From Mars or Venus?
Tony Parsons' My Baby and Man and Wife , Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and papal book news and Richard and Judy's Book club choices including The Jane Austen Book Club, The Shadow of the Wind, Cloud Atlas
Tony Parsons, one time partner of Julie Birchall, for which he deserves our sympathy if not our admiration, has his latest book getting a huge push in the chainstores this week. His first book, Man and Boy was a huge success and dragged him from a life of Sunday supplements and men's magazine articles onto the bestseller list. The sequels, One for My Baby and Man and Wife offered little new – the joke stayed the same: his books were just like 'chick lit', but written by a man.
In truth, they were quite like those of Nick Hornby, but not as funny or incisive. The new book, The Family Way, like Hornby's How to be Good, puts women at centre-stage by telling the trials of three sisters and their experiences with motherhood and pregnancy. How women will feel about a man telling them how they feel, and whether male readers want to know in any case, remains to be seen.
Papal Book News
Waiting for the announcement of the new Pope was a curious affair. The world ground to a halt, breathless in anticipation of a name – well, of a name that was going to mean little to most of us in any event. In truth, a conclave is a little like the Eurovision – everyone starts taking in nationalities rather than names. How quickly things change.
Only two months ago, the BBC were announcing the initial Italian print run of 300,000 copies of Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections, Pope John Paul II's allegedly dense and complex fifth book which included a detailed chapter on his assassination attempt at the hands of Turkish gunman Mehmet Al Acga in 1981. Back then, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was being called on to defend John Paul's comparison of abortion with the Holocaust. Now, he is finding his own work in greater demand and under more detailed scrutiny than his predecessors.
The new Pope had been the focus of many potted histories throughout April, most focusing on his childhood in Germany, his conservatism and intransigence. Some of us are digging deeper however, with an immediate demand being created for Ratzinger's books, including Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, Salt of the Earth and Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977, a biography of his early life. Unsurprisingly, these are occupying the top three spots in the German book charts and are only stalled in the US by their unavailability. They are published by Ignatius, a minor non-profit making San Francisco firm who were unready for the demand. Larger publishers Doubleday will now release a biography and collection of the new Pope's writings in May. This week also sees the extremely hasty publication of Bloomsbury's biography of John Paul II. It was allegedly commissioned four years ago for publication to coincide with the late Pope's 85th birthday in May. Convenient indeed.
On Cloud Nine
Richard and Judy graced the cover of last week's Guardian magazine, looking for all the world like a middle-aged Mulder & Scully from The X Files – the reigning investigators of daytime (extra) terrestrial television. They have every right to their smug appearances, with their 2005 book club selections approaching two million sales since the list was announced. All this by April – ominous really, since the knock-on effects of last year's list were still to be seen at the tills at Christmas.
2004 winner Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones sold a million copies in UK paperbacks alone. This year's competition ended last week and it will be interesting to see if the winner, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas can engender similar enthusiasm. The choice wasn't revolutionary – Cloud Atlas was a bruised survivor after failure at the MAN Booker and Whitbread, but it is a deserving, challenging winner of a prize that owes its genesis to daytime television. Ex-Waterstones' employee Mitchell, who lives in Cork, might have won the biggest prize of all.
The choice of such a heavyweight book over some of the easier reads on the list (like The Jane Austen Book Club or The Shadow of the Wind) is surprising since this is a truly populist prize, eschewing the traditional 'eminent judging panels' for a phone vote. The viewers picked Cloud Atlas, defying expectation and people's preconceptions of afternoon television viewers.
In related news, over 150 writers sent an open letter this week to Oprah Winfrey asking her to restart her own TV book club – sales have dropped in the US since its cancellation in 2002. Writers such as Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club) sent the pithy plea "Readers need you. And we, the writers, need you too". Whatever Winfrey does, readers and bookstores are already bracing themselves for the bonanza that will be the Richard and Judy summer selection.