Peckham Rye in the snow

"It was a sunny day for November, and, as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the children playing there and the women coming home from work with their shopping bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this." (The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark)

Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy - part four!

Bit of an Electric Goose exclusive here. During my travels in India I stumbled across a manuscript - not literally, of course, I'm perfectly capable of remaining upright in the face of paper obstacles - which I believe to be a fragment of the fourth book in Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy, a follow-up to third and supposedly final book The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. People, on the day the movie version of the aforementioned novel is released, I give you an extract from the new Lisbeth Salander/Mikael Blomkvist crime epic: The Girl Who Went to the Shops...


THE GIRL WHO WENT TO THE SHOPS

Lisbeth Salander put on a T-shirt which read You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps and went into her kitchen. At 8.58am, she placed a white ceramic bowl on her Svasbo breakfast table. She poured some cereal into the bowl, followed by some milk. She ate the cereal. At 9.10am, she washed the bowl and spoon, then dried them. She picked up her Apple G4 PowerBook with 60GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM and 15" screen with two USB sockets, and put it in her bag, along with a small canister of Mace. Then she went out.

***

Jerker Strömström was a noisome, vital man. He was one metre sixty-three, with vigorous long blonde hair, an untidy beard and a noisome expression. He had noisome grey trousers, a blue shirt and black shoes. He watched as a childlike young lady with a number of tattoos and piercings walked into his shop. Fucking lesbian whore. The girl picked up a basket.

Shops are business establishments that allow individuals to purchase items for personal use in exchange for money. Items can be bought using cash, debit card or cheque, although in 1993, the Swedish government in their wisdom had introduced draconian legislation forcing anyone using a credit card to pay a 12 percent surcharge on all transactions under 100 Kroner. In 1995, a group of rebel MPs had tried to overturn the ruling, but had failed. In 1998, they had tried again, but had also failed. In 2001 they had tried and failed again. In 2003 they had tried and failed again. In 2006 they had tried and failed again.

Strömström looked at the girl suspiciously.

***

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist sighed with satisfaction. He had just finishing writing and editing the latest issue of Millennium magazine and an accompanying book, having worked for 19 hours straight with no breaks. He flicked on the radio in his office. The song that came on was 'Reach' by S Club 7. He stood up and reached for a copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie. Being one metre and eighty-three tall, he managed to grasp the book from its place on the top of his bookshelf with ease. He sat down and started to read.

***

Salander looked around the shop, deciding what she was going to need. She picked up a basket and began to shop, taking a tube of Colgate toothpaste, two pencils, an apple, a 1.5-litre bottle of Coca-Cola, four packets of ready salted crisps and a pair of shoelaces. She walked further down the aisle and took a 200g tin of baked beans. I really like baked beans. She went to the cashier, who told her the items came to 98 Kroner. She took out her card to pay.

***

As the girl took out her card, Strömström narrowed his eyes, and smugly began to tell the girl about the 12 percent surcharge. Before he had even finished his sentence, he felt a sharp stinging in his eyes as Salander sprayed Mace directly into his face. What the hell? Out of nowhere, he felt his jaw break as she kicked him in the face and he fell to the floor in agony. She took out a hammer and he moaned in pain as she smashed him in the ribs. Another woman-hater had learned not to provoke Lisbeth Salander.

***

Blomkvist looked across from his office window, frozen with shock at the supermarket scuffle he'd just witnessed. What the hell? Then he recognised Lisbeth Salander. Of course. Despite being only one metre fifty tall and weighing less than 90 pounds, she truly was the smartest and most introverted person he'd ever met. She was just so... odd.

***

As Salander left the shop, she happened to glance into a nearby window. A man was watching with a look of surprise on his face. She couldn't believe it. Kalle fucking bastard bloody idiot Blomkvist.

THE END

(Posted with apologies to the late Stieg Larsson and his translator, since I did actually really enjoy the books. After finishing this, I noticed Nora Epron had written her own parody for The New Yorker - it's rather good, and you can read it here.)

Ian McEwan on crisps

One day I hope Ian McEwan will write a whole novel about crisps. But this will do for now.

