Well I am still feverish, pale and coughing like a cat with a mouth of hot pepper! Also very bored sometimes when my headache prevents further reading. On such occasions I read and re-read Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/ Maturin series of books set in the early 19th century aboard various HM ships of war. O.K. I know what you are thinking but these are sea adventure books with a real difference. O' Brien was fluent in several languages, a classicist and the biographer of Picasso and the great British botanist Joseph Banks he also brings to the stories a phenomenal knowledge of the 18th/19th century and the ships and language of the era.
I have a passion for sail boats and the sea........... how could I not be brought up in Plymouth? Reading one these sea tales spirits me aboard one of the huge ships of the time and I am plunged into this strange arcane world of ropes, sails, unpredictable weather and at times violent action.
There are the long sea chases the taste of salt spray the cut of ropes and the wide wide wide desperate ocean where the horizons are circles of nothingness. What better cure for a sick man than O'Brien in full flight?
Looking forward to seeing you all at next LB on 27th Feb.
Friday, 19 February 2010
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Stream of consciousness burblings about publishing
I was most annoyed by the Macmillan/Amazon debacle last week and vowed to stop using Amazon. I'm about to go to Harbour Bookshop to buy the Christopher Reid book (can't really afford it, but will sacrifice all coffees and lunches out this week)as my library copy is due back, but even other online outfits like the 'BookDepository' would be better than Amazon. I also cannot imagine buying a Kindle. I like to own books; I like their physical feel; I even like scribbling in them (and photocopying the odd bit to show a friend); I certainly could not cope with the idea that 'Big Brother' Amazon could delete a text from my Kindle memory, or that I cannot add rude comments to a page as I'm reading. I think Amazon does need taking down a peg or two, but unless more people speak out - especially to advertise other second-hand and 'special deal' sources - then not much will happen.
I don't know enough about the workings of the publishing industry, but as so many of the smaller and more specialist companies seem to be sinking I'm loathe to be sweepingly negative, I don't want any more disappearing. What are the alternatives? Suggestions please. Self-publishing makes me think of Parliament before MPs' expenses were introduced, when all the ones without money could not take part.
I do feel for authors stuggling to make a living, but I've never thought of writing as a source of income (more an illness or obsession) and have been ridiculously delighted when anyone has paid me anything - but then I would not want to be taken advantage of. Maybe the likes of JK Rowling and Dan Brown should subsidise struggling authors?
I don't know enough about the workings of the publishing industry, but as so many of the smaller and more specialist companies seem to be sinking I'm loathe to be sweepingly negative, I don't want any more disappearing. What are the alternatives? Suggestions please. Self-publishing makes me think of Parliament before MPs' expenses were introduced, when all the ones without money could not take part.
I do feel for authors stuggling to make a living, but I've never thought of writing as a source of income (more an illness or obsession) and have been ridiculously delighted when anyone has paid me anything - but then I would not want to be taken advantage of. Maybe the likes of JK Rowling and Dan Brown should subsidise struggling authors?
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Henry Porter of The Observer on Books
Hi Everyone,
this taken from the Observer 7 Feb and Written by Henry Porter is an interesting article and lays out the main problems facing an aspiring author today. Note that a writer only gets 35p royalties on a £10 book!!!!!! Also remember that in Britain in 2007 of the 200,000 books on sale only 10,000 sold more than 3,500 copies. Of the 1.2m copies sold in U.S. in 2004 only 2% sold more than 5,000 copies!!!! As I've mentioned often in Just Write and Left Bank its the process of writing that is the important thing that creative act and what it engenders in you the writer that is the vital element.
It might be a good idea to discuss different ways of getting a book published at a meeting of people with novels, short stories and poems etc waiting in a bottom drawer.
Hope you all enjoy this and offer comment on it.
Michael
As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing
Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work
·
Henry Porter
The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010
Article history
Last Monday at 8.30am I began to type the first lines of a new novel. These sentences are unlikely to see the light of day but they're a start – I am out on the pitch swinging my arm in a fashion that convinces me at least, which is certainly an advance on the week spent inside the pavilion whitening my pads and tidying the locker.
To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room.
