Reading Review 2014

For me, 2014 was a pretty respectable reading year. I achieved my Goodreads Challenge of finishing forty books, I discovered some exciting new authors (especially Helen Oyeyemi and Evie Wyld), and I even managed to make it through some non-fiction. On my travels, I had the time to tackle a few tomes (Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch), whereas later in the year when I was busier I sped through shorter novels (Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Graham Greene’s Doctor Fischer of Geneva). With only one or two exceptions, I enjoyed everything I picked up – I certainly identified some all-time favourite reads. So below are just a few of the books that especially stood out for me last year.

Best non-fiction: Gossip From the Forest by Sarah Maitland. Maitland's exploration of Britain’s forests is fascinating in itself, but the magic really happens when she connects natural history with the history of fairy tales, and uses what she’s learned to inform her own creative writing.

Best short story collection: The Rental Heart and Other Fairy Tales by Kirsty Logan. There’s been a lot of buzz about Logan’s debut collection - rightly so, as far as I’m concerned, for her short stories are dark, dreamlike and beautifully-crafted. I devoured them all in just a couple of sittings, not because they were easy reads, but because – like faerie –Logan’s world was difficult to leave.

Best children's/young adult book: More Than This by Patrick Ness. I’m reluctant to choose Ness for this because I picked him last year too, but his writing is so bold and unique that I simply can’t resist him. I’m also reluctant to say too much about this story, because the way it unravels is completely unpredictable and best appreciated without so much as a sniff of spoilers.

Best classic: Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery. Why haven’t I read this before? It really is a great book, mainly because Anne Shirley is such a fantastic character. As my pal Joely Badger pointed out, Anne is very much a contemporary of Richmal Crompton's (Just) William, in both her earnestness and her knack for getting into trouble. A lovely read.

Most disappointing book: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. I'm a big fan of Gaiman's work, especially Stardust, Neverwhere and his short stories. His ideas are big, his writing is clever, but I thought the plot of this one was rather muddled, even dull.

Best reread: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 and 3/4 by Sue Townsend. After the sad news of his creator’s passing, I revisited Adrian Mole last year, and found his adventures just as bittersweet, just as awkward, and just as likely to cause ugly snorts of laughter as they ever were.

Best book: The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine. I’m not sure where to start with this one. In fact, at some point in the near future, I’d like to write a proper review of it, because Alameddine has given me such a lot to think about - both as a reader and a writer. So for now I’ll try to keep it short. Hakawati is the Arabic word for “storyteller”, and this is a book about stories. On the surface, it tells the tale of Osama, the grandson of a hakawati who returns from the US to his Lebanese homeland after the civil war. But woven within that story are countless others, ranging from the ‘real-life’ tales of Osama’s family to the fairy tales, folk tales and even religious tales told by the hakawati himself. It’s such a rich and complex structure, so inventive and entertaining, that you can practically sense Alameddine’s glee as he tests how far he can push the boundaries of his novel. I thought it was superb, and there’s no doubt it’s the best book I read last year.

I would, however, also like to mention The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, and Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, for they too completely captivated me. Now I write this, I wonder whether I enjoyed these books so much because each of their authors – like Alameddine – approached their respective plots in an original, playful way: Miller’s was a retelling of the Iliad, Fowler revealed hers from middle to beginning to end, Wyld related half of hers backwards, while Atkinson told different versions of hers again and again.

So I suppose, if I've learned anything from my reading habits of 2014, it’s that I like a juicy structure; a book that not only tells a good story, but tells it in the best possible way. It’s a discovery that I’ll be keeping at the back of my mind when deciding what to read in the future, and also one I hope will give me more focus when it comes to my writing.

Australia: Melbourne, City of Literature

'What's this about books?'

Continuing with my travels, I left New Zealand at the beginning of March this year, and flew into Queensland, Australia. Over the course of the next week, I then had a series of strange and fairly dangerous adventures, which included sailing out to the Great Barrier Reef during a tornado warning, night diving with sharks, and getting trapped in the middle of ‘Cape Tribulation’ (the name’s a clue, by the way) during a tropical storm, unable to leave a flooded, spider-plagued hostel because all the nearby crocodile-infested rivers had burst their banks. In short, Australia was enormous fun from the get-go.

After those slightly mad seven days, I headed south, to Melbourne, which was an even more exciting prospect than Queensland. First and foremost, it used to be the home of my creative co-conspirator, Joely Badger, who was my trusted guide for the remainder of my Australia trip. And secondly, Melbourne is a UNESCO City of Literature.

