The Versatile Blogger Award

Thank you to the weary blogger behind Tired Mind, Typing Fingers. If you take a look at her blog, you’ll see that she’s trying to get on with her writing (and the rest of her life) despite chronic illness. She’s also found time to nominate my blog for a Versatile Blogger Award, which is very generous of her. Thank you, TMTF.

Everyone can see a leg in plaster. Ill health can be much harder to deal with when it’s invisible. When in contact with others, there are only two possible options: pretend it’s not there, or explain it. As a doctor I know that both options have drawbacks. Check out Tired Mind, Typing Fingers for insights from someone in the know.

The rules.

According to the rules of this award, I must nominate ten blogs that I believe also deserve the award, then share seven interesting facts about myself. I’ll try to find some, but first this.

The ten blogs I’m nominating for a Versatile Blogger Award.

Sue Moorcroft

Sue is a best-selling author of romantic fiction, and a writing tutor, so there’s plenty to enjoy here, whether you want to read or write novels.

Debbie Young’s personal blog

Debbie writes both fiction and non-fiction (see her new Sophie Sayers mystery, as well as her terrific book Coming to Terms with Type 1 Diabetes), and helps other authors, notably through the Alliance of Independent Authors.

The Artist Unleashed

The word ‘versatile’ could have been coined for Jessica Bell, who’s a writing coach as well as an award-winning novelist and poet, singer/songwriter/guitarist and designer. She’s also the brains behind The Artist Unleashed, a blog that manages to be useful and a bit quirky.

This Itch of Writing

There’s always a lot to think about on Emma Darwin’s blog, which is all about fiction and what she calls creative non-fiction: writing it, reading it, teaching it and, as she says, sometimes hating it.

Jane Davis – virtual book club

Jane is an accomplished novelist whose blog features a virtual book club. It’s a lively interview series in which authors pitch their books to your book club.

Helen M Taylor- the right words in the wrong order

Helen’s career to date has had more twists and turns than a helter-skelter. Suffice to say she hasn’t yet made it as a rock star surgeon. On the plus side, her debut novel The Backstreets of Purgatory (in which Caravaggio wreaks havoc in modern day Glasgow) is out later this year.

Tripfiction

You know TripAdvisor? Well, Tripfiction was created to match a location with a book. Thanks to a searchable database, you can find a book relevant to almost any trip, however far flung.

Women Writers School Blog

Laurie Garrison is Founder and Director of Women Writers School, a project that aims to increase the number and visibility of women writers read, published and recognized for their talent. There’s lots of advice for writers, and much more besides.

Amna K Boheim’s blog

Amna took a roundabout route to her career as a novelist, a path that included eleven years in the City. Her blog is an interesting and eclectic read.

Slugs and Snails Tales

Nikki Roberts blogs on life with her boys, and to raise awareness of ADHD and epilepsy. Her posts are always enlightening and fun.

Finally, seven snippets about me.

1 I’m a fan of Liverpool FC. But, whenever I go to a game, they lose.

2 Although red is my favourite colour, I have lots of orange things.

3 My cat is called Mishmish. This means ‘apricot’ in Arabic and in Hebrew, so it describes her colour perfectly. She’s also one of four cats I’ve named after a fruit.

4 My first car was a VW Beetle which I drove for over twenty years. See my antediluvian glasses?

5 I used to do my mother’s tax returns when I was ten years old.

6 I’ve known my oldest friend (also called Carol) since she was born. Or possibly before then, since our mothers (both called Jacqueline) were also friends.

7 I did O-level Russian, but so long ago that I remember nest to nothing. до свидания!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of my Favourite People are Books (part two)

It’s usual for a list of great novels to include

  • an inscrutable foreign masterpiece from the present-day
  • one Jane Austen title (choice depends on intellectual criteria, such as which film hero was most fanciable)
  • an angst novel (Philip Roth often fits the bill)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird
  • Catch-22
  • and *drum roll* Anna Karenina.

bookshelf

Maybe you’re waiting with bated breath for Rosamund Bartlett’s new translation? Her Anna Karenina, due to be published in August, is already ranked about two millionth on Amazon (how does that happen? Tolstoy pulling rank again?).

