My Weekly Book

Not my readers, sadly. No, this is an article from The Guardian in which the reading public is invited to nominate its choice of the year’s best discoveries. Which is a nice spin on the seasonal book list. Here’s the link: Readers’ Digests.

And, just to add value, my list of the best books I read this year (learn more about them via this link):

• Dead Run – PJ Tracy
• The Sixth Lamentation – William Brodrick
• Dead Lagoon – Michael Dibdin
• Death Knock – Frederic Lindsay
• Have Mercy On Us All – Fred Vargas
• Missing – Karin Alvtegen
• Interface – Joe Gores
• Total Recall – Sara Paretsky
• Touching the Void – Joe Simpson
• Holding the Key: my year as a guard in Sing-Sing – Ted Conover
• The Call of the Weird – Louis Theroux
• Untold Stories – Alan Bennett
• V for Vendetta – Alan Moore
• Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Rule Britannia – Daphne du Maurier
• Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
• The King of Elfland’s Daughter – Lord Dunsany
• The Chrysalids – John Wyndham
• The Eagle of the Ninth – Rosemary Sutcliff

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It didn’t help that I read this BBC Online story while writing the final scene of my NaNoWriMo 2006 story, with just hours to go to before the deadline expired. That couldn’t be described as containing sex – rather some very innocent teenage snogging – but it completely put me off my stroke nonetheless:

First timer takes bad sex award

Iain Hollingshead has won the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2006 with his first novel Twenty Something.

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Now in its 14th year, the award is given to the passage considered to be the most redundant in an otherwise excellent novel.

The panel admitted it was a close call against Tim Willocks’ The Religion but Hollingshead’s reference to “bulging trousers” tipped the scales. The 26-year-old said he was delighted to be the youngest recipient.

[snip]

Among the other nominees were established names like Irvine Welsh and Will Self but the panel described them as “beyond help at this point”. Read full story here…

I am still alive, just desperately trying to keep within hailing distance of my NaNoWriMo writing deadlines, and thus I am prevented from doing much blogging. These deadlines have gone far enough to pot to be really worrying while being close enough to what it says on my ink and highlighter-saturated piece of paper (formerly and laughingly known as a planning sheet) to prevent me sinking to my knees in despair.

The situation is as follows: I am on about 22,000 words and I should be 9,000 in advance of that. The goal is to have written 50,000 words by November 30, midnight. Who knows what will happen…

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As to reading, that is going just fine, a better method of procrastination has yet to be invented. I had a little incident in Borders the other day, the kind of incident that comes with free chocolate. They are actually handing out Green and Blacks at the till and who loses here, I ask you? Anyway, it was a classic three-for-two ambush and included a new Louis Theroux (I have phrased that sentence like this deliberately in order to avoid an accident with that x and an apostrophe) entitled The Call of the Weird. Along for the ride were Alan Bennett’s extensive memoir Untold Stories and a new Sara Paretsky paperback Fire Sale. I have already read the Theroux (practically in a sitting) and two-thirds of the Bennett, as delightful as ever.

A trip into the library merely to return books took me past a display that resembled the giant bars of chocolate you see stacked at the end of supermarket aisles from mid-September onwards. The result of that was a book of short stories by Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s fame, entitled How We Are Hungry and a detective story by Judith Cutler called The Food Detective. You can see how the library staff were working to a theme in their displays which makes the end-of-aisle analogy even more appropriate. I’ve got Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy, as thick as a brick and a wonderful find, sitting on a table waiting to be started and I dearly hope I will actually enjoy that as much as I expect to. In the graphic novel department, I finally bought a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and am expecting to be reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series in the new year. Oh, and a collection of gardening columns by Monty Don arranged by month and entitled My Roots has been pressed on me by Beloved Other Half who was bowled over by tales of muddy potatoes and hazel hedges. I’ve got as far as March and am enjoying myself.

And now to what I thought was the point of this post; a couple of good things spotted in the Guardian Books pages today (spent writing hard, as you can see). The first is an analysis of the language in DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, a book I once started, did not persevere with and intend to read again. The second is a fascinating interview with Robert Persig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is essential and insightful reading because apparently he allows himself to be interviewed so rarely. Oh, and I was given the most beautiful book as a birthday present, but will post separately about that.

