AS Byatt on why one should love the mysteries of this writer I’ve never heard of.

I have never been able to read Agatha Christie – the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn’t decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing. Sayers, Marsh and Allingham crossed the puzzle fiction with the romantic novel, and give us elegantly plotted love stories mixed in with the threads of death and detection.

Of these three, I love Allingham most, because she wrote best and is most surprising and satisfactory as a tale-teller. She has things in common with Georgette Heyer in her mix of pace and lightness. She has invented her own world, and we recognise with pleasure that we are in it.

How do you generate interest in your dictionary? Publish a words-of-the-year list.

“There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary,” said Erin McKean, a lexicographer at Oxford. While publishers can rely on coverage for new entries in just-published dictionaries, some reference books go for as long as a decade between revisions. “We are constantly surveilling the language to see what new words people are coming up with,” Ms. McKean said.

Doris gets her Nobel and gives her acceptance speech, centred around the idea of a “hunger for books”, transcribed here.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

A rumination on the place of the professional author in the political “discussions” of the day, tipped off by the whole Bennett/Amis bruhaha across the pond.

In fact, the connection between politics and literature in this country is more extensive than it seems. Many a Victorian cabinet minister doubled up as an essayist and reviewer: John Morley, who edited the Fortnightly Review, ended up as secretary for India. But by and large these writer-polemicists were belle-lettristes and weekend essayists: polemic was something they kept for the hustings and the opposition front bench. From the other side of the fence, the writer who makes a conscious decision to engage in the formal mechanisms of domestic politics – Hilaire Belloc, for example, who served as Liberal MP for Salford – is a comparative rarity. Much more common was Orwell’s refusal of the nomination for the Hampstead Garden Suburb seat in 1945 or Evelyn Waugh’s relief at not having joined the cavalcade of Winston Churchill’s “young men”.

Meanwhile, the reluctance of most contemporary writers to sound off on subjects which lie near to their heart has several explanations. The first is that time-honoured literary quietism, which usually lines up under the banner of “independence” and “being your own man”. The second is sheer self-preservation – see Martin Amis: the realisation that should you momentarily venture into the public realm to suggest that climate change is a bad thing or the government is inept, all kinds of people who would probably not know a book if it landed on their heads will rise up to criticise you for your presumption. The third is that, in a world full of unimaginable economic and cultural complexity, the writer – if he is honest with himself – will be disagreeably aware that his judgments are no more informed than anyone else’s. Evelyn Waugh, invited to contribute to the famous Spain: Authors Take Sides pamphlet of 1937, began by admitting that he knew the country only a tourist. The specimen contributor to the 2003 volume on Iraq probably knew even less.

And yet, whatever we might think about Martin Amis’s views on Islam or high-profile literary lobbying of international summit meetings, there is one compelling reason why these voices should be heard. Broadly speaking we inhabit a society in which certain political and cultural topics have more or less disappeared from public discussion, such is the anxiety with which politicians contemplate their approach.

David Orr starts off his NYT review of Michael O’Brien with some interesting thoughts on fame in the poetry world.

No contemporary poet is famous, but some are less unfamous than others. That’s because the poetry world, like most areas of American life, has its own peculiar celebrity system — and if the rewards of that system rarely involve gift suites filled with swag from Jean Patou, they remain tempting enough to keep grown writers hustling. The problem is, poetic stardom is an unpredictable business. Good writing doesn’t guarantee a reputation; bad writing doesn’t guarantee oblivion; nor can grace, money or nimble careerism entirely explain why Poet X reads to overflowing auditoriums, whereas Poet Y reads to his cats. Maybe it’s simply the case that, as William Munny remarked in “Unforgiven,” “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

The crime writer profiled around her recent marriage.

She started her career as a crime reporter, before moving on to work in the medical examiner’s office in Richmond, Virginia, and is as familiar with morgues as others are with supermarkets.

She flies helicopters, rides motorbikes and is terrier-like with her causes. Several years ago she set out to prove that the British Impressionist painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, and she is still on the case.

“The Sickert Trust had better watch out,” she warns tantalisingly, “when copyright expires on his letters in 2012.”

As for the cyber-stalker whom she recently successfully sued, she hisses: “I haven’t finished with him yet.”

