The Guardian's Blog, page 166

Noel Gallagher may not read it, but he writes fiction

The singer has declared that fiction is 'a fucking waste of time' but, as his own work shows, words can take us on life-changing journeys

Noel Gallagher's recent suggestion that reading fiction is a "fucking waste of time" and readers and reviewers are "putting themselves a tiny little bit above the rest of us" – is a valuable contribution to the debate around books and literature's role in modern society. His remarks raise three important questions; about the value of fiction, the relationship between song and book, and the challenge of access to reading.

This is a man who has sold millions of records worldwide – sales that most authors and publishers could only dream of – in part because of his imaginative lyrics that inspire and transport the listener, just as a work of fiction does for the reader. He may have conceded that the words to his songs, for him, mean nothing more substantial than people queuing up to hear him play and shelling out for the records. But listening to Oasis songs, it doesn't take long before you stumble upon a truly beautiful lyric ("Wake up the dawn and ask her why/ A dreamer dreams she never dies"). Just because words are put to music, it doesn't mean they stop telling a story. Any art form that offers a respite from the daily grind, be it song, novel, or film, should be valued.

Pop music and literature should not compete for attention, but complement one another in conjuring a sense of wonder about the written word. The list of treasured wordsmiths who embody this synergy is endless – Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, PJ Harvey …

At Booktrust, we promote reading for pleasure – often through fiction – because, simply put, it improves life chances. The studies that link reading and social mobility are endless; recent research from the Institute of Education tells us that reading for pleasure throughout childhood leads to significantly higher results in maths, vocabulary and spelling. But novels also feed the imagination, bring solace, and extend understanding – altering and illuminating the world around us.

Noel Gallagher is right to have challenged the literary world to focus on access and the problem of elitism; reading should never be a closed book for anyone. Which is why Booktrust's Bookstart programme gives free books to every child accross the country, and uses songs and rhymes to introduce children to the world of words.

The role of music in encouraging a love of words is an important one, and as a lyricist, Noel Gallagher has played his part in inspiring a generation to cherish them. But let's also recognise the immeasurable contribution of authors of fiction.

• Viv Bird is the chief executive of Booktrust

FictionNoel GallagherViv Bird
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Guardian readersHannah Freeman

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 26: The Dark Half

Plainly drawing on King's own demons, this story of a writer's worst imaginings coming to life is haunting in every sense

King's addictions have been well documented in this series. The Tommyknockers, his previous novel, was written in a haze of cocaine and cough syrup, and reads like it; after its publication, King's wife, Tabitha, staged an intervention. He was to kick his habits, save his family, and then resume writing. When he came back, two years later, it was with The Dark Half, a novel that manages to encapsulate all King's demons – his addictions, his worries about his family life, the ups and downs of his own publishing career – while being unlike anything he'd written before.

The Dark Half is my favourite King novel. It may not be his best, but it's the one that I love most.

When King's angry, less-pleasant Richard Bachman pseudonym was discovered by the reading public, he decided to kill him off, and issued a press release about the fake writer's death. It was a nice touch. In The Dark Half, Thad Beaumont is a writer who has an angry, unpleasant pseudonym of his own: George Stark. The pseudonym is discovered, and Beaumont is forced to kill him off as well. A story runs in People magazine, along with a photograph of a mock burial, a headstone for a man who never existed. "George Stark," the headstone reads, "Not a very nice guy". With King's pseudonym, however, that was that (aside from his own journeys back into the Bachman voice in later novels). For Beaumont, burying this fake man somehow channels him into coming to life. The rest of the novel deals with what happens when Stark comes out of that grave (heralded by the message, "The sparrows are flying again") and enacts a terrible series of killings – killings that inevitably leave Beaumont as the prime suspect.

The plot is one of King's strongest – the idea of your demons becoming real, and hunting you out to enact some grotesque revenge, is a hugely appealing one – and yet what lingers after reading are the ways in which King's own life intrudes upon his fictional work. If Stark is seen as a projection of all of those traits that King saw and hated in himself (anger, pain, addiction, a potential for violence), the work takes on a whole new layer. At the end of the book, when Stark is vanquished, Beaumont's wife leaves him, unable to see the man she once loved past the hate and pain he has brought upon his family. It's possible to see this as a fear that King himself had; that Tabitha, his long-suffering wife, would find herself unable to see the man that she loved for all the mess in their lives.

What stuck with me was that it was about a writer actually writing. Though the writer with demons is an essential King trope, this book feels as though it's about an actual, working writer: somebody with a career. For better or worse, when I was a teenager I saw Thad Beaumont as an aspirational figure; a man who was doing what I wanted to do. I once rewrote The Dark Half – don't laugh – across 17 pages, abridging it into a short story in an attempt to understand how King did it. Even the excerpts of Stark's writing – about an even nastier man than the faux-author, called Alexis Machine – tied into the main story. Stark's writing was Beaumont's writing was King's writing. If Alexis Machine was Beaumont's darkest moment, so too was it King's.

In my first edition of the novel, the cover proclaims The Dark Half to be King's "masterpiece". It's not heralded as one of his great novels now, and I think that's hugely unfair. It's a deeply personal book, intimately bound up with the creative process, and yet also presents a gripping, and almost grotesquely dark story to rival any other that King has written.

Connections

The Dark Half introduces Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who will later reappear in Needful Things – another hugely underrated book – and Bag Of Bones. (And, thanks to Pangborn's reappearance, we discover the true ending of The Dark Half: that, when Beaumont's wife leaves him, he ends up killing himself.)

Next: Four Past Midnight

Stephen KingHorrorFictionJames Smythe
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Edgar Allan Poe's shockingly unsensational storytelling

Expecting thrills and scares, many of us in the reading group have thus far found Poe's storytelling hypnotic only in the sleep-inducing sense

It was more than eight long days ago – or perhaps more, or less, since I have taken no note of time – that I first opened Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales. During the whole dull, dark and laborious process of reading these melancholy tales, I have found not one mote of joy. I have hardly even found interest. Rather, to an anomalous species of boredom I have found myself a bounden slave. The accumulation of woe after woe, horror upon horror – and of longueurs I still yet tremble to repeat – combined with the repetition of themes and ideas, has become an almost intolerable burden. Repetition! Did I just write repetition? The word hangs before my eyes, and although I have imbibed an immoderate dose of opium my mind apprehends it as clearly as the shaking hand before my face. The phantasmagoric …

… you get the idea. Poe, I'm sorry to say, is tough going. My progress through this book has been singularly slow. It's partly my fault, having been busy elsewhere. But better judges than me have also been complaining on this month's discussion boards:

MythicalMagpie writes:

I've only made it as far as The Fall of the House of Usher, and it's taking a damn long time to fall. It seems I can only read a couple of pages of Poe's writing before I fall asleep. There's a really hypnotic quality to all those tangled sentences. I confess to being a bit disappointed. Having read some of the authors who followed in his footsteps, I was expecting a bit more from the fount of all horror fiction.

My verdict – more effective than hot cocoa at bedtime.

It makes me wonder how seriously Poe expected his writing to be taken. Was he in fact a frustrated poet who needed to write sensational Gothic stories to put food on the table? Or would we need to go back a couple of hundred years to appreciate how far ahead of his time he really was?

Witchdoctor concurs: "I agree with you, a couple of pages is enough to send anyone to sleep."

Oranje14 says: "Hmmm … having read this recently I would say it's not scary at all, and by today's standards the plots are nothing to write home about."

I share this sense of disappointment. It turns out that the story I focused on last week, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, is something of a high point. There was enough good material and genuine inspiration there to make the silliness and verbosity of the rest forgivable. That's largely untrue of the rest of this collection.