Publishing seems to be one of the great mysteries of commerce. Despite the large numbers involved – a total of £1.752bn was spent on 235.7m books in 2009 in the UK, that's nearly four books for every man woman and child – the business today is a testament to self-deprecation, with only a few people willing to assert the unique value of books and their content.
When you transfer the model into any other business, the way books are sold seems like an evolutionary freak. Imagine you are the owner of a chain of ironmongers and a man suggests that you sell his new line of household equipment. You agree but with the following conditions. First, though he retains ownership of his pans and brushes, you will take something more than 50% from any sale. Second, he must pay for front-of-store display to make sure the goods catch the customer's eye. Third, if they don't sell within a specified period he pays to ship them back to his warehouse. Fourth, if your centralised ordering system breaks down and the items fail to materialise during the broom and mop-handle promotion, he has no comeback.
That is how publishers sells books: having paid an advance to a writer and stumped up for editing, design, marketing and distribution, they take all the retailer's risk.
Selling through the supermarkets is even tougher. There is huge competition for space and the supermarket demands a much greater percentage of the sale price. Publishers guard the figures closely but 65% is not uncommon; one asked for 85% before Christmas. In order to sell more hand-crafted mint chocolates and olive oil, the supermarket may chose to make a loss leader out of a bestseller by Dan Brown or JK Rowling, thus devaluing the book and harming the trade of the local book shop in one swipe. "Supermarkets like to give any specialist shop a good kicking," said one publisher.
The forces in the book market are increasingly monopolistic, particularly when it comes to selling on the web and on the new battlefront of ebooks. Amazon, the online retailer, has unprecedented power to squeeze publishers' margins and to compete with high street retailers. The company now wants to make its Kindle reader the primary platform for ebooks and is pursuing a strategy that when the publisher supplies books at wholesale it will also license the books at a very low price to the Kindle. In effect publishers would be providing the means to cannibalise their own product, and at a discount. Unsurprisingly they prefer a model that allows them to appoint a company such as Apple as an agency for their books.
I don't have serious objections in principle to the right kind of "disintermediation" – the jargon used for the process of reducing the supply chain – or even to ebooks, as long as they don't completely replace the physical book. If all man had ever known was ebooks and someone came along and suggested actually printing one it would be heralded as a wonderful addition to civilisation. However, there should be doubts about the remote power of deletion that Amazon retains over the Kindle. During the Amazon-Macmillan dispute last week sample chapters from Macmillan books disappeared from electronic readers and last year the company removed a copy of Orwell's 1984 because of a rights problem.
If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer's share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent's fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer. The fierce discounting in supermarkets means that writers are now even less likely to earn out their advances. At the same time advances are being cut and authors' contracts are being summarily cancelled.
We tell ourselves times are tough and jobs must be saved. Newspapers, TV, the music business are all suffering from the recession, a collapse of advertising and audience. But as their advances are cut, authors have failed to notice that during the worst recession for 80 years, book sales went down last year by just 1.2% in value and only 0.5% in volume. Non-fiction titles suffered but fiction is booming and all the publishers I spoke to are secretly optimistic.
So the storm is far from perfect. What does seem to be happening is that publishers have somehow become embarrassed about "being the impresarios of stories and ideas", as Toby Mundy, head of Atlantic Books, romantically describes his job. They have allowed the relegation of the book to the status of a stone-baked pizza, a commercial and moral misstep, and writers have gone along with it because of the gloomy orthodoxies of necessity.
Talk of "disintermediation" is nonsense when half a minute's thought will tell you that the intermediaries that count, the ones between writers and readers, are large, monopolistic and generally unsympathetic to writers. E books don't bother me any more than writing on a computer does. The world will accommodate them even though reading Christopher Reid's Costa-winning collection of poems on a screen will scarcely add to the experience. What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.
Over the last couple of weeks I've finished three books, Finest Years by Max Hastings, Generosity by the American novelist Richard Powers and an extraordinary book by William Blacker about his life among the farmers and gypsies of Transylvania, Along the Enchanted Way. They were thrilling to read. We should prize the system that produced such wonderful storytelling: it needs to be nurtured as an essential part of our society. To write a book half as good as any of them is what makes me proceed with trepidation from the first to the second paragraph.
this taken from the Observer 7 Feb and Written by Henry Porter is an interesting article and lays out the main problems facing an aspiring author today. Note that a writer only gets 35p royalties on a £10 book!!!!!! Also remember that in Britain in 2007 of the 200,000 books on sale only 10,000 sold more than 3,500 copies. Of the 1.2m copies sold in U.S. in 2004 only 2% sold more than 5,000 copies!!!! As I've mentioned often in Just Write and Left Bank its the process of writing that is the important thing that creative act and what it engenders in you the writer that is the vital element.
It might be a good idea to discuss different ways of getting a book published at a meeting of people with novels, short stories and poems etc waiting in a bottom drawer.
Hope you all enjoy this and offer comment on it.
Michael
As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing
Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work
·
Henry Porter
The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010
Article history
Last Monday at 8.30am I began to type the first lines of a new novel. These sentences are unlikely to see the light of day but they're a start – I am out on the pitch swinging my arm in a fashion that convinces me at least, which is certainly an advance on the week spent inside the pavilion whitening my pads and tidying the locker.
To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room.
Publishing seems to be one of the great mysteries of commerce. Despite the large numbers involved – a total of £1.752bn was spent on 235.7m books in 2009 in the UK, that's nearly four books for every man woman and child – the business today is a testament to self-deprecation, with only a few people willing to assert the unique value of books and their content.
When you transfer the model into any other business, the way books are sold seems like an evolutionary freak. Imagine you are the owner of a chain of ironmongers and a man suggests that you sell his new line of household equipment. You agree but with the following conditions. First, though he retains ownership of his pans and brushes, you will take something more than 50% from any sale. Second, he must pay for front-of-store display to make sure the goods catch the customer's eye. Third, if they don't sell within a specified period he pays to ship them back to his warehouse. Fourth, if your centralised ordering system breaks down and the items fail to materialise during the broom and mop-handle promotion, he has no comeback.
That is how publishers sells books: having paid an advance to a writer and stumped up for editing, design, marketing and distribution, they take all the retailer's risk.
Selling through the supermarkets is even tougher. There is huge competition for space and the supermarket demands a much greater percentage of the sale price. Publishers guard the figures closely but 65% is not uncommon; one asked for 85% before Christmas. In order to sell more hand-crafted mint chocolates and olive oil, the supermarket may chose to make a loss leader out of a bestseller by Dan Brown or JK Rowling, thus devaluing the book and harming the trade of the local book shop in one swipe. "Supermarkets like to give any specialist shop a good kicking," said one publisher.
The forces in the book market are increasingly monopolistic, particularly when it comes to selling on the web and on the new battlefront of ebooks. Amazon, the online retailer, has unprecedented power to squeeze publishers' margins and to compete with high street retailers. The company now wants to make its Kindle reader the primary platform for ebooks and is pursuing a strategy that when the publisher supplies books at wholesale it will also license the books at a very low price to the Kindle. In effect publishers would be providing the means to cannibalise their own product, and at a discount. Unsurprisingly they prefer a model that allows them to appoint a company such as Apple as an agency for their books.
I don't have serious objections in principle to the right kind of "disintermediation" – the jargon used for the process of reducing the supply chain – or even to ebooks, as long as they don't completely replace the physical book. If all man had ever known was ebooks and someone came along and suggested actually printing one it would be heralded as a wonderful addition to civilisation. However, there should be doubts about the remote power of deletion that Amazon retains over the Kindle. During the Amazon-Macmillan dispute last week sample chapters from Macmillan books disappeared from electronic readers and last year the company removed a copy of Orwell's 1984 because of a rights problem.
If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer's share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent's fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer. The fierce discounting in supermarkets means that writers are now even less likely to earn out their advances. At the same time advances are being cut and authors' contracts are being summarily cancelled.
We tell ourselves times are tough and jobs must be saved. Newspapers, TV, the music business are all suffering from the recession, a collapse of advertising and audience. But as their advances are cut, authors have failed to notice that during the worst recession for 80 years, book sales went down last year by just 1.2% in value and only 0.5% in volume. Non-fiction titles suffered but fiction is booming and all the publishers I spoke to are secretly optimistic.
