Julian Assange memoir

It currently sits in 766th place overall on Amazon's bestseller charts, and in 70th position on the internet bookseller's biography list.Whether Assange will be pleased or disappointed by the numbers remains to be seen: although the Wikileaks founder said that Canongate's publication was "about old-fashioned opportunism and duplicity — screwing people over to make a buck", the publisher has promised to pay him royalties once it earns back its advance.Created with Assange's cooperation (according to its publisher Canongate the Wikileaks founder spent more than 50 hours being interviewed for it) but published against his wishes, the book went on sale last Thursday amid widespread coverage and serialisation in the Independent."There was no build-up for the trade, the media or with the reading public.

But we're proud of the way we handled what has been a difficult and unusual launch, and we are extremely proud of the book," he said. "Fortunately, the conversation now seems to be moving away from the 'publishing story' and focusing on the quality of the book itself. The early reviews – with the exception of a predictable whitewash in the Guardian – have been very positive, particularly in the Times and Independent with many more lead reviews lined up for this weekend. And the early customer reviews on Amazon are extremely positive too."

And in spite of the controversy surrounding the claims and counterclaims flung by Assange and his publisher, figures from book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan reveal that Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography sold just 644 copies in its first three days in shops."It was only the 50th bestselling hardback non-fiction book of the week, and only the 537th bestselling book overall, sitting directly behind Julia Donaldson's Freddie and the Fairy (Macmillan) and Sharon Kendrick's Satisfaction (Mills & Boon), a £6.99 collection of three short stories featuring 'three of her sexiest, most intense Greek heroes and glamorous heroines'," said Philip Stone, Charts editor at the Bookseller.

Canongate publishing director Nick Davies told the book trade magazine that the autobiography's performance was "a marathon and not a sprint", and that the publisher had "never made any big predictions about the sales of the Assange book – particularly on the first three days of sale"."So far the Assange autobiography has attracted two five-star reviews on Amazon, one saying that the book "was a long long way from the negative view of him presented by a media I now see have an agenda", the other that it painted "a vivid picture of a man on a mission to make the world a better – a more just – place".

Exciting events without the expanding newspaper industry

It was bad for those who joined the very long queues, especially in former mining villages or steel towns, but the majority went about their daily routines, finding themselves better off as the years went by, and would not have known they were living through exciting events without the expanding newspaper industry and increasing number of television channels.

"In the bookshops, you could find some very good books firmly located in the 1980s which dealt with topics like the rise of Thatcher or the causes of the Brixton riots, but equally there was escapist fiction or interesting non-fiction that took out of everyday life. Not a year passed without something new and memorable landing on the shelves."As well as journalistic career that has included spells as chief political correspondent for the Observer and Daily Telegraph and his current role as senior writer for the Independent.

Andy McSmith is the author of five books: biographies of John Smith and Kenneth Clarke, a collection of short biographies called Faces of Labour, and a novel, Innocent in the House. His latest book, just out in paperback from Constable, is No Such Thing as Society – a history of Britain in the 1980s.

"Each decade leaves its imprint on the memory. Images from the 1980s suggest a time of excitement and bustle – Live Aid, Princess Diana, the Falklands War, mass pickets outside Rupert Murdoch's new Wapping plant, testosterone-driven yuppies doing frenetic trade on the floor of a deregulated stock market, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall coming tumbling down, apartheid in its final throes. The western world saw more social change in those 10 years than in any other decade since the war. "But the much used cliché about the curse of interesting times did not apply to the average person.

Robert Harris

Harris was born in 1957 in Nottingham. His father was a printer and while he says "we had very little money, but I had no sense whatsoever of being poor and had an extremely happy and culturally rich childhood. My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter. The classic family story is us going to a school event when I was about six and all the other children reading out stories about what they did on their holidays, but mine was called 'Why me and my dad don't like Sir Alec Douglas-Home'.

There's a lot of moaning today about too many kids going to university, but my parents were bright people and I wish they had had that opportunity." Harris made his name as a novelist with Fatherland, his vaguely Orwellian, 1992 debut that posited a counter-factual history of Europe after Hitler had won the war. He followed it with bestsellers set among the second world war code-breakers of Bletchley Park (Enigma) and in the aftermath of Stalin's Russia (Archangel). He has transported contemporary political issues back to ancient Rome and, drawing on his close association with New Labour when a political journalist on the Observer and the Sunday Times, conjured a character very like the post-Iraq Tony Blair in The Ghost (2007).

