Tonight:
5°c
'Tis the season of festive cheer and literary logrolling. Of the three books Esther Freud chose as her books of the year, two titles, Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins, were from same publishing house as Esther Freud. I have nothing against her literary judgment (they would have both been my books of the year) but surely she should have declared an interest that she was also published by Bloomsbury? It undermines her otherwise savvy endorsement.
Paul Theroux excelled himself. He chose Patrick French's biography of VS Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. His reason? Its portrait of a damaged soul vindicated a much-maligned earlier biography, Sir Vidia's Shadow, by, er, Paul Theroux. Full marks for scratching his own back.
AS Byatt singles out Philip Hensher's novel The Northern Clemency in the TLS as "solid, generous, gripping, is as good as everyone says it is". Generous praise indeed. Could her views perhaps have been coloured by Hensher's glowing encomium of AS Byatt in The Times in January this year? Hensher singled out Byatt as one of the 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945: "AS Byatt's fiction is of great richness," he gushed.
So, to join in the shameless logrolling, please allow me to nominate The Art of Conversation, by Catherine Blyth. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his book of the year nomination for his wife.
* Chancellor Alistair Darling say the book he's enjoyed most this year is Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. “A thoroughly evocative novel from one of the best writers of his generation,” he tells us. Never mind that the book was published more than 18 months ago, it shows Darling has some sort of hinterland. The novella is about a couple's disastrous wedding night in the 1960s. McEwan's Saturday was seen as emblematic of the Blair decade. Will On Chesil Beach come to be seen as emblematic of the Brown-Darling era? A couple who start out with the best of intentions but then screw everything up.
* I have the dubious honour of being an ex-boyfriend of this year's Literary Review Bad Sex Prize winner, Rachel Johnson. I attended the award ceremony at the In and Out club last week as a cheerleader for Alastair Campbell, hoping he would walk off with the honour. Alas, it was not to be. Rachel pipped him to the post and invited me out to dinner afterwards with her and her husband to pay tribute to the two men in her life who had taught her all about bad sex. How could I say no? I wasn't sure whether I should be flattered or embarrassed. All I can say in my defence is that it takes two to tango — or have bad sex.
Reader views (1)
I was in a bookshop at lunchtime: there were two books, written by different BBC reporters, and both had quotes on the front cover from fellow reporters saying what a good book they were.
And another thing, shouldn't these public servants at the BBC pay some of the proceeds of these books back to the BBC, as presumably they did their research and writing whilst performing their daily Beeb duties?
- Nobby Clark, Perth, Scotland, 03/12/2008 14:37
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