The Reader Online

Gratuitous picture of a Scottish castle

For the last two weeks I’ve been swanning around Western Scotland, staying well away from anything to do with the Internet, email and (more or less) telephones. It’s been lovely. But now I’m back and my inbox is full. Here are a few of the choicest cuts:

First up, friend of The Reader Caroline Smailes says that her novella Disraeli Avenue is now available for pre-order. This novella will be published as a limited edition of 500 hardback books and all 500 books will be signed and numbered. The pre-order will be available direct from Bluechrome at only £10 and this book will arrive before Christmas, being dispatched on December 01 2008 (the ideal Christmas present!). All books remaining after the pre-order will have an official release on January 15 2009 (the actual RRP will be £12.99). Most importantly, all profit from the sale of Disraeli Avenue will go to One in Four the organisation run for and by people who have experienced sexual abuse. Pre-order it here.

We previously mentioned the download version of Disraeli Avenue, which is still available for free. If you download it please make a donation to One in Four if you can.

Over at Readerville proprietor Karen Templer announced that the Note:Books micro-blogging application is now fully available. If you like making notes about your reading and enjoy talking about books in a lively and friendly community, then this could be for you.

If you have romance in mind Penguin has teamed up with match.com to run a dating website aimed at book lovers. According to Marketing Week part of the idea is to bring the written word back into the art of courtship. Ah, bless. Members will be able to describe themselves by listing the books they read, but it would be a lot more fun to use Penguin’s own book classifications. I consider myself a Modern Classic of course, but I can think of at least one former girlfriend who could be described as Poetry, Drama, and Criticism. Here’s the link to Penguin Dating.

And in case you missed it, the Orwell Diaries blog launched on August 9th. Lovely stuff.

Posted by Chris Routledge

We’re in holiday mode and it’s only going to get worse over the next couple of weeks, so here are a few good links to be going on with.

In The Literary Review our own Philip Davis expands on his ideas about ‘The Shakespeared Brain’. Read his earlier thoughts here.

The Washington Post has a review of Doris Lessing’s reimagining of her parents’ lives, Alfred & Emily.

The Freakonomics blog at the New York Times has an interesting idea for writers hoping to take the risk out of writing: sell shares in your upcoming novel.

Wired has a breakdown of who is likely to want to buy a Kindle ebook reader and concludes not only that the reported sales so far of 240,000 Kindles represents quite a large chunk of the market for these things but that the Kindle at this point is something like a ‘game changing Harpsichord’. That may turn out to be a little harsh, but it’s a fair assumption that the ‘iPod of reading’ is not likely to sell as well as the iPod itself.

This is the week in which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died. Here are some of the best links covering his life and death.

And finally, it may be quite historic now, but Bookride has a terrific tall tale from the second hand book trade. Is it true or untrue? I don’t care.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Meg Guroff wrote to let me know about her labour of love, powermobydick.com, an online, annotated edition of Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby Dick. There are other online editions out there, but this one is presented clearly and simply, with annotations that ‘announce’ themselves as you mouse over the relevant word or passage. Search, and a nifty T-shirt are apparently coming soon. As some readers will know I’m a big fan of this novel and while I’ve had time so far only to scratch the surface of the site, I expect to be coming back to it quite often.

Here’s the link again.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Some links from way back when. I apologise for these being so old, but I’ve been too busy reading philosopher John Perry on Structured Procrastination:

At the end of May LA Weekly featured a piece by John Banville on Georges Simenon. The Neglected Books Page followed up with a characteristically detailed recommendation of Simenons to get started.

My daughter has recently become a fan of Flat Stanley and I’ve enjoyed being reacquainted with it too. So I was delighted to come across this post by Janice Harayda of One-Minute Book Reviews. Read the comments on the post for a fascinating discussion of a game involving paper ‘flat Stanleys’ and long-distance travel. This reminds me of the ‘Where’s George?’ caper that was popular in the US a few years ago.

The highbrow but friendly blog The Valve is reading Adam Bede this summer and the debate looks promising already (rule number three for the discussion is “It’s summer: let’s have fun and not be snarky.”) This novel is one of the five shortlisted in our Classics on Richard and Judy campaign and isn’t getting much love. Well, none actually. If you haven’t voted yet, go to it.

