The Guardian's Blog, page 197

What are you reading today?

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

Thanks to mattjcuk_photography for posting the above picture in our Flickr group. If you'd prefer to show us what you're reading rather than posting a comment, please do so by visiting our What are you reading, today? group and posting a snap. Each week we pick one from the pile to illustrate this blog. There are some great pictures to browse through which might also give you some ideas about what you'd like to read next.

Here's what you have been reading over the past seven days, and what you thought of your choices:

KaalKaczmareK posted:

Cousin Felicity and the Eels of Misty Point -by a reclusive New Zealand author.
A Huck Finn-esque cheeky tale with deceptive depth.

RabBurnout:

This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You by Jon McGregor - excellent short stories by this top, young, British writer whose omission from the recent Granta list has been questioned by some.

lukethedrifter:

So, I had a slight disaster. I was wading through the swampy, irritating Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk, as it was my 1990s London book, and positively reeked of that decade (it was written in 1993), when the three main characters turned on the TV and watched the Berlin Wall fall. I nearly fainted. The bloody book is is set in 19bloody89.

Which at least gives me the chance to redo the 1990s with a better book. To be fair, I think it picked up. I thought it was self-indulgent and faintly ludicrous in its depiction of emotional fragility for 150 pages. Then, as the page turns, Agnes (and with her, the writing) suddenly develops a backbone for 30 pages, the best section of the book - in fact I'd go so far as to describe those 30 pages as very accomplished. Then it sinks back into the mire for the final 20 pages of neat resolutions. One to avoid, unless you like aggravation.

How's the rest of the reading project going, lukethedrifter? Do you have a list of books you can share with us?

judgeDAmNation:

I'm currently reading 'Wind-up Bird Chronicle' which is my first taste of Murakami, though I've already stocked up on more, (including WITAWITAR) and although I'm quite keen now to move on to the next item in my reading pile I still don't really want it to end, it's quite strange and wonderful.

Here's our review list of the titles we'll be writing about over the next few days, subject to last minute changes, as always of course.

Non-fiction

• Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill by Antonia Fraser
• Ziggyology by Simon Goddard
• This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood by Alan Johnson
• Waiting to be Heard: A Memoir by Amanda Knox
• Nijinsky: A Life by Lucy Moore
• Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan
• Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power
• Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929-1934 by Wilhelm Reich
• How to Read a Graveyard by Peter Stanford

Fiction

• The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
• Blood and Beauty by Sarah Dunant
• Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley
• Dark Road by Ma Jian
• Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
• A Homecoming by Susie Steiner

Children's

• Sun Catcher by Sheila Rance

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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Gatsby may be great, but F Scott Fitzgerald is greater

Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby looks set to entertain, but it's Fitzgerald's life story that has to be seen to be believed

You can't open a newspaper these days without finding someone writing about F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I'm not complaining. Gatsby is the novel – almost a prose poem – I reread every year, and I never tire of its backstory. Although everything I've seen about Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming film fills me with anxiety, I'll be among the first to go and see it. Cinema and Fitzgerald could make an ideal marriage. Why shouldn't a movie director re-imagine 1920s West Egg and give us his reinterpretation of what Fitzgerald christened "The Jazz Age"? It can't, or won't, be the novel, but it might capture something of the madness in which Fitzgerald found himself.

The writer was great that way. A party animal with a line in champagne zingers; endlessly quotable; completely at one with the zeitgeist; a literary artist whose obiter dicta became the soundtrack of his times. For instance: "There are no second acts in American lives." And: "All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." And perhaps most famous of all, the last line of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

We're going to read a lot of Fitzgerald quotations these next few weeks. Fitzgerald's admirers will be delighted that he is getting some long overdue recognition, but sad, too, perhaps. When he died in Hollywood in 1940, Fitzgerald was almost completely forgotten. His funeral was attended by just 30 people, including his editor Maxwell Perkins. Sales of his books had virtually dried up. His publishers, Scribners, still had unsold stock from the first printing of Gatsby. He had lived the American dream, and it had turned into a waking nightmare.