Coming from Edinburgh, and having written about its City of Literature status before, I was keen to find out more about this aspect of Melbourne during my stay there. I was only visiting for three weeks, but it turns out you can discover quite a lot about a place in that time, and so below are just a few of my book-related adventures in Australia’s first literary city.

Detail from the Joyce and Court Oldmeadow Memorial Sculpture

1) Visiting the State Library

Melbourne has some beautiful buildings, and the State Library of Victoria is one of them. Handily situated in the centre of the city, its pillared façade and elegant lawn easily make it the grandest building in sight – exactly as a library should be. 

Inside too, it’s an impressive space, especially the domed La Trobe Reading Room. Although perhaps my favourite part of the library was the Joyce and Court Oldmeadow Memorial Sculpture (above), cast in bronze by Tessa Wallis. It features multiple characters from Australian children’s literature, many of which are native critters, including a koala, a wombat and a platypus.

View of Melbourne over the Yarra

2) Seeing John Marsden at the Children's Book Festival

As luck would have it, the Children's Book Festival was taking place while I was in Melbourne and Joely suggested we go and see the author John Marsden, who she explained was something of an Australian national treasure. His most famous work is the Young Adult series that starts with Tomorrow, When the War Began, which seems to have been required reading for Australia’s schoolchildren over the past couple of decades. Tomorrow kicks off the story of seven teenagers who go camping deep in the Australian bush and return to find their town has been invaded, and life as they know it has changed forever... 

Happily for Joely and me, much of Marsden’s talk focused on writing. As a neat little story-building exercise, he had the audience match some random adjectives and nouns, creating strange pairings such as ‘blue spaghetti’ and ‘glass parrot’, and then he demonstrated how to construct a tale around them, by asking three questions: 

- What led to this?

- What are the consequences of this?

- What is the resolution?

Marsden told us that ‘stories interrupt routine’, which I like as a definition, and then pressed upon us the importance of language, urging aspiring writers to learn the rules of English in order to later enjoy breaking them. Plus he dispelled the myth that authors receive some kind of divine story inspiration: the Tomorrow series developed over time, he told us - the result of combining subjects in which he was interested, such as farming and Second World War history, with a wish to write about a group of resourceful teenage protagonists.

Joely at work in The Moat - with cocktail, naturally

3) Writing in Melbourne’s cafés

Melbourne is famous for its ‘café culture’, which I’m pretty sure is just a hipster way of saying it has lots of nice places to drink coffee. But it does, and obviously there is a natural attraction between writers and caffeine (/alcohol) so in Melbourne’s many cafés Joely and I had a great old time chatting stories, plotting stories, writing stories, coming up with a story-related business idea (maybe more on that one day…) and even meeting up with her Melbourne-based writers’ group.

Our favourite haunt, it should be noted, was The Moat, downstairs from Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre for writers. Not only does it have very cool, book-focused décor, they also have literary-themed cocktails. I sampled ‘The Bard (Ode to William Shakespeare)’, and it was glorious.

4) Picnicking at Hanging Rock

All right, this wasn’t exactly in Melbourne, but just outside of the city is the infamous spot featured in Peter Weir’s cult 1975 film, Picnic at Hanging Rock. Although the story of the turn-of-the-century schoolgirls who disappear on a Valentine’s Day picnic at the rock - some of them never to be seen again - was actually originally a novel, written in 1967 by Australian author Joan Lindsay.

I never saw any of these people again

Naturally, staying so close to Hanging Rock, Joely and I decided to visit this notorious place with a couple of friends, and of course we had a picnic there, and obviously we dressed up in frilly white tops and re-enacted parts of the film (shouting ‘Miranda!’ at one another from between the rocks, and so on). And, maybe I’m imagining it, but the Rock does have a weird atmosphere, perhaps not helped by the fact that we visited on a particularly hot, bright day not unlike the one featured in the well-known film. 

It seems to be a popular misconception that Picnic at Hanging Rock is based on true events - even the author herself grew vaguer over time as to the inspiration for her novel. So, for me, perhaps stranger than the Rock itself was its visitor’s centre, which shows a kind of documentary film on a loop about the girls’ disappearance, despite the fact that - as far as anyone knows - it never happened. I thought this piece of marketing quite interesting: although we’re so used to fictionalising facts in books and films and TV shows, it’s rare to experience the factualising of fiction, which appears to be what is happening around the story of Hanging Rock. 

5) Having tea at Miss Marple’s

Finally, one of the things I liked best about Australia was that even when I thought I was getting used to a country that, in many ways, is very similar to my own, it would take me by surprise. I was shocked, for example, by the high quality of hot chocolate there, the high prices of books, and the high probability of being subjected to violence when attempting to feed cockatoos. 

