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April's Reading group: The Spire by William Golding

A lofty choice this month, said to be a little forbidding. But I don't doubt it will be a rewarding ascent, and the more satisfying if we make it together

Once again the hat has sided with democracy and the most frequently nominated book, William Golding's The Spire, has emerged as this month's Reading group choice.

Golding's fifth novel was highlighted by DylanWolf when he made the suggestion that this month's theme should be construction. It then featured in a good half-dozen other nominations. If quartzbrained's recommendation is anything to go by, we're in luck. S/he says: "It's a dizzying book, full of incredibly vivid and hectic imagery – I would thoroughly recommend." JudeTheExplicit also tells us he "loved it". JohnSelfAsylum, meanwhile, noted: "It's got to be The Spire, hasn't it? I have read it, or tried to, but I consider my copy to be ripe for revisiting. It's about, if I recall, the folly of man's ambitions… "

I'm slightly concerned by that "tried to" read it – but only slightly. Now that we've had a month of Proust – and it turned out to be such tremendous fun – I'd view any such challenge as welcome. If the book is difficult that will just give us more to discuss. I'm also confident that this one is going to be fascinating. It's William Golding, after all. This is also supposed to be one of his best books – which is saying something. When it was released just under 50 years ago Frank Kermode called it "a most remarkable book, an entire original… remote from the mainstream, potent, severe, even forbidding". More recently, Craig Raine has noted that it is simply "great writing" – in this excellent article in the Guardian's Rereading series, which I'd highly recommend as an introduction to the book.

As further inducement we've got 10 copies 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 in to ginny.hooker@guardian.co.uk afterwards, letting us know your address and your user name. We can't track you down ourselves!

In the meantime, any thoughts on the book and suggestions for what we should talk about next will be gratefully received – as always.

William GoldingFictionSam Jordison
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My transgender novel is too personal to be propaganda

As the author of a YA novel about a transgender boy I've been accused of attempting 'social engineering' but you can't campaign with fiction

Two years ago, I published a book called I Am J. It's a young adult novel about a runaway transgender boy in New York City and, a few weeks ago, the state of California put the book on its recommended reading list for public high schools. It's the first time a book with a transgender character ever made the list.

I didn't write I Am J to be political, or to fill a void, or to make it on to any lists. Or to freak out the conservatives, who have been pretty vocal since the new list was published. I wrote it as a love letter. I have a transgender foster daughter and a gender-variant partner and the book was a way to imaginatively discern their psychic wounds and early fears, a way to say I see you in the best way I know. With my partner specifically, the character J embodies a childhood he didn't have but could have, had he lived in a different time with different options. J transitions at the age of 17, and he's angry and surly like a lot of teenage boys I know, but he's also resilient and creative. He offers, for me, a particular kind of hope.

J was a character tapping at the edges of my mind for several years before I wrote the book. He was singular and specific, a complicated person I wanted to sort through on the page. I think a lot of authors feel like this – drawn to write out of both love and a need to resolve something confusing, painful or just out of reach. But once the character's complete and the book is on the shelves, he's no longer your baby. He becomes a symbol, a representative and, in the worst cases, a tool.

This is what happened when the state updated its list, for the first time in five years. Despite the 7,800 titles to choose from, most of the media attention has revolved around exactly two: I Am J and De Donde? – a play about immigration. I would be willing to wager my pets that the conservative critics, who cried "sexual anarchy" and claimed that kids were "being taught social engineering that will hurt them physically and emotionally", haven't read my book. Rather, they encountered a tool, a symbol, that they could wield against larger social movements, such as the LGBTQ fight for equality.

But books, when they're good, don't live in these public arenas. They exist in a far more intimate space, between one reader and his imagination as he's turning the pages. If books are "socially engineered", they're propaganda, and readers can smell that from across the library.

I do, however, agree with the one critic that books can hurt. They can break you right open, reflect your own losses, and sometimes bring you into a broader plain of understanding. After I Am J was published, I received many letters from kids asking about J and his friends, as though he were a real person. And I received heart-wrenching emails from other children saying the book had saved their life; they hadn't read about "someone like them" before. These children weren't connecting with a political movement or a symbol. They were connecting with a human being, written on a page and brought to life in their minds.

In this way, I'm not worried about the conservative resistance to queer books. Of course, there's the very real business (and a long history) of restricting access to certain stories, and that's why I'm grateful to the State of California for making its list and including me on it. But literature, at its best, doesn't live in this world of agendas and witch hunts, as tools for any side's political purpose. Literature and its readers are in an alternate realm, and they'll continue to meet in this quieter place.

