TES poll reveals teachers’ favourite reads

| By Joshua Farrington

A list of teachers’ favourite books compiled by the Times Educational Supplement (TES) has declared Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as number one. Harper Lee’s popular school text, To Kill a Mockingbird, came in second, while JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series came in third.

500 teachers responded to an online survey to name their favourite books, to create a list which TES editor Gerard Kelly called: “a masterpiece of erudition and entertainment” which “could be one of the few things that Michaels Gove and Rosen agree on”.

In the magazine’s leader column, he wrote: “Strip out the children’s books, the inclusion of which is only to be expected from people whose job it is to engage children, and what you are left with is a pretty canonical list. There’s enough Dickens, Steinbeck, Hardy, Wilde, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo and Eliot to satisfy even the most conservative of politicians, and of course, plenty of modern greats: Kerouac, Ishiguro, Roy and Plath, to please the modernists.”

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JK Rowling: I will return to writing children’s books

JK Rowling will return to writing children’s books following the publication of The Casual Vacancy, her first novel for adults.

By Roya Nikkhah

The author, who has been reluctant to say whether she would return to children’s fiction after finishing the Harry Potter series, confirmed that her next book would be for young children.

“As the writer of Harry Potter, I’m always nervous of committing myself to another children’s book, but yes, the next thing I write will be for children,” she said.

“I have a lot of things on my laptop currently, including a couple of things for children – for a slightly younger age group than Harry Potter was aimed at – which are nearly done and will, I think, be the next thing I publish. I have run them by my children and they seem to like them which is always a good sign.

“I also have some ideas for another book for adults but it isn’t too far on [in development].”

The Casual Vacancy has been described as a “sexually explicit tale of ruthless snobbery and bourgeois hypocrisy”.

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JK Rowling: The Casual Vacancy – review

The author’s first book for adults features drugs, sex and swearing – things that Harry Potter probably never dreamed of.

By Theo Tait

They call it “denial marketing”: the process whereby the contents of JK Rowling’s books are guarded like the crown jewels until publication day. It made sense with Harry Potter, when the world and his dog wanted to know what had happened to the boy wizard and his dastardly foes. But it creates a slight anti-climax in the case of The Casual Vacancy, a novel concerning a parish council election in a small West Country town.

There are some superficial excitements here, in that the younger characters get up to things that Harry probably never dreamed of: taking drugs, swearing, self-harming, having grimy casual sex, singing along to Rihanna. The new book contains regular outbursts of four-letter words, along with the memorable phrase “that miraculously unguarded vagina” – which, leaked in a pre-publication profile, has caused a flurry of jokes on Twitter about Harry Potter and the Miraculously Unguarded Vagina.

Generally, though, The Casual Vacancy is a solid, traditional and determinedly unadventurous English novel.

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JK Rowling’s portrayal of ‘snobby’ villagers is not based on us, say West Country residents

JK Rowling said she drew on real life for The Casual Vacancy, but locals in her old home village say the portrayal of snobby residents is “fantasy”.

By Richard Alleyne and Anita Singh

When JK Rowling needed a setting for The Casual Vacancy, her first novel for adults, she didn’t have to stretch her imagination too far.

The author has claimed she drew on her own upbringing near the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire for her tale of a “snobby” middle-class community riven by provincial politics.

However, residents of the area where Rowling grew up say they do not recognise the fictional West Country village of Pagford, where the professional classes can barely hide their loathing for the inhabitants of a neighbouring sink estate.

Locals in Tutshill, Gloucestershire, say that any resemblance between their community and Pagford is as much a fantasy as the Harry Potter franchise that earned Rowling a £620 million fortune.

The author’s years as a struggling single mother, living on benefits and writing the first Potter book in an Edinburgh café are common knowledge. Less well known is the fact that from the age of nine until she left for Exeter University, Rowling lived a middle-class existence in Grade II-listed Church Cottage in Tutshill, a small community on the English side of Chepstow, the Wye Valley market town which straddles the Welsh border.

