My daughter's top ten films and books, aged 14

TOP TEN FILMS
1. Howl's Moving Castle (Miyazaki, 2004)
2. Ocean's 8 (Ross, 2018)
3. Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001)
4. My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki, 1988)
5. Moana (Clements, Musker, 2016)
6. Spider-Man: Far From Home (Watts, 2019)
7. Ponyo (Miyazaki, 2008)
8. Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
9. The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)
10. Tomorrowland (Bird, 2015)

TOP TEN BOOKS
1. The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken
2. Divergent by Veronica Roth
3. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
4. To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han
5. One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus
6. More Than This by Patrick Ness
7. 5 Feet Apart by Rachael Lippincott
8. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
9. Ingo by Helen Dunmore
10. After the Fire by Will Hill

Previously on Barnflakes
Top ten Studio Ghibli films
My daughter's top ten films, aged 13
My daughter's top ten books, aged 12½ 
My daughter's top ten films (aged 12) 
My daughter's top ten films (aged 11)
My daughter's top ten films (aged 10)

My daughter's top ten films (aged 8)
My daughter's top ten films (aged 7) 
My daughter's top twenty films (aged 5)
My daughter's top ten films (aged 3)

Phone box bookshops

BT's Adopt a Kiosk scheme (which costs £1), introduced in 2009,  has given a second life to hundreds of the iconic yet defunct red phone boxes around the UK – from miniature museums and cafes to defibrillators and nightclubs (though the best I've seen is undoubtedly an aquarium) – yet the most popular enterprise seems to be the book shop (or swap shop or library). I can imagine them lasting about a day in London but there are three within a mile of us here in Cornwall, including the brightly-painted one pictured above. With bookshops, libraries and charity shops still shut, these phone boxes are the only place to find books (without using the internet, I mean) at the moment.

Here's my lockdown reading so far:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Absorbing recasting of Thomas Cromwell as the good guy.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Classic haunted house story, made into several films and TV series.

Normal People by Sally Rooney
Apparently the zeitgeist novel of the decade (the last one, presumably), featuring two, erm, Damaged People. Similar in plot and technique to David Nicholl's One Day.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Wildly imaginative and entertaining novel featuring the devil and his cat coming to Moscow in the 1930s and causing havoc, interspersed with Pontius Pilate's trial of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm
Classic text exploring man's tendency to destroy or control life.

Previously on Barnflakes
Don't Just Be Yourself
The top 100 books
Notes on Giles Gilbert Scott
Sex workers' cards Gilbert and George style
London through its charity shops #12: Kingston

Armchair atlases

With the coronavirus preventing much physical travel, and armchair travel seeming an attractive alternative, also being sick of Netflix binging, as well as most of the planet now explored and photographed to death, it’s the perfect time to explore places that either don’t exist any more, have never existed, or are just so obscure you'll never visit them anyway.

Extinguished Countries is a new guidebook series about countries that no longer exist – a timely reminder, if we needed it, that nothing is permanent, though all civilisations feel they are invinsible. The first book of the series focuses on the Republic of Venice, which disappeared in 1797. The state once encompassed parts of Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece and Cyprus. The fascinating series contains everything from monuments, cities, famous figures, recipes, traditions and legends via craftsmen, historians and artists, and includes stories, timelines, infographics and maps.

The Unexpected Atlas series have books on Improbable Places (a 50p Barngain in 2018, keen readers will remember), focusing on the obscure and the bizarre; Atlas of Untamed Places looks at nature’s wildest places; Atlas of Vanishing Places explores places that no longer exist whilst Atlas of the Unexpected journeys to far-off lands, obscure discoveries and unimaginable locations.

Archipelago: An Atlas of Imagined Islands features an array of illustrators visualising their own remote islands. An Atlas of Imaginary Places is a fun children's books with bubble gum-sprewing volcanoes and islands in the shape of desserts.

Fictional places proliferate in film and literature, from Narnia and Middle-earth to the Land of Oz and Discworld. My favourite map in literature is probably the one in Treasure Island, with X marking the spot (for the very first time in a novel). Huw Lewis-Jones’ The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands is "an atlas of the journeys that writers make, encompassing not only the maps that actually appear in their books, but also the many maps that have inspired them and the sketches that they use in writing". Filled with beautiful illustrations of literary maps with essays by fine writers such as David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas) and Robert Macfarlane, it's a reminder that a map can do more than plot a route – it can feed the imagination.

The satirical Scarfolk Council is a brilliant and hilarious website of the fictional Scarfolk, "a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever."

Created entirely by graphic designer Richard Littler, the residents of the creepy, supernatural town are constantly under surveillance and force-fed warped public information posters and films, such as 'If you suspect your child has rabies, don't hesitate – shoot. It could save a life' (so convincing was this one it mistakenly appeared in a UK government magazine article about the history of UK government communications). In the words of the council: for more information please reread.

Though Norbiton is a place – it's near Kingston upon Thames and I've been there – describing the website dedicated to the nondescript area, Anatomy of Norbition, is difficult to do, so I'll instead pinch a quote from the website, provided by Robert Macfarlane, who calls it "A dazzlingly strange thought-experiment in virtual topography, counterfactual space, town-planning and tapirs..." Yeah, probably best just to visit it yourself.