• Cris Beam is the author of I Am J, which is published in the US and the UK.

Children and teenagersFictionCris Beam
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Novels are too personal to be propaganda

As the author of a YA novel about a transgender boy I've been accused of attempting 'social engineering' but you can't campaign with fiction

Two years ago, I published a book called I Am J. It's a young adult novel about a runaway transgender boy in New York City and, a few weeks ago, the state of California put the book on its recommended reading list for public high schools. It's the first time a book with a transgender character ever made the list.

I didn't write I Am J to be political, or to fill a void, or to make it on to any lists. Or to freak out the conservatives, who have been pretty vocal since the new list was published. I wrote it as a love letter. I have a transgender foster daughter and a gender-variant partner and the book was a way to imaginatively discern their psychic wounds and early fears, a way to say I see you in the best way I know. With my partner specifically, the character J embodies a childhood he didn't have but could have, had he lived in a different time with different options. J transitions at the age of 17, and he's angry and surly like a lot of teenage boys I know, but he's also resilient and creative. He offers, for me, a particular kind of hope.

J was a character tapping at the edges of my mind for several years before I wrote the book. He was singular and specific, a complicated person I wanted to sort through on the page. I think a lot of authors feel like this – drawn to write out of both love and a need to resolve something confusing, painful or just out of reach. But once the character's complete and the book is on the shelves, he's no longer your baby. He becomes a symbol, a representative and, in the worst cases, a tool.

This is what happened when the state updated its list, for the first time in five years. Despite the 7,800 titles to choose from, most of the media attention has revolved around exactly two: I Am J and De Donde? – a book about immigration. I would be willing to wager my pets that the conservative critics, who cried "sexual anarchy" and claimed that kids were "being taught social engineering that will hurt them physically and emotionally", haven't read my book. Rather, they encountered a tool, a symbol, that they could wield against larger social movements, such as the LGBTQ fight for equality.

But books, when they're good, don't live in these public arenas. They exist in a far more intimate space, between one reader and his imagination as he's turning the pages. If books are "socially engineered", they're propaganda, and readers can smell that from across the library.

I do, however, agree with the one critic that books can hurt. They can break you right open, reflect your own losses, and sometimes bring you into a broader plain of understanding. After I Am J was published, I received many letters from kids asking about J and his friends, as though he were a real person. And I received heart-wrenching emails from other children saying the book had saved their life; they hadn't read about "someone like them" before. These children weren't connecting with a political movement or a symbol. They were connecting with a human being, written on a page and brought to life in their minds.

In this way, I'm not worried about the conservative resistance to queer books. Of course, there's the very real business (and a long history) of restricting access to certain stories, and that's why I'm grateful to the State of California for making its list and including me on it. But literature, at its best, doesn't live in this world of agendas and witch hunts, as tools for any side's political purpose. Literature and its readers are in an alternate realm, and they'll continue to meet in this quieter place.

• Cris Beam is the author of I Am J, which is published in the US and the UK.

Children and teenagersFictionCris Beam
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Last rites for the campus novel

Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel, The Accursed, shows why writers should stay out of academia

Even by Joyce Carol Oates's prolific standards publishing two books a month apart (Daddy Love came out in the UK in February) is remarkable. Following last year's Mudwoman, Oates, a Princeton professor for 35 years, has written her second campus novel, The Accursed.

Though currently very much on-trend, the campus novel is now approaching retirement age, having begun its life in the postwar US with Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe and Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution. The pre-eminent novelists who emerged in the 50s and 60s kept their distance, however, with the notable exceptions of Salinger's Franny and Nabokov's Pnin and Pale Fire.

Once academic fiction's appeal waned across the Atlantic, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge took over, reflecting Britain's student boom and the emergence of US-style campus universities such as Bradbury's UEA. America's appetite was only renewed when the Brat Pack generation emerged in the late 80s, writing from the perspective of recent students, not scribbling professors, in Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction and Donna Tartt's The Secret History.

By then, the senior novelists who had sniffily abstained felt impelled to join in too, and the next 25 years saw fiction about universities or dons from DeLillo (White Noise), Bellow (The Dean's December), Updike (Memories of the Ford Administration), Pynchon (Vineland) and Roth (The Human Stain).