Another such surprise occurred in the middle of the Dandenongs rainforest (again, just out of Melbourne), when we came across the memorabilia-packed Miss Marple’s Tea Room and stopped inside for scones and cake. Why, one might ask, was it there? Did the Dandenongs have some link to the Miss Marple stories? Had Agatha Christie once visited? Or were the owners just very enthusiastic fans? I have absolutely no idea, for I never solved this particular Marple mystery. But then, why shouldn’t one find a café dedicated to a fictional English geriatric sleuth in the middle of an Australian rainforest? Why on earth not? 

Miss Marple's Tea Room, complete with suspicious-looking man on roof

For more bookish bits and bobs from my 2014 travels, see New Zealand: Literary Landscapes.

New Zealand: Literary Landscapes

Mount Ngauruhoe, also known as Mount Doom

Back in February, between leaving Geneva and starting freelance work in Edinburgh, I set off on a three-month trip around Australasia and Southeast Asia. My first stop was the mighty New Zealand, a country of which I had a very favourable impression, despite the fact I had never been there and actually knew very little about it. Well, I knew the obvious, clichéd stuff: New Zealand was the home of the haka, the bungee jump, and far more sheep than people; it had landscapes many claim are ‘like Scotland, but better!’ (seriously, a lot of people say this); and, thanks to Peter Jackson, it was a place inextricably linked in my mind with The Lord of the Rings.

Like so many, I grew up with Tolkien’s world: as a child, I was read The Hobbit at bedtime; as a young teenager, I tackled The Lord of the Rings books on my own; as a sixth former, my friends and I obsessed over the films. Although there are aspects of the saga on which I’m not so keen (the endless songs, the [lack of] female characters, The Hobbit films…), I have always found Tolkien’s world irresistible, its originality and scale marking it out from the rest.

To return to 2001, when we were devouring advanced publicity for The Fellowship of the Ring in the sixth form common room, I remember all the media focus was concerned with the same thing: New Zealand. I didn’t get it at the time - as far as I was concerned, Middle Earth was a fantasy version of olde worlde Britain - but then I watched the film and, of course, I understood. And now I've been there, I understand even more: New Zealand is a magical place.

Hobbiton: view from the party field up to Bag End

The most genuinely 'Middle Earth' experience I had on my trip was undoubtedly my visit to Hobbiton, also known as Alexander Farm on the North Island. Used as a filming location for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and recently rebuilt for The Hobbit films, the site has since been preserved as a tourist attraction. There, you can wander past the iconic round doors of the hobbit houses, all the way up to Bag End at the top of the hill, before finishing up in the Green Dragon pub for a drink and perhaps some second breakfast.

What particularly struck me about Hobbiton was that it didn’t feel like a film set. There are no lighting rigs or tyre tracks or wires spoiling the view. Almost everything is authentic, from the vegetables in the gardens, oversized in comparison to the little trowels and rakes, to the shirts and trousers hanging over the gates, which look as though they've been shrunk in the wash. Walking around that place was not just like walking into a story, it was like walking into that story - the one bound up with my childhood - and so was somehow completely joyful and hauntingly nostalgic at the same time.

Anyone for second breakfast?

But to talk about New Zealand only in terms of The Lord of the Rings would do the country, and my time there, a great injustice. For starters, it has a rich literary history of its own, from the folktales of its indigenous people to its current contributions to the bestseller charts. While in the country, I was fortunate to connect with stories from both ends of this scale. In Rotorua, I visited the Tamaki Maori Village where, aside from watching the famous – and frankly terrifying – haka, I was enthralled by our hosts' storytelling, their tales having been passed down in the oral tradition over countless generations. Then conversely, during much of February, I was absorbed in The Luminaries, a historical novel set in New Zealand that, among its other accolades, won last year’s Man Booker Prize (its Kiwi author, Eleanor Catton, is the youngest writer ever to win the award). Speaking, once more, of walking into stories, it was great fun to spend long bus journeys lost in Catton’s fictional chronicle of New Zealand’s gold rush era, only to look up and find we were driving through the very places mentioned in the book.

Rainforest near Franz Josef glacier

Incidentally, the bus I’m referring to here is the big green Kiwi Experience bus, a ‘hop-on, hop-off’ mode of travel that allows tourists to cover a surprising amount of land. And what land it is. New Zealand’s topography is unbelievably diverse; on the Kiwi Bus we would set off from a surfers’ paradise in the morning and end up in a rainforest next to a glacier just a few hours later. The country has it all: picturesque, snow-topped mountains; lakes so flat they perfectly mirror the scenery around them; tangled, fairy tale forests; gorges that disappear into menacing mist; craggy coastlines packed with chubby seals… and so much more. While the Scottish half of me is reluctant to confirm that it is truly ‘like Scotland, but better!’* there must be few places in the world where you can find such a variety of scenery without crossing a border.

