Me And My Big Mouth

Bits & Pieces

Adam Boulton from Sky News writes about our Crap MPs book on his blog.

David Baddiel is photographed with a copy of The Atheist's Guide to Christmas while out and about with Morwenna Banks and Jo Brand.

Richard Asplin will be one of the guests at Thursday's Firestation Book Swap and he talks about the event on his website. Well worth checking out, he compares me to Noel Edmonds.

Our other guest is Robert Hudson, who also has a splendid blog where he tries to convince people to come along.

You can get tickets here.

Permanent Bedtime

I came across this neat little website via @orbific on Twitter.

It is a permanent recording of the Shipping Forecast and the Sailing On music.

Now you can relive those wonderful sleepy just-about-to-nod-off moments at any time of the day.

This Is England

I first came across the photography of Chris Steele-Perkins with his book Tokyo Love Hello, a collection of images taken in and around that amazing city. His wife is Japanese so he knows his way around the place but obviously brings that outsider's eye to everything he sees and records.

Which, perhaps surprisingly, is a quality he also brings to this wonderful new book collecting photographs from his 40 year career. All are taken in England, the country he came to from Burma when he was a toddler (which may explain the slight detachment) and form a fascinating visual history.

I suspect I found England, My England: A Photographer's Portrait particularly interesting because the images included span the period I have been on this earth. The people, the places, the fashions spark memories and that meant I was genuinely drawn in. The shots from the 70s reminded me of growing up, visiting my grandparents in London and holidays at Butlins. Happy days.

England, My England: A Photographer's Portrait is published by Northumbria University Press (who are knocking out some really interesting and diverse books) and would be a splendid addition to your coffee table or the posh bit of your bookshelves.

Guest Blogger: John Barlow

My Life in Pork

A few years ago I got myself a new literary agent, one of those high-powered New York agents with the nasty habit of telling you the truth if you ask for it. I enquired whether she had the sales figures for my novel Intoxicated, which had recently been published in the US. She told me I didn't want to know.

Then I mentioned that I was working on a detective novel about a midget porn star and his lover Grace Kelly. She told me the truth about that too, in a single word. (I still wrote it, just for fun.) The problem was that I had nothing but fiction projects planned, and what we really needed was a change of tack. 'Well, I do live abroad', I said. 'I suppose I could try to be the new Peter Mayle.'

I live in Galicia, NW Spain. I'd written a few bits and pieces about living here, things I'd jotted down in idle moments for no particular reason. So I polished something up and we showed it to an editor. This is where I got lucky.

They say that great editors are harder and harder to find. Manuscripts these days have to be in pretty good shape before they make it anywhere near an editor's desk. In my case, the MS wasn't in good shape. Although I admire non-fiction writers like Tom Wolfe and Calvin Trillin tremendously, I had no idea how to do it myself. Fortunately, this editor did.

She seemed to know how my book should turn out and exactly how to achieve it. From the outset, every piece of advice was right on the money, every suggestion, many of them involving substantial changes, seemed to move us inexorably forward. It was a strangely compelling process, like working with a schoolmarmish mind-reader; in the end I even began to look forward to the arrival of each new batch of editorial comments, and that's not a common feeling for a writer.

My stab at being the new Peter Mayle was turning out to be a sort of foodie travel book. But 'food' was too broad a theme. It needed narrowing down, and I decided to concentrate on the pig. In rural Galicia the 'house pig' was traditionally the domestic waste unit all summer, then the provider of bacon, ham, and innumerable other porky bits through the long, miserable winters. For Galicians, the pig signifies a lot.

So I set myself the target of eating every part of the animal, in as many parts of Galicia as I could. For a year, that's essentially what I did, I ate pork. As one reviewer observed, nice work if you can get it. I drove around villages and hamlets, up mountains and through forests, and wherever I went I asked about pigs (and what parts of them I could eat). I carried with me a diagram of a pig, pasted into my Moleskine; after each meal, I crossed off another part of the hog.

Right up to the deadline - just a month or two before printing - I was still writing new stuff, and refining what we already had. 'You know,' the editor would say, 'I think there should be a chapter about...' Off I'd go, in search of the perfect pig slaughter or an interesting way of doing the kidneys, all the while wondering if I'd still be writing the book after it was published.

Galicia has a largely undeveloped rural hinterland, and I met some great characters during my search for pork. I had trotter stew with self-sufficient farmers who'd spent their entire working lives without electricity or mechanised tools on a remote mountainside. Up another mountain I ate chorizo and potatoes in a hippy commune while angelic hippy-infants gambolled with hippy-sheep in the meadows (which were just normal). I met Fidel Castro's favourite cousin (the Castros were Galician), and took part in a thousand year-old ant-throwing festival, with chunks of piping hot pig head for supper once everyone was drunk and covered in live ants... And when it got impossible to tick off the final bits of the animal, I cooked up a terrine of pig brain and face meat, although I had to do it in someone else's kitchen, since my wife is a vegetarian.