And finally the previously mentioned FeedBooks has a service for converting RSS feeds into pdfs for downloading to eBook readers or even printing out. Click on the button below to download this blog as a beautiful paginated pdf (for future reference the same button is also at the bottom of the sidebar on the left):

Posted by Chris Routledge

This week The Reader Online celebrates its first birthday. One of our earliest posts featured the startup DailyLit, which delivers literature by email in daily bite-sized chunks. Like this blog, DailyLit has come a long way in a year. It now includes Wikipedia tours, recent books such as Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and has just released the first book to appear on DailyLit before the hardback release. Here’s the link to DailyLit.

In the ever wonderful New Yorker this week there is a ‘new’ story by Vladimir Nabokov: ‘Natasha’. This is the Fiction Issue, including stories by Haruki Murakami and Annie Proulx. And there’s more. Aside from a story of her own you can hear Mary Gaitskell reading Nabokov’s first story for the magazine, ‘Symbols and Signs’.

One thing I’ve noticed over the last few weeks is growing interest in the Kindle and other eBook readers. This is still very much a niche market, but it seems to be growing. Bookseller Borders reports that its sales of the iRex Iliad are going well, while Penguin says sales of ebooks are up. Meanwhile the New York Times reports that “Nearly all publishers say their sales of electronic books are growing exponentially. Carolyn K. Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said its sales of electronic books will more than double this year compared to last year, after growing 40 percent in 2007 from 2006.” It’s early days of course, but it looks like the revolution may well be upon us. Still, there is a note of caution from the NYT:

But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices.

And finally, historian Gary Smailes has launched OneBook, a blog of short book recommendations written by its readers.

Posted by Chris Routledge

A couple of weeks ago Jen Tomkins wrote a post about ‘dumbing down Shakespeare’. It turned out to be one of our most popular posts of the last month and since then I’ve noticed a rash of stories about Shakespeare–Jen was certainly down with the zeitgeist, if not the kidz.

Firstly Kirsten Reach writes on Shakespeare’s Blackberry in the Kenyon Review blog. The article references and summarizes a long piece by Stephen Power and picks up on his discussion of a hand-held and re-usable ‘writing table’ that was used in the sixteenth century (and later), for jotting down ideas and thoughts:

This is referenced in Act One of Hamlet, when Hamlet meets his father’s ghost. Though it’s debatable whether Hamlet is meant to be carrying his “table” in his hand and writing or speaking metaphorically, it’s clear that the “table of memory” he wipes clean is meant to be this convenient little writing gizmo.

Elsewhere, Shakespeare the thinker is the subject of a fascinating review article by Martha C. Nussbaum in The New Republic. Nussbaum asks “Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?”

Tony Harrison is one of my favourite poets. His writing is muscular and forceful yet manages also to be moving and personal, with a palpable honesty to it; as if Hemingway had been reincarnated in Leeds with a love of Greek tragedy and an imperative to make amends. Harrison is also a dramatist and his latest play, Fram, is currently at the National Theatre in London. The play is about the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, described by Harrison as “extraordinarily handsome, a scientist, an artist, an adventurer who never felt fulfilled, and the first celebrity fundraiser.” He also believed that “the world will end in ice.” Over at More Intelligent Life Isabel Lloyd has a short interview with Harrison about it.

It’s been a grumpy old week over at Vulpes Libris, where the book foxes have been laying into literary classics. The results have been spectacular at times; so much vitriol in creatures so, well, so furry. Hemingway, Tolstoy, Jude the Obscure, and Mr. Rochester all come in for it:

We’ve all experienced it. You finally get around to reading that masterpiece of world literature or the modern work of genius that’s been at the top of the bestseller lists for weeks, and slowly … v-e-r-y slowly … it begins to dawn on you that you’ve read more rewarding bus tickets. What floats the boat of the reading millions simply doesn’t do it for you.

