There’s a bit of huffing and sniffing going on, after JK Rowling was voted the Greatest Living British Writer by readers of The Book Magazine. Some commentators, and no doubt other writers, are gnashing their teeth.
I suppose if the question asked was about readers’ “best loved author” there would be little doubt, but the word “greatest” holds so many elevated and broad-ranging implications.
The writer with the greatest influence? Arguably so.
The greatest technician? As opposed to Rushdie or McEwan or Byatt or Ishiguro? Well…
At any rate, for my money the real surprises lie in the other rankings. Terry Pratchett is second. Nothing wrong with this, of course, but it makes me wonder about the age of the respondents.
But Nick Hornby, for God’s sake, is at #8 between Pinter and Byatt. Rose Tremain doesn’t rate a mention. And the list is almost entirely English novelists (apart from the Poet Laureate and a smattering of playwrights and a couple of token Scots). Cast your eye down the list. Fascinating.
My picks from this selection?

Novelists in no particular order:
Hilary Mantel
Pat Barker
AS Byatt
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ian McEwan (sometimes)
Salman Rushdie (most of the time)
Julian Barnes

Kids/YA:
Diana Wynne Jones
Michael Morpurgo
Philip Pullman
JK Rowling
Neil Gaiman
Anne Fine
Jacqueline Wilson

Peter Ackroyd was the only biographer/history writer listed – no mention of:

Simon Schama
Antony Beevor
Claire Tomalin
John Julius Norwich
Niall Ferguson
John Keegan

Let alone…
Jan Morris

It’s years since I’ve read Lessing or seen a Stoppard play but I feel they ought to get a run in the A team. The young crowd (all those Smiths, for example) can wait their turn.

A morose Frank Moorhouse has written a series of features for The Australian on the country’s literary landscape – sort of. His conclusions are mixed, but there’s some interesting analysis:

“There is a literary logjam. Many doomed books, especially novels, pass by unnoticed in ghostly procession, never reviewed, never mentioned in the media, often barely stocked by bookshops, hardly selling a copy.
In their 1994 survey, Throsby and Beverley Thompson found that among the writers surveyed, 47 per cent had published a book but only 7 per cent had been reviewed.
Research I had done for the CAL showed that, among other things, in the Sydney Morning Herald in November 1964, 142 books were reviewed or mentioned: in November 2004, only 88 books were reviewed or mentioned.
While a review is not the only way to find out about or to evaluate a book (there are also word-of-mouth and browsing, although I’d hate to depend on these alone), it is the primary way. Furthermore, book reviews are the intellectual news of our society.”

I think that makes me feel better – and yet…

For books are not absolutely dead things, but… do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless warriors be used, as good almost kill a Man a good Book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills Reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

– John Milton

The longlist for The Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for 2006 is out.
Chair of the judging panel, Julia Eccleshare, announced the list in London over the weekend, saying:

“It is often assumed that unhappiness makes more interesting fiction than happiness; memories of unhappy childhoods are apparently particularly captivating. And yet in children’s books there remains a convention of offering a corner of hope. As the crossover novel edges children’s books ever upwards in every respect, that may come to be the defining characteristic of the genre. Among other things, this year’s longlist includes considerations of our future, concerns about the emotional security of children, and the lies and secrets that surround teenage pregnancy. Issues aside, all highlight the recurrent need for great adventure stories to fuel children’s imagination.”

The winner will be announced on September 28.

I see James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces has finally dropped off the best seller lists in New York, where it had stayed, classified as non-fiction, long after the revelation that for a memoir it was a pretty fanciful novel. You might remember this towering genius told Larry King:

“The genre of memoir is one that’s very new and the boundaries of it had not been established yet.”

I guess the guy’s never heard of Julius Caesar. We won’t get started on that twit Frey or I’ll never stop. But as a result of the scandal, apparently, publishers are currently looking askance at new memoirs. This is a real pity, because in memoir the reader can find some of the most insightful and often beautiful writing imaginable. Here are just a few that have affected me, in different ways, over the last twenty-five years or so:

If This Is A Man – Primo Levi
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom – TE Lawrence
Coasting – Jonathan Raban
Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
A Humming Under My Feet – Barbara Deming
Goodbye to All That – Robert Graves
Conundrum – Jan Morris (you knew I’d say that, right?)
The Fiftieth Gate – Mark Baker
The Woman Warrior – Maxine Hong Kingston
Paris, France – Gertrude Stein
My Childhood – Maxim Gorky
A Restricted Country – Joan Nestle
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter – Simone de Beauvoir

