed to cement their engagement…

Cue unhappy family number three: the Karenins. And this is just the beginning!

More from us next week!

Dion Wilson
Marketing Assistant, Penguin Press

Earlier this week Viking held the much anticipated launch party for Clare Balding’s wonderful childhood memoir My Animals and Other Family at The Ivy.

It was a particularly busy day for Clare (it’s been a very, very busy year) as she was also spotted in the Olympic and Paralympic parade in front of our offices on the Strand (oh, and a few other sporting stars from the summer).

Penguin UK CEO Tom Weldon gave a warm and witty speech to say how much we appreciated it when an author does their bit to up their profile just before their book is published. But he added that the reason we took on the book was that Clare's a real writer. It's a magical, moving book that will be read for decades to come.

Fingers crossed that the book is a massive bestseller when it's released today. She certainly deserves it; there was a LOT of love in the room for her as you can see below.

Anneka Rice, Clare Balding, Jennifer Saunders and Penny Smith

Arlene Phillips, Clare Balding and Andrew Lloyd Webber

Alice Berry
Online Editor and Unofficial Party Paparazzo

Hamish Hamilton's influence on my literary education began some ten years ago – specifically when I was in my early teens and just beginning to develop an appetite for short fiction. Hamish Hamilton was the first UK publisher of a group of authors who, to me, best exemplified the form at the time: Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, Haruki Murakami and subsequently, Dave Eggers. Where many publishers would have shied away from the short story (“There’s precious little economic incentive to write one,” lamented Lawrence Block), Hamish Hamilton seemed to me a loud and proud patron of it. Today, the imprint is still home to some of the boldest and most prolific names in literature -- Zadie Smith, Paul Murray, Lydia Davis and Helon Habila, just to name some of my favourites. Founded in 1931, Hamish enjoys a long and established heritage that has managed to translate seamlessly into an intrepid spirit of multiculturalism and innovation – perhaps most directly manifested in its literary magazine Five Dials, the “heartbreaking PDF of staggering genius” that I first came across while trying out laptops in one of Tokyo’s electronic mega-malls, of all places.

It had always been clear to me that Penguin presented the ideal environment for one looking to learn the ropes of publishing, and this is why I feel incredibly fortunate to have been selected as the Helen Fraser Diversity Fellow for 2012 -- Penguin's third since the programme's inception, and the first non-UK citizen to take on the role.
 
While working on my application for the 2012 fellowship, I was able to spend more time at Penguin after my initial internship placement at Viking, interning with Fig Tree and then moving on to an eight-week temp cover with the adult mono production team. In addition to equipping me with basic editorial skills, these roles steered away from the uni-mandated style of academic analysis and conditioned me to start approaching the book as a product instead. Which authors share a similar target demographic? Can something as simple as a font switch alter the tone of a book, or differentiate a celebrity biography from a work of literary non-fiction? These were only some of the questions I was encouraged to ask (plus I’m now able to identify the paper stock used in different editions of a book, which I still maintain is as cool a party trick as any other). All this helped strengthen my application, and I'm grateful to everyone who took time from their busy schedules to give me advice and share their experiences.

The fellowship runs from July to December, and I kick-started my first week on the placement with a sunny weekend in St. Germans, Cornwall, assisting the Hamish Hamilton team with our stage at the Port Eliot Festival -- certainly not your typical work schedule. Some of the more generic jobs within the office include sorting through mail, making sure our book data is kept as up-to-date as possible and organizing author quote sheets – small but fundamental tasks that ensure our day-to-day operations run as smoothly as possible before we turn our attention to the more glamorous side of things (like when John Banville stops by for an interview with Five Dials).

While my favourite assignments are still largely editorial-based -- reporting on submissions from agents or pitching ideas for Five Dials -- the fellowship has been imperative in debunking the myth that the be-all-and-end-all for aspiring editors is knowing how to whip a manuscript into the best possible shape. There are a dozen other factors to consider simultaneously, and many of these occur beyond the pages of a book. The fellowship presents a wonderful opportunity to really delve into the minutiae of such processes. This could be anything from studying the buying patterns of online retailers to working with production to decide what type of paper finish goes on the book jacket. Needless to say, there’s quite a bit of spontaneity and variety from publishing one book to the next.

With the economy still picking up the pace, it has become more crucial than ever to take into account consumer patterns and developments in both the UK and the international scene. It just so happens that the upcoming Hamish Hamilton titles I'm most looking forward to are translations -- Javier Marías’ The Infatuations (which had many of us making a beeline for his other beautiful re-issues from Penguin Modern Classics), three novels from the cult Argentine author César Aira and Sam Taylor's translation of The Victoria System by Eric Reinhardt. I'm also very excited to be present during the release of Zadie Smith's much-anticipated NW next month, as well as forthcoming issues of Five Dials that are due to be launched in Berlin, Cork and with a bit of luck, Tokyo. If you haven’t seen our latest ‘B’ issue (dispatched from the Edinburgh Book Festival by American essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan), here it is: http://fivedials.com/files/fivedials_no24.pdf
 
The highlight of my time here so far has been talking to people from various departments about the work they do and how it relates to the editorial process, and applying the ideas I have picked up from these interactions to my duties at Hamish. Everyone has been so generous with their time, and I’m confident that when the fellowship ends, I will be ready to embark on my first ‘real’ editorial job armed with a strong foundational knowledge of the book trade as a whole.

Marissa Chen
Helen Fraser Diversity Fellow, 2012

The average novel probably takes the average reader just a couple of weeks to read, (assuming you’re fitting it in around everything else you’ve got going on).

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, at an admittedly hefty 829 pages, will undoubtedly take a lot longer, but then again, it most certainly isn’t your average novel…

To give you an idea of quite how brilliant it is, when the great American novelist William Faulkner was asked to name the three best novels ever written, he replied: ‘Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina.’ On top of that, the likes of Vladimir Nabokov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky have praised it as one of the most magical and perfect novels ever written.

In other words, it’s long because it’s a rich and complex masterpiece; a multi-layered tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. And with a lavish-looking film adaptation due out in September, starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law, with a screenplay by none other than Tom Stoppard and direction from Joe Wright (of Atonement and Pride and Prejudice fame), there’s never been a better time to start reading it.

So we’re setting you, and ourselves, the challenge of reading (or re-reading) this incredible book before Christmas.
 
