As well as his Age of….trilogy covering the social and economic changes of the 19^th century, Hobsbawn’s Age of Extremes is seen as a major historical work dealing with the turbulence of the 20^th,- a lucid, dense but inviting inquiry into the chaos and order of our wars and peace.

We wait with baited breath for the latest instalment of a fine man, a committed communist and a brilliant historian.

There are, of course, many reasons potential authors want to publish their own books. They have an idea or manuscript they has not passed the gauntlet of various agents and publishers; they may just want to print a few copies of a personalized piece of work like a memoir for family members which is unlikely to be published; they may want to ‘have a go’ since they don’t think their book is very good or they may indeed want to sell a lot of books and make their living as writers.

And how have the major publishers reacted to the new aspirations of self-published writers? Well, some have embraced the trend whilst other lag far behind. HarperCollins has launched Authonomy.com, a website dedicated to “flushing out the brightest, freshest new literature around”. Writers upload their work and HarperCollins  publish the best. In 2011 Penguin launched  Bookcountry.com, based on the same model.

Recently,  Penguin bought out Author Solutions Inc, one of the world’s largest publishing services, in a bid to become leaders amongst the self-publishing pack. Many publishers hwoever, buoyed up by the revenues of ebooks (which they objected to at first) are slow to manouvre to the self-publishing challenge.

The success of Fifty Shades, which was both a self-published book to begin with and a piece of fan fiction, shows what turbulence is hitting the publishing industry. It’s now bottom-up, with the publishers seemingly now at the bottom of the ‘what’s hot’ list.

So, does the Booker Prize reflect and amplify existing social prejudices? So often we hear about the tragic exclusion of this author or ‘that book’, and so often literary luminaries who have been overlooked decry the Prize as bunk. But is the prize actually prejudiced against non-English authors? Does the Booker Prize have a British bias? An English bias? A London bias? Does the coveted literary award lack the plurality of its commonwealth-wide, network of booming voices? Are the Booker judges overtly middle-class, insular and inward-looking?

Let’s start with the Celtic fringe. The stats are illuminating. Only 3.5 % of Booker winners have been Scottish. This is surprising, considering the wealth and depth of Scottish writing. Wales has only produced one winner; Northern Ireland none. Ireland has won three times. In isolation, these stats are perhaps not as damning as one might think-there are of course ten times as many Englishmen as Scots. But vis-à-vis, commonwealth success, the celtic fringe has not done particularly well.

So what about further afield? Well the Booker is far more generous to former British colonies than it is to home Celts. Australia and the African nations have both won four times, Canada has won three,, India twice, New Zealand once. What does this tell us? Perhaps that books from our nearest neighbours are quite exotic enough for when the judges feel the prize must go abroad.

However, there definitely is a trend working against foreign authors in British and U.S publishing These Commonwealth success stories actually run against the grain of a renewed protection impetus emanating from the British domestic scene, with a Cameron-supported, ‘British Books for British Readers’ rolled out last year. The U.S is similarly reluctant to branch out into global literature. They are happy to export, but less so to import.

Beyond the commonwealth, and the awarding merits of Booker’s criteria, there is a dearth of ‘foreign’ books hitting UK shelves. Take a walk around Waterstone’s and you will only find Russian authors at least fifty years dead! It is strange that in Britain we have such a pedigree of respect for Russia’s antiquated authors yet contemporary Russian fiction is practically invisible. You may similarly struggle to find any Chinese authors on the 3 for 2 shelves..

Yet, strangely, Russian literature is healthy; booming even. Russian has more than its fair share of equivalents in terms of its own book prizes. These Russian awards are held in high esteem in their own country but simply do not translate across the waters.

India now represents the biggest new market for British books with its emerging, literate middle class. It is third behind the U.S and the U.K in terms of total book purchases. However, the rest of the world are catching up and it is now non-English books which are selling the fastest. India is also flocking toward its teen ficiion too, with a third of the country’s population under 30.

If Britain won’t accept more foreign authors on its shelves, will there be a backlash in terms of our exports?

Two Important Shades Indeed

So, this is what women want!  50 Shades’ popularity has sent shockwaves down a publishing industry’s much-buffeted sonar system. They presumed that sexual and fantasy fiction must be suggestive to work. The sex is all in the mind, publishers like to state, so make it just juicy enough to get the imagination running wild. But that premise has been turned upside down with 50 Shades’ graphic descriptions of sexual activities. For this reason 50 Shades must be seen as a hugely important book. Readers don’t want sharp inhalations of breath in the voyeuristic age of Facebook and Youtube, they want triple penetration with double fisting for good measure.