But perhaps Fitzgerald's life and work is compelling precisely because it answers, in an archetypal way, what we, the reading public, expect the career of a genius to look like. Consider the bare bones of his story. Comfortable beginnings in St Paul, Minnesota, the heart of the midwest. His mother reports, appropriately, that the boy's first word was "up". First stirrings of the writer's ambition. He moves into the fast track of his society, pursuing literary goals, and goes to Princeton University. Drops out; falls in love and is rejected; writes a novel that's turned down; goes to the battlefields of France; returns to the USA with no prospects. Then ... 1919-1920: his annus mirabilis. Revises his unpublished work. This Side of Paradise is accepted by Scribner, and is published to huge acclaim. Now his sweetheart, Zelda Sayre, agrees to marriage.

Scott and Zelda lead rock star lives in the Manhattan of the 1920s. Burning with ambition for his art, Fitzgerald completes a book whose many rejected titles include Trimalchio in West Egg, the novel the world knows as The Great Gatsby. There's an added myth about its publication: Gatsby did not flop, as is often claimed; it just didn't do as well as had been hoped. TS Eliot, for one, wrote: "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." It was only in comparison with Fitzgerald's astounding debut that it seemed to fail.

Thereafter, Fitzgerald went into a long tunnel of decline, a decade he later described in a controversial sequence of Esquire articles as "The Crack-Up", a rare text recently republished by Capuchin Classics. In search of that elusive "second act", he moved to Hollywood, published Tender Is the Night, a novel that baffled the critics, and began his final unfinished masterpiece, The Last Tycoon. Then dies, aged 44; is forgotten, but lives on through Gatsby. It's a literary life for the ages.

In outline, the F Scott Fitzgerald story is the movie you might want to see. Baz Luhrmann's version will be entertaining. It won't be Gatsby, the novel. But never mind. Many new readers will be inspired to discover the miracle of Fitzgerald's prose, and the strange subtlety of his vision. In 1925, Gatsby was ahead of its time, and almost too prescient. Now, it seems perfectly in harmony with the deepest and darkest chords in American life. That's why, for some, including this writer, it remains the greatest American novel of the 20th century.

FictionF Scott FitzgeraldRobert McCrum
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The digital truths traditional publishers don't want to hear

The choices offered by digital publishing can only be good news for writers, says Barry Eisler. So why are traditional publishers so angry?

Until November 2007, when Amazon introduced the Kindle, the only viable means of book distribution was paper. Accordingly, a writer who wanted to reach a mass audience needed a paper distribution partner. A writer could hire her own editor and her own cover design artist; she could even hire a printing press to create the actual books. The one service she couldn't hire out was distribution. And publishers didn't offer distribution as an à la carte service. If a writer wanted distribution, she had to pay a publisher 85% of her revenues for the entire publishing package: editorial, copyediting, proofreading, jacket design, printing, and marketing, all bundled with distribution.

Was a price of 85% of revenues a good deal for this packaged publishing service? For some writers, it clearly was. JK Rowling became a cash billionaire via the traditional packaged publishing service, and obviously there are hundreds of other examples of authors for whom the packaged service has represented a good value.

But for every author who wanted and benefited from the packaged service, there were countless others who took it – if they could get it at all – only because they had no alternative.

Digital distribution has provided that alternative. And increasing numbers of authors are choosing it.

Digital book distribution is available to anyone who wants it. What in the paper world requires trucks, warehouses, a sales force, and longstanding relationships with buyers at dozens of retail operations, in digital is a push-button à la carte service offered by companies like Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, Kobo, and Smashwords. An author so inclined can buy digital distribution for 30% of the list price of the book she's publishing – the same digital distribution a legacy publisher offers – and outsource all other publishing functions, all for significantly less than legacy publishers charge for their packaged service.

