File Under: A Rant

I had heard good things about Doreen Baingana's book "Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe" and was pleased that my library had a copy in stock.

On my first attempt to find it, I drew a blank, but this is a common problem in my library - many books are listed as in stock, but are not be found on the shelves.

On my next visit, I looked for it again on the Fiction shelves where it was categorised as being, but again to no avail. Then I had a thought occurred to me and I looked on the Black Writers shelf, and there it was.

Doreen Baingana is a black writer in so much as she is black and a writer, but I still think the catalogue's record of the book being in the General Fiction section is more accurate. For me the Black Writers section has connotations and I as a white woman would normally have no interest in those books and would feel somewhat of a fraud in that section (in the same way that I enjoy the beats of NWA, but know that "911s a Joke in Your Town" is not aimed at me).

At what point does a writer who is black cease to be a Black Writer and just become a Writer?

Having taken the book home, I read "Tropical Fish" in one evening. It was fantastic. Set mainly in Uganda, some of its themes were very specific to that place, but other parts of it were universal. It is a wonderful book, and not one that should be marginalised in the Black Writers shelf.

So the lessons learnt are once more to not trust the library catalogue and to look in the Black Writers section again because who knows what other gems might be tucked away there.

Book Award Challenge: Completed

I have completed the challenge!

1. Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Master - Guardian First Book Award 2005
2. Last Orders by Graham Swift - Booker Prize 1996
3. The Sea by John Banville - Man Booker Prize 2005
4. The Gathering by Anne Enright - Man Booker Prize 2007
5. Boy A by Jonathan Trigell - John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2004
6. Shipping News - Annie Proulx - Pulitzer Prize
7. Whatever - Michel Houellebecq - Impac Prize
8. The Accidental - Ali Smith - Whitbread Prize
9. White Tiger- Arvinda Adiga - Man Booker Prize 2008
10. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Pulizer Prize 2008


10 books across 6 prizes.

Book Prize

I like Sky Arts’ Book Show. I think Mariella Frostrup is a great host. I like the format of the show. I think the show pitches a good balance between intellectual and accessible.

However, one element disturbs me each week.

The competition prize.

You can win each of the books that the guests have picked in answer to the question about the character in literature they would most like to be. But you also win this Book Chair.

I love books. I quite like chairs. But this is just wrong. Hideous.

Which character in literature would you be?

Every guest on The Book Show (on Sky Arts) is asked this question. There have been various approaches to it. The character who is most like yourself. The character with the most enviable life. The character who is nothing like yourself who you'd like to feel things through for a time.

I've been pondering this for a few weeks now. I've struggled to think of many female characters who I'd like to be, so I'm putting aside gender. Someone else on the show picked this character, but I keep coming back to it.

I would be Arthur Dent from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

He is English, he is often confused, he wears a dressing gown and he gets to travel.

Favourite Passage: "Underground Man" by Mick Jackson

About twenty years ago, on my birthday, good Lord Galway of Serlby presented me with a beautiful basset-hound pup... Immediately recognizable by their stout little legs, concave back and baggy ears, something about their appearance suggests they have been knocked together out of odd bits of other dogs. The simplest task - such as walking - can prove very troublesome for a bassset-hound. It is as if they had been poorly designed. Their coat is always most generously tailored and none more so than the pup handed to me that day. He had on him enough flesh to adequated clothe another two or three dogs besides - the majority of it hanging of his face - and though he was at the time no more than a few months old he wore the immutable basset expression of Lifelong Woe.