Recently in Literature Category

I love bookshops.

No really. I absolutely love them. Working in central London is great because there are a multitude of them, they open late, there are chains and specialists, and if I find myself with some time on my hands, then they're the obvious place to go.

I like to visit at least every week - if only to see what new titles are out. Now unlike CDs and DVDs which are all released on a Monday, or video games which are released on Fridays, there's no specific day for new books to come out. If there was, that'd be the day I went.

Instead books seem to drift into shops - sometimes well ahead of publication dates, other times well after them depending on how speedy the warehouse operation has been.

Keeping up with new titles is fascinating.

But going to bookshops at this time of year is depressing. We're in the run up to Christmas and some vast proportion of book sales are sold in the two or three months before Christmas. That is, they're sold to people who never otherwise wander into a bookshop. As a result, the shelves are heaving with books by "celebrities" - a number of whom have possibly not even read their own works. Then there are books from TV chefs, the "hilarious" comedy titles all hoping to be this year's Eats, Shoots and Leaves or whatever, Doctor Who annuals, TV tie-in titles, the Guinness Book of Records ad nauseum.

The shelves that used to be full of interesting new fiction or non-fiction titles, are now stuffed with this dross. These books' RRPs are all vastly inflated so that the supermarkets and chains can sell them at 50% discounts and still get a reasonable sum for them.

Gone are the more interesting fiction paperbacks that might otherwise has piqued your interest; something you read about when it came out in hardback that you'd quite like to try. Of the Booker shortlist, only the winner is in evidence, but a stack of Martina Cole books overwhelm it.

Then there are all the calendars. They're all dreadful and hideously over-priced. And they take up valuable real-estate in the bookshop.

I understand that bookshops need to have successful Christmases - indeed the whole High Street sector is suffering at the moment, and I'd hate to see a chain go under. But I do feel that I, as a regular and important customer who spends a lot of money all year round on books, that I'm actually being chased away at this time of the year. Amazon's no better with the same cash-in titles by comedians, most of whom are "penning" autobiographies while they're still in their twenties or early thirties.

Am I a book snob? Probably. Not as snobbish as some by a long shot (Oh, what a shame that there's only one more episode of Ed Reardon left in this series. Series 2 out to buy next week). But I feel that my book buying and browsing has been rudely interrupted. For the next two months I'm going to see the same titles in the same places in all the shops. Then after Christmas, Waterstones and Borders will discount precisely those titles - especially the ones that didn't sell despite the publishers' massive advances, and their appearances on the now little watched Richard and Judy).

Perhaps I need to go somewhere else for my book habit?

A fascinating piece from Saturday's Guardian explains how going forward, Picador will be publishing nearly all their literary fiction straight to paperback with an expected £7.99 price point. A limited number of guaranteed sellers will retain their hardback status, and some titles will get published in both formats - one aimed at collectors/fans.

To my mind, it's a smart idea. I've never really understood the way that a book comes out in a format that few will read - reaping all the attendant publicity and reviews at the time - then a year down the line, the cheaper paperback comes out, with only a song and dance really being made if the publisher's marketing department starts spending on advertising.

It sort of makes sense in cinema where reviews are only really given to titles that make it to the big screen. So even a relatively small film will try for a one-week run in London to garner those national reviews, before quickly turning up on DVD.

It's not quite that simple with books, where plenty of other factors are in play. I don't work in publishing, but it seems to me that the book club market is not as big as it once was, and they were an obvious target for hardback buyers. You get guaranteed sales as a publisher, but at lower rates. The reader gets a nice big hardback for their bookshelves.

Then there's been the emergence of the trade paperback. At first they were bookclub only editions - perhaps from someone like QPD. I certainly picked up a few "hardback" titles in that format through bookclubs faster than if I'd had to wait for the high street paperback. More recently, they tend to be the "airport exclusive" edition, selling at roughly a tenner each and coming out simultaneously with the hardback.

Sometimes these trade paperbacks filter down to bookshops, but often as a stop-gap between hardback and a full paperback. Because, as the article notes, Richard & Judy's Bookclub demands a paperback, it often comes in the trade paperback form - Arthur and George by Julian Barnes was a good example. Or it just might be a publisher's exercise to maximise returns (possibly after paying out significantly in an advance). So Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind came out in hardback for last Christmas, trade paperback in May for summer reading, and in a mass market edition last month for this Christmas.

The celebrity hardback is probably not going anywhere while publishers continue to pay handsomely (some would say, foolishly) for their largely-ghostwritten memoirs. What we are seeing is an escalation in cover price to allow for half-price deals. £20 or even £25 cover prices are becoming the norm so that you can still clear a tenner or more at retail while offering a massive 50% off (or even more online).

But if literary titles aren't selling enough, then you'd be foolish not to publish directly to paperback. I'm surprised that Picador aren't using the trade format and gaining closer to ten pounds a book rather than the £7.99 price point. You rarely see trade paperback titles in 3 For 2 offers, yet £7.99 books are far more ordinarily in these deals.

Where the big changes are going to have to happen is in the literary press. Paperbacks are shoved away at the back in a small half page roundup. Only a handful of higher-profile titles get the full 1000 word treatment - although it seems unlikely that Cormac McCarthy's next book wouldn't get this no matter what format it arrived in. It already annoys me that there's never any rush for editors to tell us when big titles have arrived in paperback. Sometimes to two line pithy reviews come a month after the title has reached shops. They'd never wait that long for a major author in hardback, but then pages will be found for those writers' reviews to appear. There isn't an eight book limit because "that's what our paperback roundup review looks like".

In summary then, this is a bold move, but a smart one. In any other area of the arts, the reviews appear, and then most people try to see or hear the endeavour being reviewed. The first weekends of a film's release are when most people watch it; the first weeks of an album's release are when most people buy it; the early weeks of a new play's production are, with a few long-running exceptions, when most people go to see it. But in publishing a review comes out, and you might well make a note to check the title out in a year's time when it reaches your price bracket.

An interesting contrast is the US market, which seems even worse to me than our market. I don't know what the health of the publishing industry's like in the US, but the "one year rule" doesn't necessarily hold true.

What seems to happen is this. The hardback comes out first. Then, sometime down the line, a paperback version of the novel may come out. An exceptional example might be The Da Vinci Code. This came out in hardback in the US in March 2003. The UK hardback came out in July the same year. By March 2004, the book was in paperback in the UK. The US paperback didn't come out until May last year to tie in with the film - three years after hardback publication.

The average price for US hardback is currently around $26-28, with some titles going for a bit more, and others for a little less. Then, if the book is a "literary" title, it comes out in a larger format trade format. These titles are likely to have a $14-16 price point, which isn't a great deal less than the hardback price if you think about it - certainly less of a differential than many UK titles.

Finally, there's the mass market paperback market (which gets a separate bestseller list from the New York Times), where books are around $8-$10. If you wander into the average Barnes & Noble (based on my trip to New York a couple of weeks ago), you're likely to see many more trade titles than mass market titles. Although genre fiction comes out in the mass market format, and it's these titles you'll see in supermarkets and pharmacies, "proper" bookshops relegate these editions. A literary author won't even see their book come out in this format. At least I know that I'll be able to eventually read Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach in a "mass market" edition (even though I know it'll be eight quid for less than 200 pages); in the States, that's not true. Mass market titles in US bookshops, tend to be hidden away, and are not to be found on the front of shop tables where the bestselling books are displayed.

Now it maybe that the US book market is vibrant and doing very well thank you. But when I see The Kite Runner priced at $15 and convert that to £7.50 at a very good exchange rate, it's not hard to see that it's a pricey buy. The UK edition may be £7.99 but I'd expect that US price to be slightly more favourable than that given that weak dollar. And UK booksellers seem to run vastly more titles in 3 For 2 promotions and the like, than their US counterparts. The Kite Runner will show up in UK supermarkets (and will again with the release of the forthcoming film). But that's much less likely to be the case in the US. Popular fiction doesn't get much cheaper than £6.99 in the UK, and mass market fiction in the US starts at $7.99 as I say. So US literary purchasers aren't getting a great deal. So my question is this: are US publishers not attempting to reach the cheaper end of the market, and are they, in doing so, missing out on potential sales?

Did you know that Christmas is coming? I was so annoyed when I saw my first Christmas advert on the 20th October. I can really do without sleigh bells before the clocks go back.

Anyway, the Christmas season is well upon us now, and the celebrity books are rolling out left, right and centre. On the train in this morning, Metro had details of several signing sessions taking place over the coming days.

A Waterstone's ad told us that we have an opportunity to meet Lawrence Dallaglio, the England rubgy star. He's signing copies of his autobiography, It's In The Blood. As you can see from the ad, that's pretty much all there is. I would expect the bookshops to prefer that you bought your copies there rather than online, but I'm sure a handful of people will have rugby shirts or photos for him to sign as well.

Meanwhile a Borders ad lets us know that Alice Cooper will be holding his only UK signing of his new book Golf Monster at their Oxford Street branch. There's a note in the ad that's worth reading:

"All customers must purchase a copy of Golf Monster to receive an autograph. Additional autographs are given at the discretion of Borders. Due to limited signing time, customers are advised to arrive early to avoid disappointment."

As I say, it's reasonable that they insist that you buy your copy at the shop, although I've never really been to a signing where people hadn't bought a copy there. The rules regarding additional autographs are practical. If the queue's reasonable, then get out a CD to sign. But if it's busy, let's just do the books.

Finally there was a further Waterstone's ad for racing sensation Lewis Hamilton's book My Story. Obviously, considering Hamilton was only born in 1985, I would anticipate further volumes will follow in due course.

But the most interesting thing about this ad is the accompanying restrictions:

"Please note Lewis Hamilton will be signing dedicated copies of 'My Story' only, a maximum of two copies per person. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment. Access to the queue is on a first come, first served basis. Due to time constraints reservations will not be available."

Let's be clear. Hamilton is only there for a little while, but because some PR person is paranoid that every copy sold will be on eBay within minutes, they're forcing Hamilton to write a dedication in every copy, and thereby take longer. Dedicationless books are more valuable because you'd probably prefer In any case, the two copies limit would surely put off most chancers.

If, perhaps, the signing wasn't at 4.30pm on a weekday, there'd be a greater chance of real fans being at the singing rather than, say (and I don't mean any disservice), students who might be more tempted to make a quick buck selling on their books.

I've never heard of a book signing where you're forced to have a dedication. I suspect that this will be the start of a trend

Robert McCrum in today's Observer has written about why It's time to ditch the prize guys - arguing that it's time for the Booker Prize to be radically reformed from the ground up.

Except, it's really not very clear why exactly he feels it needs this change. Certainly the Booker no longer gets the TV coverage it once had, now being timed to arrive during the BBC's Ten O'Clock News, but I'm not sure I understand why the prize is out of touch as he says it is. He doesn't say why. Is it because the shortlist, Ian McEwan aside, isn't made up of a list of names that I could choose myself if I was provided with a list of eligible names?

Seemingly, the prize chairman Sir Howard Davies gave "one of the most embarrassing Booker speeches in living memory." But McCrum doesn't explain why it was emabarrassing. The main substance of his speech that was reported was the backslapping that goes on between reviewers who know one another and review one another's books. The Times had a good editorial on it. I don't think there's anyone in the literary world who doesn't know that this goes on. Every year, Private Eye helps us when it examines the various Books of the Year lists, helpfully explaining any feuds or friendships that mightn't be too obvious for those of us who don't move in their circles and mightn't otherwise be clued in.

McCrum needs to explain himself.

I love Amazon. They contribute literally pennies to the running of this site. Let's put it this way, I've never actually reached the threshold for getting even an Amazon token from them from people clicking the links on this site.

Nonetheless, I use Amazon a reasonable amount, and they send lots of email advertising as a result.

One particular type of email is the "recommends" email, where Amazon examines what you've bought in the past, and looks for patterns amongst its other purchasers to perhaps direct me to another title I might be interested.

Except it never really works that well. I'm sure that there are teams of people in the States who sit there fine tuning Amazon's algorithms but basic things like books I bought as gifts rather than for myself are difficult to take into account.

Anyway, this a rambling way of telling you about the book I was "recommended" today. I bought Mission Song, by John Le Carré a while ago, and so I was sent this:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by John Le Carre have also purchased An Introduction to Godel's Theorems (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) by Peter Smith. For this reason, you might like to know that An Introduction to Godel's Theorems (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) is now available. You can order yours for just £42.75 by following the link below.

Wow. That'll go down well with people who love spy-thrillers.

I did study maths at university and am vaguely familiar with Godel and have heard of his incompleteness theorem. But seriously, this is a little specialist for the average reader.

I noted a few weeks ago that following the controversy over Tintin in the Congo, it was storming the Amazon charts (it's currently 115).