Skidrisk – inspired by the road warning sign Skid Risk and, erm, Scarfolk – is my own imaginary town (which still lives entirely in my imagination), located somewhere in North Cornwall, where everyone loves car parks and cafes, and lives in the 1980s....

Previously on Barnflakes
Here's to you, Robinson

Frank Baker and The Birds

Sixteen years before Daphne du Maurier wrote her short story The Birds (first published in the short collection The Apple Tree in 1952), which Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) was loosely based on, British author Frank Baker wrote a novel also called The Birds, in 1936.

Frank Baker had an interesting, if mostly forgotten, career; first, inauspiciously, in a London insurance company. He then moved to St Just in Cornwall, becoming a church organist. He also began to write, publishing his first novel, The Twisted Tree, in 1935. The Birds was published the following year. Set in pre-war London, the apocalyptic tale depicts birds attacking people with the intention of the destruction of mankind. Despite the novel receiving decent notices, with the Birmingham Mail going as far as to call it "The most original piece of imaginative fiction since Wells wrote The War of the Worlds", the book only sold several hundred copies.

Nevertheless, Baker continued writing, and Miss Hargreaves, written in 1940, became his most famous book. It later became a stage play, TV show and radio programme. During World War II Baker was a professional actor, touring with the likes of Paul Scofield. Then he was the pianist for Players' Theatre, a West End music hall. Still writing, he produced novels, short stories, articles and plays. His 1954 novel Lease of Life was adapted into a film by Ealing Studios the following year.

When Hitchcock's film The Birds came out in 1963, Baker was tempted to sue Universal Studios for the similarities between the film and his novel, believing his story to be the inspiration for the film, but demurred. Daphne du Maurier denied ever having heard of Baker's The Birds, though they both lived in Cornwall (a small county where everyone seems to know everyone else), and, by coincidence, Baker's The Birds was published by Peter Davies, who was du Maurier's cousin. Apparently excited about publishing Baker's book, it is likely he might have mentioned it to du Maurier at some point.

Hitchcock scholar Ken Moss believes the Baker novel has more in common with the Hitchcock film than the du Maurier short story, citing certain scenes including an attack in a phone box as well as the triangle of the main characters. Author Christopher Fowler goes as far as to say Hitchcock meant to buy Baker's version but bought du Maurier's instead, accidentally.

Anyway, it seems Baker himself wasn't immune to a bit of plagiarising. In his autobiography, I Follow But Myself, published in 1969, he admits that his birds book bears some resemblance to Arthur Machen’s The Terror, published in 1917. Baker's The Birds was reprinted in a paperback version in 1964 (above) featuring a cover with characters not unlike those in the Hitchcock movie. It was reprinted again in 2013.

Frank Baker and Daphne du Maurier ended up writing to each other. In one letter, du Maurier tells Baker, "I wish for your sake Hitchcock had bought your novel rather than my short story from which to adapt the film". They both lived and died in Cornwall, du Maurier a legend and Baker a complete unknown.

The top 100 books

Warning – includes photography and art books! Comics! A dictionary (of sorts)! And no Austen or Dickens or Middlemarch! In alphabetical order.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Tintin Herge
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
The Americans Robert Frank
Atomised Michel Houellebecq
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Frank Miller 
A Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson
Birdsong Sebastian Faulks
Bound for Glory Woody Guthrie 
Brave New World Aldous Huxley
The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer
Catch-22 Joseph Heller
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl
The Cheese Monkeys Chipp Kidd
Chronicles Volume One Bob Dylan
A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess
Cloud Atlas David Mitchell
Collected Stories Tennessee Williams
Collected Short Stories W. Somerset Maugham
A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
The Corrections Jonathan Franzen
Cryptonomicon Neal Stephenson 
The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham
Death and the Penguin Andrey Kurkov
Designed by Peter Saville Emily King
Dracula Bram Stoker
Eric Gill Fiona McCarthy
Factory Records: The Complete 
Graphic Album Matthew Robertson
Factotum Charles Bukowski
Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury
Fictions Jorge Luis Borges
The French Lieutenant’s Woman John Fowles 
Fungus the Bogeyman Raymond Briggs
The Ginger Man JP Donleavy 
Going East: Two Decades of Asian Photography Max Pam
Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift  
Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond 
Herzog Saul Bellow
The Hills Were Joyful Together Roger Mais
Hitchcock Francois Truffaut
The House of the Spirits Isabel Allende
In Cold Blood Truman Capote
In the Eye of the Sun Ahdaf Soueif
Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë
The Journey is the Destination: 
The Journals of Dan Eldon Dan Eldon 
Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
Letters Francois Truffaut
London Fields Martin Amis
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
The Lorax Dr Seuss
Lost Horizon James Hilton
Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
Maus Art Spiegelman
Max Ernst Collages Werner Spies
The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka
Midnight's Children Salmon Rushdie
Miles: The Autobiography Miles Davis
Moonfleet J. Meade Falkner
Nico, Songs They Never Play on the Radio James Webb Young
Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
No Logo Naomi Klein
On the Road Jack Kerouac
Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood
Perfume Patrick Süskind
Pigeon's Luck Vladimir Tretchikoff
The Plague Albert Camus
Riddley Walker Russell Hoban
Ringolevio, A Life Played for Keeps Emmett Grogan
The Rings of Saturn W. G. Sebald
Rip It Up and Start Again Simon Reynolds
Robinson Chris Petit
Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design Jennifer Bass
A Scanner Darkly Philip K Dick
Scorsese on Scorsese Ian Christie (Ed.)
A Season in Hell Arthur Rimbaud
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ Sue Townsend
Short Stories Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston
The Songlines Bruce Chatwin
The Story of Art EH Gombrich
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
The Tiger Who Came to Tea Judith Kerr
Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky Patrick Hamilton
Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry
Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell Deborah Solomon
The War of the Worlds HG Wells
Watchmen Alan Moore
Ways of Seeing John Berger
We Need To Talk About Kevin Lionel Shriver
Where I'm Calling From: The Selected Stories Raymond Carver
Where the Wild Things are Maurice Sendak
Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys
William Eggleston's Guide William Eggleston
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami
Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë
Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do it Geoff Dyer

