The Guardian's Blog, page 232

Non-fiction roundup - reviews

Steven Poole on Curious Behavior by Robert R Provine, Satisfaction Not Guaranteed by Peter Stearns and Grammar for Grown-Ups by Katherine Fry and Rowena Kirton

Curious Behavior by Robert R Provine (Harvard, £18.95)

Why do we yawn, tickle, laugh, cough, scratch, sneeze, hiccup, vomit, or cry? Over the years, Provine has investigated these and other behaviours in the lab and on the street, and the result is beautifully written and constantly surprising. Provine is a neuroscientist who scorns neural reductionism; he refuses to talk down to his readers, actively encouraging them to perform their own experiments; and he is charmingly funny, dotting his exegesis with laconic flashes of thematic silliness or amused humility. "My reputation as a yawn sleuth," he writes, "has conferred a curious kind of charisma – I've become a yawn stimulus."

A major theme of the book is contagion. Why, for example, are yawns contagious? (Why is even reading about yawning likely to make you yawn? Are you yawning yet? Yawn.) Provine also suspects that many of the behaviours he studies are means of communication. "Tears resolve ambiguity of facial expression", and even "breathing is grammatical" – coughing or laughing generally occur at syntactic breaks in speech. Provine also considers farts as "buttspeak", using the example of the celebrated French fartiste Le Pétomane to ask seriously why we didn't evolve the faculty of speech via the anus, and so giving a whole new meaning to talking out of one's arse.

Satisfaction Not Guaranteed by Peter Stearns (NYU Press, £23.99)

Sneezing and yawning, Provine notes, can provide "satisfaction" (yawning apparently can even trigger orgasm in some people: try this at home) – which is just as well, since little else in life today does. Given the enormous advances over the last few centuries in agriculture, medicine, education and so forth, this author asks, why aren't we happier in our "modern condition"?

The "satisfaction gap", Stearns argues, arises from various factors not yet eliminated by modernising forces (major stressors such as war) or actually created by them: the disorienting effects of constant change; the monstrous hegemony of clock time; the cruel injunction to be happy; meaningless and oversupervised work in modern jobs; medicalised death; anxiety over "correct" child-rearing; and the inability of shopping really to help. The book is dry but interestingly nuanced, encouraging us to see our flawed modernity as a "work in progress". In Victorian times, Stearns relates, "Nervous middle-class people now learned that having sex too often, possibly more than once a week, could induce premature death or insanity." One hopes that at least they yawned a lot.

Grammar for Grown-Ups by Katherine Fry & Rowena Kirton (Square Peg, £10.99)

It comes decorated with a blurb from that celebrated literary stylist Alastair Campbell, but this guide doesn't inspire confidence when, on the first page, it disobeys its own rules on hyphenating compound adjectives (speaking of "not so common errors" and "not so basic grammar"), and ascribes to itself a wan optimism ("This book […] hopefully shows that good grammar" is important).

Most of the explanations of parts of speech, punctuation ("the written equivalent of the satnav") and so forth are competent if yawn-inducing; the book will sate potential readers' hunger for lists of homonyms, American vocabulary or misspellings. Some of its preferences, though, are mysterious – "There is no such time" as 12am or 12pm, the authors declare, insisting (with reckless pleonasm) on "12 noon" or "12 midnight". And, as always with style guides that offer lists of "commonly confused words", one wonders just how common they are. Does anyone mix up "eschatology" and "scatology", or is that just more buttspeak?

Reference and languagesScience and natureSocietySteven Poole
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Reader reviews roundup

This week: George Gissing, Sebastian Faulks and the short stories of Frank O'Connor

Welcome, readers all, to this week's reviews roundup. Now, writing about writing is one thing. But writing about writing about writing could get more confusing. Nevertheless it's a challenge NickVirk has masterfully embraced, this week, in his review of George Gissing's Victorian classic. New Grub Street, he tells us, "is a novel which aptly depicts the psychological frustrations of an author." Although the book is now often overlooked, "Gissing weaves his words together with aplomb and his characters are as remarkable as any that Dickens or Austen ever created," he says. And in spite of a "bitterly depressing plot'," it had him hooked: "The novel reads like a thriller and is an ample page-turner even for those who prefer contemporary fiction."

