McCrum in Ten Chapters

The Observer's literary editor Robert McCrum hangs up his hat after more than 10 years in the job and gives us a fascinating whistle-stop tour of the changes he has seen in the publishing world in that time.

Along the way he shares his thoughts on subjects such as: Zadie Smith and the new generation of authors; how Amazon.com has changed the retail market; the rise and rise of Rowling; Franzen snubbing Oprah; the explosion of literary festivals; how literary prizes have come to be the most reliable guides in a perplexing landscape; why McEwan's success typifies the decade; how blogs have taken over the role of reviewing; how Lynne Truss talks to our anxiety in an age of cultural upheaval; and finally, the Kindle.

This article is a must-read for anyone interested in the trends, and it's nice to discover that McCrum is very optimistic about the future of the book :

... what I have described are the birth pangs of a golden age. The market for the printed book is now global; the opportunities for the digital book are almost unimaginable. To be a writer in the English language today is to be one of the luckiest people alive.

Soap Oprah

Fiction needs all the big mouth friends it can get, so pleased I am indeed that Oprah Winfrey is going to feature works by contemporary writers again. Now, I'm no fan of her often melodramatic and always glurgy talk show, but she's put some pretty strong titles in the limelight in the past, including works by Toni Morrison, Wally Lamb and Anita Shreve. And her endorsement means that these works are also thrust before the Malaysian reading public. We all like to be told what's good to read - no shame in that.

My own particular debt of gratitude to Oprah is that without her book club, I probably never would have heard of one of my favourite books - Bernhard Schlink's The Reader.

Oprah stopped featuring contemporary titles after a spat with Jonathan Franzen (author of The Corrections, a novel I very much enjoyed) in 2002.

She then decided that dead authors were a safer bet, since they couldn't talk back. But the classic titles she chose did not generate the same enthusiasm, and readers lobbied for contemporary fiction to be put back on the menu. She's now featuring A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.

Do check out Oprah's website for some interesting discussion of some very good reads.