Highlighting

As you know, I recently got a Kindle.

I’ve already got quite a lot of stuff on it – it’s actually kind of worrying me how easy it is just to one-click your way to a whole library of books.  Just like going to a car boot sale, or Primark, it all seems so cheap that you fill up your basket with things you don’t remotely need, or even particularly love, in the mistaken belief that it’s a bargain – until you tot up your day’s spending and realise that you could actually have bought one amazing thing instead.  From, like, Marc by Marc Jacobs or something.

Anyway.  My Kindle spending is a whole different issue – and it can’t be a bad thing that it’s making me spend more money within the publishing industry, right?

The point of this is that I have already amassed quite a collection of electronic reading matter.  It’s a mixture of adult and YA, mostly, some great books and some (using the same Primark-shopper logic) that I probably wouldn’t have bothered to buy in hard copy.

Something that I have been finding fascinating is the ‘highlighter’ function.  As you may know, it is possible to electronically highlight passages of books on Kindle, and also to see what other people have highlighted, or how many people have highlighted the same parts.

One of the first books I read on my Kindle was the magnificent ‘You Against Me’ by Jenny Downham.  There was quite a lot of highlighting going on in this book, with one brilliant passage towards the end that had been highlighted by multiple people.  A great function is that you can see exactly how many people have highlighted certain parts – surprisingly, people seem to gravitate towards the same sentences to highlight.

Anyway, ‘what a good idea’, I thought.  Highlighting is such a good thing.

Then, after that, I read quite a few ‘adult’ books, and was surprised to find that nobody had highlighted anything at all.

I read Joan Didion’s beautiful, life-changing, awesome ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ (followed by her devastating ‘Blue Nights’) and could scarcely believe that there were no highlights.  If ever a book was made for highlighting, it’s that one.

Then, straight afterwards, I started reading ‘The Carrie Diaries’, Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City prequel for teenagers.  Yes, it’s full of highlights.

This can only lead me to think that YA books get highlighted more than others.

I think this is a shame.  I am an avid highlighter – not yet on the Kindle (as I haven’t quite figured out how to do it yet!) but in my actual books.  Certain tomes – such as my copies of ‘Your Voice In My Head’ by Emma Forrest, Courtney Love’s biography by Poppy Z. Brite, ‘The Bell Jar’, ‘Franny and Zooey’ – are full of underlinings and highlights.

Although I’ve never grown out of it, I suppose highlighting is kind of a stereotypical teenage thing: ‘how does this relate to me/help to define me/put into words things that I can’t say myself?’.

In ‘The Carrie Diaries’, seven people have even highlighted a passage about the futility of highlighting (!), but in general it is the ‘deep’ thoughts, the universal truths, the things that apply to us that we thought nobody else would ever understand.

Like many people obsessed with books and music and films, I have a natural tendency to look for these highlight-able thoughts everywhere.  My walls were always plastered with famous quotes and my favourite song lyrics.  I would painstakingly transcribe whole songs into my diary.  I would bore my friends silly with how I heard this amazing lyric that spoke directly to my soul (often by Tori Amos, just as likely Brian Molko); I would insist upon reading aloud entire chapters of books that I thought were particularly relevant to our lives at that moment – I couldn’t sit quietly in the library for long without exclaiming ‘oh my god, Ali/Lou/Rach – you have got to hear this!’.

By highlighting, I felt that it gave me ownership, that it really was mine and really did help to sum me up.  It helped me to remember them, to form a reference library of myself.  And I still do it – thinking it’s to remember the construction of a sentence or a particularly beautiful word choice, but I’m sure it’s still just as much for the same reason it’s always been.

I think highlighting is a good thing.  We should try our best not to grow out of it.

Carine Roitfeld Ballet

If you start to type Carine Roitfeld’s name into Google, this is one of the automatic options that comes up.  I was struck by this, because it was exactly what I was planning to search for.

Carine Roitfeld loves ballet – not only the aesthetic of it, but apparently doing hours of ballet exercises every day. I am inspired.

I am obsessed, at the moment, with that sort of exercise – ballet, Pilates , yoga – on top of my usual running regime.

Now that I can picture Carine Roitfeld doing her own ballet exercises at home every day, as I do mine, it somehow makes the whole thing seem way, way cooler.

So, thanks for that.

Summer Mixtape

Well, it might be pouring with rain but it IS July.  So, here's my summer mixtape to cheer things up (somee new stuff and a few classics).

LEE RANALDO: Angles
CAT POWER: Ruin
THE PIXIES: I Can't Forget*
MADONNA: Borderline
ELLIOTT SMITH: Bled White**
THE B-52S: Is That You Mo-Dean?
CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG: Trick Pony
LE TIGRE: Hot Topic
LEE RANALDO: Xtina As I Knew Her***
BAT FOR LASHES: Daniel
PJ HARVEY: You Said Something
PLACEBO: English Summer Rain

* Leonard Cohen cover
** Always
*** I am obsessed with this entire album - best of 2012 so far.

