Nick Hornby's 40 of the Best

If we are lucky, we read the right books at the right times, and both the books and the times should be left alone. Have you read Moby-Dick yet? No? Well, don't go back to The Catcher in the Rye, then. It was great once and maybe you're asking too much of it if you want it to be great all over again. This is not to diminish the books that we read at earlier stages in our lives, not to make the claim that, as we get older, our critical faculties get sharper - the sad truth is that we lose as much as we gain.

Nick Hornby's absolutely right about the impossibility of rereading certain books we loved when we were younger and feeling the same way about them. And I find myself saying increasingly about books "My much younger self would have loved this, but the me I am now is unimpressed." One of the perils, I think of growing older and having read so many other books.

Hornby has now finished his tenure at The Believer where he wrote an engaging monthly column about the books he'd bought and the books he'd read, which were then collected The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. Now he has been asked to choose 40-odd books for a writer's table at Waterstone's bookshops across the UK. His highly browsable, completely unsnobbish list is here . And although he recognises how hard it is to make reading suggestions for other people, I think he makes a pretty good job of it!

Potter Magic for Christmas

Potter mania takes over the Muggle world once again with the launch of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of five short tales ostensibly written by a 15th-century wizard and translated from the original runes by Hermione Grainger.

The footage above from the Telegraph is of the launch at Waterstones in London. Fans queued all night and some even flew in from overseas to be the first to get their hands on this last little bit of magic in the series.

(Bookshops here - brace yourselves!)

Did Waterstones Wimp Out ? You Betcha

Has Waterstones lost its spine? A contributor called Brett on the political blog Harry's Place certainly thinks so.

The British bookstore chain pulled the plug on a booksigning by South Wales poet and playwright Patrick Jones at the 11th hour because of threats of protest from Christian extremists. He was due to launch a new poetry collection Darkness is Where the Stars Are.

Stephen Green (right) and campaigning organisation Christian Voice vowed to disrupt the event if it went ahead, saying that the book was "blasphemous".

In the end the poet had to sign copies in the street.

So what was so controversial about the poems? Jan Fortune -Wood, commissioning editor at Cinnamon Press (which published the book) :

A few of the poems deal with Patrick’s strong views on religion, particularly the way in which it is often associated with military conflict, the subjugation of women or movements that exclude the ‘outsider’. These are issues that art should rightly be pushing to the forefront of debate in a liberal society and there are people of faith who are concerned with such issues as well as humanists and secularists.

William Crawley on the BBC website says :

Mr Jones is plainly a poet who addresses political and religious themes in his work. In this collection, some poems explore the portrayal of women and some deal with the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. He uses language that is, at times, raw. He would not be the first poet to address these themes or to use raw language.

But as Fortune-Wood goes on to say :

Debate is not served by caving in to extremists, who do not even represent the majority of Christians, let alone the values of civil, liberal society, but proceed by threat and intimidation.

Surely a bookstore has a duty to support its authors - from whom it makes its money, after all, and it's necessary to stand up against all who would silence a writer's voice. (Or the space for other voices shrinks away too.)

It's the job of the British police to offer protection against intimidation and thuggery, should the bounds of legitimate protest be overstepped.

You can hear both Jones and Green talking on the BBC Wales website.

Here is the publisher's statement :



If you feel strongly about the issue, do drop an e-mail to Gerry Johnson, Waterstone's Managing Director at gerry.johnson@waterstones.com . (Be polite, please!)

You can also support Patrick Jones by buying a copy of his book from Cinnamon Press or from Amazon. (Mine is on the way!)

Postscript :

Carrie Dunn on the Guardian blog calls Waterstones "cowardly".

(Thanks, Jilly Kidd, a Second Life friend, for bringing this issue to my attention yesterday.)

Digital D-Day?

More ebooks vs trad book debate in the British press following the announcement yesterday that the Sony reader will be sold from September by Waterstones bookshop for £199 (which is a hell of a lot less than the cost of the iLiad favoured by Borders).

