The Guardian's Blog, page 235

What are you reading today?

Our review list and what you have been reading including The Coward's Tale, Philip K Dick's Ubik and Titus Awakes by Maeve Gilmore

I start with a plea and a promise:

Hannah, can't someone else put these blogs up when you're not available. I get quite frustrated when there isn't a new one each week as it's a great blog for interesting comments and recommendations.
As it generally gets lots of comments compared to many other blogs on here, I think it's a shame it gets neglected if you're not around.

It is very nice to be missed but I'm really sorry to have caused any frustration SharonE6. I hereby promise to do my very best to ensure there's always a TLS thread open.

The last blog was up for two weeks because I was on holiday – see, I am keeping my promise – and there were many great ideas about books we should be giving site space to, including this posted by AggieH:

Even with the risk that a professional reviewer will disagree and will dislike it, I propose it as a subject for ATL review. I – and 16 others – have made our amateur case for The Coward's Tale in the reader-review area. In my opinion, it deserves a wider audience and a wider audience deserves it.

Thank you for the great tip AggieH. Claire A and I have copies of The Coward's Tale winging their way to us as I type, and when they arrive we will ponder the best best way to proceed.

Here's another great idea left by atrixo:
I was surprised that during the Olympics you didn't discuss bio's from different types of athletes. I'm reading David Millar's 'Racing through the dark' (a member of team gb, tour de france cyclist and an ex-doper), and I've ordered Chrissie Wellington's book 'A life without limits' about her meteoric rise to become Iron man world champion, also endurance tale 'The worst journey in the world'. It seems that an intellectual sports person is an oxymoron so when you stumble on well written accounts then it's worth lauding them, Also worth while, Scott Jurek 'Eat and Run', Christopher McDougall 'Born to Run', Haruki Murakami's running book. You missed a trick there.

The Paralympic Games are in full swing, so now seems the perfect time to do this as an Open thread. Great idea atrixo, thank you for posting and keep your eyes open for the blog.

Apart from The Big Book of Gross Stuff, Bart King's photo of which adorns the top of this blog, you have been reading everything from William Golding to Juan Rodolfo Wilcock. Here's a roundup of what you have been reading over the last fortnight.

pabloelbrujo:

I am currently reading Philip K Dick's Ubik - which I am really enjoying. Previous to that I read his The Man in the High Castle which I think is the best book I have read for a long, long time.
May I recommend Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl - which is one of my favourite books of all time and I rarely meet people who have heard of it.

Pecksie:

I'm reading Madeleine de Scudery's seventeenth-century bestseller, Clelie (sorry about the lack of accents, but this website doesn't seem to allow them). The original novel, published over the course of six years in 1654-1660, ran to 7300 pages (!), reduced in this edition to a more manageable 385.
As it was considered rather unseemly for a woman to seek publication, Madeleine's brother Georges allowed her to borrow his name, under which Clelie was first published. It immediately became a sensation.

WorcesterStorey:

I was amazed to see that nobody had written a review of Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles, which I've just finished, so here's mine:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/...

richardpierce:

I've just finished Titus Awakes by Maeve Gilmore, based on a fragment by Mervyn Peake. I loved all the Gormeghast books, and I found this to be a worthy 4th in the series. Its voice was somewhat lighter, I must admit, and it contained much hope beneath the apparent hopelessness of the human condition. Definitely worth a read.

And I join GetOver99 in congratulating R042 on completing his/her novel:

None as of yet, I've been writing more articles and working on ideas that never seem to get finished; I did, some time back, finally getting around to putting a novel in a similarly cynical tone out into the wild for better or worse. If you click on my username there's a link to my blog there.
I apologise to all others here for what is really shameless self-promotion.

Here's a selection of some of the books we'll be writing about this week, subject to last minute changes.