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JK Rowling: ‘The worst that can happen is that everyone says, That’s shockingly bad’

Harry Potter sold millions and made her one of the richest women in the world. Now JK Rowling has written her first book for grown-ups. But is the magic still there?

By Decca Aitkenhead

JK Rowling’s new novel arrives with the high drama and state secrecy of a royal birth. Its due date is announced in February, and in April the disclosure of its title, The Casual Vacancy, makes international news. The release of the cover image in July commands headlines again, and Fleet Street commissions a “design guru” to deconstruct its inscrutable aesthetic, in search of clues as to what might lie within. Waterstones predicts the novel will be “the bestselling fiction title this year”. Literary critics begin to publish preliminary reviews, revealing what they think they will think about a book they have not yet even read.

I am required to sign more legal documents than would typically be involved in buying a house before I am allowed to read The Casual Vacancy, under tight security in the London offices of Little, Brown. Even the publishers have been forbidden to read it, and they relinquish the manuscript gingerly, reverently, as though handling a priceless Ming vase. Afterwards, I am instructed never to disclose the address of Rowling’s Edinburgh office where the interview will take place. The mere fact of the interview is deemed so newsworthy that Le Monde dispatches a reporter to investigate how it was secured. Its prospect begins to assume the mystique of an audience with Her Majesty – except, of course, that Rowling is famously much, much richer than the Queen.

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How Pottermore cast an ebook spell over Amazon

Digital magic ... JK Rowling at the launch of Pottermore, the website created to sell ebook versions of her Harry Potter books. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

…And why Harry Potter’s move into epublishing is digital magic

By Philip Jones

Take a look at Amazon’s ebook site and do a search for Harry Potter books and you will see something genuinely marvellous. Something that will warm the cockles of every publisher in the land, and perhaps even a few booksellers too.

Well, for a start, you will see that for the first time since the series began in 1997, official ebook versions of all seven titles in the Potter series are being sold.

But something even more remarkable has happened. In bringing these books to the digital marketplace, Pottermore, the business created to sell the ebooks, has forced Amazon into perhaps the biggest climbdown in its corporate history.

Instead of buying the ebooks through the Amazon e-commerce system, the buy link takes the customer off to Pottermore to complete the purchase, with the content seamlessly delivered to their Kindle device. It is the first time I’ve known Amazon to allow a third party to “own” that customer relationship, while also allowing that content to be delivered to its device. Amazon gets something like an affiliates’ fee from this transaction, much less than it would expect to receive selling an ebook through normal conditions. Schadenfreude doesn’t even come close.

 

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100 books that defined the noughties

Zadie Smith

Zadie, Nigella, Steig and, of course, the boy wizard. The decade has seen publishing phenomenons like no other, but which books, for better or worse, have summed up the noughties?

By Brian MacArthur

Never in the history of bookselling has there been such a phenomenon as Harry Potter; JK Rowling’s series sold in tens of millions and appealed to adults as well as children. The great success of the British book trade this decade was the Richard & Judy Book Club. It ran in the late afternoon on Channel 4, and made instant bestsellers of Victoria Hislop, Audrey Niffenegger and Zoë Heller, among others. The 100 titles they selected sold 30 million copies.

A decade defined in Britain by Tony Blair is represented in this list by two revealing books about the making of New Labour and the rivalries, quarrels and often poisonous relationships among the leading personalities – Cherie Blair’s memoir and Alastair Campbell’s diaries.

Across the world, it was a decade defined in blood by al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks on America, which precipitated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – see books by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Ed Husain, Ahmed Rashid and Khaled Hosseini.

It was also the decade of often tawdry celebrities, such as Russell Brand and Ashley Cole, and those, such as Katie Price, who didn’t even pretend to write their own books. Alan Hollinghurst won the Man Booker Prize for an explicitly gay novel; Ian McEwan rose above his rivals as the country’s pre-eminent literary novelist; and a black man became president of the United States – and wrote two bestsellers.