A second shade of importance might be in the explanation of 50 Shades’ E-Book success. Instead of reading Lady Chatterley in full view of train companions, the commuter can now get their smut in the cover-less black vortex of the Kindle. No one knows what your reading after all. But this is perhaps a minor point compared to the great news that 50 Shades started its life as an E-book and then a print-on-demand paperback. This does add a hidden depth to the 50 Shades explosion and provides a reassuring example of how the hidden gem in the digital library can enjoy global acclaim every bit as much as those found in the 3 for 2 section of Waterstone’s (apostrophe included.)

But perhaps the most intriguing  shade in the 50 Shades explosion is in the power of the accompanying parody.Almost instantly, two separate 50 Shades of Grey parody books have, somewhat surprisingly, hit the charts in their own right.50 Shades of Black & Blue by I B Naughtie  has risen to #38 on the Amazon Kindle Store’s UK Bestseller list  even though most critics agree it’s a commercial hi-jack with no literary merit. Similarly, 50 Shades of Red, White & Blue by Maggie Muff has also enjoyed success in the direct aftermath of the 50 Shades ‘motherbook’. What’s important about this? Well, for a start such parodies could only arrive in time in E-book form which is another example of the versatility of the digital book world compared to the more protracted paperback counterpart but also that when a ‘silly’ book comes along the e-book can always test just how far the silliness can fly. E-books probe; paperbacks wait. With that in mind, my new novel The Book That Made Even Cartman Spew will be out soon. Parodies welcome.

Norton and Co. 2009

Struggling to read a book? Is your concentration broken easily? Do you even read books anymore? No? Well it ain’t your fault it’s the internet stupid!

That the internet is to blame for the  contemporary challenges obstructing the kind of mindful  contemplation  needed for deep thought processes is the case put forward by Carr- and it is, by all accounts, a cogent, damning case indeed. The premise; that our obsessive use of the internet is not just changing the way we think but also changing the very structure of our brains.

Carr, using a variety of anecdotal evidence alongside scientific discourse shows what damage to our minds has already been done and its all due to excessive internet use. The kind of deep, meditative thinking used to read novels ( which we used to possess) is being replaced by a scatter-brained, multitasking version of thought. It’s shallow, meaningless and virus-like in its bombardment of our respective hippocampuses. Brought about through  changes in the neuroplasticity of our brain’s circuitry- where a horde of competing and superficial thoughts battle for prominence- our brain is literally re-wiring itself in response to the internet’s inherent qualities of fast-paced, often moronic, instantaneousness.

The internet may have made finding information easier and we may no longer need to delve deep into the archives to find instant gratification for what we’re looking for but, as Carr persuasively attests, a by-product of the internet’s quantum tentacles sucking on all forms of information is that we no longer use the internet to specifically find anything. Or at least, anything of meaning.

We log on but our brain’s can never truly log off. We enter a world of screaming, competing information and we end up skimming everything rather than excavating deep for meaning. It’s all cosmetic, there’s no deep thinking going on at all Carr argues. The internet is a portal to another world and one where our brain’s journey into comes at a high price- the capacity to think deeply ( even our mind’s capacity for truly  human thought) is a tragic casualty.

Where Carr is most persuasive in his attack on the quick-fire, surface-level style of thinking that the internet promotes is in placing the internet in a historical context. The computer is seen as the latest, though uniquely different, technological tool in a line stretching back to the sundial in the Agora and the Gutenberg Press. Technology changes our minds, Carr concludes, but the changes wrought about by the internet bring forward an almost inescapable torrent of change and one we can not but submit too. We can never go back to a pre-internet age, Carr asserts, and in this he is both correct and sharply prescient.

Carr is best when showing the extent of our reliance on the internet and also the modus operandi of our mind’s functioning whilst ‘logged on’. The network of seamless tags, hyperlinks and categories, the difficulties of remaining on any one webpage for more than a minute or two, the skimming of text online- all combine to produce a ‘shallows’ where the mind floats on a nothingness of content, deprived of the deep waters of human memory and empathy. Carr would agree with Seneca; to be everywhere is to be nowhere.