Non-Fiction

• A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths by Tony Fletcher
• What Are You Looking At? Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye by Will Gompertz
• Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra
• Straphanger: Saving Our Cities from the Automobile by Taras Grescoe
• An Almost English Life: Literary and Not so Literary Recollections by Miriam Gross
• How to Do Things with Fictions by Joshua Landy
• Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
• The Virtuous Citizen: Patriotism in a Multicultural Society by Tim Soutphommasane
• Vagina: A Cultural History: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf

Fiction

• The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman
• What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam
• The Way The World Works by Nicholson Baker
• Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
• England's Lane by Joseph Connolly
• The Angel Esmeraldo by Don De Lillo
• The Weight of a Human Heart by Ryan O'Neill
• Merival: A Man of His Time by Rose Tremain
• How the Trouble Started by Robert Williams

Children's

• Gods and Warriors by Michelle Paver

Hannah Freeman
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Choose September's Reading group book

After the unrepresentative and elitist choices of recent months, this time we'll go for bestsellers

The last two months on the Reading Group have been among my favourite so far. The discussions of André Gide and Alan Garner have been fascinating, intelligent and enlightening – and everything you could hope for in a reader-led book group. I have been slightly anxious, however, that these two months have perhaps led us too far from our revolutionary origins.

Alan Garner was not elected; the discussion of Boneland and his early masterpieces The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Moon of Gomrath was a diktat from yours truly. André Gide, meanwhile, is wonderful, but about as elitist as they come.

It's clearly time to hand power back to the people. It's time for a populist Reading Group. It's time to talk about bestsellers.

How we define bestsellers is up to you. Anything, basically, that has sold truckloads of copies dating from Homer right up to 50 Shades of Grey. We shan't be pernickity about figures, so long as it has the right feel. So no Keith Ridgway even if you think that justice will one day see his books on every school desk in the land, but lots of JK Rowling, Margaret Mitchell and (god help us) Jeffrey Archer. Don't forget too that writers like Gibbon, Dickens, Hemingway and the Brontës have sold plenty of books in their time … But I should stop. I'm setting terms and dropping hints already, when the choice is yours.

And I thought we'd go on votes this time around in line with the spirit of bestsellerness. (The sorting hat will come back into play next month. I'll choose something suitably autumnal…)

FictionSam Jordison
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Point Horror's grim fascination

It seems that many readers shared my morbid childhood enthusiasm for Christopher Pike

Copies of Christopher Pike novels were prime bargaining material at my school. I can clearly remember sitting in a maths lesson, reading whichever one I was most recently obsessed with under the desk, trying desperately to finish it before the end of the class because I'd promised I'd give it back to its owner (who hadn't read it and who was waiting crossly at the desk behind me).

I was reminded of my fixation by the comments on my Sweet Valley High piece last week: yes, lots of you were fans of the Wakefield twins too, but Point Horror and Pike were brought up again and again by readers. I did read Point Horror – The Lifeguard, The Baby Sitter, basically the RL Stine ones – but it was Pike who I loved. And I am racing back down memory lane at the thought of him.

I started out with Chain Letter, one of his earliest and surely the inspiration for all those dire I Know What You Did Last Summer films. It's about a group of friends who receive the same letter, signed "Your Caretaker", asking them to do something dreadful … all because of their nefarious deed one night in the California desert. "It was a peculiar letter, taller than it was long, with no return address. Alison wondered if it was a love letter. Whatever it was, whoever had sent it had lousy taste in colour. The off-purple envelope reminded her of spoiled meat." God, the adumbration! And the main character was called Alison! I was hooked.

Then there was Slumber Party – this cover is, seriously, amazingly evil – which involved a group of friends (these friends are always American high schoolers) who go away on a weekend skiing trip, only for people to start to go missing and for vengeance to be wreaked.

Looking at Pike's bibliography, I've read most of the early ones, right up until Monster (when I would have been 13, and must have progressed in my reading choices). They are all something of a mishmash in my mind now: there was usually a terrible act from the past which had to be accounted for, I think. And there would always be some horribly gruesome descriptions, a bit of teen romance – and usually someone who was meant to be dead that turned out to be alive.

