Category: Personals

Three Years of Mostly About Stories – A Retrospective

Mostly About Stories is three years old, ish. I am a little proud of the number because I am good at giving up on things and I have not given up on this. I would be lying if I said writing a blog post had become a sort of habit to me. There have been weeks and weeks where I have done nothing, depleting old stores of posts. And there have been times when I have written many posts in one go, just because there was plenty to say. Until recently I had managed to post pretty much every week – it was a kind of unwritten rule with me that I would get one weekend off a month. And regardless of the machinery behind achieving that regularity, I am still chuffed about it.

Most good things come to an end, and I have to admit to myself that I need to change my approach to the blog to keep it running. That most terrible ghoul – one’s personal life – is beginning to get in the way.

This past year I finished my degree at Cambridge and after a few months dilly-dallying about in France and Switzerland and the US and Jordan, I finally got a job. Readers, I hope, will forgive me for the last part, because to the best of my knowledge there are not altogether many options for receiving money in regular and sizeable amounts other than these so-called “jobs”. Even murdering one’s relatives, a tried and tested method, is hampered by their ultimately limited numbers. And though I am not a gambler I am not interested in becoming one either.

Earlier this month I moved to Moscow to take up a job focusing on renewable energy and decarbonisation strategies in a Russian energy company. To a large extent, I am continuing my Cambridge degree by other means. The same cycle of reading, thinking, and reporting exists in both spaces. The only difference is that I now use PowerPoint instead of Word and my exams are all viva voce. My interest in making the planet a better place for all of us is a little less than my interest in great works of literature, but not insignificant either. Anyway, I believe that it would be a dereliction of my duty to others not to work in a way that has an impact on the world.

It is too soon to tell whether I will survive the job or explode like Thomas Buddenbrook. Either way, I have noticed already that I have considerably less time to read and write than I had previously, and this is a problem for the blog. One solution I considered long ago was simply to write about shorter things. In particular, given the blog’s name, I could simply write about short stories every time. This is a possibility. The shorter the work, the easier it is to dissect it, and probably the more interesting the blog post would ultimately be.

Another option is to do more generally thematic pieces, more considerations of a topic than anything else. The problem is that I am twenty-four years old and cripplingly aware that anything interesting on a topic has already been written and so I would rather not waste my readers’ time. Is there really much value in me selecting some obelisk-like word and riffing on it for a few pages? Montaigne could title an essay “on such-and-such” but can I? At school each weekend one had to write such essays – perhaps it’s a habit I should get back into. And, well, in truth much of what I write on this blog has been partly for myself and writing such essays would be good practice for me, after all.

Either way or indeed any of the other ways – more translations, more interludes into my own experiences (I liked the grape picking piece too) – I am not such a huge fan of the regular half-analytical half-descriptive half-homework-helpers half-entertainers that I have been putting out for these past three years, not anymore that is. I don’t want things to become routine and stale. But the terrible truth is that I have begun to notice repetitions in my own work. I don’t just mean the regular references to Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so on. I am allowed to have favourites. What I mean is, I seem to be saying the same thing over and over again. Certain observations on the meaning of life and the difficulty of communication, for example, just keep coming up. And as the job and I do battle, I am only going to get more tired and more boring.

I do not like the academic criticism I have read, which is mostly soulless and dead. But there is something to be said for the highbrow prose that lives just on the edges of the academy, in fancy magazines I rarely read. Serious essays, things that require research not to make a point at a conference but as a dish requires spices – to make them a joy to consume. I read a book and maybe the introduction and write a post. This is a function of the time constraints I live in. But it forces me to rely on things inside myself, rather than stretching myself in new directions. Another option for me would be to write much less regularly, even monthly, but each time produce a properly researched piece that actually had something interesting to say.