When the book was published, I became a minor pork celebrity here. I was on La Ventana, Spanish radio's prime-time chat show. It was broadcast live from a theatre with an audience of a thousand, and a further million listening at home. If you think you can speak a foreign language, try live network radio and a theatre full of eager listeners: I shat myself, linguistically speaking. Then there was an appearance on Luar, Galician TV's Friday night variety show, which on the evening in question was pig-themed; yes, that's a whole evening's singing and dancing extravaganza about the tasty animal I'd been chasing all year. I don't think Peter Mayle ever got to do anything like that.

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Everything But the Squeal: A Year of Pigging Out in Northern Spain was edited and published by Farrar, Strauss, Giroux (US), and is also out with Summersdale in the UK and Wakefield Press in Australia.

You can view a Flickr photostream of the book here.

Senses Working Overtime

An American banker is kidnapped on the streets of Antwerp. Held in a sealed-off apartment he is, at first, reasonably well treated with requests for books and other items granted with little delay.

But then things start to turn nasty. His captors commence their plan - to remove his senses one by one. And the whole thing is being filmed and broadcast across the internet with viewers paying to vote for whether to end his torment, or to prolong it.

Which may sound like the plot to a dodgy horror movie, the sort that has about seven sequels, and in lesser hands it may well have read like this. But Stona Fitch is not trying just to shock you for the sake of it, his remarkable novel will really make you think, force you to consider your own position and beliefs. But it will also fuck with your head. Just a bit.

As each atrocity is committed you find out a little bit more about the kidnapped banker and, as you do, you find that he isn't perhaps quite as innocent as all that. Not deserving of his fate exactly, but the defined edges of right and wrong become blurred.

It takes a highly skilled writer to be able to create scenes of gut-wrenching torture (I did feel physically sick at one point, when Touch was being dealt with by the kidnappers) and somehow not make them feel gratuitous. They are there for a reason and work completely with the story. The tension borders on the unbearable as you discover which sense is next, as is the feeling of resignation when it happens.

Senseless is a short novel which most people will polish off in just a few sittings. You won't be able to forget it though. Ever.

Senseless by Stona Fitch is published by Two Ravens Press and is out now. There is also a movie adaptation that I am going to try to check out. Trailer below. In German for some reason, don't think it is a German movie, was filmed in Scotland as far as I can tell.

Guest Blogger: Marcus Chown

My Top 4 Bonkers Things About the Universe

I’m a science writer and, as a science writer, I am constantly amazed at how much stranger science is than science fiction; how much weirder the Universe we find ourselves in is than anything we could possibly have invented. I was thinking about this - and what I might write in this guest blog - when I remembered seeing a You-Tube video which comedian Robin Ince did of his top “Top 5 Dead Scientists”. Reasoning that, if an idea is a good one, it’s worth ripping off (!), I thought I’d do something similar. But, instead of my “Top 5 Dead Scientists”, I thought I’d do my "Top 5 Bonkers Things About the Universe". Actually, because of space constraints, I’ll slim it down to just 4!

Number 4: If the sun were made of bananas, it wouldn't make any difference

This is because the reason the Sun is hot is that it contains a lot of mass. All that mass weighing down on the core, squeezes it and makes it very hot. In fact, the centre is about 15 million degrees. Crucially, at such temperatures, all matter – regardless of its composition - dissolves into an anonymous state called a "plasma". So it doesn't much matter what the Sun is made of. Actually, it is about a billion billion billion tonnes of mostly hydrogen gas. But if you were to put a billion billion billion tonnes of microwave ovens in one place - or a billion billion billion tonnes of bananas – the you’d get something equally hot that looked pretty much like the Sun.

Number 3: You could fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube

This is because matter is incredibly, mind-boggling empty. An atom, if you remember from school, is like a miniature Solar System with a tight nucleus playing the role of a Sun orbited by electrons like planets. But the nucleus is incredibly tiny compared with the orbits of the electrons. Tom Stoppard, the playwright, had the best image. He said, if the nucleus is like the altar of St Paul's cathedral, an electron is like a moth in the cathedral, one moment by the altar, the next by the dome. Imagine, squeezing all the space out of an atom. Well, if you did that to all the atoms in all the people in the world, you could indeed fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube.