So the storm is far from perfect. What does seem to be happening is that publishers have somehow become embarrassed about "being the impresarios of stories and ideas", as Toby Mundy, head of Atlantic Books, romantically describes his job. They have allowed the relegation of the book to the status of a stone-baked pizza, a commercial and moral misstep, and writers have gone along with it because of the gloomy orthodoxies of necessity.
Talk of "disintermediation" is nonsense when half a minute's thought will tell you that the intermediaries that count, the ones between writers and readers, are large, monopolistic and generally unsympathetic to writers. E books don't bother me any more than writing on a computer does. The world will accommodate them even though reading Christopher Reid's Costa-winning collection of poems on a screen will scarcely add to the experience. What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.
Over the last couple of weeks I've finished three books, Finest Years by Max Hastings, Generosity by the American novelist Richard Powers and an extraordinary book by William Blacker about his life among the farmers and gypsies of Transylvania, Along the Enchanted Way. They were thrilling to read. We should prize the system that produced such wonderful storytelling: it needs to be nurtured as an essential part of our society. To write a book half as good as any of them is what makes me proceed with trepidation from the first to the second paragraph.
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Poor Anne!!!!!!
quite an account but it doesn't figure in my reckoning but I am sure there is an O.B.E. in it somewhere! I've been reading 'The Sea,' The Sea by John Banville which won the Booker in 2005. Much praised and the writing is to be admired and the insight is deep but all deeply depressing, full of Irish misery. It's unremitting and I'm struggling to make the end despite the ravings of the critics. It is good on memory and just how unfaithful to any kind of veracity it is but the existential themes running through everything are quite exhausting.
For a bit of relief I watched Ken Russell's film of 'Women in Love,' last evening. It's a fine effort to represent the subleties of the novel through film. With the nude scenes (Bates and Reed) with bits in full view and the torrid (for the time) love scenes no wonder it was controversial, typical Russell. But I loved his films on Elgar and Mahler which are classics. It did seem a bit dated and mannered but who would have a stab at it today? Definitely worth watching. I'm going to watch La Boheme with two of my favourite singers Anna Netrebko & Rolando Villazon in title roles. Magical wonderful stuff their La Traviata is a sizzler too. Glorious; why doesn't Plymouth have an opera house????????
quite an account but it doesn't figure in my reckoning but I am sure there is an O.B.E. in it somewhere! I've been reading 'The Sea,' The Sea by John Banville which won the Booker in 2005. Much praised and the writing is to be admired and the insight is deep but all deeply depressing, full of Irish misery. It's unremitting and I'm struggling to make the end despite the ravings of the critics. It is good on memory and just how unfaithful to any kind of veracity it is but the existential themes running through everything are quite exhausting.
For a bit of relief I watched Ken Russell's film of 'Women in Love,' last evening. It's a fine effort to represent the subleties of the novel through film. With the nude scenes (Bates and Reed) with bits in full view and the torrid (for the time) love scenes no wonder it was controversial, typical Russell. But I loved his films on Elgar and Mahler which are classics. It did seem a bit dated and mannered but who would have a stab at it today? Definitely worth watching. I'm going to watch La Boheme with two of my favourite singers Anna Netrebko & Rolando Villazon in title roles. Magical wonderful stuff their La Traviata is a sizzler too. Glorious; why doesn't Plymouth have an opera house????????
Sunday Sunday
It's dusk now and I have been at this keyboard since before sunrise. What have I been up to? Writing a fictional piece? Not quite ... I've been grappling with the accounts for the South Hams Theatre and Concert Club! As their newly appointed treasurer, I have until Tuesday to make sense of all the transactions over the past year and present a report to the committee.
If you enjoy theatre/concert trips and would like to be transported by coach from Kingsbridge (and other places en route) to Plymouth, Torquay and Exeter venues, let me know. The joining fee and subscription rate are minimal ... and you will meet like-minded people too.
There are 350 members already and the more we have the more variety we can have in our programme of events.
If you enjoy theatre/concert trips and would like to be transported by coach from Kingsbridge (and other places en route) to Plymouth, Torquay and Exeter venues, let me know. The joining fee and subscription rate are minimal ... and you will meet like-minded people too.
There are 350 members already and the more we have the more variety we can have in our programme of events.
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
Musings on a Snowy Day
Hi everyone I do hope you had a wonderful festive season and wish you and your loved ones a healthy,happy and holy 2010. We Went down to Southern France for the hols where the weather wasn't as warm or sunny as we expected but we had a great time nevrthelss with some Swedish friends. It was warm enough for a new year dip in the Med! My friend Christer is a great film buff and we watched Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo which is so imaginative and funny with some incredibly witty dialogue. Grab a DVD if you can. Mia Farrow is enchanting.
Revolutionary Road directed by Sam Mendes and starring Di Caprio and Kate Winslett is much harder to watch because of tis subject matter the break up of a marriage in 1950's America. Its deep but perceptive stuff and the acting (even by Di Caprio) is superb I thinbk Winslett was Oscar nominated for her part. The camera work is detailed and revealing as well.
I read a lot of non fiction over the holiday. Richard Sheltons 'The Longshoreman,' the story of his life as a Marine Biologist is fascinating and covers much more than the fish world although that is written about in some detail. Somebody wrote about this book that 'Shelton's writing was so good it interests you in things you are not interested in,' which I found to be very accurate. I could compare him to Redmond O' Hanlon (Trawler). Both are fine writers as is Adam Nicolson
grandson of the notorious Vita Sackville West who was the lover of Virgina Wolfe and numerous others and was the builder of the gardens at Sissinghurst castle in Kent. Not quite to my taste.... the gardens I mean. But I digress. Nicolson's book 'Sea Room,' is superb and tells of his relationship with the Shiant Islands off the West Coast of Scotland. he was given them by his dad....as one does. Its so detailed and covers folk lore, sailing, anthropology, history, oceanography. I found it gripping and ending up longing for a visit and felt I knew intimately the places he described. Both Shelton and Nicolson demonstrate that there are still some fine writers around and I was also heartened that Colm Toibin won The Costa Book Award. I'm looking forward to reading Brooklyn. His novel about Henry James 'The Master,' should have won some years ago but was pipped by, in my opinion, a greatly inferior novel The Line of Beauty...not sure that is the right title. The following is from The Guardian.
Colm Tóibín is one of the most highly regarded Irish writers of his generation, loved by his readers and admired by his peers, but when it comes to major book prizes he is something of a bridesmaid. He so often nearly wins them but doesn't – until, that is, tonight when he was named winner of the Costa novel of the year award.
It was an achievement all the more notable because Tóibín was up against the literary sensation of last year: Hilary Mantel's Booker prize-winning tale of Tudor intrigue, Wolf Hall. "It's just great but I'm very surprised," said Tóibín. "Wolf Hall was a wonderful book."
Brooklyn, a sparely written account of a young woman's emigration from 1950s Ireland to New York, was one of five category winners announced tonight which will now compete for the overall Costa book prize.
Other winners were Christopher Reid in the poetry category for A Scattering; Graham Farmelo in the biography section for his account of the life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac; Patrick Ness, the children's book award for The Ask and the Answer; and Raphael Selbourne, the first novel award for Beauty.
Tóibín was on the Booker longlist but to widespread surprise was not shortlisted. Previously, The Master was just pipped to the Booker by The Line of Beauty in 2004 while The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted in 1999, the year JM Coetzee won for Disgrace. Tóibín also has form in the Costas – or Whitbreads as they were formerly known – with a shortlisting in 1990 for his first novel, The South.
Tóibín said he was delighted to win and that book awards did matter. "It does make a great difference to what publishers call sales and what I call readers." He described Brooklyn as quite low key, about somebody very ordinary and not a book that would be considered as an automatic prize winner.
Brooklyn was straight away installed by William Hill as 6-4 favourite for the overall prize – odds too short for Tóibín.
"I won quite a lot of money when I bet on Hilary Mantel when she was 12-1 for the Booker. I don't think I'll be betting on me," he said.
The novelist made headlines last year when he suggested in an interview that he did not really enjoy writing and the best thing about it was the money. There was, though, probably a twinkle in his eye. Asked yesterday if he enjoyed writing he said: "Look I'm working at the moment and it has been a great Christmas and everybody has been out drinking and I've been locked in here since December 27 with these characters and sentences trying to get out. So, no. I want to finish this book."
