The Guardian's Blog, page 170

Downton Abbey gives Virginia Woolf a room of her own

Julian Fellowes's nod to Woolf in the forthcoming fourth series continues an extraordinary afterlife for the Bloomsbury novelist

"Downton Abbey will feature fewer deaths, [and] Virginia Woolf", was how one US advance report on the fourth series of Downton was headlined; and it's a mark of the novelist's ever-increasing lustre that other previews similarly picked out her appearance, although it's only a cameo.

An acquaintance of the possibly fishy publisher Michael Gregson, Lady Edith's married fancy man, Woolf (played by Christina Carty, who unlike Nicole Kidman – who played her in The Hours – has a strikingly Woolfian profile) will be seen at a party in 1922, the annus mirabilis of modernism, in which she published Jacob's Room and began her affair with Vita Sackville-West.

This nod from Julian Fellowes continues a remarkable afterlife that has included two Oscar-winning films (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Hours), a key feminist artwork (Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party), inspiring the names of two bands (Shakespeare's Sister, and Modest Mouse), and homages from Patti Smith, who can be found reading her work on YouTube, and Florence Welch.

And all that's to ignore her ubiquity as an image (the subject of a book, Brenda Silver's Virginia Woolf Icon) appealing to advertisers, student poster-buyers and visitors to the National Portrait Gallery alike, where the classic picture of Woolf at 20 was for many years the bestselling postcard.

As well as the usual mugs, T-shirts, bibs, aprons, fridge magnets and pillows, fans can buy a branded writing desk, tracksuits, sports water bottles, parcel tape and a Kindle case on which Vita is pictured. Disappointingly, Woolf onesies are as yet only for babies, but if you're already looking for bookish Christmas presents, "Be Afraid" hoodies (using Man Ray's 1935 photo of her looking back at him icily) are available for £26.

Virginia WoolfDownton AbbeyTelevisionPeriod dramaJohn Dugdale
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Reader reviews roundup

Booker contenders from Jhumpa Lahiri and Jim Crace and a two-hander from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are among the novels under review this week

With a fortnight to go until the Man Booker prize, reviews of the shortlisted novels continue to flow in. AnnSkea had two main issues with Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland. The first was the style: "Short paragraphs are broken into brief subjectless phrases which often make complete nonsense. Paragraphs, too, are arbitrarily divided into small blocks of text, as if the author is afraid that the reader's attention will lapse if she uses longer sequences of words. It was a while before the story absorbed me enough to distract me from these stylistic quirks."

The second was a broader point about the expectations raised by prizes:

Now that the book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize I expected it not just to be well written but also uniquely different in some way. The Lowlands, however, is a family saga which fits into a well-established genre in which life in the protagonist's home country, where war, terrorism and/or civil strife prevail, is contrasted with life in (usually) America or England. . Maybe I expected too much.

Jim Crace's Harvest provoked no such reservations in laudate, who wrote:

I loved this book. The rich texture of the writing, the Hardy-like rural setting, the lack of sentimentality.... What joy to read such a compelling tale of loss, of grim zenophobia, of resigned and dumb powerlessness, all told in language free of the desiccation and bleakness of much contemporary writing. It is that language, the almost tactile descriptions of land and soil and earth and smells and sounds, that makes it possible to read, with enthrallment, a cameo of the monumental and disastrous changes brought about by the enclosure movements. Jim Crace uses a small palette and paints it richly.

Moving away from the literary heartlands to the, er, literary heartlands, AlanSkinner salutes two writers who haven't as yet troubled the Booker juries - but are none the worse for it.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens is, he writes, an unexpected wonder. "It's hard to imagine both Neil and Terry in the same sandbox. Individually, their imaginations are so fertile and their talents so prodigious that it's would seem inconceivable that there'd be room enough for both." However:

One of the impressive things about the book is that it is hard, if at all possible, to tell which writing and which ideas belong to which writer. There are no disconcerting shifts which make the reader think, 'Ah, this is Terry's bit' or 'Only Neil could have written this.' There is one style, one voice, fuelled by two imaginations in harmony.