Once the subgenre received these grandees' endorsement it became a near-compulsory rite of passage, with contributors including Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Lorrie Moore, Richard Powers, Jane Smiley and, most recently, Jeffrey Eugenides and Chad Harbach.

It's not hard to see why so many are drawn to extend the tradition, besides the sense that doing so is an elite club's induction ritual. The cut-off communities that writers love to observe are hard to find in the interconnected contemporary world, and they're otherwise usually forced to visit the past (the Tudor court, the monastery, the long-ago country house) to satisfy such cravings. Also not to be overlooked is their collective reluctance to leave any experience not translated into fiction, whether it's the almost universal experience of being a student or the now widely shared one of teaching literature or creative writing. The standard of the campus club's productions, however, increasingly makes you wonder why they bother. The mystifying, unfunny college strand is the weakest part of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, with a female student 50-odd years younger than her creator as protagonist, is either his worst novel or (for those who dislike Back To Blood even more) the point where his career went downhill. Harbach's university material seems humdrum alongside his baseball scenes. Bellow's Ravelstein was dreadful, Roth's The Human Stain muddled and sometimes embarrassing.

And writers can't help treading on each other's toes. Chabon's Wonder Boys is fun, but gives another airing to the musty tropes of writer's block and authorial malaise on campus. Eugenides's The Marriage Plot overlaps fairly glaringly with AS Byatt's academic romcom Possession.

Oates's bizarre, sprawling novel, in which the devil comes to Princeton in 1905, is especially saturated with other books, ranging from vampire and Stephen King shockers to the prototypical tale of a don driven mad, Goethe's Faust. Like other recent campus concoctions, it suggests a moratorium has long been overdue.

FictionJohn Dugdale
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Poem of the week: When that I was and a little tiny boy by William Shakespeare

For 1 April, a sonorous refrain from one of literature's most plaintive fools, making plain the shadows behind the japes

It's not often that April Fool's Day and "Poem of the week Monday" coincide. So it seems an auspicious time to honour one of Shakespeare's most graceful and complex fools, Feste, from Twelfth Night, or What You Will. His song, "When that I was and a little tiny boy", concludes a play which is itself a celebration of misrule, with a plot driven by disguise, mistaken identity and practical jokes.

The lyrics of this song, like others in Twelfth Night, might not have been written by Shakespeare. Robert Armin, a noted singer and clown, and the first actor to play Feste, is also a contender – as is our old friend, Anon. Whoever he was, the writer seems to have wanted to fill out Feste's character and "back-story" and add a little last-minute tragi-comic, silly-sad commentary on life. It's almost a version of "All the world's a stage". For that reason, my money's on Shakespeare as the song's author.

A recent displacement in the clown's fortunes is hinted at early in the play. Feste – "a fool that the Lady Olivia's father took much delight in" – has outlived his first master, and seems to wander freely between the houses of Olivia and the Duke Orsino. Jester, singer, psychologist, philosopher, informal physician and spoof priest, Feste knows his own superior worth: "Those wits that think they have thee do very oft prove fools."

Twelfth Night is full of music, and explores different attitudes to it. For Orsino, music is "the food of love" and even Sir Toby Belch prefers a love-song to "a song of good life". The forlorn realism and mock-ballad-form of "When that I was…" make it unique among the seven songs in the play.

The double refrains in each verse are relentless, yet their touch is light. "Hey, ho, the wind and the rain" shrugs a wry weariness at life's weather. The play has delivered the requisite happy endings to its nobly-born leads, but Feste and the rain go on telling a different story. Their epilogue points a sly finger at privilege, and, perhaps, at the whole device of happy endings.

The first line offers a charming image, almost a Nativity scene, and an unexpected conjunction: "When that I was and a little tiny boy" (my italics). Why the word "and" rather than the equally metrical "but"? It's oddly effective, fencing off the first part of the sentence to give it existential bite – "When that I was… " It's the kind of enigma Feste loves. However, the answer is probably that three subsequent verses, and the penultimate line, begin with a "But" (almost as in a nonsense poem). Another would be excessive.

"A foolish thing was but a toy" could be a joking reference to masturbation; the actor can make the appropriate gesture and get an easy laugh. The price of the double entendre is the pathos of imagining the clown as an innocent child, not yet officially a clown, not blamed for foolish acts, simply licensed to play. Some commentaries interpret the "foolish thing" as the child himself, in which case he would also be the worthless "toy" or "trifle".