Back to it…

I love this article, from The Guardian. I once worked as a library assistant – but the worst thing I ever did was borrow more books than I should…

Judge shows leniency to remorseful book thief

…Police were alerted to the thefts when a rare book dealer in Somerset saw the library’s stamp on one of the books on sale online. Buckley, who was an amateur photographer, had uploaded pictures of such quality that the seal was visible to the naked eye.

When police raided his high-rise flat, they found more than 400 books, carefully indexed by Buckley on his own card system. The haul included a book of letters about the death of Louis XVI and a 1675 edition of English historian Willam Camden’s The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth.

Officers also found a volume of political writings by Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Between January last year and March this year, Buckley took the books in twos and threes from the library’s private collection. A security system failed to alert library staff to the thefts. Read full story here…

Here’s a story from the BBC News website that should bring a wry smile to the face of anyone who has read Daphne du Maurier’s last full-length novel, Rule Britannia – Celtic resistance and all that. Of course, viewed in a certain light, it’s also quite funny.

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Ferry receives US warship warning

…Operation Neptune Warrior, a training exercise for Nato warships, is taking place off the west coast of Scotland.

A threat by the US Navy to fire on unidentified ships was transmitted to the Kilcreggan to Gourock ferry as it crossed a warship’s path.

A spokesman for HM Naval Base Clyde said the ferry was in no danger and an investigation is under way.

The MV Kenilworth was making its regular 10-minute crossing at about 0940 BST on Monday when the incident happened.

The US warship was leaving Faslane naval base for the two-week exercise.

It is understood it mistakenly broadcast a warning on VHF Channel 16, the international calling and distress frequency, instead of on an exercise frequency. Read full story here…

This is sad news. Eric Newby was a fantastically witty and informative writer and I would recommend his books very highly. From BBC Online:

Travel writer Newby dies aged 86

Travel writer Eric Newby, whose works included A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush, has died at the age of 86.

Newby began travelling after World War II with a climbing expedition in Afghanistan, which formed the basis of his best-known book.

He was awarded a CBE in 1994 and was given a lifetime achievement award by the British Guild of Writers in 2001.

[snip]

He was frequently accompanied on trips by his wife Wanda, who he met in Italy during World War II following his escape from a prisoner of war camp.

[snip]

He was hailed as a “marvellous storyteller” by Washington Post book critic Noel Perrin.

The Times’ Geoffrey Moorhouse said: “The thing that sets Eric Newby apart from other literate travellers is gusto. Where others flutter on impressionistic wings… he barges into everything with relish and mockery in the opposite of the grand manner”. Read full article here…

• Eric Newby on Wikipedia (includes selected bibliography)
• The Telegraph obit

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Bibliophilic article by Nick Hornby in today’s Graun. I find the condition described troubles me especially on public transport where I will perform contortions trying to discreetly read the title and occasionally the jacket of other people’s books. Also deals with the issue of people who are snobbish about what other people are reading:

Can’t put it down?

Engrossed outdoor readers were a common sight over the long, hot summer, noticed Nick Hornby. He found the variety of books on show gave a surprising insight into what we read – and why we read it

For those of us who suffer from the occasionally embarrassing condition almost certainly known as xenagorabibliomania – an obsessive curiosity about the books that strangers read in open spaces – then this summer’s heatwave has been a disaster: we weren’t able to walk five yards without seeing a head half-obscured by an intriguingly unlikely paperback. In the last month alone, I have spotted a beautiful young woman reading a copy of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida outside a Starbucks in Islington (I know, I know – what else could one expect, in a borough where you can always find an emergency semiologist but never an emergency plumber), and a man in a vest reading a battered history of English prisons at the Gospel Oak lido. Sometimes it’s as much fun trying to fathom out a person’s relationship with a book as it is to contemplate the mysteries of his or her marriage. Read on here…

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Here’s something that has brought out my cynical streak. From USNews.com:

Maybe it was the influence of his wife, Laura, a former librarian, or his mother, Barbara, a longtime promoter of literacy. Or perhaps he was just eager to dispel his image as an intellectual lightweight. But President Bush now wants it known that he is a man of letters. In fact, Bush has entered a book-reading competition with Karl Rove, his political adviser. White House aides say the president has read 60 books so far this year (while the brainy Rove, to Bush’s competitive delight, has racked up only 50). The commander in chief delved into three volumes in August alone-two on Abraham Lincoln and, more surprising for a man of unambiguous convictions, The Stranger, Albert Camus’s existential tale of murder and alienation.