The truth is, my first month in Moscow has been frightening. Not because of war fears and the pleasures of being treated as a migrant, though the former at least has made me lose sleep. No, what is frightening is that although I am only supposed to work from nine till six each day (and my colleagues log on half an hour later than that anyway), suddenly I find myself almost unable to read. Exhaustion, disorganisation, one can lay the blame on whatever one wants. But the situation is the same. I pick up books and put them down. The pleasure and the attention have gone. No doubt the onrush of routine and stability – because I still haven’t had a normal week yet – will help. And indeed, this past week has seen me read a little.

But from my perspective, I need Mostly About Stories to encourage my growth and development, rather than hinder them. I need it to be a place where I can follow my interests rather than one where I just repeatedly rip the surface contents of a book out in order to say the same things I’ve been saying for three years over and over again. It should not be an echo chamber for my own unchanging self. We all agree that serious literature is good because it rewards thought. My blog posts, generally written the two days after finishing a book, rarely manage to highlight that depth as well as I would like. And writing the posts often doesn’t make me think as much as I would like either.

What form the future of the blog will take I do not know. It will still mostly be about stories. But the posts will be less regular, less predictable in content and timings (though still on Mondays/Sunday evenings). The most important thing is that I would like to write about things that interest me. I would like the motivation for a piece to be not finishing a book but the thoughts that the book has occasioned within me. Three years is a long time, and I’m proud we have made it thus far. But as I am unable to complete a merger or acquisition, and refuse to outsource (though I am extremely grateful to my girlfriend, Marcelina, for helping me with proofreading and so much more) a change of pace will have to do to keep my content from getting stale. I hope you approve.

But do have your say and leave a comment on what you would like to see in posts and approach going forward. I have been really grateful for the additional engagement in my posts this year. This past year I have even had various book recommendations come my way (e.g. Anton Reiser, Riders in the Chariot), which I do note down but cannot promise in the near future to fulfil. Anyway, thank you, readers!

The numbers, for those who like them. In 2019, I had 4635 views, in 2020 I had 17960, in 2021 I had 35570. The most popular pieces continue to be those that are most useful for students – things on Benjamin, Kafka, Gogol, etc. But I am always glad to see more niche things get even a single view.

The books I enjoyed the most last year were Robinson’s Home and Sebald’s The Emigrants.

Big or Small? A Note on Book Sizes

Occasionally, we have serious discussions about the length of books. In the 19th century, when often people were paid by the penny, writers tended to write awfully long books. These days new fiction tends to hover around the three-hundred-word mark, or not even reach that. I myself rarely read a modern book that is longer willingly, unless I am sure I will enjoy it. But because I am busy with exams, I thought I would take a slightly simpler topic for this post, one that gets less attention, but which is still fun to think about – not the length of books, but the size of them!

I remember my surprise at first seeing a French book someone at school was reading – it was so small! I soon learned that what we have in the United Kingdom (and I presume, in the United States as well) is not a global book-size-format but rather, like the non-metric system we use, a size pretty much unique to us. Studying German and Russian I have been exposed to books of various sizes, including those academic books which for no good reason are bigger than everything else on my shelf – I am looking at you, Princeton University Press.

In general the books we find abroad are smaller than the ones we have here. German books from Fischer or dtv are only slightly smaller than their English translations would be, while the lovely little bright yellow Reclam editions are tiny! Russian books are more formulaic, at least if you are looking for literature, with Azbuka and AST the two main editions. However, I also have a few books from the “little library of masterpieces” series, which are about the same size as the Reclam books, but they are hardbacks and generally longer, being single-volume collected editions or long novels.

I have my final exams right now, so my desk is adorned with the books I will be writing about. On the left are my Russian books. You can see how much smaller they are then the Oxford World’s Classics Chekhov near the top. The blue book is my Gogol – it has all of his stuff in, pretty much, from the early Ukrainian tales, to the Petersburg tales, to Dead Souls and even his plays. Not half bad for such a small book!

What are the advantages and disadvantages of these smaller sizes? One of the clearest benefits is portability. You don’t tend to notice the size of your Penguins or Oxford World’s Classics until you try to put them in a jacket pocket. They do, of course, fit into rucksacks and satchels, but you will look rather silly if you try to put them anywhere else. A thick book will remain thick – or indeed, get thicker – when its size is reduced. But for those shorter books the added thickness is nothing compared to the convenience of actually being able to fit them in one’s pocket.

