The Penguin Blog

Five in Mind part the sixth

Back in the day when I had an answer for everything, I used to ask everyone I met what their favourite book was. It was my trademark question, my run-out-of-conversation-on-a-first-date question. Then one day, I realised I could no longer answer the question myself. I was a bad first date.

The funny thing with favourite books is that they change all the time, because we change all the time (stay with me on this one). Which means that certain books read at certain times become, for that day, week or month, the 'best book ever written'. Probably a book that inspired you at a time when you needed inspiring, or whose characters you quoted from endlessly because you were standing in their shoes when you met them.

It's a relief to learn from the inside that the Penguin Classics list of the Best Books Ever Written isn't selected on the emotional whims of a woman in her late teens and early twenties. But I was delighted to find that there's at least some degree of crossover ...

High Windows

When I’d reached a point where I was reading Phillip Larkin by day and watching Six Feet Under by night, I knew the world couldn’t get much blacker. Larkin’s honest portrayal of the ugliness of the world is juxtaposed with the occasional moment of stark beauty which always comes as a shock, even when you know the poems by heart.   

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novels are magic, not to mention the best form of escapism you can find. And the more of his books you read, the more vivid their world becomes. Journeying through and beyond the whole spectrum of humanity and range of emotions (at least several times), this particular novel is an epic for all the family.

A Fine Balance

I love this story, not only because it gives such a wonderful insight into India at the time, but also because it makes you feel humble in a way that stays with you well beyond the final page. It is rare to find a novel that makes you care about the characters from the very beginning so consistently, and with so much heart. 

Don Quixote

I suspect that I’ll never again meet anyone as funny, tragic or dedicated to the cause as Don Quixote. He'll always be the one to remind us how hilariously poor our perception can be when we let ourselves be ruled by our emotions. This novel is also a great celebration of friendship – we all need a friend as loyal and entertaining as Sancho Panza, but they’re few and far between.

The God of Small Things

The world became an infinitely more beautiful place when I read this novel, although its greatness lies not so much in the story as in the way it is written. A must-read for anyone with a god-shaped hole in their universe. 

 

I'll stop there. Except to say that I dig this blog. Because, to quote from Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things how can they be called remarkable? Wise words indeed.

Natalie Ramm
Marketing Manager

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5 in Mind part 5: Adventures in Type

Click to launch slideshow

Links to the books on Amazon:

#1, #2, #3, #4, #5

A Humument has a website with scans of every page.

You might have suggestions for others? You could comment if you do.

Alan
Copywriter

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Covering Bond

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not long after my parents had relocated the family from the cold, damp and impressively windy Highlands of Scotland to the less cold, only marginally less damp, but no-doubt-about-it impressively windy island of Jersey, I was invited to a rich classmate's seventh birthday party. You could tell he was rich since on the way home from school in my parents' car we passed his house. This took a while.

The signature feature of this boy's party was something so unimaginably cool that I still think of it now with fondness and envy: a home cinema. Now this wasn't some tarted-up plasma screen under a ridiculous nom de guerre available on special offer at Curries. This was the mid-1970s. A home cinema meant a roll-up screen and stand, a 16mm projector, speakers and reels of film. In his house. My jaw drops still when I think about it.

Anyway, the home cinema treated us to an abridged twenty-minute version of Live and Let Die. Being six at the time, I loved every butchered minute of it. No matter that it was one sixth the length of the original, featured cartoon-Bond Roger Moore - yet to succumb to the claggy embrace of a safari suit - and clearly could not have made any sense whatsoever. At that age as long as some things got smashed up and people got hit in an entertaining way, what was not to like?

