TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| 'I didn't know what Adrian Mole looked like – well, not until I saw John Major on the telly' Alex Clark interviews Sue TownsendIt is hardly acute literary criticism to say that Sue Townsend really knows how to hit the nail on the head, but that she does so with such apparent effortlessness and consistency is surely worth remarking. Witness a poignant little diary entry from Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years, which covers the period from mid-2007 to mid-2008. Adrian, nearing 40, recently diagnosed with prostate cancer (the misspelling in the book's title is deliberate, and people's inability to get it right is a source of much irritation to Adrian) and living in a converted pigsty with his dangerously dissatisfied wife, Daisy, is in need of cheering up. "For some reason," he writes, "I always feel comforted when I am in Woolworths. When I was a child, I spent my first pocket money there. I was five years old and forked out twenty pence on flying saucers. It is good to know that whatever travails we may suffer in life, Woolworths will always be there."Adrian made his first print appearance in 1982, in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, which followed a play broadcast on Radio 4 earlier that year. He had hitherto been part of what Townsend calls her "secret writing" – the manuscripts that piled up under the stairs, added to by night but spoken of to nobody. "He came into my head when my eldest son said 'Why don't we go to safari parks like other families do?' That's the only real line of dialogue from my family that's in any of the Mole books. It's in because it triggered it. I remembered that kind of whiny, adolescent self-pity, that 'surely these are not my parents.' I heard him first, and then saw him, but I only saw him from the head down; I didn't see his face, didn't know what he looked like – well, not until I saw John Major on the telly." By way of qualification, she adds that John Major has a lovely face when he takes his glasses off, and Adrian has become steadily more attractive over the years, the more plausibly, perhaps, to stoke a future relationship with Pandora Braithwaite, his childhood sweetheart, now a polished and rampagingly on-message New Labour MP.Pandora makes suitably dramatic appearances in The Prostrate Years, as do Adrian's parents, Pauline (now writing an entirely fabricated misery memoir entitled A Girl Called Shit) and George, his best friend Nigel ("an unpleasant blind person!" laughs Townsend, who was herself registered blind in 2001), and the Chinese restaurateur Wayne Wong, to whose premises Adrian repairs to sit near the fish-tank and eat beef in black bean sauce, one of his few indulgences in life. The ninth volume of Adrian's diaries – following updates that have taken us from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole to The Wilderness Years, The Cappuccino Years and Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction – is, like its predecessors, an ensemble piece smuggled into a monologue.But, aside from much of the topical humour that fuels the book's jaunty pace and often throwaway comedy – the smoking ban, flooding, Northern Rock and The Jeremy Kyle Show all pop up – there is an undertow that makes it a far darker and at times angrier work than Townsend's readers might expect. For a start, Adrian is ill, quite possibly terminally; and, second, he writes his diary as the New Labour project shows ever more serious signs of strain. On Tony Blair's last day in office, Adrian summons up all his hauteur to write: "I expect he will have a full day trying to repair his reputation."Townsend is unequivocal about the extent to which she feels betrayed by the Labour party and how completely her views were changed by the Iraq war. "I am a passionate socialist," she says, "but, God, I can't stand them now. I support the memory and the history of the party and I consider that these lot are interlopers . . . I could still cry to think about shock and awe, to watch it on television and think 'there are bombers and they're bombing children'. That Blair could sit and watch that, with his kids, possibly. How would he have explained it to his children? They were old enough to understand politics easily. What would he have said? I suppose that stupid line about the weapons of mass destruction. But I think he's been punished."Nor is her disillusion confined to British foreign policy. In 1997, asked to write a pre-election dispatch for the Observer, she travelled to the Gipton estate in Leeds, deliberately distancing herself from her native Leicester, where she has lived all her life. There, she found grinding poverty and very little hope, concluding: "The vermin, as Aneurin Bevan described the Tory party, will shortly be crawling back behind the skirting-board and New Labour will be dancing a victory jig on the floor. And I hope that over the coming years