The ten books every child should read before leaving school (or why I hate English Literature revisited)

"These are the ten books every child should read before they leave school". So proclaims the headline of yet another attempt to create a new canon - this time by the time-honoured process of surveying 500 English teachers. This list (with the possible exception of Harry Potter) is unsurprising - the obvious couple of George Orwell books, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, some stuff by Dickens and the godawful Pride and Prejudice (or Gold Diggers of 1815 as I like to call it).

It really is time these teachers got out from under their obsession with Dickens, Austen and 20th century American literature (almost all of which is much better in film than prose). And chose a different, more interesting, relevant and challenging set of texts for children to read. Is it any surprise that people are turned off reading for pleasure if the dreary existence of Lennie Small is rammed down their throats at school. I can't think of a less relevant book to a 14 year old Pakistani girl in Bradford.

And the same goes for the rest - again with the possible exception of Harry Potter. What we haven't got here is any literature that presses the sorts of button that film and TV are pressing in the minds of modern British children. And it shows, which is the worst failing of English literature as a subject, the sad narrowness of the way it's taught. So here's a two-fingered salute to the English teachers and Simon's list of ten books every child should read before leaving school (except I don't mean it, of course):

1. Neuromancer - William Gibson's birth of cyberpunk novel, a picture of the on-line world created before we were all on-line.
2. Dune - Frank Herbert's masterpiece: want to know where the Star Wars themes came from? A pseudo-religion based on mind control, a galactic empire, good vs evil, giant worms and psychoactive drugs on which everything depends.
3. Stand on Zanzibar - John Brunner takes us to an over-populated world filled with pop-up ads, drive-by shootings, suicide bombers and dysfunctional governments
4. A good translation of Beowulf - either Tolkein's prose translation or the stunning (if less true to the text) epic poem by Seamus Heaney. This is where we come from - ur-England and we should not lose it
5. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks explores teenage violence including the eponymous wasp factory. More contemporary than Lord of the Flies by encompassing mental illness and isolation, issues of importance to teenagers
6. The Lord of the Rings - it wasn't voted the best novel for nothing and Tolkein's great work isn't merely a fantasy. It's themes grow out from the myths and legends of Northern Europe and link to the idea of quest and the powerful message that, in the end, we all have it within us to do the extraordinary
7. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - OK the original radio series probably sets the bar too high for later books and films but the books are funny, interesting and filled with thoughts and ideas that really do speak to modern life
8. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick's alternative history is brief, telling and a great reminder that we all have in us the capacity for good and for great evil.
9. I, Robot - Isaac Asimov's best robot book (and nothing at all like the film of the same name) coins the three laws of robotics which every child should discuss and debate for it really is their future now
10. Swallows and Amazons - we've sort of forgotten about how childhood should be and, more than any other novel, Arthur Ransome's tale of kids mucking about on boats in the Lake District is the best evocation of the glory years of childhood.

You can pick your own ten or a dozen or fifty. The point here is that my list is every bit as good - no better - than the list those English teachers have churned out. I think it would be great if every child read these books but I know that some would be hated - as I hate Pride and Prejudice - by young people forced to read them or told that this stuff they don't like is what we mean by "good literature". I'm sure that your list might feature a different emphasis - urban grit, mystery, romance or whimsy. There's no right answer and what we should be doing is hoping that every child reaches 18 having created their own list of ten fantastic books that really mean something, that they'll bore their own children about and maybe write up in indulgent blog posts.

Get reading folks!

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"It's pretty much Game of Thones..." :SF, fantasy and English literature's Shakespearian creation myth

An entirely gratuitous picture of a dragon

For a very long time I played, along with other former members of Hull University Wargames Society, a postal game based on the Wars of the Roses. These days, I'm guessing that such a game would be conducted via email and social media but back them we only had post and telephone. For the game, each player controlled one noble family (I was, since you are curious, the de la Pole family led by the Duke of Suffolk - 'twas nice to keep the link to Hull) and issued instructions to the man running the game regarding alliances, marriages, battle orders and so forth. In the manner of these things, the game ended - not with a Tudor victory but with a new dynasty under the Bourchier Dukes of Essex.