Perhaps she has needed to act fierce. She’s so tiny that her high-heeled patent biker boots scarcely reach the ground from the hotel sofa. As a young tennis player, she tells me, “I had to play with the boys as there was no girls’ team, and they kept hitting balls right at me.”

When she started writing in 1990, she admits that she felt insecure.

“I had a lot to prove and probably a lot of anger and fear from my childhood. But I’m 51 now and not the same person.”

Will the new PM prizes down under have any cultural clout to go with the hefty purse of $100G? Doubtful, says one critic.

Each award will be worth $100,000, tax-free, and go to Australian writers regardless of where they live or what they write. There will be a further $100,000 to promote the prizes.

So unlike the Miles Franklin, currently the most significant fiction prize in Australia, which specifies that eligible novels must be about Australia in some form, the crucial element in the new prize is the Australian imagination.

The prizes will be the richest in the country in financial terms. But the question of their cultural worth is another matter.

And it remains to be seen if the new prizes give the fillip in sales that of the local prizes only the Miles seems consistently to do.

Mark Rubbo, a former Miles Franklin judge and managing director of Readings bookshops, said the impact of the new prizes depended on who ran them, how they selected the judges and how they promoted them. The crucial thing was that organisers consulted readers, writers, publishers and booksellers to develop a reputation.

“I don’t want to denigrate the Premiers’ prizes but they don’t have much impact. The risk is that unless the (PM’s) prizes are run creatively and intelligently, they will become like the Premiers’ prizes.”

Also under discussion down there, the progress of Melbourne’s bid to become City of Literature. Rivetting stuff.

I’m too ill today to stand the effort of dressing up in character and cutting through the ludicrous reams of spin with Bookninja’s aphoristic barbs, so you get a bunch of links. Toodle-oo.

• Two takes on adaptations of Pullman’s works… one theatre, one film
• City of Vancouver book award shortlist
• Netflix for books? (you don’t see too many dog-eared DVDs though…)
• School is killing poetry: laureate. Duh: Bookninja
• BR Meyers, he of tall poppies fame, is back, this time taking out Denis Johnson
• What happens when people start living like characters in novels

I predict that three days from now, David Sarno will write an article about the Kindle. Poof! Flock unto me, my children, for I am your prophet.

The Kindle makes it almost impossible to flip quickly between pages — since there are no pages. Locating a hastily read passage from earlier in the book is not even worth trying. To do so, you have to correctly guess and then input its numerical “location,” of which a longish book can easily have 10,000. Let’s see, that uncle character appeared a ways back . . . so . . . 3,458?

But let the Kindle bashing end there. No technology gets it right on the first try, and dwelling on one device’s shortcomings misses the broader point. A visually tolerable digital reading experience is here. As the e-book iterates, that experience will just get better. The digital readers will become more attractive and less expensive. Color will replace black and white, and buttons will disappear in favor of touch screens.

Practical and economic considerations will add up too. Think of all the books that are out of date upon publication. According to statistics from the Book Industry Study Group Inc., a market research firm that tracks the U.S. publishing industry, of the nearly 3.2 billion books expected to sell in 2007, almost 9% are high school and college text books, and another 9% are professional and reference books that cover fast-moving areas such as business, law, medicine and science. That’s 570 million books that you can never, ever update, and it’ll be the same next year.

• Surprise, surprise… Canadians don’t like the idea of foreign control of media…
• Calgary catholic schools join march of ignorance and bans Pullman
• Publishers honour critics
• Guardian First Book winner
• Intellectual property lawyers are backing the small press trying to publish a Potter encyclopedia against HRH’s wishes
• Lost Hamlet quarto, in which the mystery is solved by Fred, Velma, Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby (thanks, Michelle)

Fight promoter Shirley Dent examines the two heavyweights at her Guardian blog.

This year we are tackling the choices of George Brock, Saturday editor of The Times, and James Delingpole, journalist and author of How To Be Right, that caught my eye: Tolstoy goes head to head with Dickens. This is, I thought, a clash of the titans, a rare feast. The bookish balloonists, questioned on their choices, pulled no punches: Brock declared of Our Mutual Friend: “If there’s a better book which illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of human beings, I’ve yet to read it”. In the opposite corner Delingpole had his gloves off for War and Peace: “The only people who don’t think that War and Peace is the greatest book ever are the ones who haven’t read it.” Plenty to chew over here, then.