A very contemporary piece of fiction had Christopher Philip Howe less enamoured. On Sebastian Faulks's newly published A Possible Life, he writes that the 'decision to put what are, effectively, five novellas into one book makes them feel compressed and constrained.' One weakness of the book, he decides, is its failure to live up to its own possibilities. "By packaging these stories together with the title A Possible Life, Faulks promises something more profound than two strong and three weaker stories linked by only the most tenuous of threads." What emerges, he concludes, "is a collection that is not, really, much more than a sum of its parts."

Frank O'Connor's My Oedipus Complex: and Other Stories received a more effusive response. 'I love this collection like I love my mother,' writes OpinionsLtd, "It's complicated." What impressed OpinionsLtd was the "confessional quality" of O'Connor's style. "I couldn't help but listen," he explains. It might not have hit "lyrical notes", as he puts it. "Nor does it have a straightforward pithiness," but it's a style that "matured with his subjects...it felt like all the characters were growing up, growing old and driving towards death together. Finishing it felt like losing a family."

And that's it for this week. As ever, if your review appears here, mail us at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and we'll send you some books. Have a lovely weekend!

Sebastian FaulksGeorge GissingFiction
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Tolkien's original hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, turns 75

Schools around the country are marking the 75th anniversary of JRR Tolkien's creation today

"To the end of his days Bilbo could never remember how he found himself outside, without a hat, a walking-stick or any money, or anything that he usually took when he went out; leaving his second breakfast half-finished and quite un-washed-up, pushing his keys into Gandalf's hands, and running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill, across The Water, and then on for a mile or more." So began the adventures of one Bilbo Baggins, hobbit, of Bag End, and in honour of the 75th anniversary of the publication of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, schools up and down the country are holding their own Hobbit second breakfasts at 11am today.

HarperCollins is also marking the anniversary by releasing the first Latin translation of the book, Hobbitus Ille – "in foramine terrae habitabat hobbitus"; "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit") – as well as publishing a range of little-known sketches done by Tolkien himself as he was writing the novel, to bring the images in his head to life. From Bilbo smoking his pipe in the wonderfully circular hall at Bag End – "a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats – the hobbit was fond of visitors" – to Lake Town and Hobbiton-across-the Water, the images are, according to the publisher, "a beautiful representation of the workings of Tolkien's mind".

Only a small selection of the hundreds of drawings done by Tolkien were included in the original edition of The Hobbit, and although the artwork, held by the Tolkien estate, has since been published in a special edition book – with a sneak peak on the Guardian website – it has never received widespread publication.

The anniversary, though, is just the start of what will be an onslaught of all things Hobbit, as the 14 December release date approaches of the first of Peter Jackson's three-part film adaptation of the novel, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Let the adventures begin.

JRR TolkienChildren and teenagersPeter JacksonAlison Flood
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The weird deserves recognition as a major literary movement

Birkbeck University's recent Weird Council reminds us that the movement anticipated our sense of a subjective, uncertain reality

The image that conjures the weird for me, above and beyond all others, is the rift in reality. The tear in the space time continuum that swallows the Starship Enterprise. The wardrobe that opens to the land of Narnia. The dimensional experiment that gushes alien monsters out in to the Black Mesa research facility. The tear in the fabric of the real, in whatever guise it represents itself, is the true essence of the weird.

Attendees at the recent Weird Council conference at Birkbeck University might disagree. As an event examining the work of novelist China Miéville, they might have felt compelled to argue for that emblematic image of the New Weird, the tentacle: the monstrous appendage that emerges from the rift to disturb the mundane order of things.

