It would appear to be a book about a book - Australian author Thomas Keneally recalls how he came to write the award-winning novel Schindler’s Ark in his latest book In Searching for Schindler. Reuters reports.
Felicity Dahl, the widow of Roald Dahl, is interviewed in The Guardian. Her husband died 18 years ago. It’s an extremely interesting interview, very sad and revealing.
Even at the end, Dahl was still trying to make people’s days a little less dull. Felicity recalls that as he lay dying at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, he noticed that the nurses were being forced to wear their own clothes as an experiment to see whether patients responded better to them. ‘He said, “What a ridiculous idea. How can you possibly afford to use your own clothes on the wages you get?”‘
Felicity was sent to Marks & Spencer to buy cardigans, jumpers and trousers. ‘I came out with bulging bags. He laid them all out and when the nurses came in he said, “Now choose whatever colour you want.” That was a man who was dying, he was so ill and yet he still wanted to spread a funny idea to make them laugh and yet to give them a present, give them a treat. Treats were his big thing.’
I’m sitting here this morning looking at a Malcolm Gladwell interview in the Globe and Mail. Outliers: The Story of Success is his new book. I’m sure it will sell in huge quantities just like Tipping Point and Blink. Everyone is obsessed with succeeding. Clearly, some of it is utter rubbish.
Can you explain why it’s no coincidence Wayne Gretzky was born in January?
Hockey players and soccer players are overwhelmingly born in the early part of the year - hugely disproportionately - and the reason is that the cutoff date for hockey and soccer around the world is Jan. 1. When people start recruiting for all-star teams and rep squads, when kids are 8 and 9 years old, they pick the kids they think are the most talented. But at that age, the most talented kids are simply the ones born closest to the cutoff date because they’re bigger and more mature. And then you give them special coaching and they play more games and they practise more, so by the time they’re 17, 18 years old, they actually are better. … Kids born in the second half of the school year also underachieve - which is why [parents] hold their kids back. What’s curious is that it persists - that you see, if you have a cutoff date for school eligibility at Jan. 1, the December-born kids are underrepresented in college admissions 15 years later. So it’s not trivial - it makes a lasting difference.
Shelf Awareness interviews R.L. Stine - author of the Goosebumps series.
On your nightstand now:
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, The Girl of His Dreams by Donna Leon, Liberty by Garrison Keillor, Walking Shadow by Robert B. Parker.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Pinocchio. The original was very violent and alarming.
Your top five authors:
Ray Bradbury, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, John Dickson Carr.
Book you’ve faked reading:
????
Book you’re an evangelist for:
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury and Time and Again by Jack Finney.
Book you’ve bought for the cover:
Popcorn by Ben Elton. The cover looks like a popcorn box–irresistible!
Book that changed your life:
Mad Magazine, Tales From the Crypt comics, Barefoot Boy with Cheek by Max Shulman, Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.
Favorite line from a book:
Most dialogue between Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, especially in Right Ho, Jeeves.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Pale Fire by Nabokov.
(Thanks to Shelf Awareness - one of daily reads)
Author Anita Shreve - who is clearly a big fan of pastel cream colours judging by her kitchen - explains what goes through her head.
Last Saturday’s Globe and Mail had an interview with British spy author, John Le Carre aka David Cornwell. I’m telling you this now because I don’t read the weekend papers until the following week and I spotted it last night.
A Most Wanted Man, his 21st novel, centres around Issa, a young half-Chechen of enigmatic background who flees a Turkish prison and ends up in the care of an idealistic German lawyer, Annabel. The novelist specializes in these beautiful lady dreamers — Tessa in The Constant Gardener, Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl. Accuse him of it, and he says with a disarming laugh, “That’s the joke about my writing — that I can’t write women. It’s because I grew up so late.”