Except in Remember Me, when she was actually dead. Check out this blog, which lays out Pike's various reusable plot devices: arson! Group secret! Unexpectedly related! I do remember really loving Gimme A Kiss, to do with a secret diary, revenge, and diving – read this fantastic review if you want to get to the bottom of a seriously screwed up storyline. Mr/Ms Like Pike blog also writes up my three absolute favourite Pikes: the Final Friends trilogy, The Party, The Dance and The Graduation. "Alice 'killed' 'herself', but Michael thinks someone else was behind it … Poor little Hispanic Maria falls to her paralysis …" etc. I was going to say that the slow-growing romance between Michael and Jessica in this trilogy really touched me, but I've just read through the summing-up of the storyline and it is utterly bonkers. If you can make head or tail of it, then I salute you.

I still want to reread it, though. Pike must have heralded the early rumblings of my love for horror. That continues today, and encompasses both the ridiculous (Shaun Hutson) and the sublime (Shirley Jackson). I think I'm going to track down some of his 80s paperbacks which I so loved back in the day, and which I always had to snaffle from friends or borrow from the library rather than own. I may also embark on a mission to find and interview the reclusive Mr Pike, aka Kevin Christopher McFadden, himself: what do you think? Would anyone be interested in reading it, if I can find him?

Children and teenagersHorrorAlison Flood
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Reader reviews roundup

Ian McEwan, Alan Garner and Sadie Jones are among the writers reviewed this week – along with a debut longlisted for the Guardian first book award

Hello everyone – we're back, after an extended summer break which had nothing to do with sitting idly in the sun, and everything to do with our attempts to bring the Edinburgh International Book Festival to an, erm, international audience.

But we've still been reading and appreciating your reviews – not least all those nominations for the Not the Booker prize. Earlier in August, no fewer than six readers raved about Kerry Hudson's Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, which has since gone on to make the longlist for the Guardian first book award. AlexPhillips was impressed by a novel that is "hard-hitting but in such a manner as to defy pity" – not an easy feat for a story that could so easily have collapsed into winsomeness, were it not for the "potty-mouth" of the central character, Janie, and Hudson's knack of capturing "the gritty, seedy side of life, where dreams are things that people who are better off can have". I'm looking forward to seeing what everybody makes of the other books on the First book award list.

This week's reviews include an account of Sadie Jones's The Uninvited Guests from stpauli which manages to dramatise her own changing opinion of the novel as she read it. The country pile heirs and graces held little charm at first, she writes, but as the plot darkened, stpauli found herself hooked. "Jones has taken the brave decision of making her characters largely unlikeable at the outset, but you won't regret sticking with them."

A summer in which publishers have been as capricious as the weather – witness the unusual flurry of big books in August – has kept some readers busy. NickVirk was disappointed by Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth, which he felt was "a decent read" but lacking "the sadistic edge that is quintessential in a McEwan novel".

But it's a classic that made TomConoboy don his thinking cap. His review of Alan Garner's The Owl Service manages to honour Garner's "genius" while exposing the flaws of an old favourite from an old favourite who has been taking a late turn in the sun this summer, following the publication of his new novel, Boneland.

And that's it for this week. If we've mentioned your review, mail me on claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you something excellent from our cupboards.

Claire Armitstead
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He Never Leaves the Seat Up not my work, says Pam Ayres

Paean to the perfect partner favoured by many a wedding reader is not by Ayres, the poet has revealed. So who did write it?

The worlds of poetry and weddings have been rocked to their twin foundations this week by a startling revelation: an oft-quoted, apparently much-loved verse that has been a mainstay of nuptials for years isn't by the nation's doyenne of doggerel, Pam Ayres.

Emotional readings of He Never Leaves the Seat Up have featured in countless weddings up and down the country; the poem is regularly recommended on those marriage websites that offer guidance on readings for the big day. And it is generally identified as the work of Ayres.