If the child has made a sadly unnoticed start in life, the second verse brings no redemption. Attaining adulthood, he remains an outsider, one of the "knaves and thieves" who will never enter the gates of inheritance and power (a further manifestation of "man's estate").

The life story goes from under-achievement to under-achievement. Each verse, every "but", knocks down another hope. But (alas!) there's no fooling the wife. Does she throw out her swaggering husband between the verses? The strange plural of "beds" lends it a hovering association with the guest-house dormitory – perhaps also with hospitals and Bedlam. The beds could be harlots' beds, or, as the Shakespeare scholar Leslie Hotson says, "the various spots he is likely to fall". By now, the clown is an old man, infirm, perhaps a drunk.

In the third line, the narrator seems to omit a first person pronoun: "With tosspots still" (I) "had drunken heads". He might be alluding to past carouses with Sir Toby and his pals, or merely generalising. The tosspots, whoever they are, will simply go on boozing, whatever happens.

Finally, he seems about to embark on a mock-history of the world. But it's a tease and he shifts quickly to real time and real identities, with a courteous farewell to the relieved audience. "Come back for more" might be the gist of the last line, "We put on a great show every day!" Meanwhile, "that's all one" and the fooling is over. "All's one" is a phrase Feste uses several times during the play, and, again, it reminds us of that little existential shadow the character (or Shakespeare himself?) so often casts.

"When that I was and a little tiny boy…"

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut the gate,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas! to wive,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
  For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
  And we'll strive to please you every day.

PoetryWilliam ShakespeareCarol Rumens
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Eastercon 2013: Looking ahead in Bradford

Eightsquared – the 64th annual convention for science fiction devotees – promises to be as progressive as it is futuristic

This weekend sees the good ship science fiction boldly going into into uncharted territories of inclusivity, equality and parity as the UK's biggest genre convention takes place in Bradford.

Well, not uncharted territory so much. Despite the valleys of cleavage and tundra of white flesh on display in the so-bad-they're … no-still-bad SF covers of yore on display at the website Good Show Sir there can't really be many people who still consider SF, and its related genres fantasy and horror purely the preserve of pasty-faced boys. But if there are any lingering prejudices from outside the genre's active and vocal fandom, the 64th annual Eastercon running from Good Friday to Easter Monday at the Cedar Court hotel in the West Yorkshire city, aims to dispel them.

That's not to say Eightsquared, the name given to this year's convention (it's 64, you see, eight squared… ) will be a hand-wringing and overly virtuous affair. You still might get the odd Klingon or Imperial Stormtrooper wandering around (though Eastercon is traditionally more about the discussion panels and workshops than cosplay, apart from Saturday night's Mirror Mirror costume ball) and the main business of the con' will be centred on the hotel bar as writers, fans and industry professionals gather.

But it is true that the organisers of the event have this year decided to confront head-on some of the perceptions – informed or not – that sometimes mean the genre gets criticism from outside and within. Eightsquared chair and fantasy author Juliet McKenna says: "Panel discussions will include 'Why is the Future Drawn So White?' and 'Non-Western SF' – among the programme of more than 125 events from panels on every aspect of SF and fantasy fiction in books, film, TV and games to entertainments, readings, quizzes, book launches and social gatherings."

There will even be a performance by and panel discussion with Zulu Tradition, a troupe of genuine Zulu performers who relate their culture through music, dance and readings. McKenna says this is in response to both an increasing interest in non-western communities from western SF writers and more recognition for writers from non-European countries. She says: ""With South African writer Lauren Beukes winning the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2011 with Zoo City, and with renowned SF author Alastair Reynold's Blue Remembered Earth putting Africa at the centre of a new space-faring future, we're delighted to invite Zulu Tradition to the convention, to perform and to talk about their culture and lives."

The guests of honour at the weekend's event include American author Walter Jon Williams, UK fantasy writer Freda Warrington, fantasy artist Anne Sudworth and SF academic Edward James. There's also be a "ghost of honour" – Bradford's own JB Priestley, who will be honoured by the con and will be the subject of a talk by the local Priestley Society. The organisers also report a noticeable upswing in British Asian attendees this year.

There will be a host of authors appearing on panels and propping up the bar, including Emma Newman, Roz Kaveney, Chris Beckett, Liesel Schwarz and Paul Cornell … the latter – author of the recent urban fantasy hit London Falling and writer of Marvel's Wolverine comic – who last year kickstarted a new dawn in ensuring science fiction cons are consciously not male dominated.

