The Guardian's Blog, page 198

St George's Day launch for laughable comic 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 26 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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World Book Night 2013: the books you've loved giving

The mass public giveaway recalls the more private pleasure of spreading literary love to friends. Please pass on your present preferences

Happy World Book Night everyone! I'm out and about in London town later, and am hoping to be approached by one of the 20,000 volunteers who signed up for the mass giveaway – particularly if they come bearing Judge Dredd. After a mass reading of the Sandman books, I'm trying to educate myself in the ways of graphic novels, and apparently this one is "truly classic".

Today's initiative is about giving books to strangers, but there's something particularly wonderful about pressing a book you've loved onto a friend and finding that they love it too. It happened to me two weeks ago: I'd just finished, at a gallop, Neil Gaiman's forthcoming The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and was desperate to discuss it with someone. Fortunately, I was at my parents', so I pressed it on my mum, who shares my love of fantastical fiction; she'd finished it by the next day, and we could rave and dissect together.

I'm still waiting to hear Sarah Crown's take on Stephen King's Misery and Desperation, which I passed on a while back, and I'm now scanning my inner circle for someone to hand Joe Hill's NOS4A2 to - I was properly scared by it, in a way I haven't been for ages, and I want to find another horror fiction fan to pick it over with.

It goes the other way too. A few years ago, a friend gave me a biography of Mary Wesley, Patrick Marnham's Wild Mary. I've loved Wesley's novels for years but had no idea how fascinating she was as a person. I still haven't returned it, and now it feels like it belongs to me. Sorry, Kate.

But how about you? In honour of World Book Night, tell us about the books you've passed on which have found places in the hearts of friends and family, and about those you've had pressed on you which have gone on to become favourites.

World Book NightAlison Flood
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Granta's editor thinks Leeds is a literary backwater? His snobbery is the problem

John Freeman's comment that Leeds 'is out of the literary world' casts a shadow over Granta's celebration of emerging novelists, says Hebden Bridge publisher Ross Jamieson

It was supposed to be a day to showcase Britain's fresh crop of literary talent. A golden opportunity to celebrate our cultural diversity; raise a cheer for gender equality; marvel at how far we have come; and show the world a liberal democracy at work. It was the day Granta announced its 2013 Best of Young British Novelists. Then the editor said something ...

It reads, at first, like a slip of the tongue; a split-second blip when the public mask momentarily slipped. And yet, rereading it, over and again, it is embarrassingly revealing, incredibly offensive, and casts a gloomy cloud over everything we were just celebrating.

The problem arose when John Freeman, Granta's American editor, commented on Sunjeev Sahota's inclusion on the list: "[Sahota] had never read a novel until he was 18 – until he bought Midnight's Children at Heathrow. He studied maths, he works in marketing and finance; he lives in Leeds, completely out of the literary world."

By highlighting everything that is un-literary about Sahota's background, Freeman was attempting to make all the more remarkable his literary achievements. The problem with this strategy is that Freeman would inevitably sound pompous and snobbish: in childhood and adolescence, Sahota was poorly read; maths, with its love of numbers, is alien to the craftsmanship of the wordsmith; he works in marketing and finance, whatever they are; and he was so culturally uncouth he even bought a modern classic from - of all the blasphemously un-literary of places - an airport.

And then the quote's venomous tail: "He lives in Leeds, completely out of the literary world."

Surely Freeman was just being clumsy. He does not really mean that Leeds is completely out of the literary world. Perhaps he means, Leeds, completely out of the literary world, is not an international centre of publishing, like London? Perhaps.

The more I read it, the clearer it says: Leeds is un-literary, it does not register on the literary landscape, and it is remarkable that anyone from Leeds could possibly produce anything literary at all. Sahota is an outsider, who has been welcomed, initiated and accepted into the literary world. And that is the crux. Freeman's words ooze insular imagery – of within and without – the literary circle. It is the view from literature's headquarters.