At first glance, it certainly seems to have the ring of Ayres, who shot to fame with her deadpan delivery of domestic poetry on the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1975 (like Britain's Got Talent, kids, but without Simon Cowell or hashtags). "He never leaves the seat up / Or wet towels upon the floor," it begins. "The toothpaste has the lid on / And he always shuts the door!". Shades of Yes I'll Marry You, My Dear, for sure.

But on her official Twitter feed this week, Ayres finally broke her silence and declared that this paean to the perfect partner was nothing to do with her. "Just to clarify," she wrote, "On the internet there is a poem popular at weddings about leaving the seat up. My name is on it, but I did not write it."

Those couples who based the biggest day of their lives around this ode ("He'll be more than just her husband / He'll also be her friend / And she'll be more than just his wife / She'll be his soulmate till the end") will no doubt be shaken by the revelations.

Take the wedding of Kim and Jeff, for example, where pal Bryan was filmed "reading Pam Ayres' He Never Leaves the Seat Up at our wedding on 28 October 2009 in Bali, Indonesia". Or MsChazzer who – while pointing out "personally, I can't stand Pam Ayres" – added: "My friend had another Pam Ayres one, something about leaving the toilet seat up? [She] wanted something non-soppy and amusing and it fitted the bill for her." And then Emma, who responded to Pam's announcement on Twitter: "I am sad to read this. I chose this as a reading at our wedding especially as I thought you had!" Even officialdom is left with egg on its face: this wedding guide put together by Darlington council as recently as last November suggests He Never Left the Seat Up as a reading, attributing it to Ayres.

With Ayres – whose autobiography, The Necessary Aptitude, came out in paperback this week – out of the running, the question remains: just who did write He Never Left the Seat Up?

PoetryWeddingsDavid Barnett
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Non-fiction roundup - reviews

Steven Poole on Follow the Money by Steve Boggan, Sin by Paula Fredriksen and Philosophy by Julian Baggini

Follow the Money: A Month in the Life of a Ten-Dollar Bill by Steve Boggan (Union Books, £10.99)

An Englishman journeys to the centre of America in order to follow a single $10 bill around the country for 30 days. As it passes from one hand to another, he encounters redneck racists, local rock stars, and a father and daughter who like to shoot deer with bows and arrows. He muses delicately on rural flight and the recession, while drinking copiously and making firm friends with nearly everyone he meets.

A stunt travelogue of this sort depends heavily on style; luckily, Boggan has constructed a hugely endearing narrative personality. One morning after is described thus: "I felt like a computer booting up in the Arctic." Occasionally the prose descends into touristy vagueness, but mostly his raconteurship has you chuckling as the author ill-advisedly microwaves his underwear, delightedly discovers a "drive-thru bottle shop", and generally behaves, in refreshing contrast to the exhausting get-up-and-go of the travel genre, with a lovably shambolic lassitude. "It was 4.10. I had set out my clothes to dry, taken a walk, endured a steam bath and lain down for a nap. That was a full day by anyone's standards." I don't know how he crammed it all in.

Sin: The Early History of an Idea by Paula Fredriksen (Princeton, £16.95)

The earnestly nice evangelicals Steve Boggan meets at one point might well have taken a dim view of his escapades in other places. But "sin" has meant different things in the past. This elegant monograph traces "dramatic mutations" in the concept from Jesus to Augustine, along with changing ideas about time, the cosmos, the devil, divine justice, and the human body. (According to one early theologian, Jesus "ate and drank in a special way, without evacuating food".)

Fredriksen recomplicates the relationship between early Christianity and Judaism, and offers sharp close readings of the Gospels, the Gnostics et al. She draws out the profound differences between Augustine (who created an "inscrutable and angry god") and Origen (for whom God loves even "the rational soul of Satan"); and she also emphasises the apparent paradox that "ancient monotheism" allowed for many gods beneath the chief divinity – it "addressed the issue of heaven's architecture, not its absolute population". So some early thinkers considered the God of Genesis, the mere "author of matter", to be a lower being than "the supreme deity of pagan philosophy". Still, authoring matter isn't something to be sniffed at as far as a day's labour goes.

