TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Scary worlds entwine in A.S. Byatt's 'Children's Book' In fact or fiction, the world is not a safe place for children. That is a foundation stone of A.S. Byatt's sweeping novel The ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Duncan Hamilton's double William Hill triumph rewards risk-taking writers | Kevin Mitchell A biography of Harold Larwood was the deserved winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year awardDuncan Hamilton is a very nice guy. Which is just as well, given he has just won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for the second time in three years and picked up £21,000, with his lovely book on Harold Larwood; you've got to believe that sort of sequence will set all sort of jealous juices running.Hamilton won the gong two years ago with his book on Brian Clough, Provided You Don't Kiss Me. Now he's done it again. I can hear the gnashing of teeth around the best bars in town and beyond. I found Christian Ryan's book on Kim Hughes the best cricket read of the year, but what do I know? You can't take anything away from Duncan's lovingly forensic treatment of a man few of us really could ever know.Larwood emerged from his Nottingham pit to blast Don Bradman into something like mortality and then was discarded by the establishment because they couldn't stomach the way he did it. If you can't identify with that sort of heroism, we are not breathing the same oxygen. You've got to read Duncan's book. He captures an era so long ago so well it's almost as if he were there.The standard in 2009 was pretty good (I have to say that, having sneaked on to the long list), and how good is that in the credit-crunched noughties? Writers have got to get out there and take risks, otherwise we will end up with an anodyne list of ghosted rhubarb. I'm still not comfortable with ghosted books getting on the list. Marcus Trescothick won it last year and, good book as it was, Marcus did not write a word of it. John Inverdale, presenting for Radio 5 Live, said all the right things to Tresco but this should be an award for writers, not their sometimes fascinating subjects.What is worth celebrating even more though than Duncan's double triumph is William Hills's commitment to the printed word. This is an award that the New Zealand publishing guru John Gaustad set in train 20 years ago, when he set up his Sportspages shop in Charing Cross Road in London. For a variety of reasons, that shop is not there any more. But Hills have stuck with Gaustad and with the awards. They give young and old writers alike incentive to stretch themselves – as long as publishers keep the faith. So far, they have and that is why we should celebrate not only Duncan Hamilton's book but anyone who steps up to the mark.The mood was that Hamilton was a good force moving among us, a writer who looks at sport from a different angle. In an industry that sometimes values instant headlines above considered analysis, books such as this are a reminder that there is, indeed, another point of view.CricketKevin Mitchellguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Legal Battles Over E-Book Rights to Older Books The ownership of the e-book rights to older titles is a growing source of conflict in the publishing industry. feeds.nytimes.com |
Climate change is inspiring the ultimate scary movies | Ryan Gilbey Disaster film-makers struggling to compete with the realities of the post-9/11 world have, in global warming, found the perfect plot deviceIt may be the start of a new year, but as far as cinema is concerned that doesn't mean it can't also be the end of the world. Even before January is out, audiences will have been given two gruelling visions of the future from which to choose. You can experience your dystopian forecast in moderately Hollywood-friendly form in The Book of Eli, in which Denzel Washington battles unwashed marauding types in a harsh futuristic landscape. Or you can take your medicine straight in the form of The Road, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel about a father and son trudging through a world scarred by environmental collapse.Long before such films, or recent animated equivalents like WALL-E or 9, we have harboured a cultural compulsion to imagine our collective demise. The need was once sated by that popular best-seller, the Old Testament, but latter-day audiences have found that the disaster movie hits the spot as effectively. This genre hit an early commercial peak in 1936 with San Francisco, which restaged the 1906 earthquake, and In Old Chicago, about the Chicago fire of 1871, before stretching through 1970s hits such as The Towering Inferno (skyscraper blaze) and The Poseidon Adventure (capsized ocean liner).One trend in disaster movies was to use catastrophe as a form of divine retribution for mankind's hubris. Implicit in The Towering Inferno was the suggestion that human beings were playing God by designing structures that reached to the heavens. The 1970s Airport films tried unsuccessfully to balance their awe at advances in aviation with the suspicion that we might eventually have to pay for the sin of pride.Recently this line of reasoning has become untenable. An increasingly secular society was never going to have much truck with a storytelling format that hinges on God bringing us down a peg or two. Then there is the unavoidable fact that real-life calamities tend to unfold much faster, and more sinisterly, than anything a film studio could cook up. A modern disaster movie couldn't hope to compete with the realities of the post-9/11 world, where a screenwriter's cleverest plots can be eclipsed by the ingenuity of a bomber intent on smuggling explosives onto a plane. Projects that take nine months or more to reach the screen will have been upstaged by the evening news many times over during the course of production.This is why global warming is, to use a non-secular term, such a godsend for movie narratives. With the divine retribution angle now an anachronism, and international terrorism making Airport-style plots too near the knuckle, climate change as a plot device provides the right blend of terrible plausibility, comforting distance and chastening subtext. We know global warming is under way – well, most do – and yet the phenomenon is