Five perfect books for men who never read

Just under a third of the male population don’t read books, says a Reading Agency survey. Here are five man-friendly page-turners they might enjoy anyway.

By Leo Benedictus

Nearly 30% of men have not read a book since school, according to a survey commissioned for World Book Night, an annual event that hopes to change their ways. The reasons men don’t read are varied, but “not really wanting to” seems to be the main one. However, if you are a man – or know one – who might agree to try just one book for the hell of it, these are my guaranteed-no-regrets recommendations.

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Ulysses in America

		James Joyce (1882 – 1941) by Steve King On this day in 1934, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling allowing James Joyce’s Ulysses into America. This enabled Random House to issue the first U.S. edition, over a decade after Sylvia Beach’s original Paris edition; according to Random House editor Bennett Cerf, the case hinged entirely and hilariously upon one of these smuggled Beach editions.

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Joyce, Fitzgerald, Jumping

		F. Scott Fitzgerald By Steve King On this day in 1928 Sylvia Beach hosted a dinner party in order that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who “worshipped James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him,” might do so. Out of nervousness or champagne, Fitzgerald greeted his hero by dropping down on one knee, kissing his hand, and declaring, “How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep.”

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“The Genius They Forgot”

		Dorothy Richardson (1873 – 1957) On this day in 1873 Dorothy Richardson was born. Pilgrimage, Richardson’s twenty-year experimental novel, began appearing in 1915 — at about the time Joyce, Proust and Woolf were engaged in similar experiments. While Richardson may or may not be “the genius they forgot” (the subtitle of one biography), her writing was the first to be described as “stream of consciousness,” and her life is every bit as remarkable as those more famous and remembered.

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Joyce grandson describes Central Bank coin ‘one of the greatest insults to Joyce family’

A view of a limited edition James Joyce collector coin issued by the Central Bank.

Image of Joyce ‘the most unlikely likeness ever’

Stephen James Joyce, grandson of James Joyce, has condemned the commemorative coin for the author issued this week by the Central Bank.

The coin, which sold out yesterday, two days after 10,000 were issued, contains an error in the quotation used from the third episode of Ulysses .

Mr Joyce described the circumstances of the coin’s issuing as “one of the greatest insults to the Joyce family that has ever been perpetrated in Ireland”.

Lack of consultation
Mr Joyce complained about a lack of consultation with him and the James Joyce estate by the Central Bank over the coin.

He said the first he heard of it was in a communication last September, but when he attempted to contact the person concerned it turned out he was no longer at the bank. Another brief communication arrived in March, which contained no further information. Had he seen the coin, or an image of it, the error would have been spotted.

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Gay Talese on the Social Order of New York’s Cats

By Maria Popova

A rare and wonderful 1961 taxonomy of Gotham’s feline fraternity from the godfather of literary journalism.

Cats, not unlike dogs, seem to have claimed the role of literary muses, from Joyce’s children’s books to T. S. Eliot’s poetry to Hemingway’s heart, by way of various other bookish cameos. In 1961, 29-year-old Gay Talese penned New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey (public library) — an obscure out-of-print gem, in which the beloved icon of literary journalism paints an immersive, vibrant portrait of Gotham’s secret life, from its 8,485 telephone operators to its 5,000 prostitutes to its one chauffeur who has a chauffeur, and the entire bubbling cauldron of humanity in between.

Among the singular subcultures Talese explores is the city’s feline fraternity:

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Finnegans Wake, Chop Suey

		James Joyce (1882 – 1941) On this day in 1923, James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that he had just begun “Work in Progress,” the book which would become Finnegans Wake sixteen years later. When Nora found out that her husband was “on another book again,” she asked if, instead of “that chop suey you’re writing,” he might not try “sensible books that people can understand.”

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How the Superheroes of Literature can save you from the Grammar Nazis

By Cath Murphy

We’ve all met a Grammar Nazi: those people who think it is their iron-clad duty not to comment on the rhythm of your prose or the strength of your arguments, but on the fact that you missed an apostrophe in the second line of paragraph three. I’m not going to delve into the psychology of those who misguidedly think that language has rules and they alone know how to apply them, except to remark that I’ve always been persuaded that there’s a strong correlation between a person’s propensity to correct the grammar and spelling of others and the likelihood that this same person is into weird sex.

The problem with the Grammar Nazis is not only that having a scornful virtual finger pointed at your mistakes is about as pleasant as non-anaesthetized toenail extraction, it’s that even when they’re wrong, they’re right. Even if the ‘rule’ the Grammar Nazi is attempting to enforce is so dead the only examples are found stuffed in museums, all you will get for your attempts to persuade them is carpal tunnel syndrome and a tension headache. It’s at times like these you need a secret weapon: none other than the Superheroes of Literature, authors so mighty and famous that a mere mention of them will, like a well aimed laser beam, reduce a Grammar Nazi to a heap of ash.

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Finnegans Wake becomes a hit book in China

Puntastic success … Stacking shelves at a Beijing bookshop.

Following billboard ads, James Joyce’s nigh-incomprehensible book leaps over language barrier to reach surprising readership

By Jonathan Kaiman

After spending eight years translating the first third of James Joyce’s famously opaque novel Finnegans Wake into Chinese, Dai Congrong assumed it was a labour of love rather than money. The book’s language is thick with multilingual puns and brazenly defies grammatical conventions. It begins: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

So the 41-year-old professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University was incredulous when the translation became a surprise bestseller in China after hitting shelves last month. Backed by an elaborate billboard ad campaign, the first volume of “Fennigen de Shouling Ye” sold out its first run of 8,000 copies and reached number two on a prestigious bestseller list in Shanghai, second only to a biography of Deng Xiaoping. Sales of 30,000 are considered “cause for celebration” according to Chinese publisher Gray Tan, so 8,000 in a month has made Joyce a distinctly hot property. Ian McEwan, for instance, is considered pretty buzzy in translation, but the print run of Atonement was only 5,000 copies.

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Joyce’s Birthday Books

		James Joyce On this day in 1922, James Joyce’s fortieth birthday, Ulysses was first published — although only two copies of the book actually arrived by train to anxious publisher Sylvia Beach. Although Finnegans Wake was not ready for publication on Joyce’s fifty-seventh birthday, as he had hoped, a bound copy was delivered to him. Both birthday books relieved Joyce’s superstitious fears, and occasioned a party.

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