A few years later my mother gave me a book club edition that featured two James Bond novels, Dr No and From Russia with Love. On the cover was a poorly cutout bikini-clad Ursula Andress - from that still - emerging from the water pasted on top of a scarlet background. Being a book club edition it was a hardback. Being a book club edition every other expense had been spared. You could tell because they'd managed to place the novels out of order. This might not have mattered but for the fact that frequently in Fleming's Bond books one story leads directly onto the next. In this case, From Russia with Love ends with a cliffhanger putting the survival of Bond in doubt, while Dr No begins by recounting the agent's recovery. Or, if you were reading my book club version, at the beginning Bond gets better from the poisoning he will receive some 500 pages later. Such unconventional linearity gave Bond an unexpected modernist slant.

However, it is this sort of basic inattention to details that has often been all too obvious in past editions. For much of the forty-four years since his death his books have been treated by a succession of publishers rather like that bizarre home cinema experience: a fast, enjoyable thrill not to be taken too seriously or paid much attention to, and something that is certainly not for adults.

The centenary of Fleming's birth was clearly a good time to revisit the Bonds and cover them in a package that says, yes these are fun, but also makes it implicit that there's no reason not to take them seriously. Most importantly, they should look like books worth owning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To that end Michael Gillette was commissioned to paint fourteen iconic covers. The books were numbered on their spines so it's not hard to read them in order (if you're traditionally minded). The blurbs, adapted from earlier Penguin editions, were themed around the new unified concept. Fourteen book biographies, one for each back flap, replaced the usual author biography (which is found on page one). A short extract from each book graces the back cover. They were made into demi-format hardbacks to be not so much collectible as bloody irresistible.

Having worked on the Bond novels on and off for eight years – and these are the fourth set Penguin have done in that time – I can attest to their enduring appeal. And you won't find a safari suit in sight.

The new Bond hardbacks are published on May 29th. More information available here.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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Five in Mind part four

What’s that book about the guy who works in a record shop who’s obsessed with making lists called? You know, the one about music and ex-girlfriends? Anyway, that one’s definitely on there, but since it’s a book about lists I don’t think its fair for you to make it count it on my actual list, okay? I should also like to mention that my posting this doesn’t make it ipso facto definitive. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things and I don’t have time thank you very much to sit here trying to remember every book I’ve ever read. Also, it’s Tuesday, and as you know Tuesday’s mood is different to Friday’s mood and naturally my selections will reflect that. So basically, the whole experiment is flawed. What if I were to post two – or, better, seven? That way you’d get some real range, a real sense of what on any given day of the week I’m likely to summon up. One will do? Okay, fine, but I get to change it if it I think of something else, right?

A Long Time Gone by David Crosby.

This is one of the best rock autobiographies ever written. Crosby was a founding member of The Byrds and went on to be, in all honesty, the least talented member of CSNY. Neil Young was obviously (obviously) the weird one, but my gawd was Crosby ever messed up. I’m still not sure he’s a particularly interesting guy but he seemed to be everywhere and know everyone and take everything and the story is incredible as a result.

The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner

I’m not even going to say what it’s about, since it might put people off reading it, but it would be my contender for the most brilliant book ever written. Take any passage in the book. Look up the root of every word in the passage. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t once say anything he doesn’t mean to say.

Experience by Martin Amis

I must have read this book like five times. I can and do quote from it liberally and most of the time I say that it’s Martin Amis but there are one or two occasions I can think of where I’ve stolen a real zinger and passed it off as my own. It’s about his life, which by any standard is worth reading about.

A Perfect Spy by John le Carre

I’m not one of those people who think le Carre isn’t taken seriously enough, but if I were I would leave copies of this book in dead letter boxes all round town. It’s a big novel, and a totally readable one, about what makes spies tick (and about a hundred other things).

Disgrace by JM Coetzee

If anyone ever asks me to give them advice on how to write a novel I think I’ll just say “read Disgrace”. In fact, I might start using that as my stock reply when anyone asks me anything.

