Howard Jacobson attacks the dearth of ‘good readers’

Howard Jacobson, Man Booker prize-winning novelist, before his talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

The Man Booker prize-winning author warns that political correctness is killing the way we read.

By Charlotte Higgins

The novel is in danger, according to Howard Jacobson, the Man Booker prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. But, he said, the fault lies not with novelists, but with the lack of good readers.

Describing his experience of appearing at reading groups – “sometimes they are lovely, sometimes they aren’t, and sometimes they are just staggeringly rude” – Jacobson said that he felt a sense of “heartbreak” when he heard readers say, “I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.”

He added: “The language of sympathy and identity and what we call political correctness is killing the way we read.

“That’s like the end of civilisation. That is the end. In that little sentence is a misunderstanding so profound about the nature of art, education and why we are reading, that it makes you despair. Who ever told anyone that they read a book in order to find themselves?”

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AL Kennedy and the perils of the pen

In sickness and in health … AL Kennedy at Edinburgh this year. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Writing made AL Kennedy, but it also took away her health. As she recovers, she talks about the dangerous delusions that helped lay her low.

By Sarah Crown

The point at which I started to worry about AL Kennedy’s health – seriously worry, as opposed to feeling vague concern when reading her On Writing columns for the Guardian and discovering that the sinusitis, labyrinthitis and H. pylori were still waxing – was when we met to talk about her latest novel, The Blue Book, about an ill-suited couple crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner.

Down from Glasgow on promotional duties in the middle of last summer’s heatwave, Kennedy was staying in a flat at the top of several flights of airless stairs. I arrived to find her prone on the sofa, white, wiped and thin as a lath. “Picture me,” she wrote in her column a little later, “in a small, boiling flat somewhere in Soho, lying down, throwing up, having panic attacks and listening to helicopters grind overhead. And crying if I had to do something complicated – like putting on my shoes, or trying to discuss my schedule with my editor. I was a bit tired. Writing a novel in 11 months instead of 13 isn’t a good thing. I console myself that writing two books a year gave Muriel Spark hallucinations.”

Nor was that the end of it. “My ulcer and my slowly returning schedule decided to engage each other in not altogether positive ways,” she wrote in October’s column, laid low again. “I am the person you never want to casually ask, ‘How are you?’ I will tell you. At length.” And in November: “I feel I will disappoint regular readers if I don’t mention that I spent this morning having an endoscopy and biopsy.”

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Two-thirds of parents ‘never read to their babies’

Well read … sharing books is vital in building pre-literacy skills. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Survey finding raises fear that very young children are ‘missing out on a crucial window for language development’.

By Alison Flood

Nearly two-thirds of parents never read to their babies and are therefore missing out on a crucial window for their children’s language development, according to new research.

The survey, carried out on more than 500 parents of babies by ICM and the Fatherhood Institute on behalf of the charity Booktrust, found that 64% of parents were not reading with their babies at seven months, and that 57% did not own a single book until they received their pack of free titles from Booktrust’s Bookstart programme. Three-quarters of parents said they began sharing books with their babies as soon as they received their free Bookstart books.

Bookstart’s chief executive Viv Bird called the findings “worrying”, as “the enjoyable routine of sharing books, stories, songs and rhymes with babies is vital in building pre-literacy skills as well as providing important ‘cuddle’ time”. Leaving reading with children until later in their lives means they are “missing out on a crucial window for language development,” said Booktrust, which is now working with health professionals to explore ways of reaching families at an even earlier age.

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Who’s helping who in the cover blurb game?

‘I even turned up on a self-help book I hadn’t read’ … Anthony Horowitz. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Few books now appear without enthusiastic recommendations from other authors, but does anyone really believe them?

By Anthony Horowitz

How many books can one man recommend? I sometimes feel that my name is on the cover of more books than I’ve actually written myself, which is worrying. I’ve endorsed children’s authors as diverse as Suzanne Collins, Meg Rosoff, Simon Mayo and the late, great Robert Cormier. I found the historian, Nicholas Rankin, to be “completely delightful”, and the poet, Roger McGough, “wise, funny and sad”. The thriller writer, Stephen Leather, delivered in my opinion, “a wicked read” although I notice I’ve been bumped off the front cover of the latest edition by James Herbert (“another great thriller with a devilish twist”), which I do find slightly hurtful. I even turned up on a self-help book I hadn’t read – the publishers took my name and helped themselves.

Authors promoting authors on book jackets is so widespread now that few books appear without them, a phenomenon gleefully mocked by Private Eye’s Backscratcher column, which is quick to point out where favours are being called in. There are three ways in which I find myself on other peoples’ covers.

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John Burnside wins most controversial TS Eliot prize in decades

John Burnside has won the TS Eliot prize for his poetry collection Black Cat Bone. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Scottish poet’s Black Cat Bone beats strong shortlist in contest mired in protest over City funding.

By Maev Kennedy

The Scottish poet John Burnside has won the most controversial TS Eliot poetry prize in years, for a collection described as “haunting”, after two of the original shortlisted poets dropped out in protest over funding from the hedge fund Aurum.

Burnside, a former winner of the Whitbread poetry prize, took the £15,000 prize for his 11th collection, Black Cat Bone. He beat a notably strong surviving list, including the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy; Sean O’Brien, for his first collection since winning both the TS Eliot and the Forward prizes in 2008; and David Harsent, also a previous Forward winner.

The Welsh poet Gillian Clarke, chair of the judges, said: “Amongst an unprecedentedly strong and unusually well-received shortlist, John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone is a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness. In an exceptional year, it is an outstanding book, one which the judges felt grew with every reading.”

Burnside was presented with the cheque by Valerie Eliot, widow of the poet, at a ceremony in London. She has funded the prize itself since it was launched 18 years ago but the Poetry Society, which organises the competition, will lose all its Arts Council grant this year, and its search for replacement funding proved bitterly divisive.

The three-year sponsorship deal from Aurum was announced at the same time as the shortlist – at the height of the Occupy London protests, when protests were also swelling about the Tate and other major museums and galleries accepting sponsorship from the oil group BP.

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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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Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy to become very graphic novel

Stieg Larsson's graphic adapter Denise Mina. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

DC Comics signs Glaswegian crime writer Denise Mina to adapt Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels for comic format.

By Alison Flood

Super-tough bisexual computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, star of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millenium trilogy, is set to become even spikier after Glaswegian crime novelist Denise Mina gives her the graphic novel treatment.

Mina has been chosen by Larsson’s literary estate to adapt the late Swedish novelist’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest into six graphic novels for DC Comics. The author, whose latest novel The End of the Wasp Season was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger award, said she had nearly finished adapting the first book, with the first volume to be out next March. The illustrator is Leonardo Manco, with whom Mina has previously collaborated on the Hellblazer comics.

“The estate has given me free rein and I can change what I want … I think they think that enough people have read the books, and anyway, Larsson really loved comics,” she said. “I’m not changing that much [but] I think for most women there are problematic aspects of the story … Lisbeth Salander is just a brilliant character. She is the main event for me. But she is a survivor of sexual abuse and I think every so often [Larsson] doesn’t realise how frightened she is most of the time. I wanted to put those bits in.”

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Strong showing for UK authors on Astrid Lindgren award shortlist

Meg Rosoff is one of the UK writers nominated for a body of work 'in the spirit of Astrid Lindgren'. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Meg Rosoff, Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake among 17 UK writers nominated for world’s richest children’s literature prize 

By Alison Flood

Quentin Blake, Neil Gaiman, Meg Rosoff and Michael Rosen are competing for the world’s richest children’s prize, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial award.

The UK has mustered one of its strongest-ever showings for the SEK5m prize, with 17 candidates nominated for bodies of work “in the spirit of Astrid Lindgren”. In total 184 candidates from around the world are in the running for the award, a mix of authors, illustrators, promoters of reading and oral storytellers.

“184 candidates or not, it feels very good to be nominated,” said the former children’s laureate Rosen. “It means that there are some people who think that what I’m doing is worthwhile. Producing children’s books is full of complicated emotions about worth and being nominated for the Astrid Lindgren is a very clear way to feel a bit less complicated about it.”

