…I started to write, I had three ambitions. I wanted to be published; I wanted to support myself, and one day my family, through my books; and more than anything I wanted my work somehow to provide the inspiration for a bath or shower product. Sonic Death Monkey is the name of Barry’s band in High Fidelity, but it is also the name of a (frankly peculiar) chocolate shower gel on sale at Lush, and until anyone from Lush tells me otherwise, I am claiming it as the fulfillment of a lifetime’s work - it seems unlikely to me that they hit on the name coincidentally.

If you are a young writer currently trying to whittle your ambitions down to a manageable number, and you’re currently trying to choose between, say, a Best Original Screenplay Oscar and a name on a shower gel, I should warn you there is very little razzmatazz that comes with the latter: you go into a toiletries shop, and there it is. No awards ceremony, no letter, not even a lifetime’s supply of the product that bears your name, or the name of the band that your character plays in, anyway. Not even one free sample-sized bottle. But then, if you’re in the shower-gel naming game for the glory, your motives are all wrong anyway. Knowing I’ve cracked it is all the glory I need.

…I’m on here, but Entertainment Weekly’s “New Classics: the 100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008″ isn’t such a bad list, honestly.

www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html

 It finds room for Adrian Nicole Blanc’s brilliant Random Family, a book that anyone who lives in a city should read; it recognises that Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, both published in the last couple of years, don’t need to sit around and wait for the praise they deserve. Gilead, Birds of America, The Secret History, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Clockers and Mystic River are all present and correct.

Like any list, though, its omissions are startling, so I have chosen another thirteen that really should have been included. Why thirteen? Because that would be enough to push High Fidelity down to 101, and I can then claim impartiality.

1. The Giant’s House - Elizabeth McCracken
2. The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler
3. Empire Falls - Richard Russo
4. This Boy’s Life - Tobias Woolf
5. The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
6. What A Carve-Up! - Jonathan Coe
7. The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem
8. The Blind Side - Michael Lewis
9. Spies - Michael Frayn
10. Feed - MT Anderson
11. The Railway Man - Eric Lomax
12. Revolution In The Head - Ian McDonald
13. The Van -  Roddy Doyle.

I put my friend Roddy Doyle last only because he’d be the one to get the
most pleasure out of shoving me off the bottom - that’s how literary
friendships work.

On further reflection, I now see that these are my thirteen favourite books
of the last twenty-five years. Whoever compiled that list is insane.

Regrettably, these are the truest words ever spoken about the arts.

The Cancellation

On the day of the cancellation
The librarian phoned at two.
My reading at Swillingcote Youth Club
Had regrettably fallen through.

The members of Swillingcote Youth Club
Had just done their GCSEs
And demanded a rave, not poems,
Before they began their degrees.

Since this happened at such short notice
They would still have to pay my fee.
I parked in the nearest lay-by
And let out a loud yippee.

The librarian put the phone down
And muttered, ‘Oh, thank the Lord!’
She was fed up of chaperoning
While the touring poet toured.

The girl from the local bookshop
Who’d been told to provide a stall
But who knew that the youth club members
Would buy no books at all

Expressed with a wild gyration
Her joy at a late reprieve,
And Andy, the youth club leader,
And the youth arts worker, Steve,

Both cheered as one does when granted
The gift of eternal life.
Each felt like God’s chosen person
As he skipped back home to his wife.

It occurred to me some time later
That such bliss, such immense content
Needn’t always be left to fortune,
Could in fact be a planned event.

What ballet or play or reading,
What movie creates a buzz
Or boosts the morale of the nation
As a cancellation does?

No play, is the simple answer.
No film that was ever shown.
I submit that the cancellation
Is an art form all of its own.

To give back to a frantic public
Some hours they were sure they’d lose
Might well be my new vocation.
I anticipate great reviews.

From now on, with verve and gusto,
I’ll agree to a month-long tour.
Call now if you’d like to book me
For three hundred pounds or more.

From Selected Poems by Sophie Hannah (Penguin, £8.99)

… of Borders, they are trying to flog us their e-book reader, the ‘Iliad’, for £399. Meanwhile in the London Evening Standard, David Sexton seems quite taken with Amazon’s version, the Kindle. In my branch of Borders on Monday, the Iliad was piled high on the left, just as you walk in; on the right is their wall of bestselling paperbacks, many of which are being sold at half price. It was a quiet Monday morning, and there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four hundred quid e-book reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either. Attempting to sell people something for four hundred pounds that merely enables them to read something that they won’t buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task. (A member of staff at Borders told me that he attempted to persuade a young and famous comedian to buy an Iliad last week. He seemed interested, until he was told the price, at which point he swore loudly and walked away. So at the moment, they are priced too high for millionaire showbusiness entertainers.)