Bush’s critics aren’t buying. A man who so regularly mangles the English language and seems to disdain complexity couldn’t possibly be so cerebral, they argue. But portraying Bush as a voracious reader is part of an ongoing White House campaign to restore what a senior adviser calls “gravitas” to the Bush persona. He certainly needs something. Only about 34 percent of Americans approve of his job performance-and 58 percent say Bush “seems in over his head,” according to Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. If nothing changes, the president could be a major liability for Republicans in November’s congressional elections.

Far be it from me to cast aspersions on the verisimilitude of Messrs G Bush and K Rove and their press operation. But, as someone that has so far read 38 books this year, a lot of them not particularly highbrow, and has struggled to find the time to do it, I would just like to enquire, who is running the country while they’re devoting time to improving their minds? I find this so far removed from my own experience of trying to complete a reading challenge, even while leading a normally busy life, never mind trying to run a superpower, that I cannot treat it with any credibility whatsoever.

Or maybe my nose is just out of joint.

It’s the middle of August and things are looking pretty good for the 50 Book Challenge. In that I’m reading my 38th book and it’s still summer, technically, at least. Of course, there are minor issues to tie up, not least the fact that I’ve still got half of book 34, Don Quixote, to go – and that’s quite a substantial bit of reading. But generally speaking I feel quite optimistic and it is always a boost when it looks like you are going to hit a target.

But now insidious questions have started to creep in about what I’m reading. The rules of the challenge are pretty flexible. I, for instance, am perfectly happy counting both re-reads and graphic novels although it turns out that I haven’t done too many of either. But it turns out that easily my favourite kind of book is the crime novel or thriller that can be turned around in approximately 48 hours, contains a good bit of action and a nice, intellectually-satisfying puzzle to solve.

So, this is evidently what I enjoy reading. But is it what I should be reading?

Blow that, says Mr Random. He’s a proper, instinctive liberal rather than a liberal through current political expediency, like me. He says, read what you enjoy and be damned as to whether it’s what you should be reading. I’m not sure I can be quite so casual and permissive. Obviously there are other things on my list – some classic and contemporary fiction, a lot of non-fiction and let’s not forget the Don. But they take a serious investment of time which is not always entirely compatible with the book-a-week premise of the challenge. (I have noticed that many of the people who knock off 100 volumes or more seem to concentrate on quick-read young adult fiction – I’m just pointing this out, not being judgemental.)

I have been trying to vary what’s on my reading list. But another outcome that I was looking for was to get through the incredible backlog of bought-and-not-read volumes cluttering up my flat. And, guess what I’ve been buying? Largely, but not exclusively, the crime novel or thriller that can be turned around in approximately 48 hours, contains a good bit of action and a nice, intellectually-satisfying puzzle to solve. Which means that notching up a hit parade of impressive authors, while gratifying to the ego, is only one of many possible criteria for making all this work.

Evidently I’m not the only person whose mind has been running on this matter. The BBC News website has a piece (let’s not be uncharitable and call it an extended plug) on a book by a former Booker Prize judge that’s just being published. It’s about how to choose what you read. You can plough through the whole thing here – but the following bit was what got me thinking:

Booker judge gives novel advice

“When I started my reading career books were hard to come by. Now it’s the opposite. Sometimes you feel you’re being crushed by the weight of books available.

“There is so much choice, all of it tempting and much of it good,” he adds.

“What I wanted to do, as much for myself as anyone else, was find strategies to get through this extraordinary thicket.”

To maximise the enjoyment of reading fiction, Mr Sutherland argues, the reader must develop individual criteria based on personal preferences.

These can be hard to establish when every bookshop’s shelves come groaning with instructions, exhortations and endorsements.

“I get slightly worried when everyone buys The Da Vinci Code,” he says. “It’s like a herd of thundering cattle, all heading in the same direction.

“If there is a message in the book, it’s choose for yourself – find out who you are and what fiction works for you.

Leaving aside the pointless dig at Dan Brown, something that always gets on my nerves, I find that doing the challenge is indeed helping me to work out what it is I like to read. And I’m coming to the conclusion that reading for enjoyment, as opposed to reading for educational purposes, or to improve your mind, or to give yourself something to brag about at dinner parties, may well be an under-appreciated pastime. As long as it’s not all you do…

Some interesting reviews from The Times books pages:

Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson – reviewed by AC Grayling

Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey – reviewed by Peter Ackroyd

Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control by Dominic Streatfeild.

An Imperial possession: Britain in the Roman Empire by David Mattingley.

