The list of books I read in 2011:

• Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language - David Crystal
• Crocodile Tears - Anthony Horowitz
• Stormbreaker - Anthony Horowitz
• Point Blanc - Anthony Horowitz
• Skeleton Key - Anthony Horowitz
• Eagle Strike - Anthony Horowitz
• Scorpia - Anthony Horowitz
• Strictly English - Simon Heffer
• Eats, Shoots and Leaves - Lynne Truss
• Ark Angel - Anthony Horowitz
• 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare - James Shapiro
• Snakehead - Anthony Horowitz
• The House on the Thames - Gillian Tindall
• One Day - David Nicholls
• Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger
• The Castle of Ortranto - Horace Walpole
• Twilight - Stephenie Meyer
• Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
• Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
• Doctor Who: Martha in the Mirror - Justin Richards
• Sourcery - Terry Pratchett
• When Harry Met Sally (script) - Nora Ephron
• The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
• How to Write for Television - William Smethurst
• Crocodile Tears - Anthony Horowitz
• Dracula - Bram Stoker
• Inception, the Shooting Script - Christopher Nolan
• Port Out, Starboard Home and other Language Myths - Michael Quinion
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - J.K. Rowling
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
• The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
• Mirror, Mirror - Graham Beynon
• Why Johnny Can’t Preach - T. David Gordon
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling
• A Return to Modesty - Wendy Shalit
• York Notes Companions: Gothic Literature - Sue Chaplin
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
• The Christian Imagination - ed. Leland Ryken
• Jean de Florette - Marcel Pagnol
• One Day - David Nicholls
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
• Harry Potter: Page to Screen - Bob McCabe

This year I read 44 books, 10 less than last year. I keep thinking, What if this is it? What if I’m just going to read less and less books for the rest of my life!?

I had read 20 of these before (including the entire Alex Rider and Harry Potter series), 3 of these in 2010 and 4 of them in 2009. I read ‘Crocodile Tears’ by Anthony Horowitz and ‘One Day’ by David Nicholls twice each.

13 were non-fiction, 31 fiction. 4 were about the English Language, 4 were Christian books. 8 (the Alex Rider books!) were action/adventure, 8 (including the Harry Potter books) were fantasy, 1 was sci-fi, 1 was sort of everyday romance (One Day), 1 was a classic, 5 were Gothic and 2 were sort-of-gothic (Twilight and Her Fearful Symmetry) since this is what I was/am studying in A Level Literature.

Two were scripts and one was in French (and was not read by choice!).

Last.fm stats

These should be slightly more accurate than last year’s, as since discovering something called the Universal Scrobbler I’ve been a bit obsessed with accurate last.fm stats, scrobbling the radio and everything.

Most listened artists of 2011:

1. Paramore
2. Jamie Woon
3. Murray Gold
4. Taylor Swift
5. Christophe Maé
6. Daughter
7. Newton Faulkner
8. Jamie Cullum
9. The Killers
10. Andrew Bird

Most listened tracks of 2011:

1. Jamie Woon - Night Air
2. Jamie Woon - TMRW
3. Daughter - Landfill
4. Jamie Woon - Waterfront
5. Jamie Woon - Gravity
6. Jamie Woon - Spirits
7. Jamie Woon - Spiral
8. Daughter - Love
9. Christophe Maé - Belle Demoiselle
10. Jamie Woon - Shoulda

Something of a common theme going on there…

My last track of the year was ‘Anonanimal’ by Andrew Bird.

LOL, int. Originally and chiefly in the language of electronic communications: ‘ha ha!’; used to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement.

I found that because in English Language today we were comparing Johnson’s Dictionary and the OED - and I just happened to have my library card with me so I could get on the wonderous OED website and see all the brand new stuff.

Gotta love the OED.

—

It would seem that gothic novels are, like vampires, averse to sunlight. Not because they crumble to dust (or sparkle), but because it makes them very very hot and almost melts the glue that holds the pages in the binding. I am aware of this because apparently I’m some sort of fluke, so while the rest of my Lit class toiled over The Kite Runner and The Great Gatsby in preparation to resit the exam, I got to sit on various benches and lean on various trees in various patches of sunshine, reading gothic novels and relishing the incongruousness of it.