Tens of thousands of writers newly presented with the lower-priced, à la carte choice of self-publishing are taking it. Many others prefer the traditional route. Some are embracing a hybrid approach, doing one book with a legacy publisher, another with Amazon Publishing, and yet another by self-publishing.

Now, there's nothing unnatural about this, you might think. Or undesirable. I myself have published books with legacy publishers, with Amazon Publishing, and via self-publishing. The various possibilities all have their advantages and disadvantages, there's no one-size-fits-all solution, and different routes will make sense for different authors. What matters is that authors make informed choices – because, for the first time, we authors are fortunate enough to have choices to make.

And yet, when I offered these fairly axiomatic observations during a recent keynote at the 21st annual Pike's Peak Writers Conference, the reaction among some editors and agents in the audience (and elsewhere) was extremely negative, with some walking out; others taking to Twitter to urge others to leave, to boycott my talks, and to boycott conferences where I'm talking; and a fair amount of name-calling.

The hostility is surprising in one sense (we're just talking business, after all, not politics or religion), but in another sense it's readily understandable. Because in essence, what I was describing in my talk was how digital distribution has changed the legacy publishing industry from something a writer needed, into something a writer might merely want. Because of digital, legacy publishing, which used to be a necessity, is now only potentially useful.

Bear in mind, "useful" is not at all a bad thing. It doesn't mean no one will want you. No one "needs" a BMW, after all, and yet BMW manages to sell millions of its cars to people who like to drive them.

But if your worldview, your conception of your rightful place in the universe, has always been informed by the implicit knowledge that you are indispensable, and tens of thousands of authors are now informing you that you'll have to account for your value or they will take their business elsewhere, it's not so inconceivable that you might find your sensibilities temporarily shocked.

Hopefully, the shock will lead to action. Necessities in business are rare, after all. They're called monopolies, and their customers typically revolt at the first opportunity. But businesses without a monopoly position – which is to say, almost all businesses – manage to thrive all the time while being "merely" useful. If so many other businesses are able to thrive because they are useful, there's no reason to believe legacy publishers can't do so, as well.

We have to be careful not to conflate publishing services with the entities that have traditionally provided them. The services are essential; the entities are not. This would seem a fairly obvious point, and yet as thoughtful and experienced a person as novelist James Patterson is now calling for a bailout of the legacy publishing industry, apparently because he fears that publishing is dying.

No. Publishing isn't dying; it is evolving. Authors understand this, and are embracing it. Legacy publishers need to do the same.

EbooksPublishing
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May's reading group: The Great Gatsby

It has defeated some of the world's best filmmakers. As Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby hits the screens, return with us to F Scott Fitzgerald's exquisite novel

The Great Gatsby, it's safe to say, is a very good book. Do we need more excuse to read it? Well, unless you haven't travelled on public transport recently, been to the cinema or turned on your TV, you're probably aware that anew Hollywood adaptation of the book is coming out at the end of May, which seems like an excellent reason to pick up the actual source novel again. Or maybe even for the first time, if you're one of those people lucky enough to still have in store the joy of first visiting West Egg, to first read on after those intriguing opening lines:

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."

"More vulnerable"? What does he mean? We'll see. We'll also see how much of a terrible mess Baz Luhrmann makes of the book in this latest adaptation. Because he will make a mess of it, won't he? I don't say that just because he's the director of the execrable Moulin Rouge and laughable Australia. He also did a fine job of Romeo and Juliet, after all.

I say it because the book has such a reputation of taking out filmmakers. Even the 1974 version, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, and written by Francis Ford Coppola during his glory years, clocks in at a painful 34% on the Rotten Tomatoes website, and was eloquently described as a "Long, slow sickening bore" by Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic.

Why would you have a version of The Great Gatsby that strips out Fitzgerald's beautiful prose? We'll see. The merits of all adaptations will definitely be up for discussion this month, alongside a more general – and hopefully joyful – read through this exquisite book. If there's anything you'd particularly like to talk about, please post a suggestion in the comments below.