Short wordcount books look rather out of place in big-sized books as well. A hundred pages in an English-size book generally makes me feel cheated or ripped-off, but when the book is smaller, I tend not to mind. Indeed, the smaller size often allows for smaller texts to be given their own book. The Reclam editions are great for presenting readers with one or two novellas, where an English edition would no doubt demand a whole crowd of them. A small size, then, also helps us focus on what we are reading – it gives each story its due.

I feel more motivated to read smaller books too. Shorter books by wordcount motivate us because we get to finish them quicker. But books of a smaller size achieve the same effect by letting us turn the pages more. Anna Karenina is 1052 pages in my Russian edition, but because the pages were so short, I raced through it. And it was a confidence boost too – I felt like I was a master of Russian because of it! For those of us who are not masters at foreign languages deciphering a long page can often take several minutes – and be hugely demoralising – so smaller page sizes can offer a useful counterweight.

My modern German books. You can see how they are just slightly smaller than the English ones in the centre of the pile. Quite a few of these have appeared in past posts – Cat and Mouse, The Emigrants, Three Women, Some Mann, and Else.

Small books are definitely more suitable for certain types of content, too. The main thing that benefits from a smaller size is poetry. In England we do have the Faber “selected poems” series, and the Everyman poetry hardbacks, but mostly our poetry books are just as big as the rest. Has anyone actually read a poetry book cover to cover? I’ve read Leaves of Grass, my favourite book of poems, like that once and it was a dreadful experience. Poetry needs to be dipped into, and that demands a book size that can be carried with you until the right moment arises. That’s why I have two very small copies of Whitman’s Song of Myself. It lets me carry one around all the time, and then whip it out whenever inspiration strikes.

The main problem of smaller books is that they often also have smaller fonts. However, it’s worth noting that English books are guilty of having small fonts too, or even showing no respect to their margins. My copy of Penguin’s Portable Emerson is particularly guilty of this. German books, which are smaller than their English counterparts, often have larger font sizes than they do, something I very much appreciate. Russian books are more unpredictable on that front. In any case, when it is dark, or we are tired, it’s hard to be grateful for a shorter book when that shortness is achieved by making it harder to read.

My Schopenhauer. Chekhov for scale.

The Reclam editions are particularly bad for this. I have a love-hate relationship with them, truth be told. They are so convenient, so portable, but at the same time can be a real struggle to read. And I do find they look ridiculous when they contain big books – my copy of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation is, at just over seven hundred pages, reasonably sized compared to some of the monsters I have, such as Heine’s collected poems, which go well over one thousand pages. With that kind of length, you often have the feeling that by the time you’ve actually reached the end of the book you’ll need a new pair of glasses.

In the end, though, I do come down firmly on the side of smaller books, even my Reclams. Their portability, and the increased page-turning , just makes reading them that bit more pleasant. I only wish they were written in English, but I suppose I must just get used to that not being the case! Now, there is one area where I think we in the English-speaking world are particularly lucky with our books, and that is in the notes and annotations which most of our serious literature comes with. The Germans are quite good at this as well, but the Russians are absolutely awful. Often their books don’t even have an introduction, let alone a set of notes. Some of my Russian poetry books don’t even have a table of contents! While I don’t always make use of them when they are there, I’d much rather have them than not.

Anyway, readers, how do you like your books? Rare, medium, well done? Big, or small, or somewhere in between?

Two Years of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for about two years now. I was tempted to give a little summary or whatever at the end of the year, but on balance doing it now makes sense. At the end of any year, and especially one such as that which has just passed, there’s so much to go over that the development of a little blog really has no claim to anyone’s attention.

But what is exciting is that this blog is no longer just a little blog at all.

I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. The blog has grown, massively, in relation to itself. As far as its relation to other book blogs goes, I have not the faintest idea of whether I’m doing well or badly here. Well, actually, I have the most recent version of the same survey that I mentioned when I posted one year ago. According to this, in some respects I’m doing quite well indeed.

