Oatley has been quoted in the magazine Scientific American Mind (article Fiction Hones Social Skills) as saying, Reading “can hone your social brain, so that when you put your book  down you may be better prepared for camaraderie, collaboration, even love.”

Most readers know how deeply they can be affected by the books they read.  What they didn’t know before is that when they get involved with a fictional character, they tend to follow their actions as though they were participating in them and develop a deep empathy with their motives and feelings.  Oatley suggests that reading is a form of mind-training – a course in how humans behave and react to each other.  Readers tend to have better social skills because they are better aquainted with the way other people think and they are more familiar with the huge variety of human behaviour than non-readers.

As I read this I thought of just one example. I  remember reading Brick Lane by Monica Ali,  about the experience of a Bangladeshi woman who moved to Tower Hamlets in London to marry an older man – not usually the sort of book which interests me.  As I read it however, I was drawn into the story and by the end of the book I found tremendous sympathy with Nazeem and her husband Chanu.  I became engrossed on the story of how the initially isolated Nazeem was changed by the people she met in London and by the end of the book my understanding of Bangladeshi immigrant culture was so greatly enhanced that I felt real understanding of the pressures faced by immigrants who don’t even speak the language of their host nation.

Oatley’s book is based on experimental research such as setting groups of people to read a novel and then testing their social abilities before and after.  But in the longer term, Oatley found that people who read were better at judging the emotional state of others and also making judgements about social relationships.  Reading fiction trains people in understanding other human beings just in the same way that reading a work of non-fiction can train you in science or engineering.

The author refers to research in which students were asked to read either a novel about the plight of an Algerian woman or an essay about Algerian women’s rights.  Researchers found that the readers of the novel had far more concern about the Algerian women’s rights than those who read the more newsy, third-party report.

But its the internalisation of what people read which was never quite understood before.  Readers personalities are subtly changed by what they read and they become better at relating to other people, particularly those who are very different to themselves.

I can relate to this in my own reading.  Books have taught me so much – how “good” people can be driven to commit a murder (Crime and Punishment – Fyodr Dostoevsky), what its like to be autistic (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon), how its best to be reconciled to those who do us harm (The Railway Man – Eric Lomax) and countless other books which stay in my mind like icons on the wall of a cathedral.

Keith Oatley has more books in the pipeline and if Such Stuff as Dreams is anything to go by then we will be learning more about the transformative power of fiction and how those of us who sit in a corner with a book may be preparing ourselves far more for interaction with the real world than those who think reading is a waste of time.

This gives the book a distinct lack of unity – sure, some of it is clever, but at other times, this reader at least thought, yes, but this isn’t really why I came here.  The book is subtitled “Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them”, and in a loose way, I suppose that’s fair enough, but I expected more unity of purpose, with more material written specifically for this book rather than a a collection of previously published lectures and articles (although occasionally enhanced for this volume).

I’ve no problem with bringing together collections of previously published material, but I do think the publishers should make this clear on the cover because in this case, I could find quite a bit of the book online and find out whether it was something I wanted to read.  As it is, the book is very selective in its appraisal of Russian books and the people who read them and hardly serves the purpose of its subtitle at all.

I wanted more of what it says on the tin – a book about reading Russian literature, something more comprehensive, with a bit of planning behind it. I got instead large chunks about Batuman’s intellectual and academic development including tortuous stories of how she ended up learning the Uzbek language, or how she moved from one course to another while at college – or even tales about her various boyfriends (an uninspiring bunch to say the least!).  Dare I say, that some of it seemed remarkably self-congratulatory – a sort of “look how clever I am”, but maybe that’s my English perceptions getting in the way – American reviewers seem not to have picked up on this at all.

The book contains a pretty good essay on the Russian writer Isaac Babel; and a long lecture on The Death of Tolstoy which can be found online on the Harpers Magazine archive.  Other items were previously published in the New Yorker and elsewhere.  Sometimes you get elongated versions of other articles – for example, one chapter, The House of Ice builds on an article previously published in the New Yorker and is devoted telling the story of how in 2006 a replica of Empress Anna Ioannovna’s ice palace built in St. Petersburg.  Its all very interesting, a sort of first person travelogue, the sort of thing which would be published in Granta magazine, but its hard to see its how it fits into a book about Russian literature.