a socialist Labour party will gather strength. Somebody has to care for the poor."Revisiting Leeds in 2005, Townsend was able to report significant improvements for the inhabitants of the city's estates. But she also described the ubiquity of CCTV cameras, each of them surrounded by iron spikes "uncannily like a crown of thorns"; she inveighed against the government's attitude towards the sick, revealing how a fascination with Bevan had turned her into a childhood socialist and writing: "I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor."Everything about Townsend's life is informed by her sense of where she has come from. Her house, a former vicarage that sits at the top of a broad, leafy avenue, is within walking distance of Leicester city centre but clearly in one of its more well-to-do suburbs. It is beautiful but not flashy. In her writing room, where we sit and talk, the walls are covered with framed publicity posters and jackets from her plays and books, but they only arrived there after a good deal of soul-searching that ended when she saw a television programme in which her friend and sometime mentor, the late John Mortimer, had decorated his study similarly. "They used to be all up in the attic," she explains, "because I was almost ashamed of it – I couldn't bear any evidence that I was a professional writer. Then I saw a documentary about him, and he had all of his posters, thousands more than I've got, and I thought, if he can do it, I will."The eldest daughter of a postman, she was born in 1946 and brought up in a happily close-knit family who lived on the edge of the countryside, four miles from Leicester. "We were probably the last generation to be truly free to play," she says, remembering days spent stalking through the grand rooms of an abandoned mansion, foraging for berries and soft grass, building rope swings and rafts. Somewhere along the way, she also discovered reading, fuelled by the affordability of Penguin Classics, an acquaintanceship with a second-hand bookseller and a passion for the great Russian novelists, and later the Americans. At the age of 14, the secret writing began. "Nobody ever knew. I learned to hide it. It was stories about a teenage girl, much influenced by the Russians. She certainly suffered privations."At the same time, Townsend's life was developing along another track. She was married at 18, and had three children by the time she was 22. The secret writing continued at night, when the children were in bed: "I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours. When all my kids were at home, I used to write from midnight onwards. Television was boring in those days."But it wasn't until her first marriage had ended and she had met Colin Broadway, who became her second husband and is the father of her fourth child, that she considered that her writing could be anything other than a nocturnal activity. Even when she "confessed" to Colin, she didn't allow him to read what she'd written or tell anyone else about it. It was only when he saw an advertisement in the local paper for a writer's group that things began to happen. In 1979, her first of many plays, Womberang, was produced, later winning her a Thames Television bursary (John Mortimer was on the panel), and the box under the stairs was opened for good. It was something of a jolt to those around her: "I was married to my first husband for seven years, and he didn't know. It was a massive surprise to him when he saw a poster in town to do with the play I'd written. Last time he sees me I'm surrounded by kids and wearing an apron, and then I've written this play, and there's an article in the local paper: "Local Mother Moves Into Theatre World". Local mother! I was a novelty, but then it was the 70s. Women had made a good stab at getting equality, but you were still fighting. Still skirmishing."Adrian Mole went on to make her a bestselling novelist throughout the 1980s and beyond, and one of the country's foremost humorous writers. I tell her that I am almost exactly the same age as Adrian and was, as a young teenager, utterly addicted to him: his premature world-weariness, his combination of self-importance and neurotic lack of confidence and his romantic agonies struck a chord with me, as they did with teenagers (not to mention their teachers and parents) everywhere. The illustration on the front of my dog-eared copy of The Secret Diary hints at the reason, with its Noddy toothbrush to one side, razor and shaving-brush to the other; the book captured the painful drama of adolescence, of feeling caught between two worlds and belonging to neither, down to the last detail.Now Adrian is at another of life's staging posts: on the brink of middle age, he is a man whose life still feels as provisional, bewildering and unsteady to him as it did 27 years ago. But this time, he is forced to confront a crisis that can't be wished away or played down. "I wanted him to face death," says