Even the most famous stories, such as The Fall of the House Of Usher, left me cold. And not cold in a chills-up-the-spine sense: just a bit bored. The image of the house reflected in the black tarn is admittedly impressive. So too is the description of the crumbling house itself, and the "minute fungi" that cover its exterior. But the symbolism quickly becomes overbearing: the pathetic fallacy of the awful weather, the gothic archways, the wild guitar playing, the gloom, the doom, the adjectives pertaining to gloom and doom, the decayed trees. Too much! And that's before we get to the dialogue: "'I shall perish!'" said he. 'I must perish in this deplorable folly.'" You said it.

It's possible to defend Poe as a pioneer. Here we can see the model of haunted houses ever since. Generations of writers, not to mention special effects teams and film directors, have been inspired by him. Then again, his scary buildings and emotional weather patterns aren't a patch on those described by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, while his gothic excesses don't compete with those conjured by writers such as Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe half a century earlier.

So why do we still read Poe? Is he simply a curio - an early American writer with a crazy personal life? I hesitate to say that, for I still haven't read enough, for a start. And even though I've frequently been bored, I've found odd moments fascinating, and gloriously weird. What is this thing about female corpses, for instance? Good job he was born before psychotherapy.

Others in the reading group, meanwhile, have eloquently defended his writing. nilpferd, for instance, demolishes plenty of the arguments I've made above.

I think you're reading these tales somewhat at face value as 'literature' and not paying enough attention to the ideas contained within. Poe's real skill, I feel, was his ability to engage the imagination and to explore new ways of inhabiting the reader's mind. I wouldn't argue that his prose, his plots, or his descriptions were exemplary, but I would argue that his stories were a milestone in writers' relationships with their readers.

jmschrei concurs:

For all the criticism that self-proclaimed 'higher' literary sorts may want to heap on Poe, he was a consummate story teller. He was also a commercial writer supporting himself through his craft. One can well imagine his tales being read aloud at social gatherings in his day.

G1eenJ also raises an interesting point about interpretation.

Is it his sanity or mine which is being called into question? And at exactly which point have I allowed myself to be undermined by the narrator?

There's always a curiosity in Poe about how literally we should take things. How much is the product of a diseased mind? How much springs from the imagination and a combination of gloomy physical settings and depression? How much is supernatural?

On this note, nilpferd (again) quotes Italo Calvino explaining why he chose to include "The Tell Tale Heart" in an anthology, and suggesting that it's in the realm of the psychological that the opium-drenched author is most interesting.

All of Poe's idiosyncratic traits: the crumbling house that exudes an aura of dissolution, the lifeless woman, the man absorbed in esoteric studies, premature burial, the dead woman who leaves her grave. Afterward, all the literature of decadentism was able to feed on those motifs; the film industry, since its very beginnings has propagated them to the point of saturation … I wanted a different Poe to open this second part, the Poe who inaugurates a new kind of fantastic tale, one obtained using the very limited means that will dominate the second half of the century: the completely mental and psychological fantastic story.

Nilpferd explains:

In Calvino's view the most lasting legacy of Poe's work was his introduction in this tale of a murderer's interior monologue; locking us into the mind of a madman, Poe achieves a far more chilling result than he ever did with Gothic imagery, graves, and crumbling houses.

I'm prepared to buy that line. I'm going to read "The Tell Tale Heart" next and keep plodding on. Hopefully next week I'll have something more positive to say. I might also see if I can watch a film adaptation of a story. In the meantime, what else should we make of Poe?

Edgar Allan PoeShort storiesFictionSam Jordison
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Poem of the week: The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves by Anne Stevenson

A sensual depiction of the mechanics of cross-pollination, this is also a celebration of the earthly magic of Darwinian nature

On 15 October, Ada Lovelace Day marked the annual celebration of women's achievements in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was a gifted mathematician and pioneer theorist of artificial intelligence. As the daughter of Lord Byron, perhaps she should also represent the host of science-inspired poets now enriching our cultural ecosystem? A significant number of these are women, among them Anne Stevenson, who was mining that particular seam long before today's gold rush. In this week's poem, "The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves" from her newest Bloodaxe collection, Astonishment, it's the intricacies of foxglove pollination which fascinate her.