I really need a parallel life just for reading. I own about fifty books that I've never read but slowing getting through, plus I've a list of about a hundred I want to read (The Master and Margarita,  Steppenwolf, etc) then after that (so in about a decade), all the books I should read – Middlemarch, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Then recent novels which I hardly ever read, something by someone like Sally Rooney or Three Women by Lisa Taddeo (which'll be about twenty years old by the time I get around to reading them).

Previously on Barnflakes 
The top 100 films
The top 100 albums
Books I've read this year, 2019 
Top ten most difficult fiction books to read 
Notes on not reading anymore, etc
Books of the year 2011
Illustrated children's books (for parents)
Alice and Arthur

Books I've read this year, 2019

Fox 8 George Saunders
In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles Paul Bowles
Rimbaud in Java Jamie James
The Flame Leonard Cohen
Room to Dream David Lynch
On the Map Simon Garfield
Lila Robert M Pirsig
Fantasy and the Cinema James Donald (Ed.)
The Seeds of Time John Wyndham
The Book of Strange New Things Michel Faber
The Haunting of Toby Jugg Dennis Wheatley
Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin Pierre Assouline
Nobody's Perfect Anthony Lane
The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society 
Andy Miller
Borne Jeff Vandermeer
Black Coffee Blues Henry Rollins
Wilding Isabella Tree
The Pebbles on a Beach Clarence Ellis
Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2006 
Clinton Heylin
The 22 Letters Clive King
Noam Chomsky Hegemony or Survival
Jamaica Inn Daphne du Maurier
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse Charlie Mackesy

Previously on Barnflakes
Books of the Year 2011 (a year in which I read a lot more books than this year. But I didn't have an iPhone back then.)

Flickagram #9

Reading In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles has got me reminiscing about Morocco, where I went for the first time in the mid-1990s. The book is a great read, and Bowles is an inspiration: all the times I've been to a place and said I'd like to live there (Stockholm, Bali, Marrakesh, Jakarta, Rangoon, Los Angeles...), but never did, well, Bowles arrived in Tangier one day in 1947 and never left – he died there some fifty years later. Writing letters in those days was a part-time occupation, especially for a traveller like Bowles: all his letters were typed, so he'd lug a typewriter around on his travels, and have his letters forwarded from New York to Tangier to Ceylon (when he lived for a year); letters would go astray; he'd arrive back in Tangier with a mountain of letters, and respond to all of them. Then there was the problem of finding paper and envelopes in Tangier – everything from jewellery to ceramics was easy to find, but anything practical near impossible. Not to mention beautifully written, descriptive and witty letters; obviously in this day of social media and texts, it's a thing of the past. Bowles was one of the last of what one would call a man of letters (though Bowles would disagree, as did Gore Vidal when he asked someone if they'd received a letter from Bowles, then quipped that it probably consisted solely of Bowles saying what he had for breakfast).

What is happening in this photo? Well, the girls had asked for some suntan lotion, and we gave them some. I think this was near Merzouga, a Moroccan village in the Sahara. There was nothing happening in the village, so the girls took us to a nearby lake, which was completely dried out. It was still muddy, though, and there were thousands of tiny frogs in the mud, so many that we couldn't help treading on them, and playing catch with them. There was, of course, amazing architecture in Merzouga and the Erg Chebbi, a huge sand dune in the desert, but I didn't take any photos of those. Plus I only had black and white film, which was stupid.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Paul Bowles: Exile on Maghreb Street
Notes on Black Sparrow Press

My daughter's top ten books, aged 12½

1. The Darkest Minds—Alexandra Bracken
2. Inkheart—Cornelia Funke
3. In the Afterlight—Alexandra Bracken
4. The Hunger Games—Suzanne Collins
5. Catching Fire—Suzanne Collins
6. Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard—Rick Riordan
7. Never Fade—Alexandra Bracken
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—J. K. Rowling
9. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children—Ransom Riggs
10. Listen to the Moon—Michael Morpurgo

What about all the classics? I asked. Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte’s Web, Great Expectations, Franny and Zooey, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Bible? Nope, she said.