And that's it for this week. Do keep posting your reviews, and if I've mentioned you here, drop me an email at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you something from the book cupboard. If we've featured your review on the front of the books site, you can also claim a trophy. Happy reading.

Jim CraceMan Booker prize 2013Jhumpa LahiriTerry PratchettNeil GaimanClaire Armitstead
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Banned Books Week 2013: Readers' favourite censored titles – in pictures

To mark the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, we asked readers to send us a photo of their favourite books which have been censored or banned. Take a look at the dangerous books on readers' shelves from Zola's Nana to Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge trailer: sign of a media-savvy recluse?

Pynchon may not give interviews, but has the writer started giving clues for casting any film adaptation within his latest novel?

Reading on a mobile? Click here to watch

Though he notoriously eschews publicity – no interviews, photos or readings – Thomas Pynchon doesn't entirely shun the media (he is married to his agent, after all).

For his just-published Bleeding Edge, the US arm of Penguin has produced an offbeat trailer, quite possibly written by him. It features a pseudy, arrogant New York slacker, wearing a T-shirt that says "Hi, I'm Tom Pynchon", who describes a typical day before mentioning the book's heroine, Maxine Tarnow, as someone he knows on the Upper West Side.

Less oblique was the 2009 trailer for his previous book, Inherent Vice, voiced by Pynchon (who had already ended his 40-year media boycott by appearing with a paper bag over his head in The Simpsons) in the guise of his late-60s "doper detective" hero, Doc Sportello. For the same novel, he provided a soundtrack listing music from the period for Amazon.

Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Inherent Vice – now in post-production, with Joaquin Phoenix as Sportello – is the first film based on a Pynchon work, and the experience would seem to have inspired a fascinating passage in the new novel.

Discussing a (fictional) TV series called Fraudbusters with Reg, a film-maker friend, Maxine – who is a fraud investigator – says: "They had to cancel it, it gave people too many ideas. Rachel Weisz wasn't bad, though." To which Reg replies: "[You are] just saying that 'cause you're lookalikes."

Is this a sign of an increasingly media-savvy author giving a nudge to the director about casting if Bleeding Edge is turned into a movie, too?

Thomas PynchonFictionJohn Dugdale
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Space oddity: a glossary of science fiction. Or sci-fi. Or whatever it's called | Damien Walter

What's in a name? Quite a lot, judging by the inability of science fiction fans to agree on what to call their favourite literary genre

SF? Sci-fi? Spec-fic? It's all just fantasy to me.

If there's one thing science fiction fans love, it's an argument. And if there's one argument they love more than all others, it's the attempt to define what science fiction actually is, and what is or isn't included in that definition.

David Barnett set fire to the dry tinder of the genre argument recently by declaring a preference for "sci-fi" over the generally more respectable "SF"? But, I hear the still sane among you declare, what does this even mean? And why should you care?

For the ever growing army of writers, bloggers, editors, critics, academics and just plain old obsessive fans of this thing that may (or may not) be called sci-fi, there is at least some method in this madness. Each name and definition reveals a different aspect of the immense creativity sheltering within sci-fi. Or SF. Or whatever the hell it's called!

So, here is a brief glossary of the various competing definitions of sci-fi. Much of this may reveal some bias on my part, so please feel free to correct me where I have strayed from the facts as you understand them.

Science fiction n by the late 1930s, stories featuring space rockets and robots had been around in the pages of pulp magazines for a long time. It was then that influential editor John W Campbell hit upon the brilliant marketing strategy of calling these stories "science fiction", thereby claiming a veneer of scientific credibility for the genre. The idea stuck, and is the reason many readers now insist science fiction must be based on real science.

Hard SF n not satisfied with claiming scientific credibility, many writers of made-up stories further distinguish their work by only making up stories based on ideas drawn from the hard sciences. In particular, physics. Unless, that is, they happen to need a faster-than-light engine to transport characters across the universe, in which case they just ignore physics all together. See also aliens, time travel etc.

Sci-fi n Star Wars made "sci-fi" big business. But for many, it is not true science fiction because it has no basis in science. In fact, most of what the general public thinks of as sci-fi is viewed with some disdain by science fiction fans, who dismiss the genre as "skiffy" and most of the films, books and games it includes as "fantasy" (see below).

