The Guardian's Blog, page 186

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 23: The Drawing of the Three

The second in King's Dark Tower series, you need to read the whole sequence to appreciate its glories

In 1987, Stephen King was at the height of both his powers, and his popularity. In the 13 years and 23 books since Carrie was released, his name had become publishing gold. It, The Shining, The Stand, Salem's Lot: these were books that were going to go down in publishing history. And then, in 1987, King published four novels within a 10-month period, three of them standalone books with something to offer for nearly every potential reader. The Eyes of the Dragon was a young adult fantasy novel; Misery was a literary psychological thriller; The Tommyknockers was a science fiction horror epic. And then there was The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three..

The sequel to The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three seems to have been meant for what King referred to as the "Constant Reader" – those who follow his every published word. It wasn't as if The Gunslinger set the world on fire ( sales figures suggest that it was, on release, one of his lesser-selling books); there would likely have been more fervour for a sequel to something like Firestarter or Salem's Lot. But King didn't, at that point in his career, write sequels – it's taken 36 years for the first to be looming over the hill in the form of Doctor Sleep, the forthcoming follow-up to The Shining – so the Dark Tower series was an anomaly. Where every other novel had the lowest barrier for entry possible, the Dark Tower books relied on the reader having read the others.

The Drawing of the Three picks up the action where The Gunslinger left off – or as near as dammit, after a section ("Argument") that essentially takes the role of those Previously On... bits at the start of TV shows. Roland of Gilead had been chasing the Man In Black across the desert, then they had a little tarot-card reading, Roland fell asleep for 10 years and the Man In Black escaped. Book one was hugely tense and bizarrely structured, a three-act tribute to both Sergio Leone and Tolkien filled with tonal statements of intent: dead towns, displaced children (from "other worlds than these") and a truly evil villain. Book two begins with another such statement, when Roland is attacked by a giant lobster and loses two of the fingers on his right hand. He then wanders in a fever to a beach filled with doors, each of which leads to New York City at various points in its history.

The book, from that point, becomes a "putting together the band" style narrative, with Roland going to three different times in our world and meeting significant characters. The first, Eddie, is a drug smuggler and addict, whose life is saved by Roland; the second is Odetta Holmes, a disabled black civil rights protester with multiple personality disorder; and the third is a red herring, a bad guy rather than team-mate. This is Jack Mort, the man who not only gave Odetta her split personality, but was also the reason that she lost her legs. Jack Mort, it's clear, is another of King's Very Bad Men, one whose actions have wide and far-reaching effects for the Dark Tower series, even as his particular story is neatly dealt with over the course of this single novel.

But this is a book primarily about repercussions. My own relationship with the Dark Tower novels, as I've previously said, happened 30 years after The Gunslinger was first published, and after I'd read everything else King had written. I read the first four Dark Tower novels as if they were one utterly mammoth tome over a period of only a few days. They spilled into each other, so where the first was a strangely-structured wander through vague and hazily ambient storytelling, this is more direct, a very different sort of book. There's even a tonal shift, I feel now, that doesn't jar, but definitely seems to bridge the first to the later books in the series.

Some people will see that as damning. Bridge novels – a term used to describe those books in a series that simply bind the other books together without being readable on their own – are often chastised, but they have a place. And this is a bridge novel, in the truest sense of the word. If you don't know Roland, the loss of his fingers surely means nothing to you; if you don't read the later books, the effects that Mort has on the rest of the series will make him seem as if he's somewhat pointless; and if you don't know who Jake is, the mention of him will mean nothing to you. It picks up threads while setting up new ones, and is pretty impenetrable if you don't know what you're letting yourself in for.

That's the way with the Dark Tower books. They're not casual; they're for King's Constant Readers. They're all about the threads, and how they're tied up. Rereading them is fascinating, because they're so incredibly intricate. Lines and themes reappear, fading in and out; and taken on their own, maybe they don't mean much. As part of the whole, though, they're quite the thing. It's why the series has the following that it does; to read it makes you feel a part of something. That's how I felt when I first read it, because the books felt as if they had been written for me and me alone; and that's how I feel now, when I understand it within the context of the rest of King's oeuvre.