Previously on Barnflakes:
My daughter's top ten films, aged 12 
Notes on Harry Potter

Top ten prequels

In the beginning there was...

1. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

(Original: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, 1847)

2. The Godfather Part II, Dir: Francis Ford Coppola (1974)

(Original: The Godfather, Dir: Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) 

3. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (1995)
(Original: The Wizard of Oz, Dir: Victor Fleming, 1939)

4. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Dir: Gareth Edwards (2016)
(Original: Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, 
Dir: George Lucas, 1977)

5. Twin Peaks: Fire Come Walk With Me,
Dir: David Lynch (1992)
(Original: Twin Peaks, Creators: David Lynch/Mark Frost, 1990-1991)

6. Star Trek, Dir: J. J. Abrams (2009)
(Original: Star Trek, Creator: Gene Roddenberry, 1966-1967)

7. Monsters University, Dir: Dan Scanlon (2013)

(Original: Monsters, Inc., Dir: Pete Docter, 2001)

 

8. Skagboys by Irvine Walsh (2012)

(Original: Trainspotting by Irvine Walsh, 1993)

 

9. Havisham by Ronald Frame (2004)

(Original: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, 1861)

 

10. Finn by Jon Clinch (2007)

(Original: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, 1884)

Top ten most difficult fiction books to read

1. Gravity's Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Other online lists of difficult books to read contain such novels as The Metamorphosis, Catch 22, Heart of Darkness, Cloud Atlas, The Corrections, Midnight's Children, Vernon Little God and Lolita (all of which I read with ease). By comparison, Gravity's Rainbow makes these books the literary equivalent of Peter Rabbit.

I bought Gravity's Rainbow as a wide-eyed, innocent art student some twenty-five years ago. Like many, I'd started it a few times but never got further than a few pages in. Then about six months ago, I decided to read it. And yes, it took six months (I read other books in between, mind) but I finished it. I didn't say I understood it all. Or even half of it. Maybe it would have helped if I was more intelligent, with some knowledge of quantum physics, German, Latin, history, warfare, chemistry, maths and early German cinema. Helpfully, it also has lashings of sex and drugs, as well as nonsense poems, songs and limericks, and such an array of styles (making it difficult to imagine it was written by one person, like Naked Came The Stranger, the 1960s literary hoax that was actually written by twenty-four journalists) that if I didn't get one style, I might understand the next.

With a cast of over 400 characters (most annoyingly, though, the central character – well, who I thought was the central character until he vanished for hundreds of pages – Tyrone Slothrop, well, it wouldn't leave my head that Owen Wilson would be perfect to play him in the unfilmable film adaption of the novel), a prose style denser than lead, a convoluted plot that jumps backwards and forewords in time (without letting me know!), it's been understandably compared to Ulysses and Moby-Dick as one of the most difficult novels to read. (1999's Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson has also been compared to it, a Gravity's Rainbow for the digital age, or some such soundbite, which I adored and devoured in a matter of days. It has, you know, developed characters and a plot. In the 1970s, Gravity's Rainbow felt like the start of a new post-modern genre of fractured story telling, but this genre understandably didn't really take off, and books with traditional characters and plot continued to rule the day.)

It's a mostly fascinating read anyway. With some quirky facts, such as it was Fritz Lang in his 1929 film Woman in the Moon who invented the rocket countdown. Fact.

2. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
Or anything by Burroughs. He didn't invent his cut-up technique for easy reading.

3. Under the volcano – Malcolm Lowry
Dense and fragmented. I can't remember why I went through a Lowry phase but I read all his novels (ie two, plus some short stories), and his biography (Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry), which was far more fun to read than Lowry's fiction.

4. Riddly Walker – Russell Hoban
This is written in English but not quite as know it, a mix of Joyce, Burgess, Chaucer and, er, Kent dialect, which takes a while to get used to, but it's well worth it.

5. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Like Riddley Walker, this cult classic invents its own language, a mix of English slang and Russian. At least it's short. 

6. Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
A popular book and an awful film. I found the book hard to read and tremendously dull. 

7. The Ginger Man – J. P. Donleavy
One of the funniest books I've ever read, but pretty dense.  

8. Fifty Shades of Grey – E. L. James
Don't get me wrong; difficult books to read don't have to be pretentious, weighty, 1000-page long stream-of-consciousness affairs (but it helps). They can also be so bad it's impossible to get past the first few pages. With a prose style about as exciting as a shopping list, this was apparently quite popular. The film is meant to be even worse.

9. Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding
This one does start with a list (food consumed today). Couldn't get past the first few pages. In the 1970s there was The Female Eunuch; in the 1990s we have Bridget Jones. That's progress.

10. Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
I can't remember much about this one. Canetti's short travel book about Morocco, The Voices of Marrakesh, which I picked up in a secondhand bookshop in Indonesia, is far more rewarding.

