Diary Archive

Penelope Fletcher Le Masson comes from “an island off an island off Vancouver”. She seems to have been born with a dedication to selling books: before her twentieth birthday, she’d persuaded her father to refit an old henhouse as a moveable bookstore, a brightly painted gyspy caravan which she stocked with second-hand books and set up near the only other store on the island. “But don’t write that, will you?” she asks, blushing. I hope she lets me: she may be shy about her youthful entrepreneurship, but there’s still a bookstore on the Hornby Island site today (though the henhouse is gone), and in Paris, half a planet away, she now runs one of the nicest bookshops I’ve ever visited. (more…)

A few months ago, I wrote several posts reviewing publishers’ websites. Essentially, the same problems arose again and again: the inability to target a specific market, poor search engine optimisation, a lack of attention to the user experience, a lack of original content.

I didn’t run the series for long because the repetitiveness made it boring to write, and I’m sure it wasn’t any more fun to read. However, I looked at many more sites than I wrote about, and I came to some general conclusions that may be worth sharing. (more…)

Another year, another Booker. After last year’s fun but not particularly informative blog roundup, I thought I’d take another crack at looking at what bloggers have said so far about the Booker longlist. (For my own part, I own about five of these, but have read none of them. Yet.)

Here goes… (more…)

A conversation this morning with RobAroundBooks on Twitter reminded me of a forgotten but much-loved imprint, Rebel Inc. Classics. I was surprised that people hadn’t heard of them, but looking around, it does seem that they’ve been pretty effectively erased from the publishing landscape. With some of their titles fetching (or at least, asking) high prices on eBay, they probably aren’t even that easy to find in the secondhand shops anymore. (more…)

A while ago I was staying at Il Loggiato in Bagno Vignoni in Siena. It’s a lovely little place in a tiny (two dozen buildings?) spa town on the side of a hill. The accommodation was great, and the two sisters who run it put a lot of work into making a friendly, informal atmosphere; there’s a tray of fresh cakes and wine in the lounge for the guests to help themselves, and there was also a little stack of free books. Naturally, I helped myself liberally to all three, but here I’ll concern myself with the books. (more…)

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been dedicating odd hours to not reading Brothers, the new novel by Chinese author Yu Hua.

It started a few months ago, round about the time that we had all that fuss about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. That book was getting a lot of coverage, and I was thinking of getting hold of a copy and reviewing it myself, but it was an awfully big book, and it was being very ably reviewed elsewhere. Still, I liked the idea of grappling with a big, translated monster, and so I was intrigued when I heard about the imminent arrival of Yu Hua’s Brothers. (more…)

A little while ago, I finally managed to visit Rome’s Porta Portese market. The main stretch is comprised of an infinite number of stalls that sell a depressingly finite range of stock; like a British high street, it seems to be the same half-dozen stores repeating themselves as far as the eye can see. The more interesting, more unique, stalls are in the side streets, where it’s more like a car boot sale. Here, on a table with perhaps a dozen English-language paperbacks, I came across a couple of books of a type I hadn’t seen before.

They were paperback novels, printed wide rather than tall, with two columns to each page. Maybe six titles in all; I bought Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and a volume containing Typhoon and The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. Perhaps American readers of this blog will be familiar with these editions, but the Brits I’ve spoken to haven’t seen anything like them (more…)

While book sites and blogs may be wary of turning their attention too directly towards mere television, it’s interesting how often conversation in the smoky, after hours underworld of the comments section turns to favourite series. Here, The Fiction Desk takes a look at some of the television programs most often cited and loved by the acolytes of the printed page. (more…)

I’m not usually a big fan of repackaging books—it tends to happen a lot these days, and I think the noise can distract from new fiction. However, there are exceptions: I liked the recent (and ongoing) series of Atlantic Crime Classics, and the new Magnum Collection from Penguin, published today, also seems to be a good-looking little set. (more…)

I don’t care much either way about the plot of The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s recently announced follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, but I bet the travel industry does. (more…)

I’ve been revisiting the Atlantic Crime Classics range lately, taking a look at their February title, a new edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories, collected under the title of the first and most famous tale, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. (more…)

While I was reading The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, I came across the following passage in which Conan Doyle described his reasons behind moving Sherlock Holmes from the original format of serialised novels into self-contained short stories—a move he credits with at least part of the detective’s subsequent success: (more…)

I have a theory that I revisit once in a while, but don’t often share with others because I suspect it’s largely nonsense. It goes something like this: Each of the main types of genre fiction, e.g. crime, romance, science fiction, etc. in some ways represent a distillation of one element of the writer’s art. So, for example, romance concentrates on character motivation, the drives of the separate characters and how they might conflict or be aligned. Fantasy—when it’s done well—might be said to look at the description of society and social setting. Crime fiction, following this theory, is all about the mechanics of story and plot exposition. After all, crime stories are often (although certainly not always) quite literally about the process of exposing the plot.

So whatever genre a writer might be working—or wanting to work—in, it’s worth taking a little time to explore some of the others and see what might be learned from them. For a lot of writers, the chances are that they’ll start such an exploration with crime fiction. Crime, after all, is often seen as “The genre it’s okay to like”, lacking the stigma of fantasy, sci-fi or romance. So, having decided to explore crime fiction, a writer would want to read some modern authors and the classics. The question of where to begin with an exploration of classic crime fiction has been neatly answered by a new series of Crime Classics from Atlantic Books. (more…)

I’m doing something a little different for the end-of-year round-up this year. Instead of the best books of 2008, here are some of the titles that I’m sure would have been good… if only I’d got around to reading them. (more…)

Editing and revising a novel can be a long, depressing task. A lot of the initial thrill of creation goes after the first draft has been completed, leaving behind the job of going through your work again and again: does this character come across convincingly? Could this phrase be a little tighter? In the cold light of day, does the plot really, genuinely make any sense? And the more general thoughts: How could you have made so many mistakes? What does this sea of red ink (or pixels) say about you as a writer? (more…)

Lawrence Durrell, best known as the author of the Alexandria Quartet, wrote a total of sixteen novels. Most are still in print, but until this year, his first two novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring, have been impossible to get hold of. (more…)

Although it’s sometimes necessary to whisk a character in and out of a story without drawing too much attention to him, it’s generally worth remembering that a forgettable character can be a wasted opportunity. One book that really shows how much can be achieved with minor characters is The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. (more…)

I’ve been blogging about books, in one way or another, for a few years now—I think the first book I reviewed, on a long-forgotten website, was Yellow Dog by Martin Amis, which would make it 2003—and lately I’ve been thinking about what kinds of books are best suited to blogging.

I’m not talking about genre, because fantasy bloggers will always want to blog about fantasy novels, and literary folk will always want to blog about Philip Roth. Neither am I thinking about old-versus-new books, which again is down to the blogger’s taste. (more…)

In the weeks since the Booker longlist was announced, book bloggers have been throwing their other challenges aside and getting to work reviewing the nominees. Here’s the longlist, with links to some of the reviews that have already appeared on the Blogosphere: (more…)

Faber’s new website, Robin Cook’s latest thrilller promoted with controversial “webisodes”, and more… (more…)