But, for heaven's sake, don't try reading it on its own.

Connections

Last time, for The Eyes of the Dragon, I mentioned that Dennis and Thomas's story, chasing after Randall Flagg, was left hanging open, to be revisited. In The Drawing of the Three, that revisiting occurs, as Roland tells a tale of witnessing said chase. Amazed at Flagg's power, he was shocked when he saw one of them being turned into a dog. Maybe that's not the end to the story that some readers wanted, but it's definitely a cap on Dennis, Thomas and The Eyes of the Dragon – and brings that book firmly into the Dark Tower mythology.

Of course, there are many more connections to the rest of the Dark Tower books in this, but that's pretty much a given.

Next time: Don't even attempt to run away from what might well be King's finest novel: it's MISERY.

Stephen KingFantasyFictionJames Smythe
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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

Thanks to ejahnle for the photograph at the top of today's blog. If you'd like to show us what you're reading rather than telling us in the comment thread, you can do so by tweeting your snap to @guardianbooks or by uploading it to our Flickr group. Every photo we use on TLS comes from this pool of pictures, so thank you to everyone who has contributed to it.

Here's a selection of thoughts, comments and deft reviews you posted last week:

lukethedrifter:

[I'm] about a third of the way through Even the Dogs. Like other Jon McGregor books, it's very well written, in a very mannered style, but the heart is plain for all to see. Quite beautiful, if bleak. There is a character in it, Sammy, (a minor, minor character), whom I can't help but think of as an homage to the Sammy of How Late it Was, How Late, the bold Sammy, as he called himself. That connection has made me realise how much McGregor owes to James Kellman.

discobadgers:

On the other hand, Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan was a real disappointment. Probably the worst of his novels that I've read to date. Someone on here a couple of weeks back described it as something like an "info dump" - that's exactly how I felt. Lots of filler that wasn't required, characters I didn't care about and repeating a trick he's used to much greater effect before. I don't think I've ever read so much by one author who frustrates me as much as McEwan does. With Atonement, everything came together to create near perfection. Others have had their moments, particularly Amsterdam (until it all fell apart in the last twenty pages), but he does make me want to break things at times.

retro77:

Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia, by Francis Wheen.
A blackly comic look back at the 1970s, and a mine of priceless political and social stories from a truly bonkers decade, with a particular focus on the loopier tendencies of its politicians and leaders (taking in Nixon, Wilson and Idi Amin, among others).

This book veers between being genuinely disturbing and laugh-out-loud funny, helped along by Wheen's deadpan style and needle-sharp ear for anecdote.

MsCarey:

The sun came out in my neck of the woods recently making me long for foreign parts. Nothing on my shelf would do so I took myself off to my local bookshop to do the sort of comprehensive browse [...] I emerged with Jason Elliot's Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran. It's doing a fine job of taking me right away from home and putting me somewhere hot, strange, uncomfortable and exciting.

I say "is" doing a fine job but in truth I have had reluctantly to put it to one side for this week. I'm doing an intensive cramming of the Lord of the Rings books and films this week to go head to head with my nephew in Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit on Friday. Nothing so edifying as the sight of a middle-aged woman determined to take down an adolescent....