Townsend. After his diagnosis, his thoughts are a characteristic blend of melodrama and mundanity: "I can't die yet. I've got responsibilities and a family and I have to look after my parents; they're completely irresponsible and couldn't survive without my help. And there are so many places I haven't visited yet: the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the new John Lewis department store they're building in Leicester."Throughout the novel, Adrian goes through radiotherapy and chemotherapy but, although he ponders much on the fraught love-life of his hospital nurse, he is reticent when it comes to his own suffering. "I imagine he doesn't have the words for the fear he feels," Townsend says. "He knows it's a feeling, but he doesn't want to express it because that would make it real. That's what quite a lot of people do. I'm really good at detachment myself. It's been a handy trick over the last three months or so."One feels that Townsend has had to do what she calls her "detachment trick" for longer than the last three months. She was diagnosed with diabetes in her 30s, having previously been fit, healthy and active. "I did go overly dramatic," she says, although everything about her suggests that this was not the case. "I did lie on the couch and employ a cleaner." Through the decades, her condition deteriorated significantly; she lost her eyesight and, over the course of five years or so, her kidneys failed. Eight weeks before we met, she had a kidney transplant, using an organ donated by her son; she had endured years of dialysis. She is still a frequent visitor to the hospital, and will remain on medication for the rest of her life.But if illness is one of novel's most fruitful themes – Adrian's initial attempts to secure a doctor's appointment will chime with most people – it doesn't prevent Townsend addressing other concerns. Issues of paternity and family run through the Mole books (Adrian himself has three children by three different mothers), and in the wake of the latest crisis – who is his sister Rosie's real father? – Townsend dispatches the interested parties to that great arbiter of contemporary ethics, The Jeremy Kyle Show. But what you don't get is any de haut en bas satire on reality television. "I love those people," she says firmly. "I've worked with them, and I know them intimately. They're completely manipulated by the show, but . . . I think it's validating their life; being on the television is success, it doesn't matter what the context is. You haven't been able to make much of yourself because nobody's expected anything of you; first your parents, second your schoolteachers, certainly not your peer group – they're more comfortable with the lowest common denominator, because we're all in this together, so . . . I am overly sentimental, probably, about people like that."As a child, Townsend used to sit on the bus into Leicester city centre, fascinated by the thought that the workers from the Fox's Glacier Mints factory would buy the bread made at the bakery up the road, following the chain of production and consumption as far as she could. She is convinced that the lives of the working class had more compensations than we now realise: Leicester itself had 15 working men's clubs, and most factories had several sports teams. Latterly, one of Townsend's contributions to community life has been to buy two pubs that would have otherwise disappeared, knowing that "if you gave people really good clean lavatories, not the 60-year-old urine smell, and you treated people well and were friendly, you could fill the place".She is committed to the idea that the vast majority of people are looking for an opportunity to demonstrate their best selves, and that this is being thwarted by the depredations and excesses of government – a belief that surfaces not only in the Mole books, but also in more overtly political novels such as Number Ten and Queen Camilla. Her anxiety that we are increasingly wary of one another leads her to believe that "we're on the cusp of something significant, because if it goes on that way what kind of a world are we going to be living in? We're going to be paranoid, fearful, isolated."Townsend's novels are little hymns to the power of family and community to make life bearable. It seems horribly obvious to ask her whether she keeps a diary, but rather remiss not to. She laughs and assumes a mock-dramatic voice: "I prefer to keep my secrets to myself, to the grave . . . and beyond!"Sue TownsendChildren and teenagersFictionAlex Clarkguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Book of the New Sun: science fiction's Ulysses? Gene Wolfe's vast tome sets many puzzles for the reader, not the least of which is why on earth it isn't better knownFirst, a confession or two. I know I was meant to read Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates next, but Gene Wolfe arrived first in the post and so I got stuck in; by the time poor old