The Guardian's Blog, page 184

Amazon's attitude to small presses gives a glimpse of the future

What happens when Amazon doesn't need to compete on price? The price goes up ...

The evidence may be "anecdotal and fragmentary", but it's enough for the New York Times to suggest that with "Borders dead, Barnes & Noble struggling and independent booksellers greatly diminished", Amazon have started to cut discounts. It's certainly "difficult to comprehensively track the movement of prices", as David Streitfeld suggests, but Amazon's pricing of independent publishers might give us some clues to the future.

Just look at the contrast between the UK's top 10 bestsellers – offered at an eyewatering 45% off when I crunched the numbers earlier this week – and the discount applied to, say, Acumen Publishing, a small-press publisher that focuses on academic books. You can pick up a handful of recent titles from Amazon at an average discount of just 6%. If you were to go directly to the publisher, they'd knock off 20%.

It's the same story with Seren and Carcanet. The average discount Amazon offers on Carcanet titles is 7%, compared to an average of 14% directly from the publisher. Seren's own discounts are, on average, almost ten times as large as those on Amazon.

When Amazon decides it needs to compete on price, the response is swift, as when JK Rowling's crime novel, The Cuckoo's Calling, sailed down to a whopping 50% off when her authorship was revealed earlier this week. But where the pressure is less intense, as with small press publishers, the discounts are less, um, intense as well.

According to Frances Smith, an independent bookseller who campaigns about Amazon's tax status, these pricing policies are designed "to squeeze as much money as possible out of all publishers – large and small".

"There is a perception that it is the cheapest option for all books, which is isn't," she says, adding that "the likes of Amazon don't care about smaller companies … Some think that there won't even be any small competitors left in the future." If that's what the future holds, it's a future I can't bear thinking about.

BooksellersAmazon.com
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Summer voyages: Leo the African by Amin Maalouf

A book of a book of multiple layers and journeys finds the everyman in a 16th-century traveller, says reader AggieH

Dad was right in the 70s. If I had put down that bloody book and looked out of the bloody window, I probably would have seen sights less familiar to me than Malory Towers. At that age, the Summer car trip to the other side of the same country was a journey to a foreign land far far away where they spoke funny and did things differently.

Dad would be wrong today, no matter where we were going, if the book were Leo the African. Nothing outside any window could be more thrilling than the sights shown by Hasan al-Wazzan, the 16th-century traveller whose "country is the caravan".

Amin Maalouf's vivid imagining of the real al-Wazzan's memoirs transports the reader to another world in a way to rejuvenate the most jaded adult bookworm. You feel you've been carried there on a magic carpet with an Infinite Improbability Drive that flew through the back of the wardrobe, out the secret door in the garden, down to the palace at the bottom of a sea and down a rabbit hole.

Maalouf's al-Wazzan is less passionate than the reader about his remarkable life. Like a sceptical Candide, he bears knowing but disinterested witness. In 1494, his Muslim family flees the Inquisition in Granada – the coast a "thin streak of remorse behind us" – for Fez. From then, history keeps happening to him and he just lets it.

His wanderings take him – "lightly dressed with arms swinging" – through Timbuktu, Cairo, Constantinople and Rome. He is variously a refugee, an emissary, a scholar, an exile, a lexicographer, a captive, rich, destitute, a Muslim and a Catholic. And always, a realist.

He is a poet to sultans and lover to wives, slave-girls and princesses. He is a Valentine's Day gift from a repentant pirate to Pope Leo X, who baptizes him Johannes Leo. It is a curious habit of men, al-Wazzan notes, to name themselves after terrifying beasts instead of devoted animals. "People want to be called wolf, but not dog." The papal courtiers, "somewhat surprised by the belated birth of a brown and fuzzy 'Medici', add the surname 'Africanus'.

Leo the African saw "cities die and empires perish" At 12, he still believed: "Between beasts and men the former could do the most damage". At 40, he thinks: "When everyone persists in the same opinion, I turn away from it; the truth is surely elsewhere."

Truth can sometimes be found in fiction. Nabokov declared it "childish to read a novel to gain information". Perhaps he would allow that we can gain insight. For all the buckles that get swashed in Leo the African, this is a book of understanding. It offers insights into syncretism, nationalism, religious fanaticism, capitalism and the hierarchies of oppression (political, social, cultural, financial, gender).

The details – Nabokov's "subliminal coordinates" – reveal truths about real-life expediency. Surrounded by Ottoman slaughter in Cairo, al-Wazzan reproaches an Egyptian boy who laughs when his donkey stumbles over an Egyptian soldier's severed head. "His only reply was a shrug of his shoulders and this phrase of centuries-old resignation: Whoever takes my mother becomes my step-father."

Centuries later, a less vulgar equivalent remained necessary for survival. When challenged by the latest occupier to state their nationality, people in the 20th-century borderlands of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania identified themselves as Tutejszy; the "from-here" people.