So when you start reading A Song of Ice and Fire - or set out watching the marvellous TV adaptation, Game of Thrones - it is quickly clear that part of George R R Martin's inspiration came from that tangled and bloody period of history we call the Wars of the Roses. Indeed this is true and Martin has said as much -although he makes clear there's no direct 'character-to-character' correlation merely that the period cried out for reinterpretation.

So it is not a surprise that Dan Hannan finds a connection with Shakespeare in Game of Thrones - indeed that's where the quotation in my headline comes from:

During the interval of one of the performances, I overheard some Americans discussing the play in the bar. “It’s pretty much Game of Thrones,” was one man’s summary. Indeed it is.

 The chaos that comes after a usurpation, the dynastic ambitions, the moral ambiguity, the sudden betrayals, the unexpected turns of plot – all recall the drama of Westeros.

Hannan is describing the second tetralogy of history plays - Richard II, Henry IV (parts one and two), and Henry V - a period that sits right before those Wars of the Roses that inspired Game of Thrones. The problem is that Hannan, in his love for Shakespeare's matchless words, ascribes too great a power to the Bard's works. And falls into the trap that English Literature sets for us all.

What happens is that Shakespeare's characters become part of a creation myth for English Literature - Hannan says:

...he could hardly avoid echoing Shakespeare’s archetypal characters and plots. Shakespeare’s are, so to speak, the true forms. Everything else is a shadow on the cave wall. I realise that that’s a large claim but, if you’re familiar with the plays, you’ll know what I mean.

Shakespeare really isn't about the plots - he borrowed most of them, as we know - or indeed about the characters as characters. What Shakespeare did was put in the mouths of those characters wonderful, insightful, memorable and incisive words. Words that have not just changed our language but have changed the world too.

Like most SF and fantasy writers, Martin has an audience that wants to know everything. An audience that will fill on-line forums, attend conventions, write blogs and sit in serious huddles discussing the uttermost minutiae of Martin's work. And, as a result, Martin has been asked again and again what his influences are - he says stuff like:

Well, I've already named several in this chat. Jack Vance, JRR Tolkien, Maurice Druon... I think the authors who influence you most are probably the authors that you read and love when you're young, and in my case those would include Robert A Heinlein, HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber. In historical fiction, Thomas B Costaine, Frank Yerby...I love Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but really I could go on listing names for an hour. There are a lot of great writers out there in all genres that I enjoy and appreciate.

The author who Martin doesn't mention is Shakespeare. And, while Martin has (thanks to a TV adaptation of his series of novels) stepped beyond his genre of fantasy and SF, that is the starting point to understanding his writing. Look at that list above and you'll see the characters that echo in Westeros - Aragorn, Conan the Barbarian, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Liane. These are characters that marry the comic book to ancient legend. Tolkein did not craft his characters from Shakespearian archetypes but from the Kalevala, the poetic and prose Edda and the old legends of England and Wales, from Beowulf and the legend of the Green Knight.

 In the end though, I always think a recommendation tells a lot about where something like Game of Thones starts - here's Martin giving one:

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth. It's not a series in the same sense that mine is. it's four books, largely made up of short stories, and share only a setting with each other, and a character in the case of the middle two; the wonderfully amoral and unscrupulous Kugel the Clever, whose schemes and plots always come back to bite him in the butt. But Vance is the great stylist of sci fi and fantasy, no one writes like him, and The Dying Earth is his finest work. With my friend, I edited a tribute anthology a couple of years ago, when writers wrote stories set in the world of The Dying Earth, including myself, Neil Gaiman, Melissa Shepherd, and on and on...

George R R Martin is a fantasy and SF writer and that is where we must look for the ideas, influences and origins of A Song of Ice and Fire.  Not that Shakespeare isn't important but Martin's nod to the bard isn't about character, plot or even language but is a justification for killing off leading characters!

However, in one important respect Dan Hannan is right. If we can cope with the complexity, depth of character and involvement of Game of Thrones then we can deal with Shakespeare's plays. And if someone's journey takes them from comics through to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett then to A Song of Ice and Fire before their eyes open to Shakespeare - then making the connection that Hannan makes is brilliant. But it's a two way street - people like me who hated English Literature yet read every SF and fantasy book going arrive at Shakespeare by working backwards.