Weird Council was remarkable for many reasons. First as an academic conference dedicated to the work of a writer who has been publishing for only a little over a decade, and one who belongs, as Miéville does, solidly in a tradition of genre writing that is rarely recognised in academia. Second, it brought together a remarkable diversity of specialists with a shared interest in Miéville's work; academics, political activists and of course the fandom that have played such a major part in evangelising him to the wider world.

But it was as in its recognition of the weird itself that Weird Council seemed most significant. It comes less than a year after the publication of The Weird by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, a landmark anthology that helped to define the weird as a significant literary tradition with well over a century of history. Emerging from the works of Alfred Kubin and Algernon Blackwood among many others, progressing through HP Lovecraft, Franz Kafka and Shirley Jackson, and embracing figures such as Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges, Mervyn Peake, Angela Carter, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman and Miéville, the weird represents a powerful literary tradition.

The picture that emerged at Weird Council was of the weird as a counterpart to many of the intellectual and cultural movements of the 20th century. More than once the comparison was made between the weird, with its refusal to depict reality as contiguous and rational, and the shift in the visual arts from representation to abstraction. The weird's obsession with what might be called the "fourth dimension" through metaphors of hyperspace, multi-dimensionality and time-travel mirrors the emergence of scientific concepts such as relativity and quantum theory. In an overarching sense, the weird shares the subjectivity and uncertainty prioritised by postmodern philosophy. The reality the weird describes is as immutable and unknowable as the reality of the postmodern world.

The weird is characterised by a willingness to play fast and loose with reality. And its emergence in the early 1900s coincides with a radical shift in our perceptions of what reality is. Science at the time was busy revealing not just that our universe was much, much bigger than we had guessed, but also far less certain, with the principles of quantum mechanics suggesting that God did indeed "play dice with the universe". We were also becoming aware that many things we accepted as real – ideas of nationality, race, gender, sexuality and many more – were in fact socially constructed. The conservative social order in which people knew their place was about to be replaced with a far more complex and less certain liberal worldview.

The weird became both a part of these radical changes, and a reaction against them. JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is a paean for the return of a king and a social order that was undergoing radical and irrevocable change. As becomes apparent in his racist poetry, HP Lovecraft's stories articulated a very deep anxiety and fear of social change. The commercial genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror that commoditise the weird are often reactionary in nature. Faced with a rift in reality, they encourage the reader to dive for cover.

The significance of Miéville's writing has been to reawaken many people to the radical purpose of the weird. Novels such as Perdido Street Station, The Scar and The City & The City remind us that much of what we call reality is constructed, uncertain or unknowable. Faced with a rift in reality – and our world of high speed technological change confronts us with such things daily – we don't have to respond with fear and seek escape. Instead we can choose to dive headfirst in to whatever dimension lies beyond.

Because of its importance as a radical literature, and also its vast influence as a reactionary one, it seems well beyond time that the weird received far more serious attention as a major literary movement. Weird Council was an excellent start. Long may it continue.

FictionScience fictionFantasyDamien Walter
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Author events: what's with the questions?

Writers' public Q&As can be relied on to throw up some very odd questions. Should we all just stick to reading in corners?

Howard Jacobson was in fine, showmanly form last week, reading from and discussing his new novel Zoo Time at the Hampstead & Highgate literary festival. A typically provocative tale of one man's unruly passion for his mother-in-law, it's also a killingly funny portrayal of a literary world on its last legs: with authors being told they should be writing bite-sized smartphone diversions to pass time at bus stops instead of dodo novels; that being in print is yesterday's thinking.

The book's chief plaint is not so much that the novel is dying – although it's clearly not in very good health – but that people are forgetting how to read. In the context of a public event with a Q&A looming I didn't think Jacobson would dare read Zoo Time's opening scene, which takes place at a readers' group in Chipping Norton. But of course, with his usual brio, he did. So it was that we heard about his failing fictional protagonist, Guy Ableman, meeting his fictional readers, and facing a series of increasingly obtuse, aggressive questions: why aren't there more characters to identify with? Why does he use the masculine pronoun so often? (Why not "he stroke she", or perhaps "they"?) Why does he hate children so much? (He doesn't write about children, he offers. "Precisely!")