So it was interesting to note that in Hergé's own home country, state prosecutors are considering whether charges can be brought. Ridiculous, I know. Plenty of racist/sexist/homophobic books are available to buy - not least Hitler's very own Mein Kampf. And so they should be. We shouldn't be trying to whitewash (pun intended) our history. We should understand that for good or bad, these views were accepted by many people in our past.

Anyway, I was also tickled, in some perverse way, to note that the very store where all this trouble started, when the title was inappropriately placed in the children's section, is now displaying the book on its front of store tables.

Walk into Borders on Oxford Street currently, and you'll see Tintin In Tibet proudly placed on the first table you come to as you enter the shop!

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that Tintin in the Congo is currently sitting at number five in the Amazon best sellers list? This follows everyone suddenly noticing that a book first published between 1930 and 1931 is actually a bit racist. I don't believe that this is particularly new news, and tend to agree with Giles Foden writing in today's Guardian - I can't find a link but essentially he says that it should be removed from the children's section but should still be made available, and lists some other classics that have also been accused of racism, fascism or other labels. But the story certainly seems to have reinvigorated interest in the title.

This is written as a review of the most recent, and sadly last, Zen novel. But really, it's a reflection of Michael Dibdin's work. And a fine body it is too.

In recent years there's been this awful new "non-fiction" genre of books develop. It started with the Dave Pelzer books which detailed his terrible upbringing. It was so bad, he got a trilogy out of it.

Anyway, the books sold loads with their distinctive white covers and distant looking photos. There was plenty more misery to come.

And now, Borders, instead of putting these books into biography (or indeed, fiction in some instances), has created a "Real Lives" category. What this picture does show is that there's a certain dominant feature essential in any book of this type. Can you tell what it is?

It's very sad to hear that Michael Dibdin has died. He was a really fine author and I've absolutely loved his Aurelio Zen series of novels.

More obituaries at the BBC and the Daily Telegraph.

A final Zen novel, End Games, is due in July.

[UPDATE] The Guardian's own obit, and In Praise of... Aurelio Zen from today's leader.

And speaking of The Independent - it has a new promotion running on Saturdays called "Banned Books." Each week you can buy one of "25 cutting-edge titles, censored classics and literary landmarks" for £3.49 with your Saturday Independent (at selected stores).

They gave away the first in the series, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, on Saturday. I'm a sucker for a freebie, so of course I picked up a copy. Except that I'm not so sure that it has ever actually been banned. I'm pretty certain it hasn't in the UK - indeed I suspect that it's one of the few titles first published in the 1960s to have remained permamently in print. And while the film was unavailable in the UK for many years, that was never "banned" either. Stanley Kubrick simply withdrew it sometime after it had been released following a press furore over supposed copycat attacks, and never allowed it to be re-released or made available on video or DVD in the UK. Of course, nowadays you can easily pick up a copy and it comes around regularly on Film 4 and the like. Unavailable it might have been, but not banned.

I'm not saying that the book wasn't banned in other countries, and I doubt that the novel has been published in, ooh, North Korea or similar. But banned?

Sad to hear that veteran Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski died last week. I first came across him when I started reading Granta many years ago. To be honest I was intrigued by a magazine that came in a paperback book format. But two writers from those early editions really stood out for me: James Fenton's reportage from his times in Vietnam amongst other places, collected in the book All The Wrong Places; and Kapucinski who's reporting came from absolutely all over the world.

There are loads of books by him, but maybe ones to start with include The Soccer War (only one part of the book), and his more recently published The Shadow and the Sun detailing his time in Africa.

The remarkable thing about Kapuscinski is what he was able to do at a time when Poland was behind the Iron Curtain, and freedom of travel was not something bestowed lightly by the State.

As befits the man, there are obituaries all over the place. But here are ones from The New York Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Times.

Granta's put an interview conducted with Kapuscinski on its website along with a piece from 2004 (also reproduced in a shortened version in this weekend's Guardian Review).

Finally, worth noting is a curious piece in Slate. We know that American journalism is holier than thou, which in many respects is why much of it's so dull. But Jack Shafer does argue convincingly about the less glorious side of Kapuscinski's writing. Still Shafer does say that fats are "invited to pour benzene over my naked body and set it afire with e-mail."

I was wandering around Borders the other day, just to see if they had any interesting books in the London branch that hadn't been in the Norwich branch. Not that I need any more books.

Anyway, they did have the hardback of Restless by William Boyd on sale at half price. Now I love William Boyd and have read nearly everything he's written, but never in hardback. Still half-price is always tempting for a novel that was only released in September.

While I was umming and ahhing about this, I noticed the same title in paperback on the big 3 for 2 table.

Wow - that's a quick sprint to paperback I thought. You might get a trade paperback at airports or available through the book clubs, but surely the mass market paperback shouldn't already be available.

Then I saw the other sticker on the cover. The one that didn't say "3 for 2".

The Richard & Judy Book Club. I don't know exactly what the rules are for it, but I think your title has to be in paperback. And in any case, if it gets selected, you rush out a paperback edition as quickly as possible almost certainly achieving, even in a popular author like Boyd, substantially more sales than you would otherwise.

I've noticed that in the past, Arthur & George and The Shadow of the Wind both published trade paperback sized titles to "qualify" for appearance. Maybe the rules have been tightened, or maybe publishers figure that they'll generate even larger profits from the mass market edition.

The Independent has the other titles that'll be clogging up the top of bestsellers list (and supermarket shelves) for the rest of the year (via Booktrade.info).

My parents have read a couple of books by someone who they said was quite good. I was curious to find out more, so I asked:

Me: "Who's the author?"

Them: "We can't remember."

Me: "What's the name of one of the books he wrote?"

Them: "We can't remember."

Me: "Can you tell me anything about the book? What genre was it?"

Them: "Some of it was set in Chile."

Me: "Isabelle Allende?"

Them: "No. It's a man. And they've got a British sounding name."

Me: "Can you tell me anything else about his books?"

Them: "No. But he's a lecturer at UCL."

Me: "!"

Them: "And he teaches Development Studies."

Me: "How can you remember detail like this, yet not remember either his name or the title of one of his books?"

Them: "He does the same subject as your sister. One of the books had 'Silver' in the title."

At this point, I go away and do a lot of Googling with the limited information that I have. I draw a blank. There are an awful lot of books with 'Silver' in the title.

My parents inform me that next time they're in the library they'll try to find one of his books and make a note.

The next day, I get a call from dad:

Dad: "He wrote for Spooks."