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Here from The Guardian, is the latest instalment in a long and disturbing saga – the fallout from Åsne Seierstad’s book The Bookseller of Kabul. I read this in in May 2004 and was bowled over by it. Which makes me feel complicit, somehow, in the resulting row.

I think the thing that has been missed in this debate, at least as far as I can see, is that Seierstad showed how the men in her account were often every bit as much victims of their society and circumstances as the women. And this made me despair for the future of the country.

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Which doesn’t support Shah Mohammed Rais’s argument that he has been portrayed as “a tyrannical traditionalist bent on imprisoning women” – since I felt he was somewhat at the mercy of the stultifying Afghan traditionalism himself (although I agree no-one was actually making him walk around in a burqa, forbidding him to work or trading him in for a good-looking teenager at the first opportunity).

Shah is an entrepreneur who, I believe, scented an opportunity in Seierstad and was peeved when things didn’t work out as he had envisaged they would. This is, I stress, just my personal impression from reading the book and following the coverage of the case. He continues to make good capital out of this whole affair and may yet achieve his aim of turning it all to his advantage.

So, are Seierstad, myself and all the other members of the book-buying public who devoured this work Western imperialists trying to tell people from other cultures how to run their lives? Or is moral relativism an even bigger evil? I tend towards the latter view but find the whole argument exausting and invite you to read the book, and the press coverage, and decide for yourself.

I just hope that Leila makes it out.

Bookseller of Kabul’s wife applies for asylum

The wife of an Afghan bookseller depicted in an international bestseller is applying for asylum in Europe because she claims the book has endangered her life.Suraya Rais is the wife of Shah Mohammed Rais, the title character in The Bookseller of Kabul by the Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad. Since its publication in 2002, the book – an account of an Afghan extended family after the fall of the Taliban – has become a hit around the world; in the UK, it was the bestselling non-English-language book of 2004.

Today, Mr and Mrs Rais claim that The Bookseller of Kabul has put their lives in jeopardy. At the weekend, it was revealed that Mrs Rais applied for asylum in Sweden in April. “Åsne Seierstad’s book has made it difficult for the family to carry on living in Afghanistan,” says Mr Rais’s lawyer, Per Danielsen. Read on here…

Outrageous. Mr Random has been persuaded that he ought to read Dead Run, the latest thriller by mother-and-daughter writing team PJ and Traci Lambrecht. So I got it out of the library for him, and he’s enjoyed it and now he’s resolved to read Want to Play and Live Bait and I’m glad that my recommendation didn’t fall flat and everyone is happy.

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But my point lies elsewhere. At the back of Dead Run is no less than a prologue and TWO chapters of the next in the series, Snow Blind. Now, on one hand this is no bad thing. I am a huge fan of these books and so are a lot of other women I know. But, two chapters? And a prologue? What absolutely shameless pimping this is.

The most annoying thing about this habit of publishers is the way it throws out your expectations. You’re expecting a centimetre or so of action before the end of the book and then, suddenly, you’re looking at the words THE END and feeling mightily discomforted. These days I always check where the story actually finishes.

To be fair, you have to read a fair bit before you meet any familiar characters. But still. Anyway, it looks promising so here’s a brief extract before the book goes back…

This was the story Emily was remembering on her last day, and it amazed her that she could remember it at all. She’d only heard it twice in her life – once from her Aunt Laura, who’d told her on the sly when Emily had turned thirteen, as if it were a strange and secret birthday present; and again from her mother on the day Emily had left the home farm to marry Edward and make her own life. Her mother had giggled during telling, which her aunt had never done, and that had frightened her a little. And then she told her to remember the tale, that it wasn’t really so funny, in case a day should come when she would need it.Today she needed it, Emily thought, wondering if she could finally do it, after all these years. And if she did, what would all those wasted years have been for?It was the last day; the last day of secrets. She lay on her back in bed, right hand pressed against her flat stomach; pushing, pushing the pain back inside; holding the evil, growing mass that writhed inside with hungry tentacles reaching for open nerves. God, it hurt.

A perfect, thin line of light pushed up the black curtain on the horizon outside her bedroom window and the quality of dark began to change inside the room. This room, where love and hell had happened, all in the same lifetime.

Emily’s feet were on the floor before the first chirp of the earliest rising bird had sounded, and the rush of agonizing pain pushed her head to her knees. She squeezed her eyes tightly closed and saw rolling, sparking pinwheels of light.