Leo The African was "from no country, from no city, no tribe". Maalouf's achievement is that he conveys al-Wazzan both as an everyman and an extraordinary man. He does so through fine writing. Maalouf, and translator Peter Sluglett, convey culturally extravagant dialogue without a hint of cartoonishness.. The complex chronicle is so deftly written that it reads as a tale being told.

This is a book of multiple layers and journeys. The final journey is the reader's. Leo the African is that rare novel (Pride and Prejudice, Don Quixote, Candide) from which the reader must travel back. Upon closing it, it's a shock to find yourself on a 21st-century kitchen chair. It's a shock to discover that you haven't been seated like a sultan, "a pyramid of silk on cushions of brocade", listening to al-Wazzan tell you the story himself.

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Royal baby books: not all poopers ...

As Kate and Wills prepare to open a new chapter in the royal fairytale, it's hard to keep a po-face – especially where noble nappies are concerned

In pictures: Coo over the covers of royal baby books

The idea of picture books about the advent of the royal baby made my nails dig into my palms at first. Poor short-changed kids, being read to – poor kid being read about, come to that – and indeed poor Kate, giving birth not just to an heir, but a protagonist several times over. But I still, grudgingly, remember my enjoyment of Diana, the Fairytale Princess, a shiny white 80s hardcover with naïve sweet-shop illustrations which now, alas, look like the set-up for the punchline of a sick joke.

In the early 80s, as a child of tender years, I was deeply attached to this revoltingly upbeat commemorative volume, twee guardian fairies notwithstanding. And actually, if I could find it, I would read it again like a shot. It may be sycophantic, gooey fare for parents, but small children – monarchists to the last – will probably enjoy this wealth of books about a baby born to the purple. Just train them to say "Rubbish! What about the workers?" at the end.

Closest to my well-thumbed Diana in format is Robin Ink's A Royal Fairytale – slightly ironically, since this is actually the "book of the app". Although I was quite taken with the picture of Rowan Williams in smart brown brogues, conducting the wedding , this was otherwise a rather baldly factual account. Girl goes to university, meets prince, is proposed to "after they had been friends for a very long time" – a sly sideswipe at HRH's dilatoriness? – and produces a baby doesn't really add up to a whole book.

But I can see that interactivity with sheep, corgis and hot-air balloons would make for an appealing e-read.

Meanwhile, The Royal Baby, by Tony Bradman and Tony Ross, is a manful attempt to meet current frenzied speculation about the contents of the Duchess's hillock head-on, without pandering to it. As the "beautiful princess" and her "handsome prince" (sporting rather too much hippy-length blond hair for a Wills-a-like) celebrate their wedding, everyone begins to ask "When will they have a baby?" Curiosity about the attributes of the impending imperial wean runs fever-high – hirsute, sporty, male, female, both? (twins, rather than hermaphrodite) – but we are enjoined in the end that we'll all have to wait and see. The sense of expectation readers are left with slightly confounds the nice cosy message that all babies are unique. It suggests we're all going to be scrutinising this particular little scrunchface for signs of strength, cleverness and general royalness from the word go. Which is unfortunately quite likely.

The Royal Nappy , on the other hand, is focused on the business end of the puissant infant, as you might expect from the chap who brought you The Queen's Knickers and Cinderella's Bum. Who knew the banking crisis was actually caused by an error in the Royal Mint, which mistakenly pumped out £-emblazoned Pampers instead of paper money? Poo is always good for a chuckle (or, in the case of my daughter, a terrifying roar of maniacal laughter), and I liked the idea of Henry VIII's youthful fondness for meat pies giving rise to a special song, handed down from royal nanny to royal nanny, to greet all-too-frequent princely egestions. In a similar vein, Shhh! Don't Wake the Royal Baby focuses on the unusual methods Elizabeth and co might use to get an unsleeping infant to nod off (think helicopter rides and a parachute jaunt attached to granny). Ada Grey's illustrations adeptly render shiny-haired Duchess, owl-goggled Queen and even the royal auntie, catering the welcome party and bellowing for "More blinis!", although Prince Philip has been elevated to kingly status and given an astonishingly shaggy pair of eyebrows.

My out and out favourite, though, is Baggy Brown and the Royal Baby by Mick Inkpen, an extremely savvy re-issue, with new cover and tweaked title, of 2007's Baggy Brown.

Rather than the baby, the splendidly-named Princess Sophinyinianna of Thingland, this book focuses on the first of a limited-edition run of Royal Bears, who undergoes a SuperTed series of misfortunes in the bowels of the teddy-making machine and is taken home to a factory-worker's little son.

Alfie's journey to return Number One, aka Baggy Brown, to his regal owner is atmospheric and tender, and with the help of the fabulous Lady Jane Farque-Hurrah, who has "five children of her own and knew exactly when a child was telling the truth", there are happy endings all round. I would be happy to read this one over and over again – though I'm willing to bet the favoured bedtime read will wind up being The Royal Nappy.