Given that, on average, we read 200 words per minute, this 200,000 word novel should take you, the desperate-to-be-distracted commuter, approximately 1000 minutes to read. And given that there are around 5000 commuting minutes remaining until Christmas, we reckon this is easily achievable.

If we all add up the time we spend staring into space on the train every morning and evening, or even just steal an extra 20 minutes before bed, we’ll have devoured it in no time.

We’ll all be reading it here at Penguin HQ, blogging about our progress and reactions along the way, and we’d love you to get involved too - whether on your own, with your book group, or with friends – by letting us know how you’re getting on.

So, here we go. Watch this space for our first update next week, where we’ll be discussing our reactions to the opening, and the implications of that first line…

Dion Wilson
Marketing Assistant, Penguin Press

Michelle Paver is the international bestselling author of Wolf Brother, and the first in her brand new series for Puffin, Gods and Warriors, publishes on 28^th August. Read all about her inspirations, research and insights into the Mediterranean Bronze Age … 

A boy is on the run in the mountains.  His camp has just been attacked by mysterious warriors in black rawhide armour.  Now his dog is dead, his sister's missing, and he's running for his life.

This is where it all starts for the hero of my new five-book series, Gods and Warriors.  Like my previous series, Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, it takes place in prehistory; but this isn't Stone Age Scandinavia, it's the Mediterranean Bronze A ge.

I've loved this period since I was a child, when I pestered my mother to visit the mummified animals at the British Museum, and I devoured Roger Lancelyn Green's luminous retellings of the myths of Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt. Gods and Warriors is my attempt to recreate the spectacular, exotic, magical world of the great Bronze Age civilizations: the Mycenaeans, the Minoans and of course the Ancient Egyptians. 

This was a time of enormous uncertainty, when survival depended on the vast, unpredictable forces of the wild: the sea, the sky, earthquakes, volcanoes.  It was a world in which the stranger you meet on the mountainside might just be a spirit in disguise, and the falcon circling overhead might be a messenger from the gods...

Over five books, Gods and Warriors will follow the story of Hylas, the Mycenaean outsider who starts life as a goatherd, but grows to be a hero.  It's also the story of Pirra, the daughter of the High Priestess of Keftiu (Crete), and her quest for freedom.  And it's the story of the three wild creatures who will become their best friends: a dolphin, a falcon and a lion.  (And as in Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, parts of each story will be told from the animal's point of view.)

In Greece I explored the Cretan ruins of Knossos and Phaestos, as well as lesser-known sites in the Peloponnese, including the hugely evocative Menelaion outside modern-day Sparta, and the eerie underground cave system at Vlychada.  I also spent several days wandering the Taygetos Mountains; and to get to know dolphins, I swam with a socialized one in Florida, and then with wild dolphins in the Azores.  That was an unforgettable experience which, more than anything else, helped me imagine what it's like to be a dolphin.

But I don't do this research in order to teach, or to show how painstaking I've been.  I do it to make the story real.  I want the reader - whether they're nine or ninety, boy or girl - to feel that they're right there, living the adventure alongside Hylas and Pirra.  And of course that means leaving out most of the research, and only including the odd startling detail which will bring it alive without slowing it down.

So that's Gods and Warriors.  I really hope you enjoy it.

Michelle Paver

www.michellepaver.com

There are three things that I’ve learnt which I believe you should know about Penguin. Or actually four, but the last one isn’t out until November.

Number one, the people here are daring. This is what I’m Thinking, Fast and Slow as I make my way through the suited crowds on the Strand and into the Penguin Towers. Everyone on this street might look like a penguin, but it is my t-shirt clad self who’s actually one (or as I see it, won). In my generation, publishing is not the most popular career or the safest either. But it’s incredibly rewarding. That saying about dead fish swimming with the current? Applicable to penguins too. It takes guts to go down this path, to not follow the crowds to investment banking. And that’s why people here are driven by unusual Paper Promises: exceptional books.

Which leads me to my second point: that the work at Penguin is groundbreaking. I’m reminded of this everyday as I walk down the corridor at Penguin Press. One of the most respected brands in publishing, it’s in this division that books are printed not because they’ll be successful, but because they’ll change the world. These are works that further knowledge, add to the public conversation and offer pioneering ideas. They’re Pathfinders; Where Good Ideas Come From; The Better Angels of Our Nature. The risks here aren’t really risks: when you publish a phenomenal book and it doesn’t sell very well, you will have still made a difference. And when The Black Swan eventually surfaces, you know the world will never be the same. Working here is like Moonwalking with Einstein, or rather, several of them: charting unknown territory; taking small steps for humanity; dancing instead of walking.

And that’s why, thirdly, the internships at Penguin are unlike any others. Work and fun here are not mutually exclusive, not in social media marketing. It’s all about disrupting platforms; outdoing your predecessors. That means you have to be as creative as you possibly can. Sometimes my ideas seem outrageous even to myself, but it’s often those insane concepts that end up making the cut. In my role as a social media intern, I’ve run several successful competitions on Facebook and Twitter, contemplated our strategy, reached out to influencers, put up a new Tumblr website (http://penguinpress.co.uk) and much, much more. Instead of coffee runs, I’ve been given responsibility and taught How to be an Explorer of the World, sitting in on meetings from Penguin Australia to the next Spanish bestseller.

Which, by the way, is phenomenal and the fourth thing you absolutely need to know about. Let’s go back in time to my third week here: I’m Feeling Lucky. I’ve just read the manuscript for one of the biggest titles this autumn and now I’m taking part in an exclusive meeting on its upcoming marketing campaign. They’re talking about how they’re going to make the author a celebrity in the UK. And not just talking; detailing exactly how that’s going to happen. ‘I’m so excited,’ one of the editors says with a smile on her face. She has no idea: I can barely sit still. I wonder if they can tell?

Weeks later, I’m asked to stay on as a freelancer in the company and help execute a digital marketing campaign for the book. I can hardly wait. And I promise, neither can you, in approximately 2-3 months.

So, the gist of it all? Don’t follow trends. Set them. That Spanish bestseller? The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa. Out? 1 November. Facebook? At www.facebook.com/theyellowworld My internship? The best ever. Your next job application? Addressed to Penguin Books UK, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL.

Kalle Mattila
Penguin Internship Scheme

Don’t judge a book by its cover, goes the adage. All well and true, but how wonderful is a book with a cover as lovely and enticing as its insides? And how great is it when you choose a book based – don’t judge, everyone does it – on its irresistible cover and find that, in doing so, you have accidentally stumbled across a writer destined to be a favourite for ever? That’s how I first came to read The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, and I will be forever grateful to the designer of the edition I idly picked up for introducing me to the addictive pleasures of hard boiled crime.

Which brings me to the Penguin Essentials, Mark Two (featuring, I’m happy to say, The Thin Man). What are the Penguin Essentials? Exactly what they say on the tin, that is to say, truly essential books. But what does that mean, I hear you ask, and what are the criteria for choosing these ‘essential’ titles? Well. These are books that have stood the test of time, that are still read and loved today, that will change the way you look at things, and linger in your mind long after you’ve turned the final page, redesigned with beautiful, unexpected new covers.

www.penguin.co.uk/essentials

Richard Bravery and the Penguin General Art department did a fantastic job with the first set of Penguin Essentials last year and they have really pulled out the stops with our second Essentials collection. From In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s chilling reconstruction of the brutal murder of a Kansas family to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark’s tale of a schoolmistress no-one will ever forget, there is a book here to appeal to everyone – with covers to die for, by a diverse and exciting group of artists, illustrators, and designers.

For obsessive hoarders like me, these are beautiful editions (and, ahem, affordable pieces of original art) that are crying out to be added to your bookshelf. And, for readers coming to these books for the first time, the Essentials offer the enviable chance to discover a whole bunch of new favourite books, with covers as wonderful and intriguing as their contents.

Sophie Missing
Assistant Editor, Fig Tree

Recently I’ve found myself leaving the house earlier and earlier in the morning; I never thought I’d have a job that I couldn’t wait to get to, and Designer with Special Sales at Penguin Books is it.

The simple fact is that everyone at 80 Strand says hello in the morning, and I get smiles from people in the corridor (sometimes having no idea who they are or what they do). I don’t know where that impression of ‘people in London are so miserable’ came from; learning from my simple life up North, I even started talking to people on public transport! And found that anyone will chat back.

This, and the fact that I really love what I’ve been doing. Sitting on InDesign all day is a dream job; I play around with existing book covers and make actual books, I’ve designed a presentation, which will continue to be used in the future; I’ve amended book covers that have actually gone to print, and brought profit into Penguin. It’s all very exciting.

What I have really loved over the past two months is the fact that I’m treated like a part of the team. Jobs come in quickly in Special Sales, sometimes with tight deadlines, and I do them and so contribute to the team. I get invited to all the meetings, and all the (paid-for) breakfasts and lunches. And drinks and dinners. This has been a great opportunity to get to know people outside of work, and experience the world of publishing with Penguin. I’ve been doing a Masters degree in Publishing in Edinburgh, and the Scottish publishing industry – though I’ve always known it was small – is like another world. Although feeling like a tiny fish in a massive pond for a while, I’ve liked getting to know the structure of Penguin and where I fit in.

As I knew I was moving to London for two months from Edinburgh, I brought a couple of books with me. I now have three massive piles sitting on my desk, and scattered all over the floor. Walking up the corridor on Floor 7, a telltale crowd give away the fact that things have been added to the pulp shelf. The pulp shelves often harbour some rare find, or a book that ‘I’ve been meaning to read’. Going along to sales meetings has also meant getting to see new releases that won’t be on the shelves until Spring 2013, and just when I’m getting excited about something (like Emily McKay’s The Farm) I get given a proof copy. Being a book-lover and hoarder, that’s another thing I love: the books that are around the office, piled on desks and spilling out of bookshelves, being proudly displayed as a top seller. I love the shouts of excitement (and the celebratory prosecco) coming from sales when a book is at number 4 in the Amazon charts.

Most importantly, this internship has reaffirmed the fact that publishing is what I want to do, and Penguin is where I want to be.

Nadia Suchdev
Pearson Diversity Summer Internship Programme

I am extremely proud to introduce the internship schemes that run across Penguin. From the Penguin Internship Scheme which was newly-launched for 2012 to the positive-action traineeships like the Pearson Diversity Summer Internship Programme and the Helen Fraser Fellowship, there are a wide range of opportunities to get involved with the company and start your career in publishing.

These programmes exist to try and open up the prospect of a career in publishing to as wide a group of people as possible. As we all know, getting into publishing can be incredibly tough and so the premise behind our programmes is to give our interns a meaningful, paid experience at Penguin and a proper introduction to the publishing world. Each manager who hosts an intern has to come up with a project for the person to get stuck into during their time here – i.e. on our internship schemes you won’t be confined to the photocopier!

But don’t take my word for it – some of our current interns have kindly agreed to write for the Penguin Blog so you can see first-hand what life is like for an intern at Penguin. 

I never thought I’d say that a Dickens novel was too short, but: Dickens, Hard Times is too short! You have disappointed me. The eleventh book in our epic quest to read all his novels, it felt like a mere pamphlet at 288 pages, and I missed the richness and depth of other works.

There are still many joys, especially the self-made businessman Mr Bounderby, who says all the things piggy rich tax-dodgers come out with today: I’ve made it all by myself, why can’t everyone else? Why do all my selfish workers want to be ‘fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon’? Etc etc. The fact-obsessed school owner Gradgrind was a pertinent reminder of what happens when education becomes micro-managed; the lisping circus master Sleary was a pleasure; the put-upon weaver Stephen Blackpool (with his scarily accurate alcoholic wife) broke my heart and, in fact, the lack of happy endings all round made the novel a surprising change from the norm. There was so much here, but I felt a frustrating lack of development of ideas and characters.

