This section's just for entertaining, interesting or useful bits and pieces to do with books. Anything suitable will be gratefully received and added (see main page for contact details).
"(BS)" means the information came via The Bookseller.

Latest

Book purchasing demographics:
90% of UK households read books - 60+% of adults read fiction - 70+% of children 6-14 read fiction - still on fiction, 75% of girls and 66% of boys read it; 77% of women and 45% of men - 52% of readers say they read to relax or relieve stress, 27% as a form of escapism, 24% to use the imagination ... (I don't think I understand these categories). Info from "Reading the Situation" - Book Marketing Ltd. (BS)

Evening with an Author
I’m at this evening out in Tod
Not particularly odd
But there’s this really boring sod.
I wish I wasn’t here.

I could be reading Harry Potter
Or floating in my warm bath water
Or doing things I really oughter
Instead of being here

I should have brought my crossword book
I could have brought my crochet hook.
Call him a poet? What a schmuk!
I wish I wasn’t here.

I could be painting my bedroom ceiling
Repairing where the paper’s peeling.
Instead I’ve got this sinking feeling
I wish I wasn’t here.

I think Sam Beckett got it right
That authors should keep their mouths shut tight
And speak out loud through what they write
Instead of being here.

I squirm and fidget on my chair
This bloke’s completely unaware
I fix him with a steely glare
I wish I wasn’t here.

I meditate on my Tai Chi forms
I stifle sixteen thousand yawns
I contemplate eternal dawn
While I’m sitting here.

I think he’s coming to the end
I turn and grimace at my friend
Oh no! He’s boring on again.
I wish I wasn’t here.

He stops, he gazes round, a pause.
I stand and lead the group’s applause
We stampede for the exit doors
Hey – let's get out of here.

©Richard Parfitt

Thanks to Richard for the above which accurately depicts a particular event. If you were there, you'll remember it. (We hasten to point out that all our local authors, famous and not-yet-established, are models of stimulation and empathy, and give genuinely fascinating talks and readings - and we're very grateful to them for their public appearances which have all been entirely successful!)

Click here for "The Poet's Reply"

"We hold onto favourite books for reasons that are not universal. Each word and sentence in this one carried me into arms I'd been in before. No other book brings me as close to my lost self." Michael Ondaatje, writing in The Guardian Weekend, 17.2.2001, on Bringing Tony Home by Tissa Abeysekara.

"An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself." - Dickens (apparently, but where?)

"Books are a bad family; there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish only others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell." - Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House, Vintage pb, 1997

Top 10 authors, UK (by sales):
Paperback modern fiction:
Danielle Steel, Sebastian Faulks, Maeve Binchy, Louis de Bernieres, Catherine Cookson, Nick Hornby, Tom Clancy, Wilbur Smith, Ian McEwan, Josephine Cox

Paperback 19th century fiction:
Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, L N Tolstoi, F M Dostoevskii, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Bronte, Arturo Perez-Reverte
Whitaker BookTrack, 1999 (BS)

Reading and the Brain

"PET scans generate images of the brain that distinguish highly active regions from those that are less active. The more active a region is, the more glucose it metabolizes - creating a 'hot spot' of energy consumption. The greater the activity, the more intense the hot spot and the more brightly colored its appearance on the PET scan.

"Findings on brain activity have surprised more neuroscientists than reading specialists. PET scans show that there is no 'reading center' in the brain, no one place where reading occurs. Several different parts of the brain are involved in reading, each making its own contribution to success. ...

"... Hearing words creates hot spots in the temporal lobe of the cortex. Seeing words mainly involves areas in the occipital lobes. The dramatic differences in brain function during these two activities begin to suggest how complex learning to read is. The scans also imply something else. the hot spots form not just a pattern, but a network, because the active parts of the brain work together to perform what may superficially seem a simple task.

"What parts of the brain burn glucose most intensely when someone reads? The answer depends on how skilled the reader is, the difficulty of the text, the goal of the reading activity (for instance, understanding main points versus searching for details), the level of motivation, whether the reader has a specific reading disability, and other factors. ... Equally important is the fact that reading is a whole-brain activity."

Taken from http://www.cast.org/udl/ReadingandtheBrain23.cfm

Yorkshire people and Londoners tie in second place in a World Book Day survey (1st March 2001) carried out among 2,000 adults by Book Marketing Limited on the amount of time per week spent reading for pleasure: 4.9 hours. The Scots came first (of course) with 5.8 hours; the overall British average is 4.6 hours. (BS)

According to John Ezard reporting on Jenny Hartley’s new book Reading Groups (OUP, £5.99) in the Guardian, there’s a mighty subculture of reading groups alive in the UK (65% less than 5 years old), with an estimated membership of 50,000 - majority women, majority over 40, over half with higher education, and two-thirds in paid work.