SF abbreviation because science fiction fans didn't like "sci-fi", they started abbreviating what they did like to "SF". Pronounced "ess eff", not "sniff". Because no one knows what SF means, writers and fans are forever telling people it means "science fiction" before correcting people when they say, "Oh, you mean sci-fi," which tends to annoy both parties.

Speculative fiction n now things get complicated. Because lots of science fiction writers don't actually have any science in their SF, they call it "speculative fiction" instead. To make matters worse, even though it's specifically not science fiction, speculative fiction likewise gets abbreviated to SF. This has also become the default term for literary writers who want to write fiction with science in it, but without calling it science fiction.

So, to recap. Science fiction is a genre consisting of made-up stories with science in. Unless the stories are sci-fi, which doesn't have science but is what most people think of as science fiction. Unless it's called SF, of course, which most people think means "San Francisco". Or speculative fiction, which is what posh people call sci-fi.

Phew! Right, now then.

Fantasy n ('fæntsi) one solution would be to say that, because all these stories are primarily made-up or imagined by the writer, they are all kinds of fantasy. Problem is, because of JRR Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, most people think "fantasy" refers to stories with elves in. They therefore get confused if the word is also used to talk about stories with rockets in.

I could continue with definitions of cyberpunk, steampunk, weird fiction, horror, urban fantasy, new weird, new wave … the list goes on. They're all part of what makes [insert preferred collection noun] such an oddball and fascinating community to be part of and create stories in.

But I did say there was method in this madness. Boil this insanely complex and largely pointless argument down to its essentials, and you arrive at something quite interesting. Is it enough for a story to be purely the product of its creator's imagination? Or should a story instead be extrapolated from an external, rational and scientifically provable truth? In a world still starkly divided between reason and fantasy, it's an intriguing question to ask.

Science fictionFictionDamien Walter
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Ten of the worst publishing moments

A televised scuffle on the Brighton seafront made a laughing-stock of editor Iain Dale this week - but that's nothing compared with the humiliation of the publishers who turned down Harry Potter

Iain Dale's scuffle this week at Brighton, as the burly head of Biteback wrestled with a small elderly protester while his author Damian McBride was being interviewed for breakfast TV, led to what was probably the most public humiliation ever undergone by a publisher: the clip went viral, TV news channels and news­papers gleefully showed the images, and comments (in the press and on Dale's blog) were largely hostile. It deserves a place in a top 10 of publishers' worst experiences, which otherwise merci­fully took place away from the public eye...

1933: Thomas Wolfe submits a lengthy manu­script to Max Perkins at Scribner's. Having made Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel a hit by cutting out 90,000 words, Perkins (played by Colin Firth in the forthcoming film Genius) buckles down, groaning, and turns it into the still-vast but single volume Of Time and the River. Yet Wolfe stuns him again by leaving Scribner's.

1960: Mrs Max Schuster, a discrimina­ting reader, peruses Harold Robbins's raunchy novel The Carpetbaggers and asks Max: "Is this the kind of dreck you want to publish at Simon & Schuster?" Afraid of her scorn, he lets the book (total sales more than 8m copies) and Robbins (best-selling writer of the 1960s and 70s) go elsewhere.

1972: Reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes gives a press conference by phone to denounce Clifford Irving's fake Hughes autobio­graphy. Panic at McGraw Hill, which had paid $765,000 to Irving, most of it intended for Hughes but channelled back to Irving via a dodgy Swiss bank account.
1980. Buccaneering Roger Straus and bookish Robert Giroux, the odd couple who had made Farrar, Straus and Giroux America's most illustrious literary publisher, fall out over what Giroux says about Straus in his introduction to an anthology marking his 25 years at FSG. Their relationship never recovers from the tiff and the firm's heyday is over.

1984: Anita Brookner's glum hymn to spinsterhood Hotel du Lac is the shock winner of the Booker prize, leaving the publishers of the rival favourites, JG Ballard's Empire of the Sun (Gollancz) and Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (Cape), open-mouthed at the prizegiving banquet.