Early in 2012 Cornell put forward a manifesto for his frequent con appearances and stated: "If I'm on, at any convention this year, a panel that doesn't have a 50/50 gender split (I'll settle for two out of five), I'll hop off that panel, and find a woman to take my place."

It was a promise he made good on, and the Eastercon organisers this year have taken up his cudgels and are aiming for gender parity on all panels. Juliet McKenna wrote in a blogpost about the policy: "By 'avoiding a gender imbalance' we mean that we would generally avoid not just all-male (or all-female) panels but also panels where one gender was in a small minority. Having a single woman on a panel of four, or two on a panel of six, would be imbalanced in this respect.

"We are setting out our policy on this because in the run-up to the 2012 Eastercon there was significant discussion in many fan forums about the lack of gender parity on panels and the steps that might be taken to deal with this. We have thus given this issue considerable thought and have decided that we will commit to gender parity."

It might just be that the 64th Eastercon in 2013 is remembered as the point when science fiction conventions came of age and put into practice the forward thinking and progressive ideologies that are so prevalent in the genre's writing. And, with a bit of luck, there might be the odd Klingon around as well.

• Are you attending Eastercon? Leave your observations, highs and lows, panel reviews and favourite bits in the comments below.

Science fictionFictionDavid Barnett
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50 Shades of Pam Ayres pastiche. Join the BDSM fun

Her take on EL James isn't really hers, alas. But different poets taking command of Christian and Ana sounds like fun. Who wants to play?

So the "Pam Ayres" Fifty Shades of Grey poem isn't by Pam Ayres after all. This little ditty, told from the husband's perspective, has been doing the rounds online, and has been linked to Ayres on various forums.

The missus bought a Paperback,
down Shepton Mallet way,
I had a look inside her bag;
Twas Fifty Shades of Grey.

Well I just left her to it,
And at ten I went to bed.
An hour later she appeared;
The sight filled me with dread…

Ayres, though, took to Twitter this morning after actor Tanya Franks told her that she'd "just read your 50 Shades of Grey poem - the mental images of Mabel and hubby are laughingly and howlingly disturbing". Indeed. Ayres, though, says she "DID NOT write this poem. It is doing the rounds on the internet etc, but it is nothing to do with me".

Ah well. I'd have loved it if the author of "I wish I'd looked after me teeth" had turned to BDSM, but it looks like it was actually one John Summers.

But Fifty Shades, Pam Ayres style - I like it. And I wonder if we could amuse ourselves, this gloomy last-day-of-work-before-Easter, with the adventures of Christian and Ana done in the style of various other authors. Here's Fifty Shades of Eliot:

April is the cruellest month, Christian tells Ana, time for
Whips and chains, pains, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring kinky sex through
Dull fiction to add spice to readers' lives ...

I'm sure you can do better. The floor is yours. The best, judged by me, wins a collected edition of Ayres's verse - if they want it.

Fifty Shades of GreyPoetryFictionEL JamesAlison Flood
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Writing a book isn't supposed to be fun

I'm enjoying writing this column, but the grander endeavour of a whole volume does, alas, requires more sweat and worry

As I write, I couldn't claim, quite, that my fingers are dancing across the keyboard. But they are making their way at a stately pace appropriate to my age (and figure), unimpeded by cramping of the limbs or brain. I enjoy writing for the Guardian, doing this occasional series of bibliobits, and am animated by my ongoing conversation with my readers.

At the same time, as I sit here at our house in New Zealand, I am trying to begin writing my next book, which is provisionally titled (in my mind, if not yet that of my publishers) The Life and Death of the Book. I have reason to feel cheerful, for I have another book coming out in April – Lost, Stolen or Shredded: Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature – the publication of which will engender a lot of relief, as well as the usual anxieties.

As I began work on the new book, I wrote a yellow post-it and stuck it up over my desk: "Write as if you were writing for the Guardian. Make it fun." Because something that is fun to read – which is my hope with these occasional columns – is usually easier to write. If you bring a concentrated light-heartedness to the act of composition – even if you have to will it – you are, in my experience, more likely to write well, if not easily. Writing well is never easy.