After hearing that, Jacobson's readers would surely take care that their own questions were more rather more germane. Wouldn't they?

Zoo Time is about a mother-in-law – but why didn't he write about fathers-in-law, one woman asked, accusingly. One chap took issue with his portrayal of poisonous spiders. Finally, another man wanted to know where the author had found the nerve to steal his daughter's name. Which name was that, Jacobson asked, and from whom did I pinch it? Vanessa, obviously, the man returned, and you know her very well. Vanessa is the name of Ableman's wife, a tall, willowy redhead. The object of identity theft here, it turned out, was Vanessa Feltz. Not that easily confused, you might have thought.

Signs are not good, then? Well, if aiming questions wide of the mark is a morbid symptom, then readers, like novels themselves, are taking their time to die. Since I've been attending public readings, there've always been a few people in the audiences grinding very strange axes. Where do you get your ideas from? Why aren't your books more life-affirming? Isn't this domestic comedy really about aliens?

Something about the occasion of an author reading seems to set (some) people off. You sort of wonder whether the problem isn't that we don't know how to read anymore, but that we've never known how to behave at author appearances.

And you could argue that that's not an entirely bad thing, since reading isn't really a collective experience. There's a joke I've always liked in Peter Carey's novel My Life as a Fake, describing a minor poet (more than a little reminiscent of Stephen Spender) whose success has rather outrun his talent. He was, says the narrator, very good at "the social side of literature" - as in, the irrelevant bit. And much as I enjoy seeing writers in three dimensions at literary festivals, literature is really something meant to be consumed in a quiet corner, on your own.

Howard JacobsonFictionLindesay Irvine
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Shelf preservation: Why my ebook conversion only goes so far

I've grown to love the format for certain genres, but some books demand three dimensions

The news that ebook pricing has taken a nosedive to the earth's molten core gives me a pang for poor saps still trying to earn a Cup-a-Soup by engendering novels. Especially newbies. It's all very well for established authors and retailers who can afford it to sell books for less than a packet of gum, but what about those who can't? That said, I am, to my shame, a deeply clutch-fisted reader. Convulsive speed of consumption, coupled with an unladylike appetite - like a bibliophagous hybrid of boa and goat - make me miserly about forking out for short-lived literary indulgences. That's what the library's for.

But I'm no longer anti-ebooks themselves. I have even been known to pay more than 20p for one. This is for purely practical reasons. My daughter's size is now inversely proportional both to the tidal wave of jolly-coloured, beeping crap she generates, and to the beetling pyramid of classic children's books I am pretending to keep for her benefit. So I've converted from a diehard, forest-felling Kindle-dodger to an inveterate user of the reading device. Although still not much of a Kindler, I'm horribly addicted to backlit iBooks in the darkened intervals of toddler sleep – it feels like a grown-up version of illicit reading by torchlight after bedtime, a keener pleasure for being stolen.

The books that work best digitally, for me, are Stephen Kings and Jonathan Kellermans – fat compulsive paperbacks, whose physical bulk I grudge to house, but which suit the bookstack-in-my-pocket's comforting convenience to a T. Out-of-copyright classics also represent an e-reader bonanza – recently I've indulged my yen for castaway self-sufficiency with Robinson Crusoe and The Coral Island (although it's slightly unnerving to read about bare-essentials survival on something so tiny, sophisticated and absolutely alien to the worlds described.)

I've also been assuaging my impatience for Cumberbatch's return by rereading Sherlock Holmes in full. I had a one-volume hardbacked Sherlock, as a child, which I toted about in my school backpack. Having him in my phone is considerably easier on the shoulders. And from Andrew Lang's many-coloured Fairy Books to Camilla Lackberg's savage but domestic Scandi-thrillers, my overburdened bookshelves have been relieved by my conversion.

