TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Paperback Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. THE BLIND SIDE, by Michael Lewis2. OUR CHOICE, by Al Gore3. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin4. FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner5. THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls feeds.nytimes.com |
'Twitter' declared top word of 2009 Global Language Monitor's vast survey of print and social media places Twitter ahead of Obama and H1N1 as most used wordAs world leaders prepare for the climate-change summit in Copenhagen and stock markets around the world get the Dubai shakes, a Texas-based algorithm has declared "Twitter" the top word of 2009.According to the Global Language Monitor (GLM), the social media website has been the most popular word in the print and digital media around the world this year, followed by Obama in second place and H1N1 – the name of the virus behind the epidemic of swine flu which has swept through Europe and the US – in third.Other words in the global top 10 include "stimulus", "deficit" and "hadron" with Stephenie Meyer's popular Twilight series pushing "vampire" into the top five.According to the president of GLM, Paul JJ Payack, Twitter is a word that sums up the recent rise of social media."To us it's kind of a surprise that Twitter came up as number one rather than Obama," he said, "but that tells you how big Twitter is globally." The success of the word is not just because social media are "taking the world by storm," he continued, but because it's "a fun word" which has spawned a whole vocabularly of tweets, twictionaries and even twitterature. "It's like Obama – you don't have a lot of play on the word Gordon Brown, or George W Bush – whereas you do with Obama, and you can with Twitter."GLM's software tracks the frequency of words and phrases in print and digital media, the internet, the blogosphere and databases such as Lexis-Nexis, to try to understand what people are really talking about. "We try to open it up as wide as possible," said Payack. "We look at broad swaths of the internet, we try to get at everything."Payack is confident that the results reflect the conversations people are having in their own homes or on the street."There is no way to measure every word spoken on the planet," he said, "but since people use social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, as well as blogs, to such a great extent, we can see how they are thinking (and feeling) to an unprecedented extent."According to Fiona McPherson, a senior editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, it's a very different exercise from the lists of new words published by dictionaries every year. "We've already got 'vampire' in the dictionary," she pointed out. However there are overlaps in the kind of data they are looking at."Twitter is undoubtedly a word of the year," she continued. "It hasn't made it into the OED yet; because nothing ever comes out once it's gone in we normally need to have a history of usage over five years. But it's certainly something that could make its way in."While lexicographers have traditionally leaned more on literature and newspapers, she added, individual tweets might be valuable references in the future: "If the dates were verifiable, and they were properly archived then I don't see any reason why not." But Twitter's number-one slot is perhaps a function of the kind of data GLM is looking at, she continued. "It's self-perpetuating in a way – you're talking about what you're doing."Michael Jackson's death is commemorated in the top phrase of 2009, "King of Pop", while Barack Obama leads the list of names. Other phrases in the top 10 include "climate change", "too large to fail" and "cloud computing", and US politics dominates the list of top names, with Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel and Sonia Sotomayor joining the president.GLM has also identified "global warming" as one of the most used terms of the decade, which Payack suggests is an indication that mainstream political parties are trailing behind voters when it comes to their perception of green politics."The consistently strong performance of terms such as 'climate change' and 'green' over the past decade shows that people on the ground are very attached to the environment," said Payack, "that they are embedding these ideas in their lives."GLM's top 15 words of 20091. Twitter2. Obama3. H1N14. Stimulus5. Vampire6. 2.0 (term borrowed from computing, meaning 'next generation')7. Deficit8. Hadron9. Healthcare10. Transparency11. Outrage12. Bonus13. Unemployed14. Foreclosure15. CartelReference and languagesTwitterRichard Leaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Put em right on Enid Blyton | Jean Hannah Edelstein The enthusiasm with which parents are buying books featuring old-fashioned discrimination leaves a bad taste in the mouthMy parents never bought me an Enid Blyton book, which is why (of course) I took such real subversive pleasure in finding some stacked in my grandmother's dusty bookshelves. My favourite Blyton title was The Put-Em-Rights, the story of a pious band of children from middle England who are inspired by a travelling preacher to do good works in their community; their well-intentioned efforts go generally awry and the overall message is that it's best to stick with your own kind, especially if you're working class. As it was in significant opposition