Picture booksPrince WilliamThe Duchess of CambridgeChildren and teenagersImogen Russell Williams
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Summer voyages: Notes From Overground by Tiresias

Twenty years of train journeys between Oxford and Paddington are packed into a cult travel book from 1984

Notes from Overground by Tiresias (the pen name of Roger Green) was published in 1984. It became a minor cult, and though it never sold very well, it still gets into the occasional blog today. We admirers occasionally meet and share favourite moments.

Whereas most railway travel books involve crossing deserts in clanking trains with locals selling unhygienic food through the windows at the stations, this is devoted exclusively to 20 years travelling on British Rail between Oxford and Paddington. It is funny, wistful, and occasionally alarming. If it has a theme, it is the lives wasted through commuting, which Green calls a "small, unspectacular tragedy".

The author was a civil servant, in a department secretive enough for him not to tell us what he did. On his way to and from work, however, he noted an extraordinary range of oddities or created an odd sense of reality: scenes glimpsed from the window, the conversation of fellow travellers, graffiti on passing walls, the vocabulary of rail travel (and we forget how this had begun before privatisation, along with those ads in which Jimmy Savile plugged cheap tickets.)

"Orwell foresaw it all. Loudspeakers blaring a humourless mixture of muzak and misinformation. Twenty-four hour digital clocks. Trainspeak coinages like Inter-City, Travellers Fare, Awayday, Railair, Sealink, Britainshrinkers …"

He describes the homebound scene at stations: "Daddies descend and are met. Each set of participants knows only of its own little scene … each welcomed father ought not to learn of the existence of dozens of others along the line, any more than a prisoner should hear of the execution of his fellows."

Some of us remember the graffiti on a wall just outside Paddington, which read "LONG AGO IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE". Green spent long conversations fretting about what it might mean, though it faded year by year, was repainted, and finally the wall was demolished. He reflects that during his classical and literary education, none of his teachers told him that the only purpose of all this learning was to solve the Times crossword on a train.

"When the train passes any kind of sporting activity, invariably nothing is happening. The bowler is always about to bowl, the referee about to start play… at our uncouth advent, the initiates freeze into a tableau vivant, waiting for us to pass before they resume celebration of the mysteries. The Grecian Urn syndrome."

He sees the arrest and handcuffing of a yobbo near Didcot. "Train moves off. Law-abiding commuters look variously annoyed, smug, curious, compassionate, indifferent ... we should not. Few of us sense the bracelets round our own wrists. But they are there, along with the uniformed escort. Man is born free, and is everywhere in trains."

Green did escape in the end, to Greece, where he bought a house next door to one that belonged to a famous Canadian singer. He wrote another book, Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen. Much of it is devoted to the fact that Cohen never turned up.

Summer readingRail travelCivil serviceRail transportSimon Hoggart
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The best books on Brazil: start your reading here | Pushpinder Khaneka

Our Brazilian adventure begins with a celebrated literary classic and ends with a heady historical portrait of this vibrant nation

The Violent Land by Jorge Amado

Amado's novel about the 1920s cacao wars in north-east Brazil is an epic tale of greed, lust, love and murder. Two powerful families, led by Zinho Badaros and Horacio Silveira, battle over the virgin forest of Sequeiro Grande, which they want to develop as cacao plantations – to increase their wealth and power.

These tough, wealthy men of the Bahia region use lawyers and gunmen to assist in their land-grabbing through deceit and violence. Workers flock to the lawless land with dreams of making quick fortunes, but find only brutal regimes on the plantations that keep them in near-slave conditions as they face disease and death.

For the conquistadors of this new land "fertilised by blood", it is the best in the world for planting cacao, which is "worth more than gold".

Amado vividly describes life in the local towns – with their landowners, adventurers, assassins, prostitutes and corrupt officials – inspired by his time growing up in the region, the son of a cocoa planter.

The Violent Land is reputed to be the greatest novel by Brazil's best-selling author and was his favourite. A sometime Communist party member, Amado endured prison and exile in the 1930s and 40s. He died in 2001.

Bahia Blues by Yasmina Traboulsi

A short, sharp novel about a group of people who congregate daily in a square in the north-eastern city of Salvador de Bahia. In monologues, the protagonists introduce themselves to readers as they go about their businesses – struggling to make a living. The characters, although mostly archetypal, are written with warmth and empathy. Among them are a popcorn vendor, two gay, HIV-positive rent boys, an orphaned prostitute, a bitter, failed writer, and a seven-year-old sweet seller who is already head of his family. This small community is under the protective eye of Maria Aparecida, an ageing carnival queen.

The arrival of an outsider, Gringa, is a catalyst for change, forcing group members to re-examine their lives. Some abandon Bahia, following their dreams – nourished by TV soap operas – to find a better life in the megacities of the south. But life can be hard, and harsh, in the big urban world.

The passionately told story offers a slice of 21st-century Brazil: in Rio's violent, gang-ridden favelas, on São Paulo's anonymous, busy streets and under the brutal regime of Bahia's Canju prison.

Traboulsi, a lawyer of Lebanese and Brazilian parentage, delivers a powerful, gritty and impressive debut novel.