Philosophy: All That Matters by Julian Baggini (Hodder, £7.99)

Pagan philosophy has had its moments too. Where most popular overviews of philosophy take the form of a historical narrative with approachable splashes of biographical colour, Baggini's book is thematically organised, plunging the reader rapidly into the analysis of truth and reality, from Aristotle and Plato to Locke, Kant, Ryle and Wittgenstein; and thence to metaphysics (the study of "the fundamental nature of reality", including causation and free will), religion, the self, aesthetics, political philosophy and ethics.

Baggini is an efficient (and amiably opinionated) sketcher of the major ideas, and names Life of Brian as one of his recommended "philosophical films" in a playful set of appendices. The book usefully praises "the intellectual virtues of rigour, subtlety and mitigated scepticism", and offers a particularly incisive defence of "abstract" thought – an adjective normally used these days as a term of abuse. Thinking abstractly can be a hard day's work too, or so I'm told.

PhilosophyReligionTravel writingSteven Poole
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Overlooked classics: Nothing But Blue Skies by Thomas McGuane

McGuane brings us a disappointed anti-hero along with some very good jokes, in the unfamiliar territory of Montana

When someone comes to the end of their marriage and describes it as an "anti-synergistic situation" your first assumption is probably not that they're a Montana cattle rancher with a habit of getting into bar brawls. But that is exactly what Frank Copenhaver, the midlife crisis-stricken anti-hero of Thomas McGuane's eighth novel, is. Over the course of his a 40-plus year career, McGuane has consistently confounded expectations of what an outdoorsy, western novel should be. In Montana, where he's lived on his own ranch since the late 1960s after moving from his native Michigan, he's surrounded by schmaltzy, whimsical fiction writers who mythologise the west: novelists who, in his own words, would never write "a scene where somebody was delivering a pizza". His rugged protagonists are more angst-ridden and prone to overthinking – beefier, slightly-less-wise-cracking Woody Allens who often happen to drive pick-ups. "It's not my job to put a smile on your face; that's the job of your bartender or pharmacist," he told the Guardian in 2007. If so, he's not quite doing his job right: Nothing But Blue Skies will often raise an (admittedly slightly uneasy) grin. How can it not, when it features a character who has made the mistake of "marrying three duck hunters in a row", or such wisecracks as "Shorty didn't need to shave because the cat could lick his beard off"?

When Nothing But Blue Skies opens, Copenhaver has broken up with his wife, Gracie, and "something has come completely loose inside". When he thinks about her potential new lover, it feels to him like seeing "a drooling new face at Mount Rushmore". He consoles himself by spying on her best friend from a tree as she gets undressed, then sleeping with her. But the initial freedom that comes from the split soon turns into a consuming, directionless emptiness. His business collapses, and he starts to feel the fear of spending his life alone, the full realisation that perhaps he's no longer meant to be someone's. "Loneliness – its not like other things that strengthen you," writes McGuane. "Loneliness makes you weaker, makes you worse. I'm guessing enough of it makes you cruel."

McGuane's own background contains a fair share of carousing, particularly alongside his friend Jim Harrison during the 70s, when he wrote screenplays (most infamously The Missouri Breaks, starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson) and got married to Margot Kidder (his second marriage of three). And Frank, similarly, has spent time in California in his youth, where "everyone seemed surrounded by quotations". Back then, his father wrote him off as a drunken sports lecher, but, between the numerous erections he experiences during Nothing But Blue Skies and makes little effort to conceal, Frank is prone to strange bouts of sensitivity, unexpected in an alpha male outdoorsman. He clashes with the cowboys who work for him, one of whom runs over his beloved dog ("Dog ain't got no business under a tyre," is the employee's shrugging response) and another one of whom beats his wife and is memorably described as "as kind to cows as he was unreasonable with people". Frank is a man of simple desires – fishing, sex – but he's also thoughtful and introspective: much more so than the men who surround him and offer such nuggets of life advice as "the lady doesn't marry the carpenter unless he's got a second home in Santa Monica or a two foot dick".