Favourite books are:
1 Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
2 Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
3 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
4 Enduring Love, Ian McEwan
5 Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
6 Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
7 Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
8 Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson
9 Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
10 Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
11 Every man for himself, Beryl Bainbridge
12 Snow falling on Cedars, David Guterson
13 Larry's Party, Carol Shields
14 The Reader, Bernard Schlink
15 = Beloved, Toni Morrison; The Shipping News, E Annie Proulx
17 Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler
18 = Regeneration, Pat Barker; A Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler
20 Quarantine, Jim Crace
21 A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
Some of these can be found on the Reviews page and all of them on the Book Case shelves ...

"Reading Time"

"Are you interested in reading? What kind of books do you like? Isn't it fun to read magazines lazily! Have a nice Reading Time with me!" - Japanese mug

The Poet's Reply

I had this speculative invite
Its manner lucid and polite
A book club – Tod – next Tuesday night.
I wish I hadn't gone.

I had this slightly sneaky feeling
The prospect wasn't too appealing
I'd previously had an awful meal in
Tod – I shouldn't have gone.

But I'd just brought out another book
I was sure they'd like to take a look.
In hindsight clearly quite mistook
I wish I hadn't gone.

A poet leads a troubled life
Of inner conflict, doubt and strife
I can't explain this to my wife
I really shouldn't have gone.

She said, "You're bloody out again.
Just typical of bloody men!
I'm off then – see you – don't know when!"
I wish I hadn't gone.

I tried in vain to remonstrate
She'd never been one for debate
I called out "No! Stop! Come back! Wait!"
I wish she hadn't gone.

Observing my departing mate
I realised that I was late
I had this book club speaking date
I don't think I should have gone.

I went and somehow struggled through
What I said I haven't a clue
It made no sense, I know – it's true
I wish I hadn't gone.

I tried to give them of my best
My performance clearly lacking zest
My personal life severely messed
I wish I hadn't gone.

So don't give me your dirty looks
Or fiddle with your crochet hooks
Or fill in clues in crossword books
While I'm droning on

When you see a poet speak
With weary eye and chalk white cheek
And mumbling like a circus freak
They've probably had a lousy week
With their marriage halfway up the creek
It's just your friendship that they seek
Instead you're just a lousy clique
That should have taken up batique !!!
I really shouldn't have gone.

Sorry.

©rp

Our thanks again to Richard. We really think he should take it up for a living!

Lots of goodies just turned up via Yahoo: first, The Scotsman, 2nd March, unsigned, commenting both on the reading survey and Reading Groups (see above for both).

The writer starts off with scepticism over the survey, but continues:
“Everyone knows that Scots were great readers once upon a time. If you had to colour in a blank map of Europe 350 years ago with all the countries where school provision was standard and where most of the population were able to read the Bible, Scotland would stand in almost splendid isolation. Parts of Prussia and Holland would join us, but hardly anyone else. Certainly not England, which had to wait until Forster's Education Act of 1870 before every child in the country could be guaranteed a basic education.

“Being so naturally suspicious of celebrating our virtues, we dismiss the importance of the tradition of the lad o'pairts, but it is so ingrained and widespread that no amount of historical revisionism can uproot it. The high value placed on book learning, the tradition of respect for the dominie, the disproportionate numbers of autodidacts - are the very building blocks of Scottish culture.”

Modern examples are cited, including “Whitbread winner Jeff Torrington, who left school at 13 and educated himself entirely through libraries, ... Booker winner James Kelman, who owes far less to his formal education than his widely-read informal one. For all its faults, in avoiding specialising too early, the Scottish education system does at least encourage its pupils to read beyond the confines of a narrowly prescribed number of subjects. ... Many Scottish writers who have worked in England are hardly surprised by the news that Scotland is the most well-read part of Britain.

"‘We have such a thriving culture and a long tradition of a meritocracy emerging from an open education that it's no great shock,’ says novelist and short story writer Ali Smith.

“Whitbread poetry prize-winner John Burnside agrees. ‘The “democratic intellect” idea still holds good. Because of our education system, Scots are more ready to read outside their own field. It's important here to have a broad base in your reading, and so you tend to find doctors with a very great interest in history, or engineers with an interest in history, things like that. “

... Saltire prize winner Ronald Frame (says) ‘Maybe it's all down to the self-improving aspect of the Scottish character, the idea that you have to work for your pleasure.’”

The article continues later: “Ironically, in an increasingly impersonal age and for such a supposedly solitary activity, the future of reading seems to lie in reverting to the way we used to read in the past: together.

“Reading groups are the success story of the last few years. ... Back in the 18th century, they provided an invaluable forum for the dissemination of radical ideas. (e.g. Tom Paine's The Rights of Man.) From Scottish families in the 16th century gathered together round the Bible to groups of friends discussing the latest Ian Rankin novel, reading in Scotland has come a long way. Or is it just a strangely circular journey?”

Copyright © The Scotsman Publications Ltd.

Then at www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/reading is a fascinating site run by David S Miall and Don Kuiken at the University of Alberta: Reader Response - Empirical Research on Literary Reading. It gets a bit learned in places (“phonemic iconicity” indeed!) but the Overview page should warm the heart of every reader of literature.

They argue that “Before literature is displaced (by other media: television, hypertext, the internet), we need to know what experiences we may be giving up, or whether they can be replaced by other media (our research suggests that they can't, although we are not sure about this yet). It is also worth reminding ourselves that literary experience in some form has been a central feature of all human cultures since prehistoric times: it may be an adaptation that has helped humans to evolve and survive. We need to know if its contribution to human culture is unique and what that means, if so, for maintaining our future health and our social values.”

They’re also trying to pull the study of literature and pyschology away from poststructuralism and its chums which can’t be bad: “discourse theory (as we mentioned above) has dominated the study of texts, and this has meant that literature has either not been studied, or that the questions asked of literary reading have been poorly formulated.”

Visit the site for full details but here’s their answer to “Why do we read?”

“There's no single answer to this. Sometimes we read for the story: we want to know what happens (do they marry? does she find the gold?). Sometimes we read to learn something about our own situation or our own feelings. Sometimes we read in order to become immersed in another time or place, or to learn what it's like living in another culture. Sometimes we read to enjoy the sound and feel of the special language in which a literary text has been written. But there does seem to be something unique about literary reading: it provides an experience that we can get in no other way, whether from other kinds of reading or from other media, such as movies, television, or video games”

And in answer to “How is literary reading unique?”

“We think literary reading may involve some distinctive psychological processes not found in other kinds of reading. If we contrast reading a newspaper article or a textbook with the reading of a novel, we believe that readers' feelings are not only more important in the context of a novel, but that feelings play a critical role in the constructive processes that enable a reader to sustain her reading and make it meaningful as a whole. Our theory of reading is thus based on trying to understand feeling rather than cognitive processes. Although cognitive components such as imagery or memory are clearly essential, these are controlled and shaped by the reader's feelings. Feelings are important because they engage the reader's sense of self. Reading a literary text involves exploring and perhaps questioning the self, although readers may generally be unaware of this underlying process while reading.” 

And finally, still courtesy of Yahoo, a wonderful page run by a booklover called Stan Jones in Anchorage, Alaska: www.litrix.com - “A quiet place for lovers of good reading”. His aim is to publish out-of-copyright books on the internet. Most of these are available in bargain editions at £1 or so, so The Book Case has no problem in passing this information on. The Ten Most-Read Books in the Past Week are Moby Dick, Ethan Frome, Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Crime and Punishment, Twelfth Night and The Count of Monte Cristo.

What especially makes the site worth a visit are the summary notes. Guess the Jane Austen novels described by the following:

“Clueless miss minds everybody’s business but her own”
“Too many pretty women; too few men of large fortune”
“An unlikely heroine in Bath”
“You’re never too young to be an old maid”
“Five daughters and not a suitor in sight - what’s a mother to do?”
“Guests in their own home! Indeed!”

And a couple of Brontes (harder):
“Conventionality is not morality”
“Misanthrope’s heaven”

Visit Litrix to find out the answers. (Or ask Felicity at The Book Case)

A reminder from The Editor, the Guardian's media supplement, about the Bulwer-Lytton website, www.bulwer-lytton.com run from the English Department at San Jose State University. Entrants to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are challenged to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. For example:

"Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracked paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life." --Dr. David Chuter, Kingston, Surrey, ENGLAND (1999 Winner)

The department are now evilly turning their attention to published writing and "propose that you locate, isolate, and otherwise identify samples of bad published writing" and submit them along with your own commentary. We are dismayed to see Lindsey Davis and P D James among the offenders. To be dismayed yourself, go to the Sticks and Stones page of the above site!

"The man looked round at the walls of bookshelves. 'Dis joint ain't no good, Mae,' he said. 'Dey ain't got nothin' but books.' 'May I help you?' asked the small gentleman, stepping forward. 'How could you help me if you ain't got nothin' but books?' said the man." - Edward Eager, Half Magic, 1954, n.e. OUP 2000.

"Advanced Technological Bookmark

Walking in the sea of the book with you as a good partner and building a good life for you" says the backing card on this very nice Chinese bookmark encouragingly.

"For adults, returning to a book from childhood is an unusually powerful way of tapping into a part of one's life that is otherwise lost forever. While neighbourhoods change and schools get renamed, fields get built over and woods get chopped down, the magical experience felt when you read a particular story remains intact. Even just seeing the cover of a favourite book can rekindle feelings from childhood; sensations, memories and more." - Julia Eccleshare, "The Proliferation of Modern 'Classics'", Books for Keeps, January 2001

Best title of the June 2001 crop: Folding Teabags from Search Press (it's a craft book), with the doughty reprint On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers in second place.

Thanks to new Children's Laureate Anne Fine for the following quotation (Times, 2nd July):

"Ms Fine added that children had short reading lives, from five years to 15. 'If we don't reach them, they will be different people from what they could have been. They will be less rich in spirit, more impoverished in understanding. We only have one childhood. Books in childhood can transform the child inwardly.'"

Bookish types in Heaven

"And scholarly people, they tend to last as long as anyone. they like sitting around reading all the books there are. And then they love arguing about them. Some of those arguments ... go on for millennium after millennium. It just seems to keep them young for some reason, arguing about books."

- Margaret in "The Dream", History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes, talking about the problem of getting bored in eternity.

"One of the great things about books is sometimes there are fantastic pictures" - George W. Bush, quoted in The Ruling Asses - a Little Book of Political Stupidity

"There is an old saying in Japan, READING IN AUTUMN, indicating that the good weather and the longer nights in autumn is perfect for reading." Thanks to Takeko Ogawa for this.

"Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service" has won The Bookseller's Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year. It received 35% of the votes recorded at theBookseller.com, and beat "Tea Bag Folding" (Search Press), "The Art and Craft of Pounding Flowers: No Paint, No Ink, Just a Hammer!" (QVC), "Fancy Coffins To Make Yourself" (Schiffer); "The Flat-Footed Flies of Europe" (Brill); and "Lightweight Sandwich Construction" (Blackwell Science).

Book Forager: http://www.branching-out.net/forager/

The Society of Chief Librarians, a "reader-development agency" called Opening the Book Ltd and a software company called Applied Psychology Research Ltd have together produced a webpage called Book Forager. As reader, you click on sliding scales of opposites to indicate the sort of book you like and the website comes up with a list of suggested book. The dichotomies on offer are: Happy/Sad, Funny/Serious, Expected/Unpredictable, Romantic/Realistic, Beautiful/Repulsive, Gentle/Violent, Easy/Demanding, No Sex/Sex, Conventional/Weird, Optimistic/Bleak, Short/Long. The grading was done, after debate, by teams of librarians. The system's apparently very popular in libraries. I'm still puzzling over it ...

Golden Needle Ladies' Sewing Classes of Herat
In the Sunday Telegraph of 16th Dec. 2001 an article by Christina Lamb tells how women dressed in regulation burqas attended the above group three times a week for the past five years. Once there, they did no sewing but listened to a professor from Herat University lecture on literary criticism, aesthetics and poetry, while children kept watch outside for the Taliban. Professor Mohammed Nasir Rahriyab had himself been forced to replace most of his university literature classes (for men only) with Islamic culture. Hundreds of similar classes took place all over the city, enabling women secretly to write and to study Persian poets, Shakespeare, Joyce and Dostoyevsky. The plan was thought up by Ahmed Said Haghighi, President of Herat's 90-year-old Literary Circle.

A study recently conducted by Unicef found that 29,000 girls and women in Herat province received some form of secret education while the city was under Taliban control.

Herat is a centre of learning with the reputation of being the cradle of Afghan civilisation; there is a saying, "If you stretch out your feet in Herat, you kick a poet."

24-year-old Leyla Razeghi had several stories published in the Literary Society's journal, under a male pseudonym, criticising the Taliban regime in metaphors. Herat's leading poet, Naser Khafash, constantly wrote anti-Taliban verses for secret circulation, one of which became a standard insult chanted against the moral police by small children.

Booksellers
"Hugh had once said to me, 'In a selfish world, Lewis, booksellers are a category of people who are generally helpful and kind.'" - The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain.

Absolutely!

"UK booksellers sold almost 130 million titles last year, and book sales are poised to pass the £1 billion mark for the first time ever in 2002. This surge in reading is thought to have been fuelled mainly by the phenomenal success of two female authors - Helen Fielding with Bridget Jones's Diary and J K Rowling's Harry Potter series." - Egg Newsletter

Centre for the Children's Book

Planned since the early 1990s by Elizabeth Hammill, a New York-born ex-employee of Newcastle Waterstone's Children's Books Dept., this centre to preserve and exhibit the work of Britain's finest writers and illustrators is scheduled to open next year on the banks of the Ouseburn, Newcastle. Mary Briggs, a former assistant director of education for Newcastle, joined the project in the mid-1990s as business director.

An ex-cornmill and a potato crisp warehouse next door will be turned into a seven-floor centre with bookshop, gallery, cafe, plus exhibition, research, education and performance spaces. The mill itself is passed by the children fleeing on a raft in David Almond's children's book Heaven Eyes.

The aims are to preserve the material, put the words and pictures on show, and bring literature to adults and children excluded from it for all kinds of social, economic and cultural reasons: and originally "to put children's literature on the map", though that aim has been greatly helped along in the meantime by the successes of J K Rowling and Philip Pullman.

Supporters, apart from David Almond, include Philip Pullman, Philippa Pearce, Shirley Hughes and Quentin Blake who has offered illustrations for the centre's publicity material; a trust set up after Robert Westall's death contributed £100,000 and all the author's manuscripts; Walker Books gave support for an exhibition of Colin McNaughton's work; and the Centre now has Arts Council funding. The project already has Michael Foreman's engravings for Alan Garner's Stone Book quartet, Shirley Hughes's illustrations for Up and Up, work by C Walter Hodges, the original artwork for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Ballet Shoes, and a collection left by Kaye Webb of Puffin books. The Opies' huge collection, saved for the nation, is sadly hidden away, uncatalogued, at the Bodleian, Oxford.

Quentin Blake, the illustrator and former children's laureate, describes the Centre as "a pwerful engine for the development of cultural and educational projects which will both speak to our young people and carry our name abroad". "You need to be able to read. That is like being given a set of tools. But then you need to be motivated to use them."

Business director Mary Briggs says, "It isn't about alleviating physical and financial poverty. It's about giving people access to new worlds." "... it's about communities and quality of life."

http://www.booktrusted.com/handbook/organisations/ccb.html

Centre for the Children's Book, Pendower Hall, West Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE15 6PP
tel: 0191 274 3941 fax: 0191 274 7595 emal: info@ccbook.freeserve.co.uk

Info from Guardian Education, 19 Feb. 2002, David Ward, "Elizabeth and Mary's Big Adventure".

From The House of Bath catalogue: "Ancestral Connections - A Classic Archive of Timeless Elegance: Bedside Cabinet. Bookworms will love this novel storage idea! Our wooden-framed bedside cabinet is entirely handpainted to resemble a much-loved library of gilded classics." Presumably they mean woodworms.

"'What's wrong with you?' asked the wolf. 'Can't you see I'm a big and dangerous wolf?' 'I'm sure you are,' replied the pig. 'But couldn't you be big and dangerous somewhere else? We're trying to read.'"
A Cultivated Wolf (children's picture book) - Becky Bloom & Pascal Biet.

With skill, heed, and iudgement this worke must be read,
for else to the reader it stands in small stead.
- from the title page of William Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, London, 1584 (2nd edition).

"Then there was the man, driving north listening to Oliver Twist when he began to go out of range. He turned round at the next junction and drove south till the programme finished." - Publishing News, 3.5.02, on Urban Soundtracks radio programme broadcasting readings of classic novels to contemporary music, currently on Galaxy FM.

“I once started reading War and Peace, but I got halfway through it and I couldn't stand it any more. I'm a very normal person.”
Doug McAvoy, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, quoted in Guardian 9.5.02

"I'm actually quite worried about those people you see on long train journeys with nothing to read, just staring blankly into the middle distance. What the hell is going on in their heads, then? Perhaps they've got excellent memories, and they're just remembering a particularly good book they once read, which saves them having to carry one round."
Pete McCarthy, McCarthy's Bar, ch. 7, "The children of Lir"

“If this is some sort of endurance test then we may as well endure stylishly. Would it be pretentious to read Anna Karenina?” “Not pretentious, but perhaps a touch antisocial.”
Penelope Lively, Cleopatra’s Sister, Part 2, Ch. 3.

“Things have not happened to me; on the contrary it is I who have happened to them; and all my happenings have taken the form of books.”
George Bernard Shaw, quoted by A C Grayling, Prospect, September 2002, “Lives of the mind”.

“There has to be cruelty in a great short story writer; an unforgiving circumscription of chance, history, society or family - whatever determines the fate of a character. The world of the short story is unjust to its inhabitants.” Ruth Padel on William Trevor, Prospect, September 2002, “Briefly, cruelly, Trevorly”.

In October's Prospect magazine, Toby Mundy declares "We are living in a golden age of book publishing in which quantity and quality rival anything in the past, in which books have never been so well published and in which they occupy a more boisterously visible place in the general culture than ever before." But he doesn't think it'll last - you'll all go on reading, but you'll get your reading material online. He also thinks bookshops can return 25% or more of unsold stock and uncollected customer orders. If only! See: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=11513

"It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already." Nick Hornby, How to Be Good, ch. 15

BLURB WRITERS' CLICHES

The Bookseller of 31 Jan. gives author Sarah Harrison's definitions as follows:

Enchanting: there's a dog in it
Heartwarming: a dog and a child
Heartrending: they die
Thoughtful: tedious
Thought-provoking: tedious and hectoring
Haunting: set in the past
Exotic: set abroad
Prize-winning: set in India
Perceptive: set in London NW3
Epic: editor cowed by the author's reputation
From the pen of a master: same old same old
In the tradition of: shamelessly derivative
Provocative: irritating
Spare and taut: under-researched
Richly detailed: over-researched

"Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, shee could never bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book's, and in verse too, if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that." - Dorothy Osborne writing about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623-1673, quoted by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own.

"One of the first things you learn about reading is the amazing exterior invisibility of all the rush of event and image which narrative pours through you." - Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built, ch. 1 "Confessions of an English Fiction Eater"

UK Book Purchasing 2001

From The Bookseller's Pocket Yearbook 2003, we learn that although fewer people in the Yorkshire TV region buy books than those in other TV areas (South, Anglia, London, Midlands, Westward - we tie with Tyne Tees and Wales and are ahead of Lancashire and Scotland), individually our customers spend far more on books than anywhere else in the country. Hurrah!

Sales of newly published books are predictably far higher in some categories than sales of backlist titles - hardback fiction, biography, cinema & TV, sports - but customers buy roughly equal quantities of new and old paperback fiction titles, and far more established titles than new ones in the following categories: poetry, children's books, computer software, MBS, management, study guides, dictionaries, travel books and atlases. For history, cookery and humour, slightly more old titles than new are sold.

Top ten paperback fiction authors for 2001 were: Tolkien, Helen Fielding, Joanne Harris, Ian Rankin, John Grisham, Terry Pratchett, Louis de Bernieres, Danielle Steele, Anita Shreve, Zadie Smith.

Why reading is fundamental

Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks. I also think it's very important for people to see things from other points of view. It's sort of the same skill as acting really. Particularly early on, when it's not scary. I mean I think children love the idea that there are different viewpoints and different words for things and different worlds. And the more that they pretend to be other people, the more they understand what it's like to be other people, the harder it is for them to hate them and misunderstand them when they grow up. - Samuel West

http://www.rif.org.uk/donate/Samuelwesttranscript.htm

A wave is partially made of water from the wave before and partially by new water; it rises, then it disappears into the sea to contribute to the next wave. It may be that a poem rises, partly made up of words from a previous poem and partly by new words; it disappears to contribute to the next. - Valgarthur Egilsson, Waiting for the South Wind, Ch. 4, “The Fjord Mother Moving”

One of the English teachers sets up a screen in the cafetaria. Every day, she projects onto it the text of a selected book, slowly scrolling it down to give the children a taste. I put my head round the door one lunchtime to be met by total hush, as everybody silently eats their chips with their eyes glued to Lord of the Flies.

- Marie Stubbs, headmistress of St. George’s RC Secondary School, Maida Vale, where head-teacher Philip Lawrence was stabbed to death in 1995; from Ahead of the Class

" .. I walked into the kitchen crying and Neil said ..., ‘What on earth is wrong?’ and I said ‘I’ve just killed the person’. .. He said ‘Well, don’t do it then’ ... and I said, ‘Well, it just doesn’t work like that.’ You are writing children’s books, you need to be a ruthless killer."

- J K Rowling on the demise of a key character in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

"Go ahead and order the (expensive) book - if I divide the cost by the time spent reading it, it still works out cheaper (hour for hour) than most other activities :)"

- Book Case customer

"You want to read something that is not chick-lit but sun-lit: something that is both literary and pleasurable, something that lifts the spirits while engaging the mind. Dr Johnson observed that 'the true end of literature is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it.' While practically every Booker shortlist ... is strong on endurance, it remains extraordinarily hard to find novels that celebrate life."

- Amanda Craig, "Against Grim-Lit", Mslexia Spring 2003 reprinted in newBOOKSmag 16.

Bookcrossing comes to Manchester

In mid-August, Urbis Museum, Manchester (near Victoria Station) joined the Bookcrossing urban phenomenon by placing "thousands of books - each bearing a sticker with a unique number registered on its official website - at shops, bars and bus stops, and in taxis and train stations. Anyone lucky enough to find one ... can then read it, log on to the website to look at its previous journey, update it or leave reviews before releasing it for others to enjoy" said Terri Judd in the Independent on 14th August.

"If people want to take the books on holiday and leave them in Geneva or the Costa del Sol that is fine," said a spokeswoman.

Read more about it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,898667,00.html

"She looked around at Harry, her face glowing, and he saw that the presence of hundreds of books had finally convinced Hermione that what they were doing was right."

J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, ch. 18 “Dumbledore’s Army”

“You know, Fanny,” she went on, “it’s all very well for funny little people like you to read books the whole time, you only have yourselves to consider.”

“And if I might offer you a little advice, Fanny, it would be to read fewer books, dear, and make your house slightly more comfortable. ...” She cast a meaning look at the plateless digestives and went away without saying goodbye.

Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford, Part 2, ch. 2

"I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is. "

Hunter S Thompson, quoted by Paul Theroux, Guardian Weekly, May 29-June 4 2003

“ ... reading, you empty yourself so far as you can, and you try to subdue yourself to the material of another life, to have the horizons another life has, to enter into its separate density, which can seem as hard, at times, as for water to enter a block of solid close-grained hardwood. ... the ultimate reward ... was an empathy independent of liking .. that if you had been applying to real people ... you might have called ‘respect.’”

Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built, “The town”

“Books are a mass medium, but there is no way for readers to be aware of one another. ... A reader feels alone in a book, but is actually one of a crowd, all occupying the same points in textual space, all making a hubbub that none of them can hear. If the readers of Catcher in the Rye were visible to each other, it would become clear that the solitary paths of Holden’s thoughts are actually intensively trafficked.”

Ditto, “The Hole”

The
happiness of
mankind, the real
salvation of the world
must come about by
every person in existence
being taught to
READ and induced to
THINK.

Taken from the cover of Cole's Second Funny Picture Book. E W Cole arrived in Australia in 1852 as a gold rush immigrant, opened a bookshop in Melbourne in 1865 and in 1873 opened the first Cole's Book Arcade.

One person in every 28 in Britain bought a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the first day it went on sale. (Guardian Weekly 26 June - 2 July 2003)

Storybook Dads: this project at Dartmoor Prison encourages inmates to read bedtime stories onto CD for their children to listen to, helping the family relationships which are important in discouraging reoffending and reducing the children's trauma. It also helps the prisoners' literacy levels and encourages them to read to their children on release. Similar schemes are in place at Gartree where library staff and volunteers run a Reading Corner for inmates and their children, and Highpoint in Suffolk where volunteers help inmates record stories.

"A Captive Audience" by Tim Lezard and Phil Chamberlain, Big Issue, 3-9 Nov. 2003

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." - high-flier Nagasawa in Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, ch. 3

"No other book is so utterly worthless as a mediocre novel. A mediocre guide to trees or to cheese can have its uses for those who don't have anything better on the subject to hand. A history book or biography, however dull, contains some facts that may prove handy one day. Atlases, anthologies and instruction manuals all have some utility. But a lifeless novel has no value whatsoever. Worse than worthless, it is positively a menace - for any time spent reading dim, failed novels is so much time lost, time subtracted from life. In fact, a blank book is more desirable than a book defaced with such redundant type. At least blank pages can be used for doodles."

- David Sexton, Evening Standard, quoted in The Week, 15.11.2003

"[Doris Lessing's] despair at the embattled status of literature is shot through with hope because of the effect of Harry Potter, and admiration for His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. 'Maybe what we're going to have is an elite who do read. That's better than nothing. But then it's evident that those who don't read are handicapped, they're going to notice that themselves.'" - interview with Amanda Craig, Times, 23 November 2003

“There are 2.5m pulped Mills and Boon books in the new M6. The paper's absorbency helps keep tarmac in place.” - BBC, 18th November 2003, quoted in Prospect, February 2004.

Accountants read more for pleasure than do other professions according to a World Book Day survey; they especially like funny books. Secretaries come second, journalists fourth, taxi drivers fifth, lawyers sixth, and teachers and chefs joint seventh. Clergymen come last. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3531255.stm

"Given that the average audiobook is about three hours long, you could have approximately 111 audiobooks on your iPod - more than enough for most two-week holidays. Indeed, probably enough for a world cruise." - Steve Levine, "Cause for Alarm?", Publishing News, 8th October 2004

'For children's fantasy writer Philip Pullman, George W. Bush would make a perfect villain in his epic sagas of good and evil.

"He would fit right in," said the British author of the trilogy His Dark Materials which now looks set to follow in the cinematic footsteps of Harry Potter and The Lord of The Rings as the next blockbuster franchise.

"Bush has this baying certainty and has imposed this fervent zealotry," said Pullman whose books have been condemned by church groups for attacking organised religion and decrying autocracies that brook no argument. "The Christian right in America is the mirror image of the Islamic fundamentalist," he said.'

- Paul Majendie, Reuters, London, 5th November 2004

Police in a sprawling working-class suburb on the edge of the Mexican capital are to fight crime with a new weapon: books. The leftwing mayor of Nezahualcoyotl, Luis Sanchez, has ordered all 1,100 members of the municipal police to read at least one book a month or forfeit their chance of promotion. "We believe reading will improve their vocabulary and their writing skills, help them express themselves, order their ideas and communicate with the public," Mr Sanchez said. "Reading will make them better police officers and better people."

- Jo Tuckman, Guardian, http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1432483,00.html

Rude customer, 6th May

Enraged writer man
Hates cards, bookmarks, bags, receipts.
Polluter Book Case!

(He also denounced our postcards and the Orange Prize but I've run out of syllables.)

"I do not find that I enjoy waiting for things to happen in a book. You sit there, and all the words you have to take in - it just isn't all that interesting."

- Interviewee quoted in Expanding the Book Market, published by The Bookseller in association with the Arts Council & Book Marketing Ltd, March 2005

"It's amazing how kids love books. You do feel that for kids who are denied books it's really unfair."

- Gordon Brown interviewed by Barbara Ellen, Observer, 3 July 2005.

"... a historical canvas is necessarily crowded, and readers who are afraid of crowds should keep to the better-ordered lanes of fiction."

- Steven Runciman in his introduction to The Sicilian Vespers, 1958 (currently out of print)

"Historians have noted that the shift from oral to written scripture often results in strident, misplaced certainty. Reading gives people the impression that they have an immediate grasp of their scripture; they are not compelled by a teacher to appreciate its complexity. Without the aesthetic and ethical disciplines of ritual, they can approach a text in a purely cerebral fashion, missing the emotive and therapeutic aspects of its stories and instructions. Solitary reading also enables people to read their scriptures too selectively, focusing on isolated texts that they read out of context, and ignoring others that do not chime with their own predilections."

- Karen Armstrong, "Unholy strictures", Guardian Weekly, 19-25 August 2005 (also at http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1546780,00.html)

"The plot is both slight and tedious and fails to kill off enough of the poisonous characters."

- review in The Observer, 21 August 2005.

From Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk's speech given recently in Frankfurt upon accepting the 2005 Friedenspreis, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (see http://www.nrc.nl/redactie/Doc/pamuk.doc):

"The novelist will also know that thinking about this other whom everyone knows and believes to be his opposite will help to liberate him from the confines of his own persona. The history of the novel is the history of human liberation: by putting ourselves in other's shoes, by using our imaginations to free ourselves from our own identities, we are able to set ourselves free. ...

" ... a Turkish novelist who fails to imagine the Kurds and other minorities, and who neglects to illuminate the black spots in his country's unspoken history, will, in my view, produce work that has a hole at its centre. ...

"To understand what is unique about the histories of other nations and other peoples, to share in unique lives that trouble and shake us, terrifying us with their depths, and shocking us with their simplicity - these are truths we can glean only from the careful, patient reading of great novels. ...

"For it is by reading novels, stories and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled and hidden by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are. ...

"These are the times when we feel humility, compassion, tolerance, pity and love stirring in our hearts: for great literature speaks not to our powers of judgment, but to our ability to put ourselves in someone else's place. As I imagine these all these readers using their imaginations to put themselves in someone else's place, as I conjure up their worlds, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, all across the city, a moment arrives when I realise that I am really thinking of a society, a group of people, an entire nation - say what you will - imagining itself into being. Modern societies, tribes, and nations do their deepest thinking about themselves through reading novels; through reading novels, they are able to argue about who they are; so even if we have picked up a novel hoping only to divert ourselves, and relax, and escape the boredom of everyday life, we begin, without realising, to conjure up the collectivity, the nation, the society to which we belong. ...

"... the novel was one of the greatest artistic achievements to come out of Europe. The novel, like orchestral music and post-Renaissance painting, is in my opinion one of the cornerstones of European civilisation; it is what makes Europe what it is, the means by which Europe has created and made visible its nature ...

"The book best equipped to absorb everything in the world - without doubt - is the novel. The imagination - the ability to convey meaning to others - is humanity's greatest power, and for many centuries it has found its truest voice in novels. "

Orhan Pamuk, author of "Snow" and "My Name is Red" among other books, faces trial next month for referring to his country's massacre of Armenians. The article was printed in the Guardian Review of 29 October 2005.

"When you read a novel or a play, it enlarges your psychological repertoire. You see more choices that can be made. So it seems to me that by reading when you're young, you sophisticate yourself."

- Hilary Mantel, Guardian Saturday Review, 19 November 2005, "Escape from the Margins" (arguing that her love of reading in difficult home circumstances in her teens was not merely an "escape").

"When you can read, you cannot not read." - Oyvind Palshaugen, "Reading and Writing as Performing Arts: At Work" in Dialogue, Skill and Tacit Knowledge, ed. Goranzon, Hammaren & Ennals, 2006

“Elsewhere in the US, class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of readers of James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces, whose author admitted much of the memoir might not be literally accurate. Lawyers claim that readers deserve damages for their wasted time.” Guardian, Saturday 18th March 2006; “Californian tries to sue himself”

"We know one thing: schools are now places where less and less time is spent reading and listening for pleasure. For those children who have parents who give them that enjoyment, it matters, but not terribly. For the rest, books are that thing you do where you have to answer boring questions about adjectives and character."

Mike Rosen, letter to the Guardian, Fri. 24 March 2006: "Why children find reading boring"

Your iPod may be changing your brain

Jackie Ashley, reviewing a speech by Susan Greenfield in the House of Lords, suggests that the heavy use of electronic media by young people could be having an impact on thinking. "She begins by analysing the process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so 'build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys ... One might argue that this is the basis of education ... It is the building up of a personalised conceptual framework, where we can relate incoming information to what we know already. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it significance.' Traditional education, she says, enables us to 'turn information into knowledge'."

Instead, many young people merely experience a rapid succession of electronic icons - "the flickering up and flashing away again of multimedia images do not allow those connections, and therefore the context, to build up. In a short attention-span world, fed with pictures, the habit of contemplation and the patient acquisition of knowledge are in retreat."

Government funding for scientists and educators into the effect of the digital-picture world on how children learn to think is recommended.

Guardian Weekly, 28 April-4 May 2006

'"I don't even read," he added. ... I didn't know what to say. As a group, I put writers on the same level as horses: a species almost beyond reproach. Whatever their imperfections, they were still writers. They got me through my childhood, through the last ten years without a date. Whatever sanity I had was thanks to writers, to books that either helped me forget my troubles or helped me to understand them.'

Susan Richard, Chosen by a Horse, ch. 9, 2006 (uncorrected proof)

There comes a moment when the borrower starts to believe that possession is nine tenths of the law and that the thing has become theirs. This is especially the case with books, where the act of reading instinctively confers ownership.

Guy Browning, "How to ... Lend", Guardian Weekend, 10 June 2006

If the idea of masculinity is limited to the Saturday night punch-up, the whole da Vinci, Shakespeare, Kipling legacy is wasted.

Conn Iggulden, "The Boy is Father to the Man", The Book Magazine 2, Summer 2006.

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