So apparently it’s possible to be Freshly Pressed twice… Just over a year after my post about eBooks was Freshly Pressed, my post about the forthcoming changes to the Man Booker Prize criteria received the honour yesterday.
Tag Archives: Publishing
The Man Booker Prize Longlist 2013
The longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2013 was announced today. 151 books were submitted for consideration and the final 13 are:
Five Star Billionaire: Tash Aw We Need New Names: NoViolet Bulawayo The Luminaries: Eleanor Catton Harvest: Jim Crace The Marrying of Chani Kaufman: Eve Harris The Kills: Richard House The Lowland: Jhumpa Lahiri Unexploded: Alison MacLeod TransAtlantic: Colum McCann Almost English: Charlotte Mendelson A Tale for the Time Being: Ruth Ozeki The Spinning Heart: Donal Ryan The Testament of Mary: Colm Tóibín Continue readingFiled under Books
Five Reasons To Support Your Local Indie Bookshop
This week is Independent Booksellers Week. An interesting article in The Guardian yesterday outlined five reasons to support your local indie bookshop. In order from worst to best, they are:
5) To maintain property prices in your area: Maybe this is because I am neither a Daily Mail reader nor a property owner, but this seems like a very strange reason to support an indie bookshop. I suppose there is a tenuous link in that independent shops are generally found in nice places to live. However, it isn’t really at the top of my list of priorities…
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On Writing by Stephen King
‘On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft’ by Stephen King is part-autobiography, part advice manual for aspiring authors. The first part of ‘On Writing’ is a personal and often very witty memoir as King recalls his journey towards becoming a published author. The second part explores what King calls the ‘writer’s toolbox’, including tips on vocabulary, grammar, elements of style and editing. The final part is where King describes the car accident in 1999 which nearly killed him halfway through writing this very book and the long recovery process afterwards. There is also a very interesting reading list at the end (along with a second one if you read the 10th anniversary edition as I did). It sounds like a slightly haphazard structure but it works because the subject of writing is always at the heart of it. Continue reading
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The Folio Prize: Do We Need Another Literary Award?
Another day sees another literary award announced…this time, it’s the launch of the Folio Prize, a new £40,000 literary award sponsored by the Folio Society for the best work of fiction published in the English language. This particular prize was created after several literary bigwigs complained about the supposed dumbing down of the Booker Prize in 2011, a year when books were chosen for their ‘readability’. Heaven forbid that somebody who wasn’t on the judging panel might actually understand or even enjoy something on the shortlist…
Continue reading
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Are Libraries Killing Bookshops?
I read an interesting article in The Guardian today in which Terry Deary, author of the Horrible Histories series, claims that libraries ‘have had their day’ and that the concept behind them, namely offering the impoverished access to books, no longer applies in an era of compulsory education. I have a feeling his views are only shared by a tiny minority of people. Continue reading
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The Best of 2012 Survey
BEST IN BOOKS 2012
1. Best Book You Read In 2012? (You can break it down by genre if you want) Do I have to choose? Well, one of my favourites was Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami which I read not long before I started my blog. I’ve read a lot of good books this year though.
2. Book You Were Excited About & Thought You Were Going To Love More But Didn’t? I was a little bit disappointed by The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I liked it but I didn’t love it.
3. Most surprising (in a good way!) book of 2012? The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. At least, I think it was surprising in a good way… I thought it would be too weird for my taste but I actually quite liked it. Continue reading
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French Bookshops
French Books
Here’s one way of preventing Amazon’s hegemony over book sales: in France, book prices are fixed by law so they cost the same amount whether you buy them online, in a chain shop like Fnac or in a small independent bookshop. When I was living in Paris during my year abroad, the stingy student side of me was a bit miffed that it was impossible to get new books at a discount. On the other hand, it means that there are still a lot of independent bookshops which are managing to stay open (about 400 in Paris) and that can only be a good thing. Continue reading
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Are Book Awards A Waste Of Time?
Source: The Guardian
Whether it’s the Bad Sex award given to the author of the most cringe-worthy sex scene in literature each year or coveted literary prizes such as the Booker and the Pulitzer, book awards attract a lot of attention. They also attract a considerable amount of debate particularly concerning the worthiness of winners. So do we actually need them and what do they really achieve?
Regular followers of this blog will know that I read quite a lot of books which are nominated for the Booker Prize and other similar literary awards. I don’t read these books purely because they are on the shortlist and I certainly wouldn’t rush out and buy the whole lot straight after the announcement. Like most people, I still choose books almost entirely according to personal recommendations and general browsing rather than the number of prestigious awards they have won. However, I am always intrigued by what it is about them that got them recognised and nominated in the first place so I do try and hunt down the ones I think I might enjoy and have heard generally good things about. Continue reading
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The Rise of eBooks: evil or essential?
The eBook debate continues to rage incessantly and provoke some very important questions. Is the controversy less about the value of books and more about the development of modern technology? Who are the winners and the losers in this supposed eBook revolution? Does it really matter what format books are available in? For many people, it certainly does.
Although I don’t actually own an e-reader yet, I do plan to get a Kindle soon (hopefully for Christmas this year) after borrowing my sister’s one earlier this summer. I will be using it almost exclusively for when I’m commuting by train as it is the practical side of e-readers which appeals to me the most.
Source: The Guardian
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Thoughts About Political Biographies
My Political Bookshelf
The Politics section in most bookshops is often an odd one. I think there are two explanations for this. Firstly, it is because books about current affairs usually go out of date very quickly – politics changes pretty much everyday and a lot of books about ongoing events can end up in a bargain bin faster than you can say ‘Yes, we can’. Secondly, I think it is because politics tends to overlap with so many other subjects like history, sociology, economics and biographies. In your average Waterstone’s shop, the Politics section will typically consist of a slew of memoirs and biographies of New Labour era politicians, a couple of AS Level Government and Politics textbooks, some books which claim to explain the origins of the credit crunch/globalisation/some other trendy political buzzword in layman’s terms and maybe a few George W. Bush-bashing books. Overall, it isn’t particularly inspiring and doesn’t really reflect the diversity of the subject especially when there is so much quality political journalism out there. It also demonstrates how books have become sidelined, as far as politics is concerned, in favour of more modern media which can be updated instantly. A 140 character tweet is likely to reach and influence millions more people than an exhaustively researched tome about the state of the nation today. Overall, the cycle of the publishing industry is incompatible with the fickle 24 hour news cycle that we have today.
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Same Cover, Different Book
I spotted this cover of ‘The Forgotten Waltz’ by Anne Enright today and realised it was exactly the same photograph as the one on my copy of ‘Les belles images’ by Simone de Beauvoir! I know this happens quite frequently in the publishing industry – I’m sure there must be similar examples of almost identical book covers for vampire fiction and you only need to look at the chick lit section in a bookshop to see that all the books invariably use the same sort of curly fonts and pink colour schemes as these so-called marketing experts think this will appeal to their target market. Admittedly, my copy of ‘Les belles images’ is a French edition so few people in the UK will have seen it, but is it really so hard to check that a photo from their stock hasn’t been used before?
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