Local poet Anthony Owen will be on his home turf when he appears at the Third Coventry International Festival Of Literature at the Belgrade Theatre in May. The Coventry Literature Festival is unique among UK literature festivals due to its focus on community events, with public writing workshops, children’s events and opportunities for local writers incorporated into the programme.
You can buy tickets and find out more on the Belgrade website:
Wednesday 13 May, 8pm. Heaventree hosts the Festival’s opening night by inviting the editors of a number of poetry presses and magazine publishers to showcase their best new writers. Guests will include Horizon magazine, The Wolf magazine, Flarestack Press, Under The Radar and the Warwick Review.
This is an invaluable chance to research the diverse opportunities for publication offered by the UK poetry industry, gaining that knowledge of the terrain which is vital for new writers.
Tickets: £5.Thursday 14 May, 8pm.
The launch of My Father’s Eyes Were Blue by Coventry poet Antony Owen and Still This Need by Michael McKimm.
Antony Owen is a commercial manager from Allesley who writes poignant, unsettling poems, reminiscent in style of the Mersey Beats and their French forbears.
Finishing this was a struggle, I admit it. But it was all worth it in the end.
It is a fabulous picture of the history of a Parisian apartment block and all of its inhabitants using the conceit of going through the building room by room.
Some rooms contain great inventories, others stories, others bits of jigsaws that add to the stories of others.
I would heartily recommend this – the back cover of my edition desribes it as something like the last of the great novels.
It is an immensely complicated work, but as you see it begin to see the human stories and family sagas knit together it all makes sense. I also enjoyed it because I think I could reread every chapter discretely as a kind of poem.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 [Rebecca] – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 [Brideshead Revisited] – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 [Chronicles of Narnia] – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 [Winnie-the-Pooh] – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 [Anne of Green Gables] – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 MISSING
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 [Cold Comfort Farm] – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 [The Bell Jar] – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes] – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 [A Town Like Alice] – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
My score: 65/100
Passing this on to Intersecting Sets & Prole Art Threat.
When my sister was about 13 she took part in an interesting experiment about the amount of information people can take in from different sources at once (basically a group of them sat in front of a bank of TVs showing different things and were then tested in a Crypton Factor stylee). The upshot of the experiment, as I remember it, was that the younger you are the more adept at doing this you are because you have grown used to dealing with a multitude of information – a classic example being an airport!
Hooray for Christopher Foyle – a good Essex man from near Maldon – and, of course, something to do with a few big bookshops.
I was reminded of this just now (I confess I had forgotten it from this morning!) because I’m in the process of editing something written by an academic colleague.
The thing that reminded me was the question posed by Evan Davis: should we make a point of using obscure words to prolong their existance or should we concentrate on making ourselves understood using say the 800 most commonly-used words?
We certainly claim to have have a good many more words in English than in other languages – but see the Oxford Dictionaries on this….
Kakistocracy
A system of government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.
Bovine Scatology
For those of you who love a good euphemism, Bovine Scatology is a term
coined by General Norman Schwarzkopf, first heard by the viewing public
at a press briefing on status of the air and ground campaigns during the
Persain Gulf War. The general referred to speculations by various
military pundits, employed by CNN and other news gathering/reporting
organizations, as “bovine scatology”.
I am doing useful things today. I’ve started to write my handover notes – 20 pages so far and probably only a third of the way in. Who knew that my head held so much information?
My useful lunchtime contribution is going to be writing my birthday list. It has been requested – and Himself is being nagged!
The question is – what do I want? Easy to think of things that I would buy myself if I had the money, but will other people want to buy them for me as presents?
And then, when I think about things that I would buy myself as presents they seem wasteful and friperous and I start to think that I should ask for useful things….
This week I have been mostly reading books from the Oxfam bookshop in Coventry…
Including:
The Little House Trilogy
The Big Sleep
The High Window
Just William
Death in a White Tie
Five Children and It
And what has struck me most about the Little House books is the vast
quantity of detailed information on housekeeping and animal husbandry.
There is a whole chapter in Little House in the Big Wood on slaughtering a pig and rendering, curing it all. Nothing is wasted.
Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall and Gordon Ramsey would be proud –
especially of the description of cooking and eating the pig’s tail,
making brawn and playing football with its inflated bladder!
You also get fabulous descriptions of harvesting and preparing maple syrup and hunting a wide variety of animals.
They don’t make children’s books like this any more!
When my sister was about 13 she took part in an interesting experiment about the amount of information people can take in from different sources at once (basically a group of them sat in front of a bank of TVs showing different things and were then tested in a Crypton Factor stylee). The upshot of the experiment, as I remember it, was that the younger you are the more adept at doing this you are because you have grown used to dealing with a multitude of information – a classic example being an airport!
This week I have been mostly reading books from the Oxfam bookshop in Coventry…
There is a whole chapter in Little House in the Big Wood on slaughtering a pig and rendering, curing it all. Nothing is wasted.
