Melvin Burgess: my favourite children’s books

Stories can empower teenage readers and challenge their parents and teachers, says Melvin Burgess.

Books fulfil many roles – they can be comforting, they can be distracting, they can take us places we’d never normally go. But my favourite books, generally speaking, are empowering books – books that give us a little bit more understanding about the world, and ourselves in particular. Such books for children are not always comfortable for adults. Bringing up kids is a long process of letting go, and it’s easier to keep them on the rails, by and large, where we know what’s going on.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Shehadeh in contention for second Orwell Prize

Raja Shehadeh

| By Charlotte Williams

Author Raja Shehadeh is in the running to win the Orwell Prize for a second time, with Random House the most nominated publisher on the shortlist for the £3,000 prize.

Raja Shehadeh’s Occupation Diaries (Profile Books), about daily life in Palestine, is among the titles on the seven-strong shortlist, with Injustice by Clive Stafford Smith (Harvill Secker), examining the US justice system, and A Very British Killing by A T Williams (Jonathan Cape), about the killing of a hotel receptionist in Iraq by British Army troops, the two Random House titles on the list.

Shedhadeh previously won the prize in 2008 for Palestinian Walks, while Stafford Smith was also on the shortlist that year for Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay.

Click here to read the rest of this story

20 Awesome Examples Of Literary Graffiti

  Thank you, graffiti artists, for making our streets a little bit smarter. How many of these literary references do you recognize?

1. Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse Five”

 

Click here to read the rest of this story

10 Classic Books You Read in High School You Should Reread

By Kevin Smokler

In Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven’t Touched Since High School, Kevin Smokler takes you on a trip down high school memory lane, when you couldn’t stand reading As I Lay Dying or Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Or maybe you could, you bookworm. Either way, Smokler gives us 10 books and 10 compelling reasons why you should revisit them.

It’s all too easy to look at the novels assigned to us as high school students as monuments or mist, to be worshiped or abandoned as we did our outfit to the junior prom. That either/or narrative matches both how we encounter these “great books” in education (as non-negotiable requirements) and an educator’s hope for our response (that their “greatness” changes our lives). That may be a whole lot no-shades-of-gray thinking on my part. As proof, I’ll accept a “meh” opinion on Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter from anyone assigned to write an essay on it as a teenager.

Is there a third way? I hope so. I spent the last year rereading the books my high school teachers assigned to me. My thinking: It isn’t enough to give a classic another look just because “it’s a classic.” A classic is also so because of its resonance and usefulness throughout time, JST as Shakespeare’s Henry V was a patriotic salvo when Laurence Oliver adopted it at the beginning of the Cold War and a warning about the cost of empire when Kenneth Brannagh did at the end of it.

Below are 10 high school classics where I found that useful thing I missed the first time around.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Plum in Trouble

		P. G. Wodehouse (1881 – 1975) On this day in 1975 P. G. “Plum” Wodehouse died, aged ninety-three. Given the hundred books and the three-dozen musicals, it seems reasonable to believe the account of Wodehouse’s final moments which has him collapsing while trying to pick up the pen and papers his wife had thrown across his hospital room. On this day in 1946 George Orwell published “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse,” in which he tries to rescue the author from his stickiest and most famous spot of trouble.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Orwell on Orwell

		On this day in 1950 George Orwell (Eric Blair) died. Many of Orwell’s contemporaries viewed him as over-earnest or foolishly idealistic, and even his friends made jokes about their “Knight of the Woeful Countenance.” In “Why I Write,” an essay from his last years, Orwell said that he would have been a different man and writer, had the times not been what they were: “…I wasn’t born for an age like this; / Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?”

Click here to read the rest of this story

Listen to a Rare Recording of Samuel Beckett Reading from ‘Watt’

By Tom Hawking

It’s always interesting listening to an author reading from their own work. There are plenty of authors who’ve been perfectly willing to do so, but others are or were more reticent to do so. George Orwell was perhaps the most famous example, but Samuel Beckett was another — or, at least, he refused to be recorded doing so — which is why we were fascinated to see that Dangerous Minds have apparently unearthed a video of the late playwright and author reading a passage from his second novel Watt.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Orwell & “The Gramophone Mind”

		On this day in 1945, George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published. The book was delayed by the WWII paper shortage and very nearly a casualty of the war itself, either at the hands of German bombs or British politics. “The enemy is the gramophone mind,” he wrote in his preface to the book, “whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”

Click here to read the rest of this story

Why I Write: George Orwell’s Four Motives for Creation

By Maria Popova

“Sheer egoism… Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.”

Literary legend Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, would have been 109 today. Though he remains best remembered for authoring the cult-classics Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was also a formidable, masterful essayist. Among his finest short-form feats is the 1946 essay Why I Write (public library) — a fine addition to other timeless insights on writing, including Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and various invaluable insight from other great writers.

Orwell begins with some details about his less than idyllic childhood — complete with absentee father, school mockery and bullying, and a profound sense of loneliness — and traces how those experiences steered him towards writing, proposing that such early micro-traumas are essential for any writer’s drive. He then lays out what he believes to be the four main motives for writing, most of which extrapolate to just about any domain of creative output.

Click here to read the rest of this story

From Civilization to Big Brother: how a game recreated Orwell’s 1984

Civilization: not so civilizing?

It turns out that if you play Civilization II for long enough, you enter a world very much like Orwell’s 1984. Coincidence?

By Sam Jordison

If you happen to have touched a computer some time within the last 20 years, the chances are you may well have spent a regrettably long time playing on one of the many instalments of Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise. I doubt, however, that you will have devoted quite as much of your life to it as a contributor to the Reddit forums going by the name of Lycerius. He (it must be a he!) posted the following extraordinary statement:

“I’ve been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be.”

Just in case you are one of the few people not to have played Civilization, and are therefore unaware of the planet-shifting magnetism of Lycerius’ post, Here’s a quick primer.

Civilization is a game that – true to its name – enables you to build your own civilisation. You start in 4000BC in a small village, which you gradually expand by farming, building things like libraries (so that you can develop technologies), and producing armies to conquer other territories. It’s addictive, vaguely educational and most sane people stopped playing some time around 1997 (both in real and game years), once they’d built a spaceship and reached Alpha Centauri.

Not so Lycerius. He has carried on for an extra 2,000 years – although he is at pains to point out he doesn’t just play Civilization II non-stop (“Naturally, I play other games and have a life…”). Yet, as quickly becomes apparent when you read through the rest of his post (as I urge you to do), even if Lycerius had dedicated all of his time to playing Civilization, it wouldn’t have been wasted. The results are fascinating. He summarises them thus:

Click here to read the rest of this story