So I decided to do exactly that, in a stuff-your-face-at-one-sitting kind of way.

Biblioasis blog has an interesting speech on translation delivered by their new international editor, the brilliant curmudgeon-ahead-of-his-years, and occasional literary conspiracy clown, Stephen Henighan.

In contrast to some publishers these days, we decided that we were not going to hide the fact that our translations were translations. We were not going to hide the translator’s name, or banish it from the front cover. On the contrary, we would boast about our translators, just as Avon Books used to boast about Gregory Rabassa’s prowess in translating Latin American literature during the 1970s, or Penguin Classics boasted of David Margashack’s ability to render Dostoyevsky into 20th century English in the 1950s. We would recognize that translation is the most intense form of engagement with literary language that exists, an endless sifting and sieving of words for the kernels of their meanings, an improvisation which is never finished and is never satisfactory but which yields the miraculous act of transporting one culture into the realm of another, of causing the collisions of words and genres and concepts and histories and passions and fantasies which fissures and hybridizes literatures and yields new forms.

At the most simple level, translated literature opens up the world.

A new age of enlightenment and cultural prosperity for Australia? If the proliferation of literary awards, including a new $200G set mandated by the incoming Prime Minister, is any indication, Australia will soon be the place to beat. But David Malouf, a literary dreamboat if ever there was, offers some words of caution.

“Australia has produced some of the world’s great writers,” Mr Garrett said in a statement yesterday. “Yet unlike many leading nations, Australia doesn’t have a flagship national award for fiction and non-fiction literature. The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards will recognise Australia’s great writers and will help foster and inspire new generations of writers.”

The prizes, which will be funded to the tune of $1.2 million over four years, sent a shiver of excitement through the publishing industry yesterday. But the author David Malouf sounded a cautionary note.

“The weakness of all such prizes as these is that one writer gets a lot of money and the other writers nothing,” he said. “So it is really not useful to writers in general in the sense that all of them, except one, get nothing.”

Jessa asks former blogger cum uber publisher Dennis Loy Johnson what affects book buyers have on cover design.

In any event, about the only thing the big retailers ever ask of us is that we put blurbs on the front cover, which we hate to do — I think the only people who are influenced by blurbs are booksellers, not book buyers. But once or twice it’s been made clear that a blurb might prompt them to order more books, which would mean we could print more books, which would bring the per-unit cost down, which means we can keep the cover price down, which means we’re persuaded. But even that has been rare.

An adorable video of young chimps outperforming (even adult) humans on short term memory tests. I love how the chimp is absent mindedly popping off the numbers with a hand out under the treat dispenser. Maybe the college students need a hamster bottle designed to drip a few drops of Coors Light every time they get it right. Let’s not underestimate the power of treats. But seriously, the chimps: grant them human rights already!

Tor’s president riffs on mass market, trade paperbacks and impulse buying in the sci-fi lit world.

Trade paper has never done better for us. It’s been growing steadily for years and it’s certainly nice to see two of our books on nationally respected trade paperback bestseller lists in any one week, but I am worried about mass market. So much of mass market is impulse and impulse is so important to the creation of new readers. The person buying a book from a wire revolving rack in a drugstore as he waits for a prescription, the person who buys a book from an attractive in-line display in a supermarket, in a shop in the hotel lobby, or at a newsstand in an airport or a train station is not necessarily a committed and regular reader. But numerous surveys have shown that if you please them often enough in impulse situations a meaningful number will be converted. These impulse sales are an important part of our outreach and we need to be sure there is a selection which will tempt that consumer. Nielsen surveys have shown science fiction and fantasy as high as 12.4% of fiction sales. If no science fiction is displayed a significant number of potential customers may not be tempted, the same is true of many other categories and in each case new readers will be lost.

Thanks, Mark.

A children’s author who named her picture book character “Mohammed the Mole” in a misguided attempt to be inclusive, is changing his name in a new edition of the book. This decision was made both to save herself the death threats from the radical Muslim world and to capitalize on the infamy of the teddy bear teacher who barely escaped this week with her life. (Don’t kid yourself, no threats had yet been made. It was an opportune time to send out a press release…) Is the character’s new name any better? You decide: the culturally insensitive Welsh name “Morgan”, which means “holy fire of artifically-induced wrath used to control an uneducated, bored, poverty-stricken populace through a misplaced sense of agency”. I looked it up. (Coincidentally, this is also what “Jesus” means.)