Our review list

Non-fiction:
• Imre Kertesz by Dossier K
• What do Women Want? by Daniel Bergner
• The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
• How to be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman
• A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt - And Why They Shouldn't by William B Irvine
• Girl Least Likely To: Years of Fashion of Female Desire by Liz Jones
• The Society of Timid Souls by Polly Morland

Fiction:
• Children of the Jacaranda by Sahar Delijani
• 2121: A Tale from the Next Century by Susan Greenfield
• Never Ending Sky by Marlen Haushofer
• Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen
• Missing Out by Adam Phillips
• The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

Children's:
• Blood Family by Anne Fine (Doubleday)

Review book club:
• NW by Zadie Smith

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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Judging the Forward prizes for poetry: my verdict

Reading 162 collections, it was fascinating to compare the work – and to see whose lines stayed with me

What's the best thing about judging the Forward prizes? Free books? Reassessing a poet you hadn't paid enough attention to? Those are good, but the best might be the poems, and odd lines, that stick in your head. They may be from books that didn't even make the shortlist, but they've still made a mark – Dannie Abse's line "Men become mortal when their fathers die" from his collection Speak, Old Parrot, isn't going to leave me any time soon.

I admit that the main reason I agreed to judge was that the panel includes Sam West, and the fan-girl in me couldn't resist meeting Major Edrington from the Hornblower series. (His mellifluous readings during the judging improved many a poem about which I'd been unsure.) But I did wonder if I could keep up, especially when 12 or 15 books arrived at a time. Ninety-six publishers submitted books; we read 162 collections.

It became addictive to compare one with another, to re-read and see something that didn't immediately impress become more powerful, to find a poet whose work I thought I knew doing something unexpected – and to glory in the work of good new poets. This last happens most often on the First Collection list, my favourite to read for. It's also pleasing that half the shortlist comes from tiny houses: small presses are often where the most adventurous writing happens. We were supposed to produce shortlists of five in the three categories (Best Collection, Best First Collection and Best Single Poem); there are six on the Best First shortlist, which indicates the quality in depth in that category.

When the judging panel – Jeanette Winterson, Sam West, Paul Farley, David Mills and myself – compared our shortlists, some books and poems had gripped only one judge, who was nonetheless passionate about his/her fancy and would argue fiercely to convince the rest. If you ever thought it was possible for these lists to be "fixed" by one judge, be assured it's jolly hard; there are four other equally opinionated folk in that room.

I'm glad to say there was no pressure to achieve unanimity, because that's how to end up with an anodyne list that neither offends nor inspires. Some choices are unanimous; others are majority decisions. At the end of our four-hour judging session we were all allowed to break with consensus-building and nominate a few personal favourites for the 2014 Forward Book of Poetry, which should ensure the book – published on 1 October, the same day the prizes are announced – shows a wide range of the best poetry of this year. The anthology, possibly even more than the prizes, is the real fruit of our labour: it's for those who suspect they might enjoy contemporary poetry but who aren't prepared to pick through 162 collections to find out. In other words, we've strained our eyes and, occasionally, our minds so you don't have to.

Any trends? Philip Larkin once famously denounced the "myth-kitty", but his disapproval has not killed it. I met the whole Greek and Roman pantheon, several times. Unlike Larkin, I'm not against mythical beings in poetry; it depends how you use 'em. But I was surprised at their popularity in this year's crop. Another kind of poem much in vogue is where a narrator watches a craftsperson making something. It might be anything from lace to a Dutch barn; the fascination is with the act of making, which parallels the poet's own craft. Again, this can work or not, but it can risk looking a little vicarious. It's no accident that one of the books on the first collection shortlist, Adam White's Accurate Measurements, is by a poet who has himself worked as a joiner: the immediacy and assurance of his poems on the craft is striking.

There are collections with a central theme, like Rebecca Goss's Her Birth and Dan O'Brien's War Reporter, and more disparate ones – Sinéad Morrissey's Parallax, Marianne Burton's She Inserts the Key. In the individual poems list there is both grim subject matter and humour, often coexisting. I don't think you could identify any unifying principle to the poems and books chosen, other than that they had to be memorable, to stay in the mind even after the judge had read another couple of dozen. That was my yardstick.

Forward prize for poetry 2013Forward prize for poetryPoetrySheenagh Pugh
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Poem of the week: An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope

Whilst counselling restraint, Pope's famously stinging wit is here trained on targets that can still be seen today

This week's choice is an extract from Part Three of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism. The whole poem runs to 744 lines, but that shouldn't put you off! It's as readable as it was 400 years ago, and highly pertinent to many burning literary issues – writers' prizes and who judges them, for instance. Pope wrote it in 1709, the year his first work, four pastorals, appeared in print. He was barely 21. When it was published in 1711 it earned the young poet immediate acclaim.