Number 2: 98% of the universe is invisible

Only 4 per cent of the mass of the Universe is in the atoms that make up you and me, the stars and planets. And only half of that have we ever seen with our telescopes. 23 per cent of the mass of the Universe is invisible, “dark”, matter. We know of its existence only because its gravity tugs on the visible stars and galaxies. No one knows what it is. And 73 per cent of the mass of the Universe is dark energy. Discovered only in 1998, this invisible stuff fills all of space and it has repulsive gravity. To say we are at sea in understanding dark energy is a bit of an understatement. Our best theory of physics is quantum theory. It has given us lasers and computers and nuclear reactors, an understanding of why this stage is solid and the sun shines. But when quantum theory is used to predict the energy of the vacuum – of the dark energy – it gets a number 1 followed by 120 zeroes bigger than we observe. This is the biggest discrepancy between a prediction and an observation in the history of science.

Number 1: Out there in the universe there are an infinite number of copies of you reading and infinite number of copies my Top Five Bonkers Things About the Universe

This takes a bit of explaining. Basically, the Universe was born about 14 billion years ago. That means that we can see only the stars and galaxies whose light has taken less than 14 billion years to get here. Objects whose light would take more than 14 billion years – well, their light hasn’t got here yet. It’s still on its way. The consequence of this is that we can only see a portion of the Universe. We call it the “observable universe”. And the observable universe is surrounded by a horizon. It’s pretty much like the horizon at sea. Just as we know there’s more of the sea over the horizon, we know there’s more of the Universe over its horizon.

How much? Well, according to the standard picture which is called “inflation”, there is an infinite amount. So, imagine, the observable universe is like a soap bubble. Well, beyond the edge of it, there are an infinite number of other soap bubbles. All of them would have had a big bang, and in all of them different galaxies and stars would have congealed out of the cooling debris of the big bang fireball. In short, they would all have different histories.

But they key thing – and this has got to do with quantum theory and I won’t go into it – the key things is that there are only a finite number of possible histories. Now, if we have only a finite number of histories and an infinite number of places for those histories to be played out, then it follows that every possible history happens and infinite number of times.

So there are an infinite number of places where you never started reading this blog. There are an infinite number of places where the dinosaurs were not wiped out by an asteroid 65 million years ago but when on to develop intelligence and build motor cars.

If you’re wondering why I’ve picked this as my Number 1 Bonkers Things About the Universe, it’s simple. Even if this is the worst blog you have ever had the misfortune to waste your time on, I can console myself with the thought that, in an infinite number of other places in the Universe, you thought it was the best thing you had ever read and raved about it to all your friends and family!

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Marcus Chown covers some of these ideas in his new book We Need to Talk About Kelvin: What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe (Faber & Faber).

Guess What I Got For My Birthday

Should point out that Ethan is taking the piss with the 40 on my card. Not that old quite yet.

Birthday Songs For Sunday

Today is my 39th birthday. To celebrate I am going to Stina you all up.

Saturday Round Up

Stuff I've been reading and dipping into this week.

Not entirely convinced about the wisdom of taking a novel about degenerative illness and assisted suicide and packaging it to look like a text book or non-fiction title, and the £12.99 price tag doesn't exactly help either. All that aside, Right to Die by Hazel McHaffie is a decent stab at working the subject into a fictional plot from someone with a respected medical background. I suspect it will appeal most to readers who already have an interest in the issues it tackles but that is no bad thing.

At the Firestation Book Swap in September I ended up with Inside the Whale by Jennie Rooney which no one else seemed to want on the night. I thought maybe I had ended up with a duffer so had put off dipping in to it but was really rather charmed by some delightful prose when I sampled a few chapters this week. I suspect this will prove to be a quick but rewarding read. The blurb on the back is rubbish and confusing, I really had no idea what the book was about by reading it, but it seems to be a story of two lovers during WWII told in parallel narratives. Will definitely be investigating further.

Yorkshireman John Barlow lives in Spain with his Spanish wife and their young baby. For his latest book, Everything But the Squeal, he travels around Galicia in an attempt to eat every part of a pig imaginable. This is a mighty fine travel book full of descriptions of mouthwatering dishes, as well as some that may not appear quite so much. Barlow has a neat turn of phrase, coming from his background as a novelist no doubt, and this is a book that will appeal to any carnivore. The fact that the author's wife is a vegetarian just adds to the pleasure.

There is plenty in Katherine May's debut novel Burning Out to suggest she is, as they say, one to watch. Following a bit of a breakdown at work, Violet returns to her hometown only to meet a girl who seems to be reliving Violet's past. An intriguing concept which, after a bit of a slow start, picks up nicely. Would be an excellent book group selection.