The books have received warm reviews with a quote from Martha Gellhorn adorning the Fatherland jacket:"Powerful and chilling ... convincing in every detail". They have notched up even more impressive sales. Harris and his wife Gill, sister of Nick Hornby, and their four children live in a large old vicarage in Berkshire that was once visited by Jane Austen. It is usually described as "the house that Hitler built".
　　
In thinking about his latest book Harris's new wealth and his old politics came together. "When Lehman Bros went down people were saying AIG was going to be next. That rang a bell because almost all of my money was in some sort of AIG bond, but like most people I didn't understand the first thing about this world. When I looked into it a bit more it was terrifying and shocking. We're all like mountaineers on some rock face lashed together. We're clinging on for dear life. And at the same time there has been this alarming rise in the super-rich class, which has been somehow facilitated by new technology."
　　
Harris says he had little interest in writing about the new rich. "I have met some of them and they seem to me to be both boring and often themselves bored. But I was intrigued by these enormous amounts of money, all floating free of tax, which is profoundly undemocratic. We've all been like saps buying our pension funds and tracker whatevers, and while we've been left for dead, these people have cleaned up. Anger was not the least of my emotions in writing this book."
　　　　
Harris read English at Cambridge but spent most of his time editing the university newspaper. In 1978 he joined the BBC trainee programme "largely because at that time NUJ rules meant if you went into print journalism you had to start work in the provinces. I'd just come from the provinces and didn't particularly want to go back." While working on Newsnight and Panorama he co-authored a book with his friend Jeremy Paxman about the history of germ and gas warfare; he then wrote books about the media's handling of the Falklands war and an account of the forged Hitler diaries fiasco. By 1987 he was political editor of the Observer.

That you think of setting a book

A quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, itself written near Geneva, opens the book. While Harris points out that many hedge funds have relocated there for both tax reasons and to be near the large hadron collider at Cern, from where they might recruit the mathematicians and physicists needed to develop increasingly sophisticated computer models, "as soon as you think of setting a book in Geneva, then Frankenstein does loom large". It is not only a man-made monster running out of control that provides the literary and scientific underpinning to the novel: Darwin features prominently and the shade of Orwell hangs over the book, with its emphasis on surveillance, sinister corporations and an anti-democratic dystopia.

Set on British general election day 2010, Robert Harris's latest novel is a characteristic combination of ripping yarn, political and historical verisimilitude and diligent research into a hither-to closed world. The Fear Index is set within the mysterious opulence of a Geneva based algorithmic hedge fund. The company at the heart of his story has developed an artificially intelligent, "self-learning" computer model that trawls the world for information and allows its traders to anticipate market movements prompted, usually, by some disaster or failure. But having delivered this novel about predicting the future – it could be claimed as easily by the science fiction community as the thriller world – Harris was surprised to see on the BBC website a few weeks ago the headline "Supercomputer predicts revolution" and a story about how the Arab spring was foreshadowed via "automated sentiment mining" in which websites were searched for increased preponderance of words such as "terrible" and "horrific".It is a peculiarly apt concern.

"Orwell has always been a huge influence on me," he says. "He first came to mind regarding this project about 12 years ago when I read a book by Bill Gates in which he said one day the McDonald's headquarters in America would know when a Big Mac was sold in Newbury and then a computer algorithm would work out when the cattle had to be slaughtered in Chicago. I got very interested in these ideas but couldn't find a way to make them work in fiction. Then came the financial crash and I realised I could marry the two things. These algorithms that were driving companies were nowhere more dominant than in the City.

King Crow by Michael Stewart

There's a lot going on in Paul's world, and there's even more going on in his head. Paul's home life is distinctly suboptimal: he's bullied, his mother neglects him and her unsettled lifestyle sees him continually moving from house to house and school to school on the manky fringes of Manchester. As a result, he's retreated into ornithology and fantasy and we're treated to some fine nature writing and some fantastic riffs about the inherent stupidity of penguins, why giant pandas really don't deserve to be saved and the contribution vultures make to their eco-system. The direct staccato voice and no-nonsense language visible in that plot summary remain throughout.

Combined with Paul's frequently nonsensical world view they provide continual amusement and just the right level of bemusment. Paul may be troubled, and he may take us to some dark places, but King Crow remains a light, beguiling read."That doesn't really matter. Then we ran away, then we stole a car and knocked Andy down.