to the liberal orthodoxy about inclusiveness I'd been taught at home and at school, I read it several times with complete consternation.That was 20 years ago, and these books were already anachronistic. But as statistics released by Amazon.co.uk released this week demonstrate, many British parents and grandparents appear to remain convinced of the benefits of Blyton for young readers: alongside obvious choices like Dan Brown, JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, Blyton is in the top 10 most purchased authors of the decade (and the only dead one, besides William Shakespeare).At first glance, it's surprising. But Blyton has more in common with most of the writers on the list besides the fact that she has never been lauded for her particularly good writing. This poll of the most mainstream choices of British book buyers illustrates, I think, a collective desire for escapism, showing that our motivations haven't changed too much since the beginning of fiction. Even in this age of relative realism, we seem to be seeking out narratives that draw us away from the realities of contemporary life and offer alternative paradigms to the ones in which we live: being the teenage lover of a glittery vampire or a dashing symbologist with a much younger French girlfriend all seem seductive prospects in contrast with our sometimes humdrum lives.And in keeping with that trend, Blyton's books are also works of fantasy, but read in a contemporary context, a rather more sinister imagined world than those presented by the other writers on the list, because it's so much closer to something real. It's a Britain in which boys are boys, girls are girls, the races know their place and social mobility should be frowned upon – even at the time of their publication, I suspect, Blyton conceptualised the kind of society that much of Middle Britain would have aspired to belong to, but which never quite existed.The enthusiasm with which these books have apparently been purchased for young readers in the past 10 years suggests more about their parents than them: that fear of the future, or even the present, is moving them to value for young people a familiarity with a comforting, simpler past, that is based on old-fashioned discrimination.It's more than just nostalgia for things today's adults enjoyed when they were small: most of Blyton's books were already outdated by the time most contemporary parents of under-10s were small. Rather, this seems to be evidence of an ongoing – or perhaps even resurrected – longing for a streak of solid, widespread conservatism. And the thought that the children of the noughties are being imbued with it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that not even lashings of ginger beer could put right.Enid BlytonChildren and teenagersChildrenParents and parentingParentsJean Hannah Edelsteinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The writer's friends, imaginary and otherwise | AL Kennedy Without other people it would be, in very many ways, impossible to writeI do hope the festivities were kind to you, Best Beloveds. I myself spent the duration lying on the sofa and sincerely hoping that someone would shoot me through the forehead. I find there's nothing quite as effective as Christmas for bringing out all those especially rampant viruses – the ones The Body of the self-employed person saves for rapid deployment as soon as a proper holiday is declared. This is, quite simply, revenge upon The Mind for the rest of the year's truncated nights, double-booked evenings, hair-tearing afternoons and rewrite-and-email-haunted mornings. It is, however, rare for The Body to really rouse itself, dust off its top hat, stop laughing maniacally and playing the organ in the basement (I know, I know) and put together a proper plan for Complete Domination of Everything. This year however, The Body outdid itself and The Mind's planned break – which was to be filled with nourishing readings from the classics, pottering at the terrifying edges of the new novel and contemplative strolls along the frost-jewelled riverside – actually resolved itself into a tedious amount of throwing up, interspersed by drooling blackouts. Which was restful and cleansing in its own way and half a mark off to all those of you who briefly thought – Yes, but surely that's just a traditional Scottish Christmas? The bit after the carafe of Windolene runs dry and before they start boiling up boot polish with Covonia to release its subtle notes of oak?You'll be glad to hear that I was feeling moderately well and attentive in time for the (admittedly insanely-plotted and solipsistic) execution of the Doctor. So, as my Inner Child stares, rocks and whimpers in another of my mental basements (because it's fitting that one fictional construct should mourn another while inside a third – welcome to my brain) the rest of me is back on solids and it's time to look back on 2009's more pleasant aspects. I'd like to at least open 2010 with a touch of zip and to briefly banish any post-Copenhagen conviction that our entire species is doomed and many activities are therefore rather pointless. The more pleasant aspects of my writing life, of course, involve other people. Without other people it would be, in very many ways, impossible to write.Of course, I now have to break off and agree that writing, particularly novel writing, does tend to be something one does by oneself. Even those truly, madly, deeply irritating