But I've found that, space or no space, not all my books can exist solely in the library of the electronic ether. There are many that I MUST possess, in chunky, tangible print.

I can't, for example, stop buying ancient, tea-tanned SF paperbacks if I find a good cache in a secondhand bookshop, and I'm a sucker for the sell-off box at the library. In addition, I yearn to own any book that makes me cry, and any children's book I think has the hallmarks of a future classic (Venn circles which often overlap). These I want not only in print, but in pristine first editions. Very silly, since I hope my daughter will one day want to read them; buying a tatty spine-broken copy would be far more to the point. But there's something about the power of these books that gives me a giddy, worshipful, slightly drunken urge to treat them with kid gloves. Into this category fall Frances Hardinge's Gullstruck Island (and all her others, too), John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and Skellig.

Which books do you buy to read digitally, and which MUST be print? And why?

EbooksKindleE-readersImogen Russell Williams
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What are you reading today?

Our review list and your space to tell us about the topics, authors and books you'd like to see covered on the site

Welcome one and all to this week's blog. Thank you to JoTayl0r0 for the snap at the top, I hope you enjoyed the book. If you'd like to upload a photo of the book you are currently reading, please visit our Flickr group called What are you reading, today? and share your picture. You can also browse the growing library of photographs.

Before we move onto this week's review list, here are some highlights from last week's blog. If you are wondering which book to read next, maybe one of these suggestions will inspire you:

Lioc:

I've downloaded everything that looked like a Science Fiction book in the "Authors! Tell us about your work" thread (except my own works of course, I already have copies of those).

I'm working my way through them.

So far done:
RO42 with Absolute Liberation: High Tech combat in the far future, war still messes with people heads and is a great way to find out if someone is crazy. Be interesting to see his next project.

The Second Internet Cafe by Chris James: Rebooting the timetravel / alternate universe franchise with a series opener. A quick energetic read. Will be looking out for the sequel.

Next up:
Mindjammer, by Sarah Newton

(I downloaded some non-science fiction as well, I may never get to them, they only get read after I run out of Science Fiction...)

beatricevargas:

Posting here at the suggestion of Dan Holloway.

Over on Authors! there are loads of books vying for attention. This is a great idea, but everyone is hoping to get seen and the thread is enormous. Aside from Lioc (and good for you!) there seems to have been little take-up. Also, we've been told that spamming on other threads is definitely going to be deleted, so this appears to be the last and only chance to get one's work noticed.

My suggestion for taking this forward is randomly picking one (more if pos) from the books already posted and either asking the writer to send it in for review or, and this may be more fun for all concerned, posting an extract open for BTL comments. As I mentioned over there, I doubt there'd be much negative sock puppeting because we'd spot it.

Writers could get useful feedback, and, if a selection of extracts were posted, it may also provide insight into whether "there's some really great stuff out there" or "everything self-published is worthless" which is the ping-pong commenting we've been reading on the book site forever.

There, that's my three pesos worth, and my hat (book) thrown into the ring!

Thank you for your input, I promise not to let this thread die. I'm delighted so many people have used it to talk about their work. I will formulate a plan as to how to take it forward, and as always, I invite all suggestions. Thank you to beatricevargas for being the first to add the first good idea to the pot.

This week I'll give the final word to happysouthafrian:

Recently Finished a Book called Enders Game by Orson Scott Card. Never been a fan of futuristic Sci Fi but this book completely changed my perseption on that as its more a tale about one young prodigy's battle against all odds. Wasn't able to put it down as the author wrote it beautifully and the ending was superb. An absolute must read.

Followed this up by one of my favourite books ever! The Count of Monte Cristo is a tale that everyone should read at least twice in their life time. Reading it I realised how much other stories have borrowed from it, the original revenge story. A long book but felt dismayed at the end when I realised I wouldn't be reading it for much longer. Alexandre was certainly no Dumas!