All I need to add for myself is that the narrator is called Paul Cooper and he's quite strange – but then you've probably guessed that.  Or at least it does for that first two-thirds of the book, until Paul offloads a very big surprise. I'm wary of saying more about this revelation, because to do so would be to spoil it. Suffice to say, it is a big one. It completely wrong-footed me. It made me go back to the beginning and entirely changed my view of what had been happening. Perhaps I'd been reading naively, but that shouldn't draw away any praise of Michael Stewart's skill. It was an unsettling and impressive moment.

The car really smashed into him and there was blood everywhere. I wouldn't say he was alright. I'd say he was dead. That would explain Dave's look. Then we had a car chase. I tried to shoot Dave. Then we walked into Kendal. Then we nicked a clown, went to a squat party, took lots of drugs and I ended up here and had sex for the first time ever with Becky, who is lovely."Later on, he gives an even more succinct version: "Apart from killing a man and one or two little hiccups, this has been a really successful trip."
The trouble is that, after dropping us over this steep edge, Stewart never quite manages to get back to the same heights. I still enjoyed the final third of the book. Paul remains amiable and intriguing and there's still plenty of the madcap action that makes the early pages so enjoyable. But the narrative disintegrates along with Paul's increasingly damaged psyche. It's looser and flatter and never quite as compelling. To go back to that original metaphor, it becomes Open Season rather than The Decline Of British Sea Power. Still good. Still wonderfully strange. But not a masterpiece.

a page-turner of tomalin

Tomalin's book, a page-turner, seems to me to be an effective reproof to those who, like Michael Holroyd, believe literary biography to be in its death throes. But what does she think? Are publishers going to dispense with fat lives? "No! I think people are always saying things are over. Fiction has been regularly over since the 19th century. You can't entirely talk about books in groups like that. Some work and some don't. Clearly, we have got a public with a shorter attention span, but there is also this great interest in history. I'm devoted to Michael. He's adorable. But I rather think he's enjoying being Cassandra about this." On the other hand, so far as her own career goes, she would like to work on slightly more manageable subjects in the future (Dickens follows Hardy, who followed her award-winning Samuel Pepys). "I have grandchildren and step-grandchildren and I would like to spend time with them. I'm 78 and Michael [Frayn, the novelist and playwright, and her husband] is 78, too, and he also needs a bit of attention." She sighs. "People say I should write a memoir, but I don't think I can." Why not? She is quiet for a moment and then she says: "Because I don't have enough sense of myself. I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am. One of the things I have done since I started writing biography is live through them. Those lives are still with me. It's as Katherine Mansfield said, 'One life is not enough.'"

Is there anything left to disclose about Dickens? Perhaps not. His biggest secret – the existence of a carefully closeted mistress, a one-time actress called Ellen Ternan (Nelly), with whom he may have had a child (the baby probably died) – was, after all, revealed to its fullest extent in Tomalin's groundbreaking 1990 book, The Invisible Woman. Unless more diaries or letters unaccountably turn up, a new life is a matter of emphasis, mostly. Nevertheless, her skill is such that you read her Dickens with a mounting sense of amazement (and sometimes horror), the small things taking a hold of you as much as the large. It is wonderful. Two weeks after I finished it, I still cannot get out of my mind the fact that, once it was over, Dickens's feckless parents never again referred to the year they forced him to spend working in a blacking factory (he was just 12 years old), as if it had never happened.

Nor can I stop thinking about the way Dickens signalled to his long-suffering wife, Catherine, that their marriage was effectively over (he simply got a workman in and divided their bedroom in two). Next time I see a photograph of Dickens – it won't be long; next year is the bicentenary of his birth – I will remember Eleanor Picken, who met him in Broadstairs when she was 19. Thrilled to know the famous writer, Eleanor sunned herself "in his smiles", but she thought, too, that his eyes were sometimes like "danger-lamps".

Like Dickens, Tomalin is fiercely energetic, and mordantly funny, but today she also has the slightly frail aspect of one who, having completed a vast undertaking (Dickens's life is so incredibly voluminous: his letters alone run to 12 volumes, each one some 800 pages long), now awaits the verdict of the various partisans who patrol this sacred ground. Her eye wanders to the window. "You feel exhausted, low, terrified. When I was young and books were published, no one made any sort of fuss. Now... you feel people are going to jump on you. You can't help it." It would be the same with any book, but in the case of Dickens, who induces such intense (and intensely odd) passions in his devotees, you can multiply this by five.