   

Jon Elek
Assistant Editor

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Five in Mind part three (Five Guilty Pleasures)

Before I start this list, I’d like to stress that I do read Proper Books. I spend my days working on serious tomes about the state of the world, and marvelling at the heights that the English language can soar to in the Penguin Classics. Sometimes, however, I don’t want the finer things in life, so here are my five books of shame. In the way that the Pot Noodle “slag of all snacks” TV ads from a couple of years ago tapped into the need to gorge yourself on something highly unsuitable every now and again, these are the books that I devour guiltily in secret, like a pork pie or a Findus crispy pancake. I’d be a bit embarrassed to be seen reading them on the tube, but I would want to lock myself in the loo at work to finish them. And can you really say that about Middlemarch?

1.The Lord of the Rings.

I know it’s fashionable to snigger at the slightly overblown prose and silly names, but I stand by this book as my ultimate comfort read. I’ve loved it ever since I listened to the marvellous BBC radio adaptation with my granny many years ago, and I still re-read it often (it got up to once year when the films were out - mainly so that I could say things like “Ah, but Elrond never actually did that!” - although I have weaned myself off that now).

2. The entire oeuvre of Stephen King. 

I love horror writing and ghost stories in general, but when it comes to scaring the absolute bejeezus out of you, I don’t think Stephen King can be beaten. Even typing the names of some of my favourites – Pet Sematary, Salem’s Lot, The Shining – is making me slightly nervous. So I’ll move on to number 3…   

3. Lace by Shirley Conran.

“Which one of you bitches is my mother?”

I defy anyone to think of a better opening line from a novel. This just narrowly beat Jackie Collins’s Chances as the biggest, best and most brazen of all the 80s sex and shopping novels. It also has the one thing that many commercial writers seem to overlook these days – a good plot (and the infamous ‘goldfish scene’ is forever burned onto my brain, as I suspect it is for many women over 30).

4. Bridget Jones’s Diary.

My other favourite ladies’ book. Easy to dismiss as the first ‘chick-lit’ novel, but I think Helen Fielding’s heroine captures our foibles, self-delusions and calamities in a way that hasn’t been done as well since Mr Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody (see, I do read classics!). Plus it makes me laugh and laugh. 

5. Revelation by C. J. Sansom.

Be warned – C. J. Sansom’s books are like crack. I’m a huge thriller fan anyway, but who would have thought the adventures of a Tudor hunchback lawyer (think Cadfael crossed with Inspector Morse crossed with the film Seven) could be so addictive?   

So there you have it – I feel a lot better now I’ve got those off my chest. In fact I’m off to have a pickled egg.

Louise Willder
Copywriting Manager

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Five in Mind part two

Now that there's little to do but tend to a baby, my reading habits have only altered in so far as there's a little less Egyptian Book of the Dead, and a little more reading-for-potential-hand-me-down-must-reads. Although I'm sure there must be someone out there who counts those things as utterly compatible.

Potential candidates that I've been re-reading for suitability include:
1. The Virgin Suicides. Not only full of superbly named characters (Lux Lisbon, Trip Fontaine), it's an immaculately crafted love-letter to loss, adolescence and lovely girls. And it made me sing Carol King songs for weeks afterwards.

   

2. Lee Server's biography of Ava Gardner. Yet another beautiful woman turned crackers by the world that wants her. Plus, what an amazing description of Clark Gable: "He was an uncomplicated man with a vast natural charisma that he never sought to analyze; he drank himself to sleep, got to work on time, and never took himself too seriously ... he was relaxed, reassuring, funny ... Gable was a dignified man who worked in the spirit of comradely professionalism." Swoon.

3. Speaking of Gable, Gone with the Wind is a book that's also always charming. Whilst the same can't be said for the recent musical version (Why, Nunn, why? And P.S - you might want to try having the singers audible over the orchestra. Although ...), the novel displays the mighty art of creating the perfect antihero, even if the heroine is fairly flawed (and summed up by one reviewer: "her journey is essentially spoilt brat to hard bitch" ). Rhett Butler, we salute you.

