Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker – Romance Special

Flowers? For me? Oh, you shouldn't - oh. You didn't. They're for your mother? Fine. Whatevs.

But you did get me a book? Now we're talking.

Despite difficult book relationships at times, a deciding factor in agreeing to domestic bliss with my better half was the discovery of a key shared book. I say I gave the book to him, he says he gave it to me. Potato potahto. (I gave it to him.)

So which book have you found shared love in? Or, for the misanthropes out there, which was the straw that broke the relationship's back?

Once more, I'll post something nice out to whichever answer I like best. Although that will probably only apply to UK people. But come on! Everyone can just join in anyway! Yeay! Hang on – you didn't even get me flowers. Why am I feeling bad about this?

Sam the Copywriter

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Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker – part #2

I suppose I owe you all a charitable high-five for not pointing out that not only had our previous Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker been done before, but it had been done by me. Shameful. But you were all v sporting for not whispering about my fading cerebral powers behind your hands. Or were you?

This Friday, new thoughts (one hopes). I'm only fifty pages or so from the end of this (which has possibly the best collection of quotes on the jacket that I've seen for a while) and I'm desperate that it wasn't so. At least with this one, there's two whole sequels, which are equally excellent. I'm just not particularly eager to leave the world of Priss, Lakey and Kay, despite those throwaway name-references making the whole thing sound a little too Blyton. Still.

So, my question to you this fine Friday is: which are the books that, while you're reading them, you wished they'd never end? Subquestion: which book would you actually like to live in?

To complete your happy Friday, here's a man we should all be cheering and whooping and celebrating all round. (Actually am, for once, crying as I read this.) Please read this, as it's so very, very important, and go to your library this weekend, and show it some affection.

Sam the Copywriter

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Dirty Rotten Scavengers

At the Penguin Press ‘launch lunch’ I talked about a book called Waste, by Tristram Stuart, which we're publishing in July. It's about food waste. We throw away up to 20 million tonnes of food in the UK every year, and that amount is matched by some other European countries, Japan, and the US. If there was a way of redistributing the excess it would feed 1 billion of the world's hungry three times over. Food is wasted all along the supply chain. Farmers overproduce because they know as much as a quarter of their crop may be rejected for aesthetic reasons – if a potato is too knobbly or a carrot too wonky  it will be thrown away. In the supermarket, because of unnecessarily strict food  safety guidelines and sell-by dates that again are there for aesthetic reasons, food is thrown out weeks before it would be unsafe to eat. And finally, in the home, we buy too much food and don't eat it all. If we wasted less, global food prices could stabilise, thereby allowing the hungry to afford more, and because there would be less demand in the rich West, the countries that export food to us at their population's expense would sell it where it was needed. Pollution would be drastically reduced – there would be fewer cows emitting methane and fewer fuel-guzzling machines transporting and processing food.

 

The author lives by example. As a student he fed himself on what food shops and supermarkets threw away. He is a Freegan. To this day, as well as the pigs he rears and his vegetable patch, he lives largely on what is discarded by others. Now I have always wanted to go bin-dipping, and when I mentioned this to my colleague, Emily Hill, she confessed that she did too, so on a Sunday afternoon in April we went looking for our dinner in bins around the Strand and Covent Garden.

***

The first supermarket we came to had closed a few minutes before we arrived, and there was no sign of food being wasted front of house, but when we went around the back we saw a man unloading several green pallets into a green skip. The pallets were full of food that had reached its sell-by date but was fit to eat. When we asked if he minded us taking pictures he was delighted. He had complained to his manager about the amount wasted every day but was told there was nothing they could do about it. Not only was this food fated to expend its nutrients in an incinerator or pit, it was sprayed with blue dye to prevent the food being sold on, a slightly less offensive deterrent than bleach, which some supermarkets use to put off scavengers.

The second supermarket, within walking distance of the first, was more careful about who it let look at its bins. We came to locked doors and a warning sign that rhymed: ‘This door will not open before 8AM, unless it is the dustbin men.’ We moved on to a doughnut shop. A black bag nestled innocuously by its doorstep. It was heavy. I opened it and found a buffet of multicoloured, icing-smeared, cream-filled unhealthy snacks. They had been put in the bag an hour earlier, when they would have been fine to eat, and now were soiled by cup dregs and damp tissues.

 

Our last two stops were coffee shops. One we passed as it was closing, saw the fridge shelves stacked with ready-to-eat sandwiches and resolved to come back to find out what was being done with them. The other we were drawn to by the small hill of transparent bin bags outside it. The first, we discovered, did not throw its sandwiches away, but saved them till the next day – a guiding star of frugality in a sea of commercial effluent. But the see-through bin bags of the second were full of sticky Danish pastries, soggy bread pitted with dried fruits, and croissants.

 

We went home hungry, but not because there wasn’t enough to eat.