When I hear ‘gothic’, I immediately think of the Victorians, of a love of scandal concealed behind a solemn and austere façade – or perhaps it was the solemn and austere façade, the natural literary destination of the era of a Queen in mourning. But perhaps not, because the gothic genre goes back much further than that – it was well-established and well-loved enough for Jane Austen’s parody Northanger Abbey in 1817, and in fact the first work of gothic fiction, The Castle of Ortranto, dates back to 1764.

The Castle of Ortranto still feels very close to Shakespeare, not only linguistically but also in terms of character – the well-meaning monk who inadvertently messes things up is straight out of Romeo and Juliet – and plot, particularly the number of people who miraculously turn out to be related to each other. But I could see why it’s gothic: a creepy castle, a dark and stormy night, ghostly happenings… The one thing I thought was missing was Monsters. Supernatural events were basically on the side of good, or at least of fate and poetic justice – the bad guy, the Monster, was thoroughly human. But hey, I thought, this is only the very beginning of the genre. I read on.

But by the time I was part way into Frankenstein, I began to realise that, contrary to public perception, gothic novels aren’t really about the monsters. Reading Frankenstein, a ‘strapline’ kept running through my head: “One man. One monster. Which is which?” There are certainly times when it is easier to understand and pity Frankenstein’s Monster than it is to pity Frankenstein himself. Because of this, I’m always a little disappointed when the Monster slips back from intelligence and reason into monstrousness. It seems a little like Shelley has created for herself a literary monster: a creature who must for the sake of the narrative be killed, but who is too nice for this to appear totally just and ethical. There is an oft-corrected assumption that ‘Frankenstein’ is the name of the Monster. But is that in fact the truth? Is that the point of the story?

Wuthering Heights takes this a step further. Not only are there no Monsters at all, there are no supernatural events either, other than those wished and imagined into being by a half-crazed Heathcliff.

…Or are there?

The intriguing narrative structure of Wuthering Heights means that it is essentially two stories told in parallel: Nelly Dean’s narration of the history of Cathy and Heathcliff (and Edgar, who I think deserves more attention than he gets when people talk about the novel), and the ‘real time’ story in Lockwood’s diary. This means that the reader discovers things in stages, along with Lockwood. And it means that Lockwood was visited by Cathy in his dreams long before he knew anything about her…

Aside from that, Wuthering Heights is an entirely human story. The only thing that really makes it gothic is the weather. Sentient meteorology, as I read one blogger describing it, is possibly the key gothic trait; a book is not really gothic unless there’s a dark and stormy night at some point. The landscape and weather are practically characters in themselves. For instance, Frankenstein goes to the Scottish highlands to fulfil his promise to the Monster, entirely, as far as I can tell, on the grounds that it looks more epic.

A second, rather more unexpectedly indispensable aspect of gothic novels is the story within a story. I think Frankenstein is the winner on this front, featuring a story within a story within a story within a story. This tendency to make books resemble Russian dolls seems to be borne out of a great gothic aversion to the third person: as far as possible, everything is narrated first hand, through narration, through letters… Everyone is willing to talk, adept at storytelling, remembers every detail down to direct speech – from the servant who’s usually really unhelpful, to the monster who has only just learnt to speak.

From what I’ve read, the Chronicler, as I will call the fictional persona taken on by the writer, is generally not really involved with the main events of the story; he is recording the first-hand account of another – Victor Frankenstein, or Nelly Dean. But neither is he entirely detached from the proceedings: he is made to some degree involved in the narrative by some shocking or mysterious event with which the book opens, drawing both Chronicler and reader into the depths of rumour and folklore made real.

During this period of reading round the gothic, I also found myself sitting in the common room one morning, rereading Twilight. I started because basically anything is more attractive than revision. I continued because I wanted to see how far the so-called ‘Saga’ could be classed as gothic. Well, all of the gothic elements I have mentioned so far do appear in some shape or form.

For instance, I think the thunderstorm during the baseball game pretty much classes as a dark and stormy night, and more importantly the landscape around Forks is definitely sufficiently epic. There are stories within stories too, when each of the Cullens relate their past – and thinking about Twilight, the book I know best in the series, I think Carlisle and Edward’s vampire births in the dark streets of Victorian London, the pious doctor become a killer, is where the book is at its most gothic.

It’s also not about the Monsters: yeah, there are vampires and werewolves, but all the supernatural stuff is just extra complications to the main story, essentially your common-or-garden teen romance. But tied up with this last point is an element in which Twilight fails not only as a piece of gothic literature but, in my view, as a story.