Every business on which the development will have an impact – from booksellers, publishers and e-tailers – will be watching how UK consumers take to e-book readers ...

the Bookseller notes while Graeme Neill on the Bookseller blog considers the knock-on effect for the British publishing industry, and wonders what Amazon.com will do now - they have thus far refused to discuss a UK launch date for the Kindle. (Are they playing a wait-and-see game?)

However, Neill points out :

... the most interesting thing that will happen over the 12 months is whether the public are convinced. A £199 price point is attractive to early adopters but according to our features editor Tom Tivnan, the only member of The Bookseller to use the device, it is clunky to use. With the likes of the Nintendo DS and iPod on the market, the public is used to beautifully designed products that scream 'must have'. Will the Iliad and Sony Reader capture the imagination in the same way?

John Sutherland muses about the advent on the ebook on the Guardian blog and its likely impact :

... my feeling is that the current batch of e-readers are still two electronic generations premature. We await the Model T. But the seed is sown, and we won't have to wait long - the market is too big not to be filled. Will it kill the traditional book? No more than TV killed the movies, or the movies killed the theatre. It will, of course, change the cultural constellation. But, having enjoyed 500 years of dominance, the codex book can't complain about taking a back seat for the next half millennium. ... What the e-reader means - in the not too distant future - is as much of a cultural explosion as the "rather unusual manuscript" brought with it in the 15th century. It's not a storage device but a portal, a Lewisian wardrobe, opening into new worlds. New possibilities in linkage and illustration will supplement facsimile type.

Sutherland's vision of the future of the ebook is just beautiful (and - ahem - similar to my own!) :

In a few years, you'll be able to hear the author's voice - should you so wish - or switch between script and oral versions, full-text or abbreviated text, or digest. You'll be able to "dialogue" the book, or its maker. Soundtracks will be as possible, and as enriching, as they are with movies. Media mix will create new realms of literary artistry. Perhaps even smells. ... In 20 years, we won't know how we lived without the thing.

Postscript (27/7/08) :

There's a very interesting debate about ebooks in The Observer. Author Peter Conrad makes the case against them :

My iLiad may have gobbled up the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Dickens and DH Lawrence, but somewhere inside that slim slab of grey plastic they had apparently dematerialised, waiting to be summoned from the ether, page by page. All those thick books, heavy with experience, were now weightless, like ghostly replicas of the tattered, dog-eared, much-pored-over counterparts on my shelves. ... The iLiad, I discovered when I tried it out, is itself a merely metaphoric book. What you read is 'digital print' - print without an imprint, hovering in a grey cloud on the screen, remote from the gravity of the printing press or the flourishes of human handwriting.

But novelist Naomi Alderman sees the ebook's tremendous potential :

What's most exciting about ebooks is not what they can do at the moment but what they may do in the future. The iLiad can connect to the internet: imagine reading Middlemarch and, at a touch of a button, being able to look at images of the same paintings and sculptures Dorothea looks at in Rome or, for academics, being able to see links to all articles which reference the passage you're reading. ... Works written specially for the ebook reader are an even more exciting prospect. A piece of 'ebook native' fiction may allow you to hear the birdsong while reading a romantic outdoor scene, or may automatically subscribe you to a fictional newspaper mentioned in a crime thriller. Some will consider such things gimmicky and a threat to 'proper' reading, but different kinds of text can co-exist. Audiobooks haven't killed the printed word, television hasn't killed radio. What we're seeing isn't the death of the book, but the creation of a new art form. ... That form is still in its infancy, but as a novelist I'm excited by the creative opportunities it will bring. Meanwhile, as a reader, I'm simply excited by the possibility of regaining some floorspace. The e-reader will never completely replace paper books, but it's got an awful lot to recommend it.

A Faulk-Full of Fancies

UK bookstore chain Waterstones is introducing a new campaign called Writer's Table as part of Waterstone's Writer's Year, which is designed to highlight the role of the author, The Bookseller reports. Top authors are given a freehand to select the 40 books which have most shaped their writing.

Critically acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks goes first, and you can read his hand-written review of each book here.