Luckily, Charles Dickens read my mind and made his next novel, Little Dorrit, a far more sensible 860 pages. Here are more thoughts:

‘It's never a great idea to publish a book with 'Hard' in the title. I thought I'd be in for a boring read, but my long held assumptions were wrong; it's a great story and if anything it's over far too quickly. Even the setting, grimy old Coketown, potentially quite oppressive, is described with Dickens usual energy and wit so that you can hear the rattling of the looms and taste the coal dust. My favourite character is probably Merrylegs the circus dog. To summarise this novel: Down with equations! Hurrah for horseback balancing tricks! Worth reading if you are a busy professional who does not have time to tackle any of Dickens's 900 page-ers.’ Becky

‘Hard Times is so very much shorter than most of the other Dickens books we've read (110k to Copperfield's 382k), and it surprised me now much I noticed and mourned that brevity. This Dickens felt much more like a short story, with characters lightly sketched rather than fully drawn, and with now-familiar archetypes populating the grim scenes of a northern industrial town, Coketown. Really, Dickens, it was too short, and I could tell that you'd just bashed this one out. C- for effort. Having said all that, of course his weakest efforts are, still, leagues ahead of most other novels. And as ever, the dialogue is a masterclass in dialect and character, the children and villains are utterly believable and the family relations are all so recognisable. Plus it's got a charming circus ringmaster with a lisp! And one of the most blackly comic family reunions I have ever, ever read. So, considering its shortness and its almost comically bleak ending, I give Hard Times a better-than-The-Old-Curiosity-Shop 6.9/10.’  Sam

Louise Willder, Copywriter

Yesterday I sold some books.  Obviously, in a fundamental sense, that's what everyone at Penguin does every day (and if they don’t think that’s what they do, I think the Boss might like a word…), but I mean I really sold some books because I, and the rest of Team Pop, launched the new, and pretty fabulous (even if I say so myself) Penguin Pop-up Shop! In the forecourt of Penguin Towers at 80 Strand, with the twinkly, hilarious genius that is Eoin Colfer (more on that later). The shop had been a long-time coming.  Seriously long – we had the first meeting in 2011 – but I felt the hours and hours of talking through design iteration after design iteration and the merits of pedal-power versus scooter-speed were well worth it when I took my first cash sale.

The shop made its debut in bright sunshine (amazingly!) and a queue of people were quickly lured in off the Strand by the dazzling orange, the beautiful books (naturally) and the aforementioned Artemis Fowl creator, Eoin Colfer, who officially declared the store open (and was kind enough to sign a few volumes for the first customers too).

Designed by the brilliantly talented Shell Thomas and brought to life by producer Mick Glover, the look of the shop has gone through a number of transformations, from a standalone bookcase for readers to browse, to what it is now – a transportable, scooter-ised shop-front (we have plans for the shop to travel around A LOT). It was the orange Swifty scooter that eventually won us over; there aren't many things cuter than a Penguin on wheels.

Preparations for the shop’s launch were pretty hectic – particularly as the vinyls you can see on the shop only arrived at 4pm on Thursday.  We spent the last week making a number of last minute adjustments (you know, little things like taking the height down by a couple of inches to GET IT INTO THE LIFTS!  Stress?  You have no idea.) but, on the day, the shop did us proud. The reaction from readers was fantastic and Eoin Colfer reckons that every author should have one of their own.

So, it’s ready, it’s rolling, and it’s probably popping up at a festival near you soon – follow @penguinukbooks and track it down (I’ll be the one with the big, proud mummy, smile).

 
Lorna Broomfield
Communications Executive

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 6/19/2012
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38. Tom Bullough's Top Ten Science Fiction Reads

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 6/15/2012
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A few months ago, I filled out a form online called “Am I a Canadian without knowing it?” and discovered that I am, in fact, a Canadian – albeit one who has never travelled west of the Atlantic. I was almost as surprised, when I sat down to compile a list of my top ten science fiction stories, to discover that I am a science fiction fan. The signs were there, I suppose–I spent eleven years researching and writing Konstantin, a novel about the origins of the space programme – but even so I’m amazed by how many of my favourite books I’ve been able to squeeze into the genre. I have not troubled much with a sci-fi definition. If it’s fiction and it contains a bit of science, I was happy to include it. Konstantin would certainly have been eligible, and that’s a story about a deaf boy growing up in 19^th-century Russia.

 

So, and with apologies to Stanislaw Lem:

  

1. Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban.

 

I first read Riddley Walker when I was twenty, and I’ve read it again four or five times since. It is a tale of technological speculation, but it is set two thousand years after a nuclear war, written in a strange, mutated form of English, and the characters are speculating not about the future but about our technology today. It isthe conventional idea of science fiction turned inside-out – a story of regression, a tangle of myth among the relics of machines. When Hoban died at the end of last year, we lost a truly great writer.

 

    2.The Sandman, by E. T. A. Hoffmann.

 

The Sandman is a short story from 1816 about a young manplagued by the image of the Sandman, a nightmarish character who steals the eyes of children who refuse to go to sleep. He falls in love with an eerily perfect woman called Olimpia, the daughter of a physics professor. Hoffmann fascinates me. By transposing folk tales to an urban setting, hepaved the way for the likes of Nikolai Gogol, and,to my mind at least, you can trace the influence of The Sandman through Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, all the way to Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner.

 

    3. Lost Boys, by James Miller.

 

For me, Lost Boys is science

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39. How to get children to love books...

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 5/24/2012
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If you’re reading the Penguin blog then it’s very likely that you’re an avid reader and know the virtues of getting kids reading from a young age. We all know that reading is fundamental for development and research has shown that having good reading skills from an early age is linked to future success in life. But what about kids that don’t enjoy reading and don’t understand the pure escapist pleasure that books can offer, how do we help them? There are many children for who, delving into a book is the last thing on their mind. Whether it’s because of the distractions of TV and video games or because it feels too much like school, some kids just don’t ‘get’ books. So as voracious readers ourselves how do we help these kids become readers and learn to love books?

 

The key is to get kids to take that first step into enjoying the reading experience, as once they start to enjoy reading they will soon flourish. One way to engage kids is through books which are not straight-forward black and white text. So books that have fun and engaging text, a humorous story or are in a comic book style are more likely to be engaging for kids as they will find reading less of a chore. This is what makes the Geronimo Stilton books so ideal for reluctant readers, not only are the books funny, (they are about a mouse reporter and his fabulous adventures, so how could they not be!) but they are also full of colourful text and pictures. Every page is interesting to look at, whether it’s the bright pink text flying across the page or the words climbing up the page, this fun text design is perfect for engagement and it’s more accessible than traditional black and white text. As one reviewer puts it: The illustrations are brilliant along with the different types of fonts and colours used as they encouraged my 5 year old to follow the words as I read them.

 

If you’re looking for further proof that books with engaging text and images are accessible for kids and great for reluctant readers, then look no further than Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series. This illustrated diary series with its comic style adventure has proved a huge hit with kids, even beating Harry Potter to be voted Blue Peter’s best book of the decade!

 

So if you know a reluctant reader why not give one of these series’ a whirl, who knows you might uncover an avid reader who was just waiting to find the perfect book for them. The key is to

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40. Doing Dickens – Part 9

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 4/24/2012
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That’s it. Dickens has broken me. Not because Dombey and Son, the ninth in our attempt to read all of his novels, was too long, or too hard, but because it is so utterly, utterly heartbreaking.