What doesn't do is to suggest that Shakespeare is the acme of literature - as if everything else by comparison is but a pot-boiler, the doodlings of lesser men. When faced with that argument, us fans of fantasy are wont to throw 'On Fairy Stories' at you or to point at the ancient English story-telling tradition that was the basis for what Shakespeare was doing. And then to stomp off muttering - as Tolkien did - that 'English literature ended with Chaucer'.

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I know nothing about English Literature...except that Michael Rosen is wrong

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Our debate about English Literature has some certainties.. And one of these is that Michael Rosen (posh Marxist chap who wrote some children's books and got to be something called the "Children's Laureate") doesn't like Michael Gove. Plus, of course, the fact that Michael Rosen is wrong.

I say this as someone who finds the whole idea of anyone - whether neocon insurgent or faux-marxist establishment - deciding what is or isn't good literature both offensive and pointless. Yet Rosen is allowed space to say (in simple terms) that he knows better that some other chap - lacking, I assume, in his elist left-wing credentials - what young people should be reading. Indeed Rosen's latest criticism sums up the presumption - "Dear Mr Gove - you are too unexpert to determine young people's reading" (I'm not sure 'unexpert' is a proper word).

Wow! The scale of the arrogance of Michael Rosen! This scion of wealthy, middle-class Marxists is so prescient, so much a renaissance man as to know that Michael Gove (a man lacking Rosen's privileged education and background) is 'unexpert'. The wonderment of this is beyond parody - a bien pensant left-winger attacking someone as 'inexpert'. Brilliant!

Rosen launches into an ill-informed, partisan and barely literate attack on Gove. It is a joy to see this supposed champion of literary right-on-ness crash into the contradiction of his obsession. He makes a huge leap in his assumptions - as if the study of "fiction and drama from the British Isles from 1914 onwards" is somehow the "Toryfication" of the English Literature GCSE! Look at that English writing - Thomas, Orwell, Wells, Waugh, Rushdie, Owen, Greene. These are all works that merely celebrate some Tory Reich!

Yet Rosen persists! To the point of simply pretending that 'British Isles' means something other than 'British Isles' (for what it's worth, I'm not sure I'd lumber any GCSE student with James Joyce but he clearly falls into the definition set out in the review). Our posh faux-marxist cannot conceive that what Gove is trying to do is get young people to appreciate something of our modern literary heritage.

Rosen is that worst sort of thing - an educated man with a bloody great bee in his bonnet. And the bee is that he doesn't like choice and liberalism in education. So, because he's sort of famous and the Guardian will pay him, he gets to make stuff up about changes to the English Literature GCSE and have them published in a national newspaper. Of course, Rosen is wrong but that won't stop a whole lot of folk sharing his ignorance simply because of their tribal distaste for a man who rather wants young people to read some modern English Literature.

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Sorry, Dame Stella, but you're wrong about children reading - and about social media

Dame Stella Rimmington, former head girl and ex-spy is chairing the judging panel for this year’s Man Booker Prize. I suspect that part of the job description for this chairing role is to say something controversial about literature or reading or the general state of the world through the eyes of bookish folk. And Dame Stella has obliged with a gentle rant about twitter:

Dame Stella said that while she was confident a market for fiction would still exist in 100 years, she feared many children were not growing up to be book lovers. “I think much of the Twittering and emailing and texting and all that sort of stuff that children go in for now may be taking their eyes off reading fiction. When I was young we read more than the average child reads now.”

Now I don’t wish to be too critical of such an eminent lady but she’s talking nonsense:

In the UK, the value of publishers’ sales of children’s books actually increased in 2010 by 2%, to £242m. The report shows that the value of publishers’ UK sales has been increasing year on year over the last three years, from £236m in 2008.

And this represents some 60 million books sold which makes for five books on average for each of the UK’s roughly 12 million children. OK, the kids aren’t devouring hundreds of books in the manner that Dame Stella doubtless did as a girl but they are definitely reading.

More importantly however social media – all that twittering, emailing and texting – means that children are doing something we never did (and which I suspect Dame Stella’s contemporaries didn’t do either). Children are writing to eachother. OK, they’re writing in a language that only just approximates to English and is replete with acronyms, shortened words and peculiar codes but it is written communication.