gradual enough to rule out any risk of reality stealing a march on fiction. The director Roland Emmerich has been a notable opportunist in this regard, grafting environmental concerns onto the template of the old-school disaster movie for end-of-civilisation epics like The Day After Tomorrow and last year's 2012.The nuclear age once fuelled a similar climate of fear in cinema, but it's been a while since filmmakers invoked that spectre. It will be interesting to see how our ongoing struggle with climate change, which can't be moved so easily to the back-burner, is reflected in the stories we tell on film. Even if carbon emissions were to be reduced to zero tomorrow, our need to contemplate our own extinction would still remain. For all their sobriety, the latest dystopian visions fill the same need within us as the cheesiest disaster movie, but with one important difference. When we see The Road, we can't discard the fears provoked by the film once the lights come up. Instead, we take them home with us and, if we're smart, act on them.Film adaptationsFilm industryCormac McCarthySeptember 11 2001Climate changeDenzel WashingtonRyan Gilbeyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
In praise of trilogies A triple-decker story is one of the glories of the art of fiction, but it's not easy to pull offLast year I had a moan about cliffhangers in children's literature. I still think they're unholy, the devil's hallmark of publishers chopping one substantial book into fun-sized pamphlets. But I'm losing my knee-jerk antipathy to trilogies. Providing all the books in a trilogy stand alone – with proper endings – and complement one another, the best things really do come in threes. Inkheart, His Dark Materials, Peter Dickinson's Changes, and Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus are all superb, and all the better for coming in three volumes. And rather than starting a series which spools away into infinity, it's often good to know that you'll be left wanting more at the end of a third book, not being gradually disillusioned by an increasingly shopworn formula.The power of three presents its own pitfalls, however. A cohesive trilogy which maintains a constant quality of writing as well as sustaining a reader's interest is a much greater challenge than a single book, and many authors fail to pull it off, churning out second and third volumes that seem lacklustre by comparison, or just a bad fit with what went before. To me, William Nicholson's Wind on Fire trilogy is a case in point. The first book, The Wind Singer, is a self-contained dystopian novel set in the city of Aramanth, where citizens' colour-coded privileges depend on exam results. Featuring sinister "old children" who turn badly-behaved and poorly motivated youth into more of themselves, mud-people who get stoned on tixy leaf, and beautiful adolescent Zars who march into battle chanting "Kill, kill, kill!" the book is light-heartedly compelling. In book two, however, everything goes a bit awry – an invading force sacks the city, slaughtering and burning en masse; the nasty Mastery holds hostages in monkey cages that are set alight if anyone tries to escape; and a woman's face is slashed by a jealous lover. I'm all for dark and uncompromising children's literature, but upping the ante to this extent after the first volume's gentle, PG-rated antics is baffling to me. I was also a tad disappointed by the second book in Rhiannon Lassiter's Hex trilogy. The eponymous first volume, written at the precocious age of 17, has a fascinatingly dislikeable anti-heroine, Raven, and a gripping future world in which people are literally stratified by wealth – the rich in the Heights, the gangs in the shadowy ground-level slums – and citizens with the Hex mutation are proscribed and executed. While the third book, Ghosts, feeds the reader's yen for revolutionary action as the genocidal elite get overthrown by Hexes, the middle volume feels as though it's marking time – Raven is captured by the security forces, but not a lot happens and not much is learnt. A good rule of thumb, in fact, is probably to avoid dedicating book two to the protagonist's capture and imprisonment. Patrick Ness's The Ask and the Answer seems much more static than The Knife of Never Letting Go – after Todd's indomitable peregrinations in the first book, he seems to do little but rage against his confinement in the second. Avoiding this momentum-drain, the best trilogies shift place and perspective in their second volumes. After Lyra's betrayal of Roger at the end of Northern Lights, it's gripping and unexpected to find The Subtle Knife opening with a new protagonist, Will Parry, and in a new world – ours. In Inkspell, too, much of the story is told from Dustfinger's perspective within the Inkworld, rather than solely from 12-year-old Meggie's. Dustfinger is a magnificent creation, morally ambivalent and long-suffering, with an Odyssean yearning to get home at all costs that contrasts with Meggie's childlike concern for her parents and new adolescent love-interest. Seeing things through his eyes immediately makes Inkheart's worlds more subtle and memorable, and gives the second book, if anything, more gravitas than the first. Having broadened their scope in book two, imparted to their work the epic flavour that justifies the trilogy treatment, and written the third book that made it greater than the sum of its parts, writers can rest on their laurels. But it's astonishing how few trilogies remain trilogies throughout their lives. Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy acquired a fourth volume to become a quartet, 18 years after The Farthest Shore was published. And there have since been two further books, The Other Wind and Tales from Earthsea. And forget Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon A Time In The North – Pullman has been working indefatigably on a full-length novel set in the His Dark Materials universe, The Book of Dust, for several years. Providing there's a long enough gap to make the publication of subsequent books a treat rather than a dilution, I'm quite keen on trilogies in five parts – as long as there aren't any cliffhangers.Children and teenagersScience fiction, fantasy and horrorImogen Russell Williamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |