Culture

The Booker Prize longlist is perennially accused of pandering to the masses and to publishing publicity departments in particular. Heaven forbid the award might encourage reading or even book-buying. This year highbrow eyebrows shot up even further at the inclusion of titles so obscure they made current front-runner DJ Taylor, put forward for Derby Day, look like, well, Thackeray. Even the efforts by more famous nominees have been deemed under-par.   We wonder if this disregard for critical opinion could have something to do with the fact that Booker chairwoman Stella Rimington, former head of MI5 and now departure lounge novelist, is no stranger to bad reviews herself.   Can you guess which Booker nominees these critics are badmouthing?

As The Hemlock Cup is released in paperback, Daisy Dunn engages in some Socratic Dialogue with its author, historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes I get the impression from your book that Socrates must have been quite aware of his own eccentricity, or oddness.  Do you think he knew he was doomed from the start? In a way that’s a level of knowledge of Socrates I don’t think I could have, even having studied him for ten years. Our problem is we don’t have any of his words, so it’s a case of jigsaw-puzzling. I think what is certain, from all accounts, is that he doesn’t seem to have cared about the fact he was different from the run of the mill heroic, democratic Athenian.

"The death of books has been greatly exaggerated," says novelist Lloyd Shepherd in the Guardian. He has written a detailed statistical analysis of the long-term trends in the trade and presents a positive outlook, perhaps too positive. His case hinges on two standout facts. Book sales in the UK have increased by 42 per cent over the last ten years and UK publishing sales have increased by 36 per cent during the same period. The industry yielded £1.7 billion last year. “Why the gloom?” Shepherd asks. The answer, it seems, is simple. As this blog illustrated here and here, retailers haven't been able to compete with Amazon on either price or overheads.

It seemed wrong, somehow, to include a story about the travails of Chorion, the company that owns Mr Men, Noddy, Poirot and Raymond Chandler, in the round-up of the weekend’s literary pages. But the news that the firm is close to entering administration made its way into both the Sunday Times and the Telegraph. Were it not for the boom of interest around Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, The Cat’s Table, Chorion might have been the leading literary story of the weekend. The outlook is pretty bleak. The Bookseller reports that Chorion has debts of £70m, annual interest payments of £35m and £16m of earnings, according to its annual accounts. The form has also been mired in internal squabbles.

A few weeks ago it looked like this column might have to be rechristened Feather Duster Jobs of the Month. The High Court judgment that The Telegraph pay £65,000 in damages over a “spiteful” book review would, we panicked, lead to a climate of fear on Grub Street, with literary editors terrified to publish anything but the most simpering eulogies. We needn’t have worried. James Lasdun on House of Holes by Nicholson Baker (Guardian) “… a completely ridiculous book, whether you read it as camp parody or straight smut. The real story here is why the cleverly observant author of works such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature has chosen to publish something at once so daft and so half-hearted.

The US president’s summer reading list has recently been at the centre of a media furore. The White House released a statement that Barack Obama had bought two books at Martha’s Vineyard bookstore to add to the three he had brought with him from Washington. Other sources say that Obama actually bought five books at Bunch of Grapes, which is reputedly an extremely liberal bookseller. We’re unclear as to the whole truth but we’ll keep you posted as more revelations filter through. The list – as it stands – is as follows: 1. The Bayou Trilogy by Daniel Woodrell 2. Rodin’s Debutante by Ward Just 3. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese 4. To The End Of The Land by David Grossman 5.

The Oxford English Dictionary and the Collins Dictionary have both published their new shorter versions. A crop of words has been defined and introduced, replacing those words that are now deemed to be obsolete. This is the age of the social network. ‘Re-tweet’ has been officially recognised by both dictionaries as a noun and a verb. It has been joined by an additional definition of ‘cougar’, a noun to describe an older women seeking sex with a much younger man, and ‘Textspeak’, a noun to describe the truncations and abbreviations that are used in text messages, many of which have gone into the language: Lol, WTF, M8 and so forth, as well as the mock-Jamaican patois that has become so infamous in light of the recent riots.

Hilary Spurling and Tatjana Soli have won the James Tait Black prize. The award is prestigious, for being decided by scholars and students of literature. Soli won for her debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, which is set during the dying moments of the Vietnam War as a group of western journalists survey the decline. The protagonist, Helen, finds herself in the country after her brother was killed in action. Helen shuns the assorted gonzos in Saigon and goes native. The book received rave reviews, notably from Janet Maslin the New York Times. Hilary Spurling, a one-time warden of this parish, won the biography prize for her book, Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China.