If you take a look at the AbeBooks.com homepage today, you will see we have launched a new monthly feature called Legends of Literature. First up is F. Scott Fitzgerald. In November, we’ll focus on PG Wodehouse and then end the year with John Steinbeck. These are the authors that never stop selling on AbeBooks, from $1 reading copies to $5,000 rare editions.
Fitzgerald has always been a fascinating character, but did he really waste his immense talent? Every Legend of Literature feature included an interview with an expert on the featured author and Kirk Curnett of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society has strong opinions about how much Fitzgerald achieved.
Ken Follett, author of World Without End, is reading Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The Independent has an interview with Kenny.
The writing postman, Kevin Boniface, in The Guardian. I just keep thinking of Cliff from Cheers!
The Observer interviews Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland. In case you don’t know, the book concerns a cricket team in New York among other themes.
There is a wonderful quote in the interview.
As a teenager, O’Neill played cricket for the Netherlands’ under-19 side. He kept up the sport in England and, when he came to New York, he set about looking for a game. Eventually he called up the Staten Island cricket club. ‘Joe,’ asked the club official, ‘are you a white man?’ ‘Yes,’ O’Neill replied. ‘Well,’ said the official, ‘you better pack a helmet.’
AbeBooks has an interview with Christian Lander, the author of Stuff White People Like. I recommend the book, which was a blog before it was a book.
“It all began on January 18 this year when a friend and I were discussing The Wire TV show and he said he wouldn’t trust any white person who didn’t watch The Wire,” said Lander. “We started joking around and talking more about how white people go into therapy and get divorced and so on, and I said let’s start a blog.
“It was all a joke. I didn’t expect the blog to be seen by anyone except a few friends. When the blog got 1,000 hits in a day I registered the name and then it jumped to 30,000 hits in a day, and then 300,000 and then – at the absolute peak – it got 800,000 hits per day.”
Jodi Picoult is interviewed in The Guardian. She’s lying through her teeth for most of this.
Q - What made you want to write when you were starting out?
A - I honestly can’t remember NOT writing.
That’s a standard cop-out answer straight off the interview training sheet provided by her PR person. It would be fine to say “Well, when I was 30 or 31 after I became sick to death of being a stay-at-home mom.”
Q - Do you have a daily routine when you are writing?
A - I get up at 5:30, go for a three mile walk with a friend, then come home, shower, get the kids off to school, and sit down at my computer. I keep working until 3:30, when I magically become a mom again.
Jodi, I don’t believe you. No-one gets up at 5.30am and goes for a 3-mile walk, least of all bestselling authors.
The Guardian gives Andrew Davidson, author of The Gargoyle, some right royal treatment. Signed copies anyone?
The BBC has a feature on Terry Pratchett where the author talks about the difficulties of writing.
In the most common form of Alzheimer’s, the main symptom is loss of memory, but PCA affects the back of the brain and so it is motor skills and vision which are hardest hit. Still thinking and speaking coherently, Pratchett’s typing has gone downhill.
“It’s unusual because people deal with me and they refuse to believe I have Alzheimer’s because at the moment I can speak very coherently, I can plot a novel,” Pratchett says. “I type badly - if it wasn’t for my loss of typing ability, I might doubt the fact that I have Alzheimer’s.
The Gargoyle is already the most hyped debut novel of the year. Penned by Andrew Davidson, a 39-year-old native of Winnipeg in Canada, the book is not the regular run-of-the-mill first-time effort from a promising newbie. The Gargoyle is expected to smash records and the publishers are backing the book to the hilt with a substantial worldwide marketing campaign.
In the coming months, we are going to be hearing a lot about Andrew Davidson and his book concerning a cynical and vain drug-addled porn star burned to a crisp in horrible car accident. While on the slow painful road to recovery, the now-suicidal ex-porn star meets an apparently crazy gargoyle sculptor, who claims she’s known him for 700 years dating back to her time as a nun in a medieval German monastery. OK?
Read the rest of the interview at AbeBooks.com
And here’s what the NY Times book review has to say about The Gargoyle.