I don't read a huge amount of crime fiction and I tend to be quite picky about what I do decide to invest my time in. There is a lot of really tepid stuff out there, chock full of cliches and unimaginative writing, which is best avoided, but when I find a good author I will often work my way through their whole list. I had no tried anything by David Hewson before and the first few chapters of The Cemetery of Secrets were well-written and sufficiently intriguing for me to stick with it.

In terms of actually reading a book from start to finish I greatly enjoyed Senseless by Stona Fitch, the story of a man kidnapped and held captive. His captors gradually remove his senses one by one. Unforgettable stuff and a full review will follow next week.

I also started reading First Light by one of my favourite authors Charles Baxter. He tells the story of a brother and sister but backwards from their 40s to birth. Should have it finished soon and shall report back.

It's Not Easy Being Gray

If you are a fan of Richard Yates. Read this book.

If you love the movies of Frank Capra. Read this book.

If you watch that TV show Mad Men (which I have never actually seen but I assume is the sort of thing I should be referencing at this point). Read this book.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson was a massive bestseller when it was first published in the States in 1955 and was made into a film the following year.

It concerns itself with the seemingly ordinary life of Tom Rath. Married, father of three, he fought in Europe and the Pacific during WWII and keeps whatever happened there to himself. He finds his job dull, his home life only just about satisfactory, and is struggling to make ends meet. The inheritance he hoped to inherit is being merrily thrown away by his aging grandmother, his parents both having died when he was younger.

Not the best of set ups for a man who is basically a pessimist. Good job he is married to an optimist.

It's funny, he thought. I'm always sure things are going to turn out badly, and, damn it, they usually do.

"Everything's going to turn out all right!" Betsy always said.

The first half of the book could have been written by Richard Yates. It has all the poetic despair of that great American master. The opening few chapters have some of the best writing I have read outside of Yates, Charles Baxter and Kent Haruf. Wilson has the ability to convey a decade or marriage in a single sentence. Remarkable stuff.

But unlike Yates, who starts out bleak and dives headfirst downwards into despair, Wilson offers us some hope. There is light at the end of the tunnel and, although it takes till the very last page to get there, it makes for a complete and satisfying read.

There are touches of Capra, especially in the supporting cast and the way the various story strands resolve themselves, a fact noted by Jonathan Franzen in his introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition I read. 

It is hard to imagine anyone reading this wonderful novel and being disappointed. I am pretty sure most would love it. It seems to have fallen off the essentials shelf in the 50 or so years since it was published but I would politely suggest that every self-respecting home library should have a copy.

Sloan Wilson wrote a dozen novels, including a sequel to this, but it would appear that they are all out of print. I may have to track some secondhand copies down as I am eager to read more, and soon.

I will let you know how I get on.

He Could Have Been A Contender

When John Wardle was a teenager he became acquainted with a couple of other lads called John. They were a bit older and their surnames were Lydon and Ritchie. All three were soon to change their names.

John Lydon became Johnny Rotten.

John Ritchie became Sid Vicious.

John Wardle became Jah Wobble.

The first two formed a band you might have heard of. When that group split up Lydon reverted to his real name and formed Public Image Ltd with Wobble on bass and that was the start of one of the most diverse and eclectic musical careers of recent times.

Jah Wobble's work has ranged from punk to avant-garde Krautrock to world music and beyond. He recorded an album that was nominated for the first ever Mercury Prize, he has performed with countless international legends, he has set the work of William Blake to music and he gave Sean Hughes a much needed slap on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

Not bad for a poor boy from the East End.

Memoirs of a Geezer is the story of this unorthdox life in music and it is, if I may make so bold, one of the best rock autobiographies I have read. Told very much in his own voice, complete with comic asides, tangental ramblings and the occasional rant it reads as you would imagine a conversation down the pub with the man himself would sound. Although you probably wouldn't catch him down the pub these days, he has been off the booze for many a year.

And a good job too. Wobble has enjoyed, if that is the right word, his fair share of excess and he portrays that time, as far as I can tell, with great honesty and frankness. And that is part of the attraction of the whole book. It feels entirely genuine. When he is being a wanker he shows himself to be a wanker, when he learns his lesson he credits those who helped him, when he thinks someone else is a git he says so and explains why. It really is quite refreshing.

Lots of highlights to choose from. His nostalgia-free take on the punk era. Accounts of shambolic PiL gigs. His spell working on the underground when he famously made the platform announcement 'I used to be somebody'. The making of the Rising Above Bedlam album. His annoyance upon discovering that Never Mind the Buzzcocks was largely scripted and subsequent slapping of his team captain (for which he was congratulated by members of the crew). Stories from his time in China with his second wife. Ups. Downs. Inbetweens.

There is an obvious audience for this book. Those involved or interested in the punk or post-punk era will know Wobble's work well and are going to find lots to entertain them in here but I would suggest that anyone with heathy interest in contemporary music will enjoy it as well.