Admittedly, the new book covers weighty ground, from cave art to Kindles (without being for a moment a "history of the book") and its many topics and obligations do not always flow trippingly off the pen. This problem is no doubt exacerbated by the fact that I am learning as I go along, but then again I like doing that, and believe that an author enjoying the process of discovery is often more agreeable to read than one mired in his or her own expertise. (One of the reasons I rather admire Geoff Dyer).

The new book is both more demanding and harder than burbling on about this or that for a column. But is it really all that different? Same me. Same (I hope) voice. Yet the differences are enormous, and the effects catastrophic. I arrived for my six weeks in New Zealand with the modest hope that I might produce, say, 12,000 words. Three hundred a day. Maybe a bit more, but acceptably and realistically perhaps a little bit less. But after three excruciatingly cramped weeks, whimpering at the keyboard every morning, I was unable to compose a single sentence as compelling, even, as the afternoon's shopping list. I could count 3,000 words, but they were faltering, joyless drivel.

I had to give it up. It was not merely making me miserable, but ornery as well. I railed against myself, was horrid to my very dear wife, was rude about New Zealand generally and Hawkes Bay (as close to paradise as you may find) particularly. Frustrated and depressed, I looked every day at my post-it sticker, until I pulled it down in a rage and binned it. "Fun?" What fun? It was as unmitigated as misery can get without a genuinely serious cause.

What went wrong? Aristotle says that a tragedy shows a good man declining from a state of happiness to one of misery, through a great error of judgment. I presume the tragic hero was, in his happy emotional state, writing a column, and in the miserable one a book – and that his error was in moving from the one to the other. Hence his downfall. He should have known better.

But we inhabit a world made up only transiently of columns and blogs, and more abidingly of books. It's no good, then, basking in the relative ease of the lesser endeavour, while shirking the more significant and difficult. Writing a good book, which is what one tries to do, is one of the great human activities, and if an author is good enough and lucky enough, the result will be around for generations.

Perhaps it is that thought that is so daunting? When I write one of these columns it flows off into the ether, people read it or they don't, make occasional comments, and then it is to all intents and purposes gone. It is to me anyway, though all of these pieces can still be found, and to a sensibility more contemporary than mine, presumably have the same longevity as a book.

But a book, a form that I both revere and fear, is another thing altogether. It requires more time, more research, more thought, more acute efforts of composition. It tests the authorial self severely, and consequently there is more at stake in its composition.

And reception. This may account for why authors are so unaccountably concerned with what the reviewers may say. Writers know that a review is simply the opinion of a person more or less fit to deliver a verdict. We are aware that, given that Joyce and Proust had their detractors, so may we. Yet our sensitivity to bad reviews can be so acute that, even if we do not entirely sympathise, we can understand Alain de Botton's response to a New York Times reviewer who had an adverse opinion of his new book: "I will hate you until the day I die."

But the fact that our work goes out into the world and gets publically commented on doesn't seem enough, quite, to account for the anxiety that writing causes. The real concern, after all, is not what some damn reviewer or other may think, but quite simply whether the book is a good book. And though some authors are great praisers of their own products, most, I suspect, harbour an inward fear that the book is not, quite, good enough.

John Banville says that he does not read his reviews, not so much because it would be painful if they were slighting, but because he already knows – "better than any reviewer" – what is wrong with his books, the places in which he is painfully aware that they could have been better. Why read someone less likely to know where the sore spots are?

Writers, like all artists, are Platonists. We have an inkling of something perfect and ideal, which haunts our imaginings and prompts every stroke of the pen or keyboard. We are aware that with a great effort of attentiveness, formulating and reformulating, listening closely to our own voice, modulating it into more tuneful harmonies, we might do something not just good, but perfect. And occasionally in phrase or sentence or paragraph we do just that. But I know of no writer who is not, finally, just that little bit disappointed with the final product. (Well, I know some who are not, but they are never the good ones).

Maybe a "little bit disappointed" is mitigated by the further "but it is the best I can do". That's what writing a book demands of you. Whereas writing an occasional piece – such as this – isn't as daunting because one is not aiming for the unattainably perfect. I write this carefully, and as best I can, but mostly I am just having some (serious) fun, and hoping my readers are too.

So that's it, then. That's where the error lies. I cannot write the new book in the same spirit or voice as I write this column, nor should I have tried. Silly me. It is genuinely enjoyable to do these. Writing this book is harder, and worse, and better, and more important. And it requires, which is at the heart of the problem, that I keep my eye in different directions at the same time. Cross-eyed composition (looking at both the keyboard and my research notes) gives me a headache and makes me crazy, and is not conducive to an (apparently) effortless flow.