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JK Rowling’s new book: clues suggest a turn to crime fiction

JK Rowling ... getting involved in crime? Photograph: Joshua Lott/Reuters

There’s no official word on what her new book will be about, but all the evidence points to a crime story.

By Alison Flood

Suspicions that JK Rowling was working on a crime novel have been around for years, though nobody could ever make it stick. Some suggested she could be writing a political fairytale for children or an encyclopaedia of the Potter universe. But yesterday’s (detail-free) announcement about her new book for adults gives a vital clue that she’s been writing a crime novel. It has the fingerprints all over it of the hugely respected editor David Shelley, a man who counts Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Carl Hiaasen and Mark Billingham amongst his authors and who comes from a background steeped in crime and thriller writing. And now he’s going to be editing Rowling’s new book.

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The top 10 books stories of 2011

An extract from Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test topped our books site chart for 2011. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

From non-fiction to Naipaul and psychopaths to Pottermore, here are the stories that brought readers to our books site this year.

By Richard Lea

Another year comes hurtling around the corner, another sinks gratefully back into its easy chair, and in the traditional spirit of openness and honesty it’s time to look back at the literary stories which have made 2011 – or at least the stories we’ve all been reading on the Guardian Books website. With only the briefest nod to the usual caveats, here they are: the most popular stories of 2011.

Except that, er, here they aren’t. I would love to share this year’s top story with you, but Jon Ronson’s witty, touching and illuminating account of Tony – who faked madness to avoid five to seven years for GBH and wound up spending over a decade in Broadmoor – was extracted from his latest book, and, so, as our page glumly announces, “has been removed as our copyright has expired”. Some of you are no doubt grinning smugly and turning to your paper archives, but for those who don’t have the relevant copy of Weekend magazine to hand, I suppose I could point you to Will Self’s excellent review of The Psychopath Test, or try to give you a flavour of how artfully Ronson flips between sympathy for Tony – who finds it’s “an awful lot harder … to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy” – and the clarity provided by Robert Hare’s psychopathy checklist, but I guess I should really just apologise and move on.

Except, um, moving on is pretty hard when second on the list of 2011′s top books stories is a sorry page. Pottermore: Harry’s digital adventure was a specially-created page which lasted just one day to host one of the clues for the internet treasure hunt leading to JK Rowling’s online project, Pottermore. Maybe it’s only a marketing wheeze, as Sam Jordison suggests, but more than a decade after Harry Potter first found the Philosopher’s Stone, his popularity clearly remains undimmed. Our tech-folk had to wall off this page from our usual content in a custom-built silo to withstand the fierce attentions of Potter fans from around the world – my browser can’t even find the server that it was sitting on.

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Harry Potter course to be offered at Durham University

A potted history … 70 Durham students have already signed up for the new course.

Module will focus on ‘social, cultural and educational context’, but no word on whether Expelliarmus will be applied to students with poor grades.

By Alison Flood

There’ll be no flying lessons, potions or defence-against-the-dark-arts classes, but Harry Potter fans at Durham University have the option of a course on the adventures of the boy wizard.

Around 70 of Durham’s undergraduates have already signed up to the module Harry Potter and the Age of Illusion, which will be offered for the first time this autumn as part of the university’s Education Studies BA degree.

Thought to be the first course in the UK focusing on the works of JK Rowling, the module will require undergraduates to set the series “in its social, cultural and educational context and understand some of the reasons for its popularity”, and to consider Harry Potter’s relevance to today’s education system.

The registrar of Durham University, Carolyn Fowler, called it a “serious but innovative” academic module. “A huge amount of work has gone into developing it, and we are extremely excited to be offering it as a study option to our undergraduate students, who have already expressed a high level of interest,” she said.

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