In the meantime we have 10 copies of the new film tie-in hardback to give away. The first 10 people from the UK to post an "I want please" below the line will get a copy. Although, don't forget to email ginny.hooker@guardian.co.uk afterwards,
letting us know your address and your user name. We can't track you down
ourselves!

F Scott FitzgeraldSam Jordison
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Reading group: designing William Golding's The Spire

Finding the perfect image for a book is always a challenge. Golding's jacket designer Neil Gower explains how it was done

Here's a treat for fans of well-designed covers, a video of Faber's Neil Gower talking about his work on the Lord Of The Flies:

Since re-designing that 50th anniversary edition of Golding's breakthrough novel, Gower has also steadily been working through the complete series of Goldings as Faber re-releases them. He has also worked on The Spire and I emailed him a few quick questions about his thoughts on the design process - and the way the book itself struck him. His answers were so interesting that I here include them in full, unedited.

With regard to the design I wanted to convey a sense of period and the frailty of the structure. Fortunately, the spindly and uncertain linework of drawings of the time allowed me to convey both very neatly. The three figures enclosed in the 'courtyard' of the plan represent Jocelin, Mason and Goody and thereby the three forces of faith, practicality and sexual attraction that eddy through the narrative. I also like to add some enigmatic detail that only explains itself as the reader progresses through the story and I was pleased to incorporate the Nail (in its dotted frame) hovering above the pinnacle of the Spire itself. In the book Jocelin hammered it into wood where it served no structural purpose. This seemed very succinctly to represent the triumph of faith over reason, faith both in the physical ability of the Spire to stay standing and, indeed, in a spiritual God.

It's difficult when reading a book in order to design a cover to react in a way that's not coloured by over-attention to detail and imagery. Consequently, my main reaction was one of awe at how skilfully Golding had put the book together, itself a complex structure of inter-dependent metaphors, meanings, images and characters. It is a while since I read it, but I suppose the questions it made me ask myself concerned personal ambition and faith in ideas/situations that might prove baseless. I found it hard to shake off the conviction that Golding himself must, at many points, have seen the creation of the novel as his Spire, having to silence his own doubts as to its validity and integrity.

The other thing I recall being struck by was the repeated comparisons of the cathedral with the human body – the obvious phallic spire, the "stretching and collapsing" ribs (as if breathing) etc. Even (and I may well be reading too much into it now) the 'Nail' driven stubbornly in as if to grasp and fasten onto something.

I especially like the idea that Golding must have seen the creation of the novel as his spire. That's something we can possibly put to Golding's daughter and biographer Judy Carver on our webchat on 26 April . I've also read that Judy has final approval on all Neil Gower's designs, so make sure to ask about that too.

In the meantime, enjoy this quick slideshow of earlier covers for The Spire, leading up to Gower's own version, alongside a first edition of The Lord Of The Flies, and a few images of the great man himself, and his Old Testament beard.

William GoldingArt and designSam Jordison
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Richard Dawkins named world's top thinker in poll

Evolutionary biologist beats four Nobel prize winners for his global influence and significance on the year's biggest questions

When Prospect magazine listed Britain's leading public intellectuals in 2004 and invited readers' votes, it was Richard Dawkins who emerged as No 1. Nine years on, the biologist, author and campaigner has bettered that by topping its "world thinkers" rankings, beating four Nobel prize winners (and another contender regarded as certain to receive one soon) in a poll based on 65 names chosen by a largely US- and UK-based expert panel.

Joining him in the top 10 are the psychologists Steven Pinker (3) and Daniel Kahneman (10), the economists Paul Krugman (5) and Amartya Sen (7) and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (6), who all, like him, figured in the magazine's first list of world-class thinkers in 2005.

A late run by the octogenarian British physicist Peter Higgs (8) secured him a place in an elite squad containing three other scientists, while the remaining slots are taken by academics turned politicians from the Middle East: Afghanistan's Ashraf Ghani (2), an economist who served as finance minister after the US-led invasion; Iraq's Ali Allawi (4), another ex-minister and author of The Occupation of Iraq and The Crisis of Islamic Civilization; and Egypt's Mohamed ElBaradei (9), prominent in the Arab Spring and now in opposition to Mohamed Morsi.