Three chapters are devoted to Batuman’s time in Samarkand where she was learning the Uzbek language.  Its all very funny and contains many amusing anecdotes such as how she learned to choose water-melons in the market by listening to them talk.

In the final chapter, Batuman visits Florence where Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot.  She moves on to discuss his novel The Possessed and after summarising the book in a few pages, she immediately lost me by interpreting the book in the context of René Girard theory of “mimetic desire” which was apparently “formulated in opposition to the Nietzschean notion of autonomy as the key to human self-fulfilment”.

Four or five pages of discussion of this theory then follow, after which Batuman recounts a little tale of how when she returned to Stanford the department’s dynamics had completely changed as new people had arrived (including the charismatic Matej from Croatia) and others had left.  We get four or five pages of the impact on these changes and a fair amount about Matej’s impact on Batuman’s life, but I can’t for the life of me see how they relate to Dosteovsky’s book The Possessed.  But then Batuman’s writing jumps around so much its just as I said at the start of this review, like following a butterfly as it moves from one plant to another: its difficult to focus in on one particular topic before she’s off on another one.  I’d have had no problem with reading about Girard’s theory of mimetic desire in the midst of a book which had been leading up to it, but to just drop it into a chapter largely discussing personal relationships within her department reads like a first-year female student at University who’s reading her text books while eyeing up the boy at the next table.

I’m very disappointed with this book.  Its lack of focus and structure completely detracts from some of the good things it includes.  It seems a cheap way of putting a book together to me and if it had been subtitled “assorted writings of Elif Batuman” I wouldn’t have bothered with it.  The lure of reading about “the Russian literature reading experience” misled me in this case and I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you’re already into Batuman’s work.

Rick is not the first person to write his life story in the context of the books he’s read, but this one is as good as any and was a read both amusing and informative.  I’ll quote from the publisher’s website to list some of the books covered:

Dr. Seuss, Horton Hatches the Egg;
Magnus Hirschfeld Sexual Anomalies and Perversions;
Allen Ginsberg, Howl;
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye;
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land;
Descartes, Meditations;
David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding;
W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems;
F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit;
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy;
Tom Wolfe,The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test;
Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations;
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self;
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch;
D.H. Lawrence,Women in Love;
A.S. Neill, Summerhill;
Roald Dahl, Matilda;
Alice Miller, Pictures of a Childhood;
A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic;
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams;
Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy;
Peter Wright,Spycatcher; and
Rick Gekoski, Staying Up.

And there was a good enough mix of the familiar and the new to keep my interest throughout.  Rick is basically an academic (ex-lecturer in English at Warwick University) turned rare book dealer, and has many contacts in the world of literature.  And oh yes, he’s been a judge on the Man Booker Prize.  So, as far as literature is concerned I guess he’s qualified to write about books, which he does eruditely, knowledgeably and perhaps above all, humorously.

Rick’s book is not just about books of course, but also about himself, and I have to say, his life has been interesting.  He writes about his childhood in a way which explains his love of reading, and like so many avid readers, their literary imagaination seems to have come alive through gaining access to an adult library at an early age.  I remember at age 14 being able to graduate from the junior public library to the adult library, and finding riches there beyond belief.  My own interest seems to have been in humour (Patrick Campbell, Georges Mikes, Leo Rosten, Stephen Potter), whereas Rick Gekoski seems to have got his rocks off by exploring his parents extensive library of psycho-sexual literature, whether Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing, or Sexual Anomalies and Perversions by Magunus Hirschfield.

Thankfully this stage seems not to have lasted too long and in no time Rick was deep in Holden Caulfield’s life in Catcher in The Rye (ah, EVERYONE I knew back then seemed to read Catcher, but how many young people know it today?).

