New Science May Help Oasis?

As someone who reads a lot, I always pay attention to what the news has to say about the latest developments in the study of reading.  Three recent stories caught my attention and I think it is pretty clear how one of these stories is all the evidence you would ever need to see to support the other two.

The magazine Science just published a study which claims that reading literary fiction improves one's theory of mind. From the editor's summary in Science:

Theory of Mind is the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one's own beliefs and desires. The currently predominant view is that literary fiction—often described as narratives that focus on in-depth portrayals of subjects' inner feelings and thoughts—can be linked to theory of mind processes, especially those that are involved in the understanding or simulation of the affective characteristics of the subjects. Kidd and Castano (p. 377, published online 3 October) provide experimental evidence that reading passages of literary fiction, in comparison to nonfiction or popular fiction, does indeed enhance the reader's performance on theory of mind tasks.

I think that makes a lot of sense and I am glad that there is some evidence to support it.

And the journal PLOS ONE published something very similar:

How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation

From the PLOS ONE abstract:

The current study investigated whether fiction experiences change empathy of the reader. Based on transportation theory, it was predicted that when people read fiction, and they are emotionally transported into the story, they become more empathic. Two experiments showed that empathy was influenced over a period of one week for people who read a fictional story, but only when they were emotionally transported into the story. No transportation led to lower empathy in both studies, while study 1 showed that high transportation led to higher empathy among fiction readers. These effects were not found for people in the control condition where people read non-fiction. The study showed that fiction influences empathy of the reader, but only under the condition of low or high emotional transportation into the story.

So, two serious studies which contend that perhaps reading fiction makes you a better person - or perhaps better able to relate and understand other people - which, I would argue, helps you to be a better person.  Most readers probably love to read whether or not it is good for them so explaining the benefits of reading is for the most part preaching to the choir.

However

I was reading the Guardian the other day and I saw this headline:

Noel Gallagher says reading fiction 'a waste of fucking time'

Oasis songwriter voices frustration at reading what 'isn't fucking true' and says he restricts himself to 'things that have actually happened'

(Ask yourself: who are the angriest pop musicians around?  I bet he's in the top three of every list.) He goes on at length about how he hates reading stuff that isn't true and it occurred to me, that if there ever is a person who could benefit from spending more time reading fiction, its him.  (Note:  He has created a lot of great music and some of the anger and rage he feels has been put to some good use musically.  But still, I think at this point in his career, he could do with some reading therapy.  Especially since what he claims about reading fiction is now proving to be scientifically unsound.)

New Books!

After not buying many books this summer (spent the time reading books I already own), somehow a giant stack of (mostly) new books has appeared.

I was punished by the universe for not ordering the winner of the Booker Prize when it came out in the UK (not that I knew this was going to be the winner, but I knew I wanted to read it well before it won) and as a result my new American copy of Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, ordered the day after it was published in the US, is a second edition.  That is not fair.  (But I am very happy for her that her book is already in a second printing here.)  But as these things have a way of evening out, I found for $4.00 an autographed first American edition of the 1987 winner of the Booker Prize, Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger.

New hardcover first editions from the UK:  Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe, The Deaths by Mark Lawson, and Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright.  I did not order Denise Mina's new book when it came out this summer and have been duly punished and got a 3rd or 4th printing of The Red Road. Ugh.

New hardcover first editions from the USA: The Facades by Eric Lundgren, &Sons by David Gilbert, and Night Film by Marisha Pessl.

And some other bargain priced first edition American hardcovers: When the Women Come Out to Dance and Tishomingo Blues, both by Elmore Leonard.  And Heart of the Hunter by the very interesting South African crime writer Deon Meyer.

And the weirdest new addition - a large print, ex-library edition of a collection of Michael Gilbert short stories, The Mathematics of Murder.  In terms of bad editions of books, condensed editions are the worst, next is large print, then I guess book club editions, then maybe ex-library editions, then maybe anything not a first edition.  Many of the copies available of this Gilbert book were very expensive and because of the government shutdown and threat of default, I made a panicked decision and opted for this inexpensive large print edition of The Mathematics of Murder.  This book is from the Sefton Public Libraries - Birkdale Library Southport.  Which is in or around Liverpool.  Checked out at least 21 times from June 2005 through July 2010.  I hate looking at it but when I am reading it, after a while I sort of forget how large the print it.

Elmore and I

Everyone knows by now that Elmore Leonard died last month.  It was heartening to see how much people liked him and his work.  I have been a fan of his for some 20 years now - but have harbored a terrible secret about my relationship with Elmore Leonard:  I have never read an Elmore Leonard novel.

