Room to Read makes the Big Book Swap the new Book Club

Room to Read supports a cause very close to my heart (children’s literacy in the developing world), and is an organisation I am proud to support. Their premise is simple, clear to understand and significant: World change starts with educated children.

In recent months, my close group of girlfriends from school – whom I love dearly and who, lucky for me, I still get to see on a regular basis – have started a bit of a book club. It’s basically just another excuse to meet up over a bottle of wine, share good food and a good old gossip but, as well-educated young women, we also love a good read. And, we came to realise, we don’t read enough.

Well, imagine if we couldn’t read at all? Imagine if our fathers insisted that as soon as we were old enough to work in the local village, we dropped out of school and earned a decent wage instead? What if we couldn’t get to a school because it was so darn far away? Or because we had to look after our pain-in-the-ass younger brother instead?

I’m not going to get all charidee on you, but it’s worth thinking about, which is why I think Room to Read’s Big Book Swap is such a genius invention.

As a fundraising mechanism, it is a completely fluid concept, which is namely, this: instead of all going out and buying brand new copies of the same book, take your £8.99 (let’s round it up to £10) and put it in a central Big Book Swap pot for Room to Read. Then bring along a well-loved, well-read copy of your favourite book, and share that with the group instead. You learn a little bit more about each other’s past, reading habits and experience, you hopefully get introduced to a brand new title and you get the fuzzy warm glow of having given to charity.

And get this: every £10 you raise (give or take, that’s the price of one shiny new book in the UK) will buy you TEN local language books in Africa. TEN.

What’s not to love about that?

You can set up a small Big Book Swap with three of your closest friends. Or you can set up a table at work and get the whole building involved over the course of a day. You could host a fun singles evening at your local pub (bonus: all attendees will have at least one thing in common from the get-go, a love of books) or even a tea party for your kids and their friends after work. Take the concept into your school, university, office building or local sports club.

Or just use it as another excuse for a bottle of wine and a gossip.

But find a way to do it. The official day is Tuesday 29th March, and thy want to see as many events happening on that day as possible, but don’t be restricted by the day – the important thing is that you get involved. And to find out how to get your dosh to the nice folks at Room to Read (and to tell them about what a rip-roaring success your event was afterwards), email london@roomtoread.org.

And come and tell us what you think on Facebook too.

Lady Dior: when literature shapes fashion

I had a feeling my Links of London post wouldn’t be the last LFW ad to grace this blog.

Flipping through the FT‘s fashion special of its weekly portion of riches, How to Spend It last weekend, I was again savouring all the luxury brand creatives as much as (if not more than) the editorial pieces between. Typical marketer I guess.

In the opening spread, the enviable elegance of the magnifique Marion Cotillard seeped from the Dior pages. But this time it was the choice of prop that caught my eye.

© Dior / FT

Granted, the striking red and black contrast of the composition called for a book jacket of the same – peeping out of Cotillard’s arm candy to add a subtle hint of literary culture to her undeniable beauty. But was Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye the only one the stylist could lay her hands on? Or was there something deeper that informed the choice?

I noticed it because Catcher happens to be one of my top three books of all time. The intensely human centre of the narrative has made it one the preeminent novels of the twentieth century. Perhaps the implication is that, like the book, Lady Dior and her purse of choice are truly iconic. So was it chance that the Penguin cover design happened to fit so sharply into Dior’s latest creative?

© Dior / FT

Either which way, the choice was interesting. While high fashion houses like Dior spend hundreds of thousands on advertising creatives inventing a luxury world which its audience buys into (the classic, ‘buy the lifestyle not just the product’), essentially they do need to shift sales. When said product is included in shot, you can bank on every effort having been made to draw your attention to it.

Does the bag have the same presence of focus in the image with the book removed?

Thus, arguably, in this particular composition, Catcher has a greater starring role than Cotillard.

But for those more interested in the bag than its contents, you can snap up the ‘Le 30′ black lambskin leather number with ‘Cannage’ embroidery for a mere £1,550 from Dior.com now. Random fact? The Le 30 range owes its name to the number 30 in Christian Dior’s Avenue de Montaigne address.

My favourite? Well, it has to be the pink really doesn’t it. And just a snip at £1,290:

© Dior.com

A Generation X reading of Dangerous Liaisons

Two radically different novels, written over two centuries apart. And yet I found a commonality yesterday that I felt was worth sharing.

In Helen Constantine‘s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Laclos‘ most notorious and celebrated work, she touches on the aristocratic social pressures felt by Valmonte and Merteuil that prevent them from succombing to any ‘real’ emotion throughout the entirety of the novel. She summarises thus:

In that debased society love is viewed as a failing, a weakness, and something to be avoided at all costs.

Valmonte’s connection with Tourvel is the closest we get to raw emotion (for the pop culture translation, that would be the Sebastian/Annette, Ryan/Reese pairing in the Cruel Intentions adaptation), but he is forced to deny himself even that due to the restrictions imposed upon him by his upbringing and continued engagement with polite society.

In fact, this was possibly the greatest moment in the 1999 remake – the emtionally charged raw battle between Sebastian and Annette in her bedroom when he tears himself away, all the while belying his true feeling for her by the fact he can hardly stand the deception any longer.

© Columbia Pictures 1999

What did this remind me of? A couple of weeks ago I picked out a few of Coupland’s glossary definitions that he used to define his era of a nihilistic void to share on this very blog. And two of these, when combined together, exactly mirror Valmonte’s struggle, providing a deeper exploration of Constantine’s statement above:

1) Derision Preemption: a life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers

2) The Cult of Aloneness: the need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships, often brought about by overly high expectations of others

The former, when applied to Valmonte’s eighteenth century aristocratic setting, makes perfect sense – he is physcially unable to admit any form of emotional attachment for fear of derision from his peers, largely fearing Merteuil’s reaction (which is indeed mockery combined with a healthy dose of jealousy).

Valmonte’s expendable is his relationship (or potential relationship) with Tourvel, additionally fuelled by unrealistic expectations of her heralded by his previous relations with Merteuil. For Valmonte, no one will ever match up to Merteuil (he holds her somewhat on a pedastal), and in any case, his desperate need for complete independence from any form of attachment prevents him from committing to any kind of meaningful relationship with Tourvel regardless.

So what can we draw from this parallel? Was Laclos simply miles ahead of his time in his awareness of basic human emotion? Or has it taken 200 years for the inclinations and emotional withdrawal of eighteenth century French aristocracy to filter down to mass society? Or, and this is the one that I like the most, were both writers simply finely tuned to a fundamental of human nature?

Modern pop-psychology and relationship advisers, the likes of Greg Behrendt et al, would have us believe that the non-committal emotional ‘retardedness’ that both Coupland and Laclos touch on here is almost exclusively (or at least primarily) a male outlook. But surely the Marquise de Merteuil puts forward just as strong an example as Valmonte? Coupland’s definitions were not solely ascribed to Andy – would Claire have not sympathised in the same way? In other words, the girls can be just as bad as the boys – throw in a manipulative streak and possibly even worse.

If such principles can cross centuries, cultures and oceans, permeating time and history just as fervently as the pop culture consciousness, then surely there must be something in it?

And just as an endnote – Blair and Chuck = Katheryn & Sebastian? Yes even Gossip Girl has jumped in on this particular battle of the sexes.