In search of Emmett Grogan

"Mr Grogan writes so clearly that he almost convinces us the whole story could be true."
– The New Yorker

"This book is true."
–Emmett Grogan

"The best and only authentic book written on the sixties underground."
– Dennis Hopper

According to his autobiography, Ringolevio, A Life Played for Keeps, by the age of 21, Emmett Grogan (born Kenny Wisdom) had fought in a gang fight with the largest gang in New York (The Chaplains); spent time in jail; become a heroin addict, a burglar and a robber; watched as he and his mates kill a heroin addict with battery acid (it looks like heroin and leaves no trace); attended a posh prep school on Park Avenue, Manhattan, where he excels at basketball and goes to weekly parties with the rich kids and their parents for the sole reason to scope out the houses to rob them – which he does very successfully, waiting for the owners to go on vacation then looting them all of money and jewellery. Whilst doing this, he stays at a posh hotel and hangs out at Birdland listening to the likes of Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie. But when local gangsters get wind of his selling the stolen jewellery he becomes a wanted man.

He flees the States with $40,000 in his pocket; first to Amsterdam (on the boat across has an affair with a model), then Paris, where the tensions between the Algerians and the French are high – a bomb explodes just outside his hotel room. Meeting two men in a cafe, he drives with them across the Alps into Geneva, Switzerland then Italy, where he climbs mountains, learns to speak fluent Italian and helps build a church. He spends eight months in Heidelberg partying and spends a large chunk of his money; goes to Italy, witnessing the funeral of "Lucky" Luciano; then Rome, where he gets set up by a dealer called Squint Laszlo and spends seven months in jail (he's 17 by now). He swears revenge on Laszlo, tracks him down to the States, watches his house for a month, kills him with a shotgun, expertly making it look like an accident (they'd been a lot of recent mishaps with local residents killing themselves whilst cleaning their guns).

Emmett goes back to Italy and in Rome he watches films and reads the beat writers. He meets a girl, attends film school and immerses himself in New Wave cinema, Pasolini, Fellini. Adapts TS Eliot's Wasteland into a screenplay. Makes and acts in a few films, one of which wins a prize at a film festival but then is expelled from film school when one of the judges recognises him from when he was arrested and tried in Rome previously. Reads Joyce – goes to Dublin. Gets a job at the Guinness brewery, hangs out with the IRA, blows up a few buildings. Goes to London; writes pornography books for a while until, again, gangsters are after him for muscling in on their turf (his partner in writing had just been hospitalised).

(When he's not doing these things, he's either beating the shit out of someone, drinking Cutty Sark, taking drugs, getting busted by the cops, having casual sex (most notably in the back seat of a limousine with four beautiful black chicks and a lot of cocaine, whilst being driven through the Newark riots of 1967) or reading Beat writers.)

At 21, Emmett Grogan returns to the States for good, where he immediately gets drafted into the Vietnam war. In army training, where, naturally, he excels, Grogan deliberately gets himself discharged by popping a load of pills and aiming a bazooka at his fellow soldiers, and subsequently spends time in the psychiatric ward before being set free.

Grogan finds himself in San Francisco in the mid-1960s and becomes immersed in the counter culture, founding the Diggers, the anti-establishment anarchist group who distributed free food, put on improvised street theatre and organised free concerts with the like of The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin. Entirely distrustful of the whole flower power movement, he becomes a kind of outlaw figure and legend, equally admired and despised. His reputation spreads, and Grogan gives talks in London, New York and San Francisco; he coins the phrase "Today is the first day of the rest of your life"; hangs out with The Black Panthers, Timothy Leary, The Hell's Angels, Michael X, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Bob Dylan; organises the Rolling Stones' Altamont free concert (whilst in police custody). He kidnaps Governor George Romney and his wife, Lenore, in a large truck in San Francisco, managing to lose the FBI and the police. One of the most moving sequences in the book occurs when he leaves San Francisco briefly to learn how to hunt deer with an American Indian in a forest in New Mexico.

This was all before he was thirty; by thirty-five he would be dead of a heroin overdose. Whether or not it's all true or not is a moot point; it's a terrific read. Whether or not there even existed a man called Emmett Grogan is also fairly moot (my boon companion think he's fictional, and in the book there are several allusions to Emmett Grogan being a myth – he shuns all publicity, refuses interviews, the photos that exist of him are not him but an actor. He basically works like a dog, stealing food and setting up 'free' shops to help the poor and needy (an about-turn for someone who used to beat the shit out of people, and murdered a few too). There's not that much information about him online.

The 500-page autobiography, written in crystal clear, detailed prose in the third person, where, confusingly, for the first half of the book he is Kenny Wisdom before changing his name to Emmett Grogan, is part polemic and part unbelievable adventure story. Why is there not a film made of this  man's life?

If writing an autobiography by the age of thirty seems a little vain, well, Kenneth Branagh, merely an actor, wrote his first one by the same age, and Jordan, a model, has so far ghostwritten* four, the first of which was the biggest selling autobiography sold at WH Smith** in a single week.

*I don't mind ghost-written autobiographies at all – unless they're a writer, there's no reason to suppose any celebrity should be able to write a book of their life. However, Jordan has also ghostwritten three novels, which is slightly beside the point for a novelist.

**I've been meaning to write a post about WH Smith for years, but it'll just consist of this: it's crap. It's always been crap. It's like jack of all trades, master of none. Its greetings cards are tacky, magazines and books bland and mainstream, chocolate overpriced, toys and stationary limited... Bring back Borders! Did I actually dream Borders? It was like my favourite shop ever, yet no one I mention it to have even heard of it.