Second favourite, at 3-1, for the overall prize is a debut biography by Farmelo – a five-year labour of love telling the story of one of the least-known yet most important scientists of the last century. "It is absolutely appalling that most people in this country have not heard of the name Paul Dirac," said Farmelo. "He was the greatest scientist Britain produced in the 20th century."
Part of the reason for the lack of knowledge is that Dirac loathed publicity. Farmelo gained access to a previously unmined family archive in Florida hopes the book will bring the genius of Dirac – and his importance to science – to a wider public. "He was a publicly educated boy from a Bristol terrace and what he achieved was immense. He conceived half the universe in his head, he conceived antimatter."
The winner of the first novel award, Selbourne's Beauty, is the story of a young Bangladeshi woman on the run from her family. "I'm very pleased. It's great to be recognised and of course it's invaluable in terms of getting the book out there and being seen by people."
Like most novelists Selbourne has had a range of jobs over the years, including as a scooter salesman, but all have been attempts to get out of teaching, he said. It was while teaching in Italy that Selbourne made the arguably unusual decision to move to Wolverhampton, attracted by a job teaching unemployed adults with basic skills needs.
The city, he said, gets a bad press. "The people for one thing are incredibly friendly. I'm from Oxford so I'm a southerner used to unfriendly people. I find Wolverhampton very stimulating."
For Reid, winning the poetry award is third time lucky – he has been nominated twice before. His winning collection is a tribute to his wife, who died in 2005.
The 6-1 outsider for the overall award is Ness for the second book in his trilogy Chaos Walking, which the judges called "a major achievement in the making."
A judging panel chaired by novelist Josephine Hart – including Marie Helvin, Caroline Quentin, Dervla Kirwan, Gary Kemp and Tom Bradby – will now decide the overall winner from the all-male list and announce it on 26 January.
Revolutionary Road directed by Sam Mendes and starring Di Caprio and Kate Winslett is much harder to watch because of tis subject matter the break up of a marriage in 1950's America. Its deep but perceptive stuff and the acting (even by Di Caprio) is superb I thinbk Winslett was Oscar nominated for her part. The camera work is detailed and revealing as well.
I read a lot of non fiction over the holiday. Richard Sheltons 'The Longshoreman,' the story of his life as a Marine Biologist is fascinating and covers much more than the fish world although that is written about in some detail. Somebody wrote about this book that 'Shelton's writing was so good it interests you in things you are not interested in,' which I found to be very accurate. I could compare him to Redmond O' Hanlon (Trawler). Both are fine writers as is Adam Nicolson
grandson of the notorious Vita Sackville West who was the lover of Virgina Wolfe and numerous others and was the builder of the gardens at Sissinghurst castle in Kent. Not quite to my taste.... the gardens I mean. But I digress. Nicolson's book 'Sea Room,' is superb and tells of his relationship with the Shiant Islands off the West Coast of Scotland. he was given them by his dad....as one does. Its so detailed and covers folk lore, sailing, anthropology, history, oceanography. I found it gripping and ending up longing for a visit and felt I knew intimately the places he described. Both Shelton and Nicolson demonstrate that there are still some fine writers around and I was also heartened that Colm Toibin won The Costa Book Award. I'm looking forward to reading Brooklyn. His novel about Henry James 'The Master,' should have won some years ago but was pipped by, in my opinion, a greatly inferior novel The Line of Beauty...not sure that is the right title. The following is from The Guardian.
Colm Tóibín is one of the most highly regarded Irish writers of his generation, loved by his readers and admired by his peers, but when it comes to major book prizes he is something of a bridesmaid. He so often nearly wins them but doesn't – until, that is, tonight when he was named winner of the Costa novel of the year award.
It was an achievement all the more notable because Tóibín was up against the literary sensation of last year: Hilary Mantel's Booker prize-winning tale of Tudor intrigue, Wolf Hall. "It's just great but I'm very surprised," said Tóibín. "Wolf Hall was a wonderful book."
Brooklyn, a sparely written account of a young woman's emigration from 1950s Ireland to New York, was one of five category winners announced tonight which will now compete for the overall Costa book prize.