William Jefferson Clinton

Ora Bill Clinton, a dieci anni dalla fine di quella sua esperienza politica, in piena recessione economica mondiale ha deciso di far sentire la propria voce attraverso un libro. Il volume, che si intitolerà Back to Work e che sarà pubblicato nel mese di novembre, contiene la ricetta segreta di Bill Clinton per far fronte a questa tempesta economica senza paragoni nella storia. William Jefferson Clinton, detto Bill, è stato presidente degli Stati Uniti d’America per otto anni, due intere legislature, tra il 1993 e il 2001. Un periodo che coincise esattamente con l’ultimo periodo di crescita economica degli States, una crescita dovuta essenzialmente all’esplosione della cosiddetta new economy, trascinata dallo sbarco nel mercato delle nuove tecnologie informatiche.
　　

　　
Le prime indiscrezioni che sono trapelate danno per certa la presenza di due fondamentali ingredienti nella magica ricetta di Bill: «increasing bank lending and corporate investment», vale a dire aumentare l’attività creditizia delle banche, quindi il debito delle famiglie, e far crescere gli investimenti delle aziende. Ricetta rivoluzionaria? Non me ne intendo molto di economia, ma non direi.
　　
In ogni caso, ammesso e non concesso che qualche editore italiano voglia tradurlo, non sembrano esserci le condizioni per preoccuparsi: il libro uscirà in America a novembre, vale a dire che in Italia non potrà arrivare prima della metà del 2012. A quel punto l’economia come la intende Clinton potrebbe già essere un amaro ricordo.

Read you loved

In this gripping account of the quest for the energy that our world needs, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Prize. A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change. It is a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new energies that are competing to replace them. From the jammed streets of Beijing to the shores of the Caspian Sea, from the conflicts in the Mideast to Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley, Yergin takes us into the decisions that are shaping our future.

The Quest presents an extraordinary range of characters and dramatic stories that illustrate the principles that will shape a robust and flexible energy security system for the decades to come. Energy is humbling in its scope, but our future requires that we deeply understand this global quest that is truly reshaping our world.The drama of oil-the struggle for access, the battle for control, the insecurity of supply, the consequences of use, its impact on the global economy, and the geopolitics that dominate it-continues to profoundly affect our world.. Yergin tells the inside stories of the oil market and the surge in oil prices, the race to control the resources of the former Soviet empire, and the massive mergers that transformed the landscape of world oil. He tackles the toughest questions: Will we run out of oil? Are China and the United States destined to come into conflict over oil? How will a turbulent Middle East affect the future of oil supply?
Yergin also reveals the surprising and sometimes tumultuous history of nuclear and coal, electricity, and the "shale gale" of natural gas, and how each fits into the larger marketplace. He brings climate change into unique perspective by offering an unprecedented history of how the field of climate study went from the concern of a handful of nineteenth- century scientists preoccupied with a new Ice Age into one of the most significant issues of our times.

He leads us through the rebirth of renewable energies and explores the distinctive stories of wind, solar, and biofuels. He offers a perspective on the return of the electric car, which some are betting will be necessary for a growing global economy.

Le Quattro Cose Ultime

Quando, però, fanno la loro inaspettata comparsa vagoni di treno e luoghi come Memphis, lago di Constanz, Fatima e riferimenti a Gesù, Impero Romano e dollari, ecco che un piacevole disorientamento spinge il lettore a chiedersi se non possa trattarsi di un’ucronia in singolare chiave fantasy (e il pensiero, solo per un attimo, corre al mondo creato da Jacqueline Carey per le sue serie su Kushiel, compresa la religione peri-cristiana fondata dal beato Elua, che può richiamare, pur nella sua diversità, quella del Redentore Impiccato di Hoffman).

Le quattro cose ultime, di Paul Hoffman, è l’atteso seguito de La mano sinistra di Dio e il secondo volume della nota trilogia fantasy per adolescenti (/adulti) The Left Hand of God.La mano sinistra di Dio (di cui vi invito senz’altro a leggere qui) è un romanzo assai particolare. Pur essendo introduttivo e non perfetto ha in sè tanti e tali spunti interessanti che, soprattutto dopo aver letto l’ultima rivelatrice parte, si viene irrimediabilmente spinti verso il seguito. La trilogia è ambientata in un mondo che non è facile inquadrare: all’inizio si è sicuri di trovarsi in presenza di un tipo di realtà affine al fantasy “classico”.