 There is currently much consternation in the book industry about the future of the conventional book, but my suspicion is that it will prove to be more tenacious than the CD, for the following reasons:

1) Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs. Vinyl yes, CDs no. They are too small for interesting cover art and legible lyrics, the cases break easily, and despite all promises to the contrary, they are extremely easy to break and scratch. Books have remained consistently lovable for several hundred years now. For readers, a wall lined with books is as attractive as any art we could afford to put up there.
2) E-book readers have a couple of disadvantages, when compared to mp3 players.  The first is that, when we bought our iPods, we already owned the music to put on it; none of us own e-books, however. The second is that so far, Apple is uninterested in designing an e-book reader, which means that they don’t look very cool.
3) We don’t buy many books – seven per person per year, a couple of which, we must assume, are presents for other people. Three paperbacks bought in a three-for-two offer – expenditure, fourteen pounds approx – will do most of us for months. The advantages of the Iliad and the Kindle – that you can take vast numbers of books away with you – are of no interest to the average book-buyer.
4) Book-lovers are always late adaptors, and generally suspicious of new technology.
5) The new capabilities of the iPod will make it harder to sell books anyway. How much reading has been done historically, simply because there is no television available on a bus or a train or a sun-lounger? But that’s no longer true. You could watch a whole series of the Sopranos by the pool on your iPod touchscreen, if you want.  Reading is going to take a hit from this.

But – and this is the most depressing reason – the truth is that people don’t like reading books much anyway: a 2004 survey of two thousand adults found that thirty-four per cent didn’t read books at all.  The music industry’s problems are many and profound, but you never see advertisements asking us to listen to more music; there are no pressure groups or government quangos attempting to ensure that we make room in our day for a little Leona Lewis. The problem is getting people to pay for music, not getting people to consume it.  Can you see every teenager in Britain harassing their parents for a Kindle? Me neither.

 I’m not naïve –  I’m sure that in the future we’ll be able to take a pill that saves us the trouble of having to read anything ever, and books will die overnight. But while people are so resistant to the act of reading itself, the four hundred pound reader is not going to be the must-have accessory of the near future.

If you would like to discuss this post, you can comment on it at the Penguin Blog http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com/the_penguin_blog/2008/07/special-guest-p.html

…of reading Thurston Clarke’s book ‘The Last Campaign - Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America’ is the introduction it provides to RFK’s fierce moral rhetoric. How about this, from a speech he gave to twenty thousand students at the University of Kansas, right at the beginning of his fight to secure the Democratic nomination in ‘68:

 ”Our gross national product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but the GNP - if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead….and the television programmes which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for  the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It  does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage…it measures everything, in short, except that which  makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

He had me at “gross national product”.

…festival season is upon us, and as I stare at the line-ups in newspapers and magazines, it occurs to me that they are very like opticians’ eye-charts. I (usually) recognise the names in big writing at the very top, but as I get older, I am mystified by the smaller ones, and I draw a complete blank with the bottom row. Here’s the bill for Morrissey’s forthcoming concert in Hyde Park:

I don’t know about you, but I’m very hazy on the fourth tier, and utterly baffled by the last. And even corrective surgery won’t help me.

….photograph of Nick Hornby and Nick Hornby, taken at our discussion last week. You can see a slide of one of Nick Hornby’s sculptures on the screen. Nick Hornby is on the left. And on the right.

…these football tournament summers. But the narratives of the tournaments themselves, the twists  and turns and sub-plots, tend to disappear from my memory almost as soon as the final kick in the last penalty-shoot out has sailed over the bar. Here’s a piece I wrote for the New Yorker about the 2002 World Cup. Who remembers the President of Perugia now? But what joy he provided at the time.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/07/15/020715fa_fact

…I have just finished reading is serious and intelligent. It also has the most peculiar flaw I’ve come across: its characters become wildly over-animated in conversational exchanges. The following reactions are drawn from a random sample of about a hundred pages, approximately a fifth of the novel, so there are loads more where these came from – and remember, these is no physical violence involved, despite all appearances to the contrary. “He grabbed the crown of his head”; “She fisted her skirt hem”; “He narrowed his eyes and pressed his cap” ; “M stumbled, his face twisted…M snorted and waved her off…She stood gaping…”; “Her neck jerked back, defensively”; “He thumbed his beard from underneath”; “She caught her hair. Her face flamed. She pulled at her shirt collar. She gathered her spray of hair and tied it up like a hank of rope” ; “The face yanked back, snorting”; “K palmed her own temples”; “he grimaced as if she’d kneed him” ;”She squinted at the possibility”; “His mouth hooked sideways”. After five hundred pages of this, I could see the characters only as sufferers from Tourette’s taking part in an Olympic boxing tournament; they flinch, snort and wince, their eyebrows shooting towards the heavens, at every available opportunity. I  am not the fittest talker in Britain, admittedly, but if I had to do all that every time I wanted to chat to someone, I would end up in hospital on a ventilator.

…people in their 60s at the James Brown tribute, some of them sitting directly in front of a couple in their twenties who danced manically (and, it has to be said, annoyingly) right from the opening bars.  Those who grew up with funk are more or less of pensionable age now: if you were twenty-one when James Brown released ‘Cold Sweat’, often cited as the first funk record, then you celebrated your sixtieth birthday a couple of years ago. I was glad to see the older people at the gig, because by being there, they were demonstrating a lifelong commitment to something that has meant a lot to them – after all these years, they want to drag themselves out on a Saturday night to see Fred Wesley and Pee-Wee Ellis in the flesh. Meanwhile, there is every chance that the ostentatiously exuberant young couple will not be listening to music much, if at all, in ten years’ time. I know from my own experience that people who seemed consumed by music and literature at college let it all slip with scarcely a backward glance once they reach their thirties. Maybe it is time to turn conventional wisdom – or at least, the conventional broadsheet columnist’s gripe – on its head and demand that only old people should be allowed to go to concerts. They are, after all, the only people who have been able to demonstrate that their love for music is not just a passing fad, a response to boredom and peer-group pressure.