To qualify for this year's world thinkers rankings, it was not enough to have written a seminal book, inspired an intellectual movement or won a Nobel prize several years ago (hence the absence from the 65-strong long list of ageing titans such as Noam Chomsky or Edward O Wilson); the selectors' remit ruthlessly insisted on "influence over the past 12 months" and "significance to the year's biggest questions".

This requirement may have been a factor in the top 10 being all-male (presumably a source of frustration to the five women on the selection panel, including Prospect's editor Bronwen Maddox), with longlistees such as Hilary Mantel, Martha Nussbaum and Sheryl Sandberg not making it through to the elite of the elite, and the likes of Germaine Greer and Naomi Klein not even making it into the 65. But it may also, of course, simply reflect the gender make-up of the monthly's readership.

Political engagement was clearly enough for the Middle Eastern trio to meet the criterion of current influence, and others among the cerebral galacticos have been in the news too. The Higgs boson was identified at Cern in July and confirmed there last month, making him an odds-on favourite for a Nobel. Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow became a worldwide bestseller last year. Krugman, a New York Times columnist as well as a Princeton don, has been the leading critic of "the austerity delusion". Pinker might well have made the chart anyway, but probably owes his high position to his switch from his specialist field of psycholinguistics to history in The Better Angels of Our Nature.

As for Dawkins, the continuation of wars of religion and terrorist atrocities informed by it means his atheist crusade remains relevant to the year's biggest questions, despite the end of the Bible-bashing, war-mongering Bush era in which he first raised his banner – this week his 670,000 Twitter followers could find him (between musings about socks) rejoicing in France's legalisation of gay marriage, ridiculing a journalist's Muslim beliefs, and retweeting a story that the older Boston bomber "was angry that the world pictured Islam as a violent religion". On Monday, no doubt manfully resisting efforts to deify or idolise him, the world No 1 will attend the premiere in Toronto of a documentary about his roadshow (with Lawrence Krauss) promoting science and reason.

Richard DawkinsSteven PinkerJohn DugdaleAmartya Sen
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading today?

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

It feels a long time since I was writing a new TLS thread; it's good to be back. Thanks to everyone who has told us their thoughts on creating a space for other books blogs; you have given us a lot to think about.

To pick up Claire and AggieH's conversation about ways of finding book reviews, we have another development to tell you about. If you have written a review it will now be added to your reader profile like this.
Big improvement, no?

After a week of many shortlists, including those of the Women's prize for fiction and the Orwell prize, let's kick off with a past award-winner, this time of the Booker: A Sense of Ending, by Julian Barnes.

singo111:

The writing is undeniably magnificent, managing to say so much in so few words, but never feeling particularly poetic. It's precise, but is the polar opposite of the similar brevity-merchant Yasunuri Kawabata whom I was reading last week. Whereas Kawabata writes like a watercolourist, with atmospheric touches to guide the reader's imagination, Barnes is a draughtsman, finding the exactly right words for crisp and clear (albeit equally beautiful) sentences.

To be honest, that's where my appreciation ends. I struggle to get excited by unreliable narrators (not a spoiler to reveal this, he reveals it on nearly every page), and there isn't enough in the theme of unreliable memories to make this a masterpiece (IMHO)... Obviously others, not least the booker judges, disagree.

lukethedrifter replied:

I'm a huge Kawabata fan, but also loved The Sense of an Ending. It's an interesting parallel to draw. Barnes might be sparse of word (at least there), but he is explicit about feeling and emotion; I think Kawabata alludes much more than he explains.

AggieH said:

I don't think it has enough layers & dimensions to be a rewarding reread either. I do re-read Barnes' other work. Especially Flaubert's Parrot, Arthur & George and his short stories. I think he won the Booker for the wrong book.