If – twenty years ago - we’d have said that the most common form of communication between young people would be written communication, the experts would have looked at us, shaken their heads and called for the men in white coats. Yet that is the reality – we have replaced the verbal communication, whether directly or via the telephone, that was the dominant feature of the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s with a mish-mash of written forms.

It seems to me that, regardless of the oddity of language involved, the growth of social media forms – facebook, twitter and so forth – makes a positive contribution to the literacy levels of young people. After all you can't play in the sandpit of social media if you can’t read or write can you!

Dame Stella’s comments reveal yet again the extent to which the literary elite are out of touch – not just with the facts about books and literacy but with what interests and excites young people about reading and writing. Yet again much chatter will be expended on the Man Booker Prize – chatter that will sail completely by the majority of folk. Why?

Because the literature involved presents an impenetrable arrogance that covers up the deeper truth – it is indulgent literary fiction that is dying out not reading. And this is because the books promoted by the literary elite are not what most people want to read. If the Man Booker Prize is to mean more it has to break out from the narrow genre into which is has crawled – it has to embrace popular fiction and recognise that just because a book doesn’t use three words that aren’t in the Concise Oxford Dictionary on the first page and has fun things like spies or wizards or vampires in it, that doesn’t make it a bad book.

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Why I hate English Literature!

Its funny isn’t it, those things which we get chippy about! And the sheer hypocrisy of such chippiness. However, this blogpost is about my shoulder-based chip and why it is important.

My chip is with English literature. Not the books themselves – although if I’m honest, I have tried and failed to read those books beloved of English teachers. I’ve set out to read a Jane Austen novel or two, I’ve struggled through a few chapters of assorted Brontë sisters writing and I’ve banged my head against D H Lawrence. All without success – I can find no joy or pleasure from such reading.

Nor do I find more recent writings any better – I waded my way through ‘Midnight’s Children’ although to this day I’m not entirely sure why I ploughed on through the indulgent, impenetrable prose as it gave me no satisfaction. And I could go on – every now and again one sets oneself to read one of these books so praised by the cognoscenti. And the result is inevitable disappointment.

So this is my chip. The intelligent press and media whenever it speaks of literature, speaks of these books. And I feel the weight of arrogant, smug, superiority from these literati – the clear impression that they are so much cleverer, so vastly more impressive since they can speak the language of “English Literature”!

So when I write words like this I mean them:

They don’t want to bury themselves in what some smug literary critic (in this case from the Guardian) calls “thought-provoking books” because, to put it pretty bluntly, most of the literary novels that clutter up the prize shortlists are really dull. A little bit of me smiles with pleasure at the fact that Katie Price (or rather whoever wrote the book with her name on) outsells the entire Booker shortlist!

This isn’t inverted snobbery – I don’t think that the potboilers churned out under Ms Price’s name are great books. But equally, I do not believe that a great book is defined by a narrow, self-referencing audience such as that which decides upon the Booker Prize shortlist and, ultimately, that prize’s winner. Such writing shoves aside – and the cognoscenti dismiss – whole areas of writing as mere ‘genre fiction’. No science fiction or fantasy book has ever graced the Booker shortlist for the simple reason that those who decide on that list believe no good writing exists within that genre (and more to the point wouldn’t be caught admitting to reading any of it).

I recall an especially snide article on science fiction in The Spectator. What struck me wasn’t that the author was snide – he’s entitled be so – but that it was abundantly clear that he hadn’t read a single SF novel and was basing his dismissal of the genre entirely on having watched a few mainstream science fiction TV shows and films.

So yes, one of my favourite TV moments will always be the expression of utter disappointment on Clive Anderson’s face when he had to announce that “The Lord Of The Rings” was the greatest English novel (or so the public had voted). And I smile serenely at some of the frothing antagonism (and allegations that the books vote was somehow fixed by hordes of “well-organised” Tolkien fans) that followed. Like from some writer I’d never heard of called O’Hagan:

O'Hagan, who was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize with his novel Our Fathers, expressed anger that the show is based upon public opinion.

"Somebody said that The Big Read was not just un-literary but anti-literary and I think that's right," he said. "It is based on the assumption that the opinion of the public is always beyond reproach."

O'Hagan added that he "hated the opinion of the population".

"Their choice in books is bound to be emetic, and so it has proved to be."

You do see why we hate the literary establishment now don’t you?

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