A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb

Robb eruditely entwines food with history and politics. His book is littered with fascinating digressions and his appetite for culinary delights is matched by an appetite for knowledge.

The sweep through 500 years of history – from colonisation by the Portuguese, through decades of military dictatorship to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's first term as president – is entertaining and informative, and often reads like a novel (and a thriller at that). It covers the brutal slavery that lasted longer than anywhere else in the western hemisphere, the destruction of the fugitive slave settlement in Palmares, and the war against the religious community at Canudos. Along the way Robb introduces us to classic Brazilian literary works.

The death of the title is the grisly and mysterious end of PC Farias – fixer and bagman to the corrupt president Fernando Collor de Mello – but there are many other deaths, through genocide, massacres, assassinations and crimes of passion.

The Australian writer, who has lived for many years in Italy and Brazil, paints an affectionate, perceptive portrait of the country – but burns with anger at the monstrous inequities in Brazilian society.

BrazilAmericasPushpinder Khaneka
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Summer voyages: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

This 1961 children's classic, a modern Alice in Wonderland, takes readers on a fantastical journey along the road towards reason

The best journeys can be those you don't know you need to take. The Phantom Tollbooth, one of those rare children's novels that both delights the adult reader and returns them to a child's perspective, begins in a fug of stasis and ennui. Milo is a bored and boring little boy, baffled by school and disengaged from the world - "there's nothing for me to do, nowhere I'd care to go, and hardly anything worth seeing" – until the day he finds a strange package in his room containing a flatpack tollbooth and an incomprehensible map. He duly assembles the tollbooth, gets into the electric car he's ignored for months, and sets off in desultory fashion for Dictionopolis – "I might as well go there as anywhere."

What he finds is a fantastical land where the abstract concepts that seem so irrelevant at school are made both concrete and surreal: words are bought and sold in the marketplace, and numbers mined out of rocks. Conclusions is an island that's easy to jump to but hard to escape, eating subtraction stew just makes you hungrier, and to reach the Kingdom of Wisdom you must scale the Mountains of Ignorance. Milo's quest is to reconcile the rulers of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, who are warring over the importance of words versus numbers, and rescue the exiled princesses Rhyme and Reason: his journey, of course, is the road to enlightenment.

He is accompanied on the way by Tock, an earnest watchdog who helps him not to squander our most precious resource, time, and the Humbug, a pompous giant insect who provides light relief and an example of the dangers of lazy thinking. Their journey is punctuated by meetings with other extraordinary characters, such as the floating Alex Bings, who was born in the air and is growing down: he scoffs at the human system of growing upwards and not knowing where you'll stop until you get there ("Why, when you're 15 things won't look at all the way they did when you were 10, and at 20 everything will change again"). Or meet the Soundkeeper, who soliloquises on the many different kinds of silence:

"Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause in a roomful of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're all alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful, if you listen carefully."

It's typical of Juster's insistence on considering things from all angles that he follows this beautiful and stirring speech with Milo's wry thought: "For someone who loves silence, she certainly talks a great deal."

And then there's Chroma, who conducts the colours of the sunset; the Dynne, who loves noise; the Terrible Trivium - literally a "monster of habit" - who chillingly promises that "if you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult," along with scores of others, all remarkable, witty and surprising.

Published in 1961, The Phantom Tollbooth is the closest thing we have to a modern Alice in Wonderland; like Carroll's classic, it preaches reason through oddity, exalting rationality while letting the imagination run riot. Both books are full of obsessives ("everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best," sighs Milo), and ought to go over children's heads, but don't. Tollbooth was not expected to be a hit: "Everyone said this is not a children's book, the vocabulary is much too difficult, the wordplay and the punning they will never understand," Juster later remarked. In fact, the genius of his book is that at the end of the journey, the child reader is left like Milo - knowing that there's more to learn, and that they want to learn it.

Neither book talks down to children because both bubbled up from their author without commission or design. Juster wrote the book when he was "trying to avoid doing something else", and found himself thinking back about his relationship with learning as a child (at 10, like Milo, he "spent a large amount of time being uninterested"). The illustrations were similarly a happy accident: Jules Feiffer, who shared an apartment with Juster, came to investigate what all the pacing was about, and ended up contributing his strange, dark, "itchy-scratchy" drawings (as Maurice Sendak described them). Like the words, they are unlikely, but perfectly apt: funny, footloose and scary by turns.

There's one big difference between Carroll and Juster. The more you think about Alice in Wonderland, the more morbid and perverse it becomes. The Phantom Tollbooth's message is bracing but benign: it calls on us to rise to the challenge of the world by paying proper attention to its wonder and difficulty. Boredom and depression are far from merely childish demons, not least because an adult has to battle them for so much longer. When Milo thinks at the book's beginning that "it seemed a great wonder that the world, which was so large, could sometimes feel so small and empty", it must strike a chord with every reader, young or old.

"When a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world," says Reason at the end of the book, in a neat riff on community, complexity and the butterfly effect. "Whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer." Milo has to leave home to discover how fascinating it was all along.