Happy Friday

Sometimes I think if you say something it can become true.  I started off this week saying: I think this week is going to be an excellent week.

Around the mid-point - tired and working hard and strugggling to go for a run - I was starting to doubt the wisdom of this and wish I hadn't spoken so soon.

But now it's Friday: I've had some promising and positive news on my manuscript and got back in touch with a beloved long-lost friend who is now in New York.

So, you know - keep the faith (Desperately Seeking Susan).

Nam myoho renge kyo.

Telling Stories

I am about five minutes too young to have been a fan of The Charlatans.  I was eight when their first album came out, and their sporadic resurges kind of passed me by.  I kind of remember ‘North Country Boy’ coming out in 1996, but it wasn’t really my thing.  To be honest, I hadn’t realised they were still going.

I picked up the singer, Tim Burgess’s, memoir recently on a whim.  It’s had decent reviews and I love a good rock n roll tale.

I’m glad I did, and thoroughly enjoyed it without being familiar with all the players and the songs.  Tim is a charming narrator, a genuine eccentric with a great story and a friendly voice.  He has a sense of humour about himself, which for me was what made this book, particularly as this balanced out his apparent belief that The Charlatans were a bit more important than they were.  I mean, obviously they were to him.  But still.

I also liked how honest he was about his ‘influences’.  Every song he mentions having a hand in writing, it’s always ‘a cross between the Faces and the Beatles’ or ‘inspired by Dylan, with a bit of Lennon.  He even says that an entire album cover concept was ‘borrowed from the Beastie Boys’.  He doesn’t pretend to have original ideas, and is indebted to his heroes.

There is a lot of sadness and madness in this tale, perhaps inevitably.  I hadn’t realised how much.  Again, this is told with a lot of empathy and a good sense of humour (as far as possible).

On a more frivolous note, I also hadn’t realised quite how criminally good-looking Tim Burgess had been.  Worth a look just for some of those early photographs, frankly.

Sister hols

This photo, taken by my mum in Greece about a month ago, is my current favourite thing in the world.

This is me and my beautiful sister.  Judging by that description, you can probably already tell which is which, but I am the one on the right.  I would say 'the tall one' but if you had met us, you would know that this was all relative and, frankly, laughable.

The Carrie Diaries

If you’ve read the original book Sex and the City, you’ll know that it is nothing like the television series.

It’s nothing to do with female friendship.  It is an episodic series of vignettes – obviously, considering its newspaper-column format – about women in New York.  Women who do not know or like each other.  Carrie Bradshaw is a minor character who turns up occasionally at parties and is known for being needy with boyfriends.

So, when I first saw the TV programme (I was lucky enough to watch an advance tape of it when I was interning at Time Out!), I was surprised but pleasantly so.  Soon, like all women my age and a bit older, I loved it.  You know, what’s not to love?  I too have a close group of girlfriends and love clothes – it’s great to see a glossy version of yourself on the screen.

And that’s where (at least in the early days – don’t get me started on the movies) the strength lay in SATC – it was like watching the movie star version of yourself and your friends.  Everyone loves having the ‘which character are you?’ discussions about that sort of thing.

So, even though lots of people seem to think it’s a pointless cashing-in exercise, I think the concept of The Carrie Diaries fits in perfectly.  I was intrigued to see where Carrie came from, how she became ‘Carrie Bradshaw’ and met the others.

Rather fascinatingly, I thought, Candace Bushnell seems to have grown fond of the characters in the same way that we all have.  Rather than the icy-cool New York tales that she usually writes, this is a really warm nostalgia trip that is much more like the group of friends in the TV series.  It’s almost impossible to read without picturing a young Sarah Jessica Parker in the role, looking just like she did in classics such as Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

It’s a two-parter – book one covering Carrie’s last year at high school in her home town, and book two, Summer and the City, travelling with her to New York for a writing course before starting university.

While the second book gets more exciting – when she starts to become the glamorous, starry New York character we recognise – I actually preferred the first for its ordinariness.  It reminded me of the slightly-out-of-date 80s teen books I used to read in my early teens – Judy Blume, Caroline B. Cooney and Paula Danziger.

It was great to see Carrie transform from the standard schoolgirl – wearing jeans, writing for the school newspaper, competing on the swimming team and obsessing over smalltown boys and friends – to a girl who runs around Manhattan in her grandmother’s feathered hat and a vintage Chinese robe, knocking out plays on her typewriter and dreaming of being a star.

It’s a transition that we all had in some way or another at that age, even if we don’t all grow up to be played by SJP – and, who knows?, we still might yet.