Here's a selection of some of the books we'll be reviewing this week. Tell us what we've missed and what you are reading in the thread below.

Non-fiction

• There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe
• Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Muses by Henrietta Garnett
• Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook
• The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revolution by Frank McLynn
• Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall by Thomas Browne

Fiction

• A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts by Sebastian Faulks
• Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah
• Infinity by Gabriel Josipovici
• The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare,
• John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk
• Building Stories by Chris Ware

Poetry

John Fowles's Selected Poems edited by Adam Thorpe

Children

• The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman

Hannah Freeman
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Short stories are far more than premises for 'twists'

Clive Anderson, chairing the BBC short story award judges, wrenches the form out of shape with this reductive view

Writers have said a lot of things about short stories. "Get in, get out, don't linger." That was Raymond Carver. "The sound of the story comes first," said Grace Paley. "A new kind of prose" was Katherine Mansfield; "A row of lamps", Virginia Woolf. Chekhov's "new form" … All opinions varying, but all agreeing and disagreeing about the genre from the point of view of someone who actually writes short stories – either for a living or for fun, as craftsperson or artist, on commission or as experiment.

How very different, then, that sense of the vision and imagination and self-consciousness of the short story of writers themselves is to the definition laid down by this year's chair of the BBC International Short Story Award, Clive Anderson, who told us that what the short story must have – its overriding and most important feature – "is a twist".

Really? A twist? Isn't that something that we used to talk about in the fourth form when we were reading Saki, or earlier, while in thrall to Tales of the Unexpected? Isn't a "twist" something you put in to spice things up, add colour or bite, because you worry there's not any colour or bite there in the first place? That whole motivation for the turnaround ending – the "sting in the tail" as Saki called it – was that nothing else in those kinds of stories was surprising, not really. We're on home ground with writers who rely on a twist; everything is familiar. We feel pretty clever reading them because we're in control; we're never unmoored and taken down curious paths on new journeys. The twist is there to provide the surprise, all of it. Its job is to jolt the tale into life.

However you view the work of Saki and others, who enjoy fashioning their stories this way (and there are plenty who do, and plenty that's interesting about their stories), the problem here is not so much the notion itself as the fact that we have the chair of a high-profile, widely-publicised award telling us what counts in the genre; a lawyer and chat show host defining for the nation what is valuable and memorable about this important component of our literary art.

That speaks to a larger concern – which is the way literature in the UK is constantly made safe and understandable, diluted and commoditised, by those who don't have the first idea about form or voice or point of view or emotional landscape or any of those things real writers concern themselves with before they even sit down and think about inventing a story.

Once again, the pronouncement that comes from the chair of this year's distinguished panel of judges – writers and critics both, who have made a life out of thinking about fiction and what makes it valuable – is privileged over those other, more informed voices, to have the soundbite that carries.

"Judging this competition was" says Clive Anderson, "a perfect reminder of just how rewarding the short story genre can be. In the 10 which made it to the shortlist are to be found everyday human activities such as first loves and last laughs, infidelity and murder. Plus a goose, a dog and a must-have disposable electronic device. In short, some great stories."

Not surprising that the paragraph has us think not about these "great" stories at all, but about the voice of Anderson himself. It's what our culture wants to do to art: break it down, play it for laughs. Make us feel we get the joke. It's the approach that stops us taking it seriously.

Yet the short story is so serious, and so hilarious, and terrifying and moving and transporting. It is so much more supple and dangerous and "other" than glib comments such as this would have us believe, taking us, in the single breath of our reading, to another place, a new way of thinking. It has the power to alter our emotional temperature in just a few pages. At the recent World Writers' Conference at the Edinburgh International Book festival, writer and cultural critic China Miéville spoke about "the remorseless prioritisation of recognition over estrangement", the relentless privileging of one kind of story told in one kind of way. Wouldn't it be nice if here, upon the occasion of the varied and textured shortlist that marks the 2012 prize, we thought about what the short story could do - rather than simply reiterate what it's always done?