Why is this novel not more famous or popular? Why? I’m baffled. It’s GREAT. During our readathon my unscientific calculation of a book’s quality has been the number of page corners I’ve turned over (sorry, yes, I’m a folder) because I’d found something amazing. By the end of Dombey I’d not only cried twice, but the book had virtually doubled in size from my fevered page-wrecking.

There’s so much I loved in this story of a dysfunctional family, ruled by a man for whom business is everything, yet who is a sad, damaged prisoner of his own pride and conventionality. There’s little Paul (the ‘son’ of the title), a perfect study of a thoughtful, wistful child, wise beyond his years, who sees animals in the wallpaper and sits ‘as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming’. There’s Dombey himself, freezing everyone he knows with his cold arrogance, shunning his daughter Florence for his son and heir, and yet whose repressed emotions are described with astounding subtlety. And, above all, there is Edith, Dombey’s second wife and a towering rebuttal of the charge that Dickens can’t do attractive women. She is beautiful yet brave, intelligent, strong and defiant: trapped in the ideal of Victorian womanhood that she has been groomed for, consumed by self-loathing, but eventually breaking free from her cage. She is mesmerising. The novel is deep and modern in its idea of people scarred by their upbringing; the writing is wonderfully vivid and heightened. I’d urge everyone to rectify Dombey’s inexplicable poor-relative status by reading this incredible book. And so would Sam:

‘I had to ask for this latest Dickens Club to be postponed by a couple of weeks so I could finish this huge tome, but boy, was it worth it. We all seemed equally baffled that Dombey and Son is not only not hailed as a masterpiece, but is also rarely heard of at all (the usual response seems to be, "Mmmm... I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is.") So here's what it is, in a nutshell: Brilliant. It's great. It's so clearly the twin of David Copperfield, which we all loved with a passion, but in many ways Dombey slightly tips the scales for me, in part for the female characters. Many people criticise Dickens, saying he can't write women, but with Edith Granger and Florence Dombey, I think this book proves those critics wrong. Yes, they are both beautiful, and yes, Florence can seem slightly wet, but only in a passing glance. She's actually an incredibly strong, intelligent and independent (eventually) young woman, ground down daily by the dysfunctional family she's clinging to. And Edith, an early (and I think better-written) version of Great Expectation's Estella, is fierce, bold and completely broken by the society she's born into. There are so many echoes between characters, parallels and repeats, and the book is filled with imagery of the sea: tides, waves, weather, plus Dickens is the best writer I know of children and childhood. Throw in old, old-fashioned Paul and Mrs Skewton, Captain Cuttle and master villain Carker and you've got my joint favourite Dickens ever. Please read it. A hearty, merry, insistent 9.4/10.’ Sam

 

Louise Willder

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41. Conversations with A Twist

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 4/16/2012
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Oliver Twist is Cityread’s Dickens novel for April. London’s libraries launch the first ever Cityread London in partnership with Penguin Classics, focusing on Oliver Twist as part of Dickens 2012. Over 300 Cityread events will take place throughout April, across all 33 London boroughs, bringing Oliver Twist to life in libraries, cinemas and museums. From afternoon tea and Dickens at Kensington Palace, to Hip Hop Dickens workshops in libraries, there’s something for readers of all ages. You can take part in Cityread London by asking at your local library or visiting the Cityread Facebook group.

Here Cityread blogger Aoife Mannix attends the launch

of the ‘Conversations with A Twist’ exhibition at the Free Word Centre.  You can find out more about the exhibition and watch the accompanying short films here.

I arrive at the Free Word Centre on Farringdon Road just as they are finishing filming Professor Robert L. Patten’s series of short films on Oliver Twist.  It’s a place I’ve come to know well over the last couple of years as I’ve run writing workshops here as well as attending poetry readings and interesting talks on various aspects of freedom of expression and the role of the writer in society.
 
In addition to being the home of organisations such as English PEN, Free Word is launching an exhibition in conjunction with the Charles Dickens Museum.  ‘Conversations With A Twist’ examines Oliver Twist from the point of view of social justice.  I stand under a huge banner bearing one of the best known quotes in English literature ‘Please, Sir, I want some more’.  The illustration is from George Cruikshank’s series for the original serialisation of the book.  It shows a fat bald man in a white apron peering down at a scrawny boy.  Professor Patten, who is visiting scholar at the Charles Dickens museum, points out that this famous drawing has often since been reinterpreted as a political cartoon.  It’s a perfect way of representing a huge gap in power relations that dates back to the French Revolution.

Oliver has had the misfortune to draw the short straw amongst the starving workhouse boys and thus he is the one who has to ask the cook if they can have more food.  Far from taking pity on him. the cook hits Oliver with his ladle and has him dragged before the board.  These good gentlemen are so shocked at the little boy’s audaciousness in complaining about slowly starving to death that they decide to imprison the nine year old in solitary confinement until they can find a trader to take him off their hands for a reward of five pounds.  They also confidently predict that rebellion at such a young age is a sure sign that Oliver is destined for the hangman.  By ending the first serialisation with this prediction, Dickens is giving us a damning indictment of Victorian society while at the same time leaving his readers anxious to find out if this will indeed be Oliver’s fate.
 
Cruikshank’s drawing shows the other workhouse boys with pale, twisted faces.  It’s a vivid, nightmarish image.  Patten argues that while the faces may look like caricatures, the boys were actually starving and shrunk from severe malnutr

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42. Jennifer McVeigh talks about the research behind her novel, The Fever Tree