And then Rick read T S Eliot, The Waste Land, and I just have to agree with his choice and the influence it had on him.  I read it when I was about fifteen and remember spending whole evenings trying to decode is mysteries and to grasp hold of the word pictures it presented to me.  It inspired me to write, and what greater commendation is there than that?  Wonderful stuff: –  and then to discover so much more in Four Quartets, which I soon found was recorded on LP records by Alex Guiness whose rich, actorial voice so enhanced my understanding of Little Gidding.

Isn’t the pleasure of reading a book like Outside of a Dog so much to do with discovering shared experiences, that sense of inwardly saying, “Ah yes”, when the writer enthuses about one’s own literary loves?

Rick progresses through some fairly esoteric stuff on his journey to Silence of the Lambs (and yes, I agree, even Robert Harris deserves a place in the canon because of his creation of Hannibal Lecter, a character so real he must jump off any page that contains a mention of him).  But to reach Lecter we progress through R D Laing, Germaine Greer (this is a very 60s list at this point), and even touches on Hume, Descartes and A J Eyer.

I was quite pleased to see Carl Hiassen in Rick’s list, for we must all have some lighter reads to keep us going (I confess to reading every Lee Child book as it is released), but it was fascinating to read Rick’s encounters with the Cambridge spies – Kim Philby etc, and Rick actually travelled to Moscow to meet Mrs Philby.

This is a very interesting book which must keep any avid reader interested throughout its 300 pages.  I reached the end and could have done with more, and what greater tribute to a book is there than that?   Its a great book to dip into, and also one to read from cover to cover in a couple of days.  I am sure it will remain on my shelves as a regular reference point and I’m pleased I bought it.

Kafka has always interested me, but I’m not a great one for biographies so this seemed a good way of learning more about this favorite writer than I would glean from a Wikipedia article or some-such.  In any case I was on my way home after a visit to the Tate Gallery, so was in the mood for more visuals rather than immediately descending down into pages of text.

I think the first thing to say is that the book is a work of art in its own right.  The design of the volume is immediately attractive, and when you open it up, the eye is drawn into a fascinating and complex set of images, showing Crumb’s interpretation of life in early 20th century Prague.

Take this illustration of Kafka’s home life for example, where poor Georg has to look after his elderly (but still tyrannical) father.

Crumb’s larger than life images somehow portray the essence of the father son relationship.  I am not saying that words could not provide a more accurate “picture” of the realities of the situation, but for a quick impression, Crumb and writer David Zane Mairowitz do a pretty good job.

Its a little like seeing a film of Kafka’s life, but more than that, because Crumb adds his own unique and definitely eccentric perspective.  There must be a whole set of people who would baulk at a full-scale written account of Kafka’s life who might glean quite a lot from this graphic novel format.

Perhaps the book should just be seen as entertainment in its own right, but at least its entertainment which very successfully communicates a lot of information.

I enjoyed this book and wouldn’t hesitate to try some more titles from this useful series.

Swift writes on a vast range of topic, and rarely fails to please.  I first came to his work through Waterland, one of those books which managed to draw me into a wholly believable yet utterly strange landscape (in this case The Fens) which I had never encountered before.  Since then I lingered in the Fens while on a business trip to King’s Lynn, a journey which I found myself interpreting through my memories of Waterland.

Then Last Orders came along and quite rightly won the Booker Prize (and was later filmed so effectively with Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay and others).  Since then I’ve read most of Swift’s books and enjoyed them all so it was difficult to resist this varied collection of pieces from such a wide range of sources.

In Making An Elephant, we find episodes from Swift’s life, illustrated by short articles, portraits of other writers, interviews, poems and essays.   It is an ideal book to dip into, but I found myself reading the whole thing over a couple of days, conscious that it is also a book I will enjoy having on my shelves to refer to when thinking about the writing process or just wanting to recall some of the evocative scenes described in it.

The book contains some nice stories.  I enjoyed reading about Swift’s year in Greece as a young man, and his discovery of the Russian writer Isaac Babel, who accompanied him almost as a friend through the pages of his Collected Stories.  I then read how Graham took his friend Kazuo Ishiguro (“Ish”) to help him choose a new guitar, ending up with a beautiful hand-made Spanish guitar on which he sometimes “murders Bach” after a hard day’s writing.  I agree with him that “playing a musical instrument “tells you quite a lot about the mysterious process of discovering what you have inside”.