Two takes on the value/lackthereof of romance novels, through the lens of Mills & Boon, which is the UK version of Harlequins. As noted recently here at Bookninja, the primary difference between M&B and HQ is the erotic display of practical hoisery.

Let’s start with the first old chestnut that’s used against these books: that they are pulp fiction written in purple prose. Well, they have never been presented as contenders for literary prizes and therefore need not offend anyone who would denigrate them on this basis. These books started out as serials, novellas written to appeal to women who would pick them up for an exotic, escapist treat. And, as with any successful business venture, the original formula has stayed largely the same. Man meets woman, they fall in love, there is a conflict and, ultimately, a happy ending. It is the paradigm behind every great literary romantic work.

Detractors believe that these books perpetuate the stereotype of the doormat woman, taken by a boorish hero, crushed in his arms and transformed into a newer, different type of doormat. They suggest that this fiction encourages women to subscribe to a mythical fairytale, in which men are always the saviour. What drivel. The women who populate these books come from as disparate and wide-ranging economic situations as the women who read them. To say they are all mindless romantic illiterates yearning to be saved is lazy ignorance.

• Giller book made for TV
• Cell phone novels tops in Japan (heard it!)
• Poem by Wordsworth’s teenaged neice published
• Old James Bond on his way back
• Friggin Paris hoarding the smut

Publishers Weekly profiles a few of the top people in the US book business. Good guy and NBCC president John Freeman gets a nice nod for his tireless work promoting books and saving the whales of the industry: the book reviews.

Book publishing folk have been bemoaning the reduction of space devoted to book reviews in newspapers for years. But the issue reached a tipping point in April 2007, when former Atlanta Journal-Constitution book review editor Teresa Weaver learned her position would be eliminated. The newspaper promised to continue covering books, but many industry insiders saw Weaver’s exit as a major blow, and her departure reinvigorated the debate over the decline in print coverage of books. The AJC wasn’t the only paper to make such changes this year: the AP, the Chicago Tribune, and the L.A. Times Book Review also had cutbacks.

Led by National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman, book people in Atlanta and all across the country rallied to get Weaver reinstated. Although a petition signed by some 6,000 people ultimately failed to get Weaver her job back (she wound up in the newly created position of book editor at Atlanta magazine), Freeman believes the AJC’s coverage did not change “as much as it looked like it could have.”

Freeman’s glass-half-full take is that since the events of last spring, non-newspaper organizations have stepped up. He commended Barnes & Noble’s online review, Bookforum and the New Yorker for increasing and improving their coverage. And the NBCC has sponsored panels aplenty on the increasingly large role bloggers are playing in bringing book reviews to the public. One more upshot to the crisis? Freeman says he now has informants throughout the industry. “Someone will forward something to me saying, ‘You better watch out for this.’ ”

Maud Newton, a long time ‘Ninja fav, writes about her run in with the head assclown at Gawker. Maybe gossip bloggers like this douche bag are closest, out of all the blogger flavours, to becoming what they seek to replace — the varied douches (douchae? douchide? douchorum?) of Page Six.

Author and critic, dead at 91.

The New Republic looks at the situation.

Complaints about the condition of book reviewing in this country are as old as Ben Franklin’s bifocals. Pool acknowledges this. It has been steadily downhill since day one. “Book reviews first appeared in America at the end of the eighteenth century,” Faint Praise begins. “They have been frustrating people ever since…. For two centuries reviews have been lambasted by critics, often reviewers themselves, who have complained that reviews are profligate in their praise, hostile in their criticism, cravenly noncommittal, biased, inaccurate, illiterate, or dull. Generally, the argument runs, American reviewing has never been worse.” Pool cites a well-known essay by Elizabeth Hardwick published in Harper’s in 1959 titled “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which read like a requiem then; and yet here we are, almost a half-century later, still crabbing and singing the same old blues.

The perceived perennial decline in book reviewing mirrors the perennial decline in book publishing. Like the Broadway theater, the publishing world is always tottering on its last legs, a wheezing shadow of its former glory waiting for the final curtain to drop, only to be jolted back into spastic life by an unexpected franchise boon (John Grisham, the Harry Potter series) and granted enough of a reprieve to keep the pity party going until the next financial slump. Much of this fatalism is standard issue, an occupational tic.

Apparently you shouldn’t try to ghost write the memoirs of someone you despise. That’s good advice, but I would broaden the caution to include not sucking 15 electric jello shooters from the cleavage of a go-go dancer while in the company of someone you despise. But that might just be about my own baggage.

It makes me wonder, however, whether dislike of the subject is always a potential trap for the ghostwriter, or indeed for the biographer. In the introduction to The Life And Death of Peter Sellers, Roger Lewis describes how writing the book led him to despise his idol. Lewis takes the high moral ground on this, based on Sellers’ various domestic and professional transgressions, but it’s hard not to wonder if his dislike isn’t something to do with him being — and there’s no nice way of saying this — the parasite on the back of the star. Compulsive hero-worship often goes hand in hand with hero-loathing, and it’s made much worse if week in, week out, you’re sitting at home collating into print the experiences of someone who has lived a much more exciting, glamorous and successful life than you. Even if — as in the case of Sellers and Brand — that life has had its appalling comedowns, because, from where the writer’s sitting, even the comedowns are no doubt pretty glamorous.

Relax, dear reader. The ebook isn’t the end of all literary life as we know it. (Read the comments too. It’s like eavesdropping on a dysfunctional family thanksgiving dinner. I guess there’s some sort of battle going on there. Here’s hoping the good guys win, whoever they are.)

No, the e-book is not the end of civilization. If readers kindle to the Kindle, splendid: Any reading is better than no reading. Nothing valuable was ever preserved solely on Luddite grounds. The screening of America will inevitably come to include our encounters with serious prose, or what is rather comically described in our culture of speed as “long form.” (Meanwhile the Internet is re-educating the planet for a largely audio-visual life in short form, but that is another vexation.) And yet it is neither sentimentality nor snobbery to insist that what we mean by the experience of reading may be singularly indebted to the printed book, to its physicality and its temporality. The breathless, Bezos-loving man from Newsweek says that he is reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson on his iPhone. No, he isn’t. All reading is not the same. It takes more than the apparition of words to constitute a book and its inner forms. Bleak House is not e-mail (even if it once was serialized) and Atonement does not deliver information. “Search” is not the most exciting demand that one can make of a text. So let us see how many conversions to literacy’s pleasures these gadgets make, and let us be grateful for them; but let us also recognize that we toy with the obsolescence of the book at our mental peril.

• Protests continue against Bangladeshi author… Shameful
• Is Conrad too heavy for today’s crowd?
• AL Kennedy wins award, pleads for sanity
• This image is kind of illustrative of my relationship with words… the slightest change in expression on this person’s face would take them from being embraced to being attacked
• Bookstore flasher: removes his jacket, bends his spine, shows his colophon (can I get a rimshot please?)

Once held up as a sort of internet-age bookselling best practices exemplar, Powells is not free of the worry plaguing the entire sector.

But Powell, the man closest to the action, is not celebrating. He listed some of the things that have made the store noteworthy and successful — the mix of new and used, the early Web presence, the symbiotic relationship with the city of Portland, with which he remains very involved — and concluded: “That has carried us well to the moment. The moment is full of trepidation and uncertainty.”

Hunched protectively and built like a bull, he played nervously with a rubber band around a baseball he keeps at his desk and spoke into his chest.

“I’m at heart a pretty shy guy,” said Powell, who launched the first Powell’s in Chicago while a political science graduate student at the University of Chicago with a $3,000 loan that came from several faculty members, including Saul Bellow. “I’m not a glad-hander.” He is into noir novels set in other countries, and you can see his brooding temperament enjoying heroes such as Henning Mankell’s soulful detective or Alan Furst’s elegant, elusive spies.

But the challenges he faces are not fictional. His goal, he said, is to keep bookstores, and his in particular, “from being marginalized the way music stores have been marginalized.”

Eschatological musings through the ages.

It occurred to me that we might be entering a second golden age of dystopian fiction like the one that began 75 years ago when Aldous Huxley published Brave New World. Then currents of eugenic theory, talkies, the rise of fascism, Stalinism and the second world war helped inspire such quirky classics as Rex Warner’s Aerodrome, and, of course, the big brother of all such novels of ideas, George Orwell’s 1984.

However, another way of looking at things soon presented itself, which is in itself a fair indicator of the kind of times we live in: my thoughts are not my own. The dystopian meme has actually been planted in my head by marketing men – specifically the people at Vintage who are about to release Brave New World paired up with Aerodrome in attractively packaged new paperbacks.

Another interesting blog post from Sam Jordison at the Guardian. Sam, Sam, Sam. You’ve been blogging an awful lot lately, haven’t you…? Don’t you think you’ve had enough? You know, the first step is admitting you have a problem. Don’t follow me down this lonely lonely road, my British friend. I’ve spent the last year or two looking for a way out. There isn’t one, Sam. Run while you still can.

Iranian lit pulling Lavern and Shirley in US: it’s gonna make it after all…

The cross-cultural story is only just starting to be told (notwithstanding the pioneering works of earlier writers such as Nahid Rachlin, whose “Foreigner” came out in 1978), as the generation of Iranians who immigrated as children is reaching adulthood.

This generation, as Sofer and Khakpour both noted, grew up less than secure in its Iranian-ness, came of age in the politically correct, hyphenate-happy 1990s, and began to write in this decade with greater assurance in and some freedom from their cultures.

“I think there’s a certain comfort with people publishing now who are 35 and under,” said San Jose State University literature professor Persis Karim, 45. Karim was born in the U.S. to an Iranian father and a French mother. “They have a personal and linguistic confidence. They’re less burdened by the baggage of Iran.”

I read with Porochista in Chicago and she’s the real deal. Quite a good story-teller.

Northern Ireland is going through a literary renaissance … again.

The UK’s poet laureate, Andrew Motion, said it was no coincidence that Northern Ireland’s poets were receiving so many accolades around the world. Motion said the influence of such established poets as Heaney and Longley was invaluable for the new generation of Northern Irish writers now emerging.

‘Instead of lying under their canopy basking in glory, the likes of Seamus and Michael have been working hard to nurture new talent. These are exciting new times in which a fresh generation is being helped to find its voice,’ Motion said.

The Guardian looks at the new trend of “restoring” pre-edit versions of literary mainstays such as Raymond Carver and Jack Kerouac. Strikes me just now that this trend is perhaps part of the general solipsism of our times. Maybe we want to believe books are the result of individual genius, in part because we believe that this “genius” is a human trait waiting to be tapped by us all rather than a freak of nature popping up on occasion. The very idea that a published mainstream book is the work of a individual, that it isn’t a collaborative effort, is nice and romantic and great for bio-pics and motivational boosts for cafe-bound scribes, but is also patently ridiculous. On the other hand, editors like Lish think they’re gods, so one wonders. Plus, all this means the publishers get to sell the same book twice. Maybe that’s the real answer for the trend. Extra revenue streams. I wonder if the author/estate gets a separate advance and set of royalties for what’s essentially a different book.

The carved-up Carver saga, which first came to light almost a decade ago when a New York Times reporter checked out Lish’s boast that he had played a major part in forming the voice that influenced a generation of fiction writers, is only one of a string of cases in which the texts of well-known books have been “restored”. Some readers regard the process as unnecessary interference with a writer’s words by someone who, in many instances, the writer never knew, far less authorised. Others see it as a legitimate step in directing the reader back to the author’s primary intentions. “The publication of ‘original’, ‘lost’ and ‘restored’ versions of works by noted writers is a well-established practice among modern publishing firms” – so says Stull on the website that he and his wife, Maureen P Carroll, have set up to promote the Beginners project.

The NYT looks at the ancient tradition of hawking stuff in book adverts.

If the mark of a classic is that every time you read it you discover something new, then the 1972 paperback of A. E. Van Vogt’s science-fiction novel “Quest for the Future” just might be a classic. Those who read the book when it was first published in hardcover in 1970 certainly won’t recognize this passage from Chapter 15: “A large gleaming machine with an opening at one end was wheeled in, and once again the cycle ran its Micronite Filter. Mild, Smooth Taste. For All the Right Reasons. Kent. America’s Quality Cigarette. King Size or Deluxe 100s.”

I want to talk about the discourse, and about the kind of public conversation we should be hoping to have. But before I do that, I will pay my Islamic readers – and I know I have a few – the elementary courtesy of saying that I DO NOT “ADVOCATE” ANY DISCRIMINATORY TREATMENT OF MUSLIMS. AND I NEVER HAVE. And no one with the slightest respect for truth can claim otherwise.

Is reading just about making you look cool? More on that French book about talking about books you haven’t yet read.

So why is it that, in spite of all these things, I find How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read so depressing? Why does the fact that it has appeared on clever-clever newspaper Christmas books lists even before it is in the shops make me feel weary to my bones? It’s not only that you can have too much irony. It’s that Bayard’s essay (assuming it is not really by Chris Morris, and a giant spoof) is yet another product of a world that commodifies everything, that regards books pretty much as if they were status handbags. It sees reading only as a social indicator, as a way of getting on or looking cool, ignoring the fact that, at bottom, it is a private pleasure to be enjoyed for its own sake.

This world is obsessed with speed and appalled by depth: it calls libraries ‘idea stores’, and regards Wikipedia as a perfectly respectable way of getting information. This is wrong. I don’t care – or I only care a little – that I struggle to remember the precise plot of, say, The Catcher in the Rye. What matters to me is that every time that book and I get together, it’s like being in the best company ever.

Why don’t Brits like science fiction? It’s because they have sex with their socks on. I swear it’s true. I have a theory that you can answer virtually any question about England this way. Try it. It’s cathartic.

I remember, as a young boy, overhearing a neighbour remarking snootily that they were surprised such an intelligent man as my father should read Astounding magazine, the greatest of all SF periodicals. I knew at once that SF was the real deal. Yet it is the embarrassing uncle at the British literary feast. He’s one of the family, but nobody wants to go near him. He has, they say, disgusting habits, and his only friends are sad little creeps who memorise Star Trek scripts. But we need the uncle now more than ever.

“The truth is,” Aldiss has written, “that we are at last living in an SF scenario.” A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism.

The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial.

No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre

I’m telling you… it’s the socks. (Note: not stockings — little black wool socks over glaring, mottled shins.)

Also appearing this time of year: lists-designed-to-sell-books’ fatter cousin, profiles-designed-to-sell-books!

• British novelist Sarah Hall (now this lady is pretty)
• Afghan Khaled Hosseini (who somewhat endearingly can’t understand his own success)
• Ted Hughes (up and coming young poet’s letters examined…)

Guys, it’s going to be mostly shopping list top tens for the next little bit. I’ll try to dig out the news in between, but surely they’ll slip in here and there. Hopefully your books are on some of them…

• Page from Napoleon ms sells for $35G
• Word books for Xmas
• Does anyone know? Were the Goldman’s scumbags before OJ came into their lives, or is it merely an osmosis thing?
• John Freeman on how the NBCC’s Most Recommended list came together
• Book world is not being crushed under digital thumb
• Putin using political judo to debilitate Russian culture
• How Pullman’s trilogy became a cottage industry

Dan Wells takes on the Globe 100 in a lllllllengthy post over at his Biblioasis blog. The thing I find funny about the 100 is that the reviewers themselves aren’t consulted. Reviews I’ve written in the past have led to 100 listings, but I only found out by opening the paper in December. I guess I had my input in the form of the review, but no one ever asked beyond that whether I thought the book deserved to be in the top 100 of the year. Not that they’re obligated to, but they do use the reviewer’s text and name to make the case. Seems like a no brainer. Hey, George. Do you think Eggers deserves the top 100 this year? Yes. Solie? Sure.

Thankfully, both times my reviews have been used the book has deserved its place. But one of Dan’s complaints is that the Ormsby book he published was given a good review, by me, but didn’t appear. Not that it matters now, but I don’t know that it should have, considering the limited space devoted to poetry in the list. Despite loving that book, I don’t think it was one of the top three or four books of poetry for the year. (So maybe the system is working, given my complaint…? That’s a little specious.) Now, if it were a 100 list where 10 poetry books got a nod, I’d say yes, but we don’t do that here in the land of ice and snow.

Poetry appears there as a charity, like you might mention and applaud an invalid grandparent at a wedding. It’s not really a best books list, so much as an advertorial — a shopping guide.