"He was a man to take his pleasures seriously. The trick was to set the fragment on the centre of the tongue and, after a moment's spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth. His theory was that the rigid irregular surface caused tiny abrasions in the soft flesh into which salt and chemicals poured, creating a mild and distinctive pleasure-pain."

Ian McEwan, Solar (Jonathan Cape: London, 2010)

Birthday books

What I got last year...
...and the year before

Nice sentence

"He came to a marketplace, where old men who looked as if they had heard the crying of their children fade and turn to silence too many times led donkeys carrying panniers of gnarled, sawed-up tree roots, drawn like wisdom teeth from the back jaws of deforested hills, to sell as firewood."

James Meek, We Are Now Beginning Out Descent (Canongate: London, 2008)

Sebald
Self
Brooker

Walking wounded

Fascinating stuff from David The Wire Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which I've been blazing through recently like the bookhound I once was (Wolf Hall, you tore apart my averages and gobbled up my confidence):

The distortion of television and popular culture is nowhere more apparent than in the intimate relationship of bullets and bodies. Hollywood tells us that a Saturday Night Special can put a man on the pavement, yet ballistics experts know that no bullet short of an artillery shell is capable of knocking a human being off his feet...

Although the popular belief that many people fall down upon being shot is generally accurate, experts have determined that this occurs not for physiological reasons, but as a learned response. People who have been shot believe they are supposed to fall immediately to the ground, so they do. Proof of the phenomenon is evident in its opposite: There are countless cases in which people - often people whose mental processes are impaired by drugs or alcohol - are shot repeatedly, sustaining lethal wounds; yet despite the severity of their injuries, they continue to flee or resist for long periods of time.

(Don't worry, mum, I'm not about to go and shoot up the high school.)

DIY: How to write blurb

"A tragic/astonishing/rubbish meditation on love and loss/identity and selfhood/apples and pears, [book title] confirms [author's name] as one of [country in question]'s most promising/daring/pouting novelists/storytellers/blurb writers."

Last orders at Borders

Had half an hour to kill on Thursday, so I dropped into the Borders closing down sale on Oxford Street to see if there was anything left. Unsurprisingly, it was pretty cleared out. But then I wandered over to the £1 shelves, which initially looked pretty scanty...

...and snapped back to reality 10 minutes later to find myself holding a sizeable stack of books.

Not one of them's on the vague "to read" list that sits somewhere at the back of my mind - yes, Sales 8, Will 0 - but all good authors, and new hardbacks at £1 each are pretty hard to put back on the shelf. From another point of view: I saved £99!

Birthday books

This year's batch...

Put your best footnote forward

A pair of footnotes I've enjoyed recently. The first is from a history of Bob Dylan's song 'Like a Rolling Stone', the second from a non-fiction account of a murder which took place in Wiltshire in 1860.

"John Hammond told me once that I should take over Columbia Records," [Dylan producer Bob] Johnston says, as if telling the story of a broken treaty, of how his Apache ancestors were driven from their land. "And so I said, 'Well, how do you do it?' I went up and met with Paley and Stanton [William S. Paley, the legendary capitalist buccaneer who bought the tiny Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, was chairman of the board of CBS, Frank Stanton had been president of the company since 1946] and those people up there, and they said, 'What would you do if you came into this?' And I says, 'Well, you're not gonna like it and you won't do it, but I think the first thing is, you should get your shit together. And by that, you should have the tenth floor of attorneys. And the eleventh floor of accountants. And the twelfth floor of music. And they should never be allowed to pass one another. Whatever you want to do, however you want to cheat, and fuck these artists around, is your opinion - but at least give them the opportunity of doing something, without people who tap their foot and whistle out of tune, and judge what's being made according to what somebody did last week, to keep their job six months longer.' And I said, 'If you do that, the music will always be the music, and those son-of-a-bitches will never have the chance at it, you can make all the money you want to, but they can't fuck with the music.' Paley said, 'That's very interesting.' John walked out and said, 'You didn't want the job, did you?'"

Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone, London: 2005, fn. p143

***

To demonstrate the weird logic of homicidal monomania, [writer Joseph] Stapleton recounted a horrible story about a mild-mannered young man who was so obsessed with windmills that he would gaze at them for days on end. In 1843, friends tried to distract him from his fixation by moving him to an area with no mills. There the windmill man lured a boy into a wood, then killed and mutilated him. His motive, he explained, was the hope that as a punishment he would be taken to a place where there just might be a mill.

Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, London: 2008, fn. p236

Commuting sentences

Heh, Blog After Reading seems to have sparked Brand-Ross-Sachs levels of controversy, with a number of people wondering when all this page-flicking gets done (and good point from Fwengebola about William Gladstone's lack of access to latter-day time-wasting devices like boxsets of The Wire or b3ta newsletters).

I have one answer in the form of a commuting poem I originally wrote in response to a short ditty posted on Facebook by my old boss Martin (his went: "From London Victoria / To Brighton Central / I am always sitting / Next to someone mental"):

From Kennington
To Paddington
I get a lot
Of reading done.

And no, I do not use the Johnny 5 method.

The Electric Goose's new baby sister

This is probably going to make me sound a bit like a list-making OCD wrist-wringer, but for the past 11 and a half years, I have been writing down the name of every book I've read. It's simple, really: when I finish a book, I add it to the list.

I started doing this back at school in 1997, after a teacher, Mr Macfarlane, told our history class that the 19th century British Prime Minister William Gladstone used to read around 60 books a year - during his premiership. The man was devouring books like they were cheese and chive flavoured Pringles, in between running the country, bickering with Disraeli and inviting prostitutes back to his house for tea and biscuits. And I began to wonder if I got through that many (books, not whores, or biscuits), as someone who didn't have to rule the UK as well. So I started making a record.

Then, a few years ago, I discovered that Art Garfunkel has been doing the same thing since 1968 and I realised that untamed haircuts aren't the only thing we have in common.

Anyway, the reason for this confession is because I recently digitised my list, in case of fire (oh, all right, because I was bored), which means The Electric Goose now has a sister blog, called Blog After Reading. She wears glasses, is slightly pretentious and lives here.

Christmas books

You give 'em, I read 'em.

Birthday books

Cuba: sentence of the holiday

"This pantagruelian pongid then paced around the block, kicking up cars like metallic divots, eating double-deckers as if they were Double Deckers, and then finally squatting in the very centre of the Circus itself to strain, push and deliver a turd the size of a newspaper kiosk, which wavered, lengthened from stub to cigar, before plummeting fifty feet from Kong's arsehole on to the shaven heads of a posse of style-victim cycle couriers, who, like cattle in a thunderstorm, had taken shelter in the open."

Great Apes, Will Self

Cuba: holiday reading

BOOKS. LOTS OF BOOKS.

Tonight on Channel 4: When Women Rule The World

Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic feminist novel of 1915, imagined an idyllic country ruled over by women, in which trouble and strife were non-existent, with an asexual version of womankind reproducing without the need of men and living together in peace and happiness. Right on! CPG would undoubtedly be delighted to hear that the dream has come to Channel 4 – in the form of new reality show When Women Rule The World. Read more...

Birthday books

Lots to read...

More book pictures

Prize Lottery

Ha! Although I'm loathe to defend Orange (what with working for them and everything), novelist Tim Lott's description of the loveable communication giant's literary prize - awarded to women writers only - as "discriminatory, sexist and perverse" stinks of sour grapes of wrath.

The Lottster's clearly sore after Private Eye described the prize he chairs - the Prince "nope, me neither" Maurice prize - thus:

"The Prince Maurice prize for literary love stories... allows seeming chairman in perpetuity Tim Lott to invite chums and other clubbable novelists to conduct the judging in a five-star hotel in Mauritius - where the winner can stay for a fortnight. Among Lott's 2008 panel is Irvine Welsh, a connoisseur of luxury hotels and avid log-roller whose influence can perhaps be discerned in the shortlist's inclusion of his pal and Cape stablemate Ewan Morrison (whose 'love story' is about wife-swapping) and the fishy presence of three books - no other publisher has more than one - from the small Scottish indy Canongate, to whose collection Children of Albion Rovers Welsh and shortlistee James Meek were contributors."

Revelation

Whilst reading Julian Cope's Japrocksampler: How the Post-war Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock 'n' Roll, it occurs to me that I have never heard the word "archipelago" said aloud.

Japan: holiday reading