Authors Adrift in the Blogosphere

The blogosphere can also be a rough place for fragile ego of authors writes Pamela Paul in the New York Times about writers who google themselves to listen into conversations about their books. There's also a list of the most blogged about books of the year. Nice to see Orwell's 1984 is still very much shaping the collective consciousness.

It's for sure a funny feeling that whatever you put out about book on your blog may be visited by the author. Leon got a nice e-mail not long ago from Irish novelist Sebastian Barry, and I was thrilled to have Paul Andersen drop by and leave a comment after I'd made mention of his huge tome, Hunger's Brides back in September, when the book was reviewed by the New York Times. It does pull you up and make you realise that you need to be fair and accurate and even sound reasonably intelligent in what you write!

I fall more in love with blogging as a medium all the time. Connectivity and immediacy. Total editorial control. From my head to yours, across the city or across the world. I surprise myself by wanting to write for my blog much much more than I want to write for paper publication and get paid for it.

And I got my 30 seconds of fame when I (apparently) got quoted on the lit pages of the Guardian with a wise comment on the Booker winner!

Now tell me, how many of you google your own name every day to see what the world is saying about you? (Guilty!)

The Incredible Shrinking Book

Was reminded of one of my dad's favourite jokes:

I learned speed reading and managed to complete War and Peace in half an hour. ... It was about Russia.

It seems that readers are less patient with long books these days and now shorter versions of some classic tomes look set to hit the bookshops. The first book to receive this treatment is Tolstoy's War and Peace in a new translation by Anthony Briggs. Later, a shorter and less theoretical A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawkins is due for release: a sort of dumbed down versions for dummies like me. I've attempted this book three times and always seem to disappear down a black hole halfway through.

I was surprised though to read that Susanna Clarke's fairly recent award-winner Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is to receive this treatment as well. I must confess though that I am among the readers who have been put off the book by its size. That's not to be pathetic: a big book claims too many hours of your life! We are living in the age of ficiton overload with more titles being published than ever before while our attention spans get ever shorter.

On the other hand I have mixed feelings about the other titles on the list for the shortening treatment: I've been meaning to get round to reading Moby Dick and Clarissa for years, but always something newer and more happening gets in the way. (My cheeks are burning with shame.) Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon has been sitting on my "to-be-read-shelf" since last year (More bookguilt!) when I felt it was a gap in my own education that needed filling.

But I have read Underworld by Don DeLillo and think it quite brilliant. I gave it five stars on Amazon and wrote gushingly:

'Underworld' requires time and effort on the part of the reader, but is immensely satisfying. The story of ordinary lives lived in the shadow of the cold war, fits together like a chinese puzzle : it is left to the reader to discover all the interconnections of plot and character. I found myself rereading whole sections to enjoy the beauty of the language. Worth reading a second time!

Not that I think I will ever have time and patience to read it a second time. And I'd love to know whether anyone in Malaysia has managed to even get past the very difficult first chapter?

Wonder if Vikram Seth or Paul Anderson will find themselves getting chopped in the fullness of time! A painful thought, no doubt.

A Suitable Heavyweight

The New York Times carried a story the other day about Paul Anderson's debut novel Hunger's Brides. They say it is "certain to be one of the biggest books of the fall". And in more ways than one.

The book is 1,360 pages long and weighs 4 pounds 9 ounces. (Please can someone else convert that to kilos because I've failed every maths exam that life has ever thrown at me!) Anyway, about as much as a six-pack of beer or a chihuhua dog.

But what really made me smile was this comment on Khitabkhana's entry about the book:

It is an incredibly sad moment for the 25-year old history of Indian Literature. Our reigning champion, our soap-operatic gift to humanity, our Suitable Boy, has been beaten by bloody eleven pages. This evidently is a colonial conspiracy.

Vikram Seth urges his readers in his A Word of Thanks poem at the beginning of the book:

Buy me before good sense insists
You'll strain your purse and strain your wrists.

If I was ever told that I was going to be marooned on a desert island and could only take then books with me, for sure this would be one. Even if it weighed more than everything else in my luggage combined.

I read the book in a week when I had shingles and I was so totally engrossed that I couldn't bear to come back to the "real world".

Of course, the question that keeps the pages turning is who will Lata marry in the end? Will her head or her heart govern her choice? I'm a romantic and wanted the former, my colleagues all argued that it should be the latter because Lata is Asian, and therefore pragmatic, after all. Of course Seth (the rascal!), keeps us guessing right to the end.

And I was open-mouthed in awe at the way that Seth juggles a cast of characters larger than I'd ever have thought possible (there's someone new on almost every page!) embracing a huge sweep of society. I felt as if I had been in India for that week.

The book is way too short. Perhaps that sequel is called for!