The Guardian's Blog, page 62

Battling bias on the shop floor: how bookstores can support diversity

A bookseller explains how Kamila Shamsie’s call for gender equality in the industry, and the fiery debate it provoked, could lead to greater diversity all around

Kamila Shamsie calling for a year of publishing only women has certainly unleashed a storm. Some disagree that gender bias exists, while others would rather celebrate the commercial success of some female authors. A couple of publishers have even taken Shamsie at her word.

Most people agree that this is a complex issue, with so many levels during the publishing process at which bias can be perpetuated that it is impossible to pinpoint why and how many female writers struggle for recognition against their male counterparts. But one vitally important aspect of this debate seems to have been overlooked: books, once published, must be sold, and while many transactions are conducted online, many others continue to occur in old-fashioned brick-and-mortar shops. Customers don’t just buy what they’ve read about, they come in to browse, to find out what’s available, or to see what their local booksellers have enjoyed.

Related: Kamila Shamsie: let’s have a year of publishing only women – a provocation

Related: No men allowed: publisher accepts novelist's 'year of women' challenge

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Poem of the week: (Houdini in Karis) by Tua Forsström

In this piece from the Finnish-Swedish poet’s new collection, Houdini is an escape artist who longs for human connection

I went to the basement on the afternoon of the
nineteenth of August and made a carpet from
galvanised three-inch nails and ice-green shards of
bottles I had thrown on the stone floor.
The audience roars when on the carpet I slowly stretch out
my wonderful back.
I can break out of all the strongboxes there have ever been.
I walk with light steps in my star-strewn slippers.
Everyone asks about my age and that the wounds don’t bleed.
I give no interviews and think in the morning
and the evening when I fall asleep about one thing. That one goes
up to someone and means something. That one will stay.
I wanted to change my life! Sometimes I think
I glimpse a beloved figure at the bus stop,
like a movement only, there was often someone else in a
dark blue jacket and yet we vanish in the glitter.

Related: Poem of the week: The snow whirls over the courtyard's roses by Tua Forsström

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Readers' favourite quotes in Game of Thrones books revealed

Amazon has revealed the passages from George RR Martin’s saga that readers have highlighted the most on e-readers – with Tyrion Lannister the most quotable character. But what is your favourite line from the books?

To coincide with the Game of Thrones season finale, Amazon.co.uk has revealed the 10 most highlighted passages from George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the book saga that inspires the TV show. House Lannister is the most featured family, with Tyrion Lannister the mouthpiece for four of the 10 quotes.

Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.” – Tyrion Lannister

A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.” – Ned Stark

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.” – Tyrion Lannister

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” – Cersei Lannister

They say night’s beauties fade at dawn, and the children of wine are oft disowned in the morning light.” – Barristan Selmy

We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.” – Aemon Targaryen

If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.” – Ned Stark

Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.” – Tyrion Lannister

Let them see that their words can cut you, and you’ll never be free of the mockery. If they want to give you a name, take it, make it your own. Then they can’t hurt you with it any more.” – Tyrion Lannister

The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. “They never are.” – Jorah Mormont and Daenerys Tagaryen

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Reading American cities: books about Honolulu

The most un-American of all American cities is bathed in literary culture. Anisse Gross investigates Hawaiian detective novels and alerts us to stories of Pearl Harbor, examines Hawaii’s oral tradition and sifts through the many writers who spent time on its sands – from marathon correspondent Hunter S Thompson to novice surfer Mark Twain

What are your favourite Honolulu books? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll feature a selection in an upcoming readers’ list

Honolulu. The most un-American of all American cities. Honolulu is both the westernmost and southernmost major American city and the most remote city in the world – its geography the first act of distancing itself from the United States. The city does not think of itself as American, and conversely, when thinking of American cities, no one thinks of Honolulu.

Roughly translating to “calm port”, Honolulu is the only American city with a royal palace, a reminder of the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, subsequent annexation and eventual American statehood in 1959, the same year James Michener published his epic historical saga Hawaii, a 937-page chronicle of the island which goes all the way back to the lava flow which gave the island birth.

The cross-section of Pacific and Asian cultures that arrived brought to Hawaii a mix of races, food and languages

Trouble in paradise is an evergreen theme. Behind the wafting scent of plumerias is the shadow city tourists never see

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YOLO Juliet. srsly Hamlet. Macbeth #killingit. Shakespeare goes textspeak

A new series of books for younger readers gives some of the bard’s greatest plays the 21st-century textspeak treatment. If you have FOMO, read on …

Related: Mind your slanguage, and don't be an erk. YOLO | Mind your language

Shakespeare took Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland and refashioned them into stories fit for the theatre – the most popular format of his time – transforming history into a rose that “might never die”.

“I read Romeo and Juliet when I was a freshman in high school about 5 years ago. Being that young it was kind of hard trying to read through and understand everything because it was in old english, but now I’m pretty clear on what the story is all about. Its a tragic love story and I loved it even though the ending was sad.”