Carr laments the passing of a pre-internet age, claiming that each new era brings forward the memory of that last but that the internet represents a clean break form human experience. Carr warns of the inherent dangers involved in our full-throttle plunge into the cyber-world of the computer. The stakes could not be higher, Carr forwarns, claiming that the very essence of humanity could be lost in whirlpool of neon-lit, html-based hieroglyphics.

Superb and breathtaking in its ramifications, Carr is one of the world’s top thinkers writing about the consequences of our computer-based, information age. Part scare-mongering (though powerfully persuasive in its conclusions), part intellectual history of human thought and part discourse on technology’s impact on Western culture, the Shallows is an entertaining and disturbing book which everybody should read.

Not everything gets its just rewards. If history is written by the victors then literary history is surely written by the commemorated whilst the swathes of the forgotten lurk in the great sea of lost erudition; unseen, unsung, scarcely read.

Literature’s lost heroes, characters, twists and turns number no less than the real-life nearly-men of science, adventure, expedition and war. There are, quite simply, boundless great books which remain practically disclosed to the public forever, barred from ever seeing the light of day, eternally tortured through the punishment of not being read. Nor is this tragedy the work of some unscrupulous publisher keeping such works buried in the vaults of time. Mostly, these lost works appear lost through sheer, nonsensical, unpredictable bad luck- or at least due to a range of reasons nobody really understands. So, are there countless other Macbeth’s and Don Quixote’s surrendered to the cemetary of time, or to coin a phrase from Carlos Ruiz Zafon, the Cemetary of Lost Books? Well, I don’t know, but there are certainly some greats that have been long forgotten.

Ship of Fools by Katherine Ann-Porter may be just one such forlorn castaway. It’s a story of a cruise ship and its eclectic cast of passengers; the voyage becomes a crucible of tension, irrevocably changing each passenger singularly and collectively. Perhaps a director in the future may stumble upon it and turn it into a new Titanic with a mystery twist? And why not, it would surely surpass the countless Agatha Christie mysteries which appear on the box but then again, it not by Agatha Christie. It most ceetainly is however, two things; brilliant and scarcely known. Those same directors might be advised to excavate further, slip upon a stool and crash into another shelf in the Cemetary of Lost Books and topple over Samurai Shortstop by Alan Gratz, a charming tale of an emigrant Japanese boy who uses his samurai training to extraordinary effect, taking the baseball league by storm.

If they searched even further their lamplight might carry them too an even more lamentable woe. The House of the Spirits by Anabel Allende,  should be as famous as A Hundred Years of Solitude, but obviously it isn’t. It is a stunning novel full of the magic realism which brought ….Solitude   such acclaim. The tragic tale spans four generations of an aristocratic Chilean family. It is an analogy of Chilean history in the twentieth century- Allende’s own father had

If not in the Cemetery could Waterstone’s be a protectorate of these forgotten books? Well, maybe, but you would have to special order them and to do that you would have to have heard of them in the first place. No mean feat when the title and author has been forgotten. If you are searching though Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson is an essential novel which blurs reality and fiction into a truly stark conclusion- it relates, via strangely scribbled memoirs, the story of a woman battling madness, convinced she is the last creature on earth- the reader never discovers whether this is due to her madness or not.

There are of course many, many, more forgotten and hardly-known books which makes the compiling of a ‘Top Ten Forgotten Books’ list a rather fruitless endeavour. Still, what strikes most personally is that we all surely have a few precious books which we realize we have read and that not many other people have. This, in a strange way, makes us champion these precious books in the same way a small cult film can be championed in the heated conversations of late party’s- ‘you’ve gotta see this film…… well you’ve gotta read this book too..’ perhaps should be our riposte. So, if you have read an obscure, forgotten book you should champion it; resurrect it from its nameless grave.

It’s about time then that Bard and Muse posed the question, what, precisely, is the popularity of music biography books all about? Good question I hear you chant- well, yes it is.

It’s tempting to think these books promise to reveal hidden secrets of the superstars we love; secrets we already sensed lingered deep within their souls, but secrets we need the confirmation of the printed word to finally lay to rest. After all, musicians are bound to be tortured souls aren’t they ( there have been seven Jeff Buckley biography’s in nearly as many years), or wild hedonists, or mental cases- and all the sordid and depraved details of their childhoods will be spilled out in ruthless detail by these books.

Clearly there is something about music biography’s popularity that involves revelation; a step-by-step story of the men and women behind their music image, from the mundane details of boy band’s whose industry-led rise is devoured at Christmas time by teenage girls, or the sobering sadness of tales of individual greatness, such as the popular Nick Drake and John Peel recent biography.

But the greatest appeal of music biographies owes something to the distinct mediums of music and books in themselves. When we see our favourite artist at a festival or a gig or on television, we see them briefly, we see them raw or we see them painstakingly choreographed, and we see them momentarily; albeit at their loudest and proudest. But what we don’t see are the curious details of lives, the story of spats and rifts and self-abuse and pain; the agony and ecstasy. We don’t see the hours of practice, the early days of being in a band, the tide of their fortunes, from early breaks to final bust-up’s. We get all this and more with books. We get the full story, warts and all, and for those desperate to seize every possible detail of their favourite artists, we get the reward too.

But do we? All this presupposes that music biography is a high-quality genre of books. It definitely isn’t. Clearly there are many cynical publishes seeking to bring out biography’s of artists who barely deserve a headline in a local paper. Then there’s the writers of these biographies’s, probably an estranged boffin who dedicated himself to learning every facet of a band’s existence and is looking to cash in on otherwise rather superfluous knowledge. And then of course there are the motivations of the artists themselves; having someone write your biography seems a great way to balance the books of all those expensive studio sessions and tours. It’s also a great way for the families of deceased artists to trade off on the memories of their prodigal sibling.

What is most frustrating about the music biography genre is the hurried feel that a lot of them seem to possess; many are poorly written or exclusively special interest. Few deserve their bestseller status, but this doesn’t stop more and more pouring onto the shelves. And whether you love them or hate them, it looks like every band worth their salt will have a bestselling biography if current trends continue.

Before there were horror stories, comedies, biographies, memoirs and adventure novels there were, back in them olden days, plain old books. What! But what kind of books! Well how am I meant to know?

Well actually the only available read was probably the Bible (part adventure, part betrayal, part tragedy, part inspirational…..) So, as the world modernised, its literature became increasingly categorized, though its difficult to credit the translating monks of medieval abbey’s contributing much to the thrillers, slashers and chillers section at Waterstone’s.

No, for our contemporary craving for genre categorization is a peculiarly modern phenomenon; in books, films, music, you name it, there’s a hybrid inter-genre blend just around the corner.

But is it really helpful? If we see any combination of books under the ‘WW2’ genre, do we immediately think, guns, death and blood?  Yet books about ‘WW2’ could be about anything; a tale of refugees, of concentration camps, espionage, heroism, tragedy- any number of tales of conflict, adventure and love set against number of wartime background’s.  The book could be from the perspective of either gender, from any age, from any country, from any narrator. Yet the reader, without further exploration, is only informed about, quite probably, the book’s most crude feature of categorization.  What is common about these books is not their genre, which is often merely background setting.

Initially, genre labelling was presumably meant to direct us, lo and behold, from idle ramblings around the book shop. We must presumably already know what we are in the mood for when we enter a book shop, just like a DVD store. But even now with browse-based,  internet-book ordering, online categorisation is instant, user-friendly and receptive to a few buzz words of genre, embellished only with a few sentences of description for those who bother to read the blurb of individual books.

So is it really helpful? Is genre a neat tool to negotiate the pitfalls of excessive, nondescript books. Hmmm….. And does it do the author a disservice? Probably.

Perhaps the most frustrating feature regarding genre is its inflexibility. A book which has elements of two genre’s, becomes a hyphenated mishmash or a brand new genre title which is relatively meaningless to the reader. Do we know anymore about the difference between a comedy and a romantic comedy, except that the former probably doesn’t end up in marriage or a relationship?

The memoir genre is a prime example of book categorization gone out of control. With many of Britain’s book stores conceding to celebrity and quasi-celebrity genre’s, ‘impulse buys’ now reflects the outstanding impatience in both the demand and supply of contemporary books, from publishers to purchasers.

Genre has also seen categorisation based on increasingly superficial lines; those same book stores and websites have ‘Russian Literature’ now all collected together, from Dostoevsky to Bulgakov, regardless of the novel. ‘Classics’ of English literature, now essentially means anything produced before we were all born.