One year ago, last January, I had 1078 views on the blog for that month, which worked out as 35 views a day. This month, still unfinished, sees me already at 2738 and with an average of 111 per day. This would put me in the top quartile by pageviews according to the survey. Last year, with the exception of a dip in February, every month was larger than the last. Things just built up, slowly but surely. As they should.

I shouldn’t worry about views, but I do enjoy thinking that people read my blog. Last year I had one follower – a friend. This year I have almost twenty, and almost all of them are unknown to me. The same is true of comments. I now have a few. Not a huge amount, but enough to be excited about. Engagement is what I’m after, really, with this blog. I want a place where people read and want to have their say.

Identity

But it is difficult, because the identity problems I mentioned last year are still present. What exactly is Mostly About Stories? I have long analyses, such as my pieces on Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” (still the most popular piece by far), short poems such as this one by Baratynsky, pieces focusing on a particular aspect of a novel like my thoughts on character in Nostromo, and more general pieces, like this one on Misotheism. It is perfectly reasonable for a blog to be varied in its contents. Just as Borges declared that Kafka created his own precursors, so too do I create my own readers. But that tension between a blog that’s a mess and a blog that’s held together by a unity – some stance, or perhaps my own character – is one that I’ve not resolved.

Even so, this year has been good for the blog’s “intellectual” development. I wrote some long pieces I had wanted to for a while, such as my thing on late Tolstoy, and some shorter more conversational pieces, like my thoughts on how many books to read. I wrote on books that I enjoyed, and on books that I studied, as usual. I do still struggle with knowing what to write. With a book that I’m studying, there’s always an element of teaching involved. I want my readers to learn something, and since the books can be obscure or not available in English, they perhaps do. But when it’s a book that everyone is familiar with, or a book that is long, I’m left flummoxed. Last year I read both War and Peace and Wuthering Heights and I had absolutely no idea what to say about them. Everything’s been said already.

This possibly reflects bad reading habits on my part. I’m not sure I quite “got” Wuthering Heights, though I did have stuff to say about it. But I think it also reflects an unwillingness to write shorter pieces. One thing that I’ve been somewhat adamant about in the past is that Mostly About Stories is for longer pieces, of around 1500 words or more. Yet sometimes I don’t have that much to say, or I want to focus on something small. I wanted to write about education in Wuthering Heights but didn’t know how to make it into a good enough size.

This is an idiotic stance to have. People’s attention drops off rapidly at about 1500 words anyway. Why force people to read more? Perhaps in the future I should aim for something like 1000-1500, but ensure the content is good and tight. Or perhaps I should just let each piece take its own length. All of these ideas have merit.

Reading

Last year, which I spent mostly in Russia with a little time in Cambridge at the end, was a good year for reading. John Williams’ Augustus and Butcher’s Crossing, Marilynne Robison’s Gilead, Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March and Job, Richard Holmes’ Footsteps – all of these are books that have left their mark on me, by authors who were mostly new to me. Then there was Sally Rooney, who is exciting even as I’m somewhat ambivalent towards her work.

This year promises more discoveries. My degree at Cambridge finishes in the summer, leaving me for the first time in a very long time completely free to read whatever I want. It is a great opportunity, as well as a great burden. I am confident I will find something to read. I already have a lot of things I want to. Much more befogged lies my future beyond this blog. Do I get a job, do I do a master’s degree, do I run away into the mountains and become a full-time writer? All of these are possible, as are some less pleasant variants. Only time will tell which fate has decided for me.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Come again.

Here’s a dreadful poem for your time:

I’d Rather (by Konstantin Balmont)

I wouldn't want to be a storm, 
There's too much thunder brewing there. 
I'd rather be the dew at dawn, 
Whose quiet peace knows no compare. 

I'd rather be a little flower, 
The kind whose bloom you barely see, 
The kind that spurns the thunder's power
To have its happiness, to be.