Sorry to disappoint, but my choice of Russian blockbuster is by Boris Pasternak. When I first read it, I was neither a medic nor a writer, whereas Yuri Zhivago was both.

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over,

Snow swept the world from end to end.

A candle burned on the table;

A candle burned.

I loved Doctor Zhivago for its action, its setting, its characters, its lyricism (and Omar Sharif). I even studied Russian and tried to write poetry. Then I figured out the real lesson: to avoid becoming as self-absorbed as Pasternak’s hero. Also, not to turn into a bloke, especially not one with a frosted tache and a balalaika.

Dr Zhivago

Catch-22 may not be on this list, but I treasure another novel that gave rise to a very current phrase. Yes, the past is a foreign country in L P Hartley’s The Go-Between. Twelve-year old Leo figures out the facts of life. He also figures he’s being used.

“Well,” he said, “let’s make a bargain. I’ll tell you all about spooning, but on one condition.”

I knew what he was going to say, but for form’s sake I asked: “What is it?”

“That you’ll go on being our postman.”

While the lad was naïve by today’s standards, the book is still fresh for 1953 and nicely captures Leo’s post-traumatic stress. By comparison The Shrimp and the Anemone is rather dull. Which is to say that I don’t recall any spooning.

My choice of modern foreign masterpiece is the perfectly scrutable The Yacoubian Building. If you haven’t read it, it’s a lively ensemble novel peopled by a doorman, his family, a gay newspaper editor, Islamists, and the other motley inhabitants of the building on Suleiman Basha Street. Here’s a passage about the womanizing aristo Zaki Bey.

From Lady Kamla (she of the inexorable appetite) he learned how to start and when to desist and how to ask for the most abandoned sexual positions in extremely refined French. Zaki Bey has also slept with women of all classes – oriental dancers, foreigners, society ladies and the wives of the eminent and distinguished, university and secondary school students, even fallen women, peasant women, and housemaids. Every one had her special flavor, and he would often laughingly compare the bedding of Lady Kamla with its rules of protocol and that of the beggar woman he picked up one night when drunk in his Buick and took back to his apartment in Baehler Passage, and who he discovered, when he went into the bathroom with her to wash her body himself, to be so poor that she made her underwear out of empty cement sacks. *

The story may seem a bit ‘told’ for some, but that’s probably the nature of Arabic literature. The book has special resonance for me as I’ve lived in Cairo, although Al-Aswany doesn’t describe anything as atmospheric as my first terrifying day at school when I screamed so much that I threw up onto the teacher’s shoes.

For a tale that moves at breakneck speed and grips like a novice on a rearing stallion, look no further than Dick Francis. Low-brow? Maybe. Formulaic? Sometimes. But brilliant all the same, right from the off. This is from For Kicks.

The Earl of October drove into my life in a pale blue Holden that had seen better days, and danger and death tagged along for the ride.

I’m not the only fan of his opening style. Here’s what writer and blogger Emma Darwin has to say in Straight proof: what any of us can learn from Dick Francis.

Dick Francis

After brooding Russians, a traumatized adolescence, Egyptian neighbours and skulduggery in the stables, what could I possibly have left out? Chick-lit, that’s what. If you’ve read Me Before You by JoJo Moyes, you’ll know that Will has a life-changing motorbike crash.

“So, Patrick,” Will said, perhaps sensing my discomfort. “Louisa tells me you’re a personal trainer. What does that involve?”

I so wished he hadn’t asked. Patrick launched into his sales spiel, all about personal motivation and how a fit body made for a healthy mind. Then he segued into his training schedule for the Xtreme Viking – the temperature of the North Sea, the body fat ratios needed for marathon running, the best times in each discipline. I normally tuned out at this point, but all I could think of now, with Will beside me, was how inappropriate it was.

 What have all these books got in common?

A cracking story. Lots of conflict. Great dialogue. Wit, of course. I’m pretty sure there’s something else too, but it’s hard to analyse when you’re in awe so I’m damned if I know. Ask me again when I’ve got more of my own books onto other people’s shelves of favourites.

 

 *I had to correct the grammar in the English translation by Humphrey Davies. Sloppy editing, HarperCollins.