I am not sure what the likes of Alan Bennett, Tony Harrison or David Peace (from the 2003 Granta list) would make of Freeman's slip, but I am quite sure that a logical, rational definition of "literary world" would be anywhere where people read. And yes, people in the North can, and do, read. But Leeds, completely out of the literary world, might as well be a dark and dusty crater on the far side of the moon.

There is nothing new about London-centric literary snobbery. But there is something deeply troubling about an organisation which, when declaring the brilliance of British literature's multiculturalism, its progressiveness, its ability to reflect society, goes on to exclude others in a crass, tribal comment.

The Granta list has, for the first time, a majority-female contingent, and is breathtakingly diverse and truly global, an honest reflection of British history and how far we have come in striving for equality. It is not perfect, but it is progress.

Indeed, from within the walls of the literary world, Freeman said: "The novel has a bold, brilliant future in Britain." Presumably, being completely out of the literary world, this truism excludes Leeds. And it does make me wonder from what distance other northern towns and cities orbit the literary world. Pluto's relationship to the sun might be comparable. After all, Pluto isn't even a proper planet.

And yet, not far from Leeds - just a sheep's hop over hill and dale - nestled in the Calder Valley, is a little town called Hebden Bridge. Remarkably, this far out of the literary world, a publisher is based here. Recently ditching chalk and slate in favour of the most modern and technological of reading devices, paper, Bluemoose Books appears to be doing something right.

Lurking in this far-flung outpost, it might come as a surprise to learn that Bluemoose has gone international. It signed the Canadian novelist, Adrian Barnes, whose debut novel Nod has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, Britain's most prestigious science fiction book prize. Bluemoose is the only independent publisher to make it onto the shortlist. It is an impressive achievement.

The publishing premise at Bluemoose appears simple, but successful. As Barnes says: "My previous experience trying to get published was of agents and editors being very positive about my writing, but 'marketing' being reluctant for various reasons. The great thing about [Bluemoose] was that [it] simply read the book, liked it, and asked to publish it. My jaw almost fell off. To think it could be that simple.

"So when [Bluemoose] made the offer I just accepted on the strength of that simplicity. I haven't been disappointed. Nod has consistently been treated with care and respect by the folks at Bluemoose, whereas I've heard horror stories of writers having had their novels mangled by bigger houses."

It is a refreshing approach to publishing, in sharp contrast to the formulaic and predictable output from within the literary world. Kevin Duffy, co-founder of Bluemoose Books, explains: "The champagne and peanut trailers of Hampstead and Highgate are always trying to discover the new great hope, and it is this insular and myopic metropolitan view of what literature is, or should be, that blinkers what is published and reviewed.

"When big money advances are thrown at wunderkinds and celebrities, usually unearned, then the literary ringmasters have to keep spinning in order that those writers they've heavily backed keep getting their gongs and the media attention that follows. JB Priestley had it nailed, when he said, 'There is something shameful about praise, that soft southern trick."'

We live in an age where organisations pump out and project their desired image - images which carry messages that cannot realistically carry the opinions and beliefs of all those who do the pumping and projecting. Be careful what you say; you might reveal what you really think. But if that is the future of publishing, then perhaps Bluemoose will do better to stay completely out of the literary world. The view looks good from their northern literary outpost.

* Ross Jamieson is online editor of Bluemoose Books

GrantaLeedsPublishing
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Poem of the week: Night and Morning by Robert Browning

Two perspectives on either side of a nocturnal liaison make up a strikingly contrasting diptych

This week's choice is an intriguing diptych by Robert Browning. "Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning" were paired on their first publication in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), under the title "Night and Morning; I. Night; II. Morning." The present titles come from the Poems of 1849.

In length, metre and mood, the "twins" are distinctly un-identical. One is a nocturne, the other, a kind of aubade, or alba. They are part of the same narrative, but as different as night and day.

The first poem itself has two stanzas, but, despite their separate numbering, the effect is unitary. It begins in boldly impressionistic, even imagistic, style, as the salient features of the scene are listed in lines of lightly-flowing tetrameter. The syntax is casual, as if lines had been lifted from a notebook. Browning paints in contrasted colours and shapes, and deploys some brilliant chiaroscuro. It's visually stunning, and the auditory effects, the plashing and rippling captured in sound, are no less impressive.

The informal repetition of "and" in lines two and three helps move the syntax along with the rhythm of a traveller impatient to arrive. The boat's swiftness is evoked in the description of the little waves as "startled", and the oarsman's mood, perhaps, in the word "fiery". The pathetic fallacy hardly intrudes, so acute are the observations. Browning has taken some stock Romantic images and thrillingly re-bottled them, not least of his triumphs being that determinedly realistic "slushy sand".

Masculine energy certainly informs the activity of this stanza, but seeing it as erotic metaphor, a view which tempts some commentators, may be a case of premature imaginative ejaculation. The excitement of the sexual encounter subtly implied in the second stanza is spoiled if the first becomes merely a colourful (and noisy) preview.

The second stanza begins on foot, in a scene no less magical. The speaker's way is a long one, across "a mile of sea-scented beach" and the three fields, with the landmark of the farm signalling arrival, or near-arrival, at the lover's house. But there's no sense that the journey is arduous, and the sensuous relish intensifies. The auditory effects have been chosen to tell a highly compressed story. The tap on the glass, the scratch and spurt of the match, the low voice, the heartbeats, are pure radio. The rhyming is denser than before, thanks to the similarity of the "d" and "f" rhymes: beach/ scratch/ match/ each. That reiterated "ch" sound creates a sort of stuttering which heightens the excitement.

The phrase, "the two hearts beating each to each", might seem decorous to a modern reader, but for a Victorian poet it must have nudged the limits of the permissible. Because of the compression of the narrative, we can't be sure if it records the embrace of greeting, or if the lovers have by now bared more than their hearts.

And then there's the morning after. Browning's alba opens with a panoramic view and an optimistic, open-air flourish. The rhythm changes, or seems at first to change: the reader can hardly avoid stressing the opening word, "Round". There are no adoring backward glances, no wishing the sun could be the moon. The "world of men" doesn't threaten the speaker: he has, in fact, a "need" of it. The sun itself is given a masculine pronoun ("him"). That "path of gold", its suddenness and steadiness captured in the single word, "straight", welcomes a traveller now firmly outward-bound.

The dramatic monologue, as every literature student knows, is Browning's particular innovation (though he was not the originator of the term). More than a decade earlier, "Pauline: a Fragment of a Confession" marked his first foray into the genre. So could the "Night and Morning" poems qualify as dramatic monologue? Not if we consider the essence of the genre to be irony – that is, the speaker's unintended self-revelation.

I've sometimes felt that the "Parting" quatrain spoilt a perfect lyric: it's too forthright, after the earlier subtleties, and the implied gender polarisation seems simplistic. And yet, re-reading it, I appreciate how well it fills out the characterisation and develops the story embodied in the first poem. Browning's dramatic genius so often insists that he push the poetic boat out. Composing a two-part love-lyric that exposes contrasted psychological forces is a characteristically bold move, and, if not quite adding up to a dramatic monologue, this odd coupling seems to be a rather wonderful by-product of the genre.

Meeting at Night
I

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed in the slushy sand.

II
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Parting at Morning
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim –
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

Zadie Smith, Shlomo Sand and Jamie Rix are among the authors reviewed this week

There has been some discussion over on Tips, Links and Suggestions of how hard it is to keep track of reader reviews. With that in mind, I've decided to take a slightly different tack with this roundup, in an attempt to draw attention to our beautiful, but not always beautifully accessible, book pages.

Take the page for Zadie Smith's NW, which was reviewed this week by RedBirdFlies. Though, as my old dad would have said, "I says it as shouldn't", these pages strike me as rather wonderful community hubs all of their own.

RedBirdFlies writes eloquently of the sense of place which this week won Smith a place on the Ondaatje prize shortlist:

For me personally, it was in part a nostalgic read, Zadie Smith's writing comes alive when she evokes place and it is a neighbourhood I lived in and around for many years, NW is the most complete and yet complex character of all, embracing so much diversity, inviting everyone in without prejudice and yet claiming some in the harshest terms possible.

Lest anyone should fear this is another of those media hype-fests, RedBirdFlies conceded: "There are as many reasons to hate it as there are to love it and anyone who has lived there will likely never forget it."

However, the glory of the page is that it creates a little discussion forum all of its own, with reviews by Adam Mars-Jones and Rachel Cooke, in the Guardian and Observer, followed by Emk11 remarking that as an enthusiastic reader of Zadie Smith's work, he or she found NW "really quite tedious. Except perhaps Felix. But otherwise an uncomfortable, clunky read." Clicking on the link to Emk11's profile reveal a cluster of comments, giving a sense of where he or she is coming from.

Helen Anderson, who joined the site last summer but is making her first comment on the site, felt "Smith's experiments with narrative techniques are interesting and if her formal devices take the reader beyond a fixed 'comfort zone', I do not think that is a bad thing."

So there you have it: a varied, informed and intelligent conversation about a book, involving regulars and newbies. As a lifelong champion of the importance of reviewing, I'm delighted by the quality of this long-play conversation compared with the flurry of sometimes puerile comments that Smith so often attracts.

Here are some other pages that are worth reading because of strong reader-reviews:

The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, reviewed by Secondthought. This is controversial book by a controversial writer, but a look at Secondthought's profile makes it clear that he or she is a consistent and thoughtful commentator across many parts of the Guardian.

And last but not least, Panda Panic by Jamie Rix, reviewed by two of our beloved family reviewers from the children's site, mother and daughter team Emily and Maisy (6), who review under the name Actiongirl.

As ever, if I've mentioned your review, do drop me a line at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk, and I'll send you something from the book cupboards. If you contribute to any of the book page debates I've mentioned, let me know and you too will receive something with its very own community space.

Zadie SmithPicture booksFictionSocietyClaire Armitstead
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The curse of the forgotten authors

Open thread: Which neglected authors do you think are ripe for rediscovery

• Enter a competition to win up to £250 worth of National Book Tokens

It seems to happen every once in a while: an new talent bursts on to the literary scene, only to fall back into obscurity without apparently ever fulfilling his or her promise.

This melancholy thought was prompted by a recent Guardian article by novelist Jane Smiley, in which she named William Fain's Harmony as one of her favourite horse-racing stories.

Despite writing numerous novels and being published in the New Yorker, Fain seems to have been completely wiped from the collective literary memory since his suicide at the age of 40 in between delivery and publication of his final novel, A Sporting Life, in 1961. Google his name and see for yourself.

Or what about Joan Samson? Her sole novel, The Auctioneer, sold millions of copies and was met with critical acclaim, but both the book and the author appear to have been widely forgotten.

Some might argue that it was Samson's fault for neglecting to publish again - but they're reckoning without one-book wonders such as Harper Lee, whose To Kill a Mockingbird has never been out of print.

So, in a spirit of discovery, I'm starting my own literary resurrection campaign and I'm going to open it by staking a claim for Timothy Mo, the Hong Kong-based novelist who made a huge splash with his first few novels, then fell into self-publishing and obscurity with his next ones. He seems to have started to drag himself out of the doldrums with Pure last year, but I think more people should read him.

There must be hundreds of other examples. So give us chapter on verse on the forgotten writers you think we should all be rediscovering.

Best bookshops
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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

Apologies for the late arrival – yet again – of this column. But it's all in a good cause. In last week's thread AggieH began a discussion on critical authority:

Having just stalked two fine readers around the Internet in order to read specifically their reviews of one book … a thought struck me. Random reader reviews don't interest me. I don't browse for them, here or elsewhere. But if I am aware of their existence, I do read reviews by posters whose judgement I have learned to trust. Much in the same way that I read reviews by a few selected serious book bloggers.

She went on to complain about the frustrations of our own search system for reviews, pointing out that it is currently only possible to search for reviews by book title, and wondering why it was not possible to have user profiles for reviewers, as there are for commenters.

I wonder if I am allowed to suggest that users of this site who have written reviews for Amazon or other book sites in the past might want to repost those reviews here? Guardian moderators, if there's something unethical about this suggestion please feel free to delete it.

Well, AggieH, we've been mulling over your suggestions and have made one small innovation, which is to introduce a "Your reviews" slot in the community space on the books front, where we will now feature individual reviews. If your review is featured in it, drop Hannah an email at hannah.freeman@guardian.co.uk and we'll send you a book from our cupboards.

But your suggestion about reposting reviews that have been posted elsewhere set some bigger cogs turning, and I'd like to turn it into a question for all of you in our books community. Some of you have your own blogs anyway. How would you feel about us giving them a platform on the books site, along the lines of this Our Other Blogs space on the science site?

And how many of you would be interested in self-publishing your reviews in your own designated space, if we could make editing tools available to you? Even if you would not want to review yourselves, would you be interested in having this enhanced access to AggieH's "trusted reviewers"?

Do let us know. But don't let it stop you discussing your current reading. For what it's worth, I reread Will Self's Umbrella at the weekend, because I was due to interview him at the London Book Fair.

It's one of those novels that comes to life the second time round: with the benefit of knowing what is going on, the richness of the construction becomes clear, right down to those pirouetting modernist sentences which can spin you off on a dizzying sixty-year journey in sixty words.

In the meantime, here are some of the books we're reviewing this week:

Non-fiction
• Cities are Good for you by Leo Hollis
• Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
• Who is Ozymandias and other Puzzles in Poetry by John Fuller
• The Invention of the Land of Israel by Shlomo Sand

Fiction
• The Hit by Melvin Burgess
• Brief Loves that Live Forever by Andrei Makine

Book of the week

• Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4

Guardian readersClaire Armitstead
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Is Amanda McKittrick Ros the worst novelist in history?

There's a very strong case for the fruity prose of the 19th-century author who dreamed up Lord Raspberry and Lily Lentil

I've played Ex Libris – well, our own free version – with my family every Christmas for years. I hate it, because I feel I should be good at it, and still never win. My everlasting thanks, then, to GalleyCat , for pointing me towards the discovery of a new literary competition with which – if I practise regularly – I'm planning to wipe the floor with them come December.

Please forgive my ignorance, but I hadn't heard of Amanda McKittrick Ros until yesterday, and I feel I've missed out on years of fun. Apparently the worst novelist ever – and a quick glance at her work shows she can lay a lot more claim to the title than poor old Edward Bulwer-Lytton – the late 19-century writer was an obsession of Lewis, Tolkien and their fellow Inklings, according to Mark O'Connell's history of the worst things ever, Epic Fail. They would – and here is my plan – hold "sporadic Ros reading competitions, in which the winner was the member who could read from one of her novels for the longest without breaking into laughter".

I haven't had a chance to read all of Irene Iddesleigh, or Delina Delaney – but believe me, I soon plan to rectify that. O'Connell provides some winning examples: "Eyes are 'globes of glare.' When their owners are unhappy, these globes are 'stuffed with sorrow'. Trousers are not trousers; they are 'the southern necessary'," he writes, before highlighting this extraordinary sentence from Delina Delaney: "She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness." (That is, Delina did some work as a seamstress so she wouldn't have to live off her father.)"

It gets better. O'Connell tells us that "most of the characters in her last novel, Helen Huddleson, were named after fruits and vegetables (from aristocrats like Lord Raspberry and Sir Christopher Currant right down the social scale to Madam Pear and Lily Lentil the servant girl)".

Here's the opener to Irene Iddesleigh – my mind is boggled: "Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it against the rock of gossip; or, better still, allow it to remain within the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn," Ros writes. "Such were a few remarks of Irene as she paced the beach of limited freedom, alone and unprotected. Sympathy can wound the breast of trodden patience,— it hath no rival to insure the feelings we possess, save that of sorrow."

