The Guardian's Blog, page 119
July 8, 2014
Amazon's battle with Hachette is a fight for readers, writers and retailers | Hugh Howey
News: New Amazon terms amount to 'assisted suicide' for book industry, experts claim
How much should an ebook cost? And how should that money be split? These two questions seem to be at the centre of a debate ripping through the publishing industry. How this debate plays out could have lasting repercussions for readers, writers, publishers, and booksellers.
The debate arose as negotiations between Hachette Book Group one of the largest publishers in the world and Amazon, the largest book retailer in the world, began to falter. By all accounts, the sticking point is over who controls the price of digital books. It isn't the first time this clash has occurred over the very same issue. In 2010, Hachette was one of the five publishers that worked with Apple to raise the price of ebooks and force digital retailers onto a new profit model.
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July 7, 2014
Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week's blog. Here's a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
AggieH sang the praises of Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog, which she "shelves near Adichie these days":
It seems de Kretsers talent for summing up a character or setting in a remark was born fully-formed. There's Nelly with her disgraceful laugh. The ambiguous Posner who brings out a smile as if he were exercising a crocodile. Australia, where the native fauna was designed by 'either a child or a genius. Toms aunt with her glass cabinet of figurines:
Once a week Audrey murmured to small porcelain people of love while holding them face down in soapy water.
Also born fully-formed: de Kretsers core themes. Displacement. Geographical & social migration. Belonging, or not. Hope. Chance.
Have had Mitchell's second novel since it was published in paperback, and / but it's taken me 13 years and 4 attempts to get into it. Enjoying it finally and determined to persevere this time. Adored Ghostwritten.
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By RobDyson
1 July 2014, 19:53
I don't know whether McBride is a genius or a fake and will have to wait until she writes her second novel to find out. McBride writes like a cheap version of James Joyce. I know that the critics all loved this use of language but it is not original. (...) So this is either a work of genius or something that should have stayed in the slush pile as it did for eight years. I don't know what I think even now. Has anyone else read this? I do love what I have read of Joyce but this seems like pastiche. And the story is not particularly original. Oh dear. Even having written this I can't make up my mind. And as I don't think I will be rereading this my response will have to remain ambivalent.
This is a wonderful book, gripping, with lots of twists and unexpected turns that had me page turning until the very end. However, it is a considerable read, with no less than 650 pages but the ending makes it worth it.
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By missnewsy
1 July 2014, 20:19
Somehow when feeling down I turn to Carver's famous story "A Small Good Thing" (hence the cinnamon roll) and I've just added All of Us, his collected poetry. He was one writer who managed to rise above alcoholism to produce his finest work in his short career.
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By jmschrei
3 July 2014, 1:26
If has taken my partner over a year to get me to pick up this book, he rates it as a favourite but if I'm honest I'm a little intimidated by the legendary gore and violence... Wish me luck.
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By ID9484278
5 July 2014, 20:22
Tom Jones, I read on the beach in Spain on holiday, and it always reminds me of sun and sand. It helps that my copy is smeared with suncream. I memorised big chunks of John Donne's poetry on my tea breaks whilst working in a fish factory, and can still smell the smoked salmon when I think of him. I read Marlowe's complete plays in between serving pints in a pub one summer. The essays of Addison and Steele are inextricably linked to interrailing around Eastern Europe.
@GuardianBooks Khaled Hosseini's And the mountains echoed... Can't read it fast enough to find out what happens next :-)
@GuardianBooks Mr Mercedes by Stephen King - I'm really enjoying it. Love it when King does straight thriller!
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Poem of the week: A Dream by Matthew Arnold
John Cowper Powys described Matthew Arnold in The Pleasures of Literature as "the great amateur of English poetry" who "always has the air of an ironic and urbane scholar chatting freely, perhaps a little indiscreetly, with his not very respectful pupils."
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The best books of 2014: what are your favourites so far?
Readers' panel: Now that we're halfway into 2014, it seems a good moment to decide what the best new books of the last six months have been. Cast your vote below, and let the polling begin
"Listicles" tend to produce extreme reactions, but they're a useful way to look back and forward to organise our thoughts, as well as a nice summer distraction, and at the Books desk we've decided to embrace them. Readers have been keen to identify the best films and albums of the year (so far) over at our sister sites Film and Music, so we wanted to ask you to take a look back at the first half of the literary year.
What is the book published in the first six months of 2014 that you've enjoyed the most? Nominate it through the form below, justifying your choice of course. We're open to fiction and non-fiction.
To participate you will need to register or sign in by using the button below.
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Sir Walter Scott's Waverley at 200 is not yet old
I think it's the "Sir" that does it. When readers see the name "Sir Walter Scott" on a spine, it's almost as if a miasma of preconceptions and prejudices aristocratic privilege, dull pomposity, archaic conservatism, royal sycophancy, meandering sentences comes swirling up like so many dust motes blown off a book right at the back of an antiquarian bookseller's. If only his works could be published under any of his other names: "The Wizard of the North", "The Great Unknown', or given the 200th anniversary of its publication today, "The Author of Waverley" we might be able to see Scott's astonishing work with properly fresh eyes.