1993: Martin Amis tells Jonathan Cape £300,000 just won't do as an advance for the hot commercial property that is The Information, by an author still regarded as a literary rock star (and now with Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie as his agent). They are forced to let him decamp to HarperCollins for an advance closer to £500,000.

1995: At least nine UK publishers, including Transworld and Harper­Collins, reject Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as too long, too old-fashioned or both. Their humiliation comes later when JK Rowling's series breaks sales records and is adapted into blockbuster movies, and the editors' unfeeling kids become Potter potty.

2011: Julian Assange tells Canongate he wants to cancel his lucrative contract for a memoir, although a draft has ­already been written. Saying the ­advance has been spent, Canongate publishes the unfinished text despite his opposition, at the price of disobliging reviews, weak sales and verbal attacks by the WikiLeaks founder.

2012: Bit by bit, evidence emerges that young pop science writer Jonah Lehrer is a self-plagiarist and fabricator of quotes. As some of it is in his latest ­effort Imagine (about creativity, ­piquantly), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is forced to pull the book; and a prestig­ious magazine has egg on its face, too, as Lehrer has recyled himself in blog posts for his new employer, the New Yorker. He quits after only two months.

Anita BrooknerJK RowlingDamian McBrideIain DalePublishingMartin AmisJulian AssangeJohn Dugdale
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Do you know who wrote Great Expectations?

A third of the population don't, according to a new survey. But look on the bright side - one in three of us has actually read it

A third of the UK population has no idea who wrote Great Expectations, fretted the Daily Mail, as the results of "a worrying survey" of adult reading habits in the UK were revealed yesterday.

Who's worried? Certainly not me, and particularly when the survey went on to reveal that a different 30% not only knew who had written Great Expectations, but had read the novel.

Surely that's not a worrying result, but an accolade for the comprehensive education system. A straw poll of the Guardian office revealed that nearly all of us had read it at school.

Some of the findings of the nationwide survey of 2,000 people, conducted by Opinium Research, are more surprising still. Twelve per cent of us have, apparently, read Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Really?

If I were to survey my friends and relations, I very much doubt that one in ten could swear to having read Much Ado About Nothing, even if most of them will have seen it performed at least once.

So what is going on here? One thing, I suspect, is a bit of 'misremembering'. More than a thousand fibbers swarmed out of the woodwork earlier this month when we blogged about another survey revealing how many of us have lied about our reading. And, surprise, surprise, the third most lied about book was Great Expectations by - who's the author again? - Charles Dickens.

If you take into account the 8% who admit to having lied about reading Pride and Prejudice (the seventh most read title in the Opinium survey) and the 15% who have lied about Catcher in the Rye (ninth most read), the picture becomes a bit more worrying.

What is clear is that all the good work that is done at school is undone as soon as people emerge into the adult world.

Nearly a quarter of all adults (24%) have read fewer than five books in the last year, while one in seven (15%) admitted that they had not read a single one in that time. (That's 10% of women and 21% of men.)

But nine per cent of us claim to have read more than 50 books in the last year, which is surely cause for celebration – no matter whether those books are thrillers (favoured by 30%), crime novels (26%) or romance (16%).

The truly depressing discovery is possibly the most predictable: the most widely read work of contemporary "literature" is The Da Vinci Code. Unfortunately, it's unlikely anybody would lie about that.

Proportion who've read the classics

Animal Farm - 36%

Romeo and Juliet - 33%

Great Expectations - 30%

Macbeth - 29%

To Kill a Mockingbird - 28%

Lord of the Flies - 28%

Pride and Prejudice - 26%

Of Mice and Men - 25%

Catcher in the Rye - 18%

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - 15%

Much Ado about Nothing - 12%

None of the above - 28%

William ShakespeareJane AustenCharles DickensGeorge OrwellWilliam GoldingJD SalingerClaire Armitstead
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Writing sex: which classics would have received the Fifty Shades of Grey treatment?