A gothic novel has a moral. No, it’s not as simple and blundering as that, but they certainly deliver messages. However, gothic characters often serve not as examples, but as warnings, and as a result, good and evil are not clearly defined, and not always the way round that one would expect. You could argue, of course, that Twilight has this subversive quality: there’s the thing of rumour and folklore turning out to be true, but bits of it turn out to be false too – sunlight, mirrors… plus the fact that there are good Monsters. But is it really intended to be subversion of a genre? Is it just Stephenie Meyer picking and choosing which bits of the legend she wants to steal, and which bits to rehash? It seems that the gothic elements in the books appear almost by coincidence rather than by design.

I can see why the parallel is drawn between Eclipse and Wuthering Heights; they are in some ways fairly similar love triangle stories. But imagine if Bella chose Jacob, and Edward went bad, and Jacob had a young, innocent sister whom Edward seduced, and married, and terrorised, just to spite her brother. (I put it that way round because I can’t imagine Jacob getting away with that with, say, Alice – but both Edward and Jacob have enough traits that the parallel with Cathy’s two lovers works either way round. I can’t remember which way it is in Eclipse; it should be noted during this discussion that although I’m definite that I have read Eclipse, I can’t remember a single thing that happens in it, except for something with a tent. End parentheses.) Well, for a start, it would be a much better book…

Actually, I think that’s my point. That story is far more exciting, and far more real – they are vampires and werewolves after all. Meyer’s mistake is to make her Monsters, her characters, too tame, to safe, too good; to not concede that her readers have the sense to tell what’s a good example and what’s a warning. While it could be considered subversive to have good vampires and werewolves, good and evil still remain almost childishly defined in the Twilight universe. There is no sense in which the reader is left wondering, left to decide for themselves – and it is that which drives the whole plot in a thoroughly non-gothic direction.

thankyou for your recent enquiry regarding driving lessons with ourselves…

And this one.

we can do a lesson on Tues 7th at 9.30 if that is suitable for yourself

Aside from the apparent lack of ability shift key (they’ve capitalised “Tues” but not the start of the sentence?), and the belief that ‘thankyou’ is one word… what’s with the random reflexive pronouns?? Hasn’t this person been hearing and using the words “us” and “you” for their whole life?

Interestingly, Michael Rosen mentioned this recently in the episode of Word of Mouth about politeness. He surmised that it was a politeness strategy, a way of softening the slightly accusatory tone of “you”. I’d never come across it before, until one day I found a small colony of them in my inbox.

It just goes to show, grammar isn’t entirely about making things intelligable. Some errors do not hinder clarity, they’re just really, really annoying.

—

Throughout Hamlet the audience is presented with humour and death, side by side, and this sense of contrast and conflict adds to the underlying atmosphere of tension in a play set on the edge of a war which never quite breaks out. Unlike the earlier versions of the story which Shakespeare’s Hamlet draws upon, this is merely the backdrop for the main conflict of the play: the conflict between a heroic past, exemplified by the story of Pyrrhus which Hamlet and the Players quote in Act 2 Scene 2, in which revenge is the only right and glorious path; and a thinking, conscientious and largely Protestant future, in which murder is damnable and demons are sent to tempt the godly into sin. This is Hamlet’s dilemma: is he damned if he does not avenge his father’s murder, or damned if he does? In a classic revenge tragedy, Hamlet’s course of action would be clear, his obstacles entirely external, and the play charting his demise unlikely to be four hours long. But clearly what Shakespeare is writing is not mere tragedy, and his use of humour is another way in which he breaks from the classic mould.

—

Oh, but I love it so much!!

Tellement bon                            So good
Tellement fort                           So strong
Je pensait qu'il était immortel          I thought he was immortal
Tellement long                           So long
Ce temps mort                            This waiting time
Je me dis que ce monde est cruel         I said to myself that this world is
                                            cruel

Trop lourd                               Too heavy
Ce discours                              All this talk
Trop d'histoires d'une vie               Too many stories in a life
Trop lourd                               Too heavy
De nos jours                             These days
Tous ces gens que réalisent aujourd'hui  All these people who make today real

Le jour oú je m'envolerais               The day I fly away
Je monterais droit au ciel               I'll rise straight to the sky
Pour aller me reposer                    To go and rest
Auprès mon pere spirituèl                With my spiritual father