Old, ravaged huddle; tiny woman; folded into a small package of gray hair and sharpened knees, alone in a chamber of agony where, inexplicably, birds welcomed the morning in gay, sporadic disharmony.

She did things that seemed odd, considering her chore list for the morning. Prepared and ate her oatmeal; drank her precious single cup of coffee; carefully washed the bowl and cup and saucer with their faded, rose patterns, knowing those patterns had always been there, amazed at her years of indifference. Everything seemed sharper, clearer, as if she had seen the world for years through a lens just barely out of focus.

And then she walked to the old gun cabinet in the dining room.

Neil Gaiman has published a great article in his journal about Alan Moore’s and Melinda Gebbie’s graphic novel Lost Girls:

Lost Girls Redux

When I first started writing comics for adults, I found myself forever needing to explain that, no, I wasn’t writing those kind of adult stories.

The boundary between pornography and erotica is an ambiguous one, and it changes depending on where you’re standing. For some, perhaps, it’s a matter of whatever turns you on (my erotica, your pornography), for some the distinction occurs in class (i.e. erotica is pornography for rich people). Perhaps it’s also something to do with the means of distribution – internet pornography is unquestionably porn, while an Edwardian publication, on creamy paper, bought by connoisseurs, part works bound into expensive volumes, must be erotica.

Alan Moore knows his words.

Moore has always championed underdog media: his work in superhero comics exemplifies this. That Watchmen was on Time Magazine’s list of the greatest novels of the 20th Century is less surprising than its existence (it is a masterful superhero comic about time, mortality, age and nuclear fear, amongst other things) in the first place.

Almost ten years before Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, (a story that took many of the figures of Victorian popular fiction, including Alan Quatermain, Mr Hyde, the Invisible Man, and combined them in one huge romp), Moore, in collaboration with expat San Franciscan underground artist Melinda Gebbie, began Lost Girls, with a similar, although less fantastical, conceit – that the three women whose adventures in girlhood may have inspired respectively, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wendy, and The Wizard of Oz, now grown, meet in a Swiss hotel before the first World War. Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, three very different women, one jaded and old, one trapped in a frigid adulthood, one a spunky but innocent young American good-time girl, provide each other with the liberation they need, while also providing very different (and, needless to say, sexual) versions of the stories we associate with them – we go with the girls, in memory, down the Rabbit Hole, to Oz, and to Neverland. Read on here…

Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing.net, reviews Douglas Coupland’s jPod – excerpt below.

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I’m really looking forward to reading this, as Microserfs is a good contender for my favourite book ever (if you haven’t read it, do so, right away). But I’m in debit – I still have Eleanor Rigby unread on the shelf. And I’m at the point with Coupland where, while I know the GIAC and Miss Wyoming days are well behind him, but it’s still like listening to Morrissey albums from the mid-to-late-90s – you feel you never know when you’re going to come across something that’s going to really upset your dedicated fandom. And, indeed, see the stuff about writing himself into the book, below. So I must screw up my courage and read it if I’m ever to get onto this next one…

Coupland’s JPod: the Anti-Microserfs JPod is the anti-Microserfs. Coupland has written himself as a character into the book, someone reviled by his other characters, presumably for having duped them into thinking that irony and a career in tech will make them happy and fulfilled. He’s a villain, and he’s pretty unflinching in criticizing his own work.The prose is peppered with long pastebombs of Internet prose, from the banal to the sublime. eBay UI chrome. Penis enlargement spams. Acronym expansions, humorous and serious. All the valid three-letter Scrabble words. Where this kind of pastebomb appeared in earlier Coupland works, it was ironic, or cool, or funny. In JPod, it’s a cross between reverent prose-poetry and a lament at how our brave revolution has become another bureaucracy.

Coupland’s message is more than a counsel of despair there. First and foremost, he is indeed saying that working at EA in 2006 is no less miserable and soul-crushing than working for IBM in 1975 was, sure. But he’s also reveling in how fast the revolution happened, how many peoples’ lives it’s touched, how fast it’s become the new normal.

Which is right: there’s no such thing as a permanent state of turmoil. Eventually, turmoil becomes normal.