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 4/11/2012
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The Fever Tree took me down a rabbit warren of research - a world of dust, diamonds and disease. I began with an idea: what was life like for the British on the diamond fields of South Africa? Who were the men and women who went out there? What kind of lives did they lead? And what moral codes were they bound by? My journey started in the British Library, reading books on the history of South Africa in the 19th Century. These were wonderful for giving me a general overview of the period - the politics of the time, and the people who were in power - but they couldn't bring that world to life. I needed real stories about ordinary people. I wanted to know what it smelt like to live in a tent in a diamond mining town, alongside 4,000 Europeans and 10,000 Africans, without sanitation or running water. I wanted to know what it was like to be shipped out to South Africa to work, by an emigration society which specialised in re-locating women. Using the bibliographies of the history books, I tracked down the primary sources from which much of their material was taken. I was drawn into the extraordinary world of the pioneer - men who travelled thousands of miles into the interior of South Africa with little more than the shirts on their backs. There was Barney Barnato, a Jewish boxer from Whitechapel who scraped a living as a comedian, and went on to become one of the richest men on the fields. There were cockney traders, flush with success - lighting cigars with five pound notes; there were men who made little and - after a bad turn at the gambling tables - shot themselves on the veldt. These were the stories which allowed me to see just as my characters would have done over a hundred years ago. I read guide books on the Cape published in 1880 and sifted through women’s magazines from the 1870s - turning over patterns for embroidered glove boxes and lace cushion covers - just as my character Frances might have done. I delved into manuals on social etiquette, cooking, botany, and what to bring on a hunting expedition to the Transvaal. There are books in the British Library which you simply couldn’t find in a lending library. Books that might have had a tiny print run, and aren’t useful to anyone but a handful of historians, which proved priceless for my research.

One afternoon, I was reading about African labour on the diamond fields, when I came across a reference to a smallpox epidemic which had ravaged the diamond mining town of Kimberley in the 1880s. I looked at the notes at the back of the book, and they cited the diary of a doctor called Hans Sauer. I tapped it into the British Library catalogue, and sure enough, they had a copy. In just over an hour Sauer’s diary was sitting on my desk, and it told the extraordinary story of a smallpox outbreak which had been covered up by Cecil Rhodes, the great statesman. The epidemic - which could have been easily contained with vaccination - ended up killing thousands. At the time it was reported as ‘the greatest medical scandal in the long and honourable history of British medicine’, but it has since been forgotten. Two of the doctors who were paid off to deny the presence of smallpox - Jameson and Matthews - went on to become Prime Minister and MP. This shocking story seemed to lie at the very heart of Britain's exploitation of

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43. Doing Dickens – Part 8

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 3/6/2012
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We made it! With Martin Chuzzlewit we have officially reached the peak of our Dickens mountain – 8 books down and 8 to go – and it’s downhill all the way from now on (in a good way, obviously).

Unfortunately, Martin Chuzzlewit had a strange effect on our little group as we found ourselves wondering if, perhaps, it was all becoming a bit too much? Were we drowning under a weight of apple-cheeked urchins? Were we (whisper it) Dickensed out?

 Luckily a crisis was averted with a week’s extension, and we concluded that we still love Dickens (phew) but Chuzzlewit is definitely not our favourite. However, even being able to say ‘it’s not my favourite Dickens’ makes me feel unbelievably smug.

 This odd morality tale sees our hero Martin transformed from a bit of a tool into a reformed character (via a slightly pointless but hilarious trip to America), but it’s hard to root for him and somehow it doesn’t quite hang together. As always, the incredible characters save the day: passive-aggressive villain Pecksniff; prematurely bald Tom Pinch (one of those people who ‘look their oldest when they are very young, and get it over at once’); permanently drunk Mrs Gamp and her magnificent verbal tics; and, best of all, the meanly-portrayed cast of pompous, gluttonous, spitting, ludicrously-titled Americans such as General Lafayette Kettle. Did the others agree?

 ‘Nearing the half way point in the marathon that is the complete works, I hit a Dickens wall with Martin Chuzzlewit (a Dickens wall is made out of cobblestones and sentimentality) and didn't want to read another of his novels as long as I lived. But after a few chapters, I found myself giggling aloud on public transport at the dysfunctional Chuzzlewit family, and revelling in the abject evil of Jonas, and loving the awful Mrs Gamp and her cucumber obsession. So, perhaps not Dickens's best book, but a very funny one, and I like the way the story hops back and forth across the Atlantic, and is so very rude about poor old America.’ Becky

‘I didn't get as  far with this as I'd hoped before our deadline discussion day, but I was  surprised how much I enjoyed what I did read, considering I'd had this pitched  to me as a weaker one. This comes up again and again in our Dickens talks, but  I'm struck repeatedly that even a weak Dickens book is so brilliant, and his  wit and humour makes even the most turgid/confusing/bizarre story easy to  read. And as ever, his villains are so well imagined and written, and his  ironic asides (and King of Irony himself, Mark Tapley) make Martin  Chuzzlewit laugh-out-loud. Some points deducted from the final score as I  didn't finish it (yet) and can't deduct points from myself, so I give this a  solid 6.4/10.’ Sam

 Next time, hankies ready for Dombey & Son, which is apparently a bit of a tear-jerker …

 Louise Willder, Copywriter

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44. Understanding Maus

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 11/8/2011
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Art Spiegelman’s Maus is one of the most significant graphic novels in existence; a fact signalled most obviously by its status as the only graphic novel to have won the Pulitzer Prize (in 1992, by special commendation). As if to underline this unprecedented, and as yet unrepeated, endorsement from the American literary establishment, the collected volumes of Maus grace every “Graphic Novels you Must Read” list that is worth its salt as well as several lists which do not restrict themselves purely to graphic novels as a medium.

What lifts Maus above other graphic novels isn’t purely its subject matter, depicting the Holocaust with the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats, but the complexity which Spiegelman instils into the text (far above and beyond my simple summing up of the animal analogy). The irony of the animal imagery is that Maus is also very effective at reminding the reader that what is being depicted is a true and human story, with real people and real lives behind the words and images.

[For me this is one of the most powerful moments in Maus, it portrays both the horrendous nature of the Holocaust, but also its effects on those of subsequent generations who did not live through it, but who are tasked with continuing its memory – Spiegelman is tired, depressed, stressed, but he’s also become trapped amongst the horrors which he has written about: the pile of discarded corpses, but also (and not often noticed) the watchtower and wire fence of the concentration camp outside his window, not to mention the at first ominous exclamation by an unseen seeming gunman off panel.]

The publication of MetaMaus further emphasises the human element of the book, sometimes unbearably so. It’s a hefty volume packed out with photos, preliminary sketches, interviews, and the original script to the comic, seeking to answer the three most common questions which have followed Spiegelman since Maus’s first publication: “Why the Holocaust?”, “Why Mice?” and “Why Comics?”. Some of this material is familiar, although it has never been so beautifully presented, or been placed in the company of so many other wonderful insights. The gem in the crown of the book is the interactive DVD which is included; on the disc is a digital version of the complete Maus, with audio commentary and sketches available for almost every page and panel at the click of a button. The content of the MetaMaus book is expanded tenfold, with extra pictures and material which would not have been possible to squeeze between the bindings of the text. Finally, and most haunting to my mind, are the audio clips of Spiegelman interviewing Vladek. To hear Vladek relaying the now familiar story of his life first hand in that thick Jewish-American accent sends genuine chills down my spine.