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Birthday boys: how an accident of history links Dante and Yeats

Born almost exactly 600 years apart, these two great poets find themselves woven into 21st-century culture in very different ways

Dante Alighieri and WB Yeats were born almost exactly 600 years apart, on 13 June 1865 and around late May or early June 1265. If Dante750 and Yeats2015, their anniversary organisations, were able to arrange a joint birthday event for their shades, the pair might reflect on how strange – and strangely vigorous – their legacies have become in recent years. Both poets, stern seers who come together in the forbidding “familiar compound ghost” of a “dead master” TS Eliot meets in “Little Gidding”, would have cast a cold, admonitory eye on the last half-century. Yet somehow their respective oeuvres have proved remarkably adaptable to it, as exemplified by the current “selfie-con-Dante” phenomenon (cut-outs for posing with him have been placed at Italian tourist sites), the sight of Mad Men’s Don Draper holidaying with the Inferno on his lap, or a vast global audience hearing Yeats’s words being read out when No Country for Old Men won four Oscars including Best Picture.

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New Fifty Shades of Grey book stolen ahead of publication

A manuscript of Grey, EL James’s tale of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele told from the male perspective, has gone missing, with publishers fearing piracy and leaks

Fifty Shades of Grey author EL James’s forthcoming Grey, the story of the relationship between Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele told from his rather than her perspective – “Unlike any woman he has known before, shy, unworldly Ana seems to see right through him – past the business prodigy and the penthouse lifestyle to Christian’s cold, wounded heart” – is sitting pretty at the top of Amazon’s charts this morning, just over a week before its release.

But it turns out that one reader couldn’t wait until 18 June to get their hands on it: the Daily Mail reports that a manuscript was found to be missing yesterday, and “it is feared thieves may be planning to release pirated versions of the novel, or sell extracts to media outlets”.

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Paulo Coelho tells readers: buy my book after you've read it – if you liked it

The Brazilian author is offering two of his works for free and asks readers to pay only if they enjoy them. ‘This idea does not harm the business,’ he says

In a time of frantic change in the publishing world, it seems as though new ways of reading, buying and selling books are emerging every week. The latest to play with the paradigm is the canny Paulo Coelho, who this week made two of his books available online. In what he calls a “reverse method of bookselling”, the bestselling Brazilian author suggests that readers pay up only if they enjoy what they’ve read.

Coelho is offering readers the English version of his 1997 non-fiction book The Manual of the Warrior of Light and the Portuguese version of his novel Brida. The former, which compiles teachings, philosophical thoughts and stories, can be found on his profile on the digital publishing house Inkitt, as well as on his own blog, where it can be downloaded as an ebook. He also promises to do the same for more editions of his books in Portuguese and in Spanish.

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Mr Ripley's great talent? Making us like a killer and his crimes

The Reading group verdict is in: Patricia Highsmith’s amoral protagonist in The Talented Mr Ripley offers a queasy kind of entertainment – and an armchair psychologist’s perfect case study

“I couldn’t make an interesting story out of some morons,” said Patricia Highsmith in 1981. She explained: “The murderers that one reads about in the newspaper are, half the time, mentally deficient in some way, or simply callous. There are young boys, for instance, who pretend to be delivering, or who may help an old lady carrying her groceries home, and then hit her on the head when she invites them in for tea and rob her. These are forever stupid people, but they exist. Many murderers are like that, and they don’t interest me enough to write a book about them.”

Ripley, however, is a different case. He, Highsmith says, is “reasonably intelligent” and, crucially, amoral. “I suppose I find it an interesting contrast to stereotyped morality, which is very frequently hypocritical and phony. I also think that to mock lip-service morality and to have a character amoral, such as Ripley, is entertaining. I think people are entertained by reading such stories.”

“He is a perfect example of the narcissistic personality disorder. Swinging between the poles of excessive self-criticism and grandiosity, easily to take offence and vicious in retaliation – all to make up for a lack of core self.”

“We are subtly introduced to the two overriding themes of the antisocial personality disorder (still labelled by many professional authorities “psychopathy” and “sociopathy”): an overwhelming dysphoria and an even more overweening drive to assuage this angst by belonging.”

“I would perform an MRI, complete blood work … to rule out comorbidities, as well as run a toxicology screening, STD/HIV screening … and MMPI (personality test) to evaluate the extremities of his personality and discover if other fluctuations other than his ASPD [antisocial personality disorder] could be treated with medication or effective psychotherapeutic techniques.”

Related: Tom Ripley, the likable psychopath

“His actions are an extreme response to emotions all of us recognise: the sense that there is a better life being lived by somebody else, somewhere else, someone not trapped inside the hollow existence in which we find ourselves. It’s one of the things which makes us human. We’ve all been Tom Ripley, just as we’ve all known a Dickie Greenleaf, the man who has everything, whose attention makes us feel special. We’ve all basked in the sunshine of that attention and felt the chill of losing it.”