Much like Jah Wobble himself, this is a book that transcends genre and cannot fail to win you over.

Memoirs of a Geezer is published by Serpent's Tail and is out now. I also highly recommend Wobble's career retrospective CD set, I Could Have Been A Contender, which features music from throughout his varied career.

More Tacitus Anyone?

I am sure many of you will have seen this already but Stuary Jeffries wrote a piece for the Guardian yesterday with the rather silly title of How Waterstone's killed bookselling.

The Bookseller asked me to come up with a response which is now live on their website.

Every couple of years one of the broadsheets pipes up with some withering moan about the state of British booksellers. In nearly every case the argument is based on the views of authors, agents and publishers, none of whom are typical book buyers and all of whom seem to long for the good old days when Waterstone's would by ten times more than they needed of every literary fiction hardback.

Those days are long gone and in my piece I point out some of the reasons why this is a good thing.

Which is not to suggest that Waterstone's is perfect now, far from it. I personally think that as a company they are moving too far towards the mass market and are losing sight of the more quirky and interesting books that they used to clean up on. The balance is slightly off as a result. The evidence can be found if you compare their market share on some of the more leftfield titles with that of Amazon. As Waterstone's drop the ball in that area, Amazon are moving in and cleaning up.

Thankfully there are always the booksellers in individual branches who discover and champion great books and there are also, believe it or not, buyers at the head office who do the same. It wouldn't take much to step up a gear in that area and I suspect they will have to do this once they review how this Christmas has gone for them.

But Jeffries' article is way off the mark. I love the way he describes how he watched a university lecturer get completely confused by a simple link-save offer - the kind of promotion you find in Smiths, Boots, HMV and pretty much everywhere else. But more on that later.

For now it would be great if you could pop on over to my Bookseller piece and leave a comment, for or against.

Her Fearful Follow Up

OK, I will cut to the chase. Her Fearful Symmetry is not as good as The Time Traveler's Wife but it is sufficiently different for that not to matter.

Julia and Valentina are mirror twins. Teenage twin sisters who are exact mirror images of each other. They lead an oddly disatisfying existence with their parents in America until they inherit a London flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery from an aunt they didn't know existed. The one condition being that their parents must never set foot in the building.

Deciding to ditch college and move to London they settle in to their new home. Below them lives Robert, their late aunt's boyfriend, still coming to terms with the loss of his lover. Above is Martin, an agoraphobic with OCD whose wife has just moved back to Holland. Oh, and they unknowingly share the flat itself with the ghost of Elspeth, their dead aunt.

The stories of these characters unfold/overlap/entwine/converge as they tend to do in fiction and we end up with an entertaining, if sometimes disturbing, modern ghost story.

One of the things that I enjoyed about The Time Traveler's Wife was the author's ability to mix the fantasy elements of the story (a bloke who keeps popping back and forth along his own timeline) with the more realistic (the nuts and bolts of how he manages to live) while really having fun with the concept (making sure he gets to see lots of really great concerts, playing around with lottery tickets). She does a similar thing with her ghost in Her Fearful Symmetry. There is an internal logic to the story which ensures you don't really question what is going on. It sort of makes sense, at least within the confines of the book.

And also like her previous book, she isn't afraid to plonk in some real unpleasantness. There are moments of uncomfortable reading in this book. Characters do things you would really rather they didn't. Niffenegger deftly pulls the right strings at the right time - there isn't too much sentimentality, the ghost stuff isn't overdone, you flip to another story thread just before you've had enough of the previous one. She is really good at what she does.

And that is without mentioning the twists, one of which you may seem coming but probably not both. Although you might be on the lookout now that I've mentioned them. Sorry.

My only major criticism is that the ending felt a bit rushed. Having been swept up in the story and characters I would have happily spent an extra 20 or 30 pages in their company for a more protracted resolution but wasn't given that chance.

Her Fearful Symmetry is hugely enjoyable and has a real edge to it. If not quite a classic it still ranks as one of the best books I have read this year and if it had come out before The Time Traveler's Wife I feel sure that we'd be hailing her as a rising literary star. Instead she is holding steady.

This is her In Utero, coming after Nevermind. A really very good follow up to a life-changing classic. It is pointless comparing, just enjoy it.

Crap MPs

On Thursday we unleash Crap MPs on an unsuspecting Christmas stocking filler buying public.

A controversial countdown of the Top 40 worst MPs in British history the book contains 10 currently serving members, at least two certifiable nutcases, one highly litigious individual (we have no fear), a Churchill (but not that one) and someone who quite possibly spent more time giving blow jobs than serving his constituents.

Every MP in Westminster will be offered a free copy and we (by which I mean Claire and Robin from The Friday Project) will be outside Parliament tomorrow handing them out to MPs as they arrive for work.

I wonder how many will take us up on the offer?

The 10 who feature will be getting one whether they like it or not.

I am sure they can take a joke. If not, I will probably be arrested on trumped up charges on Friday.

Hopefully all the booksellers reading this will be clearing space on their tills in order to put piles of this there for the weekend. You know it makes sense.

Crap MPs by Bendor Grosvenor & Geoffrey Hicks. Only £7.99. At a tillpoint near you from Thursday.

Oh, and if you want to have a stab at guessing the identity of the 10 current MPs included in the book, or want to suggest who should be on the list, you can do so at this Crap MPs site.

Exotic Mutton

Last night MOTC cooked some mutton for dinner. Not just any mutton recipe mind you, but the Braised Mutton and Caper Cobbler recipe from The Exotic Meat Cookbook: From Antelope to Zebra.

Mutton? Exotic?

Well, this fine cookery book contains recipes for some very exotic meat - kudu, wildebeest, crocodile, zebra etc. - but also includes sections for some less unusual but somewhat out of favour dishes such as the aforementioned mutton.

The recipe itself was courtesy of Brian Turner, and I must say it was absolutely delicious. So much so that I have brough the leftovers to work in a tupperware to heat up for lunch. Corinna will be so pleased.

Here's how it looked fresh out of the oven.

And here it is all dished up and ready to scoff.

Not exactly cookbook quality photography, I grant you, but perfect comfort food for a cold November evening. We'll definitely be having it again, and MOTC reports it was amazingly easy to make. I shall post some recipes from the book up here soon, some of the more exotic ones perhaps.

Did Somebody Say Cake?

Time to rustle up some interest in the next Firestation Book Swap. This is the monthly book event hosted by the fragrant and delightful Marie Phillips and my good self. For November we will be joined by novelists Richard Asplin and Robert Hudson.

Richard Asplin is a stand-up comedian when he isn't being a novelist. His first book, T-Shirt and Genes, was described by Tony Parsons as 'the funniest debut novel since The Rachel Papers' but we won't hold that against him. He followed that up with Gagged which was a 'thriller with jokes' and has just published Conman, about a bloke who allows his comic memorabilia store to be used as the site for an elaborate sting when he finds himself in need of some readies. Suffice to say, it doesn't go terribly well. The sting, that is. The book's great.

Some of you may remember Richard from his guest blogger appearance here back in the summer. He is a very funny chap and I am sure he will embrace the somewhat shambolic Book Swap format with gusto.

Robert Hudson's debut novel, The Kilburn Social Club, is all about football. Only it isn't. It is set in an alternative present day, one where a football team made up of opera singers, gay freedom fighters and university lecturers all take equal pay and have to undertake charity work as part of their contract. Hmm, that doesn't really help to explain things does it? One reviewer called it ‘Reminiscent in places of Iain Bank’s The Crow Road and Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!' which is certainly more of a pointer.

I guess you'll just have to come along and let him explain it for himself.

But don't just come for that. Come for the free cake (provided by my wife and various members of the audience). Come for the surreal questions from the Question Jar. Come for the chance to swap a book you no longer want for one you do. Come for the opportunity to meet up with a variety of Twitter celebrities such as @bahtocancer, @benjohncock, @essiefox, @cbarlowmarrs, @magicnose, @EmmaB4 and many others.

All of the Book Swaps have been great fun so far. This one should be a cracker.

It only costs a fiver to get in. You can book in advance from the box office or pay on the door on the night.

We'd love to see you.

Free Toilet Books

You may well have seen the guest blog post by Phil Norman last week. He is the author of Closet Reading, a thoroughly entertaining history of man's obsession with reading on the loo.

Well, today I have three copies of said book to give away. As usual you just need to promise to make it the next thing you read and to review it online as soon as you can to help spread the word.

Leave a comment below if you want one.

A Song For Sunday

It's Hard To Be Alone by Soko.

Guest Blogger: Charlie Campbell

It’s a pity that the people you’d most like to go on strike rarely do. City bankers, boy bands, those people who stop you in the street wondering if you’d like a free stress test… they keep working away, helping make the world a slightly worse place. Personally, I would love to have a month when publicists downed tools and allowed us, all too briefly, to know just what was really going on in the heads of their noble masters. Remember when Lee from Blue spoke out in the aftermath of 9/11, asking how we could care about events in New York when so many elephants were suffering? I think you’ll find his publicist had flu that day.