That would be a twist indeed.

Short storiesFictionAwards and prizesKirsty Gunn
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Bringing noir fiction out of the shadows

A host of vintage noir and crime thrillers are being reissued as ebooks. Can you give me some clues about which ones to read?

I love Gollancz's SF Gateway, where the publisher has made heaps and heaps of hard-to-find science fiction classics available as ebooks, so it cheered up my Monday morning to see that Gollancz's parent company Orion has just launched a similar project for vintage crime fiction. From James M Cain to Anthony Price, Jim Thompson to George V Higgins, The Murder Room collects out-of-print or hard-to-trace classic crime novels and makes them available in digital format.

It's kicking off with 150 titles, with another 100 to follow by the end of the year, and it's a feast of noir, thrillers and classic crime, from The Postman Always Rings Twice to Cogan's Trade. My favourite type of crime novel is the psychological thriller; reading expert Barry Forshaw's analysis of the genre, I think it sounds like I'll love Joan Fleming and MM Kaye (I already adore The Far Pavilions), so I'm off to get stuck in.

I'd like to educate myself a little in noir fiction, though, and to expand my knowledge of classic detective fiction. So all you experts out there, take a look at Orion's list and tell me where to start. And if there's any classic crime out there which isn't on the list, perhaps we can point them in its direction …

Crime fictionThrillersFictionAlison Flood
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Writing naked: uncovering the truth of creativity?

Many singers maintain that creativity is best expressed in the buff. Maybe writers should take a fig leaf out of their book

Now that Naomi Wolf has given us "the truth about the vagina" in a revelatory volume hilariously reviewed by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker and Zoë Heller in the New York Review of Books, perhaps it's time to move beyond the narrow canyons of orgasm and address the desirable physical state for creativity in its widest sense.

Here, in the world of books – an awkward, secret society, sometimes lacking physical confidence – we might consider taking inspiration from Lady Gaga who has, apparently, recorded her latest album stark naked. Nor is she the first, by the way. Olivia Newton-John, Robbie Williams, Ian Gillan (Deep Purple) and the Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies have all performed in the nude, some of them regularly.

Authors generally get no more daring than bedclothes. Writers who have at one time or another worked in bed include Winston Churchill, Walter Scott and (suffering from TB) George Orwell.

In our own time, both AN Wilson and the biographer Michael Holroyd have advertised their preference for writing in bed, and I'm sure there are many others I haven't thought of. For the record, this blog is being written in bed, with books and cuttings scattered in front of me across the duvet.

Writing rituals, like all fetishes associated with creativity, are intrinsically interesting. Jonathan Franzen attracted a lot of attention when he described writing The Corrections in a state of primitive solitude. According to Time magazine, "Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop … Because Franzen believes you can't write serious fiction on a computer that's connected to the internet, he not only removed the Dell's wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port."

Then there are other considerations such day versus night, drunk versus sober, or champagne (Harold Pinter) versus benzedrine (Graham Greene) versus coffee (virtually everyone). Some writers are larks; others are owls. Mario Vargas Llosa has an elaborate psychological theory for choosing first light as the best time to write.

Günter Grass, Churchill (again) and Philip Roth have all written standing up, something I've never tried. I read somewhere that Ford Madox Ford dictated his masterpiece The Good Soldier to his mistress while pacing up and down the offices of his magazine, the English Review. Henry James and Barbara Cartland – that unlikely duo – used stenographers for all their late works.

Other writers have attached great importance to the significance of manuscript. William Golding used to say that he could feel a creative current surging down his writing arm. Ted Hughes once told me that he firmly believed the pen-holding hand is able to access otherwise inaccessible, and inspirational, parts of the cerebral cortex.

But no one, so far as I know, has ever described writing in the nude. Perhaps you can help?

Creative writingRobert McCrum
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