4. A cheat here: all of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books. If only because I've managed to swiz my way through literary quizzes with his lovely in-jokes, and I feel I should pass this on to the next generation. I mean, who's ever really going to be bothered to actually read Jane Eyre? Joke.

 

5. Continuing the theme of literary heroines, Rebecca scores highly in the hand-me-down charts, and not only because I seem to have no less than four copies on my shelves. Gothic, dramatic, without a single word wasted, it's a book that feels at the heart of modern culture, whether it's Fforde, Hitchcock, or Mitchell & Webb.

I join the hand-wringers in lamenting our five-book limit. If I'd been handing-down to a son, I would have had to switch this lot for such hero-heavy titles as Kalush and Sloman's biography of Houdini (remarkable for the Spiritualists' resemblance to the homeopaths of today), Charles Fleming's biography of Don Simpson  (for how to do it in style if you're going to do it at all), High Fidelity (hilarious), Lolita  (immaculate), and Watchmen (just. Really. Good.). But five it is, so five I shall stick to. *cough*

Sam the Copywriter

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Five in Mind part one

So you know what Penguin publishes - but what do Penguins read when they're not at work?

Five in Mind will tell you. Over the next few months a collection of willing victims Penguins will write posts about five books that matter to them. That's it. They might be books they love or hate, which they picked up by accident and now can't get out of their heads, or which loom unread on a high shelf like some kind of taunting and spiteful gargoyle. These are the books that play a part in our lives and we can't forget them no matter how hard we try. Why five? Why not?

Take it away, Rob.

Just the five, eh. It’s incredibly difficult to pick my five favourite books of all time; not only do they change all the time but irrespective of the current favourites, there are always more than five, so I’m not going to do that. And neither am I going to choose five books that I simply enjoyed or admired or that stayed with me long after I read them – because there are even more of those. So, I thought I’d share the five that over the past few years I’ve relentlessly tried to push on others in the same manic way that certain people put their iPod earpiece into your lug at the slightest opportunity. Because they’re the kind of recommendations that I enjoy most. So, in no particular order, listen up:

1 – A Disaffection. James Kelman joined Penguin around the same time as I did. I like to pretend that the two are connected. He’s an incredible writer and this is an extraordinary book.

 

 

2 – The Crossing. It’s pathetic but some of us are feeling a bit put out that the world has discovered Cormac McCarthy post-Oprah and the Coen Brothers. We’ll get over it but I know that the image of the dying wolf in this, the middle book in his Border Trilogy, will stay with me forever.

 
3 – The Afterglow. Anthony Cartwright’s debut novel is set in and around the post-industrial West Midlands – the place I still call home even though I haven’t lived there for years. ‘Beautiful’ isn’t always the first adjective I reach for in describing the region so it’s a mark of Cartwright’s achievement that this book is just that – and more.

4 – Crime and Punishment. I know I know but it’s always been in the top five and I suspect it always will be. I went to St Petersburg last year and paid an enterprising guide to take me on the Raskolnikov murder walk – a fascinating and at times illegal tour that included breaking into the attic that apparently inspired Dostoyevsky’s vision of the ‘coffin’ his anti-hero lived in. The author’s former apartment is now home to the Dostoyevsky museum, where you can see his massive desk exactly as he left it and marvel at the actual spoon he ate with on a daily basis. It’s in a display case and labelled ‘The Dostoyevsky spoon’ for any scholars accidentally reading this. 

5 – Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. A mad, brilliant novel from a criminally underrated writer about a mad, brilliant cast of characters living in the Ozark Hills and trying to survive the best way they know how.

   

   

I’m really only allowed five, you say? So I can’t even mention Jonathan Trigell’s Boy A (a brilliant novel before it was great TV), The Damned United, Revolutionary Road, Shawnie by Ed Trewavas, or our very own Nicci Gerrard’s meditation on the Soham murders, or John Gray’s Straw Dogs? No? Ridiculous ...