And to quote getover99: that's why I love this place - so many points of view to be found here. Here's a roundup of what others were reading and what they thought of their choices.

Northumbriana:

Last night I just finished Hiliary Mantel's Giving Up The Ghost. She may be almost thirty years older than what I am, but so much of it resonated with me: working class girl expected to 'stay in her place'; branded as more ambition than talent; ending up on anti-depressants at university (different reasons.) Mantel's intelligence is breathtaking.

About to start Karen Charlton's 'Catching The Eagle.' I have high expectations of this one, as it is set around the Kirkley Hall in Northumberland, which I has a lot of ties and childhood memories for me.

Karen Heenan-Davies:

This week I'm reading a classic of Latin American fiction - Dom Casmurro by the Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. it was first published in 1899. I'm reading it on the recommendation of a work colleague. It's rather odd so far.

Cornishwellies (great username by the way):

Olivia Laing's To The River - and adoring it. Supposedly didn't sell well, and really should have. One for the Sebaldian/Sinclair aficionado.

Before we share our review list, here are five books stories from the last seven days you might have missed:
1. The 10 best words the internet has given English
2. Bill for compulsory science fiction in West Virginia schools
3. Marian Keyes: 'I thought I'd never be able to write again'
4. From Above and Below : Man and the Sea - in pictures
5. Watershed ages in a reader's life

Here are the books we're reviewing this week, subject to last minute changes. We put the review up through the week, but they all live on reviews page so you can browse them in you own time.

Non-fiction

• Maggie and Me by Damian Barr
• Margaret Thatcher by Charles Moore
• Not for Turning by Robin Harris

• Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris
• The Serpent's Promise by Steve Jones
• Paleofantasy by Mariene Zuk
• The XX Factor by Alison Wolf

Fiction

• Meeting the English by Kate Clanchy
• Fallen Land by Patrick Flanery
• The Gamal by Ciaran Collins
• Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser
• The Story of My Purity by Francesco Pacifico
• A Death at the Palace by MH Baylis
• Swear Down by Russ Litten
• The Deliverance of Evil by Italian Roberto Costantini

Children's:
• Warp by Eoin Colfer

What are you reading, today?

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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The best books on Colombia: start your reading here | Pushpinder Khaneka

Three classics depict a land of magic and mayhem, with an eye on history, drugs and Colombia's many complexities

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez

In the best-known – and perhaps most dazzling – novel to come out of Latin America, Colombia's favourite son takes us on a magic carpet ride through his country's turbulent past.

Historical fact is liberally mixed with fantasy in a saga that spans six generations of the Buendia family. The Buendias have great strengths as well as fatal flaws, which play out in the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo in the South American jungle. Macondo, "an intricate stew of truth and mirages", bears more than a passing resemblance to the author's own home town of Aracataca on the Colombian coast.

In this sweep of history as seen through the eyes of a single family – all of whose males are named Arcadio or Aureliano – civil war rages, lives are lost, hearts break and dreams shatter. The looping chronology, along with generations of Buendias sharing names and characteristics, gives us history as a story of repetition and return. That keeps readers on their toes in this enthralling and highly comic novel.

With this book, the master of magic realism took a giant step towards winning the Nobel prize for literature in 1982.

Delirium, by Laura Restrepo

Restrepo sets her novel in the drug-fuelled 1980s heyday of cocaine king Pablo Escobar, and uses insanity in one family to reflect the collective insanity of her native Colombia. Aguilar, a grizzled, leftwing literature professor who is reduced to selling dog food to make ends meet, returns from a business trip to find that his beautiful wife, Agustina, has gone mad. In his search for the causes of her delirium, he uncovers secrets and lies from her troubled past.

This complex and captivating novel uses the voices of Agustina, her husband, her father and a former lover – Midas McAlister, a flamboyant money-launderer and drug trafficker – to give an account of a Colombia in thrall to narco-capitalism and battered by violence and corruption. The story mostly takes place in the capital, Bogotá, which Aguilar describes as a city "where everyone's at war with everyone else".