For readers, genre-labelling seems to disguise as much as it directs, to restrict as much as it liberates. It inherently makes comparisons with other novels within the same genre and can only embellish on the attributes of any particular book by describing new themes of genre. Come on, give us some credit.

Cinema’s inter-related history with the world of literature is of course nothing new. From James Bond to Harry Potter, many directors and producing companies have looked upon book adaptations as a ‘safe bet.’ But increasingly, modern cinema seems to be on a surge of ‘revisiting’ classic books; There Will Be Blood, I Am Legend, Atonement… and the results vary from the catastrophic to the sublime. So, now seems as good a time as any to re-spark the old debate of should books be turned into films at all?

Well, in the case of McCarthy’s The Road it seems some indeed should. The Road is an oppressive, poignant book about a father’s fight for his son’s survival in a post-apocalyptic America, it is superb, and I was sceptical when I heard it was to be adapted into a film. The books’ punchy, efficient language allows the reader to conjure up his or her own personal nightmare in a way I didn’t think a movie could aspire to. Books made into films always seem somehow different to the image you had stored away when reading them, but, and this is a big but, in the case of The Road, the film added and complimented the book’s skeletal imagery. That, I suppose, is the crux of people’s objections to book-film adaptations, that even those film adaptations they enjoy are still so monotone they spoil the movie in the head. But sometimes the effect is well worth it, and can catapult a flagging book back into the spotlight.

The success of such adaptations also depends on the extent of change the film has undergone. In the case of Harry Potter the film’s were totally loyal to the book. So, too, were the Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons ( ScotCampus readers; do not watch if you’re a fan of Ewan McGregor) and both met popular if not critical acclaim. Other adaptations have been more ingenious in their translation, such as Apocalypse Now, very loosely-based on the superb Heart of Darkness, or the Coen Brothers Where Art Thou Now, extremely loosely-based on Homer’s Odyssey. I prefer the film to pluck aspects of the book and gather its own momentum, for which its medium is better suited- but The Road has questioned that premise.

The art of storytelling has never had as many mediums of broadcast as it has today, and the sharing and lending of ideas between medium’s is on the increase. Where metaphor, narration, internal dialogue and language have once reigned supreme, film now has more instruments to compete with the solitary journey of a novel; setting, soundtrack, pace, and increasingly computer graphics; all these can take viewers into more and more complex places, even if it takes all viewers to the same place.

Of course I will always say that books are better than films, but I am entirely bias and this is a book column. What I am worried about is the trend of modern filmmakers increasingly returning to old books; are they running out of ideas or just recasting them in a new life?

Unfortunately barriers to entry in publishing are almost insurmountable for new authors.A recent investigation into New York Literary Publishing Houses estimated that 10,000 novels arrive at their doorstep’s each month, of which a tiny few might become published. Surely it is hard to accept that 9,990 of those novels were woeful compared to the stand-out masterpieces which found justifiable success?

I have just finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan (2006, Penguin Press) which sheds light on the pitfalls of the literary world and is recommended reading for all of us. Taleb’s argument, in literature, as in general life, is that success, such as publishing, is often attributable solely to luck and randomness. The retrospective search for shared and identifiable traits of those lucky few who get published in an attempt to mimic their styles and get published yourself is ultimately in vain-for it excludes the spontaneity involved in the publishing process.  Dickens’ famous characters, Tolstoy’s treatment of themes, Orwell’s simple prose; blindingly obvious ways to get published perhaps, but only in retrospect. These author’s were the lucky few published, hence their styles, and not the myriad unknown potential masterpieces, have come to be benchmark comparisons for unpublished authors. Alas, I digress ( it is a seriously good read).

So, back to that masterpiece you’ve written students, every bit as good as Thackeray and Austen you say (I believe you, honest). Wait. There are more barriers to come. Firstly, existing agents and publishers looking for the next big thing search only in the ashes of the current big thing. So if what you’ve written doesn’t easily fall into genre categorisation you won’t make it past the slush pile. All the struggles of the perfect query letter, the perfect synopsis, none of these can necessarily improve the mood of the man angrily fingering the slush pile of your masterpieces.

Until we come to the internet, with its capacity to bypass traditional ports of publishing. Self-publishing does not have the stigma of being a ‘vanity press’ anymore, where only friends and family might purchase the book. It can offer genuine exposure, and that exposure can last interminably so long as it is stored in a web page.