I own about 13 of his books.  I started buying them sometime after the book Get Shorty came out. Recently I found in my collection a new and unread first edition hard cover copy of Rum Punch with a lottery ticket in it from September 1992.  (The ticket was not a winner.)  I know I listened to the abridged versions of Get Shorty and Out of Sight read by the great Joe Mantegna.  But that doesn't count as having read them, I don't think.  I saw film version of Stick when it first came out (before I knew who Elmore Leonard was) and I saw Get Shorty on videotape.  Leonard has been interviewed many times on NPR (most often on Fresh Air - really good interviews about all of his work and also many interviews about adaptations of his work) and I have read dozens of profiles of him and reviews of his books over the years. More recently I've been reading blog posts about him.   For not having ever properly read his work, I always felt that I knew a lot about Elmore Leonard.  In fact, I can't think of many people whose careers I have followed that I know as much about.

When I heard the news that he was hospitalized after suffering a stroke, I realized I was going to end up as one of those people who only starts to read Leonard because he has just died.  And sure enough I started Unknown Man #89 the night he did.

So far I have read Unknown Man #89, The Switch, and City Primeval.  I am currently reading Gold Coast. (Cat Chaser came in the mail today.) And I have been very impressed by what I have read.  I mean, I always assumed I would really like him.  I think I was partly put off by how colorful some of his characters are.  Like they are interesting to hear about but that I might not want to spend 300 pages in their company.  One of the blurbs used in Cat Chaser, from the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, but originally, it seems, from a review of Tishomingo Blues in the Baltimore Sun, says "Dashiell Hammett may have invented the genre, and Carl Hiaasen might be funnier at it on his best day, but the debate over who's the all-time king of the whack job crime novelists just ended. Living or dead, Elmore Leonard tops 'em all."  And therein lies the problem - I do not have a high tolerance for whack job crime novelists.  But so far, this has not been much of a problem.

Each book I have read reminds me a different crime writer.  Unknown Man #89, which movingly and unexpectedly becomes about alcoholism and addiction, made me think Leonard was going to be like Lawrence Block.  But then The Switch was more like a the sort of farce Michael Frayn would write if he were to try his hand at a crime novel.  City Primeval, by far the best Leonard book I have consumed in any form, calls to mind a prolix Richard Stark.  And now Gold Coast reads like a Carl Hiaasen novel - though given when it was written means Carl Hiaasen writes Gold Coast era-like Elmore Leonard novels (with mobsters and dolphins and the enforced chastity of mafioso widows).

If all goes well, I have copies to read of Split Images, Cat Chaser, Stick, LaBrava, Glitz, Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Maximum Bob, Rum Punch, and Pronto.  I regret having waited so long to read his books but the stack I have to read is quite the silver lining.

Bogmail, Reading, and the Internet

I do not remember how I discovered the Irish novelist Patrick McGinley.  My best guess is that I saw a Penguin paperback copy of his first novel, Bogmail (1978), in the mystery section of a used bookstore in the early 1990s.

I think I read it in 1994 or 1995 and it is slightly horrifying to think that is almost 20 years ago.  I loved it and then set out to find and read the rest of his books.  In Bogmail, a pub owner has to kill his barman and after he disposes of the body in a bog, starts to get get blackmailed by a mysterious person. And then things get complicated.

Earlier this year, McGinley published a new novel, Cold Spring, and Bogmail was republished to coincide with the rebroadcast on Irish television of Murder for Eden, the 1991 adaptation of Bogmail.

Curious to revisit Bogmail after all these years I got out the copy of Bogmail I read (a second edition hard cover) and was stunned by how much I wrote in it.  (I never write in books.  I often take notes but in general I hate defacing them by making notes in them.)  Apparently, my knowledge of Irish vocabulary and culture was almost non-existent and I wrote down the definitions of dozens of words.  I can remember asking random Irish people the meanings of certain words. (Which probably was a lunatic thing to do but how else was I going to figure this stuff out?)  I guess I used dictionaries to understand some of the words.  This would have been done when the internet was still in its infancy and certainly well before mobile high speed internet access (via which I always consult Google when reading now.)  In fact, I recently read 15 novels in a row by the Sicilian crime writer Andrea Camilleri and I Googled dozens of things in each book I read.   I know the internet is destroying traditional book publishing and retailing but after seeing what my reading was like pre-internet (with Bogmail) and what it is like now (with Andrea Camilleri), it is astonishing how much the internet is enhancing the reading process.  I suppose the ability to instantly access a world of information is taken for granted by most but seeing the notes I wrote in Bogmail made me realize how different things used to be not so long ago.

A different example of how the internet is enhancing my reading life just popped up in the series of books I started after I finished reading Andrea Camilleri.  For some reason, I fell behind in reading the Scottish crime writer Denise Mina.  She is a fantastic writer - so good that for the second year in a row, she has won the Theakstons Old Peculiar crime novel of the year award. Up until a few years ago I had read all of her books, usually just as they were published.  All of my copies are UK editions as I never wanted to wait for each book to be published here.  But in 2009 she started a new series with Still Midnight and it didn't grab me right away.  So I put it aside and now four years later, I've gone back to it and the books which followed: The End of the Wasp Season, Gods and Beasts, and The Red Road.  These books feature a female Glaswegian police officer named Alex Morrow.  In The End of the Wasp Season, DS Morrow mentions that some lazy police officers are reading The Digger, which is a weekly paper in Glasgow that covers crime, criminals, and corruption.  And it just so happens that via the internet I saw, back in 2007, a documentary about The Digger that BBC Scotland aired.  The reference to The Digger in the book is interesting but by no means crucial to understanding anything but nonetheless I was thrilled that I recognized it.  (And also thrilled that the hours I piss away on the internet occasionally pay off.)