There is always the danger in supplementary material that it can lessen the impact of the original text, that it will strip away any mystique. However, rather than diminish the magic and powe

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45. Ken Kesey’s Magic Trip

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 11/18/2011
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In 1964, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set off on an epic road trip across America with his ‘Merry Band of Pranksters’. They shot footage of the journey, intending to turn the material into a film, but failed to do much with it (partly due to technological ineptitude, partly to being massively high on acid most of the way).

Now acclaimed documentary-makers Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood have lovingly pieced together the material to make a fascinating documentary about Kesey, his trip, and America at a time when the country was on the brink of huge changes. ‘As a film maker it was really interesting that there was all this footage they’d shot of the bus trip, because then you can dig into it’, says Gibney when I meet up with him to discuss the making of the film. ‘Kesey and the Pranksters had been trying to make a movie out of it for years, and never really succeeding. They had versions of it which were, to the outsider, almost unwatchable. You had to ingest massive amounts of hallucinogenic drugs and be, you know, tripping in order to be able to get it.’

The film opens with images of neat picket fences and Mad Men-esque housewives, and quickly plunges into sex, drugs (Kesey initially discovered LSD through an experimental programme financed by the CIA), and rock ‘n’ roll. Kesey and the Pranksters, says Gibney, ‘struck a blow for personal freedom at a time when you were expected to be a kind of cog in a bigger social machine’. There are clear echoes here of the themes Kesey had already explored in his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is set in a mental hospital and tells the story of one inmate’s rebellion against institutional authority and repression. In both the book and in his own life, Kesey was interested in the tension between the individual and society, and the concept of personal freedom versus convention and tradition.

The book that looms largest over the film, however, is Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat novel On the Road (1957). As Gibney explains, ‘Kesey decides they’re going to take this journey across the country, and I think in part because he’d read On the Road, he understood those myths, and he was going to take that journey on the open road … he understood the poetry of it all, and he was the one along the way who was trying to make the reality fit the poetry, or to find a poetry in the reality.’ Fiction and real life become even more blurred when Neal Cassady – the basis for the character of Dean Moriarty in

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46. Doing Dickens – Part 5

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 12/6/2011
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We were giddy with excitement this month talking about Nicholas Nickleby in our Dickens readathon gang – in fact if I were a Victorian heroine I might have had to lie down with some smelling salts. The reason: we have two new recruits! Our slightly augmented group was unanimous in agreeing that, contrary to our slightly low expectations, and perhaps compared to last month, this is an action-packed romp of a read. Nicholas is a slightly two-dimensional but incredibly dashing and spirited hero; his mother is hilariously annoying, taking rambling to a sort of stream-of-consciousness art form; and the book brims over with a host of deliciously theatrical extras, hideous grotesques and dastardly villains. The whole thing felt to me like a very jolly outing to a pantomime, hissing at the baddies and cheering on the goodies – apart from the desperately sad descriptions of the dreadful school Dotheboys Hall (I was glad to discover that, partly because of this novel, many horrific Victorian institutions such as this were closed down. Good old Dickens).

Without further ado, here are the thoughts of our readers:

‘This was my first foray into the Dickens read-a-thon and I quickly discovered that there’s an INTENSE amount of love for Dickens amongst the diehard core of book clubbers. And with good reason: Nicholas Nickleby is an absolute hoot, the sort of book the word ‘rollicking’ was coined to describe. Nicholas himself is a bit, well, beige – but it’s a minor quibble when the supporting cast is this brilliant. Personal favourites: the Crummles family’s theatre troop; the hideously lecherous usurer Arthur Gride; and the profligate Mr Mantalini, who repeatedly wins back his long-suffering wife through his seductive power of his moustache. Best of all is Mrs Nickleby –the most amusingly irritating mother since Mrs Bennet wittered her way through Pride and Prejudice.’  Jess Harrison, Classics

‘For me there is not a dud character in Dicken's Nicholas Nickleby, and a wealth of heroes and villains to choose from, all aptly named. For example, the tight fisted, Wackford Squeers, head of Dotheboys Hall, a school for boys, which bears more resemblance to a POW camp than an educational establishment, whose finest moment, I feel, was when, while watching his son eat, he ' hugged himself to think that his son and heir
should be fattening at the enemy's expense'. Or equally, the detestable Sir Mulberry Hawk, who like a bird of prey encircles and finally launches himself upon innocent Kate (Nicholas's
sister). There was just the right amount of humour (mostly provided by Nicholas's babbling mother, going off on another irrelevant tangent) to keep me from despairing at the overwhelming villainy and greed of the various monstrous characters. Even in a world seemingly teeming with evil, this book still creates a strong urge to be transported back to a Dickensian London street scene and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it...Bring on 'A Christmas Carol'!’  Rowan Powell, Art

‘I'm constantly delighted by how easy Dickens is to read and how bloody enjoyable it is. The names (Vincent Crummles, the Cheeryble twins, Peg Sliderskew - Wackford Squeers, for goodness' sake), characters (Kate and Nicholas Nickleby's spirit, Mrs Nickleby's inane ramblings that are all too recognisable for anyone with a mother over fifty, the utter villainy of Uncle Ralph and Sir Mulberry Hawk, and the wonderful kindness of Tim Linkinwater and the whole Cheeryble family) and plot (Lord Verisopht's duel! John Browdie's appearances! BROOKER!) made this a joy to read. Although it's a lot more shallow than my much-loved David Copperfield and a bit of a Victorian fairy story, it still tweaks the nose of just about every other book I've read

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47. Blog a Penguin Short 1: A Guest at the Feast

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 12/9/2011
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There is something very satisfying about reading an entire book in one sitting. Part of the pleasure of Julian Barnes’ Booker Prizing winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, is that you can spend a deeply pleasurable and indulgent afternoon devouring the book whole. You don’t have to worry about forgetting who said what when, of losing track of the plot as you nibble your way through the pages, piecemeal, when you get a moment here or there. The book is completely with you and the reading experience all the richer for it.

