How noble

Beware of marrying someone who stands a chance of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics! That is, if you don’t feel like having the King of Sweden as your dinner partner at the Nobel dinner. Reverse my advice if you do. (And by the time Crown Princess Victoria is Queen, you will probably need to win the prize yourself. Unless we start getting a few more female scientists.)

I need to mention that you can’t ever expect to win a Nobel Prize. Nor can you apply for it, and there is no queueing system. Countless books mention the happy outcome of a Nobel Prize as something the really outstanding will eventually receive. Most clever people – even in books – are never quite that outstanding.

Just thought I’d dash any hopes. Hence my suggestion of marriage. Choose well.

There is so much happening in Sweden on Nobel Day (10th December) every year. Prize ceremonies. Dinners. Everything televised. Followed later by interviews and round table chats with the winners, who always turn out to be not only intelligent, but witty and fascinating company.

My pesky GP Cousin (after all these years, still four years my senior) seems to share my fondness for the round table chat. When we were last together in December some years ago, it’s what we sat down to watch on television, in the middle of his dinner party. That’s when he worried that the Grandmother might find this far too complicated to follow. That’s when I told him she’s a Physics graduate so no need to worry.

But, anyway. Here in exile we miss most of the fun. And then I was chatting to Swiss Lady on the phone the other day. She explained how she’d managed to get most of her Christmas baking done in the peace and quiet when GP Cousin was in Stockholm. I agreed it’s always good to ‘get rid of’ the boys every now and then.

As an afterthought she mentioned what he’d been doing. My ancient cousin had worked as a wine waiter at the Nobel dinner.

And he thinks I’m crazy for doing my bookwitching…

ALMA and Guus

In the end I forgot. And that was despite having written it down in three places. So when I was meant to listen to the live announcement of who would be the 2012 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner, I was enjoying a mug of Earl Grey, away from my laptop. Just think, I’d even been offered to be bussed in for the event (that is assumimg I’d been in Stockholm in the first place to be carted to Vimmerby for the big moment).

And once I’d seen the news, I was overcome by one big whopping xenophobic thought. I am ashamed of myself. Just because I haven’t even heard of a writer, does not mean they are no good or not deserving. I should not, must not, feel that the English-speaking world of books trumps everywhere else (apart, obviously, from Swedish books). But I did, for about ten seconds.

After all, I never once doubted the worthiness of Ryoji Arai who shared with Philip Pullman. After meeting him, even less so, and that’s despite this book of his I have which I can’t read because it’s all in Japanese.

So, I am very happy for Guus Kuijer, whose name I will practise pronouncing for the next few days. His entry on English Wikipedia is suitably, xenophobically short. But I gather that Guus has written a tremendous number of excellent books, for many many years. He has won lots of awards. And it is hardly surprising that the ALMA jury have decided he is this year’s winner. It follows much the same principles that the Nobel prize does. Pick someone no one else has heard of.

Actually, having belatedly checked out the live announcement I’m grateful I wasn’t there. It even out-did the one two years ago. Maybe it’s a Vimmerby effect?

At least they tried

The Tomas Tranströmer pocket book. What does that make you think of? I have it on so-so authority from Son that Peter Englund of the Swedish Academy used the word pocket book on Thursday, when talking about Tranströmer and his work.

He meant paperback. At least we think he did.

Pocket book is a linguistic false friend, because it just sounds so English. Whereas it really is Swedish for paperback.

Someone who does know they are paperbacks is my old employer, the bookshop in Halmstad. (I will be discreet, and not identify it further.) They have a good selection of books in English, and I noticed they had rearranged the shop a little, and above the new shelves they had a banner, clearly stating what they contain.

So, they did say English paperbacks. Then, Crimes and Thrillers. And finally, Fictions and Novels.

It doesn’t sound so bad.

The Crimes is obvious. They just don’t know about plural versus not counting, so to speak. I suspect the Fictions stands for novels. Because I’m fairly confident their Novels stands for short stories.

And there we are!

They tried.

So did another Swedish bookshop, many years ago, in another town. The town was overrun by visiting teachers or librarians or whatever, for some conference. The type of people who could be expected to turn up at the town’s bookshop. So the shop put a welcome note in the window. It said ‘Välkommen.’

I was in there when one of the ‘välkommen’ visitors popped in and pulled a member of staff aside and said she was very touched and it was very sweet, but it was wrong. (At this point I began to worry, because I hadn’t caught the wrongness of it, as I sailed through the door.)