For anyone wanting to understand Swift’s book Waterland there is a transcript of an in-depth interview with Swift, conducted by Patrick McGrath (another fine writer), which provides a huge amount of background information on this remarkable book.

The poems are accessible and evocative.  I enjoyed The Bookmark for example in which he writes about books which he started to read long ago but never finished:

Living by the sea as I do, I liked Swift’s thoughts about our attraction to the coast in his essay, “I do like to be beside the seaside”:

There is so much to mention in this book its hard to know what to leave out in this review.  However, the eponymous essay, “Making an Elephant”, is Swift’s memorial to his father, in which he managed to revive memories of my own childhood through his descriptions of a 1950s Sydenham, South London, in which I also spent quite a bit of time.  One of my uncles had a Vauxhall Wyvern like Swift’s father’s, “curvaceous and thickly chromed”.  My own father had only a Ford Popular but I, like Swift, made journeys in the passenger seat of the Ford along Crystal Palace Parade, with views of London to the north having a “fairy-tale aura . . a sea of lights, a black bowl of jewels”.

Later, Swift makes a wooden elephant from three pieces of plywood glued together.  His father suggests painting it yellow or pink from his impressive array of paint pots, but Graham chooses grey, “not a true elephant grey, but the only grey available, the one used in finishing off Airfix kits, battleship grey”.  The seriousness of children sometimes contrasts with the fantasies of adults.

I enjoyed a sample of local history in Swift’s essay on Wandsworth, and agree with him that Wandsworth Common has “an intricacy, a sheltering fragmentedness, even bit of Sylvan semi-rusticity”.  I know what he means; the villages of London still leave their mark, giving great character to what at first impression can be vaguely seedy urban sprawl.  Swift then writes in his room in Wandsworth about the process of writing, revealing that he writes his books with fountain pen and ink, believing that “a pen gets whatever is in your head onto the page more quickly and effectively than anything that’s been invented”.

Having skimmed through this book again in order to write this review, I don’t think I’ll be putting it on the shelf quite yet.  I think its one I will want to dip into for the next few weeks at least.  I’d recommend it to anyone who likes Swift’s books, or someone who writes, or maybe just anyone who’d appreciate a rich anthology of good writing.

I am used to hearing how books educate, inform and enlighten and it was a surprise to read that the wholly unenlightened Adolf Hitler was “possessed by a voracious appetite for reading”.  From his earliest years after returning from the First World War battle-front in France, Hitler scoured the book-stalls of Munich to fill two book cases in his rented rooms.  He read “intently, even fiercely”, usually late into the night, and Ryback records an occasion when Eva Braun interrupted a reading session and was “dispatched with a tirade that sent her hurtling red-faced down the hallway”.

Associates  recalled, “I can never remember Adolf without books”, and “books were his world”, with reading being a “deadly serious business”.

A list exists of Hitler’s borrowings from a right-wing lending library in Munich and shows that between 1919 and 1921, he borrowed over a hundred entries ranging from early church history to first-hand accounts of the Russian revolution. The list includes an large number anti-Semitic texts such as “The International Jew – The Worlds Foremost Problem”, “Luther and the Jews” and many others.

Timothy Ryback explains that Hitler was never open to alternative views of life.  Hitler had a “theory of reading” which precluded this, comparing the process of reading to “collecting stones to fill a mosaic of preconceived notions”.  He studied books to support his ideas and to provide further evidence for the conclusions he had already drawn.  I am so used to thinking of reading as enlightenment that Hitler’s approach is somehow shocking:  it is almost an “anti-reading”, the object of which is to slam the doors on new thoughts rather than to seek the widening of perspectives which “real” reading brings.

It is almost terrifying to read of the books Hitler collected.  Every theme of those years was covered in great depth, whether eugenics, anti-Semitism, military strategy, Germanic myths, occultism.  The library abounded with title such as “Teachings on Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene”, “Terminating Reproductive Capacity for Racial-Hygiene and Social Reasons”, and “The Racial Typology of the German People”.  Clearly Hitler found a considerable amount of pseudo-scientific support for his theories.