Rob Williams
Creative Director

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Storytelling2.0

Yesterday I was asking an American book blogger if, following a week spent hanging out with UK publishers, she could see any major differences between publishers in the US and those over here. "Yep," she said, "depression." In the US apparently, "morale is low" and there is a feeling that the publishing of fiction, in particular, is ailing. If the internet hasn't won already, it is believed, major damage has been inflicted on non-web based forms of entertainment.

Previous posts here, here, here and here for example, have considered that while the internet might indeed be transforming the cultural landscape, it's not yet time to roll over and die. Yes, the game is changing, but we still want to be players, still believe that there is a market for quality fiction, and still think that if you tell an interesting enough story, whatever the medium, it will be read.

Over the last 5 weeks nearly 150,000 people have read the digital fictions we've presented at We Tell Stories, and with the release of this week's installment this incursion into web-based fiction is coming to an end. We've learnt lots of things along the way. We've discovered that our authors are interested in new challenges and have enjoyed writing outside their comfort zones. That game designers are as interested in strong narrative as book editors. That there is an interest and an audience for new ways of telling stories. That we shouldn't be frightened of the internet, but instead should critically examine the possibilities it presents to create new forms of narrative, new audiences and new opportunities for our authors and their work.

We Tell Stories has been a great project to work on, but the challenge now is to learn from and take forward some of the ideas that have been raised and use this platform to make further, bolder online incursions. Being a publisher is not just about selling and distributing books, it's about selling and distributing stories and ideas, and these can take many forms.

As Mohsin Hamid writes, 'There are always at least two ways to tell a story.' The game is afoot...

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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Freeing Stoke Newington

Last Wednesday I sat in the audience at the British Book Awards listening to Khaled Hosseini graciously accept his award for A Thousand Splendid Suns. Well, he sort of accepted it. What he actually said was that he’d accept it for now, in the hope that it wouldn’t be too long before many other Afghans were nominated for such prizes – and that his highest hope would be for one of those nominees to be a woman. That ceremony may still seem a long way off but one of the most active groups in trying to bring it about is International PEN. This weekend (including today) they held their inaugural festival of world literature, Free the Word!, across several London locations.

On Saturday I bumped into John Simmons of recent Penguin Blog fame at a conversation between Yang Lian and Tze Ming Mok at the South Bank Centre. Now let’s be honest, Saturday afternoon spent listening to a pair of Chinese poets talk about translation probably isn’t going to challenge Stamford Bridge in the mass spectacle stakes any time soon (although one of my motives for attending this particular event was that I wouldn’t have to follow Wolves’ fortunes at Bristol City as closely as I normally would, as the football season nears ‘the business end’) – but in fact, the occasion was both enlightening and truly entertaining (apparently a quantity as foreign at the Bridge this season as most of the players). 

If jailing writers was an Olympic sport China would win the overall gold, and both Yang Lian and Tze Ming Mok are currently in exile, in London and New Zealand respectively. Both cite Tiananmen Square as a turning point in their poetic and political lives. Saturday was not only the first time the pair had met, it was also the day they made public an experiment in translation they’d been running between them by email. First Yang Lian read his poem about his ‘manor’, Stoke Newington, initially in the original Chinese, then the English translation by New Zealand academic Jacob Edmond – and both were beautiful in different ways.  Then Tze Ming Mok read her English mistranslation of the same poem using her imperfect grasp of Chinese (a Chinese Diasporan, she uses that distance in her work and in her humour), before Yang Lian translated that mistranslation back into Chinese. To finish, Mr Edmond tried to make sense of it all, gave up, did his own thing and in so doing bore out Yang Lian’s assertion that in order to translate poetry, translators must themselves be poets. Confused yet? So was I, at least a little bit, but it really didn’t matter. I didn’t need to understand much of what I’d heard to remember how much I once loved reading and listening to poetry. It demands a slowing down and a quality of attention that for whatever reason, I find difficult to achieve these days. But like Colin on his recent course, Saturday reminded me that the investment is invariably worthwhile.