“I can think of only one slight closeness, and that is that an imaginative writer is very freewheeling; he has to forget about his personal morals, especially if he is writing about criminals. He has to feel anything is possible. But I don’t understand why an artist should have any criminal tendencies. The artist may simply have an ability to understand …”

“I get impatient with a certain hidebound morality. Some of the things one hears in church, and certain so-called laws that nobody practices. Nobody can practice them, and it is even sick to try … Murder, to me, is a mysterious thing. I feel I do not understand it, really. I try to imagine it, of course, but I think it is the worst crime. That is why I write so much about it; I am interested in guilt. I think there is nothing worse than murder, and that there is something mysterious about it, but that isn’t to say it is desirable for any reason. To me, in fact, it is the opposite of freedom, if one has any conscience at all.”

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Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Scroll down for our favourite literary links Read more Tips, Links and Suggestions blogs

Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

EnidColeslaw_ shared this reflection on how difficult it is for many of us to get rid of material posessions – and linked it to her recent read:

For a few years now I have been trying to let go of my material possessions. I give away clothes and every paper book I’ve read goes to a neighbourhood association that collects books. My tiny bedroom is still stuffed to the gills with books, vinyls, comics, clothes, but at the end of the day, I wonder how I would react if all of this disappeared, for example if my apartment burned down. Would I be hysterically crying? I hope not, yet I don’t think I am ready to, one day, leave all of that behind me. I care a little bit too much, for the time being. Heidi Julavits does a whole lot. She has an attachment to certain objects that often verges on obsession. It’s one of the main themes of her recent memoir The Folded Clock, in which every entry begins like a diary: “Today, I”. She lives in Maine part of the year and a previous tenant of her house left a tap handle inside the wall. Out of superstition she carries it in her handbag every day, and draws it every day before beginning to work. It’s hers now, but she feels it never really belongs to her.

I’m an English Literature student and I enjoy my course reading, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nice when term is over and I can finally read what I want. I need to finish this wonderful feminist examination of the concept of virginity, and our obsession with it, in the next three days while I still have access to my uni library! Alongside this, I’m reading some Angela Carter and finishing off Austerity by Kerry-Anne Mendoza. My summer reading list keeps growing and growing, but luckily my reading speed is at a good pace after my first year at university.

It is quite unusual and remarkable in that the first half of the book addresses the author’s struggle with how a novel about a massacre should be written. [...] I found this part in equal parts compelling and frustrating. How wonderful to get into the mind of the author on something so profound, but the way that the writing obscured the actual plot made it a little confusing. However, when she starts writing the story itself, from the different perspectives of the villagers, from opposing sides, in the format of letters and speeches and catalogues of dismembered bodies, the experiment starts to pay off. I guess it’s true, when your novel is about an atrocity, half of the struggle is how you will write about it, so I understand its significance here. However, as an overall piece of work, it resonated less with me for that precise reason. Sometimes we don’t need to know about the author’s mechanics.

I’m about two thirds through and had the strange experience of going from being completely confused to utterly captivated without realising when the change happened.

I find myself rereading back up the pages as the non linear impressionist narrative means I’m not always appreciating the incredible sentences for their phrasing. I’ve never read Joyce but I don’t think i’ve ever read a better prose stylist in English than William Faulkner.

As part of a reading challenge that I set myself, I read Time Reborn by Lee Smolin. I think I will need to re-read it several times to really get it, but I liked it. Smolin writes well, makes very interesting arguments, and explains several concepts in a new way. He also seems to have some ideas and doubts that I have had, so I am quite sympathetic to his view.

However, as much as I liked his arguments I did not find them entirely convincing, mostly because he appears to dismiss the idea of an observer-dependent reality which seems a shame. He also doesn’t make much case for how the viewpoint he proposes makes a blind bit of difference to anyone who is not a cosmologist. This also seems a shame because I think that what people believe about time has some very subtle but pervasive effects on their lives, from their anxiety levels to how they justify their behaviour toward others.

Very fine and economical use of language and evoked the central character’s turmoil superbly – his hesitant steps towards understanding the African predicament during the colonial period, his sense of family and his place within that unit versus his growing need for love and new experiences beyond his very enclosed world. There are odd moments when the authorial presence is almost too imposing and overwhelms the characters – but the expression is so thoughtful and insightful that my connection with them remains right up to the sombre conclusion.

Life is short, “The Recognitions” is long. (And difficult, I’m told.) I’ve read “Moby-Dick.” I’ve read Carlyle’s “The French Revolution.” I might even read that again, at some point. But I’ll be dead one day, and you can bounce copies of “Infinite Jest” off my sinking coffin. Nobody reads everything.

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