I've been working at Penguin for over ten years and an enduring pleasure is the quantity and quality of free books that are liberally dispersed among staff. For the first three years of my employ there was barely a day when I didn't leave with a manuscript, a proof or a glossy finished text in my bulging bag. 7 years, a course of physiotherapy and three bags later I am a little less greedy than I once was, but my reading habits have also changed pretty dramatically in that time. I don't yet spend a lot of time with an ebook reader but thanks to the combination of google reader and my iPod Touch I am rarely far away from a favourite writer - a blog writer that is. So for this five in mind I'm going to eschew the world of print and rummage through my RSS feeds to pick out five blogs that I always look forward to seeing updated.
Kottke.org - Jason Kottke is one of the proto-bloggers - he began blogging over 10 years ago. Covering 'liberal arts 2.0' Jason barely comments on the items he finds from across the internet, but his interests range across technology, typography, design and recently (as with all American blogs!) politics. Basically, if you haven't got the time or energy to spend your days searching for smart, literate, good-looking things on the internet, you could do a lot worse than let Jason Kottke do it for you.
A relatively new and nerdy interest of mine is data-visualization and Flowing Data is the best blog I've found for indulging this interest. I'm not a designer, but since my work involves thinking about how we might present complex ideas and stories in digital formats I am finding the work of designers such as Edward Tufte and Jonathan Harris really inspiring. Also, some of this stuff is really beautiful to look at. In a nerdy way.
A relative newcomer to the world of bookblogging this one, but maybe the best publishing blog out there at the moment. The 26th Story is the blog of HarperStudio, an imprint of HarperCollins in the US which is doing some interesting things with their publishing business model. Their blog clearly shows that they understand the conversational tone of 'web2.0' and they smartly write about many of the issues that concern forward-thinking publishing folk the world over.
At the intersection of design, architecture and technology resides bldgblog where I find some of the best
photography and most thought-provoking articles on the internet. If
you are interested in cities or in buildings and what they might look
like in the future this is one for you. And while it has absolutely
nothing to do with books or publishing, there is a bldgblog book coming
out next year and I can't wait.
Basically, how could I resist a blog called Telstar Logistics with a logo like this and 'Land Air Sea Space' as its slogan? I couldn't and in the past few months I've been treated to posts on air-traffic routes in the San Francisco Bay area, Automated Tokyo bicycle garages and the basic taxonomy of American Houseboat design. Land, Air, Sea and Space indeed.
The great thing about a blog reading list is that there is no financial investment in them at all, just time. So if I stop being fascinated by data visualization and start obsessing about Hello Kitty, to pick an example completely at random, I can just delete my current reading list and find a whole new one. Who knows what my RSS reader will look like 6 months from now? Exciting, isn't it?
If you've got a favourite blog that you want to share, drop us a note in the comments below.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
...........................................................................
Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website
Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing
[email protected]
..............................................................................
As a long-term list devotee of the High Fidelity ilk I was unable to resist the lure of choosing my own five books. At last, a chance to inflict my musings on a wider - and I hope, more appreciative - audience than my family, the unwilling participants of many drawn-out games of ‘Top 10…’ (books, films, cities, animals, food stuffs…the possibilities are endless). As someone remarked to me only a few minutes ago: ‘If there’s one thing better than making a list, it’s foisting it on other people.’ A truer sentence has never been spoken.
I Capture the Castle
I have to confess to feeling slightly self-conscious about this choice. This says more about me than the book itself which is, in fact, perfect. Dodie Smith’s tale of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain and her eccentric family, who lead a life of bohemian poverty in a crumbling castle in Suffolk, could easily descend into twee-ness. It is to Smith’s credit that it never does. All I can say is that were I Capture the Castle to be a soup it would be Heinz’s Cream of Tomato: rich (but never sickly), comforting and a timeless classic.
In Cold Blood
Were I to create a profile on Penguin Dating I would probably refrain from mentioning In Cold Blood for fear of the characters that such a choice might attract. And yet, for all my squeamishness, it is a necessary selection. Truman Capote’s detailed investigation of the murder of the Clutter family at the hands of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock is immaculately researched and utterly engrossing. Both chilling and deeply saddening it ought, I think, to be mandatory reading for anyone professing to hold an opinion on the subject of capital punishment.
Farewell, My Lovely
I bought this a few years ago on a whim, because I liked the jacket (a 1970s Penguin Crime paperback). The first Chandler novel that I ever read, it triggered my love – obsession might be a more apt word - for hard-boiled detective fiction. For this slightly sentimental reason it remains my favourite. I would argue that Chandler is more about style than plot, but this novel is an absolute cracker. Philip Marlowe is the ultimate PI, fighting a one man battle against the corruption that is rife on the mean streets of LA. The characters have fabulous, almost Dickensian names: Moose Malloy and Velma Valento, surely the ultimate femme fatale, being just a couple of the best.