Nothing But Blue Skies is not a novel that reads at pace. Some of its slapstick comic scenes – the bar brawl, a crash involving a forklift log skidder – are almost worthy of the brilliant Richard Russo, and it tends to luxuriate in them and in its setting, but you wouldn't quite call it a "hangout book": it's a little too tinged with despair for that. It was written in the early 1990s, just as the 1960s generation were coming to terms with the fact that they weren't going to live forever, and what seems to be really getting to Frank, as much as the collapse of his own marriage, is what he calls "the escalating boredom of life in the monoculture". He laments the new construction surrounding him, the music of his daughter's generation, listens to old Neil Young songs, wonders where the tone of apocalypse within them went and mourns the loss of the highs that drugs gave him in the early 70s. These are familiar themes now, but it's fascinating to witness them being voiced by a character who's not, say, a bohemian in Manhattan or a screenwriter in California, and to watch them being played out against a stunning big-skied backdrop: a place whose "rhythmic hills" betray "sea floor origins". As much as it confounds the tradition of western novels, Nothing But Blue Skies probably confounds the tradition of aging baby boomer novels even more.

FictionTom Cox
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Are Amazon reader reviews killing off the critic?

News that a commercial operation has been rigging customer endorsements is a reminder of the virtues of professional critics

For as long as book reviews have been published, writers have argued that book reviewing itself is in a state of crisis – a pointless exercise, a waste of time. In 1846 Edgar Allen Poe called reviews nothing but a "tissue of flatteries". Virginia Woolf worried that the reader was none the wiser because "the clash of completely contradictory opinions cancel each other out". According to Elizabeth Hardwick in 1959, "sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomised, accommodation reigns … For sheer information, a somewhat expanded publisher's list would do just as well as a good many of the reviews that appear weekly." And it's even more fashionable now to be "against reviews"..

Today, the crisis takes a different form: the challenge of the web; the decline of the critic – you know the deal. More narrowly, there's Amazon, and its anonymous, unmarshalled reviews. There have been numerous flare-ups about these – the self-reviewing, the hate-reviewing, the downright-unreadable-reviewing, and so on. The latest unholy behaviour to come to light is of authors paying for positive reviews. As the New York Times has recounted, and Salon has discussed, one Todd Rutherford set up a now-defunct operation called GettingBookReviews.com that would, for a fee, ensure the publication of dozens of five-star consumer responses to a submitted book. It filled his pockets with cash, and, in at least one case it seems to have worked, helping to create an ebook bestseller out of a self-published novelist.

So: are Amazon et al, with their bought-and-paid-for notices, killing off the book review? Or are they rather making the traditional, commissioned book review more important than ever?

The unsavoury Amazon stuff notwithstanding, no one is about to write off the whole business of reader-reviews. They are, in any case, unstoppable, and the sheer weight of numbers suggests that only a tiny fraction of them can be corrupted. Undeniably, they represent the latest stimulating chapter in the rather agonised history of book reviewing (read Orwell on the subject, and Edmund Wilson, and Cyril Connolly, and James Wood …) The ones most to be trusted, however, are perhaps more likely to be found on smaller, more specialised sites than Amazon – Goodreads and Librarything, for example (and hopefully among the Guardian's reader reviews too). Yes, online anonymity will always raise problems, and no one can ensure, with this kind of reviewing, that what the New York Times calls "the sacred arm's-length relationship between reviewer and author" is being preserved. But there are book communities and book communities, and it surely pays to choose carefully where you read and write your reviews.