Tim arrived a few days later, I couldn't be prised away. In my ignorance I hadn't realised The Book of the New Sun is actually four novels; my edition was of the first two, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, so this post is about those.My other admission is to trepidation: Wolfe is revered – and I mean seriously revered – by authors from Neil Gaiman to George RR Martin and Ursula Le Guin, both of whom have called The Book of the New Sun a masterpiece. Although not everyone likes it, one extremely detailed essay says "it could be argued that The Book of the New Sun is science fiction's Ulysses". Crikey. Second: a couple of wonderings. A few of you (JamesWMoar, MaxCairnduff, RobKill, AddisonSteele) had warned me not to tackle Wolfe while I was still reeling from the intense Elizabethan-style English of The Worm Ouroboros (or his "linguistic porridge", as AddisonSteele put it – true, but I do like porridge). I imagined that I'd be glooping along through olde worlde syntax, but Wolfe isn't like that at all. Yes, there's plenty of odd words – "fuligin" for black, "carnifex" for torturer, "destriers", which are sort of super-horses. But I found this all added to the other-ness of the world Wolfe has created; I didn't exactly understand some words until I looked them up but I knew what he meant by them, and I loved his "note on translation" at the end of the first book, when he tells us how he went about "rendering this book - originally composed in a tongue that has not yet achieved existence – into English". Did you warner-offers find it irritating? I really enjoyed it.Also, while The Shadow of the Torturer won the World fantasy award in 1981 and has the trappings of fantasy (young man, long sword, mysterious destiny), surely it's really science fiction? Set a million years in the future on a world with a dying sun, where the moon is green and irrigated, daylight is red, and "rotting jungles" circle "the waist of the world", it follows the story of Severian, a torturer in the decaying Citadel who shows mercy to a prisoner he's fallen in love with. Rather than being killed for his crime, he's exiled, given an ancient sword (Terminus Est) and sent to the distant city of Thrax. On his way out of the vast urban sprawl of Nessus, his adventures include fighting a duel with a flower (more deadly than it sounds), accidentally stealing the Claw of the Conciliator (a glowing, seemingly magical jewel) from a temple and fishing a girl, Dorcas, out of a lake where the dead are sunk. The story is recounted by Severian himself from a position in the future. He is, I suspect, brilliantly unreliable; as well as the challenge of picking through his statements, this is a world which Wolfe never explains directly – the reader has to piece its realities together, which is hugely satisfying.He goes on to perform a couple of executions, meet a mysterious troupe of travelling players, escape underground man-apes who have mutated from their human origins through "eons of struggles in the dark" and take part in a cannibalistic ritual which confers the substance of a dead person's mind to the eater. We even get a bit of Christopher Marlowe. I'd worried that Severian's occupation would mean endless gruesome descriptions of torture, but this isn't the case at all – apart from a leg-peeling, a excoriated dog, and Severian's few beheadings, Wolfe steers clear of the grisly, and manages to make his torturer-hero if not sympathetic, then definitely charismatic. (Unlike Terry Goodkind, who seems to revel in his Mord-Sith's perversions – although mentioning Goodkind in the same blog as Wolfe feels a bit sacrilegious, so apologies for bringing him up.)I loved Shadow and Claw – was blown away, in fact. The whole thing is dreamlike in quality, unfathomably large in scope, deliciously, slyly puzzling. It's enormous fun picking away at Severian's ideas about the past of his far future Urth, at the mysteries of his companions Jonas (why does he have a mechanical hand?) and Dorcas (was she resurrected?), at what the Claw might actually be – and at how truthful and accurate our narrator, for all his protestations that he remembers "every rattling chain and whistling wind, every sight, smell and taste", really is. "Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there," Gaiman tells us. Then "do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far. It's tricksy and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at any time." I think a second read is definitely going to be in order; I'm also champing at the bit for the second half to arrive.What do you think? I suspect you'll mostly be huge fans, but I'd be interested to know why you think The Book of the New Sun isn't better known. Yes, it's acclaimed by fellow SFF authors and is clearly held in huge esteem all over the place – hell, there's even Wolfian scholarship out there – but despite all this I'd still say it hasn't yet made it to the mainstream. Why is that? It's certainly good enough. Could it be the cover (my version has Severian wearing what looks to be a big leather codpiece)? I'd love to know what you think.Meanwhile, next up is Mr Powers and The Anubis Gates, which I'm taking on holiday (along with New Sun books three and four – would you be interested in a post on those once I'm done?). Can't wait.Science fiction, fantasy and horrorFictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