Other winners were Christopher Reid in the poetry category for A Scattering; Graham Farmelo in the biography section for his account of the life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac; Patrick Ness, the children's book award for The Ask and the Answer; and Raphael Selbourne, the first novel award for Beauty.
Tóibín was on the Booker longlist but to widespread surprise was not shortlisted. Previously, The Master was just pipped to the Booker by The Line of Beauty in 2004 while The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted in 1999, the year JM Coetzee won for Disgrace. Tóibín also has form in the Costas – or Whitbreads as they were formerly known – with a shortlisting in 1990 for his first novel, The South.
Tóibín said he was delighted to win and that book awards did matter. "It does make a great difference to what publishers call sales and what I call readers." He described Brooklyn as quite low key, about somebody very ordinary and not a book that would be considered as an automatic prize winner.
Brooklyn was straight away installed by William Hill as 6-4 favourite for the overall prize – odds too short for Tóibín.
"I won quite a lot of money when I bet on Hilary Mantel when she was 12-1 for the Booker. I don't think I'll be betting on me," he said.
The novelist made headlines last year when he suggested in an interview that he did not really enjoy writing and the best thing about it was the money. There was, though, probably a twinkle in his eye. Asked yesterday if he enjoyed writing he said: "Look I'm working at the moment and it has been a great Christmas and everybody has been out drinking and I've been locked in here since December 27 with these characters and sentences trying to get out. So, no. I want to finish this book."
Second favourite, at 3-1, for the overall prize is a debut biography by Farmelo – a five-year labour of love telling the story of one of the least-known yet most important scientists of the last century. "It is absolutely appalling that most people in this country have not heard of the name Paul Dirac," said Farmelo. "He was the greatest scientist Britain produced in the 20th century."
Part of the reason for the lack of knowledge is that Dirac loathed publicity. Farmelo gained access to a previously unmined family archive in Florida hopes the book will bring the genius of Dirac – and his importance to science – to a wider public. "He was a publicly educated boy from a Bristol terrace and what he achieved was immense. He conceived half the universe in his head, he conceived antimatter."
The winner of the first novel award, Selbourne's Beauty, is the story of a young Bangladeshi woman on the run from her family. "I'm very pleased. It's great to be recognised and of course it's invaluable in terms of getting the book out there and being seen by people."
Like most novelists Selbourne has had a range of jobs over the years, including as a scooter salesman, but all have been attempts to get out of teaching, he said. It was while teaching in Italy that Selbourne made the arguably unusual decision to move to Wolverhampton, attracted by a job teaching unemployed adults with basic skills needs.
The city, he said, gets a bad press. "The people for one thing are incredibly friendly. I'm from Oxford so I'm a southerner used to unfriendly people. I find Wolverhampton very stimulating."
For Reid, winning the poetry award is third time lucky – he has been nominated twice before. His winning collection is a tribute to his wife, who died in 2005.
The 6-1 outsider for the overall award is Ness for the second book in his trilogy Chaos Walking, which the judges called "a major achievement in the making."
A judging panel chaired by novelist Josephine Hart – including Marie Helvin, Caroline Quentin, Dervla Kirwan, Gary Kemp and Tom Bradby – will now decide the overall winner from the all-male list and announce it on 26 January.
Saturday, 2 January 2010
Here's to 2010!!
Happy New Year to the 'Left Bank' Bloggers and I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year. I enjoyed several breaks with routine, including some wobbly health, but I'm fine now - in fact much better than before - and raring to go! I managed to get a lot of writing and reading done in between socialising, walking and sleeping. Books to recommend are: The Other Elizabeth Taylor a biography of the writer ET by Nicola Beauman, who is quite wonderful about the actual process of writing and rather contentious in what she reveals. The biography sent me back to ET's stories, which I love, and they kindled some story ideas which must have been lurking in my unconscious. Also, Esther Waters (1894) by the Irish novelist George Moore - he's not in the same writing league as Dickens, Eliot, Trollope etc, and the novel is skimmable in parts if you are not interested in horse racing and betting, but a fascinating story of being poor, pregnant and trapped by conventions in late 19thC London - I imagine it caused quite a scandal, at the time, with its accounts of baby farming.
Look forward to seeing you all at our next meeting. Carole
Look forward to seeing you all at our next meeting. Carole
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