There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away.
No one has stepped twice into the same river.
But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
– Marina Tsvetaeva

Found a marvellous article from the eminently sensible Diana Wynne Jones on how to write stories. It’s aimed at young writers but, as they say on the infomercials, there’s something here for everyone.
My favourite tip:

Some people get stiff and unhappy writing because they think they can’t manage to write how it feels to have an adventure, or to be in the middle of very fast, exciting action. This is nonsense. Everyone knows.
What you have to do, if you are stuck this way, is to stop thinking in words and then shut your eyes and think how it would be if you were the one having the adventure, falling down the cliff or being attacked by a vampire, or whatever.
You’ll know at once. Then you simply put down what you know. It may come out queer, but queer is good where actions and feelings are concerned.

Read the rest on her website.

Apparently historical fiction is the flavour of the month (just as “adventure is the new fantasy” in children’s lit). A happy juncture for some of us, but what’s it about?
One could argue that a certain style of historical fiction, perhaps kicked off by I, Claudius and hovering in the space between Robert Graves and Georgette Heyer, has never gone out of fashion and indeed includes many best sellers of the last thirty years.
Pipes and Timbrels delved a little into this apparent rebirth in a recent edition, citing Shakespearean scholar Martha Tuck Rozett’s essay “Constructing a world: how postmodern historical fiction reimagines the past”, on the latest generation of historical fiction writers:

What they share with the new historicists – and what distinguishes their novels from traditional or classic historical fictions and allies them with postmodern fictions – are a resistance to old certainties about what happened and why; a recognition of the subjectivity, the uncertainty, the multiplicity of truths inherent in any account of past events, and a disjunctive, self-conscious narrative, frequently produced by eccentric and/or multiple narrating voices.

Clearly this applies more to Geraldine Brooks and Julian Barnes than to Bernard Cornwell, but writers such as EL Doctorow and Laurence Durrell were doing interesting and new things with modern history way before anyone barthed up (sorry) post-modernism.
I’d suggest that the new directions in history writing in general (fact or fiction) are based more in post-war and more specifically post-Cold War cultural uncertainty, greater access to archival information, the impact of modern history and particularly war, influences from fields as diverse as psychology and forensics, broader international dialogue between writers and researchers in history and archaeology, and new forms of writing that pre-date post-modernist theory.
That, too, has been a recent influence, but it is not the only nor the most significant one.
It’s all part of the same wave, if you like, currents heading off in different directions, overlapping and clashing and sometimes drowning each other out.
I just made that up, but I’ll call it a theory.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
– TS Eliot

Daisy Goodwin, in The Times, reckons a poem’s as good as a lifebelt – or maybe a Valium.

“Poetry has got me through innumerable waiting rooms, traffic jams and airport lounges. It has soothed fractious children, diverted broken-hearted friends and made romantic points.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time of Gifts, recited The Odyssey to himself as he walked across Europe; Brian Keenan used the poetry of Pablo Neruda as his touchstone during his long incarceration as a hostage in Lebanon…”

[Daisy clearly hasn’t read his travel book about horse-riding across half of South America with fellow hostage John McCarthy, where Keenan bores everyone senseless with recitations. But I digress.]

“Everyone should have at least 10 poems that they can access at any time – building up a mental playlist of poems is a protection against boredom, mental atrophy, and you will never be at a loss when the batteries on your iPod finally run out. In an age of brandwashing, where advertising jingles and TV catchphrases stick in your mind, the ultimate luxury is to have what Coleridge called “the best words in the best order” always accessible.”

Quite right, too.
Unfortunately the only thing that ever pops into my head in times of crisis is the Lord’s Prayer, which isn’t much help since I retract any semblance of faith as soon as the plane rights itself or the shark turns out to be a bit of kelp.
And she doesn’t say anything about the agony of trying to remember what comes after the lines you know well:

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving ‘down the Cooper’ where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.