State of the Art: Not Yet The Season For a Nook Every one of the Nook’s vaunted distinctions from Amazon’s Kindle comes fraught with disappointing footnotes. feeds.nytimes.com |
Anne of Green Gables still a life changer A P.E.I. classic has made Indigo's list of Top Ten "Life-Changing Books" for the first decade of the millennium. cbc.ca |
The queen of TV book clubs As Amanda Ross launches her new TV Book Club, the woman who made Richard & Judy the most powerful couple in publishing talks to Alex ClarkWhen I meet Amanda Ross, joint managing director of Cactus TV and former producer of Richard & Judy, I feel I have to get something out of the way. I tell her that I was part of a panel that, four years ago, placed her at the head of the Observer newspaper's list of the 50 most influential people in publishing, above such industry power players as Gail Rebuck and Tim Hely Hutchinson, and above writers Jacqueline Wilson and Kazuo Ishiguro and cultural commentators such as Jenni Murray. As the creator of Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan's book club, then entering its third year and a familiar part of their Channel 4 chat show, Ross not only had a huge success on her hands, she had also had a profound impact on the British publishing landscape; by then, writers, publishers and booksellers not only wanted books to garner reviews and prizes; they wanted them to "do a Richard & Judy". Have your work chewed over by the golden couple and their celebrity guests on the studio sofa and, perhaps even more importantly, earn the right to have their sticker plastered on your book and, everyone knew, you had hit the big time.But for Ross, the seemingly unstoppable rise of the book clubs – there was also an annual "Summer Reads" campaign – was not without its downside. Over the past few years, she has attracted a fair amount of criticism, ranging from concern that the programme's enormous sales uplift applies to a limited number of titles and reduces the market for other books, to more ad feminam accusations – that she exercises undue influence on publishers' choices of book jackets and publication schedules, or that she is defiantly unÂliterary. She is not, it is true, everyone's idea of a publishing "type": she is strikingly friendly and informal when we meet, but she also exudes a sort of no-nonsense steeliness; at one point, in a humorous description of literary discourse, she waves her hand and says "Proust blah blah", which is not the way the literati would generally allow themselves to be heard speaking. She openly declares that she doesn't like the word literary and she rarely reads book reviews. In that context, was being dubbed publishing's most inÂfluential figure a hindrance rather than a help?"I loved that!" she cries. "It's one of the nicest things that's ever happened to me." She describes going to have her picture taken, along with others on the list, with nobody having any idea of how it was ranked. She found herself being photographed late in the day, alongside writer Sarah Waters: "I said, right, that means I'm number 50 then, and she said, yeah that means we're 49 and 50 . . . Then she was really high up and I was number one, and it was hilarious. I'd come back and said to my husband: 'It's brilliant to even be on the list when it's not my industry at all, I'm sure I'm number 50.' I was really delighted. To be recognised for anything, even if it's not your proper job, is a lovely thing."Ross's "proper job" is the making of television programmes and, together with her husband Simon Ross, brother to Jonathan and Paul Ross, she runs the production company that brought us Richard & Judy and currently shepherds Saturday Kitchen and North-east cooking duo The Hairy Bikers on to our screens. She is at pains to point out that she regards herself as neither a literary expert nor an industry insider and expresses irritation with a "terrible, horrible" trade website that described her, as she points out "in inverted commas", as a publishing guru. "I've never said that about myself. All I say is, my job is entertainment, that's all I've ever done, so I seem to be good at finding things that are entertaining – well, surprise, surprise. It's my Âbusiness to find things that are entertaining, and I've used all of those skills and applied them to books." Those skills have transformed the bookselling industry.Back in 2004, it wasn't that easy to persuade TV bosses that books could deliver prime-time viewing; the view at Channel 4, Ross