This seems a relatively flaccid conclusion: It's easier to write a column or blog than a book? Duh. You know that, and so do I. Or so did I. I seem to keep forgetting it, and need to remind myself every time I start a book. I never learn, keep sticking up those post-it notes, and then tearing then them down.

The fun comes later, once it the book is written. As long as the reviews aren't too bad…

Creative writingRick Gekoski
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Rereading Stephen King: week 18 – The Talisman

For this novel, King joined another master of the horror genre, Peter Straub, to create - a fantasy novel

I couldn't remember a word of this. It was bound to happen sooner or later: a book I'd read which had slipped entirely through my memory. Sometimes I find a book is loose and hazy in my memory – I have a bad memory, and while overarching plots usually stick for everything I've read, details are often significantly more vague – but for The Talisman, I couldn't remember anything. I have the original copy; I know it had a sequel, in 2001's Black House; and I know that, since it was written, it's become more and more entwined within the Dark Tower mythos that runs through so many of King's novels. But everything else? Gone.

At the tail-end of the 1970s, Stephen King and Peter Straub – an American horror novelist, and friend of King's – decided to write a novel together. It took them four years to get started, and when they did, it was essentially writing in turns: doing the beginning and the end together, and then passing the narrative back and forth between themselves in a writing relay. The book's germ was an idea that King had had in college.It was, as @jsatellite told me, something of a game for the two writers, imitating each other's style to produce something which felt like a single author's work.

The book itself is the story of Jack Sawyer, a 12-year-old boy whose mother is dying from cancer. So he heads off on a "fetch quest", to find something that can save her. He meets a handyman named Lester "Speedy" Parker who teaches him all about the other world that we can't see: a parallel version of our own, known as the Territories. The physical rules in the Territories are curious: time and distance have different meanings (with the alternate world being more akin to a compressed version of the United States), and everybody from one world has "twinner" in the other: sharing some of each other's physical traits, life events and character. Everybody has one, apart from Jack: his twinner, Jason, died when it was a baby, nearly taking Jack with it. (And Jason's name lives on in the Territories, used as a blasphemy, their own proxy for Jesus.) And, surprise surprise, his dying mother has a twinner of her own: Queen Laura DeLoessian (who is loved and adored by everybody, and has fallen into a deep sleep she cannot be roused from). Speedy's twinner, a gunslinger named Parkus, tells Jack all about a Talisman that can heal his mother, and so begins a fantasy novel fetch quest.

And make no mistake: this is very definitely fantasy. The two horror novelists wrote something with very few moments of conventional horror. They included werewolves (sort of) but made them friendly. They have a big bad guy (or, guys: Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris) who isn't scary per se, bringing technology and violence to the Territories in order to let them destroy themselves. There's a moment in the novel where Jack goes to watch Lord of the Rings: not a coincidence.

And there's another major theme, which also sounds through much fantasy fiction: friendship. Here, though, the primary influence is Huckleberry Finn: that book's story of friendship is echoed strongly in Jack Sawyer's relationships with both Wolf and Richard Sloat. (As Straub has said, "Twain was on our minds at the start".)

The themes are strong; the world is strong; the characters are strong. It's well written. It's long, and maybe a little over-egged in places – some of the novel's mid-section sags – but the things that they were paying tribute to come through, and the story is a good one. So: why didn't I remember it? I don't know.

I've thought about it the past few days, as I've come across moments in the book I love, now – Wolf in our world; the Blasted Lands; the Black Hotel – and I just don't understand it. It's not quite top-tier, but it's a really enjoyable novel, worthy of both writers' bibliographies. And I must have enjoyed it, because I went away and read Straub's excellent, haunting Ghost Story when I was a teenager, and his equally excellent PTSD horror Koko, and I wouldn't have done that had I not. So now I'm tempted to blame it on my teenage distaste for fantasy. It's why I didn't read the Dark Tower books; it's why I disliked Eyes Of The Dragon (but more on that in a few weeks). But in many ways, I'm really pleased I didn't remember it. I got to read a King novel from the 1980s with fresh eyes, and experience an adventure that had, somehow, pretty much passed me by.