I was awake for hours the other night, trying to locate the missing bits stowed somewhere in my memory. “I am sitting in my dingy little office/Where a… something something something.”
But in less stressful moments, when life is not threatened and memory seems not to be utterly fading, it is as lovely to be able to run Sunne Rising lightly over the braincells as it is to sing Nessun Dorna at the top of my voice in the car when nobody can hear.
And believe me, nobody would want to.
Which reminds me, why do people on public transport sing along out loud with their iPods? Are they so transported they have no concept of the cringing world around them? It seems to happen much more than it used to with mere Walkman (Walkmen?). There’s a thesis in that somewhere.
And why do they only ever sing the last few words of each line? A woman on the ferry the other day chorused “Oh yeah” over and over for what felt like 20 minutes. (It could have been worse: she might have sung, “Something something something – oh yeah”.)
Oh for the days when people whispered a few verses of Browning silently behind a book.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.
– Jan Morris

The Guardian reports that JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Irvine Welsh and Jacqueline Wilson are among 150 authors who have pledged to help galvanise support for public libraries in the UK and combat their growing image problem. It’s part of the Love Libraries campaign, launched this month.
Rowling compared libraries to the World-Between-The-Worlds from CS Lewis’s Narnia books, “where visitors could enter a thousand different worlds by jumping into different pools”.
“When I got my eldest daughter a library card I felt as though I had bought her citizenship of that same fabulous world,” she said.
Rushdie focused on the potential libraries have for disseminating ideas, saying “if knowledge is power, then the public library system gives that power to anyone who wants it.”
But a recent UK study shows that 42% of adults haven’t visited their local library in the past two years.
That doesn’t necessarily mean people aren’t reading. I hadn’t visited a library for years and years – not since I stopped studying – but had to start all over again to research historical details for my books.
Even though the Auckland City Library’s collection of material on Malta, for example, is limited (not a lot of call for it here, of course) it’s quite good on ships and maritime history. And it does always seem full of people.
But don’t start me on that library. I only love it on principal; in reality the relationship has soured. The Central Library has taken its entire Children’s Literature Reference Collection out of general circulation and carefully stored it in “The Basement”. Just when I started studying again. Sorry if I’ve mentioned this before, but it drives me crazy.
You can’t browse or flick – and flicking, as we all know, can lead to the most sublime flights of fancy or blindingly brilliant ideas. But no. Flicking, fancy and flight are not allowed. Now you have to ask for a specific title and wait for the ever-patient staff to bring the book out of its hiding hole. Then, usually, you can’t borrow it to actually read – it has to go back to The Basement.
Maybe if they didn’t call it The Basement it wouldn’t seem quite so sad and dark and lonely. The traditional “stack” always seems like a much friendlier place for books to be stored, as if they might be cosying up to each other, and partying when the lights go out. You can imagine Simon Schama interrogating Tolstoy, Pinter haranguing Hardy, and Margaret Mead scribbling it all down.
The Basement sounds as if it were a lost and found department, with books sitting about sulking, damply and dimly, like wallflowers at a dance wishing someone would ask for the next polka.

After her neighbour’s washing machine “gave up the goat”, a bone idol Jeanette Winterson had to come to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as a damp squid.
Don’t try working it out: you can read it here.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large – where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first.
And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning’s dark.
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

That new bookcase is full already.
Where do all those books come from?
I don’t know how they get here at all, given that the posties seem to have lost not one but two parcels sent here this month. It’s an emergency. I’m an addict. I must have my parcels. And fast.
Anyway, at least my lovely old set of Encyclopaedia Britannica is now on proper shelves, which only means I spend even more time learning vital things about subjects I never previously considered. I’ve never had a proper encyclopaedia before. It’s terribly exciting. At every opening, there’s a new story idea.
No time for reading.
But I just finished the last few niggling bits and pieces on my new manuscript. I think.
No rest for the wicked. Now it’s on to the next one – on a topic which, you’ll be amazed to learn, I stumbled across in the encyclopaedia.