Rosoff, whose novels have won the Guardian children’s fiction prize and the Carnegie medal, agreed. “There aren’t many awards where I’d be excited about being on a 184-member longlist, but the Astrid Lindgren prize is more like being invited to join an exclusive worldwide club. Some of the people I most admire in the world are on the list – Wolf Ehrlbruch, Jutta Bauer, Maira Kalman, Peter Sís, Ulf Stark, Morris Gleitzman, not to mention David Almond and Michael Rosen from the UK. And of course Shaun Tan holds the current title – a thrilling and brilliant choice.”

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Richard Ford: Money and the writer

Richard Ford. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

‘It mattered a great deal more to me that my novel would be published and possibly read than that somebody paid me’

Money is an odd and complex subject to a writer. In America, at least, probably few people get into the writing racket because of the money – I’ll bet not even John Grisham. And for the guys I’ve always hung around with, we got into it because we wanted to write a really good book that people would read and be changed by for the better. If that occurred possibly money would follow along – although how that would happen wasn’t very clear, and probably it wouldn’t happen no matter what we did. The old adage of Samuel Johnson’s that says anybody who writes for any reason other than money is a nitwit, was a status I had to hope would become true of me, before which time I had to try not minding being a nitwit.

The first book I ever wrote sold to its New York publisher for the sum of $3,500 – which didn’t seem like a lot of money, even in 1975. It mattered a great deal more to me that my novel would be published and possibly read than that somebody paid me for it. My wife and I felt like the money was more of a one-time windfall than anything resembling real “earnings”. We certainly had no thought that it portended more money would ever come our way. Although, we knew what to do with it. We drove to Mexico and lived off of it as long as we could (which wasn’t long), and tried to feel as much as possible like Hemingway and Hadley in Pamplona or wherever they’d been – eating and drinking cheap, having a good time, picking up cheques at the American Express office – while I factored up the fantasy of myself being a “working writer”, which wasn’t very persuasive. The money felt like what we Americans call “funny money”: cash you find in a shoe box inside the closet of a house you rented, and promptly blew on drugs or a vintage Porsche or a new sound system – knowing you’d never get it again so why save it? It was real money, okay. But it wasn’t “serious money”. That, you got from a job. And writing wasn’t really a job. It was more of a lark. It was art for art’s sake. Not art for money’s sake.

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Why the New Atheism is a boys’ club

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and for many, the spiritual leader of the New Atheism. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Is it that female intellectuals are less rational and contrarian than male secularists? Or just that society prefers lionising men?

By Victoria Bekiempis

Women are God-fearing and don’t challenge institutions. Men, on the other hand, are skeptical and rational, and go out of their way to publicly call bullshit on faith and religion – which is why today’s well-known secular thinkers, especially in the ranks of the New Atheism movement, are all male.

These statements should sound ridiculous because, of course, they are. From Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists, whose 1963 US supreme court lawsuit brought an end to prayer in public schools, to Sergeant Kathleen Johnson, who started an organisation for atheists in the United States military, to Debbie Goddard, founder of African Americans for Humanism, countless women have worked as successful atheist activists. They’ve penned books, run organisations and advocated on behalf of religiously repressed citizens. But you might not guess that from the popular portrayal and perception of atheism in America, which overwhelmingly treats the contemporary class of non-God-fearing freethinkers (also known as secularists, skeptics and nonbelievers) as a contentious, showboating boys’ club.

In November 2006, Wired magazine identified Richard Dawkins, Daniel C Dennett and Sam Harris as a “band of intellectual brothers”, whose bestselling books on atheism, published between 2004 and 2006, heralded an era of 21st-century nonbelief. The media quickly dubbed this “the New Atheism”. What differentiates this movement from more old-school atheism (besides the mainstream media’s ever-present need to anoint, brand and categorise thought leaders) is that New Atheists take a vehemently zero-tolerance approach to faith, mysticism and even agnosticism. Though the basics are the same – non-belief in a god or gods – the new system also calls for pushing non-belief on others, almost to the point of abject proselytisation.

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