Here's the first lovers' glance between Delina Delaney and Lord Gifford : "Could a king, a prince, a duke – nay, even one of those ubiquitous invisibles who, we are led to believe, accompanies us when thinking, speaking, or acting – could even this sinless atom refrain from tainting its spotless gear with the wish of a human heart, as those grey eyes looked in bashful tenderness into the glittering jet revolvers that reflected their sparkling lustre from nave to circumference, casting a deepened brightness over the whole features of an innocent girl, and expressing, in invisible silence, the thoughts, nay, even the wish, of a fleshy triangle whose base had been bitten by order of the Bodiless Thinker."

Fleshy triangle indeed. I think I am falling headlong into a new obsession. Ros also loathed all her critics, calling them variously "bastard donkey-headed mites" and "clay crabs of corruption", asked her publisher if she should take a stab at the Nobel (thank you again Mark O'Connell for this gem: "What think you of this prize?" she asked. "Do you think I should make a 'dart' for it?"), and wrote fantastically awful poetry. Here's her "Verses on Visiting Westminster Abbey" : "Holy Moses! Take a look! / Flesh decayed in every nook! / Some rare bits of brain lie here, / Mortal loads of beef and beer."

Anyway, it's clearly going to take some practice if I'm to win the Inkling game this Christmas, so I'm off to get reading. Join me, if you will, and share your favourite Ros nuggets below. Or do tell, if you think there's a better contender for worst ever novelist – but I will take some convincing.

FictionAlison Flood
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Watershed ages in a reader's life

My experience suggests decisive shifts in the kinds of books you consume as you get older. Do these turning points match yours?

Shortly after the death of horror writer James Herbert, Hari Kunzru wrote about a terrifying encounter with his novel The Dark at the age of 11 – an age which seems lamblike in tenderness, at least to parents and guardians, but one at which a lot of bookish kids make first forays into the forbidden.

I too plunged into horror at 11; browsing my fiercely academic and accomplished grandmother's bookshelves during a visit to her home in Durban, I happened across Dolores Claiborne. After three nights' listening for the vreeee of mosquitoes while sweatily devouring dustbunnies, dead husbands and domestic violence, I was hooked on Stephen King. On the same visit and in the same place, I found Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, which, alas, mysteriously disappeared from my bedside table before I learned the outcome of the narrator's libidinous quest.

I believe there are four crucial ages, or milestones, for a reader. If 11 often marks the onset of reading puberty, when kids seek out a sprinkling of sex and grue to spice up the wholesome pabulum of children's books, a sort of existential literary crisis occurs at about 15. At this age, habitual readers suddenly come over all intellectual and anguished – a bookish mid-teen is likely to burn through the complete Hardy or Dickens from a standing start, or saturate him/herself in the melancholy of the canonical Russians. Life is fraught with tragedy, love will end in tears, and reading is serious stuff which should impress the commuters on your train or bus to school, if not the boy or girl you have your eye on. (Will the inexorable rise of the e-reader, and the fact that most of these heavyweights are free via Project Gutenberg, lessen or increase this urge to blazon your intellectual colours? Maybe there'll be a retro revolution, and being publicly seen with the biggest, oldest, heaviest possible book will mark out the tortured anti-hipsters in future, making it easier for the lions to pick them off.)

The first of the seminal reading ages, of course, is the floor-tipping, giddily joyous moment at which you become a free and fluent reader, hunched over books of your own choosing and unleashed from the strictures of learn-to-read schemes. The age at which this happens varies considerably from child to child, but perhaps averages at about seven or eight – then voracious consumption of obsession-pandering series about ponies, spies, scientific trivia or ballet is likely to ensue, alongside a cheerfully eclectic "give it a go" mentality that might see Enid Blyton swapped for Daniel Defoe or an Usborne history encyclopedia, depending on the mood of the day.