Last week we launched a new series of eBooks written with this experience in mind. The Penguin Shorts can be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, these brief books provide a short escape into a fictional world or act as a primer in a particular field or provide a new angle on an old subject.

To introduce you to the series, we are going to blog our way through all nine of the launch books, as we read through the series on our way in and out of work. To kick off, I’m starting with Colm Tóibín’s A Guest at the Feast. Celebrated as one of the finest novelists and short story writers of his generation Colm Tóibín, in his Penguin Short, turns his hand to his first piece of memoir, moving from the small town of Enniscorthy to Dublin, from memories of a mother who always had a book on the go to the author's early adulthood, from a love of literature to the influences of place and family.

To Work: 388 from Victoria Park Road to Embankment (50 minutes)


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It was bitterly cold yesterday morning. It proved difficult to keep my reader still as I tried to steal away the first few pages while keeping my morning vigil for the 388 to take me into work. It’s a good journey, I always get a seat and it allows for just shy of an hour of solid reading time. A Guest at the Feast opens with

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48. Doing Dickens, Part 6 – Christmas Special

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 12/22/2011
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 ‘Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?’

Ah, Dickens and Christmas, two things that go together just like chestnuts roasting and open fires, or... I don’t know... raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (I may be mixing up my seasonal references). The above remark from a little London barrow-girl, apparently overheard in 1870, pretty much sums up how inseparable Dickens and Christmas are in most people’s minds. And as the festive season gets into full swing, the Dickens reading group have worked ourselves into a fever pitch of yuletide excitement, with a whole host of Dickens-related events to fuel our obsession.

The first of these: a special Christmas Carol book club, which met in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street (a pub Dickens used to frequent), to drink wine, eat mince pies and talk about the book. Nearly half of our group of 12 or so were reduced to tears by it, with some of us sobbing pretty much throughout, even at Tiny Tim. One reader described it as “worse than the John Lewis adverts”. We all remarked on how strange it was to actually read something we already knew so well from film and TV adaptations, and loved that so much of the dialogue was the same – proof, if any more were needed, of how minty fresh and perfect Dickens’s writing is. We were still moved by the book’s humanist message of opening up your heart at Christmas (a time “to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures”), and its anger at complacency and ignorance (“are there no workhouses?”). We also loved how Scrooge suddenly becomes so silly and hysterical after his transformation, and how the book has such an exuberant, comic, holiday feel. But mainly, we were just so impressed that Dickens managed to conjure up this timeless fairy tale out of nowhere one night (apparently he composed it in his head while walking the streets of London, laughing and crying as he did so). I would also like to thank Dickens for A Christmas Carol because without it, It’s a Wonderful Life would surely never have existed.    

Next in our festive Dickensathon was an evening discussion of A Christmas Carol with the Guardian and the wonderful Claire Tomalin, author of Dickens: A Life. Tomalin pinpointed the moment of Scrooge’s transformation as right at the start of the hauntings, where he looks back at his lonely childhood and says “poor boy” – by pitying himself as a child, he is able to acknowledge what’s wrong with him as an adult. Discussions also ranged over the persona of the

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49. Doing Dickens - Part 7

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 1/31/2012
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We’re nearly halfway through our Dickens readathon with Barnaby Rudge, a story of family secrets set amid the riots that nearly destroyed 18^th-century London.

I don’t know if it’s because it’s January, or because Claire Tomalin’s biography says it is ‘the least popular of his books at the time, and has remained so’, or just because of its drudgy name, but I have to confess I was slightly dreading Barnaby Rudge. In fact, I was very pleasantly surprised. (I think).

The plus points are easy. The most thrilling, bloodthirsty descriptions of mob violence I’ve ever read, as mad raging crowds in the Gordon riots set fire to churches, storm Newgate prison and lie in depraved heaps drinking flaming liquor. The plausibility of weak men with grudges forming themselves into groups called things like ‘United Bulldogs’ and acting all macho as they smash things up. The baddies, of course: smooth-talking Sir John Chester, and animalistic Hugh, who is transformed by alcohol from a rugged beefcake (at which point Becky pointed out it was slightly wrong of me to be attracted to a 19^th-century illustration) into a devilish beast. The last few chapters are a thrillride of shocking revelations, burnings, kidnappings, heaving bosoms, sizzling gypsies and sword fights.

But – the bad news it takes about 400 pages to get here. Not that much seems to happen before that. It’s a novel without a hero, not necessarily a problem, but I found the holy fool Barnaby Rudge too much of a cutout. And, we all agreed the depiction of young women was decidedly icky. Now on to my fellow Dickens fans’ views:

‘I don't understand why Barnaby Rudge is so unpopular; it's great! It starts slowly, I'll admit, but I really enjoyed Dickens's London of the 1780s, which is all lawlessness, muddy streets, villains crouching on corners and wigs being blown off. I think the best, most interesting character in this novel is THE MOB itself, with its complex motivations, and its unstoppable, destructive will. I love the build up of tension as the London riots gather momentum, and the climax is compelling. One thing really bugs me, though: even allowing for the fact he's a Victorian, the author's attitude towards young women is sometimes deeply unnerving. There is one uncomfortable chapter, in which our heroines are at the mercy of some potential rapists, where Dickens seems to be enjoying himself -ahem- a bit too much. It says a lot for the brilliance, humour and insightfulness of the rest of his story telling that I still love the book.’  Becky Stocks

‘Although this didn't have the immediate pace of the other Dickenses I've read, Barnaby Rudge is still full of such amazing characters. The consensus seemed to be in our group that even a weaker Dickens knocks the spots off particularly modern fiction, and with figures like wicked-but-possibly-handsome Hugh (have you ever seen someone swoon over a nineteenth-century line-drawing? I have, now), lovely Gabriel Varden (apparently the original main character in Dickens's early thoughts), dreadful small-man Simon Tappertit and the best villain I think I've ever read, Mr Chester. Father of Edward, our male love-interest, Mr Chester is utterly evil in the most friendly, smiling manner: a perfect sociopath, delighted to be fooling people with his welcoming face. His dialogue throughout is some of the best, most modern I've read in any fiction, and I urge you to read this book to acquaint yourself with him alone, even if it didn't (four hundred pages in) also contain wild rioting, burning lakes of alcohol and terrible bloodshed. Overall score: a surprising 6.2.’  Sam Binnie

Next time – Martin Chuzzlewit, where we look forward to discovering the drunkard Mrs Gamp.

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By: Venetia Butterfield, on 2/29/2012
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