Trop belles                              Too beautiful
Ces idées                                These ideas
Qu'il a voulu exprimer                   That he wanted to explain
Trop courtes                             Too short
Ces années                               These years
Mais tellement d'héritiers               But so great an inheritance

Jamais vu                                Never seen
Tellement entendu                        So much understood
Et si c'etait lui qui m'avait fait       And yes, it was he who made me
Jour et nuit                             Day and night
Il haunte                                He haunts
Le plus profond de mes pensées           The most profound of my thoughts
Pour lui c'est dedicacé                  To him it's dedicated

Le jour oú je m'envolerais               The day I fly away
Je monterais droit au ciel               I'll rise straight to the sky
Pour aller me reposer                    To go and rest
Auprès mon pere spirituèl                With my spiritual father

Le jour oú je m'envolerais               The day I fly away
J'irai me reposer                        I'll go and rest
Auprès mon pere spirituèl                With my spiritual father
J'irai me reposer                        I'll go and rest
Auprès mon pere spirituèl                With my spiritual father

This one demonstrates how ambiguous French can be. Practically all of the words in that second verse have a huge range of different English meanings, so I really just had to pick the most vague ones I could find and go with it. I had some pronoun confusion early on too, since ‘il’ can refer to ‘him’, or ‘it’ if it’s a masculine noun.

Mon âme se met à genoux                My soul kneels down
Quand les anges d'envolent             When the angels fly away,
   et ne veillent plus sur nous           to watch over us no more
Aux armes, je crois bien devenir fou   At arms, I well know I'm going crazy
Mais j'irai venger l'amour             But I will go and avenge love
   pour qu'il soit au rendez-vous         in the hope it'll be there in time

Ma vie est une larme,                  My life is a tear
   qui ne cesse de tomber                 that never stops falling
Ma vie est une famme,                  My life is a woman
   en pleurs loin d'etre aimée            crying, far from love
Ma vie est une flamme,                 My life is a flame
   qui ne cesse de brûler                 that never stops burning
Limite aux bords des larmes,           On the brink of tears,
   un coeur de glace brisé                A broken, frozen heart

J'ai peur de mon future je l'avoue    I'm afraid of my future, I admit it
Une illusion, un leurre               An illusion, a mirage,
   comme si je dormais debout            as if I dreamed awake
L'horreur c'est que l'amour           The worst thing is that love
   te prend tout                         takes everything from you
Mais tout ce que ne tue pas           But everything that doesn't kill you
   te rend fort et fou                   makes you stronger - and crazy

Ma vie est une larme,                  My life is a tear
   qui ne cesse de tomber                 that never stops falling
Ma vie est une famme,                  My life is a woman
   en pleurs loin d'etre aimée            crying, far from love
Ma vie est une flamme,                 My life is a flame
   qui ne cesse de brûler                 that never stops burning
Et mon charme et une arme              And my charm is a weapon,
   qui séduit ans tuer                    captivating but not deadly.   

Et je prendrai pour vous
Mes jambes à mon cou                   And I'll run so fast for you
Et je prierai pour vous                And I'll pray for us
Ma vie, c'est nous, c'est vous         My life, it's us, it's you
Et je prendrai pour nous
Mes jambes à mon cou                   And I'll run so fast for us
Et je chanterai pour vous              And I'll sing of love for you
L'amour jusqu'à vous rendre fou        Until it drives you crazy

Ma vie est une larme,                  My life is a tear
   qui ne cesse de tomber                 that never stops falling
Ma vie est une famme,                  My life is a woman
   en pleurs loin d'etre aimée            crying, far from love
Ma vie est une flamme,                 My life is a flame
   qui ne cesse de brûler                 that never stops burning
Et mon charme et une arme              And my charm is a weapon,
   qui séduit ans tuer                    captivating but not deadly. 

Je prendrai mes jambes à mon cou       I'll run so fast
Et je vous chanterai l'amour           And I'll sing of love for you
   jusqu'au bout de la nuit               till the end of night
Je prendrai mes jambes à mon cou       I'll run so fast
Et je crierai mon amour, mes ennuis    And I'll proclaim my love, my troubles
Je prendrai mes jambes à mon cou       I'll run so fast
Et je vous chanterai l'amour           And I'll sing of love for you
   jusqu'au bout de la nuit               till the end of night
Je prendrai mes jambes à mon cou       I'll run so fast
Et je crierai mon amour, mes envies    And I'll proclaim my love, my desires

The interesting thing about French that I’ve learnt this time around is the reason Internet translators don’t work. It’s embodied in that line, “Et je prendrai pour vous / Mes jambes à mon cou”. Stick that into Google translate, and you get, “And I will take for you / My legs around my neck”. When actually it’s an idiomatic phrase for legging it.