Tomorrow: Simon Hoggart on Notes from Overground by Roger Green

Children and teenagersLewis CarrollSummer reading
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Summer voyages: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome

It was meant as a travel guide for boating fans – but then the author's voice took over and turned it into a comic masterpiece

An ancient river. The journey upstream of an impressionable young man into a mysterious interior. An inevitable reckoning at the source. Finally, the terrible return to reality. Here, surely, is pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest.

But this is not Heart of Darkness, and the river is not the Congo. Actually, it's the Thames, and the narrator is not Marlow but J, for Jerome K Jerome. Published in 1889, a decade before Conrad's novel, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!), is one of the comic gems (barely 150 pages) of the English language. An accidental one, too. "I did not intend to write a funny book, at first," said its author.

Jerome K Jerome is more or less forgotten now. He was a jobbing freelance literary journalist who had just got married and needed to provide for his wife and family. Jerome intended his account of a boating holiday to be a popular travel guide aimed at a booming market.

In late-Victorian England there was a vogue for recreational boating on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. This was the golden age of the Henley Regatta. Rowing boats, steam launches, even the occasional gondola: in the season, up to 800 vessels a day passed through Boulter's Lock, near Maidenhead. Here was an audience for a new guide to the Thames. In fact, Jerome's descriptions of Hampton court, Marlow and Medmenham are all that survive from the original plan for a travel book.

Something funny happened on the way to publication, perhaps because it was first serialised in the magazine Home Chimes. Jerome's discursive comic voice took over. The river journey he makes with his friends George and Harris (and Montmorency the dog) becomes the narrative line on which he hangs a sequence of comic anecdotes loosely associated with the journey up-river.

Jerome's themes are airily inconsequential and supremely English – boats, fishing, the weather, the atrocities of English food and the vicissitudes of suburban life – perfectly pitched in a light comic prose whose influence can be detected later in the work of, among many, PG Wodehouse, James Thurber, Mark Haddon and Nick Hornby. My favourite Jerome set-piece is the episode with the tinned pineapple.

The three mariners have had a long, hard day on the river. They reach their evening mooring, dog-tired and ravenously hungry. When George unearths a tin of pineapple chunks, "we felt," writes Jerome, "that life was worth living after all." They were, he says, all of them exceedingly fond of pineapple. As the anticipation begins to build, he comes up with a perfect sentence in a book buoyant with light comedy. "We looked at the picture on the tin," he writes; "we thought of the juice."

It's then that they discover they have no tin-opener. What follows is a passage of comic genius spun from nothing more, or less, than the banality of everyday life. Read it. The passage ("a fearful battle") comes as the brilliant climax to chapter 12.

Three Men in a Boat is one of those rare classics that seems to come, as it were, out of nowhere, and to defy the odds. On publication, the critics were hostile. Jerome's fascination with bank clerks and "the lower orders" was denounced as a menace to English letters. As usual, the reading public paid absolutely no attention. Three Men in a Boat went on selling in vast numbers, and it hasn't been out of print since its first appearance in 1889. Jerome K Jerome later wrote a hit West End play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, but he could not recapture the mood of careless comic joy that aerates the pages of his masterpiece. That moment had passed into literary mythology. On or off dry land, you won't read a more enjoyable book this summer.

Tomorrow, Justine Jordan on The Phantom Tollbooth.

Summer readingTravel guidesFictionBoating holidaysRobert McCrum
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Summer journeys: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome

It was meant as a travel guide for boating fans – but then the author's voice took over and turned it into a comic masterpiece

An ancient river. The journey upstream of an impressionable young man into a mysterious interior. An inevitable reckoning at the source. Finally, the terrible return to reality. Here, surely, is pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest.

But this is not Heart of Darkness, and the river is not the Congo. Actually, it's the Thames, and the narrator is not Marlow but J, for Jerome K Jerome. Published in 1889, a decade before Conrad's novel, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!), is one of the comic gems (barely 150 pages) of the English language. An accidental one, too. "I did not intend to write a funny book, at first," said its author.

Jerome K Jerome is more or less forgotten now. He was a jobbing freelance literary journalist who had just got married and needed to provide for his wife and family. Jerome intended his account of a boating holiday to be a popular travel guide aimed at a booming market.

In late-Victorian England there was a vogue for recreational boating on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. This was the golden age of the Henley Regatta. Rowing boats, steam launches, even the occasional gondola: in the season, up to 800 vessels a day passed through Boulter's Lock, near Maidenhead. Here was an audience for a new guide to the Thames. In fact, Jerome's descriptions of Hampton court, Marlow and Medmenham are all that survive from the original plan for a travel book.

Something funny happened on the way to publication, perhaps because it was first serialised in the magazine Home Chimes. Jerome's discursive comic voice took over. The river journey he makes with his friends George and Harris (and Montmorency the dog) becomes the narrative line on which he hangs a sequence of comic anecdotes loosely associated with the journey up-river.