Connections

Oh ho, this is a curious one. So, when it was written, there were a few connections to other things in King's oeuvre (and, no doubt, Straub's, though I cannot help with those): there's a reference to Pet Sematary by way of The Wizard of Oz, with The Talisman echoing that book's reference to "Oz the gweat and tewwible"; there is a reference to Rainbird, from Firestarter; and the references to Gunslingers and the phrase "do ya ken" both come from the early parts of the Dark Tower series. However, at this point (popular myth has it), the book wasn't intended to be a part of that series. It was Straub who wrote in those connections, and King just neatened the corners as he wrote more novels. And, when they came to revisit this world and these characters in 2001's Black House, they would bind the two universes completely …

Up next: the final book written while Richard Bachman was still alive – Thinner.

Stephen KingFantasyHorror
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What are you reading today?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, our review list and what you'd like to see covered on the site

I let last week's TLS run on for another week because I didn't want to cut off conversations mid flow; apologies to those of you waiting for the new review list.

This conversation, from the last thread, particularly caught my eye:
alanwskinner:

I've been on a small and so far fruitless crusade to find some worthy self-published books, which means mostly ebooks.

There's been quite a few from Amazon's and the i-bookstore's free lists; as well, I have downloaded a great many samples, which I read first and then paid for and download the full book if the sample promised something worthwhile. So far, I've downloaded only a handful or so complete books, few of which justified my optimism and none made me feel as if I'd discovered something wonderful. I've tried to be impartial with regards to genre, sampling and reading books from erotica to paranormal to SF and literary fiction. Interestingly, pickings among literary fiction are slim, especially when those which market themselves as such generally exhibit either a highly-developed hubris by the author, or an understanding of what constitutes literary fiction which is very different from mine.

I've distracted myself along the way with a few others that can be found for free, or close enough to it not to matter: Jack London's Iron Heel, which made me feel I was re-living my political ripening as a young teenager in the 60s (not necessarily a bad thing); Dryden's translation of Virgil's Aeneid, Ecologues and Georgics, which is a book my mother bought me many years ago but fell into the hands of a friend, never to be seen again (the Aeneid has one of the great opening lines in literature, which Shaw later used for his play Arms and the Man); and a few others, which helped keep up my strength during my search for a decent self-published book.

So, if anyone here can recommend a good one, let me know, because my endurance has run out, I'm wasting my time, and I've quite forgot why I was doing it in the first place.

TimHannigan replied:

Your worthy attempt to give self-publishing the benefit of the doubt highlights the fundamental problem with the beast, one that so many of its champions seem to refuse to acknowledge: whether or not good – brilliant, even – self-published books do exist out there, finding them, and finding genuinely impartial guidance towards them, is virtually impossible and not something any disinterested reader should be expected to waste their time doing.

There's a tendency for champions of self-publishing to demand that readers "make the effort". But there should be no onus whatsoever on readers to do any such thing! In the reader-writer relationship it's the writer who has to make the effort! And in any case, your experience shows the practical impossibility of "making an effort" anyway.

It's a sad situation, and I by no means refuse to allow the notional possibility of there being absolutely fantastic self-published books out there. But old clichés about needles and haystacks are very apt indeed, and given that the public conversation on self-published books appears to be overwhelming dominated by self-promotion, endless ulterior log-rolling, and the ceaseless back-and-forth trading of five-star reviews the whole thing is exceptionally off-putting to people who just want to read.

PaulBowes01, summed it up succinctly:

And incidentally, it's worth pointing out that while finding a needle in a haystack is difficult, finding a dozen needles in a haystack is not much easier.

I blogged a while ago inviting for authors to tell us about their work, including self-published writers. The blog was very popular. So popular, infact, that it became clear I had bitten off far more than I could chew, so I parked the thread while I thought how to progress. This conversation has spurred us on to double our efforts to find a way. alanwskinner don't give up!

Here's the list of books we'll be talking about this week, subject to last minute changes, of course.

Non-fiction

• Wave: A Memoir of Life After the Tsunami by Sonali Deraniyagala
• Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War by Charles Glass
• Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth Century by Lucy Lethbridge
• Silence and the Christian Tradition by D MacCulloch
• Shipton and Tillman by Jim Perrin
• Creation: The Origin of Life / The Future of Life by Adam Rutherford
• The Love Wars of Lina Prokofiev: The Story of Lina and Serge Prokofiev

Fiction

• The People of Forever are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu
• The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
• Schroder by Amity Gaige
• How to Get Filthy Rich in Raising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
• Among Others by Jo Walton

Children

• Easter picture book roundup

Podcast

• Colm Tóibín on The Testament of Mary

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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