"See Darwin's pages on his foxglove summers" the fourth line advises, an elegant footnote incorporated into the poem's text. The pages can be found in Charles Darwin's 1876 study, The Effects of Cross- and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom. In his section on Digitalis purpurea (L), or Common Foxglove, Darwin stresses that it's only "the larger humble-bees" which participate in the plant's fertilisation. So the sonnet begins with a reminder of that conclusion, translated into glowing metaphor: "Because hairs on their speckled daybeds baffle the little bees,/ Foxgloves hang out their shingles for rich bumbling hummers …" Darwin's "humble-bee" and the more familiar term, bumblebee, cross-fertilise to produce "rich bumbling hummers", a description encapsulating the insect's sounds, movement and cushiony, gilded plumpness. The relationship of foxglove to bee is densely honeycombed with metaphors of seduction. The flowers are "speckled daybeds" and "tunnels-of-delight". Plied with nectar, the client-bees visit "every hooker" in an intoxicated ecstasy.

The word "hooker" has a function beyond the metaphorical. Inside the foxglove flower are hairs which, like small hooks, help the bee gain footholds as it climbs. For the reader, internal rhymes imitate the effect. "Hooker", for example, leads to a near-rhyme with "liquor" at the end of line six. In the previous line "heckles" (a form of "hackles"), also denoting an uneven surface, similarly connects in an internal near-rhyme with "speckled". The "k" sounds add thickness to the summery weight of "um" sounds. But the last line of the septet introduces a pragmatic note amid sensory entrancement. The nectar-lure has evolutionary purpose – to keep the foxglove from "propagating in a corner with itself". Darwin's comparative studies showed that cross-fertilised plants were frequently healthier than the self-fertilised.

Stevenson restructures the harmonious machinery of the sonnet into two septets, adding a further refinement, a (mostly) seven-beat line. A little lighter on internal rhymes, though still finding delicate inner sound patterns, the second septet maintains and develops the sexual drama. The anthers "let fly" their pollen prematurely, and "Along swims bumbler bee and makes an undercoat of this". The nicknaming informality here adds piquancy to the poet's voice, and generates a shared creaturely warmth. Darwin's own language is anthropomorphic at times, with words like "carry", "crawl", "footholds", "ease". The poem's linguistic abundance makes room for everyday domestic nouns like "daybeds" and "undercoat", faintly slangy idioms and the naturalist's precise vocabulary ("anthers", "dehisc", "Digitalis") when necessary.

The task of the poet as science-writer is not simply to dramatise unadorned narrative with figurative but subtly exact "lay" observations, but to visualise "bigger-picture" analogies. Here, for example, the consummation when "ripeness climbs the bells of Digitalis flower by flower" seems to mirror and expand the earlier movements of the bee as it mounts the individual foxglove corollae.

The last line is cunningly placed. The reader may have relished a vision of "design" and "desire" (which necessitate some sort of originating "mind") in the relations between bees and flowers. The poem's title adverted to a "miracle", in fact. Now the scientist in the poet might seem to be throwing cold water on those satisfying and beautiful elaborations. But this would be a misunderstanding, I think. What the poem is saying all along is that the real miracle is that such a perfectly functioning system has evolved without design. It's a reminder that Creationism doesn't simply deny the science – it betrays its wonder.

The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves

Because hairs on their speckled daybeds baffle the little bees,
Foxgloves hang their shingles out for rich bumbling hummers,
Who crawl into their tunnels-of-delight with drunken ease
(See Darwin's pages on his foxglove summers)
Plunging over heckles caked with sex-appealing stuff,
To sip from every hooker an intoxicating liquor
That stops it propagating in a corner with itself.