Jerome's themes are airily inconsequential and supremely English – boats, fishing, the weather, the atrocities of English food and the vicissitudes of suburban life – perfectly pitched in a light comic prose whose influence can be detected later in the work of, among many, PG Wodehouse, James Thurber, Mark Haddon and Nick Hornby. My favourite Jerome set-piece is the episode with the tinned pineapple.

The three mariners have had a long, hard day on the river. They reach their evening mooring, dog-tired and ravenously hungry. When George unearths a tin of pineapple chunks, "we felt," writes Jerome, "that life was worth living after all." They were, he says, all of them exceedingly fond of pineapple. As the anticipation begins to build, he comes up with a perfect sentence in a book buoyant with light comedy. "We looked at the picture on the tin," he writes; "we thought of the juice."

It's then that they discover they have no tin-opener. What follows is a passage of comic genius spun from nothing more, or less, than the banality of everyday life. Read it. The passage ("a fearful battle") comes as the brilliant climax to chapter 12.

Three Men in a Boat is one of those rare classics that seems to come, as it were, out of nowhere, and to defy the odds. On publication, the critics were hostile. Jerome's fascination with bank clerks and "the lower orders" was denounced as a menace to English letters. As usual, the reading public paid absolutely no attention. Three Men in a Boat went on selling in vast numbers, and it hasn't been out of print since its first appearance in 1889. Jerome K Jerome later wrote a hit West End play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, but he could not recapture the mood of careless comic joy that aerates the pages of his masterpiece. That moment had passed into literary mythology. On or off dry land, you won't read a more enjoyable book this summer.

Tomorrow, Justine Jordan on The Phantom Tollbooth.

Summer readingTravel guidesFictionBoating holidaysRobert McCrum
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Michael Cunningham: My fantasy Folio goes to Ulysses and To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf was a snob and James Joyce a bully – but their novels have never been surpassed. As the new Folio prize judges are announced, academician Michael Cunningham looks back at two deserving classics

We are sceptical about literary prizes. And yet – come on, confess – we like literary prizes as well.

I'm not talking about the winning, though winning them can – and probably should – produce a potent, mingled sense of scepticism and pleasure. I'm talking about the divide we may feel upon hearing that a certain book has won an award.

On one hand, there's the prize's obvious absurdity – its inevitable subjectivity, not to mention the plain silliness of deeming one book better than another. (Quick, off the top of your head: is Middlemarch better than Bleak House?) On the other, there is our rightful devotion to the whole "ta-da" business: the pronouncement, the trumpet blare, the laying of the laurel wreath on the most gifted head in the arena. It's human.

There is, however, a certain question that tends to arise among juries whenever prizes are being contemplated. Is it the fundamental purpose of the prize to acknowledge the writer who has veered closest to greatness that year (or decade, or century), regardless of the boxcar-loads of accolades that may already have been delivered; or is it to draw attention to an extremely good and possibly significant writer who seems to be passing more or less unnoticed?

I don't think such bifurcation is called for where a contemporary prize is concerned – after all, history's verdict is still out on newer books. But I feel torn between naming one of the most obvious 50 or so best books, and naming a less-than-deified book. The list of undeniable greats is predictable, and so a little dull. However, if I were to name a book that has been (in my estimation) under-recognised, I'd be implying that some lesser-known book leaves Middlemarch and Bleak House in the dust.

And so, at the risk of disappointing those who like a savage singularity, and if we're talking about every book ever written in English, I have to suggest two Folio prizes. One for the greatest, and one for the wrongfully under-appreciated.

The greatest

I'm afraid there's more equivocation to come. I'd award the greatness prize to two books: James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

I'm not talking about a tie. I'm talking about two seminal works of literature that should be considered in tandem.

Let's pause to remember that the novel, in English, is less than 300 years old. Given its youth, its track record is remarkable. We've had, in relatively short order, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby-Dick, The Golden Bowl, The Sound and the Fury, and The Great Gatsby – just to name a few (Middlemarch and Bleak House have probably been sufficiently acknowledged already).

For me, however, it was the modernists who engendered the most significant literary revolution. Suddenly, in the early 20th century, novels had as much to do with language as they did with events. They were about outwardly ordinary lives, and thereby established that there's no such thing as an "ordinary" life; there is only inadequate appreciation of humanity. And a novel was no longer meant as moral instruction for readers who were, perhaps, ever-so-slightly in need of it.

Ulysses is, of course, Godzilla, and we are the citizens of Tokyo. Joyce's book changed everything. It's the novel most likely to inspire in a writer the question: "Oh, well, now that's been done, why bother any more?"

To the Lighthouse doesn't slay and pillage in the same way, yet it is every bit as revolutionary as Ulysses, and for some of the same reasons. Like Joyce, Woolf knew the entire world could be seen by looking not only at the big picture, but also the small one, in more or less the way a physicist who studies subatomic particles is witness to miracles every bit as astonishing as those observed by an astronomer.

Unlike Joyce, Woolf didn't wish to devastate her readers. Nor did she need her readers to comprehend how brilliant she was. And, of course, she cared more than Joyce did about the lives of women. If Joyce, in Ulysses, is the vengeful god – if he's the father who gives his children the occasional, all-too-clear sense of their own limitations – Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, is Winnicott's good-enough mother, the one who's able to love her children while simultaneously urging them towards lives of their own, beyond her reach or influence.