Waverley is not a precursor to the great Victorian novels (or even the mediocre Victorian novels by the likes of Bulwer-Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth) but a development from the form's 18th-century radical roots. In the same year as he published Waverley anonymously, as Walter Scott he had produced an edition of the works of Swift. The opening pages of Waverley have a kind of sly self-consciousness that echoes Sterne's Tristram Shandy more than Trollope's Orley Farm. The reader doesn't jump into the story, but jumps into a story about the story as the narrator ponders other titles and subtitles the book could have had. He parodies gothic, sentimental and fashionable tales (though the book will eventually encompass all these genres). Chapter 24 begins with the provocative question "Shall this be a long or a short chapter? This is a question in which you, gentle reader, have no vote, however much you may be interested in the consequences."
"It is wonderful what genius and adherence to nature will do in spite of all disadvantages. Here is a thing obviously very hastily, and, in many places, very unskilfully written composed, one half of it, in a dialect unintelligible to four-fifths of the reading population of the country relating to a period too recent to be romantic, and too far gone by to be familiar and published, moreover, in a quarter of the island where materials and talents for novel-writing have been supposed to be equally wanting; and yet, by the mere force and truth and vivacity of its colouring, already casting the whole tribe of ordinary novels into the shade, and taking its place rather with the most popular of our modern poems, than with the rubbish of provincial romances. The secret of this success, we take it, is merely that the author is a person of genius".
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July 4, 2014
Fire, torment and villainy await Chris Grayling in novel punishment for prison book ban
There have been petitions to Downing Street, letters and protests in a bid to reverse the frankly indefensible decision from the Ministry of Justice to prevent books being sent to prisoners. But Kathy Lette has hit upon a route that may prove more effective in removing the ban than persuasion: humiliation.
Lette told the New York Times that her new novel Courting Trouble "will feature a corrupt lawyer named Chris Grayling who ends up in a prison where he is deprived of reading matter and goes insane". Good lord.
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Poster poems: Islands | Billy Mills
Rereading Shakespeare's The Tempest recently, I was struck again by the importance of the play's island setting, the epitome of those magical, liminal spaces where the normal rules of society can be suspended, for good or ill. In the play the outcome of this suspension is primarily beneficial; Prospero is restored to his Dukedom and Miranda and Ferdinand, through their happy love, reunite the divided factions of Naples. Once this resolution is achieved, the players can abandon their island sanctuary and return to what passes for the real world.
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America's independence from Britain resounds in its poetry
Last week, over breakfast, my teenage son looked up. "What's the point of Independence Day?" He chewed his cereal. "Shouldn't we have just stayed with England?"
I hemmed and hawed, saying that we were being taxed without representation. Of course this was one of the reasons for declaring independence from Britain in 1776, but the story is more complicated than that. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Americans were lucky to have a first-rate Enlightenment intellectual at the desk in 1876, able to put immortal words to paper. He inspired a revolution.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear;
Those of mechanics each one singing his, as it should be, blithe
and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off
work;
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat the deck
hand singing on the steamboat deck;
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench the hatter singing
as he stands;
The wood-cutter's song the ploughboy's, on his way in the morn
ing, or at the noon intermission, or at sundown;
The delicious singing of the mother or of the young wife at work
or of the girl sewing or washing
Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else;
The day what belongs to the day
At night, the party of young
fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs.
On the far side of the water, high on a sand bar,
Grandfathers are lolling above the Arkansas River,
Guitars in their laps, cloth caps like Cagney down over their eyes.
A woman is strumming a banjo.
Another adjusts her bow tie
And boiled shirtwaist.
And in the half-light the frogs begin from their sleep
To ascend into darkness,
The insect choir
Offering its clear soprano
Out of the vaulted gum trees into the stained glass of the sky.
July 2, 2014
Reading lessons of a religious upbringing without modern books
John Burnside reviews After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry
When I was eight I searched for something to read and found a white-jacketed book full of illustrations. It was about a bullied orphan who left boarding school to live in a haunted house and marry a black-haired man, and though now and then I had to ask my mother to decipher a word, I was enthralled. No one told me I was too young for Jane Eyre.
My parents are devoutly Christian, members of one of the few Strict Baptist chapels left in Essex. It's hard to explain how it was to be brought up in that chapel and that home: often I say, laughingly, "I grew up in 1895", because it seems the best way of evoking the Bible readings and Beethoven, the Victorian hymns and the print of Pilgrim's Progress, and the sunday school seaside outings when we all sang grace before our sausage and chips in three-part harmony.
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London literary benches: who should be number 51?
The National Literacy Trust has installed 50 illustrated book benches in London for the summer to celebrate the city's literary heritage and promote reading. But who should feature on the 51st? Make a case for your favourite and help us to create a Guardian readers' bench
Find London's literary benches and share your photosWe have featured a piece by Mal Peet on the joys of reading on public benches, have asked for your photos of the benches and have challenged you to a picture quiz. Now we're giving you the chance to decide who will be honoured on an extra bench, number 51, to be chosen by you.
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