From Brontë to Woolf to Agatha Christie, a romp through the sex scenes that might have been

"No writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN." This is William Thackeray introducing his book Pendennis. Perhaps surprisingly, it is clear he means something very specific: he thought that "society will not tolerate" an accurate depiction of a young man's sex life. He made the complaint several times: that he was constrained by convention from being honest about what he saw as a huge and vital part of life. It seems clear that if Thackeray had had the chance, he would have included sex scenes in his book – rueful, good-natured, nonjudgmental ones, surely.

So did his fellow writers, from the Victorian era up to more open modern times, share his wish for candour? It is a guessing game, as respectable writers of the past didn't even write about the constraints, let alone breach them. But let's do some guessing. Who was bothered by the conventions? Who would exercise their freedom if they were writing now?

We know that Charles Dickens would have liked more honesty. He wanted to clearly acknowledge that Nancy in Oliver Twist was a prostitute. Still, it is difficult to imagine him describing sex with those virginal Doras and Madelines. Trollope surely wouldn't dream of including sex scenes; he found the life of the mind so much more interesting.

You can imagine a modern-day Charlotte Brontë writing embarrassing confessional scenes about masturbation, Lena Dunham-style, or a bit like Sheila Heti – and not understanding why other people found it all a bit much. But then she'd provide some good, loving rumpy-pumpy when Jane Eyre is reunited with Mr Rochester, to keep everyone happy. Emily Brontë paints a vivid and convincing picture of overpowering sexual attraction in Wuthering Heights, but her apparently virginal imagination might have faltered at the final description.

After Edith Wharton died, explicit writing was found in her papers, so it is fair to conclude that the strong undercurrent of sexuality in her work would be more open if she was writing today. You can imagine Thomas Hardy producing horrible and upsetting rape scenes, but with none of the relish some writers take. You suspect Evelyn Waugh would pretend to turn up his nose, but sneak quite a lot of sex in there – he got away with a few startling moments in Helena (partly because nobody ever reads it), and is honest in his letters about liking what he called "smut".

Virginia Woolf could have written more explicitly than she did, and she was rude about James Joyce. But Woolf was also very concerned, in A Room of One's Own, that women's voices were lost because of what they tried not to say; that they tried to use men's voices. She also said novels "lie" and omit too much, because they deal with the big matters of life. Her and Thackeray's complaint ends up in the same place; sex, surely, was one of the things not dealt with properly. Woolf is funny about the inadequacy of one male writer's "indecent" sex scene, saying it is "impeded and inhibited and self-conscious". So surely she could do better? She does say that in a hundred years (from 1928) there will be a better, more complete book, which will give women their true voice – and thus, perhaps, also portray women's true sex lives.

The work of Golden Age detective writers John Dickson Carr and Edmund Crispin is very proper, but with hints that they were quite interested in sexual matters. It hangs round the edges of Dickson Carr's books, with their blackmail, sexy photos and nymphomania alongside the body in the locked library. With Crispin, something very weird pops out now and again. His 1946 book Holy Disorders is a most uncomfortable mash-up of black magic, Lolita and a cathedral close mystery. (It is no surprise to find that he used to swap porn with Philip Larkin.) Nowadays he'd surely be a lot more blatant and write a very different kind of book.

Once, a female interviewer asked the adventure writer Alistair MacLean why his book had few female characters and almost no sex. MacLean said wistfully that he really didn't know enough about that sort of thing. On the other hand, his contemporary Agatha Christie knew plenty, but she likes to sublimate everything to plot. It is difficult to imagine how sex would advance matters in her kind of murder story, so why should she bother to include it?

My final choice would be Daphne du Maurier. She would have rivalled Fifty Shades of Grey given the chance – in explicitness, if not necessarily direction of perversion. And it would have been much better written, too.

Over to you: which classic writers do you think would have taken advantage of today's literary openness?

FictionSexualityCharlotte BrontëVirginia WoolfEdith WhartonEL James
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading?

The space to talk about the books you are reading at the moment

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers

Not the Booker prize 2013: Anywhere's Better Than Here by Zoe Venditozzi

Venditozzi builds her heroine a convincingly shabby world, but this is the work of a talent still in the making

One of the most interesting – and unexpected – debates on this year's Not the Booker prize has been about the relative merits of chick-lit, and whether literary snobs (myself included) bear an unreasonable prejudice against it. Last week's book, the lamentable Little White Lies and Butterflies by poor Suzie Tullett, will have done little to change the minds of those who dislike the genre. I also expect my review, and plenty of the comments, will have done little to prevent chick-lit fans from feeling hard done by. Happily, however, Zoe Venditozzi's Anywhere's Better Than Here should move things forward – and into pleasingly uncertain territory.