Me: "David Wolstencroft?"

Dad: "No."

Me: "How do you know he wrote for Spooks?"

Dad: "I remember reading his biography at the back."

Me: "Hang on."

I do a quick IMDB search on Spooks to get a list of writers. I know that Howard Brenton of Romans in Britain fame is also a writer, but don't know many others.

Me: "Ben Richards?"

Dad: "Yes!"

I do an Amazon search of Ben Richards.

Me: "The Silver River?"

Dad: "That's the one. There's another set in Chile."

Me: "The Mermaind and the Drunks."

Dad: "That's it!"

I go away contented and in the knowledge that I have many many unread books at home, couldn't resist popping into Waterstones yesterday and availing myself of their current 3 for 2 offer, and have many more titles I still want to read. Oh well. Ben Richards may well be joining the pile.

I see that I'm not the only person who gets fascinated by The Guardian's regular table of bestselling (or fastselling) books across the year. Grumpy Old Bookman has a good analysis to read alongside The Guardian's own.

What does it tell us about the state of British book publishing in the UK? Well first and foremost, it tells us the power of Richard and Judy with numbers one and two amongst many others featuring in the list. What's interesting is that people are buying these books without even necessarily watching the Richard and Judy programme on which the titles feature. Of course, I've never even seen one of their book programmes, but have bought titles that have featured. The difference is that I've not bought them because they featured, but for other reasons. Indeed, as I've said before, I find a cover with a Richard and Judy sticker, slightly more embarrassing that reading a porn magazine in a church would be. Nonetheless, there's evidently a safety net that the Richard and Judy "marque" offers prospective readers.

Casting my eye down the list, I notice that I've only read one title (nearly three years ago now), and own a second that I've yet to read - The Historian. I quite fancy reading A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian, but there's always something else to buy in its place. And I will probably pick up Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? at some point as I own the other three (yes - three) titles in the series.

Otherwise, I can only say that it explains an awful lot about the limited lists of titles commonly available in supermarkets. Although given how much supermarkets are getting in on the bookselling act, I wonder how much they're actually being shaped by supermarket book buyers.

Who, precisely, is it that decides buying a book of scripts is a good idea?

Let me explain myself a little. Obviously aspiring scriptwriters can learn an awful lot from reading previously made scripts. Similarly, film or television students probably find scripts to be enormously helpful to study their arts - perhaps noting the differences between what was on the page and what was filmed.

But for most of us, surely a scriptbook is simply the tackiest and tawdriest type of commercial cash-in available on the market (excluding anthing that Carol Vordermann puts her name to obviously - in particular electronic sudoku games that . The kind of thing I'm really talking about are these: "Extras": The Illustrated Scripts - Series One and Two, Am I Bovvered?: The "Catherine Tate Show" Scripts and, "Little Britain": The Complete Scripts and Stuff - Series Three (perhaps they'll look really neat next to series one and two).

In a pre- DVD boxset age, these books probably made sense. You could hone your favourite routines for the playground, and these books were the only way you were easily going relive some of those scenes. But now you can watch the BBC Three repeats, watch clips on YouTube, by the DVDs, and watch the shows just about permamently on UKTV Gold 2 +1. So why would you buy the book?

OK - these sales do count as "book" sales, and this time of year brings more people into bookshops than at any other. And these infrequent visitors are probably scared and intimidated by the range available. So they make a beeline for the table at the front of the shop full of comedy books by famous people, chuck a couple of those in their basket and make a dash for the exit before they're drowned by the literary atmosphere. As boookseller Steerforth mentioned a few days ago, a lot of people bought the Shane Ritchie autobiography last Christmas on the basis that their gift's recipient liked the Alfie Moon character on Eastenders. Yet when the mass market paperback came out in the summer, nobody was interested. Indeed, no-one even reads these books. I suspect that the oft-quoted stat about how few people ever read A Brief History of Time compared to how many copies were sold has nothing on this genre.

Not having bought, or even gone as far as flicking through one of these tomes, I don't know to what extent they really are the scripts as written (although I'd have thought that Extras had a certain amount of improvisation going on), but I suspect that many of them might actually be transcripts of the programmes as broadcast instead, packed out with a fullsome selection of publicity stills.

I was going to suggest that the publishers just bring out a Cathering Tate Show Annual and be done with it, except... [I was so hoping that there was an actual annual, but there isn't] that'd mean somebody conjouring up some new content. Still, who wouldn't want to read short stories about Lou and Andy done in a comic-strip format in a prospective Little Britain 2007 Annual?

Last night, the Man Booker Prize was awarded Kiran Desai for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. And congratulations to her. But what was curious was the manner of its announcement. Yesterday I spent a short while scouring TV listings to find what channel it would be shown on.

BBC2? Nope.

Channel 4? Nope.

BBC Four? Nope.

More 4? Nope.

Artsworld? No again.

Normally you'd have expected one of those channels to carry it. ITV certainly hadn't waded into a highbrow literary war. So I went to the Man Booker website which said that the award would be announced live during the BBC Ten O'Clock News. Really?

And so it duly was, with the presenter on the stage clearly waiting for the BBC correspondent to turn around and give her the nod to make the award.

The award was swiftly announced - with none of the judges words conveyed - and it was back to the studio. More coverage was promised on News 24, including an interview.

I must admit that I question the involvement of BBC News in this. I can understand that they wanted to cover it, but it's a commercially sponsored award, but although the actual award is newsworthy, the live nature doesn't seem to sit too squarely with me. I'm happier for a programme on BBC Four or BBC2 carrying it, rather than it being a live event for the news. I realise politicians give press statements at strategic timed moments for coverage on news programmes, but this is a little different. Not the best editorial judgement.

On the other hand, if I were from Man Booker, I'd be thrilled. A guaranteed larger audience on the Ten O'Clock News than on a specialist arts programme.

A good piece on the Hollywood blacklisted writers who wrote for The Adventures of Robin Hood in Britain as the only way to continue working once Hollywood prevented them. The story is also well told in the TV film Fellow Traveller.

My local Ottakers has completed its transformation into a Waterstones.

At the weekend I noticed that my local Ottakers is to become a Waterstones in a matter of days. The "makeover" is only scheduled to take a day or so, and I expect to see nothing more than signage on the front of the store. The reason for the rush, according to something I read a few weeks ago, is that Waterstones are planning a big TV push this Christmas, and they obviously want to maximise that opportunity well ahead of time.