Restrepo has a sharp eye for exposing the hypocrisies and class divisions that dog Colombian society, and memorably depicts the period's excesses. Yet, through this morass, the novel remarkably ends on a note that is, if not quite happy, at least hopeful.

Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the New Colombia, by Tom Feiling

Feiling points out that Colombia is the worst place in the world to be a trade unionist, and that its army is one of the worst human rights abusers in the western hemisphere. Yet it is Washington's closest ally in Latin America and the biggest recipient of US military aid. Bizarrely, one of the world's most unequal countries is also one of its happiest.

With a book on the cocaine trade and a documentary about Colombia already under his belt, Feiling is well placed to unpick the country's complexities. He finds Colombia trying hard to transform itself after decades of violence and being at the heart of the drugs trade.

Now what was once dubbed a "narco-state" is one of the region's fastest-growing economies and a darling of foreign investors. Although it hasn't quite segued from "terrorism to tourism", as claimed by hardline former president Álvaro Uribe, there are reasons to be optimistic about the future.

By walking in urban and rural areas once closed off by the violence, talking with Colombians, and maintaining an unflinching eye, Feiling is able to offer us a deft and enlightening introduction to this vibrant country.

• Read the first in our series, on Nigeria, here

ColombiaAmericasGabriel García MárquezPushpinder Khaneka
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The best books on Nigeria: start your reading here | Pushpinder Khaneka

Our literary tour of Nigeria takes in precolonial times, the fallout of war and the double-edged sword of oil wealth
• Read the next in our series, on Colombia

Our new series opens the door on countries in the developing world that not all our readers may know well. Here are our suggested reads, from classic novels to contemporary takes, for Nigeria. Share your own in the comments section and look out for the next in the series, Colombia.

Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

Achebe is regarded as the father (perhaps now grandfather) of modern African literature. His first novel – written as a riposte to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and what Achebe saw as its distortions – has become a classic, and is one of the most widely read African novels. It tells the tragic story of Okonkwo, a powerful and ambitious warrior among Nigeria's Igbo people. Set during the scramble for Africa by the European powers in the 1890s, it portrays the devastating impact of English Christian missionaries and colonial laws on Igbo culture.

Achebe is a sympathetic voice, but he refuses to romanticise precolonial life and pulls no punches in revealing the flaws of his characters. Okonkwo is forced into a seven-year exile for accidentally killing a member of his clan. When he returns, he finds that traditional life is being corroded by the encroaching colonisers. When he and others, unwilling to adapt, try to combat this outside influence, things fall apart.

Through the novel, for the first time, outsiders were able to see Africans as they saw themselves.

Until his death on 21 March, Achebe was a thorn in the side of Nigerian military governments – and that often meant going into exile.

Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie's powerful second novel spans the decade to the end of the 1967-70 secessionist Biafran war, which tore Nigeria apart and took millions of lives.

The intelligent, compassionate story weaves together the lives and different worlds of five protagonists, among them a charismatic, revolutionary academic, his beautiful partner, and their houseboy, who develops a fierce loyalty to his employers.

As the conflict deepens, the Igbo population in the region suffer as they are sucked into hunger, squalor and violence. Personal and private struggles take centre stage as friendships and loyalties are severely tested, but the story encompasses wider themes such as postcolonialism, ethnic loyalties and race.

The pain and poignancy of the time are beautifully evoked as the new nation's hopes and dreams – represented by the half of a yellow sun emblem that appears on Biafra's flag – flower briefly, before being brutally crushed.

One of the characters in the novel is writing a book titled The World Was Silent When We Died. As if in response, Half of a Yellow Sun provides a searing history lesson that brings a distant war up close, and works as a powerful antidote to forgetting.

A Swamp Full of Dollars, by Michael Peel

In Nigeria, oil is a dirty business. The black gold of the Niger delta pollutes the region's air, land and water, and the corruption it generates poisons the country's business and politics.