Something similar has happened with Martine McCutcheon’s first novel The Mistress. You get that same sense of seeing someone as they truly are, without the polish provided by publicists, agents and careful lighting. I would love to tell you that this book was a triumph – a poke in the eye for literary snobs who think that celebrities and writing should not mix. But I can’t. It is, quite simply, one of the worst books I have ever read.

The reason for this is, I think, that the author wrote it herself. Up until now, I thought nothing could challenge ghosted celebrity novels for sheer awfulness. They represent publishing cynicism at its worst – the idea that the writing is the least important component in a book. Find a famous person, add a ghostwriter, and then sit back and watch the money roll in. This started with Naomi Campbell’s Swan, which attracted nothing but derision on release. Then came novels by Jordan, Kerry Katona, and Pamela Anderson, with more on the way from Sharon Osbourne, and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. The only man I can add to this list is Saddam Hussein who had four titles to his name. (One of his ghosts aptly commented, ‘He lost touch with reality. He thought he was a god who could do anything, including writing novels.’)

Now I can see how all this happened under the Ba’ath Party, but why is it happening here? Why are we so in thrall to these ludicrous people? And why do so many people buy their horrible books? I’m curious as to where the law stands on them. Surely the way in which they are sold contravenes the Trades Description Act. They are so clearly not what they say they are. What is the point of a novel where the actual author is not deemed important enough to have their name on the cover? Using celebrity to peddle second-rate fiction is hardly a good long-term strategy for the book industry.

But – going back to The Mistress – I now realise that this might be preferable to letting the celebrities write their novels themselves. It is clear that Martine McCutcheon has not used the services of a ghostwriter. I’m not aware of any industrial action from that profession, so assume it was a rational decision on the part of the author, agent and publisher. I have to say this was a mistake. I wasn’t expecting great things here, but this isn’t even passably written, and it groans with cliché, banality and excessive use of adjectives. No self-respecting ghost would produce this – and only the greatest satirist ever reaches these heights. This book is that rare thing – something that’s so bad, it’s almost enjoyable. We experience it with films from time to time, but I’d never come across it in literary form. As Mandy, the heroine of The Mistress, puts it:

‘Reach for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.’

So, for two reasons, we must celebrate the absence of a ghostwriter. Firstly, because he or she would not have given us unintentionally hilarious sentences like this:

‘The man looked up at Mandy. His eyes were beautiful, and despite being tired they sizzled, full of knowledge, some sadness but most of all, kindness.’

And secondly because this might be the final straw, that wonderful Ratner moment, where the public feels they’ve had enough of this particular brand of patronizing rubbish. I’m not deluded enough to think that this will herald a golden age of publishing – good and bad books have always co-existed. But hopefully this particular vein has been exhausted.

It’s not the quality of the writing that saddens me most about this – it’s the fact that this book is being published at all; that professionals suspended their judgement and taste so willingly. When publishers were bidding for McCutcheon’s novel, one senior editor described her as writing like an angel. Really? Then God is crueller than I’d thought. Agents and editors are supposed to act as gatekeepers, to stop writing like this from ever being published. We should encourage these celebrities to turn their creative energies elsewhere, giving them musical instruments, sketch books, embroidery kits, anything to prevent more novels like this.

The most hateful thing about celebrity is not the celebrities themselves, though God knows I have no great love for them. Rather, it is the sense of witnessing a ritual sacrifice – first we raise these people up, and then we cut them down. But I fear that publication of The Mistress is only going to accelerate the second half of that process.

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Charlie Campbell is a literary agent. I am guessing that he doesn't look after all that many celebrity novelists.

The Great Book Clearout: The Results

As many of you know I decided to have a bit of a book cull. Once the decision was made I had to formulate some sort of criteria and then actually start throwing stuff out.

The clearout was put on hold for a few weeks when my wife had her Open House day as part of the Windsor Fringe (we opened our doors to the general public to show off her ceramics). I had to remove most of the books from our ground floor to make room for the pots and tiles and bits and pieces. They ended up forming bloody great structurally unsound piles in our bedroom and it was definitely a breach of all manner of Health & Safety rules to attempt to weed through them while they were like that.

But over the past couple of weekends I have, with the help of my slaves children, been slowly putting things back in order and deciding which books to cast off in the process.

To give you an idea of the progress we have made, this is what the downstairs bookshelves looked like before the clearout.

And this is what they look like now.

One of the big changes is that the books downstairs are mainly our 'keepers'. The books we have read and loved and want to hold on to. They used to be in the bedroom. The bedroom shelves now have all the unread stuff. Much better all round.

But what difference has all this made to the title count? I hear none of you ask.

Well, allow me to enlighten you.

Excluding the kids' books, cookery books and several boxes hidden in the eaves I did have about 3,000 titles on various shelves and piled up around the house.