This story in Booktrade.info suggests that there will be more than a few sign changes however, with stock ending up pulped - as much as 30% of stock being either pulped, returned to publishers or "cleared".

I quite like my local Ottakers, and I hope that they don't do anything too radical.

What's really curious is that this rebranding is happening only a couple of months before the shop was due to move. Ottakers has taken a retail unit in a new shopping centre development 100 metres or so away. I assume that this is has a bigger area. Unless they plan on keeping two shops open, they're likely to moving there.

I've just been watching The Guardian's webcast of Al Gore's speech at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival (he's got a book coming out later this year, so there is some reason for him to speak). He's quite a speaker isn't he? I think sometimes we forget that politicians, whatever we may think of them, have to be charismatic characters, Americans in particular since they've got to raise so much money. I've mentioned before a documentary called Journeys with George that followed George W Bush in the run-up to his first presidential election, and spoken of how much of a nice guy he came over as.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that Gore is such an excellent presenter. He has a presentation about global warming, that he has taken out on the road for the last year or two, and much of this speech no doubt comes from this. Indeed this presentation is forming the basis of a documentary feature film, An Inconvenient Truth, that screened in Cannes last week. There's no UK date for the film yet, but I look forward to it.

The speech was excellent, and Gore speaks without notes. I certainly believe that Gore truly has a great passion for his subject, and let's face it, it's something that any of us who care about the future should not only care about, but worry deeply about.

I hope, and suspect, that The Guardian will have a podcast of this speech available sometime soon. Technically it worked well enough, although the volume was low, and I had to max everything out and listen through headphones to hear it properly.

Wandering aroud Ottaker's today I couldn't help noticing that someone's managed to publish Deal or No Deal, the book. So, I wondered, exactly how do you turn a guessing game into a 400 page book. A quick flick through it, revealed that it must have been "written" inside a week. As I say, Deal or No Deal is a guessing game, so this book just seems to be a guessing game based on how much the banker would offer in various situations. Page after page of printouts of the "board" of remaining values.

No doubt the board game, the video game and the mobile phone game are all just around the corner...

Great piece from Sunday's New York Times Magazine by Kevin Kelly on the state of play in scanning books (via just about everywhere)

A little while ago, I noted that Waterstone's current online offereing essentially ceded the game to Amazon and that they could do something a little cleverer if they tried. Today comes an announcement that from this autumn, the Amazon deal is ending, and Waterstone's is going it alone.

There are lots of big things planned: "unmatched exclusive content for customers such as streaming of book signing events, author insights, ‘try before you buy’ and personal shopping for gifts serviced by knowledgeable booksellers."

Waterstone also acknowledge that they are "in a unique position to offer our customers a national high street presence and an integrated online offer from a brand that they know and trust."

What they don't explain, is how they're going to reconcile their high street and online offerings and make them work together. Parent group HMV already has a similar situation with its music brand, and thus-far, there's been no symbiosis. It's not going to be an easy nut to crack, and there's going to need to be significant investment in IT, but it can be done, and can give Waterstone's a unique position in the market.

(Incidentally, I'd not mentioned it here yet, but it seems that Tim Waterstone's latest offer for his old brand has fallen apart. Shame.)

One of the benefits of supping with the devil and buying The Daily Mail for the past week or so, aside from building a nice cheap Ealing Comedy DVD collection, has been to read the extracts of the new Andrew Jennings book.

As sure as night turns to day, a new international tournament - in this instance the "Fifa World Cup" - brings a new Andrew Jennings book. And long may he continue.

This time around, it's "Foul!: How Soccer's Leaders Ruined the Game". Fifa is, needless to say, irritated by this book.

As the book contains a number of false and libellous claims, FIFA applied for an injunction on the publication and distribution of the book as a precaution several months ago. The Zurich cantonal high court complied with this request by passing a provisional ruling on 26 April 2006.

Huh? How can you claim an injunction on the publication and distribution of book before it's been published "several months ago"?

Incidentally, I'm sure it's just an oversight, but I don't seem to be able to find this book listed anywhere on Amazon. Normally, even if you couldn't find it listed as in stock on the main Amazon site, one of the Marketplace dealers would have had it listed pretty pronto, and it'd show up when searching. Very strange. It's published by Harper Collins so there's no excuse about a small publisher not getting their act together (actually, any small publisher is very likely to make absolutely sure that Amazon lists their title, but that's another discussion).

This is a book being serialised in one of the largest national daily papers at the moment, and yet I can't see it on Amazon. Hmm.

First off, I must admit that I don't think I'd ever before noticed the apostraphe in Waterstone's name. I certainly don't believe I used it before. My mistake.

Anyhow, Tim Waterstone has launched a bid to buy back the book chain from parent company HMV. HMV, of course, had been thinking about a buyout of rival chain Ottaker's. That got referred to the Competition Commission who've essentially said it's fine to go ahead.

In the meantime, WH Smith is thought to also be mulling over launching a bid for Ottaker's having recently put more importance into books in their stores.

I saw one of the new WH Smiths Books standalone stores the other day at Liverpool Street station, but I couldn't obviously see that it was carrying any more titles than the two nearby traditional stores that are also to be found around the station. My local store has definitely reduced their CD and DVD shelf space, but it hasn't gone to books.

What I find amazing, is that if you visit either Borders or Waterstones to buy books online, you end up dealing with Amazon, their biggest competitor (aside from the supermarkets).

I've said before that more retailers need to follow the Argos way of working with combined electronic/bricks & mortar offereings. Argos has the stock control system obviously, but the idea that I can get an online(ish) price and pick-up in-store would be great.

Here's how it could work.

I really want to read Lisa Jardine's biography of Robert Hooke.

I search the Waterstone's website.

The Waterstone's stock control can't find any in my nearby Piccadilly Circus branch, but the Gower Street branch is reporting a single copy.

Because there's only one copy there, it can't be certain that I'll find it when I'm in store. It might have been stolen, it put back by some absent minded customer in the gardening section. But with daily deliveries from the Waterstone's warehouse, it can guarantee a copy will be delivered tomorrow.

The retail price for the book is £9.99. Amazon would charge me £6.59. But Waterstone's will charge me £8.49 ordering the book this way.

Yes Amazon costs less, but I can get the book quicker than I can from Amazon since I can go to the store tomorrow. Amazon could send it out first class, but that's going to cost me a few quid. Indeed their Super Saver Delivery won't kick in until I spend £15. Ordinarily it's going to take a day or two longer before I get the book from Amazon.