I’ve written before how, as an outdoorsy sort of person, I find the natural world very inspiring, so strangely enough one of the aspects of the trip that I enjoyed the most was the long journeys. During my time on the Kiwi Bus (and when I wasn’t tackling The Luminaries) I would gaze out of the window at whatever spectacular scenery we were driving through that day and allow my mind to wander off where it liked. I reflected on what I had written, I thought about stories I wanted to tell, and I even began to sort out the plot of my novel-to-be. Because of this, New Zealand was probably the most creatively productive time of the whole trip.

As I said at the start, I had had high expectations for my Kiwi experience, all of which were totally surpassed by the country itself and the wonderful people I met there. But what I hadn’t anticipated were the moments that didn’t feature on any bucket lists, or that I couldn’t capture on camera: the feeling of stepping into Hobbiton, for example, or a eureka moment while mulling over something make-believe on a bus. In this way, New Zealand gave me even more than the adventures I had sought out there, and in terms of stories it was - like that of Bilbo Baggins – an unexpected journey.

Mirror Lake reflecting Mount Cook

*The English half of me has no such qualms

‘Well, I’m back.’

Sam and Rosie's house, Hobbiton (New Zealand)

Since mid-February, I've picnicked at Hanging Rock and second-breakfasted in Hobbiton; I've partied with Maoris and hiked with Vietnamese villagers; I've fed kangaroos and wallabies by hand, and been feasted upon by more mosquitoes, sand flies and leeches than I can count; I've climbed to the top of an Angkor temple to experience a sunset, and I've crawled through a Viet Cong tunnel to experience a mild panic attack. Then there was the diving (scuba and sky), the jungle trekking, the missed flight in Sydney, the lost tooth in Melbourne... and a thousand other barmy, totally exhausting and utterly wonderful adventures in Australasia and Asia. In fact, during the last three months, it seems like one of the only activities I haven't managed to cram in (outside of a travel journal) is writing.

Which was exactly the plan. Part of the reason I went travelling after leaving Geneva was I felt overworked and in need of a break (sometimes not an easy thing to take, when half your job is in your head). So while I'm hoping that the time away will be good for my fiction, first and foremost it's been good for me.

Besides, I didn't give up stories entirely - I don't think I could. Whether you want them to or not, new places and new people bombard you with stories, some you might anticipate and some that are completely unexpected. While I won't be writing an account of my travels, exactly, I have some literary bits and bobs from the trip I'm hoping to share with Writer's Block over the next few weeks.

Picnic time? Hanging Rock (Australia)

Plus there's plenty to look forward to, right here, right now. I'm back in Edinburgh and about to start writing and ghostwriting full-time, which is very exciting/terrifying. Fae, the anthology featuring my short story 'Antlers' is to be published by World Weaver Press in July (a post to follow on that one shortly). Then there's the fact that, without setting pen to paper, I've been having a good old think about The Novel and some other writing projects during all the long bus/boat/tuk tuk journeys of late, which may have given me some much-needed perspective. And I suppose, at the end of the day, gaining a little perspective is what travelling's all about.

Coming Soon: Fae

I'm about to take a bit of a break from Writer's Block, as I'm off to do some travelling before starting full-time freelance work in May. However just in the nick of time (my first flight - to New Zealand - leaves tomorrow night), I'm able to reveal that one of my short stories, Antlers, is to be published in a forthcoming anthology by World Weaver Press.

The book, entitled Fae, will celebrate fairy-like creatures of all shapes and sizes. As editor Rhonda Parrish outlined in the call for submissions back in September:

Historically speaking fairies have been mischievous or malignant. They’ve dwelt in forests, collected teeth or crafted shoes. In Fae, we want stories that honor that rich history but explore new and interesting takes on fairies as well. We want urban fairies and arctic fairies, steampunk fairies, time-traveling and digital fairies. We want stories that bridge traditional and modern styles and while we’re at it, we want stories about fairy-like creatures too. Bring us your sprites, your pixies, your seelies and unseelies, silkies, goblins or gnomes, brownies and imps. We want them all. We’re looking for lush settings, beautiful prose and complex characters.

Hot off the press today, Fae's table of contents is now up on Rhonda's blog, and I'm very intrigued by the sixteen story titles that sit alongside Antlers. Fortunately, there isn't too long to find out how my fellow contributors have interpreted the fairy theme, as publication of the anthology is scheduled for this summer.

Plitvice National Park in Croatia, where I'm sure a few faeries dwell

Au Revoir, Genève

The Schynige Platte: a nice spot
for some writing

For two and a half years, I have spent my days tidying stories in a turret. I have lived in a wood-panelled room – a land-locked ship’s cabin, I like to think – and I have watched the drifting of the clouds and the phases of the moon through the windows above my head. I have walked to a market each Sunday, or else taken a tiny orange train up a hillside to visit my cousin and his family. I have explored: cities, lakes, woods, summer mountains on foot, winter mountains on skis. I have become used to the unfamiliar, not just languages and cultures that aren’t my own, but the sound of church bells in the morning, the smell of cooking cheese or vin chaud in the street, the sight of little old men walking giant chess pieces around giant chessboards in the park… Reflecting on it all like this, I realise how wonderful and strange my time in Switzerland has been, almost like something from a story in itself. And now it is coming to an end - as all stories must.

I have always been driven by the desire to write – and the hope that writing could one day make up the bulk of my income. My Literary Consultant job here has been fantastic, but now I have the opportunity to put aside the editing and administration and concentrate on freelance ghostwriting and my own stories. And I know the place to do that is not in this charmed but expensive and faraway city, but in my beloved Edinburgh – my home, to which it is time to return.

View of Grand Rue, Geneva Old Town, the street on which I've lived and worked

Despite feeling fairly confident about this decision, it's breaking my heart a little, leaving Geneva while I'm having such a good time. I think perhaps it would help to dwell on the negative: the endless bureaucracy here, for example; the lack of sea; the customer service that borders on abuse. But I can’t. Switzerland, despite its reputation as a rather twee and snoozy little country, is an extraordinary place - not least for the fact its people once had the bright idea of dipping bread in booze and melted cheese. 

The mighty Matterhorn

It's also beautiful. I remember learning about  nature inspiring feelings of the sublime when studying Gothic literature at university, and I have felt that sensation again and again in Switzerland. When I hiked around the Schynige Platte above Interlaken last summer, or under the Matterhorn’s domineering shadow in early Autumn, the sights made my heart soar. I think I now understand why Julie Andrews went twirling off towards that mountainous horizon singing all sorts of silliness about musical hills – she just couldn’t keep it in. If you have never been to Switzerland, I urge you to visit at the first possible opportunity.

Of course, it’s people that really complete a place, and I have made some amazing friends out here. Geneva is a transient city, where most only stick around for a few years (or even months), so I’ve been very fortunate in this regard. Whether we’ve been indulging in thimble-sized glasses of wine in expensive bars, or slobbing out in front of TV shows in each other’s apartments; whether we’ve been lounging in the sunshine at the Perle du Lac park, or zooming down ski slopes in the biting cold - my friends and I have experienced this mad and magical place together. 

In many of these friends, and especially in my colleagues, I have also found kindred, creative spirits. We’ve swapped new story ideas, we’ve made colourful spreadsheets of competition deadlines together, we’ve read one another’s fiction – first drafts, fourth drafts, last drafts – and offered our comments. We’ve been there to share in each other’s successes – and commiserated in the face of a few, inevitable setbacks. We even made it official, forming The Pen Poppers writing group for regular practice, feedback and encouragement. As I have said before, writing is such a solitary occupation, I find it best to try and share as much of the process as possible. 

Skiing with my creative colleagues
(and two of my favourite Geneva people), Helen and Elodie

Which leads me onto my writing in Geneva. One of the reasons I want to pursue the next stage of my career in Edinburgh is that I have been a little starved of writing opportunities (as opposed to writing people) in Switzerland. But, in a way, being cut off from the UK literary scene has encouraged me to connect more in cyberspace. In the past few years, I have set up twitter and LinkedIn accounts, dedicated more time to Writer’s Block, completed Nanowrimo twice, joined two Reading Challenges, acquired Goodreads and Amazon author profiles. Now I think about it, I’m not sure I would have made my online presence quite so known, had I not felt far away.

I know I’ll return to Switzerland, both physically and in my writing (I’m already noticing a lot more mountain scenery popping up in my fiction), so I’m sure this is not the last time I’ll talk about my experiences here. But I wanted to get at least some of it down before I went, because I know it’ll seem different in a few weeks, and more different still a year or two down the line. So this is how it is right now, on the brink of leaving Geneva - and this is how I am: happy, grateful, inspired, better organised, more focused, more like a writer, even a little more worldly. And, conversely, because of all that, I'm also ready to go.

Jumping for joy at the top of Mont Salève