The last age, which I attained, possibly a bit late, in my mid-20s, has much in common with the first. It comes when you no longer read to impress – when you've left set texts and duty-books behind, and achieved perfect, unembarrassed enjoyment, reading what you want to when you want to, and for your own reasons alone. I used to feel great glumness at the prospect of the Booker shortlist, which I never read in full and seldom wanted to read in part. But formerly I felt duty bound to have a go, out of a vague sense that it would be improving, and also to forestall questions from kind but slight acquaintances who assumed I'd have assimilated the whole list at top speed and have well-formed opinions of each title. (Cue the twin detestable options of blagging or a shamefaced, wrongfooting confession of ignorance.) Now I declare cheerfully that I haven't read any of them, but that I've been totally blown away by a glorious YA fantasy about feminist vampires in space, and sing its praises until my interlocutor glazes over. I am invited to fewer parties, but at least I have more time to lie Snoopy-like upon the sofa, reading the books I want to read, when I want to read them.

Do these seminal ages of reading ring true to you? Have I missed any out, or did these watershed moments happen for you at very different ages? And what was your ponderous mid-teen reading choice?

Children and teenagersStephen KingFictionImogen Russell Williams
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James Joyce's Leopold gets his own book for Bloomsday

After bringing Ulysses to Twitter in recent years, this year's celebration will see the novel's hero get a book to himself

"… well hes beyond everything I declare somebody ought to put him in the budget if I only could remember the half of the things and write a book out of it the works of Master Poldy yes'"

This fragment of Molly Bloom's great soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses – alluding to her husband and the novel's hero Leopold – has lain there for 90 years, just waiting for some enterprising editor to take on Mrs Bloom's memory test and produce a volume of the thoughts of Joyce's Everyman. Of course, for most of that time, the jealous guardianship of the Joyce Estate had ensured that nobody could or would do any such thing, but now that the novel is in the public domain it was only a matter of time before someone decided to give it a shot. And now they have.

The LiberateUlysses collaborative, consisting of Dubliner Jamie Murphy and Steve Cole from Baltimore, Maryland, have been marking Bloomsday online for the past two years with what they call a "global multimedia celebration". They started in 2011 with Ulysses Meets Twitter – a project spread over 24 hours with 44 people tweeting favourite bits of Joyce's masterpiece. Last year they organised a bigger, better Twitterfest and published a set of video dialogues designed to get Joyce lovers everywhere talking about the book.

So when it emerged that they planned to mark Bloomsday 2013 by publishing "The works of Master Poldy", fans might assume they were going to Tweet Mr Bloom's wisdom to the world, or maybe produce a quick ebook. The reality is a bit more surprising than that. It turns out that Murphy is a fine letterpress printer whose Salvage Press specialises in broadsides and artists' books, and the plan is to produce Molly's imagined volume as in hand-printed letterpress in a limited edition using a mix of metal and wooden types.

The Works of Master Poldy will be produced entirely by hand in Dublin to mark this year's annual Joyce celebration in June. This is the kind of publishing that the digital age is supposed to have rendered obsolete. In fact, this is the kind of publishing that offset printing was supposed to have killed off years ago. It seems that LiberateUlysses really intend the multimedia bit in their tagline to be genuinely multi. To compliment this very traditional bit of publishing, they have been running an ongoing Twitter campaign of pre-publicity for the book. They're also engaging in that most 21st-century activity, crowdfunding. This is analogue and digital in perfect accord.

As a fan of the novel, I have some reservations about the idea of mining Ulysses as a source of aphorisms. There is a precedent of sorts in Declan Kiberd's Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece, a self-help volume based on Joyce's celebration of the pleasures of the everyday. The chief difference is that Kiberd interprets, whereas Mr Poldy will give us the master's own words. What's more, LiberateUlysses can claim some kind of legitimacy on the grounds that they are finally making Molly Bloom's dream come true.

In the ongoing debate on the survival of the paper book, this project exemplifies one possible model for the future. There's something about a well-made physical object with good design, quality materials and fine printing that no digital substitute can match, and the power of the internet to help publishers find funding and markets can be harnessed to make fine editions viable. Ebooks may well win the mass market, but as long as there are people who appreciate the printer's craft, paper books are not going to go away.

James JoyceFictionPublishingTwitterInternetBilly Mills
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