Could this model work? Well, assuming that bookstores do get daily deliveries, and the warehouses are fully computerised, then, yes, it could. The "copies in stock" model may need tweaking. Do I send a customer to a shop if it says it's carrying a single copy, or five copies? New technologies including inserting RFID chips into each book should allow improvements in stock control.

How do you rationlise charging online customers less than in-store ones? I don't know. Either introduce across-the-board reductions or maybe consider an online customer as a better one since they're likely to be certain purchasers. Yes, I can forsee myself standing in Waterstones reserving the book I'm holiding to save myself £1.50, but then you're getting some valuable CRM data about me in return. It's a bit like the deal you do (or don't do) with Boots or Tesco by taking their loyalty cards. (Obviously, I don't do that deal, and really couldn't care less that I could have "saved" 13p if I had a Boots Advantage Card - I just consider that I've been overcharged 13p and think about taking my custom to Superdrug next time).

Great piece from Kieren McCarthy on the Jonathan Freedland/Sam Bourne fiasco. Be sure to follow all the links.

The Competition Commission has provisionally cleared (PDF) the sale of Ottaker's to HMV (owners of Waterstones), and I for one am pretty disappointed.

I used to love Waterstones - it was a great bookshop to browse at - but bookselling's changed and it's lost the sparkle now in places like Waterstones. I'm very lucky to work close to the flagship Waterstones in Piccadilly, but even that suffers from some of the sad things that have come from bookselling.

Once upon a time there was a great display of new books at the front of every Waterstones. You'd pore over shelves and display tables with the very latest books. All kinds of books would be displayed, not just the latest blockbuster titles. But today, we have the omnipresent 3 for 2 offers. These include titles that are largely "paid for" by publishers to be included in the promotions, and while some new titles are always included, the familiar Da Vinci Codes and whatever's in the Richard & Judy or Daily Mail bookclub are more standard fare.

I've no problem with these offers, but by the time shelf-space has been allocated to the top 10 fiction and non-fiction titles, in hardback and paperback, the "offer of the week", the 3 for 2s, the kids books section, the seasonal bit (Mother's Day books or Get London Reading), and you have little or no room for new books. Only the likeliest titles feature.

Ottaker's has many of the same problems, but they have a broader range of new titles to browse at. They do make a real effort to promote local books. They have books of the month that aren't necessarily titles that will inevitably appear in the top ten lists. They have a crime novel of the month, and a science fiction novel of the month. They publish little magazines aimed at both these genres too. Some of their larger stores have Daleks in them! My local store regularly has signings for sports books by ex-Arsenal and Spurs players (I live in that hinterland between both teams - my allegiances should be clear even if I didn't write at length about the superb performance on Tuesday night). And you get the feeling that their staff recommendations are genuine choices (I can't prove it, but I suspect that in Waterstones, the staff recommendations, with their handwritten note cards, are selected from a list sent down from head office - you never see anything too unexpected on them).

I realise that as someone who pays at least one visit a week to a bookshop (and consequently has far too many titles awaiting reading at home), I'm very much out of the ordinary - the ordinary being someone who makes an annual pilgrimige to buy a couple of books at Christmas. But as a regular buyer, I've been forgotten by Waterstones. I still love the depth of range of backlist books that I can get in store, and I still regularly go there, but it's just not as good as it was when I was at University in Bath popping in and out of both the academic store on campus, and the marvellous Milson Street store in town.

On Five Live this morning they had someone from the Competition Commission defending their decision. They mentioned the supermarkets as usual, which is fine if you somehow want to read a Dan Brown novel and haven't got round to it yet (Is there anybody left? In the US they've only just released a paperback edition of the book, having finally seen demand for the hardback drying up). You're also OK if you want to read the latest chick-lit title, American thriller, or whatever. But if it's not in the top 30, it's not going to be stocked. Then they mentioned Amazon. Amazon, is of course great, but it's not the same thing. Amazon is great if you know a specific book that you want to buy, especially if it's a current hardback release or a back-list title that could be difficult to come by or expensive in store. But it's not really built for browsing. Amazon does its best of course, by giving you "other customers also bought this..." and customer lists. Even with their feature that allows you to look inside the book, it's trying hard to let you virtually do the equivalent of picking up a book and flicking through it when you're browsing in a bookshop. But it's much harder to do. Personally, I tend to know already about a particular title when I go to Amazon, or I'm seeking other books by the same author. Online book sales are not the same as retail ones.

The other things mentioned by the CC spokesperson were Borders and WH Smiths. Borders, it's true, is trying to grow its brand in the UK quite significantly. But it's a US company, and even with it's largest store in Oxford Street, it's difficult for it to stock the same level of depth as the largest Waterstones. They have significant stocks of music and DVDs. Their magazine range, however, is very impressive. WH Smiths is a different kettle of fish altogether. Their book section, to me, is neither one thing nor another. It has a greater range than a supermarket, but not so great that I could ever be sure of finding a title I'd like in store. The CC spokesperson mentioned that they were trialling book-only branches, but you get the feeling that this is desperation on their part, rather than some clever strategy. It's just about the only thing they haven't tried so far.

The one other significant player on the high street - in London at least - is Blackwells. This is probably my favourite bookshop. It's a shop which still has a really wide range of new and interesting titles on display. They have an exceptional science section - a byproduct of their raison d'etre really being the sale of academic books - and their political section is also very strong. When you go into Blackwells you just know that you're going to come out with something unexpected.

I don't hate Waterstones. I still like it a lot. But it's not as good as it used to be, and in a fair fight, Ottakers is better. Most towns and cities don't really have much choice aside from these two, with a few honorable exceptions in some of our university cities, and that choice is set to shrink substantially. There are small independent bookshops of course, and many of them are very fine. But they're set to suffer to an even greater extent as our choice diminishes. I hope that no such merger actually takes place.

The Times seems to love giving away free books at the moment. They've been running a promotion with their sister company HarperCollins whereby you can pick up a different book each week for 99p when you buy The Times in WH Smith. This is nothing new, as they've run this promotion a couple of times before - and I've made full use of it.

This week they're also packaging a couple of books free with the paper. Today they had The Discovery of Chocolate, the first novel by James Runcie. The curious thing is that Runcie's forthcoming novel, Canvey Island, out next month, is published by rival publisher Bloomsbury. It seems surprising that News Group would want to give a promotional push to an author who's now signed to a rival. Surely there are plenty of authors in house who could do with the push?