But it also seems to me that the Amazon scandals reaffirm the importance of the much-maligned traditional book review. Reviews in, say, newspaper books sections (I'm biased) are vital in offering a properly critical (often negative) opinion of new books: a necessary accompaniment to (also important) articles in the same sections that simply showcase books, or report interviews with authors: these can all too easily become elegant exercises in PR. The book reviewers are chosen by commissioning editors, they don't choose themselves, and their judgments, if the editor is doing his job properly, must be properly backed up. Yes, there's only one wise voice rather than the wisdom of the crowd, but these critics are convincing, independent, entertaining and trustworthy enough that, time and again, they are paid to offer their opinion. And not in the way that Todd Rutherford was paid, by the authors of the books themselves.

Literary criticismAmazon.comInternetE-commercePaul Laity
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Browsing the best 'book nooks'

Inspired by Little Women, one of my favourite pastimes as a child was finding the perfect reading hideaway. The dream hasn't died

I am reminded of my devotion to Jo March and of how it led to me attempting to read while sitting in a tree by Random House's collection of the best "book nooks" for children. Take a look at the link: I love the old bath filled with cushions and books, and would have given anything for my own personal reading wigwam when I was younger.

Over at Abebooks, Beth Carswell remembers reading in her sister's closet as a child, as well as "building forts and sequestering myself in a small cell of sofa cushions and blankets". I went through a period, too, when I'd lie under my bed with a collection of books – I'd drag my lamp under there, and a pillow, and it became my own secret reading den, complete with scribbles about the various injustices which had been done to me by my family on the planks above me.

It was certainly safer than my short-lived experiment into reading up a tree. Louisa May Alcott made it sound so possible – "Jo spent the morning on the river with Laurie and the afternoon reading and crying over The Wide, Wide World, up in the apple tree" – but believe me, it isn't at all comfortable. I tried it in our own apple tree, and lasted about 10 minutes – and those were spent more imagining myself the heroine of Little Women, than actually reading.

It was easier to recreate another of Jo's reading nooks: "Running up, Meg found her sister eating apples and crying over the Heir of Redclyffe, wrapped up in a comforter on an old three-legged sofa by the sunny window. This was Jo's favourite refuge, and here she loved to retire with half a dozen russets and a nice book, to enjoy the quiet and the society of a pet rat who lived nearby and didn't mind her a particle. As Meg appeared, Scrabble whisked into his hole. Jo shook the tears off her cheeks and waited to hear the news." Crunching through apples while wrapped in a blanket in the sunshine: that I could and would do frequently.

These days, I tend to do my reading lying on my bed, or on the sofa. Or, when it gets colder, sitting on the floor with my back to the radiator. I have fewer endless afternoons to devote to reading – but if I did, then a window seat, a cushion-strewn trampoline or a tent hung from a tree all look like lots of fun. How about you? Am I alone in hiding under the bed as a child? And what's your perfect spot these days?

Children and teenagersAlison Flood
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How Fighting Fantasy beat traditional games

Ian Livingstone explains how his roleplaying gamebooks have become steadily more central to the culture

When I was 10 I wanted, for a brief period, to be a professional Fighting Fantasy player. I was so fascinated with the now-iconic green-jacketed gamebooks, emblazoned with the legend "Thrilling fantasy adventures in which YOU are the hero!", that I hatched a plan to make playing them my job as a grown-up. The market for professional gamebook players never materialised, but fantasy gaming has become big business. If I'd chosen to hit the Magic the Gathering pro tour, or joined a videogame clan I might have stood a better chance.

What made Fighting Fantasy so addictive for my 10-year-old self, and for a generation of geeks around my age, was the combination of two things we love with a passion: stories and games. I'm fascinated by the way in which the massive growth of gaming in the 30 years since Fighting Fantasy was first published has changed how we think about stories – so I was very lucky to grab some time with one of gaming's most influential figures, Ian Livingstone, co-creator of Fighting Fantasy, founder of Games Workshop and lifetime president of Eidos Interactive, the company behind Lara Croft and Tomb Raider.