Ryback found that many of the books in the Library of Congress collection had pencilled annotations with under-linings and double margin scores.  Some books fell open at favourite passages and have signs of frequent of sustained study.  The book “Racial Typology of the German People” shows signs of “frequent or sustained study” and “opens effortlessly to reveal worn pages and a ragged tear along the inside cover where the spine has begun to come apart”.

Many of Hitler’s books were gifts, presented with adulatory messages inscribed on the title page:  “in loyalty and reverence”,  “to our beloved Fuhrer in celebration”,  “my Fuhrer in gratitude and loyalty”, and the combination of these messages with Hitler’s hideous ex libris plate is genuinely chilling.  We read of the publisher J F Lehamnn Verlag who’s fifty-odd titles provided “the building blocks of Nazism”, some of which seem to have been specifically published as educational primers for Hitler himself.  A book containing harrowing illustrations on sterilisation are inscribed to Hitler “in great friendship”.

Among this horrific collection of volumes, we occasionally catch glimpses of Hitler’s lighter reading – Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Don Quixote as well as most of the adventure stories of Karl May, whose adventure stories of the American West were a life-long favourite.

A fascinating Afterword describes what happened to Hitler’s library after 1945, ending with an indication that inheritors of books containing the Hitler Ex Libris plate (some of which were taken as souvenirs after the war) have found them to be a malign influence who’s effect can only be expunged by donating them to a library.

In finishing this review I will quote Alberto Manguel who in his book, The Library At Night, writes of Hitler’s library,

not all our libraries come from dreams; some belong to the realm of nightmares.  Among the volumes kept in the Library of Congress are a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed by its author “to Monsieur Hitler”, and a 1932 treatise on chemical warfare explaining the uses of prussic acid, later commercialised as ZyKlon B.  Let there be libraries that the imagination condemns simply because of the reputation of their reader.

At first glance it appears to be yet another of those attractively-produced little books aimed at the Christmas market – the sort of thing which is opened with a laugh but soon bores.  However, anyone who loves books will find plenty to interest here, some light and inconsequential facts (the first spliff in literature, the shortest poem, the longest book etc), but even these, with Sutherland’s immense store of knowledge, are set in a context which illuminate rather merely amuse.  (and incidentally, the first spliff appears in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and the longest book is Clarissa by Samuel Richardson and is about a million words long).

I loved the chapter on food, “Literary Baked Meats” which describes the gastronomic preferences of various writers and left me wanting to go to the Savoy to have an Omelette Arnold Bennett (a wish which is easily denied on discovering that it costs about £50 – and can also be made at home). Sutherland has found are many food-based “curiosities”, not least discovering foods which were first mentioned in literature and then went on to become products in real-life. For example, the early science-fiction novel The Coming Race (1871) by Bulwer-Lytton shares the “hollow-earth” theme of Jules Verne’s Journey To the Centre of the Earth, and describes a life-giving fluid under the earth’s crust called “vril”.  Scottish manufacturer John Lawson Johnston saw a business opportunity there and added “Bov” (for beef) to the front of Bulwer-Lytton’s “vril” and as they say, the rest is history.

Stories like this kept me entertained while on holiday in France a couple of weeks ago.  I enjoyed the chapter “Tools of the Trade” in which Sutherland gives his readers such information as the first book written on a typewriter (Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer) and the first authors to use computers (with Desmond Bagley and Arthur C Clarke being the main contenders).  I have to say, that for the latter category, I remember reading an article  by Terry Pratchett in a mid-80s computer magazine about his use of the Amstrad PCW.

There are 13 chapters in the book including Mammon in the Book Trade (interesting examples of product placement in novels), Name Games (including pseudonyms and the stories behind their choice), Literary Records (worst novelist ever, longest time to write a book, most misquoted etc).  These are not presented in list format but are well-written self-contained pieces.    Sutherland acknowledges the help of Messrs Google and Xerox but I don’t think anyone without Sutherland’s vast literary knowledge would have been able to come up with such a comprehensive set of topics or researched them to the same depth as him.  I found this a very satisfying read which will occupy an important place in my “books about books” category.