Anyhow, The Times' 99p book this week is Giotto's Hand by Iain Pears which looks interesting, and they're packaging another free book with Thursday's paper - The Queen of Subtleties by Suzannah Dunn - although the Amazon reviews aren't exactly encouraging.

It's all another weapon in the armoury of keeping your newspaper's ABC numbers up high. Witness The Guardian's DVD of the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much at the weekend (Hitchcock's own 1956 remake is somewhat better). The Independent has recently taught us French, Spanish and Italian, so I look forward to getting Russian lessons over a forthcoming weekend.

As many people know, there's an ongoing court case between Dan Brown, writer of The Da Vinci Code, and a couple of the authors of a piece of cod-history called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail which was published quite a few years ago.

At first glance, it seems as though it's a battle between a paperback-pop author (as my old English teacher once referred to Evelyn Waugh of all people) who's lucked out with a massive selling novel, and a couple of loons who kick started a whole sub-genre of pseudo-history books. Their book sold well enough first time around, but now you'll find it front at centre at most high street book shops as they cash in on both the legal case and renewed interest in the subject matter.

But as Nic Cohen says in his Observer piece from the weekend, the prospect of Brown losing his case is really quite scary.

As I understand it, Leigh and Baigent, the authors of Holy Blood, are arguing that Brown stole the central theme from their earlier book. It's certain that Brown read their book, although precisely when is unclear. And both titles have similar stories. Except one is presented as fiction and the other as fact.

If for a moment, we ignore the fact that Holy Blood is load of nonsense, and instead accept it as historical fact, then we're left with a true story. Why shouldn't I be able to fictionalise that true story as long as I avoid libelling living characters? I can go out and write a book about Queen Elizabeth I and pretty much have her behave or say whatever I like. There are plenty of known facts about her for me to base my novel on - indeed her life has been dramatised twice in recent months on TV. There are a wealth of biographies for me to consult when I'm writing my masterpiece. I'm not breaching copyright by dramatising these events. These things happened.

I suspect that the writers in this case are more annoyed about the fact that they dreamt up a fictional story and, having presented it as fact, have then seen the same story presented as fiction. You can't have it both ways though. Even if it was presented as a piece of fiction, then there'd be problems, since ideas in novels are regularly regurgitated. It'd be pretty impossible to make sure that the central tenet of any book hadn't already been used in a prior work.

Brown must surely win - bringing untold extra sales (who's left, I'm not sure) and valuable publicity for the forthcoming film. All totally pointless.

No, I'm not talking about Bookcrossing. I mean those books you find when you stay in, say, a holiday cottage, or perhaps a guest house somewhere. There'll be a shelf of select titles kicking around, and depending on what you've brought with you, and the offering available, you might read one or two of them.

But the list of authors is usually pretty limited. Here are some of the authors you will find, in no particular order:

Catherine Cookson
Jack Higgins
Wilbur Smith
A random Mills & Boon
Virginia Andrews

Just after Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason won the Golden Dagger from the British Crimewriters' Association, they ban foreign language titles. The rumour, according to The Guardian's Bookseller diary, it's down to the award's sponsor next year not wanting to promote obscure Scandinavian authors when there are lots of British and American authors to plug. The fact that these authors get more shelf space and promotion seems to be neither here nor there. The one great thing about prizes is their ability to help you find out about authors you might not have previously read, rather than just another Dan Brown. (Speaking of which, this is a completely brilliant initiative!)

At the weekend I went to a great new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum about Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence was a great Arabist, and I must admit that one of the books I've not read, but really wish I had, is Seven Pillars of Wisdom - don't worry, I intend to put this right.

The exhibition is quite tightly packed in, and features many of Lawrence's belongings, including some of his famous clothes. And it also has the motorbike on which he was riding when he caught a child's bike, crashed, went into a coma, and then died.

You're given an enormously informative audio guide when you enter the exhibition, and it makes for fascinating listening. I know that I'm not remotely the first person to note the incredible aptness of a letter Lawrence wrote to The Sunday Times in 1920, but it's worth repeating it, and the excerpt is included on the audio guide where Sam West reads it sensationally:

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.

We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. all experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?

The full article can be found here.

Last night I joined many others to see Lenny Henry in conversation with Neil Gaiman. A very entertaining evening it was too even if I didn't stay around to join an enormous queue and get a book signed.

Here's what Gaiman himself says about the evening (with links on from there).

I popped along to this after work, and was reminded once again that I don't read enough SF. The discussion was getting very interesting before I had to leave for my next busy Monday night engagement.

I know I must be thinking like a complete snob, but I can't be the only one who's disappointed by the number of adults they're seeing reading the new Harry Potter on the tube. Last night I saw a couple sitting together each reading their own copy. I think the worst thing is that some people have being buying the "adult" version of the book that comes without the colourful cover, and has a mature author photo of JK Rowling on the back.

Come on.

You'd probably think less of me if I sat on the tube reading a Famous Five book, and rightly so. Mills & Boon romantic novels sell well, as do Black Lace erotic novels. But people get embarraassed and you don't see them being read on the tube. If only it were the same for Potter.

One of the most remarkable things I noticed on my recent visit to America (about which, I really really will write something soon. Not that there are any readers here on tenterhooks or anything), was the fact that The Da Vinci Code is not out in paperback in America. This is a book that became a hit back in 2003, and went on to become an international hit.

In Britain it was published directly as a paperback in March 2004, and hasn't been far from the top of the bestsellers since.

That remains the case in the States, where it has yet to be released in softcover since it hasn't left the charts. It seems remarkable to me that everyone who wants it in hardback hasn't now got it. But with sales continuing apace, the US publisher isn't in any rush to release a paperback.

This is all just a long winded way of saying that The New York Times has a good piece discussing this very thing.

I wonder how far down the line Dan Brown is to producing a follow-up. For my thoughts on the book check out here.

The more alert reader may have spotted that my last couple of book reviews have now become adorned with tasteful Amazon ads.

I should explain.

Obviously this site isn't quite one to put The London Review of Books to shame just yet, but I do like to read books (and to be honest, I like to buy them even more). A while back when playing with plugins for MT (the system that this site runs on), I a became an Amazon associate. Riches awaited me.

Thousands of readers would buy books off the back of my recommendations. Amazon would do well because I link to them by default, and I'd reap the dividends.

Except it didn't quite work like that. I was pretty poor in my linking policy, and most of the time, I just put a straight link into the text.

Anyway, I didn't give it a second thought until a Q1 summary of my earnings dropped into my inbox, and I noticed that I'd earned some money.