The experiment was a success and the discussion that followed fascinating. I believed Yang Lian when he said that the best way to read is to translate, because it requires you to ‘cut in to’ the language. He described translations of his poetry not as his own work but as trees growing from the same ground (understandable as apparently someone once turned his ‘peacock’ into a ‘squirrel’); despite the well publicised loss of ‘something’ in translation, both poets were keen to make the point that much is also gained. Like the poets’ experiment, like Tze Ming Mok’s ongoing battle with her language and like the festival itself, I left understanding that the attempt to connect is what really matters.

International PEN hopes to make the festival an annual event and I very much hope they succeed. Oh, and Wolves drew 0-0. I missed nothing.

Rob Williams
Creative Director

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'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.'

Not yet they aren't. But one of the most famous opening lines in modern English literature seems to me a good place to start writing about where to begin when reissuing an old book.

A friend of mine over at HarperCollins - in fact the wise chap that employed me here at Penguin a few years ago - had to hire a new copywriter a while back. He was looking for a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff and came up with the rather neat idea of inviting all applicants to supply the current blurb of a book they were fond of together with an entirely new blurb of their own devising. They then had to explain why theirs was better.

Improving on what has gone before in publishing is usually not so difficult since jackets tend to stay on books for many years and by the time publishers get around to reissuing them they look rather tired if not plain antediluvian. Here's an example, appropriately enough, from the Eighties:

 

The blurb on 1989's Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn't sound much like a novel at all:
Newspeak, Doublethink, Big Brother, the Thought Police – George Orwell's world-famous novel coined new and potent words of warning for us all. Alive with Swiftian wit and passion, it is one of the most brilliant satires on totalitarianism and the power-hungry ever written.

Maybe. But it sounds like a bit of a slog.

When it came to doing the reissue (out in July) it didn't take a lot of head scratching for me to decide that a) it was time I re-read one of my favourite books and b) the starting point for writing this blurb had to be the excellent opening line, which manages to be perfectly ordinary until its very last word - which rips the rug out from under your feet. Nice work, George.

By listing some of the words that Nineteen Eighty-Four had added to the English language, the old blurb was trying to get across the book's weight, its sheer importance. Unfortunately, as if with a lot of attempts to make things sound worthy, Nineteen Eighty-Four just comes across as dull. Something to be admired rather than liked.

I think we can do better than that.

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent – even in the mind. For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101 …

This edition is not the Penguin Modern Classics edition. This edition is the one we want to get into the hands of school kids, to grab their short attention spans. So yes, putting the key words - Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, Ministry of Truth - in there is important, but that is no reason to leave the story or the characters out. The great thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it is so unsettling, it is so terrifying and bleak (and not much fun as satire, either). To get that across we need to know what's at stake - what Big Brother is opposed to. We need Winston and Julia, their hopes and love, their humanity. Without Winston and Julia there is no tension, no story.

A book might be a classic, big names may rate it, teachers might tell you it is an essential read. But that's no reason not to sell it as if it's brand new - to some people it will be - or not to try to seduce the sceptical reader into turning to the first page despite themselves.

At the same time as Nineteen Eighty-Four we're reissuing Animal Farm:

Both books feature stunning covers by Shepard Fairey - if you're going to grab people, get them by the short and curlies. But don't let either cover art or blurbs distract you from the words within.

Any lazy or awful blurbs on good books you'd like to share with us? And can you do any better?

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

Nineteen Eighty-Four (ISBN: 978-0-141-03614-4) and Animal Farm (ISBN 978-0-141-03613-7) are re-issued on July 3rd.

PS I'm offering a pair of these Orwells to the first comment that correctly points out the (ahem) deliberate mistake I made on one of the new covers.

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