Pride and Prejudice
Quite an agonising decision this, considering that every word that flowed from Jane Austen’s quill went on to form a flawless pearl of a novel. Well, in my opinion anyway. There is something special about Pride and Prejudice though, packed as it is with social truisms, which may be why it continues to strike a chord with each new generation of readers. It is a source of constant irritation to me that there is a stigma attached to Austen’s writing; that it is considered to be ‘for girls’, whatever that means (thanks Andrew Davies). Witty, insightful and without a superfluous word, it doesn’t come any better than this.
The Woman in White
I don’t know that I would choose this as my desert island book, but there is no denying that it is a sensational read. It seems almost unthinkable that Collins pretty much made up the story as he went along; writing and publishing monthly in his mentor Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round. This inevitably led to a few plot related flaws, but these fall to the wayside when faced with the sheer inspired genius of the creation of the magnificent Count Fosco, a corpulent, white mice loving Machiavelli in opera clothes.
Sophie Missing
Work Experience Intern
...........................................................................
Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website
Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing
[email protected]
..............................................................................
I share the sentiments of the others who have already done this. Help. Just five books? Panic. So for want of a better system I’ve just plucked five books that I’m obsessed with; five books that poor, long-suffering friends of mine will have heard me rambling on about at some point or another. There are loads more, of course, but here are five to be getting on with.
The Snow Spider by Jenny Nimmo
Like Emily (Five in Mind part ten), I feel that we should be allowed to ramble about at least one children’s book. I’m not really sure how many other people like The Snow Spider, even though I remember they made a TV adaptation of the third in the trilogy (The Chestnut Soldier). I love this book so much. Like all the best children’s books, one of the most appealing things about it is the magical ‘other’ world it’s about. But what for me makes it so different to lots of other children’s books (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example) is that the reader is never taken to the other world. The main character is shown what it looks like in an enchanted spider’s web at one point, but he never ever actually goes there. I think this is why it was always so powerful for me when I was a child, and why it retained a much stronger resonance than, say, Narnia, or other magic lands in books. It never got spoilt by description.
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
When I’d just about grown out of the stage where I believed in magical sparkly lands, I was an awkward adolescent and I fell in love with this book. They should give this out as a handbook for teenage girls. I think it’s one of the most romantic books ever written, in every sense of the word, and is probably to blame for many a copy-cat tortured diary (my own included). Who doesn’t want to live in an old ramshackle castle in the middle of nowhere with a Father whose writer’s block is so bad you have to lock him up until he writes ‘the cat sat on the mat’ for days on end, and a glamorously eccentric step-mother who has a penchant for stripping off to nothing but her wellies and wandering around the moors communing with nature? It’s a shame the film had to change the last sentence of the diary. It was perfect as it was.
The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter
Then I discovered Angela Carter when I was about seventeen and got really excited, first about The Bloody Chamber, and then about this book and then about everything else published by Virago that I could get my hands on. I have to have this one on my shelf all the time just in case I want to read a bit. It’s kind of grimy and grubby and depressing at the same time as being really beautiful and I remember feeling when I first read it that she said loads of things I felt but would never have managed to formulate in my mind, and struck a chord that other writers I read at the time seemed to be missing.
The Confusions of Young Törless – Robert Musil
I studied this for my degree and it’s one of the ones I’ll keep rereading forever because it’s amazing. It’s all about language, and power, and society, and identity, and the unconscious . . . all the exciting things basically. It also features a character who in my mind is a bit like the homoerotic Austrian cousin of Piggy from Lord of the Flies, so in some ways maybe it’s a sort of sexual Lord of the Flies, but with Freud and Fascism lurking underneath
Hmm, that all sounds like a bit of a mess, doesn’t it. It’s not. It’s great.
The Duino Elegies - Rilke
And finally, my personal bible. You know when someone’s just spent three days at a festival messing around with mind-altering drugs and they come back all weird saying things like “Suddenly I didn’t exist anymore; I didn’t know if I was a man or a woman anymore, or if I was maybe a cat, or a tree, or if I was even alive at all, or if I could even say the word ‘I’ . . .” and all that nonsense?
Well. I swear when I read these for the first time that that exact thing happened to me. I got to about the third Elegy and bang, I honestly wasn’t quite sure if I was alive or dead. The boundaries between everything seemed to have just disintegrated and everything went strange. Granted, I was probably up way past my bedtime and fighting off an impending essay crisis with copious amounts of coffee, but aside from that, I was stimulant free and just high as a kite on Rilke’s beautiful, beautiful images and his strange ideas that seem all the stranger precisely because they seem so familiar – as though they’re something you used to know, but you maybe forgot when you were born.
Ah, Rilke. What a guy.
Anna Kelly
Editorial Assistant, Hamish Hamilton
..............................................................................
Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website
Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing
[email protected]
..............................................................................
