Culture

The votes are in and the decision is made. The winner of last month's poetry competition is Sam Gwynn, for this entry on the theme of ‘dirt’: If dirt is bad, then so are we and so is history, For all of us were dirty once, as dirty as can be. Our milieu was the tillage where we bent and harrowed clods And out of dirt we made our dirty dwellings and our gods. Soon enough we had a language full of many dirty words As common terms for intercourse and blasphemies and turds. We aired our dirty laundry for our tribal mates to view; It really didn’t matter much, for they were dirty too. And eventually we found that the constituents of dirt Could make you ill or shame you with the collar of your shirt.

Here is the late and incomparable Kurt Vonnegut giving a short lecture on stories and relativity. This video was apparently used in American high schools in the ‘80s and with good reason: displaying narrative as a graph is a brilliant way of examining structure and character development. You could go beyond Vonnegut’s rough demonstration and draw a graph with multiple lines, each representing a major character in a book. One is up at a particular moment, driving another down in consequence. Such an approach might make some pupils relate to the densely plotted novels so beloved of the education system.

Emily Rhodes used to work for a major publishing house and now manages an independent bookshop in London. She is currently writing a novel. She blogs at EmilyBooks, and has just started tweeting @EmilyBooksBlog. This is the first column in her ‘Inside Books’ series, which will endeavour to shed light on the inner murk of the book world. Last week there were a few bookish grunts of dissatisfaction when Terry Pratchett beat Martina Cole to the Number One slot. Pratchett’s Snuff sold 31,904 copies and Cole’s The Faithless only 31,136, yet there were cries of foul play. This was because some bookshops had broken the embargo on Cole’s book and sold it the week before publication.

The best discoveries in reading are not those we simply enjoy ourselves but those we can share with others whose pleasure we know will equal our own – and the best of these discoveries are those we can share with children whose passion for reading is just developing. The iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore by William Joyce is just such a discovery and, if it can be considered a book, it is the best book about books since Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night. Joyce is both a brilliant children's author and a computer animator skilled enough to have worked on Pixar films, and here his two talents merge as exquisitely as Beatrix Potter’s gifts for illustration and storytelling in Peter Rabbit.

The charming novelist Michael Arditti kindly offered to answer a few questions for Shelf Life, the new feature where we ask literary people impertinent questions about their reading habits. He also posed for a photo in a rather debonair fashion on his sedan chair with his bookshelf in the background. He mentioned that he does — and always has done — most of his work in bed. That explains answer number six then. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Oliver Twist  3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? Too many to list, but Joseph Roth’s Job springs to mind.

This clip, about a Luddite monk's discovery of the book, has been circulating YouTube. How do you use it? If you close this ‘book’, will all the text inside be saved, or will it just disappear? Plus ça change…  On a separate but related point, there was a particularly well-documented case of a vanishing text in 2009. Following an ownership dispute, Amazon erased George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from the Kindle, and all the users’ annotations. Readers could appreciate the irony, if little else. This was a vanishing act worthy of Airstrip One.   For a whole text to disappear like that is a rare hiccup, but to lose a single word or part of a text during digitization is a constant danger.

We bring you October’s most scathing book reviews: Phil Baker on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif (Sunday Times) ‘Too knockabout and buffoonish to be a serious study of violence to women in Pakistani culture, too ugly to be funny, this heavy-handed book might be well intended but it is a bloody mess.’ Virginia Blackburn on Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (Sunday Express) ‘The main problem with this ridiculous book is that Jeanette clearly thinks that her opinions and feelings about everything are totally fascinating whereas to the rest of us she comes across as self-obsessed, self-indulgent and with an ego the size of a planet.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist works as a companion piece of sorts to Claire Tomalin’s rival biography Charles Dickens: A Life. The clue is in the subtitle. While Tomalin takes the subject from birth to death, Douglas-Fairhurst’s book focuses on Dickens’s early years. And what early years they were.   With a father constantly dodging the debt-collectors, Dickens’s childhood was the very definition of unstable. The book makes much of the trauma of John Dickens being jailed in Marshalsea for debt with the young Charles forced to earn his keep by working at Warren’s blacking factory. The experience might have been brief, but the impact on Dickens’ imagination was huge.

Publishing a biography just after its subject’s death is a risky business: if it’s too flattering, it will be labelled as hagiography and not taken seriously; if it’s too unflattering, it seems disrespectful and you alienate his fans. Attempting to vault over these hurdles is Walter Isaacson – the former managing editor of Time magazine and author of biographies of Einstein and Benjamin Franklin – who claims to have written the definitive life of Steve Jobs. Though he never read it, the late Apple co-founder authorised this biography and was interviewed by Isaacson over forty times. Are there any big revelations? Not really. He didn’t like Bill Gates. He refused to meet his natural father. He wasn’t very nice to work for.

There was an unintentional theme to the weekend’s literary pages: murder, in some shape or form. There are fictions, histories and real life whodunits to choose from, if crime is your guilty pleasure. First up: Death in Perguia, a comprehensive account of the Kercher case written by the Sunday Times’ John Follain, who covered the investigation and trials for that paper. Stephen Robinson reviewed the book for the Sunday Times (£) and observes that Follain ‘has produced an excellent account of the tragedy and the very Italian drama that followed.