Book Covers: The Death of Grass

John Christopher's The Death of Grass, retitled with the less snappy No Blade of Grass for American readers, is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story in a similar vein to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, and came out just a few years after Wyndham's classic before going out of print for a number of years. A film version of the book did it no favours, apparently being so bad that even the author hasn't seen it. Penguin finally republished the book a few years ago, so hopefully it will get another audience, seeing as post-apocalyptic fiction has undergone a renaissance with a new set of fears – terrorism, environment, financial collapse, pandemics, overpopulation – igniting the public imagination. The first edition of The Death of Grass (top left), published in 1956, is now worth a lot of money. John Christopher, real name Samuel Youd, is alive and living in Rye, as this amusing blog post about the literary connections of the town testifies.

Previously on Barnflakes:
The Day of the Triffids book covers

Top 10 short story writers

1. Jean Luis Borges
2. Anton Chekhov
3. Raymond Carver
4. Edgar Allan Poe
5. Katherine Mansfield
6. JD Ballard
7. W. Somerset Maugham
8. Paul Bowles
9. Tennessee Williams
10. Charles Bukowski

This is a strictly personal list and I realise I've left out, say, Sylvia Plath, DH Lawrence, Flannery O'Conner, Angela Carter, William Trevor, Franz Kafka, JD Salinger, Mark Twain, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, Kurt Vonnegut Jr and Philip K Dick.

I'd have to say, over all, the best writers of the form are Americans and Russians. And science fiction is the best genre for it (sci-fi authors are able to communicate fantastic ideas without being bogged down by characters, dialogue and narrative).

Do say: Love the economy of form
Don't say: Bit on the short side, innit?

Lookalikes #21: Anna Karenina and Anna Karina

Anna Karenina is a 19th century Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karina is a Danish-born French actress, most famous for her films made with Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s, including Une Femme est une Femme, Bande à Part, Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou. As well as being Godard's muse, she was also his wife. They were divorced in 1965 and she's been married four times since.

I'm not surprised to learn there is a band called Anna Karenina/Anna Karina (and one called The Death Of Anna Karina, though she is currently alive).

Previously on Barnflakes:
Bands named after actors

Books of the Year 2011

Following Art Garfunkel's (once again) lead of listing every book he's read, here's the books I've read this year, so not necessarily books released this year. In fact, I don't think any were released this year* (if you're looking for such a list, let me direct you to the Guardian).

The Innocence of Father Brown GK Chesterton
Dirty Havana Trilogy Pedro Juan Gutierrez
Just my Type Simon Garfield
The Mouse and his Child Russell Hoban**
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet David Mitchell
Life Keith Richards
Psychogeography Merlin Coverley
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
Books vs Cigarettes George Orwell
Bound for Glory Woody Guthrie
Seasons of the Heart Alan Spence
But Beautiful Geoff Dyer
Bicycle Diaries David Byrne
The World's Wife Carol Ann Duffy
One Day David Nicholls
On Chesil Beach Ian McEwan
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
The Rings of Saturn WG Sebald
Night Train Martin Amis
Rolling Thunder Logbook Sam Shepherd
Moonfleet J Meade Falkner
Rip it up and Start Again Simon Reynolds
Trouble with Lichen John Wyndham
24 Party People Tony Wilson
Catching the Big Fish David Lynch
Big Baby Charles Burns
Put the Book Back on the Shelf: A Belle & Sebastian Anthology Various
Complete Persepolis Marjane Satrapi
Perverted by Language Various
Black Hole Charles Burns
Four Tales James Hogg
Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk Through Portland, Oregon Chuck Palahniuk
A Time of Gifts Patrick Leigh Fermor
Collected Stories Tennessee Williams [currently reading]

Keen-eyed/well-read readers may spot a few graphic novels and books of poems, which may have taken just an hour or two to read. It's true. But this is more than balanced by The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and A Time of Gifts, both of which took me months to get through.

*Unless I'm allowed to include the recently published Saul Bass book which I'm slowly getting through. It's massive! And amazing.

**RIP Russell Hoban, who died a few days ago, aged 86. His Riddley Walker is one of the most amazing books ever written.

Top 10 Travel Books

1. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
2. A Dragon Apparent by Norman Lewis
3. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
4. The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
5. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
6. A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
7. Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
8. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
9. Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca
10. Among the Russians by Colin Thubron

Also recommended: Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue (or anything, really) by Paul Bowles; Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti; Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie; On the Road by Jack Kerouac; As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee; The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson; Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West; The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald; Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell; Venice by Jan Morris; An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul; A Year in Marrakesh by Peter Mayne and Yoga for People who can't be Bothered to do it by Geoff Dyer.

Apologies: Bill Bryson fans. I'm not.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Top 5 Great Gay Travel Writers

Patrick Leigh Fermor, well met by moonlight

Although I had an inkling that the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor had something to do with the film Ill Met by Moonlight, I wasn't sure what, exactly. I assumed he had written it*. So I was somewhat surprised to find on the opening credits (above), Dirk Bogarde actually playing him.

And although there are many films about writers (see my top ten), it's rare to find a film about a writer which has nothing to do with them being a writer. Ill Met by Moonlight is one such film, concerning as it does the audacious yet true plan by two English officers to kidnap a German commander in German-occupied Crete in 1944. The two officers were Major Patrick Leigh Fermor and Captain William Stanley Moss, who wrote about the event in his book Ill Met by Moonlight, published in 1950. Their mission – parachuting into Crete, kidnapping Heinrich Kreipe, Commander of the 22nd Air Landing Infantry Division, taking his car and driving him through 22 manned checkpoints, abandoning the car, being pursued on foot by German soldiers across countryside and mountains, and finally escaping via boat to Egypt – was, amazingly, a success.

The film, adapted from Moss's book, was one of the last films to be made by the director/producer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Unfortunately it's a rather pedestrian affair, with lots of stiff upper lips, enlivened slightly by some sumptuous outdoor photography (actually of the Alps, not Crete) and rousing music. Powell and Pressburger's extraordinary series of films, including 49th Parallel, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going!, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman, all made between 1941-1951, would be in decline by the time of Ill Met by Moonlight, 1957. Just around the corner for Michael Powell was Peeping Tom (1960), the film which effectively sealed the end of his film career, certainly in the UK.

With the passing of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE, in June this year, aged 96, gone is a certain type of English adventurer and gentleman, which stretches back to Lord Byron and includes travel writers such as Wilfred Thesiger and Robert Byron (amazingly, Byron was only ten years older than Fermor, yet seems to belong to another epoch. However, I didn't realise he died so young: he was only 35**). A BBC journalist famously described Leigh Fermor as a 'cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond*** and Graham Greene'.

Though Leigh Fermor's travelling started when he was eighteen, having decided to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, he wouldn't write about these formative travel years until many years later. A Time of Gifts, first published in 1977, details the first leg of his walk across Europe in 1933, a fascinating time with the continent on the brink of changing forever.

Leigh Fermor's prose is remarkably descriptive and florid, his flights of imagination immense, his references – to architecture, languages, literature, art, customs, geography, culture, history – enlightening and often baffling. It's the sort of book that quotes Latin without any translation. A Time of Gifts is a 284 page book which took me months to finish. I struggled with every single sentence. But it was worth it (I think).

The book is praised by most but has its detractors. Leigh Fermor lost some of his diaries written at the time of the voyage, so critics have pointed out that his remembering the amount of detail in the book over forty years later is extremely improbable. Yet to take the book at face value is perhaps a mistake. As his Telegraph obituary mentions, the book is 'a brilliantly sustained evocation of youthful exhilaration and joy, and perhaps the nearest equivalent in English to Alain-Fournier's masterpiece of nostalgia, Le Grand Meaulnes.'

Leigh Fermor arrived in Istanbul in 1935, then travelled around Greece. He joined the army and fought in Crete and Greece. In Crete he lived for over two years disguised as a shepherd in the mountains, before planning the abduction of General Kreipe. He wrote his first travel book in 1950 and spent much of his life in Greece. He married but had no children.

*He did write one screenplay, based on a novel: The Roots of Heaven (1958), an adventure yarn directed by John Huston and starring Errol Flynn, Trevor Howard and Orson Welles.
**Travel writers seem to die very young… or very old. Bruce Chatwin, who had his ashes scattered near Leigh Fermor's home in Greece, died of AIDS aged 49; whereas Thesiger was 93, Eric Newby was 86 and Rebecca West, 90.
***Leigh Fermor was in fact a close friend of Ian Fleming.

Amazon 1 Star Review: Moonfleet

I'll be the first to admit it: this idea is blatantly copied from the Cynical-C blog, which had a section called You Can't Please Everyone, a look at 'One Star Amazon reviews of classic movies, music and literature', such as Catcher in the Rye, Revolver, Psycho and Animal Farm. A great idea and hilarious (though many of the bad reviews look as if they're written for the sole intention of pissing off others), it's a shame it hasn't been updated since January last year.

This probably won't be a regular feature but seeing as I was involved in much smirking over the original review and its comments, which (strangely) took almost a decade to materialise, I thought I'd share it:

Moonfleet (Puffin Classics)
John Meade Falkner

1.0 out of 5 stars TERRIBLE, 9 Oct 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Moonfleet (Puffin Classics) (Paperback)
...Its extrodinarily boring, i thought it would never end. I made the mistake of choosing to do a book report on the ... book and i hated it so much it's not even funny. If you like that stupid format where authors use words like thee, thy and thou than u love this brutaly written novel. If i were you i wouldnt buy this book...
By Brayden E

Comments
Graham Chapman says:
There is a case for saying 'well everyone is entitled to their point of view', however, I think, better to be honest here and to say that you are a half-wit. 'That stupid format where authors use word like thee'. That was - unintentionally, of course, quite funny. I wonder what mark this dunderhead got for his (it's a boy, isn't it) book report.
17 Sep 2009

Litlover says:
He probably got an A* by the time he took his A levels - that is the calibre of student who passes these days!
17 Feb 2010

Thomas Hardy says:
You were evidently sub-literate when you wrote this review. Ten years on I hope the teaching career is going well.
21 Jul 2010

Mr. K Kilpatrick says:
This was a good book in 1898(I wonder if the stupid thee/thou was in vogue then?) and still is! Yes the style is strange; what do you expect from over 100 years ago?
ps: There's more spelling and punctuation errors in your review than in the whole book.
14 Sep 2010

The original's here.

