Page Turners
The BBC have announced the list of books to be featured on their new series Page Turners which will begin its run this Spring; dates to be confirmed. By then, you'll have seen the books which will include Khaled Hosseni's The Kite Runner and Nigella Lawson's Feast, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi and this years Buffy in the shops with their bright stickers, promotional stands and the queues which have become the order of the book club day.
Other books dicsussed are two debut novels The Dragon Tamers and The Meaning of Night.
The list is interesting for its length (24 titles), its diversities and for having managed to avoid any titles from Richard & Judy's 2005 selection. Some inclusions are already proven, like Khaled Hosseni's The Kite Runner and Nigella Lawson's Feast. Some are just released and likely to be the big books of the season, such as Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go or The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi, this year's Buffy (British Urban Female Youth) sensation, following Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. The BBC advise that all a book needs for inclusion is to be a "compelling read" and a "springboard for debate". Debate will be provided by Jeremy Vine's TV show, daytime on BBC2, and the full list of books involved is on their website, www.bbc.co.uk. The website has links to associated book clubs, the TV shows – and new for Britain – a 'book crossing', which will track books swapped between viewers. So you may not even have to buy the books to get involved.
Bonfire of the Inanities
Bill Clinton's favourite film (or so the opportunist that was Slick Willie once claimed) was Field of Dreams, a tale of a man who gets to reunite with his dead father by bulding a baseball pitch on which the souls of the dead could play out their unfinished dreams. An Introduction to Psychology class might read a need to replace the father figure that was missing from Clinton's life.
There seems to be a standing order for the White House Press Corps to ask what book currently lies by George Bush's bedside – and again it is hard not to read too much into the answer of the day. Back in 2004, Bush was reading Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy and the world began fine-combing the text for answers to the US Middle Eastern foreign policy. Bizarre meaning was also read into The Hungry Goat, the book Bush was reading to a school classroom when the 9/11 attacks began.
Even after his re-election, we continue to be overfed on Michael Moore's portrayal of Bush as the moronic inferno – stupid, dangerous and borderline illiterate. Not an image it is easy to equate with a champion of a text detailing the finer points of Israeli democracy. And if people find that one hard to swallow, how do we interpret this week's answer to his current literary distraction? Bush is now apparently reading Tom Wolfe's This is Charlotte Simmons, the much disparaged and dismissed tale of collegiate sex, already discussed in this column as the winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for 2004. What brought this choice on? Was it stolen from one of his daughters' rooms or a text book in the fight against modern permissiveness? Even the cover, a young female in a tight t-shirt seems incongrous for a man so closely aligned with the religious right. Before Tom Wolfe quite literally lost the plot with this novel, he was the author of The Right Stuff, the definitive guide to test piloting and astronauts. Perhaps George W was boning up before further awkward questions on his missing months of National Service?
When Children Attack!
Nothing is as upsetting as the over-achiever – the younger, smarter colleague who makes all your efforts at living seem pale and insignificant. Everyone has had that moment when you realise that you're more George Hook than Brian O'Driscoll, or worse, that you're comparing yourself to people who could mathematically be your child.
Next year will see the arrival at the office of a new generation of workers born in the 1990s. Knowing this doesn't dull the pain of Emma Urquhart, thirteen-year-old novelist from Inverness whose debut novel – begun when she was 10 – has sold over 50,000 copies in six weeks. The book, Dragon Tamers, obviously takes its lead from the Harry Potter series, but competing with a teenager may prove more difficult than expected for JK Rowling et al. None of the self doubt, the distractions that characterise adulthood, have slowed Urquhart, already in the process of writing a sequel while film deals are being discussed. Dragon Tamers' publishers are already boasting it will have sold a million by year end.
Comfort can be squeezed from the recent sale of Michael Cox's debut novel The Meaning of Night, which sold for £400,000, reputedly a record amount for debut fiction. Billed by the Independent as "the greatest story nearly never told", it was 30 years in the making. Mr Cox is 55 years of age, a standard bearer for those underachievers amongst us who have yet to fulfil our dreams.