But next year’s turmoil is always lurking around the corner — and every generation will get a chance to experience some kind of wrack and roll. Read full article here…

Here’s something that caught my eye from The Times – a piece that looks at Charles Dickens as a crime writer after a collection of his detective stories is published. I’ve not read a lot of his novels but I have got absorbed in the essays, journalism and travel writing – and would recommend them for a fascinating read. So I’ll almost certainly be getting this new book and, in the meantime, here’s an excerpt from and link to the article – just as icing on the cake, it’s written by PD James:

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Inspector Morse’s grandad

CHARLES DICKENS CAN justly be regarded as the founding father of the modern detective story, but his influence on the popularity of the genre and its development has been largely understated by critics of his work and of crime writing.

In this book Peter Haining does much to redress the balance, both in his admirable introduction and by his judicious selection from the novels and short stories. The book is, however, oddly arranged. It would have been more helpful if information about the genesis of each selection, including the date and circumstances of the original publication, preceded the extract rather than having to be sought in the introduction. A reader coming to Dickens for the first time, who begins the book with the piece entitled Nemesis, may be puzzled to find himself reading not a short story but a passage from Martin Chuzzlewit.

Dickens, like his friend Wilkie Collins, was fascinated by the seductively dangerous undergrowth of crime and in the work of the police, particularly the detective branch of Scotland Yard formed in 1842. He observed life in the section houses, accompanied detectives down the mean and violent streets of the metropolis, drew on real murders, both in his novels and in short stories, and portrayed in his fiction detectives whom he had met, creating from experience and imagination the most innovative, varied and vividly drawn police officers in English literature. Read on here…

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Superb interview with Douglas Coupland on Wired:

A Tale of Two Couplands

There’s a rumor going around the Internet that Douglas Coupland collects meteorites. Nobody knows how it began, least of all Coupland. But the story started to circulate shortly after his first novel, Generation X, became an On the Road for the ’90s. Every effort he’s made to set the record straight has been ignored by his many fan sites. So he recently decided to purchase a few choice specimens.

I’m visiting with Coupland at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, to discuss his novel JPod, coming out in May, when I notice a meteorite the size of a grapefruit resting on a table beside a whale vertebra. In a voice raspy from drinking late into the night before, he informs me that the meteorite was found in Argentina, and that it’s very rare. He cradles the rock in his hand. “We should all be so lucky to have people throw such good ideas our way,” he says.

Collecting meteorites isn’t the only concept Coupland has cribbed from the Web gossip about him in the past couple of years. “There’s this whole meta-Doug out there who’s no longer connected to me or even cares about me anymore,” he says. Read on here…

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Hooray! Dan Brown might be widely accused of being a bad writer; a purveyor of lowbrow, commercial fiction; an intellectual lightweight; an outright liar; and a corruptor of the reading tastes of several nations (often by people who have glanced briefly through at least one of his books) – but at least he’s not a plagiarist as well.

What is particularly interesting about this story is the sheer contemptuous thoroughness with which the plaintiffs’ case seems to have been squashed – the judge’s remarks, the refusal of leave to appeal, the awarding of costs. Good, because I feared the precedent it would have set. From BBC Online, and the full story is well worth reading:

Court rejects Da Vinci copy claim

The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown did not breach the copyright of an earlier book, London’s High Court has ruled.

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who wrote 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, sued Random House, publisher of both books.

Mr Brown said the verdict “shows that this claim was utterly without merit”.

The ruling clears the way for the Da Vinci Code movie’s release in May. Mr Baigent and Mr Leigh must pay 85% of Random House’s costs of almost £1.3m.

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Yesterday was World Book Day which I marked by seizing a handful of Spread the Word postcards from Borders (see above) and sending them to people in Britain and the US. Here’s my recommendation list:

• The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
• The Sixth Lamentation by William Brodrick
• Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
• The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier

Something else to look at: Results of Happy Endings survey (Word download)

One to watch from BBC Online:

Da Vinci Code ‘copied book ideas’

A claim that Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code copied the ideas of two other authors has gone before London’s High Court.

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh say Mr Brown stole “the whole architecture” of research that went into their 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Both books contain the idea Jesus had a child. They are suing publisher Random House, which denies the allegation.

Mr Brown attended the court on Monday as a judge heard initial submissions. Read on here…

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Those playing close attention will realise that the surnames of these two individuals, one anagramised and one not, make up the name of one of the leading characters. Quite what relevance that has to the case I don’t know beyond the fact that it will be very hard for Brown to pretend he has never heard of them. I guess it’s all down to how OK it is to use real-world ideas in fiction – something I believe the copyright laws are singularly ill-equipped to mediate on. The mischevious observer might say that at least they were credited…