£0.13

That is, some revenue from the sale of a single book. And it's not even one that I've read or linked to, so God knows how that happened.

So this is my subtle attempt to see what happens if I pursue a proper linking policy on this site. And it does make the site a little more colourful with nice cover images. Who knows, I may eventually be able to buy a book with the proceeds? But let's not run before we can walk.

While I'm on the subject of comics, I was in Music Zone the other day, and they had The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones in hardback available for a bargain £4.97! I immediately snapped up a copy, despite owning the first published collections and the original comics. (They also had Slaine the King for £2.97 so I may be making a return trip).

Today's the first of November and the start of NaNoWriMo - or National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you've got to write a novel of at least 50,000 words by the end of the month - as featured on this Evening's Front Row.

I've not written so much as a short story since school - probably at some point in my English Language 'O' Level - so it's a tough ask. But I'm going to have a bash. Write what you know and all that, so that's where I'll be starting.

I won't say any more at the moment, but stay tuned to see if I do well, or crash and burn. And I'll no doubt publish the whole thing either here or elsewhere. I haven't quite worked it all out yet.

So, 50,000 words divided by 30 days equals 1,666 words a day. Quite a schedule whilst holding down a fulltime job.

This has come as a bit of a bolt from the blue. He was only 51, and a very talented performer and writer. Disdainful though I sometimes am of that category of books, I do like reading them.

Memo to self: Really must read some James Joyce at some point.

Waterstones has a new promotion in store at the moment, in which their staff have chosen their 150 favourite books which are displayed prominently in store, and press adverts highlight individual books accompanied by specific recommendations by staff members from around the country. (A brief aside here - I'm really not convinced that this is a completely unbiased list. I'd guess that some titles couldn't be included for various reasons, particularly as there's a 3 for 2 offer on the titles included).

All well and good, and it was pleasing to see Alan Moore and Dave Green's Watchmen as one of the books on the list. But I was horrified in the Oxford Street/Tottenham Court Road branch to see a title by David Icke. In particular it was Tales From The Time Loop. Now I've got no problem with David Icke's nonsense being available (I am slightly concerned by all the four and five star reviews it gets on Amazon, but I suspect that this is par for the course with these kind of titles, as those "true believers" rush to give it good reviews), indeed I'd be terrified if it wasn't, but being included on the Waterstones list? I can only assume that this was an error by the local store. Either that, or there's a member of staff at that branch who's particularly keen on his alien conspiracy balderdash.

I may just pay the massive Piccadilly branch to double check.

Not exactly staggering news. But it seems that some authors have been writing favourable reviews of their own books on Amazon. Well there's a thing! Who'd have thought it. And other writers are giving positive reviews to books written by friends. Well that happens all the time in the press anyway, so I wouldn't get hung up over it.

In any case, aside from technical books, why would anyone totally trust a review written by an anonymous soul? I tend to use a wider range of criteria before buying a book.

The Guardian yesterday had an astonishing account from Mende Nazer about her life as a member of the Nuba tribe in Sudan, and being captured into slavery. Finally she managed to escape when she was working in Britain.

The full account doesn't seem to be up on the main Guardian site, but it's an extract from a book co-authored by Damien Lewis (surely not that Damien Lewis). Since what I read is only an extract, I'm sure that there's much more to this story and it's definitely worth reading.

I read a piece somewhere recently (I don't recall where exactly) which said that now is not a good time to buy books in the sales as you get good deals all year around.

I tend to agree with this, as the so called bargains look suspiciously like publisher initiatives to me rather than retailers shifting stock. Either that or everyone over-ordered Mark Urban's book about Napoleonic sharpshooters.

And while we're talking about books, last week The Guardian published their annual table of "Fastsellers" which I actually look forward to every year. (No link as at time of writing the Guardian hadn't put it up). One of the biggest puzzles with this is that something called Bride Stripped Bare appeared at no. 92 without selling a single domestic copy. It doesn't appear in paperback until March in the UK. Seems to be a load of rubbish.

An awesome piece by John Le Carré in The Observer this weekend, about his father Ronnie.

Well the BBC for ages have been collating the nations favourite Big Reads, and some while ago published to top 100. This has now been further whittled down to the top 21.

In the meantime, The Observer has published its list of the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. This was followed up by readers listing the books that they felt had been missed off the list.

Many of these I have read. Some I would never read. Some I own, but haven't yet felt able to either pick up and start, or just get beyond a few pages. So based on all that criteria, here are the books that I've yet to read, but feel I must. In no particular order:

A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell
The Deptford Trilogy - Robertson Davies
The Magus - John Fowles
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Pursuit Of Love - Nancy Mitford
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
Underworld - Don Delillo

Obviously I reserve the right to change these as I see fit!

Thank goodness. Someone's put together a Kurt Wallander website in English detailing the publishing order of the Wallander series of novels by Henning Mankell.

Before I got to this site, I was totally confused by the publishing order, and frankly it's not surprising. Later this month the latest English language Wallander novel is being published - The Return of the Dancing Master. Except, it's not actually a Wallander novel. So why do we get it next. Firewall was published in the States last year, and has just come out there in paperback and is available via Amazon. Yet it's UK publication isn't until next April! Before the Frost is a year away, and The Man Who Smiled 18 months from now. Yet both of these latter two take place before The Fifth Woman in the chronology of Wallander, and also in the publishing timeline. I'm so confused.

Well I'll have a look in the Crime Fiction shop tomorrow in Charing Cross Road to see if Firewall's out there.

Very sad to hear that Edward Said has died. Another obituary is to be found here.

Spiders is an excellent web comic that I've seen referenced a couple of times in the last week.

Now that I have the blog up and running, I suddenly got in a bit of a Halo Jones mood, and decided to search for pictures.

But what do you, a quick Google search throws up images from the site of Mr Ian Gibson himself. While this is to be expected, you must know that I've looked long and hard on the net in the past for information about what he's doing now.

Well I must admit that I'm not overly informed having been to the site, as there's no inidication of when it was last updated, so I've no idea when "Lifeboats" might be published. But it's still good to know I've found the site.

Well the BBC's top 100 books have been published, and they're a bit disappointing.

Harry Potter's there in abundance - surely it should be counted as one book like Lord of the Rings? Then there are books like Animal Farm which are evidently books people read at school for O Level or GCSE. And of course there are the middle class contemporary "classics" like Captain Correlli.

Mind you, I'm probably just bitter because Scoop didn't make the cut. Mind you, I never got around to voting for it.