Man Booker now accepting Americans

I do think this is a bad step. The US publishing industry is huge and US houses will plug up the Man Booker nominations lists with every book they can. The list will be swamped with US entries and the long list will contain very few third world entries, meaning they will probably vanish from the short list.

Man Booker? More like Dude Booker from now on. Shame.

No sooner did I start this in 2011 than I fell ill, then moved, and then fell ill again. Now I'm back.

Plot Coincidences

I just finished Heartstone by CJ Sansom. In it, he uses a plot which featured in my book Shun The Dark, which anyone can download for free from Scribd.com. This is that one of the main characters in his book, Hugh Curtys, is actually Hugh's sister, Emma. In Shun The Dark a missing person has always been female, because the the land tenure required the father to father a son within twelve months - this was a possible clause in the 7th century AD in the Anglo-Saxon world. Since this was a major premise of my book, I could do what some do and claim my idea was stolen. And it was - by me! I nicked it from The Wasp Factory, and blended it with a bit of The Big Sleep. So much for originality!

Martin Nichols' Books Website

You can now view my website at:

https://sites.google.com/site/martinnicholsbooks

Prize Short List for Story

I received the January 2012 issue of Writing Magazine today, and was pleased to see that I was shortlisted for the Crime Story prize for my story 'Shaking Hands'. I may even post the full story on another page. I would have liked to have won it, but it's an achievement out of possibly hundreds or thousands of readers, I suppose.

The Orange Prize - and the Blue?

Like many, I suspect, I find it hard to justify the Orange Prize for women's writing. When two out of every three purchasers of novels are female, when women win literary prize after international award on their own merits, do they need a ghetto of their own? If the Orange Prize were an old tradition, if it were the only prize of its sort, then there might be some inherited kudos and merit there, but there are numerous other equally - or rather unequally restrictive awards too.

We also have Mslexia, a whole magazine dedicated to women having a second bite of the cherry. Ruth Rendell has commented that women need no such restrictive prizes and that the Orange Prize should be opened up or abolished.

As I find I read a lot of books by women, perhaps it's the crap male writers who need sorting out by being given a special prize (the Blue Prize for the best book by a male writer, maybe) and a leg-up magazine, possibly UnderWrite, for the poor little darlings to show off their best efforts (bless 'em).

Classics - is it getting harder to read them?

I've been struggling (for the second time) to read Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. A bad cold hasn't helped. This is an unequal struggle (the book is over 800 pages long) and one I have set aside in order to read C J Sansom's Heartstone. Why is it getting so much harder to read even Victorian books?

It's not (just) the length - Sansom's book is over 600 pages - it's the whole approach to what a novel is meant to do. The financial arrangements of circulating libraries meant that multi-volume works became common. People had no radio, TV or internet, which means we have less encouragement to stick with a complex multilayered story. Dickens, like many of his contemporary authors in the UK published pretty much as they wrote. This is clear from a book like Barnaby Rudge, where the story changes central character several times as Dickens tries to work out whose story it is.

Our modern attention spans are goldfish-short. We bore easily and unless there is a whizzbang, sex or a murder every few pages, we book-surf for sensation only. Whilst I have a good knowledge of the English language, I find some of Dickens' linguistic knots hard to follow. Perhaps we are destined to find Great Literature (important initial capitals) of the past unreadable.

Mark Twain once said that a 'classic' is a book everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read. Is this the future?