Dreaming of George Smiley

From reading his books and from reading/listening to interviews with him, it is very clear Andrea Camilleri loves crime fiction.  In his third Inspector Montalbano novel, The Snack Thief, a nocturnal encounter with John le Carre and George Smiley helps Montalbano to crack a case:





Apparently, in his sleep, one part of his brain had kept working on the Lapecora case.  Around four o'clock in the morning, in fact, a memory came back to him, and he got up and started searching frantically among his books.  Suddenly he remembered that he'd lent the book he was looking for to Augello, after his deputy had seen the film made from it on television.  He'd now had it for six months and still hadn't given it back.  Montalbano got upset.
     "Hello, Mimi?  Montalbano here."
     "Ohmygod!  What's going on here? What happened?"
     "Do you still have that novel by Le Carre entitled Call for the Dead?  I'm sure I lent it to you."
     "What the fuck?!  It's four in the morning."
     "So what?  I want it back."
     "Salvo, I'm telling you this as a loving brother: why don't you have yourself committed?"
     "I want it back immediately."
     "But I was asleep!  Calm down.  I'll bring it back to the office in the morning.  Otherwise I would have to put on my underwear, start looking, get dressed-"
     "I don't give a shit.  You're going to look for it, find it, get in your car, even in your underwear, and bring it to me."
     He dragged himself about the house for half an hour, doing pointless things like trying to understand the phone bill or reading the label on a bottle of mineral water.  Then he heard a car screech to a halt, a dull thud against the door, and the car leaving.  He opened the door:  the book was on the ground, the light's of Augello's car already far away.  He had a mind to make an anonymous phone call to the carabinieri.
     Hello, this is a concerned citizen.  There's some madman driving around in his underwear...
     He let it drop.  He started leafing through the novel.
     The story went exactly as he'd remembered it.  Page 8:

     "Smiley, Marston speaking.  You interviewed Samuel Arthur Fennan at the Foreign Office on Monday, am I right?"
     "Yes . . . yes I did."
     "What was the case?"
     "Anonymous letter alleging Party membership at Oxford . . ."

     And there, on page 139, was the beginning of the conclusion that Smiley would arrive at in his report:

     "It was, however, possible that he had lost his heart for his work, and that his luncheon invitation to me was a first step to confession.  With this in mind he might also have written the anonymous letter which could have been designed to put him in touch with the Department."

     Following Smiley's logic, it was therefore possible that Lapecora himself had written the anonymous letters exposing him.  But if he was their author, why hadn't he sent them to the police or the carabinieri under some other pretext?

. . .

     Thanks to Smiley, it all made sense.  He went back to sleep.



This reminds me that I still have a lot of John le Carre to tackle, including Call for the Dead.  But for now, back to Camilleri.

Nine Years Late, I Discover Andrea Camilleri

I finally started reading Andrea Camilleri after years of buying his books and I am kicking myself for having waited so long to read him.  A friend who I always listen to when it comes to fiction told me back in 2005 that she had just discovered a newly translated Sicilian crime writer and that I should keep my eye on him.  I half listened to her advice and bought Camilleri's first book (I should say his first crime novel - which he wrote at the age of 70 - after years of writing historical fiction, directing in the theater, and producing television) The Shape of Water.

I can't believe how good these books are.  In the past few weeks, I've devoured The Shape of Water, The Terra Cotta Dog, The Snack Thief, and Voice of the Violin.  I started the fifth Inspector Montalbano novel, Excursion to Tindari, last night.

I love reading police procedurals and technically, Camilleri's books follow Inspector Montalbano and the officers under him as they solve crimes in a coastal town in Sicily.  But the focus isn't so much the ins and outs of police work but a survey of modern day Italy.  The writing is often heavy on dialogue (sometimes very earthy), the pace is often brisk, and not everything is spelled out for the reader.  Reading a Montalbano story always makes me hungry - he's constantly eating good food.  So why are these books so good?  Camilleri is old and wise, bitter and funny.  Italy and Sicily provide rich source material.  And Camilleri is very clearly a fan of crime fiction and it feels as his life's work magically lead him to lay golden eggs.

I love the covers and even love the way to spines look. (None of the above pictures are mine.)

My goal is to make sure I have finished reading all of the published books this summer and be ready for the next installment in the series when it is published in September.

Voice of the Violin

"It was well known he drove like a dog on drugs."

- From Voice of the Violin by Andrea Camilleri