There have been some celebrated (though still few) cases of author’s finding great success through a snow-balling effect, where a small pool of sales increases through word- of-mouth.  These bottom-up stories are at least encouraging in shaking up the publishing industry, keen not to miss the next big thing by not even seeing the next big thing.

The development of digital storage of books also signals a breakaway; its sales thus far have been predominantly in the under 35-age bracket, but that at least sends a message for the future. The success, and cost, of self-publishing is still materialising but might prove just the outlet for that undoubted masterpiece after all. Having said that, so many books are online, again a lucky break is needed.

Knowing people in the trade is of course a boost, as is having a journalist background. Sheer persistence never hurt, though suicide is perhaps a step too far ( as unfortunately befell John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces received widespread posthumous critical acclaim) What is clear though, is that the next J.K Rowling can only come at the expense of thousands of rejections of other supposed masterpieces

1) House of Leaves; Mark Z. Danielewski’s 

Even for those who’ve read it, describing House of Leaves is nigh-on suicidally difficult. You hear people who definitely haven’t read it saying things like ‘it’s a book within a book within a book’. Hmmm.Whatever it is, it’s fiendishly impenetrable to understand-House of Leaves  is a maze of diaryesque jottings,  convoluted footnotes, appendices, poems and letters, and general literary subterfuge. It reads like a nightmare  but you haven’t read it.

2 Moby Dick; Hermann Melville

“Call me Ishmael.” With these three words,probably recited with pride and smugness, you know someone’s lying if they say they’ve read it. Another giveaway is a well-rehearsed speech on the whale being a metaphor for all kinds of crap. An epic tale, woefully under-read, reading Moby Dick is like reading the New Testament of grand moralizing.

3 Dead Souls; Nikolai Gogol

‘it’s this clever, satirical, witty book about corrupt officialdom and peasantry..it’s about life more than death in fact…’ Few have read it. Gogol’s only novel, Dead Souls concerns  a young man who travels around Russia buying up “dead souls” – that is, peasant workers who have died, but who are still registered as living in the census records. Hugely satirical, strictly a name-dropper.

4 Middlemarch; George Eliot

No you haven’t-you say you have but actually you haven’t.  Eliot uses a small, fictitious town as a model for civilisation in general. Apparently it’s superb; epic in its scope and vision. Virginia Woolf later called  it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

5 War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy

An obvious one and of course you haven’ read it. It’s a long old book, covering an outrageously wide cast of characters in  19th Century Russia during the Napoleonic  invasion. The conflict on the battlefield is compared to the squabblings and intrigues  amongst Russia’s elite. More of an event than a book, it remains  desperately under-read

6 Madame Bovary; Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert was an outright nut but, with madame Bovary, he produced a heroine of lasting literary stardom. She is a flawed and pathetic creature, caught up in the whiffiest of French pretensions but ultimately madame Bovary is perhaps the most sympathetic character in all French literature. A brilliant story of adultery, social mores and the need to keep up appearances, few have read it despite its palatable length and easy style.
7 Crime and Punishment; Fyodor Dostoevsky

Are those cheeks still blushing? Another classic which is left on the bookshelves for all eternity, Dostoevsky’s message is beautiful and clear;  ’humility sanctifies whilst humiation damns’

The novel itself tells the intense tale of a young  student who sees himself as above the law. He decides to commit murder but later becomes sick with guilt and shame whilst the noose around him tightens.

8 Dracula; Bram Stoker

Criminally under-read and no it isn’t just about Transylvania and silver bullets ….Dracula actually spends most of his time in London. Dracula certainly isn’t elegant but it was released to instant critical acclaim. Stoker’s prose uses diary-style jottings which recount the frantic pace of Dracula’s evil doings. It swithches between characters and perspectives,  and boils with menace. The original, and best, vampire story.
9 Finnegans Wake; James Joyce

‘Yeah it’s like the hardest book i’ve ever read, really experiemntal prose and ….’ Written over 17 painstaking years in Paris, scarcely anyone has read Finnegans Wake and for good reason. Ulysses is difficult enough as it is. FW mixes up words, and jumbles prose styles; its sentences come flying off the page on parachutes of apparent nonsense. a masterpiece..we are told.

10Paradise Lost; John Milton

‘erm…it’s…erm’

The expulsion of mankind from the Garden of Eden its a tale of Christian morality. And that’s about that.