For all their genius, both authors arrived with limitations, as humans always do. Woolf was a snob, and could not, would not, write about sex. Joyce was something of a bully on the page: he cared, at times (or so it seems to me), a bit more about his readers' apprehension of his immense talent than he did about the readers themselves – or, for that matter, about the characters in his book.

Mom is adoring and nurturing and ever-so-slightly out of touch. Dad is potent and challenging and ever-so-slightly uncaring.

And so, I nominate Ulysses and To the Lighthouse, not by way of a draw, but as a pair – a marriage, if you will. A partnership in which each member is enhanced by the other, which creates a two-part entity more influential, and more important, than either individual.

The under-appreciated

As I've said, if there's an unknown or neglected book on the same level as Ulysses or To the Lighthouse, it's unknown to me. It's also neglected by me, along with everybody else.

There are, however, a number of books which (in my opinion) should be read by everyone, and haven't been.

In alphabetical order, the prize(s) go to:

The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley

Light Years by James Salter

And that, surely, is more than enough out of me.

• Michael Cunningham is an Academy member of the Folio prize, which is running daily blogs on the books academicians wish to see retrospectively awarded the prize.

Michael CunninghamVirginia WoolfJames JoyceClassicsFictionAwards and prizes
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Mel Sherratt on self-publishing: 'I just never gave up'

After being rebuffed by publishers because her books didn't fit a genre, Mel Sherratt was turned down for writing one that was too generic. Time to go it alone ...

Scroll down to recommend your own favourite self-published books

Why did you self-publish?

After trying for years for a traditional book deal, even getting to a few acquisition meetings but never having that definite sale, I began to study the Kindle market and wondered if it was the next logical step to take. It was the scariest thing I ever did – it could break my career if the book didn't sell. But the timing felt right and I had nothing to lose.

I published Taunting the Dead and in five weeks, it had hit the Amazon Kindle top 100 books, rising to number three in the overall fiction chart and number one in police procedurals, thriller and mysteries. And in January this year, I found out it was in the top 100 bestselling Amazon.co.uk ebooks of 2012.

Tell us a bit about your novels.

Taunting the Dead is a whodunnit - part police procedural, part psychological thriller. The main story centres on a woman found murdered on a night out. Several of her family and friends were in the vicinity at the same time. They are all lying to the police, as well as each other, to cover their tracks. As the lies escalate, so too does the body count.

The Estate Series has an element of laugh a minute, cry a minute, crime a minute as I explore emotions and fear. I call it grit-lit because it's gritty realism through the eyes of some really strong female characters. I'm a firm believer that there is good and bad in everyone, depending on circumstances and how far we are pushed. I'm told my writing is very visual and often emotional as well as dark; two things that readers of my genres look for.

You write in several genres. How has this been for you?

When I first started writing, I wrote a book a year, as I looked for an agent who could help get me a traditional deal. Once I finally found someone to represent me, publishers rejected my books, as they told me they didn't fit neatly into one genre. They seemed to cross the genres, having elements of women's fiction and crime and thrillers. So I wrote a police procedural, but that too was rejected by publishers because it was too similar to what other authors were doing in the same genre.

I studied the Kindle ebook market and realised that, at the time, the top 100 were predominantly women's fiction and crime thrillers, so I decided to self-publish Taunting the Dead. On the back of this, I then self-published three books I had written previously. I was eager to see if readers would like them as much as Taunting the Dead. And they did.

Have you worked with an editor or designer?

Whenever I self-publish, I pay for a copy-edit. Before I get to this stage, I have completed three drafts on the manuscript, which I then send to the same group of six people (authors, readers and editors). I trust these people to give me structural feedback – good or bad. My books are full of hard-hitting subjects, covering lots of moral issues. Potentially there could be something that could touch a nerve for a reader in each one, so I have to be sensitive to what people think. If two or three of my group say they don't like the same storyline, then I will change it.

For the cover of Taunting the Dead, I found the image of the rose and created a few backgrounds for it and then a friend created the image seen today. For The Estate series, I did the same, and we used the same fonts, with a series of similar images, to establish a brand.

Do you think it's important to have support in editing and design?

When I first published Taunting the Dead, it hadn't been copy-edited, and it's one of my biggest regrets. At the time, I was naïve to the fact that you can't edit yourself - you'll never see your own mistakes. Having had the three novels in my series copy-edited, I've learned a lot, but it is still something I will pay to have done on any further books I self-publish.

An enticing cover is exactly the same for an ebook as it is for the print version. Even though it is a smaller image, it has to be eye-catching. To me, that thumbnail image on screen is the equivalent to either having a book on display in a book shop front-cover-out or spine-out, or not at all.

You've decided to publish your next book with Amazon. Why?

