Gather round your wireless...

...because tonight, from about 11:30, I will be discussing the best and worst of the past decade with Aasmah Mir, Neil McCormick and Zara Rabinowicz on BBC Radio 5live. Let me know if there’s anything I should mention. Apart from plugs for the book, obviously.

(Expect more of this sort of stuff in the coming weeks. Sorry.)

PS: It’s here for the next week; from about an hour in.

The book of Daniel

Stan of Bête de Jour infamy recently bemoaned the state of being An Author Who Is Not Dan Brown; in WH Smith, he was offered 50% off The Lost Plot or whatever DB’s latest extravaganza is going to be called, which is bad enough if you’re just a run-of-the-mill sentient human being, but if you have your own book on the market, that you know is better than Brown’s but your sales figures will be about a squillionth of his, it’s pretty depressing.

So it was with some trepidation that I entered Waterstone’s in Croydon today (yes, am back in the temperate zone). The till chap scanned my copy of Loops (the Domino/Faber muso periodical) and informed me that the Nick Cave novel, an extract of which is included therein, will be published next week.

“And my book’s published the week after that,” I said, and immediately worried whether I sounded too pushy.

“Oh right,” he said, “I hope we can get some signed copies.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, took his business card, and strolled off. There’s the cultural landscape mapped out for you, I pondered: on one side, WH Smith and Dan Brown; on the other, Waterstone’s and Nick Cave and me. And, of course, Stan Bête.

I slipped the receipt into my wallet, and only then noticed at the bottom the half-price offer on the new Dan Brown.

PS: And here’s Expat@large with yet more evidence of Brown’s essential shiteness as a writer.

Winging it

On Saturday I shall be embarking upon a longish plane journey, and just in case a combination of Kate Hudson movies, articles about luxury watches and scented towelettes doesn’t sustain me, I’m thinking of taking a couple of books. But what to pluck from the pile? Any suggestions gratefully received.

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
“A wildly original novel of erotic fulfillment and spiritual yearning.”

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker
“...an extraordinary feat of imagination and of style funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece.”

Will Self, The Book of Dave
“Will Self is such an overpowering presence in his own books that it’s sometimes difficult to tell what he's actually written.”

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills
“If you need all mysteries to be solved and all plotlines to be resolved, this book will frustrate you to no end.”

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World
“This is a book not about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.”

Charlotte Roche, Wetlands
“It's a famous woman talking about vaginas – of course it’s going to sell.”

PS: Scott Pack offers his criteria for chucking books out. Is there some variant of this I might be able to use?

Name that toon

This made me chuckle:


And Everett reminded me of this:

Autoblography

Mary Pols in Time, reviewing Julie & Julia, the first big-budget feature film of a book of a blog:

There are memoirists like Child who write about what made them famous, or infamous. There are unremarkable people who write about a remarkable thing that happened to them. And there is the 21st century memoirist, who makes him- or herself interesting in order to write about it.

The trouble with Harry

Just finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s story collection Nocturnes, which isn’t bad – I don’t think Ish is capable of bad writing – but is, it must be declared, a little on the slight side. The subtitle, ‘Five Stories of Music and Nightfall’ says it all really: there are five stories; all involve musicians; all take place, at least in part, as night falls. And, uh, that’s about it, really. No buttoned-up butlers, no cloned teenagers, no pianos in the toilet.

The best of the bunch – and the one in which music is least central to the narrative – is ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, which involves a 40-something language teacher staying at the London flat of some rather more successful university friends. Ray (the teacher) and Emily (half of the successful couple) once bonded over a mutual appreciation of the Great American Songbook; which makes it especially jarring that Ray refers to the work of ‘Howard Arlen’, especially since it’s a Harold Arlen song that gives the story its title. (When I saw David McAlmont in London last year, he said that Arlen had been his favourite composer for many years, but he hadn’t realised it, because he’s a wee bit anonymous when set alongside the likes of Gershwin and Porter.)

Of course this may not be a mistake on Ishiguro’s part. He’s renowned for the unreliability of his narrators, so perhaps it’s a subtle hint that Ray doesn’t really know as much about music as he thinks, like Patrick Bateman not being able to distinguish the Beatles from the Stones. But it does feel rather similar to Julian Barnes’s booboo in Arthur and George, in which the Jesuit-educated Conan Doyle appears to confuse the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception.

I need to be careful here. Ishiguro’s writing fiction, as is Barnes, and that offers any number of get-out clauses for factual imprecision. I write about reality, and unless I’m going to pull the postmodernism defence, readers and critics would be fully justified if a book or article of mine includes something that just ain’t so. Moreover, my next book, The Noughties, aims to cover a whole decade, which means they’ll be entitled to point out errors not only of commission, but also omission.

Maybe I can redefine myself as an unreliable author.

Deckchairmen of the board

Apparently upon my recommendation, the lovely Geoff has been rediscovering The Korgis; just to move the goalposts, here’s the band from which they evolved, Stackridge. I have decided to adopt the clarinet player as my sartorial role model:

Lost Symbollocks

First mainstream media mention of my Noughties book, in the midst of Andrew Collins’s witty yet thoughtful analysis of Dan Brown's lasting appeal.

PS: It would appear that the current definition of an intellectual - or perhaps "a so called interllectual" - is someone who doesn't think TDVC is very good.