Not this one, though:

! (Funny how when you google image ‘christopher eccleston hamlet’, half of the pictures are David Tennant. Way.)

Yeah, I’m currently writing a 1500 word Literature coursework essay on Hamlet. And the scary thing is, I’ve never had so much fun. The question I chose is To what extent do use of humour and wordplay detract from the tragedy of Hamlet? to which I spend currently 1432 words saying NOT AT ALL! The great thing about that question is that I can go without even mentioning the existence of Ophelia, Gertrude or Laertes simply because they aren’t funny! But in relation to contrasts of emotion I do get to write about my favourite bit of the entire play, where Hamlet says

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.

(V, II, 215-218)

It’s the revelation that Hamlet, who when debating ‘to be or not to be’ was so afraid of death, is ready, in the end.

It was so hard to type that sentence in my essay and not put a at the end.

It’s lucky that for me, as long as I resist the urge to use emoticons, fangirling Hamlet and analysing it actually sound very similar. The one problem I have is that what I’m writing in my essay feels so personal, but as an A level student I don’t have the literary authority to go ‘I think’ all the time… but neither do I have the literary authority to make grand, sweeping assertions, ‘the audience feels’. And I have to admit in every Hamlet essay I write that my love for him is completely irrational - and what I don’t admit in essays is that it’s at least partly inherently based on my love for David Tennant.

But actually I get a lot of love for him as well from the performance I’ve seen live, Rory Kinnear and the National Theatre, because I got the impression that his Hamlet was never actually genuinely mad, and that somehow made his death extra-sad. Plus that was the performance I actually figured out what’s so good about theatre.

It’s that feeling of wanting to - and actually feeling able to - rush in and stop characters who are going to die. I experienced that first with Romeo but really became aware of it during Hamlet; it’s something completely different to shouting at a television screen because there’s a knowledge, at the theatre, that they could actually hear you. At the theatre the fourth wall is paper-thin. It’s air.

The second magical thing about the theatre is that the silence of a hundred people in a theatre is so much more silent than anything else. Of course, in terms of sound it isn’t: there’s background noise and coughing and if you’re really unlucky, that bane of the theatre-goer’s existence, sweet wrappers. But the sense of collective anticipation, of that many people trying to be silent, hanging on one person’s every word, is just a bit special, isn’t it?

I need 70 more words on my essay but I don’t have anything more to say. It feels perfect. Because I’m writing about something I love, I feel like every word that comes out is just the right one. My style is more academic, but more conversational, more natural at the same time - I’m not sure how my teacher’s going to react to my summing up one paragraph, “Not much tragedy there, then”, but I’m feeling brave so I’ll leave it in and see if it sneaks past. I think essays should be allowed to sound like that.

But punctuation, yeah. I remember very well the lesson in Year 6 when I was first introduced to the semicolon. I also recently suddenly remembered that, also in Year 6, having done my own English work, I would swap books with my friend who sat next to me and I would insert all her punctuation for her. Now, of course, I see the problem with that. Reading her blog, I want to slide it across the desk towards me and start scribbling in commas.

Teaching about grammar and punctuation has to sink in when you’re young. Far more dangerous than someone who can’t write at all is someone who thinks they can. By now, it doesn’t matter how many times teachers start lessons with activities on comma splicing or whatever, because everyone finds it a bit patronising, even if they are serial comma-splicers - as many A Level English students seem to be. It’s not that they haven’t at some point been taught about commas and semicolons and grammar; it’s that they haven’t been taught it as grammar, and therefore have not been taught (as I insinuated before), why.

I’m not saying everyone has to like grammar as a kid - you can learn to love things when you’re older, just as adults returning to the Shakespeare or Jane Austen texts that were the bane of their education often find that they’re not so bad after all. Grammar is, even for me, pretty boring at times. But to achieve anything with language you have to be able to communicate, and to communicate, grammar and punctuation are not just kind of important, they’re crucial.