The oil from sub-Saharan Africa's largest producer also stains western society, which is hooked on oil, and its financial institutions, into which much ill-gotten gain from Nigeria flows. "[It is] hard to imagine a dirtier business in which so many of us in the rich world are so intimately involved," writes Peel, a Financial Times journalist. Britain and the US profit greatly from the kleptocracy created by Nigeria's elite.

Meanwhile, anger in the oil-rich delta, where people feel cheated out of their share of the profits, has sparked a violent response. Peel fearlessly ventures into the militants' swamp hideouts in the lawless region – "a trouble spot as hot as the local pepper soup" – where millions of dollars of oil have been siphoned off to fuel the insurgency.

In his lively prose and sharp analysis revealing the horrors wrought by "the curse of oil in Africa", Peel's contempt for the authorities who brought about this sorry state of affairs is matched by a genuine affection for the country and its inhabitants.

• Read the next in our series, on Colombia

NigeriaChinua AchebeChimamanda Ngozi AdichieAfricaPushpinder Khaneka
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St George's Day launch for a new superhero: Englishman

The launch of an English graphic counterpart to Captain America is not a hoax. But it's hard to take seriously

But for being three weeks or so late, it almost reads like an April Fool: a digital comics company chooses St George's Day to unveil a new superhero – Englishman!

But Mohawk Media – which positions itself as an "eco-friendly" comics company because it does only paper-free digital editions – seems to be deadly serious about its new character. Not a huge amount is known about the title character – what his powers are, for example, or whether he received them from a radioactive roast beef dinner – but a preview of the cover depicts our hero in Iron Man-style armour emblazoned with the cross of St George.

Writer Chris Bunting, the man behind comics about A-Team actor Mr T and Action Man, says: "Expect plenty of famous English faces to appear in comic-book form for the first time – the cover preview reveals some of them. Plus, there are brand new, quintessentially English characters, including Greenbelt and Dry Stone Wall."

Other figures on the cover include a Thor-like character, Guy Fawkes, a female hero who could possibly be the Easter Bunny, and what appears to be the Cerne Abbas chalk hill drawing giant come to life … though his famously priapic nature is hidden from view.

Englishman, which is being released under the Eco Comics banner, will be drawn by Valentin Ramon. No release date has been announced on the Mohawk website, though there is no indication that it's a spoof on the back of England's patron saint day. Mohawk says the comic will be in a format "previously unseen" and the first issue will be available for free download.

Bunting sets out the theory behind the comic:

"I often feel quite envious of the patriotism that so many other countries display, but 'England' has almost become a forgotten, even a dirty, word.

"To paraphrase the historian David Starkey, we should celebrate, and not be ashamed of, England.

"To help address this, just as the US has its Captain America, I realised that England needed its own patriotic superhero: enter Englishman."

While patriotic comic-book characters, led by Captain America, abound in the States, Britain has had a less comfortable relationship with flag-waving superheroes, perhaps because the national colours have so often been co-opted by right-wing organisations such as the National Front, the British National Party, and more recently the English Defence League.

Marvel comics has perhaps had the most success with Captain Britain, created 36 years ago by classic X-Men scribe Chris Claremont to act as a Captain America cousin-german for British readers. Another successful hero from the Marvel stable is Union Jack, who has undergone several iterations beginning with his inception as the British representative in the second world war superteam The Invaders.

Rival DC's main Brit-costumed characters have been Batman and Robin analogues Knight and Squire, members of the international "Batman Incorporated" line-up, but perhaps the most successful mainstream comics character to encapsulate British sensibilities is John Constantine, the wise-cracking, chain-smoking magician originally created by Alan Moore.

But Englishman, fighting for truth and justice in a land where patriotism has become "a dirty word", puts me most strongly in mind – rightly or wrongly – of early Viz character Billy Britain, and his chest-swelling refrain: "I love this country!"

Comics and graphic novelsDavid Barnett
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