THE FULL LIST :

• Jake’s Thing by Kingsley Amis
• Success by Martin Amis
• Tim All Alone by Edward Ardizzone
• The Garden of the Finzi Continis by Giorgio Bassani
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess **
  
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens*
• The Waste Land by T S Eliot **
  
• The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald *
  
• Moonraker by Ian Fleming
• The Magus by John Fowles **
  
• Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser
• Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn
• Loving. Living. Party-Going by Henry Green
• The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary
  
• The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst *
  
• The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne
• An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan
• The Lake by Yasunari Kawabata
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera **
  
• The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin *
  
• The Rainbow by D H Lawrence **
  
• The Adventures of Dr Dolittle by Hugh Lofting *
  
• The Scent of Dried Roses by Tim Lott
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• The House of Elrig by Gavin Maxwell *
  
• The First Day of the Somme by Martin Middlebrook
• Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
• The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov **
  
• The World is Not Enough by Zoe Oldenbourg
• Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
• The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger *
  
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzehenitsyn **
  
• The Red and The Black by Stendhal
• A Cruel Madness by Colin Thubron
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler
• A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White
• Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge*
  
• Germinal by Emil Zola

Of course, as with all booklists, the tendency is to meme it. I've given one star to those I've read (15 in all) and two stars to those that would probably be one my own top forty of all time.

25 of the Best

British bookshop chain Waterstone's is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a list of the 25 authors it predicts will be the biggest names of the next 25 years. According to Waterstone's website:

The '25 Authors for the Future' were nominated by publishers, editors and agents, who were asked to select the emergent British writers of the 21st Century who they believed would go on to produce the most impressive body of work over the next quarter century. Over a hundred nominations were received, and the final 25 were selected by a panel at Waterstone's. These authors - some familiar and some relatively unknown - were selected from all genres and for readers of all ages, covering everything from children's picture books to literary fiction, historical non-fiction, crime, science fiction, travel and cookery.

And the list in full:

Naomi Alderman

Susanna Clarke

Siobhan Dowd

Jasper Fforde

Julia Golding

Emily Gravett

Steven Hall

Jane Harris

Peter Hobbs

Marina Lewycka

Robert Macfarlane

Gautam Malkani

Jon McGregor

Charlotte Mendelson

Richard Morgan

Maggie O'Farrell

Helen Oyeyemi

Jo Pratt

Dominic Sandbrook

CJ Sansom

Chris Simms

Nick Stone

Louise Welsh

Ben Wilson

Robyn Young

You can read all about the authors and their books here, and John Ezard's comments in the Guardian here.

Okay, let's play the "how many" game.

(Here's where the world sees what a pleb I am.)

I've heard of ten.
Possess books by only two of them (Monica Lewycka, Jon McGregor)
Have only read the first of these.

Comparative Literature

Here are a couple of nice things to amuse you this Monday morning.

There are all kinds of wacky facts about books in this PDF downloadable from the New York Times. (Or you can just click on the pic left if you're lazy.)

What are the best selling books internationally at the moment? Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, yes, you'd expect their works on the list. But Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies is in there too, and I'm also fascinated to learn that while Auster's book sold 70,000 copies in the US in 2006, it sold 165,00 copies in France!

There are also a couple of internationally best selling authors I'd never heard of (and I bet you haven't either) - Ildefonso Falcones de Sierra and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who both of course write in Spanish.

And the titles of some of the Harry Potter rip-offs around the world made me smile: my favourite is Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon (China)!

Statistic after statistic on the page shows just how much work in translation is one way traffic, with far more American titles being translated into foreign languages than the other way round.

You might also like to take a look at the list of 100 top favourite books compiled by British bookchain, Waterstones and reproduced in the Telegraph. The company asked its 5,000 staff to name their favourite five books written since 1982, the date Waterstones opened its first store.

(And yes, unbelievable as it sounds, the kind of people who work in bookshops in the UK do read, unlike too many of their counterparts here!)

The number of male authors on the list outweighs the number of female authors - this could be because (as my own small scale research bore out too) while women tend to read books by both men and women, men tend to read mostly books by men. (I'd love to know how many of those employees are blokes.)

Still, we do love to compare ourselves against lists and this one provides a very useful starting point for anyone who isn't too sure about what they might like to read.

Anyway, Happy World Book Day! Don't forget to stop off at a bookshop to buy yourself (and your loved one) a gift.