So here are a few highlights from “Hatchet Week”: The Old Man and the Sea , Kreutzer Sonata, and my personal favourite rant of the series, A Monster is Born, on Mr. Rochester. I quite like the sound of him myself. Now that Jane Eyre …

New York Magazine is also spoiling for a fight with its 40th Anniversary list of quintessential New York books. You won’t agree with the list, but you’ll feel compelled to look at it anyway and then you’ll feel affronted all day.

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I’ve been away staying in a muddy field for a week or so and I spent most of Monday trying to catch up with what’s been going on. While I was away I had the chance to read, in a real life paper copy of the magazine, John Lanchester’s article on scent in The New Yorker. We discussed scent in literature quite recently here.

Elsewhere 2008 seems to be shaping up to be the year when the rehabilitation of American crime writers into mainstream literary life gathers pace. First of all the National Endowment for the Arts has Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon on its list of books for the ‘Big Read’, which is the American equivalent to our very own Liverpool Reads. Hammett also featured recently in the city of Tacoma’s City Arts magazine, with a graphic novel-style adaptation of the Flitcraft Parable and an article about Hammett himself by Michael Sean Sullivan. I’ve been doing my bit too.

Meanwhile Chicago is reclaiming Raymond Chandler as one of its own. His 1953 novel The Long Good-Bye–for my money his most ambitious and best–is the chosen book for the city’s own ‘big read’, known as One Book, One Chicago. The Outfit will be blogging about Chandler and The Long Good-Bye from April 14th.

And finally, the Favourite Poems Read by Animals feature plumbs new depths with this reading of Howl by “Allen Finsberg”:

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I’ve been teaching Nabokov’s Lolita this week and came across Zembla, a superb website dedicated to the writer. There has been a lot of noise recently about another, unread, Nabokov book, currently locked away in a vault in Switzerland, but under threat of incineration at the writer’s last request. Slate reported on this story in January but more recent developments suggest Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir’s son, may be ready to sell it.

Last week we commented on Paul Constant’s article about book theft and the same day ran a poll of readers to see how many people would ‘fess up to the deed. A whole 23 people have responded so far, over half of whom have claimed to live lives without blemish or stain. It makes one’s heart swell with pride to know that a whopping 52 percent of our readers can be trusted. My faith in humanity is restored, truly it is. It is also pleasing to find so many (17 percent) of the respondents to this highly scientific and well thought-out survey are of a radical persuasion and believe all property is theft. If so, hand over the modern first editions I say. And two people have so far claimed preparedness to set themselves up in book acquisition and fencing schemes. They can get in touch using the usual channels.

But most pleasing of all is that after a whole week, The Guardian books blog has finally caught up with us. It is shocking to learn just how depraved and crooked Guardian readers can be.

And finally a couple of weeks ago National Geographic noted the sighting of a white whale. The marine biologist who spotted it is no Ahab chasing his impossible dream. And they wonder why kids don’t want to do science: “I had heard about this whale, but we had never been able to find it,” said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. “It was quite neat to find it.”

Posted by Chris Routledge

Maybe the sky is falling in. If it isn’t it certainly looks as if the landscape for bookish debate–and for books themselves–is changing fast. This week’s harbinger of doom was George Steiner, who complained about the current state of the English novel in a speech at the Royal Society of Literature.

The debate about the merits or otherwise of literary blogging continues. The Reading Experience weighs in on the doomsayers who think all this webby stuff is bound to debase poetry, and by implication other kinds of writing too (via Ready Steady Book): "Literature will still be literature once the gates have been torn down. It’s just that there will be fewer people claiming the authority to define its boundaries for everyone else." Meanwhile the increasingly confident (I think anyway) Dovegreyreader explains her reasons for reading in a measured but forceful post about John Carey’s What Good are the Arts? DGR also commented on the Steiner Story.

The Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year has received a lot of coverage this week, much of it of the tittering behind the hand kind. Nicolas Lezard is not amused.

Way back in the mists of last week The Times reported on the opening of The English Project, a museum dedicated to the history of the English language.

And finally, we have had a lot of traffic this week for the Stairway to Heaven. At the risk of tangling this blog and the blog on the bookshelf in a spiral of cross-linking that could lead to the collapse of the galaxy, take a look at this: A bookshelf bath.

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