Typically, Pope undertook the work in a competitive spirit. He was an ambitious, driven writer, largely self- and home-educated because of a painful spinal deformation, and because the repressive legislation against Catholics at the time denied him access to a university.

It was Nicholas Boileau's treatise, L'Art Poétique, which fired Pope to produce his own study of literary-critical principles. Like Boileau, he champions neoclassicism and its governing aesthetic of nature as the proper model for art. His pantheon of classical writers, the "happy few," as he calls them, includes Quintilian, Longinus and, most importantly, Horace.

Pope's ideals may be recycled, but there's no doubting his passionate belief in them. Deployed in his sparkling heroic couplets, the arguments and summaries are alive with wit, verbal agility and good sense. From his neoclassical scaffolding, he looks outwards to the literary marketplace of his own age. It was a noisy time, and sometimes the reader seems to hear the buzz of the coffee house, the banter, gossip and argument of the writers and booksellers, the jangle of carts and carriages.

Pope's wit is famously caustic, so it's surprising how often the essayist advocates charity and humility. In the chosen section, he begins by advising restraint in criticising dull and incompetent poets. His tongue is in his cheek, as it turns out: "For who can rail as long as they can write?" Although he takes the view that bad critics are more culpable than bad poets, Pope enjoys a sustained dig at the poet-bores who go on and on and on. The metaphor of the spinning-top implies that a whipping will simply keep them going. Tops "sleep" when they move so fast their movement is invisible – hence the faded cliché "to sleep like a tops". The metaphor shifts to "jades" – old horses urged to recover after a stumble and run on, as these desperate poets "run on", their sounds and syllables like the jingling reigns, their words "dull droppings".

From the "shameless bards" in their frenzy of forced inspiration, Pope turns his attention to the critics, and, with nice comic effect, tars them with the same brush. "There are as mad, abandoned critics too." The "blockhead" he conjures reads everything and blindly attacks everything, "From Dryden's fables down to Durfey's tales." Durfey is placed pointedly at the bottom of the pile. He was generally considered an inferior poet, although Pope's friend Addison had time for him. Samuel Garth, on the other hand, was well-regarded, by Pope and many others, for a poem, The Dispensary, denouncing apothecaries and their cohort physicians. There was a rumour current that Garth was not its real author.

Sychophancy is one of the Essay's prime targets. Pope's rhetoric rises to a pitch as he castigates the hypocrisy of the "fops" who always praise the latest play, and the loquacious ignorance of the preferment-seeking clergy. St Paul's Churchyard, the corrupt precinct of the booksellers, may be full of bores and fools, but there's no safer sanctuary at the cathedral's altar.

The Essay is rich in epigrams, still widely quoted. "For fools rush in where angels fear to read" is among the best known and most borrowed (by Frank Sinatra, among others). Briefly allegorising, Pope goes on to contrast cautious "sense" and impetuous "nonsense", again evoking the rowdy traffic of 18th-century London with the onomatopoeic "rattling".

The flow has been angrily headlong: now, the pace becomes slower, the argument more rational. Antithesis implies balance, and the syntax itself enacts the critical virtues. Where, Pope asks, can you find the paradigm of wise judgement? It's not a rhetorical question. The poem goes on to provide the answer, enumerating the classical models, having a little chauvinistic nip at the rule-bound Boileau, and happily discovering two worthy inheritors of the critical Golden Age, Roscommon and Walsh.

Readers and writers today can't, of course, share Pope's certainties of taste. But we can apply some of his principles, the most important of which is, perhaps, that principles are necessary. And we might even take some tips from writers of the past.

From "An Essay on Criticism," Part Three

'Tis best sometimes your censure to restrain,
And charitably let the dull be vain:
Your silence there is better than your spite,
For who can rail so long as they can write?
Still humming on, their drowsy course they keep,
And lashed so long, like tops, are lashed asleep.
False steps but help them to renew the race,
As, after stumbling, jades will mend their pace.
What crowds of these, impenitently bold,
In sounds and jingling syllables grown old,
Still run on poets, in a raging vein,
Ev'n to the dregs and squeezings of the brain,
Strain out the last dull droppings of their sense,
And rhyme with all the rage of impotence.

  Such shameless bards we have, and yet 'tis true
There are as mad, abandoned critics too.
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head,
With his own tongue still edifies his ears,
And always listening to himself appears.
All books he reads, and all he reads assails,
From Dryden's fables down to Durfey's tales.
With him, most authors steal their works, or buy;
Garth did not write his own Dispensary.
Name a new play, and he's the poet's friend,
Nay showed his faults – but when would poets mend?
No place so sacred from such fops is barred,
Nor is Paul's church more safe than Paul's church yard:
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead;
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks,
It still looks home, and short excursions makes;
But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks.
And never shocked and never turned aside,
Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide.

  But where's the man who counsel can bestow,
Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know?
Unbiassed, or by favour, or by spite:
Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right;
Though learned, well-bred; and though well-bred, sincere;
Modestly bold, and humanly severe:
Who to a friend his faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the merit of a foe?
Blessed with a taste exact, yet unconfined;
A knowledge both of books and human kind;
Generous converse; a soul exempt from pride;
And love to praise, with reason on his side?

Literary criticismPoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Nominations for the Guardian First book award gave this week's reader reviews something of a rookie feel

Our reader reviews have taken on a youthful tinge this week, with reviewers stepping up to put debuts forward for this year's Guardian First book award. Some may have been a little terse, but Judi Moore was full of praise for Caroline Davies's "modern epic poem", Convoy. It's inspired by the role of the merchant navy in the second world war, Moore says, "told from the point of view of the men who were there".

As such it has much in common with Nordic sagas which record for posterity deeds from long ago.

With sources including official accounts, journals and first-hand testimony the quantity and quality of Davies's research is "phenomenal", Moore continues, but this weight of detail doesn't obscure the emotional power.

Davies has pared her collection to the bone; the focus is tight, enabling sense easily to be made of the complex situations she describes; the rhythms and occasional rhymes employed enhance and reinforce meaning. Her good, plain style works against sentimentality, and against glorifying what the men went through.

According to Moore, the result is a powerful collection which examines the things we are asked to do in war, and where we find the inner reserves to achieve them. I'm looking forward to taking a look myself already.

Meanwhile uhuznaa has been catching up with a debut from 2003. DBC Pierre won the Booker prize with Vernon God Little, which according to uhuznaa is "just fucken good".

It's witty, even wise often enough, very well written in a word-smithing way, full of "you knew it!" fuck-ups and then some, it slowly creeps around your neck and starts to throttle while you may be laughing or not.

Though there's something funny "on every page", uhuznaa continues, it's too "deadly serious" to be a comedy. But the "wisdom", "laughs and shivers" are more than enough to compensate for "the time and the cost and the emotional friction you'll have to endure ... Come on, read it."

As ever, thanks for all this week's reviews. If I've mentioned yours, let me know at richard.lea@guardian.co.uk, and I'll see if I can find you something "very good", or even "great" from our cupboards. Meanwhile keep those debuts coming.

Richard Lea
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Poster poems: Journeys | Billy Mills

Whether through crowded airports or in the silence of your imagination, this is a month to travel. Time to set off with a pen

Summer time and the living is mobile. Once July arrives, many of us have hit, are about to hit, or are wondering if we can afford to hit the road. Be it a midweek break in Paris, a fortnight by the sea or three months on a J-1 visa in New York, summer is the time for travel. According to Robert Louis Stevenson, who knew a thing or two about the subject, it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive; for the next few weeks you are invited to test the hypothesis that it is better to travel in poetry than by public transport.

One of the great pleasures of any journey is the possibility of the unexpected encounter or experience. You turn a corner and suddenly the most dramatic panorama you've ever seen stretches out before you. You walk into a bar in a city you've never been in before and there they are, the lost love of your life and you think "we'll always have Paris" … Or maybe it's a bus trip on a moonlit night when suddenly a great animal wanders out onto the road, a moose perhaps – as in Elizabeth Bishop's account – delaying the journey but bringing its ineffable gift of joy to ease the way.

Of course, the encounters you have along the way will depend on the choices you make, the road you take, or the road not taken. Frost's poem is so familiar that it's easy to overlook quite how laden with paradox it is; both roads are worn "really about the same", and yet the speaker is happy to claim that picking the less worn one "made all the difference". How does he or she know? Maybe it's just the condition of journeying that we cannot know what might have happened if we had gone another way, made a different decision.

At least the travellers depicted by Bishop and Frost were paying attention to their surroundings, unlike those holidaymakers we've all met who see their trips at second hand through a viewfinder. It's a phenomenon that is neatly captured by Wendell Berry in his poem The Vacation with the observation that while the camera-wielding holidaymaker will be able to view his journey at will, he himself will "never be in it'" And that was before the advent of digital mobile technology.

Nobody could accuse the speaker in Anne Sexton's Crossing the Atlantic of not being in her voyage. She is immersed fully in every aspect of life on her floating city on a journey eastwards through both space and time, back through the generations of female ancestors who made the reverse trip before her. There's something in the energy of this poem that reminds me of the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer, as memorably translated by Ezra Pound. Unlike Sexton's poem, however, The Seafarer is the ultimate expression of travel as expulsion, of the outcast who roams without choice and with no ultimate destination available to them. Here's hoping none of us ever have to endure anything like it.

Whatever Stevenson might say, most of our journeys do have destinations and we generally hope to get there eventually. Mind you, not many arrivals are at events that have the momentous consequences that attended the end point of The Journey of the Magi or as big a let-down as the unresponsive silence that greeted, or failed to greet, Walter De La Mare's traveller at what turned out to not quite mark the end of his wanderings. Reading poems like this might make you more sympathetic to Charles Tomlinson's "These days are best when one goes nowhere" in his poem Against Travel.

And so this month's Poster Poems challenge is on the theme of journeys; long or short, arduous or luxurious, focused on the going or the arriving, your traveller's tales are welcome here. We're off on a trip around the egg of the world.

PoetryBilly Mills
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Farewell Alice Munro, and thanks for everything

Jane Smiley pays tribute to the Canadian writer Alice Munro, who has announced her retirement at the age of 82

That Alice Munro titled her last volume of short stories Dear Life could not have been a surprise to her devoted readers. In even the most merciless stories in the 14 volumes she has published since 1968, she has seemed steadily to embrace the energy of life itself. Fear and pain exist, but there is always something beyond the worst events – if not redemption or better times, then at least understanding or the outline of meaning. To me, this seems to be the quest of a writer who is above all curious, above all an investigator.

Munro once said of her ambitions: "What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting." When we read her work, we must be awed by that precision, by the way that her intent focus on the particular ends up illuminating the general. Munro is the only author whose writings are so vivid to me that I have occasionally mistaken incidents in her stories for memories of my own past.

Now Munro is bowing out. She is 82, her husband died in April; she is looking forward to doing something more sociable and less taxing than writing. Of course, I do not want to lose my access, as a reader, to her gaze upon the world, but I think it is a wise and telling choice. For one thing, she has, in the last four stories of Dear Life, revisited early material, rethought it in the wiser and more accepting terms that we would expect of someone who has spent most of her adult life maturing in the public eye. She has also recognised, perhaps, that every career has a natural arc and a natural end.

Not many successful writers have lived into their 80s – the perennially mature Henry James was 72 when he died, Tolstoy 71 when he published his last novel. Edith Wharton was working on her last novel when she died at 75. The View from Castle Rock, which Munro published when she was 75, was a grand and intriguing departure, both geographically and thematically, and one of my favourites.

But now we must let her off the hook. Thank you, Alice Munro, for one glittering jewel of a story after another. Thank you for the many days and nights I spent lost in your work. Thank you for your unembarrassed woman's perspective on the lives of girls and women, but also the lives of boys and men. Thank you for your cruelty as well as your kindness, because the one plus the other is the essence of truthfulness.

Alice MunroJane Smiley
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Independent bookshops: share your survival strategies

A debate this week highlighted some smart thoughts for keeping indies alive on the high street, but more are always welcome. Can you help?

It should be easy to love independent bookshops, with their olde worlde charm and their suggestion of a life where there's time to potter among the shelves and discover a beautiful, life-affirming novel. The convenience of click-and-deliver shopping is hard to resist, but for a brief moment last night, at a debate for Independent Booksellers Week, a world where browsing a bookshop could be an everyday pleasure seemed possible.

Top of the agenda was the economic reality of trying to make a living from running an indie on the high street. Nic Bottomley, the owner of the award-winning Bath bookshop Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, trumpeted a 13-point manifesto for independent success:

1. Do one thing differently every week.
2. Tell everyone what you're doing. Tell customers what's happening at your shop; tell publishers which of their books you're selling hard; tell the press anything remotely interesting. It will come back to help you.
3. Never pay for advertising.
4. Copy good ideas from other geographically-distant independent businesses.
5. Inspire 10 book lovers every day; convert one book-agnostic every day.
6. Surround yourself with creative booksellers who love books as much as you and can wax on about them even more persuasively than you.
7. Use social media.
8. Use the time you were going to spend bitching about Amazon to work out, realistically, what your business needs from publishers. Tell the publishers.
9. Create a community. Hold events and book groups that are so good people will attend even if they've never heard of the author and that afterwards they'll rave about to everyone they know.
10. Don't give excellent customer service. Give extreme customer service – so that you become part of the fabric of your customers' lives. They will do your advertising for you.
11. Sell e-readers now if you love them as much as physical books. If not, wait until the margins are plausible before you think about it and in the meantime carry on selling books.
12. Don't buy stock from Amazon.
13. Be surprisingly cut-throat and financially driven when no one is looking; aim not to survive, but to thrive.

My own personal favourite is point eight, advising the use of time saved by not lamenting the Amazon effect to woo and work with publishers. I like it because I want independent bookshops to stay on the high street, and I recognise that no amount of agonising about Amazon will make it go away. And I like point one, "do one thing differently every week", because it would be extremely cool to have a new or surprising experience every time you went into a bookshop. But what's missing from this manifesto? What's the key to success in the world of bricks and mortar bookshops?

BooksellersAmazon.comE-commerceLiz Bury
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Shitstorm arrives in German dictionary

Duden, the country's equivalent the OED, incorporates English loanword among proliferating anglicisms

When the most respected dictionary in the German-speaking world releases its 26th edition on Friday, of the 5,000 new words that are to be taken on board, one has received far more publicity than any other.

"Shitstorm"was first recorded in German usage in 2010, where it specifically refers to widespread and vociferous outrage expressed on the internet – especially on social media platforms – has been deemed to be so popular by lexicographers that it has earned its place.

The fact that Angela Merkel thinks nothing of dropping the word into press conferences and round-table discussions, has no doubt help speed its way up the word queue. The Guardian first caught her using it in June 2012 during a discussion in Berlin with David Cameron, when she referred to having faced a "shitschturm" (her pronunciation) over her dealings with crisis-ridden southern Europe.

A German protestant bishop, who recently faced a shitstorm himself, has called it the "modern-day equivalent of a stoning". The opposite (which has yet to enter Duden) is "candystorm", that to Germans has a close association with the US "candy bomber" planes which dropped sweets from the skies for children during the Soviet blockade of west Berlin in 1948 to 1949.

In fact, shitstorm – which was voted Germany's anglicism of the year in 2011 – is typical of a growing number of English words that have entered the German language over the past few decades. Some are given the same definition they have in English, while others, like shitstorm (which in English, until now, has merely referred to a messy and repulsive situation) have been tweaked by German users to fit their needs. The one most commonly-referred to is "Handy" for mobile phone. When English native speakers fail to understand it, Germans often scratch their heads in bewilderment, having been convinced it was a popular English word. Another is "wellness", a generic term to describe the health-farm industry and all it offers (massage, ayurveda, etc). This year Duden will even take in the verb "wellnessen".

Other newcomers to the dictionary, described as the "door frame of the German language", which was founded in the late 19th century and now contains 140,000 words, are "crossdressing", "digital native", "social media", "flashmob", "e-book Reader", "app" and "Facebook'", which, unlike "Twitter" or the verb "twittern", has been waiting in the wings since the last update in 2009 ("we wanted to be sure that it would stick around," a Duden spokesman explained).

So why the German penchant for taking on new, so obviously non-German words, when, in contrast, the French, for instance, show such resistance? It is a sensitive topic in Germany, where language purists are sometimes accused of being too closed to the outside world, a charge that most Germans, due to their 20th century-history, do not appreciate.

"It is considered fashionable to acknowledge these multi-cultural linguisms, as in so doing you are able to distance yourself from the reek of German chauvinism," according to German Radio's Burkhard Müller-Ullrich. And as a commentator in Die Welt put it, in an age that's dominated by technology "it's impossible to ignore anglicisms".

But even the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who died in 1832, acknowledged that the German tongue should be open to outside influences. As in his day, so today there are many language purists who would wish to "germanify" everything, and who deplore the growing creep of what is referred to as "Denglisch", a mix of German and English. Goethe called on them to recognise that sometimes non-German phrases were simply better. "Just tell me how to germanify (the word) 'pedant'?" he asked.

Reference and languagesWritten languageLanguageKate Connolly
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July's Reading group: To Kill a Mockingbird

Atticus Finch, Harper Lee's indelible hero, is the choice for this month's heroism-themed reading. Should be fun

For this month's heroism-themed Reading Group, the hat has chosen perhaps the greatest hero of them all: Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. Has literature ever produced a better, nobler character? If it has, I'd like to read about him. And as it stands, I'm pretty delighted to have the chance to read about Atticus again, as you can probably tell from my pleased expression in the traditional hat selection film.

Mind you, after my initial delight, I began to worry. What can we find to say about To Kill A Mockingbird that hasn't been said before? Can we find anything that already hasn't been rushed down in a million exam answers? Maybe not.

One thing we probably also won't be able to do this time will be to have a Q&A with the great writer. She last spoke to the press at length in 1964, apart from briefly breaking her silence in 2006 to say that if she had to write a form response to journalists asking her for interviews it would say "hell no". We also won't be able to read any of Lee's other novels - since To Kill A Mockingbird is the only one she's released. She has mentioned in the past that she's working on another one. I don't have the quote to hand, but am pretty sure that some time back in the 1960s she said it was taking quite a long time to write. Still, if To Kill A Mockingbird is anything to go by, it will be worth waiting for.

Meanwhile, the lack of easy subjects for our discussion won't detract in any way from the pleasure of re-reading this great book. And like all great books, I'm sure it will provide us with plenty of food for thought as we go along. To look on the even brighter side, the fact that it has been so often featured on exam scripts could also be a boon for us. I've often thought it would be fun for the Reading group to join together and try to have a blast at a few good essay questions. So if anyone has access to GCSE papers and wants to pose a few of the better challenges, please go ahead. Any other suggestions for potential subjects for discussion will also be gratefully received. I'm sure this is going to be a very enjoyable month. I'm already looking forward to re-reading the book.

Harper LeeFictionSam Jordison
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