says, was that "books are really boring on telly". But she thought otherwise: not only was she an enthusiastic reader herself, she had seen the impact of Oprah Winfrey's TV book club in America and, even more significantly, had become aware that every time a book featured on Richard & Judy it shot up the bookselling charts, to the extent that retailers such as Waterstone's and Amazon had begun to ask the show to tip them the wink if a book was going to appear. Figuring that the strand could work as long as it was lively and varied, Ross launched Richard & Judy's Book Club, selecting 10 books that the hosts and their celebrity guest readers would discuss over 10 weeks, with viewers eventually voting for a winner. At the same time, her company agreed to televise the British Book Awards, hitherto an industry-only affair, at which the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award would be presented, garnering sponsorship from the chocolate makers Galaxy and stripping from public view the more trade-related prizes.The impact was virtually immediate; in that first year, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which won the public vote, and Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea saw a dramatic increase in sales. Star of the Sea, in particular, has become a byword for the show's effect: prior to its appearance, and despite a favourable critical reception, it had enjoyed only modest sales; it ended up selling well in excess of half a million copies. Other writers to benefit have included Audrey Niffenegger, Victoria Hislop, Khaled Hosseini and Kate Mosse, whose novel Labyrinth has sold more than a million copies. When Sebold picked up her prize at the British Book awards, she was reported as describing the experience as better than winning an Oscar.Kate Summerscale, whose prizewinning non-fiction investigation of a Victorian murder, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, featured on the programme last year, told me: "The book was already selling well, but I knew this would bring it new readers. I liked the way the book club mixed up literary and commercial books, and fiction and non-fiction." Last autumn, the Bookseller magazine analysed the effect that the Richard & Judy clubs have had on the book trade. They estimate that the hundred books featured over the course of six years have sold 30.8 million copies between them in the UK, representing a consumer spend of £183.3m. Given that the entire high street accounts for approximately £900m-worth of books a year, that is no small feat.With the club's immediate success, Ross says, everything changed. Her instinct, though, was to keep faith with her original idea, based on the central principle that the viewing audience had to be able to mirror the club's progress on screen. "The problem with most other book shows," she explains, "is that they have too many books and they cover them far too briefly. You can't take in a whole book in three minutes, you've got to do it absolutely properly, so we decided that we'd do it in a book-club type format, because book clubs were starting to be popular. Ironically, when it was a success, Channel 4 were saying 'more, more, more', and I said no, we have to be careful and we have to strategise and have campaigns and then it will have a proper impact. People will lose interest if you do it too often, because you can't keep up with reading."The identification with her audience is at the heart of Ross's success. Last year, having moved from Channel 4 to digital TV channel Watch, Richard and Judy disappeared from our television sets – for the time being at least. Unwilling to see the demise of what she describes as "my baby, my passion", Ross embarked on a new project, turning a 12-minute segment into a full-length programme. The TV Book Club will begin airing tomorrow on More 4, with Monday repeats on Channel 4. The first novel up for discussion will be The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker; other featured authors include Nick Hornby, Sarah Dunant and writer of The Wire George Pelecanos. In keeping with Ross's aim to introduce viewers to less familiar names, the list also features work by debut crime writer Belinda Bauer and a first novel by doctor Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone, which Ross lets slip is her favourite (not only is it the quirkiest but, she explains, she also loved ER). Ross has recruited five celebrity presenters: comedians Jo Brand and Dave Spikey, actors Nathaniel Parker and Laila Rouass and presenter Gok Wan. "The idea is that the people on the sofa are just like you at home, in that they are the book club. In a book club, someone chooses the books for you; that's what my panel and I do, we choose the books for you. That's the beauty of it, you're given something to read that you wouldn't necessarily read, and then you're free to think and say and do about it whatever you like."Ross clearly believes in saying what she thinks and encouraging her audiences to do likewise. She appears unafraid of exposing gaps in her knowledge, freely admitting that, before she started the book club, she had no idea that retailers charged publishers for including their titles in special promotions or placing them at the front of store. Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller magazine, which last year gave Ross their award for outstanding contribution to bookselling, comments that, to the somewhat genteel world of literary publishing, she was "a bit of a shock to the system"; but, as he wryly notes, "as soon as it became apparent how much commercial power she wielded, every publisher in London wanted to be her best friend".Her detachment from the critical establishment and from review culture stems in part from her belief that there is "a different agenda" at play, one in which reviewers concerned with displaying their knowledge have on occasion left her feeling "stupid". She recalls the snootiness of the critics who were "a bit rude about us . . . a daytime show picking literary authors", and the sense of vindication she felt when David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, an undeniably complex and allusive work of fiction, won the public vote in the club's second year. "My readers proved them wrong," she says.She is also proud of her independence. Ofcom regulations mean that there can be no financial transactions attached to her selections – she once sent back a pair of Eurostar tickets that arrived with a book – and, in consequence, she has to be careful not to feature too many titles by one publisher, although she attempts to remain blind to a book's provenance until as late as possible in the selection process. Each publisher or imprint can submit up to six titles, making for an initial haul of around 800 titles, which are then sifted by Ross and a rotating group of three readers, all drawn from the Cactus staff. She also, she says, frequently slips books to other members of the team who seem as though they might have an eye.She is clear that she would like to be perceived as being supportive of the publishing industry, which she feels is "under a lot of pressure"; at the same time, she throws her hands up in the air when she receives identikit submissions designed to echo her previous selections, or when covers appear that clearly mimic those she has chosen before: "I really don't understand that; I never want to read the same thing twice, I want to be broadened, I want to see lots of different things. People are so much more adventurous than a lot of institutions give us credit for."Ross's own sense of literary adventurousness started early. Growing up in Essex through what she describes as not a very happy childhood, she could read and write by the time she went to school, and had exhausted the school's library by the time her mother joined a book club on her behalf. At 11, she was making her way through Dickens and fantasising that the lime-kilns in Great Expectations were just near where she lived. She went on to study drama at university and puts her frustratingly slow reading speed down to the fact that "when you're reading a book you can be all the characters".For seven years, Ross explains ruefully, she has not read a classic or any book that couldn't qualify as a potential pick. She has, she says, a large pile of books ready for her retirement. When I suggest that she doesn't look as though she's planning to retire any time soon, she only-half agrees, pointing to the seismic changes in the television industry and the fact that, as the head of a company, she rarely gets time now to do the bits of the job that initially attracted her.Would she ever start her own publishing company? "I'm too old to start in another industry," she laughs. "I have been approached by various publishers, because they think I've got an eye, they think that I understand what makes a populist book. But I make television programmes, I'm a TV producer, that's what I do and it's wonderful for me to be involved in the publishing world, because they are so much nicer than TV people . . . when I say this to people in publishing, they think they're all really ruthless, they can't believe it, but boy! It's a whole different ball game."Whatever her plans for the distant future, she is adamant that she will always retain a connection with the book club, which she says is one of the best things that ever happened to her. "Reading is a sacred occupation, in that it's completely democratic; you can be anyone when you're reading, you can be anywhere, you can travel the whole world without leaving your armchair. It's a sacred occupation, but there shouldn't be any limits to what you read; and there should be no boundaries to what you feel you can read."TV and radioSarah WatersJacqueline WilsonKazuo IshiguroDavid MitchellChannel 4Alex Clarkguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |