Books For Boys

Apparently, young boys are meant to be "reluctant readers" - at least according to this article in the Guardian. I'm not sure why boys, in particular, should need more pushing to read but I did find that when I was at school English lessons would stifle any interest in literature that I may possibly have had. I did read when I was at school but this tended to be masses of pulp Sci-Fi stories rather than more worthy novels. In fact, if I did find my way into serious literature it was more by way of reading Sci-Fi by the likes of George Orwell (1984) or Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) and moving on to their other works. I did end up reading more adventurous stuff at school but this tended to be at the recommendation of other teachers - my history teacher encouraged me to read Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front as it would do far more justice to the history of the First World War than the official texts' dry analysis of the machinations of egocentric politicians.

My eldest boy reads lots. In part, I think, the fact that he doesn't have a games console or computer in his bedroom helps. However, the problem I have found with him is encouraging him to read out of his comfort zone. I've taken him to the local library from a young age and for quite a while he seemed to get books that were far too easy for his reading age. After a while, I realised that he was fixated with the idea that he had to complete a book at a single sitting. In fairness, the stories that I would read to him at bedtime were very much in this format. Initially, these were Thomas the Tank Engine or Bob the Builder stories. The Bob ones bored me to death - most of the stories are complete mundanity, with Bob as a kind of latter day Stakhanov; so I used to change them after a while and we got Bob and the Tax Return, Bob and the Botch Job, Bob does one Cash in Hand and Spud the Scarecrow gets Exterminated by Daleks. The Thomas ones were much better as I can do a cracking Ringo Starr impression and the stories usually involve lots of action - a major rail disaster being a common theme. I eventually moved on to Grimm stories or some other horror story to give him nightmares but the format still remained - one story per sitting.

The problem with this came in the library because he would see something that looked a bit longer than an hours read and would immediately be put off. After some cajoling, I managed to get him to read a Horrid Henry story and, after completing one he immediately cleared through the whole shelf of them. The next ones were Roddy Doyle (yes, he does children's stories as well - at least I could spot too many rude words) and, after another push of faith I managed to get him to read one (and soon all) Roald Dahl books. At this point I started trying to read longer stories at bedtime - quite a few of them being abridged classics which Grangemouth Library do a great line in. The problem still seemed to be the same that anything that looked a bit bigger or less familiar wouldn't catch his imagination.  I did get him to read a Douglas Adams book (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) but failed with Terry Pratchett. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

However, I seemed to have a breakthrough last summer. There was a Harry Potter film on TV which he decided that he must watch. I wasn't so fussed on this (mainly because the football was on the other side) and so I told him that he could only watch the film when he had read the book. We were in Falkirk library a few days later and had a look at the JK Rowling section - it was bare: the last of the Harry Potter films had just been released and the shelves had cleared pretty much overnight. The reservation list for the first book was at least three deep. I ended up ordering the book second hand via Amazon. It arrived the next week and he had read the whole thing by the weekend. I found the second book in charity shop and this lasted just about as long. This went on for the next six weeks as he worked his way through the ever longer books (over 700 pages in one volume). The size obstacle seemed to have been overcome.

The other factor which seems to have helped is a programme called Accelerated Reading which the school are running. This involves the children choosing a book, either from a prescribed difficulty list or of their own choosing, and then taking an online test to see just how much of it they have taken in. They are awarded points depending on how well they do in the quiz and the difficulty of the books. Of course, boys being boys, they do tend to be quite competitive and have been racking up the books at quite a rate. Since finishing the Potter series he has also tackled Tolkien's The Hobbit and has almost completed the CS Lewis Narnia books which my brother bought for his birthday present. It all seems rather removed from my diet of pulp fiction but he does seem to be enjoying it all.

So how does one chose books for boys? I'm still not quite sure. I think having a book rich environment with minimal distractions helps, but it is still a case of trying to encourage reading without prescribing what to read that is the difficulty. He seems to like the whole fantasy genre so maybe I should try him with Pratchett again?

Living Life Second Hand

This week, I ended up watching a repeat of the Paul McCartney "Electric Prom" which was shown on BBC Four a few weeks back. Overall, it was pretty enjoyable with a good mix of Beatles favourites and highlights from his own solo back-catalogue. Maybe Macca has never been the coolest of rock stars but I don't much care for liking something because it is regarded as hip - he has written some great songs over the years and he really knows how to work a live audience. It must have been a fantastic experience seeing him in the flesh. At least it would have been for me but I noticed something rather odd during the performance.

I don't know where the practice originated from, but it was once commonplace at stadium rock concerts for the audience to light up cigarette lighters for atmospheric effect during slow ballads. I always thought this was rather naff but the sight of a sea of hundreds of lights actually looks quite special. With smoking now being banned at indoor venues this is maybe not so common. However, I thought that this was happening at McCartney's Roundhouse gig for the BBC until I noticed that it was actually a sea of mobile phones:

What has been bothering me is whether this is now a modern day substitute for the Zippo or whether the people are actually recording what is going on. I'd like to think the former but most of the phones in that clip are facing away from the stage - and towards whoever is doing the filming. I don't particularly approve of this kind of low level piracy - not so much because of copyright infringement but because it is a distraction for anyone nearby who actually wants to watch the show. What is completely bonkers regarding the Electric Prom is that the BBC were recording the whole show in high definition with multiple camera shots and fully mixed sound to be broadcast free-to-view on terrestrial television.

I can't quite place why anyone would still want a crappy camera-phone home movie of the whole show when they could sit back and enjoy it live and catch the whole experience again at home on TV. Where they simply trying to catch bragging rights to say "I was there"? If that is the case, it is almost as indecipherable an activity as trainspotting - simply cataloguing dates and events without ever actually appreciating what was going on. I may occasionally keep programmes as souvenirs from concerts or football matches and I have, on occasion, tried my hand at sports photography (with little success) but the memory of those occasions are burnt into my head as a series of experiences and emotions that no facsimile could ever replace - and if I have forgotten a show or event, it is simply because they were not worth remembering.

Is this now the curse of the modern age? An event must be catalogued like a stamp collection? I don't think it's for me: You only live life once - it's best not to live it second hand.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

One thing I have been doing much less of since I started having to drive to work is reading. In fact, I still do read a lot but I tend to find that I read more magazine articles and short stories than novels and larger books. I think the other factor that has come into play is that my eyesight is getting that much worse that reading the small print of a paperback is actually rather tiring. I have tried playing audio books in the car but for some reason I find this very distracting whilst driving - I find the same effect with radio-plays. For this reason, any paperbacks I have read have lasted for weeks or even months with a couple of chapters at a time being read. One case in point is Patrick Süskind's  Perfume: The Story of a Murderer which I finished last week. This has taken me around 3 months to read (on and off) although it has actually been much longer than that in reality.

I was vaguely aware of Süskind's  Perfume as it had been referenced in songs by the likes of Nirvana and Rammstein. My wife is a big fan of the book so when the film version came out in 2006 we went to see it at the MacRoberts Cinema at Stirling University. Interestingly, for a German film of a German book, it was filmed in English with a largely British lead cast (Dustin Hoffman aside). I was suitably impressed by the film and started to read my way through my wife's edition of Das Parfum. I think I made it through the first two chapters and felt quite proud of myself at having read some German literature for a change. I then realised that I had no idea what had happened in the few pages that I had deciphered. There is a big difference in being able to garner information from a German motoring magazine or the set-up instructions for an electronic gadget and actually being able to absorb the nuances of an unusual historical novel.

Last year, Nina bought me the English language version in paperback - Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. At least, she bought me a second hand copy from Amazon market place which had previously been owned by someone with some kind of nasal infection (as far as I could tell)  but the text was intact and very much a revelation. Perfume tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a perfume apprentice in 18th century France who has an extremely sensitive sense of smell despite having no scent of his own. The story follows the isolated world of Grenouille as he explores the world via the sense of smell, eventually trying to isolate the perfect scent, that of a young virginal woman by murderous means.

Perfume is a very strange story told in an unusual and intriguing way. Telling the story of an odyssey of scent is difficult but the power of words allows this - and it also indicates why the German version was utterly lost on me. I would highly recommend the book but, if your eyesight is as mediocre as my own, I also loved the film version - there are some minor differences from the book but it's well worth catching if it is on.

Happy Birthday

February 7th marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. It's actually one of those dates that I can always remember - not so much because I like Dickens's novels (which I do) but because I share a birthday with him - although, I might add, I am somewhat less than 200 years old. It's quite interesting to find out that a birthday is shared with someone famous although it isn't as much of a rare coincidence than one might imagine: with 7 billion people on the planet there will be some 19 million who share the same anniversary (obviously this is less if you happen to be born on 29th February). Once you add in famous people from the past there are quite a few to draw from. Aside from Dickens, the following caught my eye:

Thomas More was a statesman and saint, born in 1478, and was probably best known for his book Utopia and his arguments with King Henry VIII (for which he ended up headless). I actually know quite a bit about him from having to study Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons whilst at school. I grew to detest this play but I recently saw the Paul Scofield film version and loved it - it's amazing how school English lessons can destroy any appreciation of literature.

 Alfred Adler was an Austrian doctor and psychotherapist. He is probably not as much of a household name as Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung which is a pity, as his ideas were quite interesting. He drew heavily on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and he coined many familiar phrases such as superiority and inferiority complexes and over-compensation. I suppose, unlike Freud and Jung, his work appeared to be based in common sense observation rather than the somewhat outlandish claims of some early psychotherapists. Whether his ideas would be classed as fully scientific is another thing but he did, at least, appear to be on to something. He was actually in the news just last year as his ashes were discovered at an Edinburgh crematorium and finally returned to Vienna.

Alfred Worden is 80 this year and one of only 24 people to have travelled to the Moon. However, as command module pilot he never actually stepped on the Moon but is one of only 6 people to have journeyed to the far side on his own. I've always been fascinated with space so it's nice that I share a birthday with an Apollo astronaut.

Gareth Hunt is cockney rhyming slang. He was also in some dreadful coffee adverts but I like to remember him Mike Gambit in The New Avengers. Admittedly, it wasn't a scratch on the original Avengers series but it's quite cool that one of the actors had the same birthday as me.

Eddie Izzard is a comedian, actor, raconteur and "executive" transvestite (as opposed to the "weirdo" transvestite). I must admit that when I first saw Eddie I couldn't work out what kind of trip he was on but he is one of those few comedians whose work stands up to repeated viewing - if anything his odd monologues get better the more they are heard. A case of familiarity breeding affection. So... erm... Yes!

Sadly, Pete Postlethwaite died last year but was another 7th February birthday boy. I think part of his appeal is that he always came across as being a quintessentially Northern English actor but his acting rolls were so varied that gritty kitchen sink dramas were about the last thing one would associate him with. Certainly, there are very few actors who can take major roles in films as diverse as Alien 3, In the Name of the Father, The Usual Suspects and Jurassic Park and still remain utterly convincing in them all.

Sammy Lee became a firm favourite at Liverpool Football Club having worked his way into the first team under Bob Paisley. He went on to win a stash of trophies with Liverpool and played a few games for England as well. I think part of the appeal of Sammy Lee is that he was one of the most unlikely looking footballers to have made the big time. He was short and stocky and looked more like he should be running deliveries for his dad's butcher's business than playing football at international level. However, his determination was visible and I suppose part of the appeal is that he typified the "local lad done good" side of football which seems so lacking these days.

Chris Rock is another comedian, actor, writer and all-round show person. Unlike Eddie Izzard he has much more down to Earth humour, often pulling from the antics of his family whilst growing up in New York. In fact, his show Everybody Hates Chris used to constantly crack me up - not so much for Chris but from the actor playing his father, Julius, who reminded me of myself far to much for my own liking.

I was trying to find someone interesting who was born on exactly the same day as me. After doing a quick Google, I managed to find Jazz bassist, Chris Minh Doky:

Happy birthday Chris!