"I started playing games as a child and never stopped," Ian says when asked about his own passion for games, which started with classics like Monopoly and chess, then war games and board games before he discovered Dungeons & Dragons in his 20s. "For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to turn my passion for playing games into a business of making them."

It was Dungeons & Dragons that helped fulfil that ambition. Games Workshop purchased the UK rights to the cult role-playing game in 1975, which established the company's mission to make progressive games for core gamers, and led in turn to the immense success of the Warhammer franchise in the 1980s. Dungeons & Dragons established an entirely new paradigm for gaming, one that brought story and character into games as never before. "In many ways paper and pencil role-playing creates a much deeper gaming experience than many video games," Ian argues. "The narrative is made up as the game is played out rather than along a predetermined arc written by the games designer. This unstructured format of role-playing on the big screen of the imagination can't be bettered in terms of unique user experience."

It was on the big screen of the reader's imagination that the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks played out. Ian and co-creator Steve Jackson wrote the books in a second-person present style, with branching story narratives and a dice-based game system bolted on. "Fighting Fantasy gamebooks empower the reader, who felt the anxiety or joy of being fantasy heroes themselves – they lived or died by their decisions. And if at first you don't succeed, try and try again." And a lot of people did exactly that: more than 17m Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were sold, in 28 languages. And Fighting Fantasy is still going strong, with Chinese translations launched very recently.

"There are thousands of traditional books which are of course brilliantly written and have incredibly exciting storylines and thought-provoking philosophies," Ian continues, as we talk about the differences between traditional novels and interactive fiction of the kind pioneered in Fighting Fantasy. "Yet traditional books have a linear storyline and sometimes a hero which the reader may or may not relate to." The appeal of a gamebook then is that it allows the reader to be at the absolute centre of the story. The idea of a thrilling fantasy adventure where YOU are the hero is more than just a clever marketing line, it's central to the success of Fighting Fantasy and a very significant part of how games have changed stories.

The techniques Fighting Fantasy employed to put you at the heart of the story became standard in the burgeoning videogame industry. "In the early days of computer and videogames there simply wasn't enough available memory to include a compelling story, let alone graphics, speech and music. But today that's all changed, and storytelling has become an important and integral part of a videogame." Graphics are near-photo-realistic, characters more believable, and professional writers are transforming the experience of story-led games such as Deus Ex and Mass Effect. But first person action and branching story narratives are still the standard ways of telling stories.

Are we becoming a game-culture? Fighting Fantasy gave a generation of readers a first taste of what games can bring to stories, and the videogaming industry has gone on to take gaming from the parlour and make it an absolutely central part of contemporary life. Gamification has become the trend of the day in the world of marketing, with companies such as Zynga and their game Farmville exploiting our hunger for games to hold our attention and sell us products. In her super-insightful TED talk of 2010, game designer and academic Jane McGonigal asked if gaming could help make a better world, arguing that an estimated 1.5 billion "virtuoso" gamers represent a massive untapped resource of expert problem solvers just waiting to … solve all the world's problems! Games put us at the heart of the story, in a world where very often we feel far out on the edge.

That was once the traditional role of novels as well, but increasingly stories are also reflecting our hunger for games. Game of Thrones charts the power struggles between warring families in a medieval fantasy world, with each new chapter like a new move on the chessboard of Westeros. The Hunger Games has cashed in on our thirst for competition and its consequences in our daily lives. Perhaps we're becoming aware that in a world where everyone is the hero of their own story, the inevitable outcome is an ever more competitive society, and we demand books and films that reflect this reality.

I finish my conversation with Ian Livingstone by asking him the Desert Island Discs question for gamers; if he was stuck in the grim far future of Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 franchise, which game would he take to keep himself entertained? The writer of Fighting Fantasy has more than 1,000 boardgames and thousands more videogames, but there's only one choice for a true gamer. "I would probably play chess because it is the ultimate pure game, and I will always be able to improve no matter how long the war goes on."

FantasyGame cultureGamesGame of ThronesDamien Walter
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