I had intended to self-publish the next book in my series soon, but I've just been offered a two-book deal with Amazon Publishing under their mystery, thrillers and suspense imprint Thomas and Mercer. They are going to be publishing my new novel, Watching Over You, and are also repackaging Taunting the Dead.

Talk us through your publishing strategy

I priced Taunting the Dead at 99p and, once it was number one in all its categories, I upped the price to £1.99. That was 18 months ago, and it's still selling well. Because of that, when I brought The Estate series out, I could go with a £1.99 price straightaway.

It's all about making people aware of my book – no matter what my pricing strategy. Who will buy a book if they don't hear about it? I don't have a marketing background; I learned everything as I went along. I have a Twitter account and an author page on Facebook, and of course there is my blog on my website. I haven't paid for any advertising yet but I do lots of guest posts and Q&As whenever I'm asked. So, the cheap and cheerful route has worked well for me.

I have used Createspace to create a print version of Somewhere to Hide and found the system easy to use and navigate. I do intend to create print copies for all the books in The Estate series in time, but as my sales are predominantly digital, it's further down the to-do list, as it's time consuming if I do it myself.

Has it been an eye-opener making all these decisions yourself?

It wasn't so much an eye-opener as a learning curve. To learn how to do the formatting, upload the books, write good product descriptions, create covers and paperback interiors, get all the tiny details right, deal with the negative reviews and the stigma took a long time but it was worth it.

However, I think self-publishing can only get me so far. Like a lot of other authors, I would love to see my books available in different formats, and translated into different languages. My books have predominantly sold well in the UK, which is only a small proportion of the market. Now though, I have a new agent who works with me to get better deals for the work she handles. Madeleine Milburn is essentially my business partner. She frees me up more time to write. I knew, for instance, that when I was offered the deal with Thomas and Mercer, I was in safe hands when it came to all the negotiations. The two-book deal was a pre-empt - it had gone out on submission to 14 publishers in the UK at the same time.

What are the positives of self-publishing?

The speed of bringing a product to market is a bonus - being able to to get three books out in a six-month period, thereby creating a buzz around each one as they were released. I also enjoy the control element of it. It's great to be able to change a cover, or a have a sale for a limited period, or to revamp a product description within a matter of hours.

And I think that self-publishing taught me how to be more confident and business savvy. I've learned to do most things by myself. If what I tried failed, I tried something else. I began to say yes to things I would have shied away from in the past - such as speaking on author panels at London Book Fair. And trying to get a deal for so long gives me an interesting back story.

And the negatives?

When I first started, in 2011, the arguments against doing it were much stronger. I was worried that a traditional publisher wouldn't want anyone who had self-published. However, Taunting the Dead allowed me to bring out several more books through Amazon KDP, which led me to pick up many loyal readers.

Over-thinking everything is another potential hazard. Writing can be a business as well as a hobby, and just like a lot of other trades can turn more lucrative over time. Doing as much as you can for yourself is time-consuming - but something you enjoy can consume you anyway. Then you can buy in help like I do now.

Would you do it again?

I have self-published six books so far and have plans for more, alongside my traditional deal. I'm not in the White Glove program with my self-published books, as the program wasn't available for me then, so it is an option I will look into when I release book 4 in the series. I'd like to write two full-length books a year and perhaps one or two novellas for The Estate Series. By project managing and writing to my own timescales, self-publishing allows me to do this, and work with my agent and publisher too.

I often think there is an element of luck in everything we do - right place, right time - but maybe it's about putting yourself in that right place at that right time? I just never gave up. I made a lot of contacts over the years through my blog High Heels and Book Deals. The more people you get to know, the more you can network to get yourself in front of the right people. It costs money and time to attend writing festivals but I think that is a worthwhile investment too.

Give us a taster of Taunting the Dead

'There is another solution.' Phil knocked back the whisky in one go and put the glass down onto the table. 'You could do a job for me.'

Shaun gulped. 'What kind of a job?'

Phil paused. Was he really wise to trust him, knowing how close he was to Terry? His wife and Steph were good friends. What happened if he mentioned it to her and she told Steph? It could all go belly-up before it had started.

But seeing no other way out of this, he'd have to chance it. He glanced around again before moving closer to Shaun.

'A hit,' he said.

Shaun's eyes widened. 'You mean you want me to kill someone?'

'Yes.'

Horrified but curious at the same time, he asked: 'Who?'

Phil leaned closer and whispered.

Shaun stood up so fast that his stool toppled over. The two men on the next table turned their heads quickly. As more people started to look, Shaun stood there until he was old news. Then he picked up the stool, sat back down.

'You can't be serious, man.'

'I'm deadly serious.'

'But I can't do that.'

'One hit and I'll wipe your debt. All twenty grand of it.'

'But, I've…' Shaun lowered his voice. 'I've never killed anyone. I wouldn't know how to.'

What other self-published author would you recommend?

Talli Roland was the person who gave me confidence to self-publish my own books, and she has a style that I love. She has a great eye for romantic comedy in today's market, including lots of references to social media, and her books always seem fresh and appealing.

Next week: Talli Roland

Self-publishingCrime fiction
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