Ci sono alcuni momenti in cui, addirittura, La mano sinistra di Dio fa pensare anche a un romanzo che, pur essendo per lo più travestito da fantasy medievaleggiante (con tocchi rinascimentali) a sfondo religioso (l’accostamento all’atmosfera de Il nome della rosa, fatto da alcuni critici, non è così peregrino), ha qualcosa che richiama mondi post-apocalittici con elementi distopici.E’ quindi con particolare curiosità che mi accingo a leggere Le quattro cose ultime, a breve in uscita. E non solo perchè mi aspetto grandi (e terribili) cose dal protagonista Thomas Cale - data la potente rivelazione finale - o perchè vorrei capire chi sono veramente gli Antagonisti, i nemici della Vera Fede contro cui migliaia di ragazzi addestrati sadisticamente dai Redentori al Santuario combattono da tanto tempo, ma anche perchè desidero finalmente capire qual è il tipo di mondo che Paul Hoffman ha costruito. E che spero - terminata la talvolta incerta parte introduttiva rappresentata dal primo romanzo - possa cominciare a rivelarsi in tutta la sua pienezza proprio in questo volume (anche se il culmine, nei vari ambiti, verrà, ovviamente, raggiunto nell’ultimo).

The William Blake oak being planted on Peckham Rye

There's more. Hartley didn't just head down to the garden centre and pick out any old tree: rather, he went off and found one that was about to fall victim to coastal erosion. Take a look at his blog for a heartwarming photo-story of the rescue operation, complete with handy blue arrows and dramatic captions ("the eroding margins of England"; "Doomed oak").



William Blake oak being planted on Peckham Rye


Here's a cheering thing, passed on to me by the excellent Ben Myers. The latest work from an artist by the name of John Hartley is an oak sapling on Peckham Rye, planted this weekend in honour of William Blake, who claimed to have seen an oak "filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars" when he visited the place at the age of nine.

The whole thing was undertaken with the support of the Blake Society and the Forestry Commission; the tree was planted on Sunday by Linda Foster of Peckham Library; and another local, Carl Mesner Lyons, took copious pictures of the event, which you can look at here. All in all, a good day's work.

Twitter e scrittori

Oggi, 19 settembre, un altro TT letterario sbanca la classifica arrivando in poche ore al terzo posto e giocandosi la posizione addirittura con #sangennaro. Si tratta di calvino, un’hashtag ovviamente dedicata al grande Italo Calvino, strappatoci prematuramente da un ictus il 19 settembre del 1985. 26 anni dopo quel giorno i lettori appassionati di quello che molto probabilmente per i posteri sarà l’icona del Novecento italiano lo stanno ricordando al ritmo di due tweet al minuto a colpi di citazioni o di dichiarazioni di stima. L’inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà; se ce n’è uno, è quello che è già qui, l’inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme.

Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accettare l’inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo più. Il secondo è rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all’inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio.Per gli utenti navigati di twitter è semplicemente TT. E’ il Trend Topic, la classifica dei dieci argomenti più discussi su twitter, una classifica che oggi, per la seconda volta in una settimana, vede tra i primi tre topics un omaggio letterario.

"There's something to be said for what might be called the Woody Allen Method: Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit; some will miss; some will miss by a lot. But there's no time for the flatulent gas of pretension to seep into your construction's sheetrock. This is how Trollope, Balzac and Dickens worked. Each would have agreed with Gore Vidal, who once declared of those who moan about writer's block: "You're not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from." Said him.

Hawaii Governor Neil Maui Store

To be honest, I'm personally biased on this subject. As a newly minted fiction writer (my Maui novel Small Island is now available in trade paperback form at Amazon.com for the low, low price of $14.95!) I'm very sensitive to any talk about how Americans just don't read very much anymore. The other day I walked by Borders Express in the Queen Kaahumanu Center and actually shuddered when I saw the now-shuttered bookstore—the last such Maui store dedicated to the selling of books left south of Lahaina.For those of you reading this online, either at Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie And Fitch Outlet or our news blog Mauifeed, I would just like to say thanks. Seriously, thank you. There is a lot online competing for your attention, and it's heartening to us here at the paper that you would take time to read us. I mention this because on Sept. 12 Nielsen—yes, the media analysis firm that gave us television ratings—released their State of the Media: The Social Media Report. Just 12 pages and packed with colorful infographs, it's nonetheless a sobering look at what people are doing online.

"Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans' time online, now accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet," states the report. "Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do on any other U.S. website."Social networks and blogs dwarf everything else online—including porn. According to the report, 23 percent of Americans' time online is spent at Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, MySpace and a host of other sites (exactly how much time is spent surfing Internet porn isn't made explicit in the report: "adult" matters fall into 35 percent that constitutes "other" on the breakdown of Internet time).
　　
As for "current events and global news"—you know, how people like me make a living—that takes up a mere 2.6 percent of Internet users' time. Meaning that if a person spends, say, five hours online in a day, a bit less than eight minutes of that time went to reading news.And who knows how much time is spent reading books online. Like porn, books fall into "other" on the time breakdown. Whereas porn is one of the more popular "other" Internet activities (just behind something called "multi-category entertainment"), books fall near the middle of the list, between "multi-category travel" and "multi-category home & fashion."
　　
Speaking of books, on Sunday, Sept. 11, The Maui News ran a front page story on that great disaster of our time: the publication of Maggie Goes on a Diet. I am—of course—being satirical: though the controversy over the book is now very much national news, Maggie is actually just a gentle tale (Self-published! By a guy in Paia!) of a girl who learns to love herself through the act of living healthy. Of course people are going to misconstrue it as an abomination, a cruel, heartless knife in the heart of all things good and God-fearing and American.I mean, you could just read the book and find out for yourself that it shows kids the value of hope and self-esteem, but where's the fun in that? It's much easier to go online and be a troll and send one of the thousand mostly negative emails author Paul Kramer said he's received. Because that's apparently what everyone's doing online these days.
　　

Nightshade - lettrici americane di letteratura soprannaturale YA

Nightshade, a detta delle lettrici americane di letteratura soprannaturale YA, si distacca dalla media dei romanzi appartenenti al genere per ricchezza e originalità del world-building e della mitologia e per complessità della storia. Esso racconta, con un gran bel ritmo narrativo, la storia della determinata diciassettenne Calla Tor, un lupo mannaro Alpha (aspetto assai raro nei personaggi femminili paranormal romance). Calla appartiene al branco Nightshade, composto, come il vicino, non da semplici lupi mannari, ma da tostissimi guardiani che hanno il compito di proteggere i misteriosi maghi “buoni” - che governano i mannari -, dai maghi “cattivi” (Keepers e Searcherers in inglese). Ogni guardiano deve conformarsi al proprio ruolo e rispettare precise regole, alcune delle quali a base di sangue.

Nightshade, di Andrea Cremer, è il primo volume di una serie paranormal romance YA in corso di pubblicazione in 25 Paesi e l’apprezzato romanzo d’esordio dell’autrice statunitense.

Calla “kick-ass” Tor è destinata, sin dalla nascita, a Ren Laroche, affascinante lupo-guardiano di un altro branco. I due ragazzi si uniranno al loro diciottesimo compleanno e creeranno un terzo branco locale. Così fu deciso dai maghi a suo tempo e così sarà. Ma un giorno la ragazza s’imbatte in un umano, Shay Doran, nuovo della città e della scuola che frequenta, e qualcosa di assolutamente imprevisto e inaccettabile scatta (d’altronde gli ormoni adolescenziali…). Di lì a poco nascerà un triangolo amoroso che, a differenza dei molti di cui abbiamo letto, sarà ben costruito e ricco di “vibrazioni”. Attraverso Shay - che, si scoprirà, non è un ragazzo qualsiasi (i maghi “cattivi”, infatti, cercheranno di rapirlo) - la ragazza comincerà a capire che qualcosa, nel tipo di vita imposto dai maghi, davvero non va.

50 Cent, multimillion-selling rapper

Either way, 50 Cent might take comfort from the fact that he's not alone. Just last week – on this very blog, ladies and gentleman – our own John Dugdale brought the current rash of recycled titles to our attention. Apparently they're all doing it: Richard Holmes, Jeremy Paxman, the lot. As John says, "the sheer number of titles now layered in the collective memory makes novelty ever harder". Perhaps Mr Achebe might therefore be a little more forgiving next time.This week saw the conclusion of what it pleases me to term an unexpected title-fight.