And this is how the foxglove keeps its sex life in order.
Two anthers – adolescent, in a hurry to dehisce –
Let fly too soon, so pollen lies in drifts about the floor.
Along swims bumbler bee and makes an undercoat of this,
Reverses, exits, lets it fall by accident next door.
So ripeness climbs the bells of Digitalis flower by flower,
Undistracted by a mind, or a design, or by desire.

PoetryAda LovelaceCharles DarwinBeesWildlifeInsectsCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Antonio Foscari, Elizabeth Gilbert and Lizzie Eldridge are among the writers under review this week

This week our readers have been travelling through time and space in search of a tasty book. Beginning in 16th century Italy, KIPalmlund has been reading Antonio Foscari's new book on Venetian architecture, Frescos: In the Rooms of Palladio Malcontenta 1557-1575. She writes:

In the generously illustrated book...Antonio Foscari, architect and historian, traces the creation of the frescos and their fate in a fascinating story about art and architecture and not least about art reflecting family relationships. Painstaking restorations have made Villa Malcontenta a tribute to the refined humanist culture flourishing in the maritime republic of Venice, the Serenissima, on the brink of losing its dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Next we're jetting off to America in the 1800s, where AnnSkea has been catching up on Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things. She was particularly impressed with the novel's heroine. She writes:

Alma's interests are intellectual and challenging but her curiosity is boundless, her experiences absorbing, and her life is never dull. She is also a woman whose sexuality is strongly developed, initially through discovering erotic books whilst sorting through the boxed libraries which her father buys from neighbours whose business enterprises (unlike his) have failed. Alma Whittaker is a woman who deserves to stand alongside all the famous heroines of English literature.

Lastly we travel to Spain, to the turbulent years leading up to the Spanish Civil War. Mario Gerada has been reading Duende by Lizzie Eldridge. He writes:

If Duende is a word that cannot be translated into English, Lizzie Eldridge does exactly that for the English speaking world. Not only does she translate Duende in her novel but she captures all of its intense experience of both pain and ecstasy. Through her characters Jose and Nayo she explores the dominant philosophical thoughts...conceived and debated within a violent and destructive Europe.

An interesting collection of books this week, which have certainly made me want to jump on the next flight to somewhere intriguing… Remember to let us know if we've mentioned your review, and we'll dig out a book for you from the cupboards.

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Eleanor Catton's precocious predecessors

This year's Man Booker prizewinner is the youngest ever, but she's far from being the first author to make an early impression. Here are a few earlier starts

Work: Dr Faustus (c.1589)
Author: Christopher Marlowe
Age: 25
Plot: German don who moonlights as magician sells soul in exchange for boundless knowledge, long-haul travel and night with Helen of Troy
Rewards: Biography murky, but hit probably paid for more "tobacco and boys" and secured playwright/spy juicier overseas missions as Elizabethan 007
Legacy: Every comparison of a deal to a Faustian pact – between politicians and spin doctors/bankers/generals, say, or rock stars and managers – descends from Marlowe's play, although Goethe's cheeky muscling in on same legend means he often gets credit instead

Work: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Age: 25
Plot: Drippy toff decides suicide only solution as fanciable local women all spoken for
Rewards: Ample – wins aristocratic patron who ennobles him (hence "von") and makes him political protégé
Legacy: Ultimate template for all stories of neurotic, sensitive youths. Results in copycat suicides and what may be world's first fan fiction (in it, Werther's gun doesn't fire). Adored by Napoleon and kickstarts German romanticism. Werther's Originals not thought to be connected

Work: Frankenstein (1818)
Author: Mary Shelley
Age: 19
Plot: Bonkers boffin manufactures monster
Rewards: Calling card for career (after PB Shelley's death) as prototypical north London lady of letters
Legacy: The suitably scandalous mother of science fiction and horror, though after her the twin genres were taken over by geeks. Hollywood and British film industry both so indebted they should have named a studio or Oscar category after her, but may have been embarrassed at owing so much to a teenage girl

Work: The Pickwick Papers (1837)
Author: Charles Dickens, as Boz
Age: 25
Plot: Jolly chaps have jolly adventures
Rewards: Secures bigger and better magazine deal for next book and is able to use own name.
Legacy: Pickwick Papers itself perhaps led to PG Wodehouse and Three Men in a Boat. Later, darker, non-episodic novels have been more often filmed, however, right up to recent works by Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon and Donna Tartt.

Work: Woyzeck (1837)
Author: Georg Büchner
Age: 23
Plot: Bullied squaddie kills sweetheart
Rewards: None, as the author died with his masterpiece unfinished. But does lend his name to a major German book prize
Legacy: Too radical for stuffy 19th century, but later inspires expressionist drama and cinema, and also underpins absurdism. Less happily, Woyzeck becomes byword for grim, expensive dates or family outings thanks to Berg's atonal opera version of Büchner's fractured narrative

Work: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Author: Emily Brontë, as Ellis Bell
Age: 29
Plot: Nowt so queer as Yorkshire folk
Rewards: Just baffled, yawning reviews complaining about "dreary" provincial setting and people
Legacy: Initiates two main strands of romantic fiction (the kind where she dies; the kind where he's sexily untamed or lawless). Responsible for careers of, among others, Stephenie Meyer, EL James and Kate Bush

Work: Une saison en enfer (1873)
Author: Arthur Rimbaud
Age: 19
Plot: Psychedelic tale of descent into underworld, possibly based on Camden Town
Rewards: He wanted none anyway – his affair with Verlaine was already over, and he retired from writing at 20
Legacy: Hero to surrealists and Beats, and hence to rock stars from Dylan to Doherty. Made all 20th-century druggy lit look tardy

Work: Le Grand Meaulnes (1913)
Author: Alain-Fournier
Age: 27
Plot: Schoolboy crashes belle époque rave, falls for aristocratic girl
Rewards: Shortlisted for Goncourt but lost to a nobody. Judges may have regretted decision when he died a year later in first month of war
Legacy: Arguably the key influence on The Great Gatsby, and directly or indirectly on any novel or film with a life-changing party at its centre. Nervous breakdowns for translators trying to decide whether or not (and if so how) to translate title

Work: Sons and Lovers (1913)
Author: DH Lawrence
Age: 28
Plot: Randy miner's son disappoints controlling mother
Rewards: Just too early for James Tait Black prize, which he did win later. Had already won Nottingham Guardian short-story competition
Legacy: Model for all kiss-and-tell autobiographical novels or plays, such as those of 50s Angry Young Men – sex obligatory, family psychodrama optional. Author's look (beard, loose shirt) also imitated by 60s and 70s faux-bohos, helped by Alan Bates in Women in Love film

Work: The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Age: 27
Plot: Five go mad in Pamplona
Rewards: Letter from his mother saying "every page fills me with sick loathing". Later wins Pulitzer and Nobel
Legacy: Lady Brett, the novel's heroine, said to have shaped flapper fashions and hairstyles. Author's prose style very influential, from hard-boiled crime to 80s Carverian minimalism. His lifestyle, less so – huntin' and shootin' now confined to macho old-school thriller writers and rightwing historians

Eleanor CattonMan Booker prize 2013Awards and prizesBooker prizeChristopher MarloweMary ShelleyCharles DickensEmily BrontëDH LawrenceErnest HemingwayFictionJohn Dugdale
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View to a killing: why do collectors pay so much for James Bond first editions?

Early imprints of the Bond books increase in value every year. Is this just down to a large readership, or does it say something more fundamental about Ian Fleming's creation?

Funny old thing, that James Bond. Though Ian Fleming died in 1964, his hero has had a charmed existence since, newly incarnated in a variety of actors and films, and in further Bond adventures written by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and, now, William Boyd.

Of these, Boyd seems the best choice. He has a sophisticated interest in the world of espionage, a fluent prose style, and a crisp eye for a Bondish detail. He was pictured, on publication week, in front of one of seven vintage Jensens, each of which was to deliver a copy of Solo, his new Bond novel, to Heathrow, from where they would be flown to various destinations associated with Bond (or Boyd).

What will happen to the books in Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Zurich, New Delhi, Los Angeles, Cape Town and Sydney was not announced. Nothing very exciting, I presume. Standing in front of one of the cars, with young women dressed up as glamorous British Airways flight attendants, Boyd looked mildly bemused at this exuberant silliness, but was joining in with characteristic good humour.

I read all of the Bond books more or less as they came out (in paperback) and was, at the time, a devoted fan. James Bond was, to my American eye and ear, an immensely sophisticated Brit. He could be relied upon to defeat villains, bed any pretty girl, and eat and drink to a standard one could only learn from. Shaken, not stirred: must remember …

The films, too, imprinted themselves on my memory: Ursula Andress emerging from the sea; Goldfinger, Oddjob and the poor dead, gilded girl; Pussy Galore and her lesbian acrobats. Sean Connery was an exemplary Bond, and while both Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan made a decent fist of following up, Daniel Craig seems more an automaton than a flesh and blood hero. The films became increasingly reliant on special effects, with ludicrously extended chases of one sort or another, more like video games than movies; an arcade experience, not a cinematic one.

In the first edition market, the Bond books occupy an interesting and in some respects unparalleled place. In my Catalogue Number 1 (1982), as item 37, I listed an extensive Fleming collection, which consisted of all 14 novels, in nice condition in their original dust wrappers, with 22 further Fleming items. I priced it at £1,385, and remember counselling one of my customers not to buy it at what seemed to me rather a high price. The books, I observed, were only a bit of popular culture, unlikely to last, and very likely to be hyped while the Bond phenomenon was still bubbling away. I remember saying something similar about the early inflation of the prices of the Harry Potter books, which have – like the Bonds – continued to rise steeply. I am not a very good judge of this market.

The Fleming collection – which I had purchased from Iain Sinclair before he became a well-known novelist (he spent a lot of his time then as a book scout) – didn't find a buyer, and I had to break it up, ensuring a considerable Fleming inventory for the next few years.

If someone had bought it, it would have been a bargain. The prices for the Bond novels have escalated remarkably since then. I recently saw a copy of Casino Royale (the first novel) in beautiful condition offered at £50,000, and myself sold an equally pristine copy of Live and Let Die (the second) for £17,000. I wasn't particularly happy dabbling once again in the Bond market, but I was asked to source some of the books by a collector-friend, and that, after all, is what a rare book dealer is supposed to do.

My 1982 offering would now be worth at least £75,000, and I would hesitate to dissuade any prospective customer from buying Bond books, which increase in value year upon year. The process has recently been reflected in – and perhaps enhanced by – the issue of a magisterial bibliography of Fleming by the bookseller John Gilbert. It's a lavish, outsized, handsomely comprehensive account of the books, which in itself might be thought of as a collector's item. Originally published at £175, it is a companion worthy of its hero.

If you look at the price trajectory of the Bond books in tandem with other first editions over the same period, there is hardly any comparison. My 1982 catalogue had a lot of nice things, which would be worth a lot more today. It included a copy of Journey of the Magi coolly inscribed by TS Eliot to his first wife – "VHE from TSE 1927" (£775, now perhaps £15,000) – as well as the corrected typescript of Virginia Woolf's Freshwater (£4,250 then, perhaps £30,000 now). Both of these items are unique and important, and both need to be described and analysed with care so that their full significance can be understood. They are, in their own modest ways, part of literary history. Whereas my little Fleming collection had nothing special about it: none of the books were signed or inscribed by their author, there were no letters or manuscripts. Just a bunch of books, of the kind that I suspect you could duplicate with an hour's work on abebooks.com and a very fat wallet.

I do not know why prices of the Bond books have escalated so substantially over the past 30 years. Partly it is a market phenomenon: a lot more people read the Bond novels than Eliot or Woolf, and if a set percentage of the readership becomes collectors, there will always be more demand for the Bond books than those by highbrow literary writers. But the same is true of Barbara Cartland, and nobody collects her.

Like Sherlock Holmes, Bond is not merely a hero, but an archetype. Unlike the ultimate reasoning machine, Bond is an embodiment of the man of action, fit for any purpose, the ultimate answer to the manifold faces of evil. That the collecting market should respond to such figures (in children's literature think of Christopher Robin or Bilbo Baggins) is understandable enough. Collectors pursue a wide variety of agendas, but one of them is undoubtedly the (often unconscious) search for a figure with whom to identify, or one who touches some nostalgic chord.

In the meantime, the new Boyd/Bond is very enjoyable, with a full canvas of gruesome murders, hideous villains, sexy lovers and switched identities. I've read all of the Bond follow-ups, with varying degrees of satisfaction, and Solo is the best of them. It even has a new take on the perfect martini. Bold? Certainly. But Boyd has earned my trust.

Ian FlemingFictionThrillersJames BondThrillerWilliam BoydRick Gekoski
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Why you should read The Luminaries

It may be 832 pages long, but Eleanor Catton's Man Booker-winning novel is brilliantly plotted and full of characters the reader can relate to

Most years I pick one of the Man Booker prize shortlisted books to read in the run-up to the prize announcement, based on which book I like the sound of and which I think might actually win.

This year, I plumped for Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. I chose it before I knew that it was 832 pages long, but no matter: it's times like these when the Kindle comes into its own. A Victorian novel is the kind of book I find easy to love; throw in a brilliantly plotted crime mystery, and the pages fly by. If this makes it sound like a traditional, even unchallenging, novel, that's far from the truth; but it is, in some ways, a good old-fashioned reading experience.

I found it refreshing and original, the narrative voice perfectly pitched for a story of new world pioneers. Some people have found the intricate, painstakingly worked-out plot too much – not me; the story really works.

It is also a book about capitalism, greed, and the moral depths that people will sink to when the opportunity of accruing immense wealth is put before them. For me, that spoke to the banking crisis and the impact on people's lives of unfettered financial markets. There are authorities, politicians and lawmen, in this book, and they can and do work for the good, but these men – and they are all men – cannot be relied upon; they are influenced by personal prejudices and the potential for personal gain and we are never certain which way their judgments will go. I identified with Anna Wetherell, the main female character, as she attempts to navigate this rapacious society, and to establish a place within it. In the final chapters I was rooting for her with my heart and soul.

Finally, and perhaps most of all, The Luminaries is a romance in the small, individual sense and in the broadest way, too, as beauty, hope and love battle to overcome greed and ugliness.

Man Booker prize 2013Eleanor CattonAwards and prizesLiz Bury
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Which are Oscar Wilde's wittiest quotes?

Oscar Wilde, 159 today, is the most cited humorist in the new Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. Which of his lines would you choose?

•Why we need fairytales: Jeanette Winterson on Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde, 159 today, is having a bit of a moment in the sun.

A film reimagining his fable The Selfish Giant is about to hit the cinemas, and he has been crowned the most-quoted humorist in the new Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations.

Among his 92 entries is editor Gyles Brandreth's fifth favourite joke of all time: "To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness," from his 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Some of his jokes need to be spoken out loud for their full aphoristic glory to be appreciated - has anyone ever wrung more humour from two words than Wilde did from Lady Bracknell's appalled "A handbag", also from The Importance of Being Earnest?

Or how about this, from the odious Cecil Graham in Lady Windermere's Fan: "Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."

Or this, from Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance: "The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years."

We could go on, but we thought we'd leave it to you. Which do you think are Wilde's funniest lines? (And watch out for all the misattributed ones.)

Oscar Wilde
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