Top 10 Films about Writers

1. An Angel At My Table (Jane Campion, 1990)
Funny how the only two vaguely famous NZ authors are female (the other is Katherine Mansfield, in case you're wondering). Jane Campion's film of Janet Frame's life is harrowing yet uplifting and intensely moving.

2. Henry Fool (Hal Hartley, 1997)
One of Hartley's best, with garbageman Simon writing 'the great American poem'.

3. Barton Fink (The Coen Brothers, 1991)
John Turturro as the playwright selling his soul to write a Hollywood movie script.

4. Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000)
Enjoyable college drama/comedy with Michael Douglas as professor Tripp, unable to finish his second novel. Soundtrack includes a healthy dose of Dylan as well as Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.

5. Morvern Caller (Lynne Ramsey, 2002)
Adapted from the excellent book by Alan Warner, and with a great soundtrack featuring Can and Aphex Twin, the film starts with the writer already dead, having finished his novel, committed suicide and left his book to his girlfriend, Samantha Morton. Lynne Ramsey doesn't make nearly enough films. Her first since Morvern Caller, an adaption of We Need to Talk about Kevin, is out later this year.

6. Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel, 2000)
The life of Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas.

7. Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg,1991)
Cronenberg was perhaps the best choice for the 'unfilmable' book by William Burroughs, even if the results were somewhat pedestrian. Ornette Coleman and Howard Shore supply the atmospheric music.

8. Prick up your ears (Stephen Frears, 1987)
...Literally! Gary Oldman stars as gay playwright Joe Orton.

9. Tales of Ordinary Madness (Marco Ferreri, 1981) / Barfly (Barbet Schroeder, 1987) / Factotum (Bent Hamer, 2005)
The colourful life of sleazy beat writer Charles Bukowski has inevitably led to some film adaptions, none of which really capture his deadpan blend of poetry and poverty. And Bukowski was a pretty ugly guy – having Mickey Rourke and Matt Dillon play him is just plain wrong.

10. The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010)
The most recent on the list, and certainly one of the most original: the life and times of playwright Andrea Dunbar told via mimed tape recordings of family and friends as well as in situ extracts from her play The Arbor. Dunbar is probably now best remembered as the writer of Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, made into a film by Alan Clarke.

Do Say: Where's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Romancing the Stone, Sunset Boulevard, The Player, Adaption, Sideways, Finding Forrester, Total Eclipse, The Squid and the Whale, Gonzo, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Shining and Misery?
Don't Say: Where's Love Actually (Colin Firth strand)?

Plucked from the ether

'With most of the songs I've ever written, quite honestly, I've felt there's an enormous gap here, waiting to be filled; this song should have been written hundreds of years ago. How did nobody pick up on that little space? Half the time you're looking for gaps that other people haven't done.'
– Keith Richards in Life, referring specifically to Exile on Main Street*

All great art – whether literature, music or painting (probably not film – it's too much of a collaborative process) – has a timeless, ethereal quality to it, as if it was always meant to be, and has indeed always existed, it just took the right person to pluck it from the ether. Though Richards isn't exactly the genius per se, his insights into the songwriting process are fascinating – he had no idea he could write songs until he was locked in a kitchen with Mick Jagger and told he couldn't come out until he'd written one. 'Great songs write themselves', he also comments in Life, his autobiography, and this seems to ring true with other great songwriters such as McCartney/Lennon and Bob Dylan, who said, early in his career: 'The songs are there. They exist all by themselves, just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn't do it, somebody else would'. The same also seems to ring true with other great artists, from the paintings of Van Gogh and da Vinci to the works of Shakespeare and Dickens to characters such as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes.

In Iain Sinclair's introduction to a recent edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, he touches upon a similar idea:

'Holmes and Watson were instant immortals, springing, full-grown and two-thirds formed, from the author's head. They were inevitable, a force of nature. It was impossible to believe that they had not always been there: the same age, the same clothes, the same room. […] Conan Doyle was taking down a form of dictation, accessing voices from a parallel universe (where they had always been present).'

A parallel universe! It's a fascinating idea that great art isn't actually created but already exists, somewhere, and the artist is just the vessel or the channel in which to capture it and put it down on paper. I used to discuss a similar theory with a friend, that all our ideas and thoughts are just floating around, ready for the right receptacle to pluck them.

*I wish I could go back to hearing Exile on Main Street for the very first time. I remember what I thought of the album on first listening to it, maybe twenty years ago or so: that it was jumbled and chaotic and made no sense. But I kept with it. And when I finally 'got it', after five or six listens, perhaps, it was like a Eureka moment: I was, like, God, this is amazing. I've played it to death over the years and can't listen to it any more. I only had a cassette copy of it until a couple of years ago, which I'd copied off a friend's crackly vinyl. I have the CD now, which I hardly play.