First of all, there is the question of whether it should be called chick-lit at all. Given that so many people (in spite of hilarious and clever books such as Bridget Jones) view the term as pejorative, the author might not thank me for linking her novel with all those pink and pastel books. Except, of course, this one is also pink and pastel – and the cover bears a picture of a pretty woman. It is also, for the most part, about relationships and finding the right man.

The thing about Venditozzi's book, however, is that it's complicated. For a start, the woman on the cover isn't smiling. And in contrast to Little White Lies and Butterflies, where everything was on rails from the first sentence, there's no knowing if this book's protagonist, Laurie, will get what she wants. We don't even know what it is she wants. All that is certain is what she'd rather not have any more: her dead-end job and her dead-loss boyfriend.

In the early pages, both job and boyfriend are skillfully rendered. Laurie works in a call centre, mainly staring out of the window, having depressing conversations with customers about bills they can't pay and even more depressing conversations with colleagues about forthcoming Christmas parties. Her "endearingly pathetic" worse half, meanwhile, slouches effectively across the page, far more involved in his computer games than Laurie, unable even to motivate himself to pick up the takeaways she orders for him.

Laurie's life changes when she walks into a pub, takes a pint of beer served by a woman "so heavily tanned she looked like one of those bog people that archaeologists dig up from time to time", and starts talking to Gerry. Gerry too is fighting a losing battle with boredom, working night-shifts on hospital radio, mainly playing music to people who are enduring "dark nights of the soul". (The happy people, there to have babies, bring their own music: "Enya and fucking whalesong.") Gerry, at least, has had a more exciting past. As Laurie gets to know him, she learns he has already had a long career in the army – and complicated reasons for joining up in the first place.

As Venditozzi introduces these joyless lives, there's a real sense of flatness and numb despair. It's smarter and bleaker, but also far more amusing, than Little White Lies and Butterflies. Venditozzi maintains a good balance, keeping just the right side of miserable thanks to a few good jokes and light, unfussy prose. There are a few moments of brilliant humour. I snorted with laughter at the description of an uppity nurse drinking out of a cup inscribed "Queen of the fucking universe". The author also has a good nose for unpleasant detail. We see a baby eating chips: "It gummed the yellow pieces while making a groo noise." It all builds to a convincingly shabby world, and I couldn't help but feel sympathy for Laurie, even while enjoying the fact that she is far nastier than the average heroine. She's selfish, wilful, ineffective and aimless – and all the more engaging as a result. So it's a shame that, in the end, Venditozzi sends her off on such a daft adventure.

The novel kicks into action – and falls off a cliff – when Gerry and Laurie pick up an apparent teenage runaway in Gerry's hospital, and try to help him by driving away to Gerry's parents house near a mountain. It might seem an absurd comparison, but it reminded me of the latter stages of the last James Bond film, Skyfall. It wasn't just the remote Scottish location, and the fact that everyone else from the story ends up descending upon it. It was also that very little of it made any chuffing sense. Why did the boy go with them? Why did this seem like a good plan? Why do they do any of the things they do when they get there? And how on earth did boyfriend Ed get involved? I had no idea. There was nothing quite as daft as James Bond diving into a sub-freezing lake and emerging minutes later, not only alive, but also completely dry – but there were plenty of moments that came close. And none of the distracting explosions.

I became bored. The first half of the book was dispiriting for all the right reasons; the second just felt like a letdown. I'm glad to have read a novel about a young woman and her relationship concerns that wasn't ever frilly or princessy. Anywhere's Better Than Here remains glum throughout, and is all the better for it. I'd recommend this novel as the first work of a promising talent, but the talent hasn't yet been fully realised.

Next week: The last title on the shortlist, Magda by Meike Ziervogel.

FictionRomanceAwards and prizesSam Jordison
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