souls who pose with their laptops in fashionable cafes aren't actually collaborating with the baristas. They're – perhaps unsurprisingly – alone. They may even not be utter wankers – they could be saving on their heating bills, or using the dull background hum of cheap dating, caffeinated child howls and Heimlich manoeuvres as a kind of aural wallpaper to block out their internal doubts. Or they may simply like being able to look up and find immediate proof that the world contains people they didn't have to make up earlier. The joy and the horror of writing is that it's something you do by yourself – if your name's on it, it's your fault. If your name's on it with somebody else's it's still your fault. And you'll rarely find multiple authors attached to a literary novel or a short story – they don't make commercial sense for even one writer. Writers may find like-minded folk they can consult with, or even groups of other writers to support them, but the idea that writers hang out together constantly, taking a deep and involved interest in each other's scribbling, is less than accurate. Writers can certainly care about each other – I'm very fond of my writer chums, for example, and I do love reading what they've come up with. Once it's bloody well finished – I've got my own stuff to write, thanks. Writers who tutor other authors may make suggestions, ask questions, give advice – but eventually the author is alone with the text: every word an opportunity, every word a responsibility, every word another chance. That's at least half the terrifying fun of it all.So why, if anyone talks to me about my job during 2010 and uses the words solitary, lonely, isolated, or the savage wilderness which is your life would make me want to top myself do I feel a spot of throat punching would be in order, were I not a pacifist? Well – for a start, if the writer isn't writing in expectation of the reader – isn't, in some way, offering a letter to an absent love – why bother? Aiming yourself at a clique of pals, or a market, or up your own private right of way doesn't make for particularly appetising prose. Viciously selfish, compulsive, obsessive and odd as many writers may be, we do everything we do for other people.And then there are the people we make up. Yes, should you watch me writing (for what I could only say would be singularly twisted reasons) I may look as if I'm a bit glum: hunting and pecking away and then staring. And I will have no visible accompaniment. Oh, but inside, dear reader – the writer is in minds, under skins, on roads untravelled, anywhere and everywhere and more. The intensity with which a writer can inhabit a character can make good old reality seem a little bit flat without the use of mental discipline and a will to observe. We have more company than some people will ever know.Or, we're far too enthusiastic with our imaginary friends. You pick.Then there are the other people who make sure that our words reach readers and we don't have to shout them in queues, or break in and scrawl them on to sleeping strangers, delightful as that might be. The proof-reading may be patchy, incomes may be circling the drain, the assurance and vision may be stunted, but at least we still sort of have a UK publishing industry. Huzzah. I've had the same editor for nearly 20 years now. Who can say how my work would have turned out if I'd been slammed stupidly into a niche market, forbidden to write short stories, prevented from making my own mistakes? Who can say how cheering I have found the knowledge of my first reader as that one specific, intelligent and really quite warped personality? Not me, anyway.Those of you who are familiar with this blog will also be aware that this particular writer couldn't have managed 2009 without, for example, the unsung few who shove refreshment trolleys up and down trains and make a point of actually being pleasant and trying to improve multiple seatless, delayed, boiling/freezing, inexplicable, lost or otherwise disastrous journeys. I would have had much less fun without the festivals in Charleston, Glasgow, Waterford, Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Ullapool, Cromarty, Ilkley, Beverly and Toronto, or without additional audiences in Berlin, Wansee, Ely, Birnam and apologies to anywhere I've forgotten. Thanks to the Ladies and Gentlemen for the notes, emails, letters and gifts of food. Thanks to all the kind strangers who gave me food, in fact. I have often needed it – and clearly looked as if I needed it. And I would have been abandoned like a parcel in all kinds of places without all manner of cabbies, lift-givers and drivers – thanks to them for a magical blend of casual racism, climate change denial, excellent chat, strange anecdotes, health tips and unhinged staring. Special mention to the madman (in a nice way) who got me from Preston to Glasgow through gales and floods. I can only regret how much CO2 I must have generated. And thanks to the man who talked about effluent recycling throughout my flight to Toronto – it really was a helpful distraction.2010 woke up with the start of a new novel for me, so there'll be slightly less travel ahead and a marked increase in penetrating terror at home. Of which more later. Meanwhile, may the next 12 months prove as pleasant as possible for each of you. Onwards.AL KennedyFictionPublishingAL Kennedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
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