In the red corner: 50 Cent, multimillion-selling rapper, actor, and entrepreneur. In the blue corner: Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist, poet and critic, widely hailed as the father of modern African literature. 50 Cent spent much of the last year making a film about an American football player diagnosed with cancer, entitled Things Fall Apart. At least it was – until Achebe got wind of it and instructed his legal team to contest it. According to Nigerian news website Naijan.com, 50 Cent offered Achebe $1m for the right to use the title, only to have his offer firmly declined. "The novel ... was produced in 1958 (17 years before rapper 50 Cent was born)," a spokesperson said. "[It is] listed as the most-read book in modern African literature, and won't be sold for even $1bn". K.O.!

It's a neat story, but in the end, I confess, I can't help feeling Mr Cent has been a little hard done by. Achebe, after all, lifted the phrase from the astonishing opening stanza of WB Yeats' evisceration of the post-first world war socio-political landscape, The Second Coming ("Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned ..." ). It seems hawkish, at best, to hound someone else for using a phrase you yourself borrowed (going back further, as one smart cookie on Facebook pointed out, "Come to think of it, did Yeats have to pay Jesus for use of the phrase "The Second Coming"?)

Roald Dahl’s 95th birthday

Today would have been Roald Dahl’s 95th birthday had he not died at the age of 74 in 1990. This year also marks the birthday of one of his most beloved books, "James and the Giant Peach," which was published in the United States 50 years ago. (Interestingly, it wasn’t published in Britain, Mr. Dahl’s home until six years later.)

 

"James and the Giant Peach," which was adapted into an animated film in 1996 (featuring Susan Sarandon, in an especially cunning casting move, as Miss Spider), has sold over 12 million copies worldwide and been translated into 34 languages. The story of James Henry Trotter, whose parents are viciously devoured by a rhinoceros on the streets of London and who then moves in with two cruel aunts only to relocate to a giant peach, has entertained generations of children with its parable of fantasy and escape.

 

Mr. Dahl was intimate with the particulars of cruel childhood through personal experience, the details of which he laid out in "Boy," his memoir of early life. The book rivals George Orwell’s celebrated essay, "Such, Such Were the Joys," in its depiction of the arbitrary ruthlessness of English boarding school life. An episode involving the removal of his adenoids in Norway is no more pleasant.

Matters work out much more cheerfully for James Henry Trotter, who, at the end of "James and the Giant Peach," is welcomed as a hero by the Mayor of New York. Similar satisfactions await the protagonists of Mr. Dahl’s other children’s books, even as a harsher fate is delivered to the Veruca Salts of the world.

Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre

　　

Shed loads of controversy: Roald Dahl's writing hut - £500,000 or your nearest offer. Photograph: Guardian/Eamonn McCabe

It has become increasingly clear, as today has trundled on its merry way, that I wasn't the only person listening to the radio this morning to feel profoundly bemused by the item on the Today programme in which Sophie Dahl apparently asked the public to help raise £500,000 to move her grandfather's famous writing hut from the Dahls' back garden, where it is gently rotting, into the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.

I'm not quibbling over the significance of the shed itself, nor even the half-a-million-quid price tag: never having personally attempted to move and/or archive the contents of a garden shed, after all, who am I to argue? No: the real question, posed by countless listeners on Twitter, Andrew M Brown blogging over at the Telegraph and about 98% of the commenters on his article, is why, given the extensive wealth the Dahl family has presumably accrued off the back of the sales of his books (not to mention all the related merchandising, film rights and so forth), can its members not fork out for the shed move themselves?

Such was the avalanche of irritated emails received by the Today producers in the wake of the item, that they had to haul Amelia Foster, director of the Dahl Museum, on to the programme to explain what was going on. As well as flannelling on about the importance of Dahl in general, the shed in particular, and reading, across the board (none of which, as far as I was aware, was under dispute) she mounted a mild defence of the Dahl family, who have apparently "given significantly to this project already" and said that the Museum wasn't asking the public for the cash, per se; rather, it was approaching the far less emotive "trusts and foundations".

The master spy novelists

1. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Verloc is the first double-agent of the 20th century (he's working for an unnamed "foreign power", as well as being an informer reporting to Scotland Yard). Conrad's tragic protagonist is quintessentially seedy (his cover is a shop in Soho), the first in a long line of morally threadbare anti-heroes. Equally modern, in imagination and sensibility, is the terrorist "Professor", wired to his own bomb, and Verloc's wife Winnie's simple-minded brother, Stevie, who gets blown to pieces by the device. Verloc's lack of remorse for his complicity in Stevie's death finds echoes in the works of Graham Greene, confirming The Secret Agent's place in the pantheon of spy fiction.

3. The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

This is often described as the first 20th-century spy novel, but it's really the best of a pre-first world war genre of "invasion thriller" whose masters include William Le Queux and E Phillips Oppenheim, both now deservedly forgotten. An unputdownable tale of two British amateur sailors, one named Carruthers, who foil a German invasion plot in the slate-grey waters of the Baltic, The Riddle of the Sands is a classic British adventure story, influencing both John Buchan and Ken Follett. In a twist stranger than fiction, its author, a one-time clerk to the House of Commons, later became an ardent Irish Republican, and was eventually court-martialed, then executed, in 1922 for his part in the Easter uprising.

4. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

Richard Hannay was one of the great inter-war spies, a recently returned South African who gets caught up in a plot by the infamous Black Stone to assassinate the Greek premier Karolides and thereby precipitate a European war. Buchan wrote this "shocker" while convalescing from a duodenal ulcer in a matter of weeks. In keeping with a popular genre, he has the United Kingdom in danger of invasion by Germany while never letting the headlong momentum of the plot flag from one page to the next, sustained by headlong cross-country chases across well-known English and Scottish landscapes. Clean-cut, square-jawed Hannay would become the protagonist of several later Buchan thrillers, including The Island of Sheep, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast.

5. Ashenden by W Somerset Maugham

When war broke out in 1914, Maugham was sent by the British secret service to Switzerland on the pretext of completing a new play. As a celebrated writer with a gift for languages, Maugham had the perfect cover, and his assignment combined the romance as well as the absurdity of much British intelligence work. Maugham revelled in his posting. He created Ashenden as an alter ego, and used many of his own experiences in a collection of spy stories that demonstrate the ruthlessness, tedium and brutality of espionage. The essential drabness of the Ashenden stories was later influential in the spy writing of Len Deighton and John le Carré.

6. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Graham Greene worked just briefly for the British Secret Service during the second world war, but it was enough. One province of "Greeneland" would always be populated by various kinds of secret agent, culminating in the sad figure of Maurice Castle in The Human Factor. Perhaps more memorable is Greene's portrait of the accidental spy, Wormold, in his black comedy Our Man In Havana. Set in the last days of the corrupt Batista regime, Greene complained that the adventures of his vacuum cleaner salesman "did me little good" with Castro. "Those who suffered during the years of dictatorship," Greene wrote, "could hardly be expected to appreciate that my real subject was the absurdity of the British agent."

7. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Thanks to Hollywood, James Bond, 007, Licensed to Kill, has become the archetype of the 20th-century British spy, though, from an operational point of view, he is in all the ways that matter as exotic and improbable as Beau Brummell. Fleming had served in Naval Intelligence during the second world war, and translated many of his most madcap ruses de guerre to the pages of Casino Royale and its successors, every one of which was written in the tropical paradise of "Goldeneye", Fleming's Jamaican villa. It would be easy to attribute Bond's appeal to a successful formula of spooks, sadomasochism, and snobbery, mixed with sultry locations, but Fleming was a popular writer of genius. His prose is often as overheated as his plots, but it remains fresh, intoxicating and fun - a perfect fictional cocktail for jaded palates.

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Si può dire che siamo in piena guerra. Non dichiarata, ma c’è. Quando si parla di libri si usano termini sempre più allarmistici e toni esasperati/esasperanti. Lo abbiamo visto con la discussione sulla legge Levi per il prezzo dei libri: contrari e favorevoli si sono arroccati sulle proprie posizioni come un tempo facevano i guelfi e i ghibellini. E questo, in ultima analisi, è un segnale buono perché mostra la passione che vive nei cuori di quanti, a vario titolo, ruotano intorno al mondo del libro.

L’ultimo allarme sui libri viene dagli USA. Stando a uno studio dell’Association of American Publishers e del Book Industry Study Group dal 2008 a oggi c’è stato un crollo delle vendite di tascabili nella misura del 14%. Il motivo? Secondo David Gernert (agente di molti autori americani tra cui John Grisham) una parte di questo declino è dovuto agli eBook che hanno “eroso una grossa fetta” del robusto mercato dei tascabili.

Sembra, infatti, che i cataloghi degli eBook delle case editrici statunitensi siano belli pieni di “libri da classifica” e questo vuol dire che il tanto annunciato sorpasso del libro digitale si fa sempre più concreto con l’eBook che rappresenta, sul serio, il “vecchio mercato di massa di ieri”.