It pains me that I can’t add to that list Pentimento by Lillian Hellman, even though she was my hero when I was young, and even though it remains one of my favourite pieces, and even though she wrote “I trust absolutely what I remember about Julia”. It seems (can you tell this is a grudging admission, even after all these years?) to perhaps be not precisely true.
On the flipside of the coin, or memoir mixed with fiction, I can add to the list Siegfried Sassoon’s George Sherston novels, which really ought to be considered a memoir with a few names changed to protect the dead.
More recently I’ve loved:

A Mother’s Disgrace – Robert Dessaix
The Zanzibar Chest – Aidan Hartley
Tiger’s Eye – Inga Clendinnen
Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose – Sandy Balfour
Craft for a Dry Lake – Kim Mahood
Our Woman in Kabul – Iris Makkler

I’ve just read Still Life with Chickens, by Catherine Goldhammer. Marvellous. Because I work on a magazine for seachangers/small farmers, I get sent a lot of run-away-to-the-country memoirs and many of them are really boring. Still Life with Chickens is and isn’t one of that genre, but it is far from boring, and is also much more than a seachange memoir.
Still on the rural front, Richard Benson’s The Farm is a memoir of changes in his life, and his family’s future, that reflect sweeping agricultural change all over Britain – an important and moving book.
Any other bids?

Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
– Alfred Whitney

Wild and woolly on the beach this morning – grey ocean, seaspray across the beach, black clouds and thunder in the distance.
A cloud of tiny terns flew up, wheeling, drifting and shifting like fog around my head. They looked so weary. I imagine they’ve just arrived from Antarctica. I tried to tell them to stay where they were, that I meant them no harm and would skirt around, but they clearly can’t speak English – maybe they’ve come from Siberia – and so they fluttered and squeaked and rose reluctantly in the air just in case I was a polar bear.
By the time I’d finished my walk I was much the same, trudging pitifully in soft sand into a wind that froze every cell in my face, imagining myself only slightly better off than Pierre shuffling through the snow after the burning of Moscow.
Pathetic, I know.
Usually I write stuff in my head while I walk but I was too sorry for myself this morning, and grateful only for the fact that I’m not a tern. Or Siberian.

It’s so dull. Or at least it would be if it wasn’t so terrifying.
Almost every week somewhere in the US (and of course elsewhere) some kids’ book or other is banned, or parents decide to protest against the presence of poor old Harry Potter (well-known subversive and possible Anti-Christ) in their local school library.
The latest case has seen David LaRochelle’s teen novel Absolutely Positively Not banned from a reader event in Minnesota because it’s about a young man who is – or at least might be – gay.
Perish the thought.
You can read more on this at Publishers’ Weekly.

It’s winter.
We hit the first of June and suddenly the temperature plummeted: now the car takes forever to warm up, my eyeballs freeze and fall out on the walk from car to ferry, my nose may be frost-bitten, and flannelette pyjamas are proven yet again to be the greatest invention in the history of humanity.
So we’re having a Slow Food festival here this weekend, with my world-famous-in-New-Zealand thick minestrone, lamb shanks and mash, and my girlfriend’s having a glass of red before dinner.
There may even be pudding.
Desperate measures for desperate times.

PS It’s very boring being a non-drinker in winter. I’d rather be dehydrated than have yet another glass of cold water. I might sulk instead.

I’m a bit confused by some titles in the latest crop of picture books.
Clearly influenced by the likes of Neil Gaiman, they are dark (ish), perhaps provocative (ish), and more like graphic novels than picture books. Or are they?
I’m thinking mostly of The Three Fishing Brothers Gruff, by a “young graphic designer and surfer”, Ben Galbraith. It has a new (ish) look about it, high production quality (although it could do with a couple of extra commas here and there) and it’s clearly very hip. I imagine it’s selling like hotcakes.
But at which age group is it aimed?
It’s not a kid-friendly read-aloud, and the reading age is quite advanced, even though the words are few. There’s a message so didactic that even this reader, who feels very strongly about over-fishing and the environment, felt it to be OTT. Many kids would feel a bit strange, too, about the fact that all three brothers have to die to prove an environmental point.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the book – I just wonder about its market.
I could ask the same about Uncle Jack, by Kate De Goldi and Jacqui Colley. I loved Clubs (more graphic novel than picture book) but I just don’t get Uncle Jack, its target readers or the impact it would have on young kids. Maybe it’s me.
I see some reviewers have asked this too, and perhaps it’s more to do with the industry (and we readers) coming to terms with the rise and rise of the graphic novel.
Still, Uncle Jack, I suspect, will stand the test of time and find an older readership than is implied by its pitch. The astute Ms De Goldi knows what she’s doing, and perhaps people who have bought it as a picture book for young children will find that they enjoy it more as they grow older.
The Three Brothers Gruff will no doubt win design awards, but I’m not sure that kids will warm to it.
Hopefully I’ll be proved wrong.