It seems she required the note to say ‘Välkomna.’ In the plural. Because the town was full of lots of them.

Her comment was not terribly välkommen, as I recall. It’s like when you bring a gift and the recipient says they don’t want it. (You can always throw it away afterwards. Quietly. When no one is looking.)

What do you think? Would you feel välkomna by the Fictions and Crimes offered?

And anyway, as you enter the shop, you just might only be thinking of yourself. You are welcome. Never mind all the others.

Bookwitch bites #62

I’m beginning to feel like the Sesame Witch, and here I am again, bringing you the letter T.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard the voice of Shaun Tan (yes I know, I go on about him a lot), here he is  in the Guardian podcast, interviewed by Michelle Pauli in Stockholm earlier this year.

Shaun Tan podcast.

And please note how clever those young children are, being interviewed in a foreign language. (Just wanted to point that out.)

This week the winner of another Swedish award for literature was announced. Tomas Tranströmer is this year’s Nobel prize winner, and I read somewhere that he is the most translated poet in the world. So many Ts…

Continuing with the awards, Theresa Breslin has just won the Young Quills prize for historical fiction, with Prisoner of the Inquisition. Is it my imagination, or is Theresa and that book of hers winning a lot?

Before I leave you to go and drink some tea, I will return briefly to the letter B and the blasphemous and banned Meg Rosoff. Her darling creature Eck, that we all adore and would love to call our own, is about to become real. Sort of. In the book he must have been created by Bob (God, to you and me), since Bob created everything.

In real life, Eck – who has a very long tongue – is being created by a Mr Godlee, who is a friend of Meg’s. You couldn’t make it up, could you? In order to part with money, please contact Meg.

There was no dog…

Horace and the paperback

I read my previously mentioned house magazine over lunch, and it wasn’t so much inspiration, as anger, which came over me. And I’m sorry if I’m repeating this ad nauseam, but what is wrong with paperbacks? And how come some people really can’t see that keeping books has to come to an end some time, unless something changes?

They had pages of the most wonderful bookcases, but they forget that ordinary people run out of floor space for more bookcases, or money for some of the more expensive ones. And even if that doesn’t happen, there will always be one book, sooner or later, that won’t fit, because it’s full. I cleared the worst excesses before Christmas, by handing some books over to Oxfam, but mainly by brushing the problem under the carpet on a temporary basis. (Yes, I know. Fairly bulky and uneven for a carpet.)

But for people who aren’t ordinary, like Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy, books are a hygiene problem! He’s the one who tells the world each year who gets the Nobel prize for literature. I’m still working on the hygiene aspect of books. One of the magazine’s standard questions, which drives me mad every time (do they know, and do they do it on purpose?), is “Do you keep paperbacks?” Horace keeps them “if they have something sensible in them”.

Why would paperbacks have a less worthwhile content? They may not look good enough to some, but the contents? Even Nobel prize winners have books out in paperback. In fact, when I bought my Pinters years ago, I saw nothing but paperbacks in the shops. His silences are equally powerful without the hard cover.

The next page in the magazine then goes on to show bookshelves for paperbacks. Do they need to be separated? Segregated. Discriminated against. I don’t get it.

Lessing on books, and less books for me

Doris Lessing’s Nobel acceptance speech was mentioned twice to me yesterday before I had time to read it. Call me a cynic, but I generally don’t expect much from these things, but this time I really felt inspired. It was well written (not surprisingly), easy to read and on such a very important subject.

Having moaned quite recently here about having too many books, and what on earth I can do about it, I feel thoroughly ashamed. Oxfam has been the intended recipient, for when I can actually decide what to keep and what can go. But now I wonder if this is good enough.

Not all my surplus would be suitable for the readers in Zimbabwe that Doris Lessing wrote about, but a lot of it would be fine. How can I get my books to somewhere like that, without doing silly things like getting on a plane with suitcases full of books?

Coincidentally, just two days ago Daughter was bemoaning the disappearance of Dickens from the school library. Not that she wants to read Dickens you understand (for GCSE they read two chapters of Great Expectations…), but as a book lover she felt that dumping a shelf full of fresh new hardback Dickens was wrong. The official reason is that the books hadn’t been taken out by students. From my own time as a volunteer in that library I suspect that the books were simply dumped. They can’t be recycled as paper, and for some reason the school can’t take them to a charity shop.

It makes me want to cry.