 

 

 

 

 

Phillip Birch

Assistant Editor, Penguin Press

 

Emily Hill

Publishing Co-ordinator, Penguin Press

          

Around the World in 80 Books: the fourth leg

Blimey, this travelling lark is slow. I'm sorry I seemed to forget Southern Europe – I'm not going to Germany next at all. Poor old Italy. With its wealth of literature, from feline to flagellatory (always fond of literature that portrays Odysseus as the rotten fibber he truly was), I'm afraid I lumped for something altogether less translated.

Third stop: Italy. Or… the Roman Empire. So, lots of Europe, but mainly centred around Rome.

Book: I, Claudius, by Robert Graves

I'm not sure why I haven't read this already. Maybe it's my mother-in-law's habit of referring to it as "One Clavdivs"*, which is v. v. pleasing but leads me to expect some kind of Wodehousian educational hoot, or maybe it's the clunky jacket on the edition I owned as a youth; either way I'm enormously grateful to Naomi Alderman for suggesting this as my Italian destination.

The Penguin blurb describes this as "one of the most… gripping historical novels ever written", but somehow I feel that this doesn't do it full justice. Rather than merely being a juicy and salacious novelization of Rome, it's mannered, and dry, and genuinely feels as if it's been translated, but really thrives on all these things, and lacks any of the fustiness or distance that translation could sometimes entail. It's funny, and frightening, and despite the fact that I couldn't sketch that family tree if you paid me (although I don't think I'm alone in that), I found all the characters to be incredibly well-drawn and unutterably fascinating. It's a page-turner, and, most importantly, features passages like this:

"'The cook's a genius,' they are all thinking. 'The mullet with piquant sauce, and those fat stuffed thrushes and the wild-boar with truffles – when did I eat so well last?… Ah, here comes the slave with the wine again. That excellent Cyprian wine.' … And everyone says, thinking of the thrushes again, or perhaps of the little simnel cakes, 'Admirable. Admirable, Pollio.'"

'Thinking of the thrushes again'? If I was served fat stuffed thrushes, I wouldn't just be thinking of them a few minutes later, I'd be stuffing the chef into my bag and locking him in my own kitchen. Mmmm… tiny cooked birds…

Conclusions as a traveller:

Probably not the right country to marry your first wife's new son's second cousin's grandmother. A little too much poison knocking about to ensure the wedding ceremony didn't go off without at least one guest collapsing and dying, and tricky to ensure that you weren't your own sole inheritor.

I am so excited about hitting the rest of Europe. Germany, if all goes according to plan, will be my next-but-one stop, and then I'll try to thread up through Scandinavia. Thank goodness I didn't throw out my moonboots.

Sam the Copywriter

*This is the same mother-in-law who told me about Poe's Raven almost being a Parrot. Then she said, "Lenore! Nevermore!" in a parrot voice. Boy oh boy, it made me laugh, but I will never be able to read Poe again.

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The In-Betweeners

Anybody who knows me knows that I am a complete sap. I have been known to well up watching advertisements on television (This one gets me every time). So naturally I was crying as I watched Obama’s victory speech when he won the elections last month. After the initial elation however, I felt strangely deflated. Why were the media obsessed with declaring that America had elected the nation’s first black president? Being half Korean and half English, I felt robbed of what I considered a triumph for all of those with a mixed race heritage background.

The politics of identity are never straightforward. I know this from being asked a million times by strangers to define myself. Am I Korean or English or American (it’s the accent, apparently), they want to know (though invariably no matter what answer I give, to Koreans I am English and to the English I am Korean), for in their eyes, I can never be both. People like simple answers.

But life isn’t that simple. The Map of Me is a testament to this. On the one hand, people describe being mixed race as having the best of both worlds. On the other, it may mean feeling lost in between them, never feeling fully part of either. Not everyone is happy with being a mutt, though there is often a significant amount of comedy in sitting on the fence between two cultures (i.e embarrassing your stiff upper lipped relatives with emotional outbursts and annoying your very genuine Korean family with sarky and ironic comments). Reading the accounts given by those from the Map of Me (with a box of tissues to hand), which are both moving and often funny, it occurred to me that it is not only the privilege but also the responsibility of literature to explore complexities that arise in growing up between cultures, between colours even, as Zadie Smith (half English, half Jamaican) does, for example, in White Teeth, or more recently, in On Beauty. This is because I believe that literature is able to express ambivalence in such a way that other mediums are unable to.

In his latest book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell (half English, half Jamaican) emphasises that it is culture and environment, rather than the personality of individuals that is the crucial element to success. So what happens when you throw more than one culture into the mix? My hunch is that the contradictions, ambivalence and rewards reaped from growing up between cultures is beneficial to creativity. My hope is that Obama’s recent success will encourage those who have previously felt marginalised to speak up and push the boundaries of literature as well.

Hannah Michell
Online Marketing Executive

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