I now have just over 2,000.

That's right, the Great Book Clearout has killed off nearly 1,000 volumes.

May they rest in peace.

Most have gone off to the charity shop. Some have been passed on to friends. A few of the rarer tomes from my collecting days will be appearing on eBay shortly.

And you know what? It didn't hurt a bit.

I feel decongested. Uncluttered. Less clogged.

And the whole thing, the simple process of looking at every book in the house and forcing myself to make a decision on it, has got me all excited about my collection again. I have spotted lots of stuff I want to read soon and can't wait to do so.

Get rid of 1,000 books. I recommend it. It will do you good.

Free Berlin

As has now become traditional every time Oxygen Books publish a new volume in their City-Lit series I give some copies away on my blog.

This time we are off to Berlin with a collection of writing on, about or set in the city from writers as interesting and diverse as Christopher Isherwood, David Bowie, Ian McEwan, Joseph Roth and John Simpson. You can read a sampler here.

It is a really neat idea and I have five copies to hand out to the first five of you to leave a comment asking for one. If you miss out but are intrigued by the concept then do support this small indie publisher and buy a copy from your favourite book emporium. If you are one of the lucky five then please review it on Amazon or your blog or somewhere else online as soon as you can.

Berlin is published today and joins London and Paris in the series. Future volumes include Dublin and Amsterdam.

Lit Drift

Check out this interesting new bloggy literary magazine thing called Lit Drift.

I have only just been pointed in its direction but it looks good. They have creative prompts, daily short stories, free book giveaways and they welcome submissions from readers.

Lovely stuff.

I have bookmarked it and will be checking in regularly. Hope you like it.

Free Time

To celebrate the launch of the new travel guide 24 Hours: London by Marsha Moore the publisher is giving away five copies to readers of this blog.

In this interesting variation on the normal travel guide, Mason picks out the best things to do in London at various times of the day. She covers, as you might expect, the full 24 hours and comes up with some interesting hidden treats as well as the more well-known attractions. 

Boris Johnson loves it, calling it 'a nifty guide for Londoners and tourists alike'.

Marsha will be embarking upon a 24 hour tweeting marathon today, posting tips and suggestions from the book every hour. Actually she started at 5am this morning. You can follow her on Twitter here. Or visit her website for more information on the book.

And if you want one of the five free copies just leave a comment here and one will be posted off to you. The catch, for there is one, is that you must agree to review it online as soon as you can.

Guest Blogger: Simon Key from The Big Green Bookshop

la librairie grand vert

Aren’t Gallic Books brilliant? Launched in 2007, they publish English language editions of the very finest modern French literature. We love ‘em, and so do our lovely customers. We even have customers (that’s a plural) who buy everything they publish, they trust them so much.

Most publishers can only dream of this kind of brand loyalty. Now being the groundbreaking pioneers that we clearly are (we also have lustrous hair), we thought to ourselves, ‘How can Independent booksellers work more effectively with publishers?’

We generally pooh-pooh those ‘independent bookshops only’ offers that some publishers try and tempt us with. If it ain’t good enough to stock then we won’t stock it. It’s as simple as that really. So, we got in touch with Jane and Ali from Gallic Books and we had a bit of a chat. With their proven track record at the bookshop, we thought that a slightly more formal team up made lots of sense.

So we’ve kind of adopted each other.

If we were a town there would be a sign as you entered that said ‘Welcome to The Big Green Bookshop, twinned with Gallic Books. Please drive carefully’. Essentially we’ve come up with an agreement that suits us both.

The bare bones of it are;

• We’re going to dedicate a window to Gallic Books throughout the year. There’s a pretty picture of it on our blog at the moment.
• We have a bookcase in a prime location in the shop that has all their titles in.
• We’ll review (at least) one of their titles on the website and on our blog each month
• Gallic Books will feature on the front page of our website.

And in return

• All online sales from the Gallic Books website will now go through the Big Green Bookshop (free postage and packing too)
• The bookshop has been supplied with a number of complementary copies of each title
• The bookshop will be the venue of choice for all Gallic Books events
• The bookshop will feature on the Gallic Books website front page

We’re also running a competition to celebrate this entente cordiale, where anybody who buys a copy of any title published by Gallic Books through the website or at the shop between now and Christmas will be entered into a draw with a chance to win 2 return tickets to Paris on Eurostar.

Oh my goodness me, yes.

This is all new to both of us, so we’ll tweak it as we go along, but I think it’s all rather exciting. We’re happy with the way things are and have decided to trial this for a year.

Our customers already enjoy reading titles published by Gallic Books, and we’re delighted to have our name associated with such a fab publisher. We hope that other independent bookshops and publishers are finding similar ways of working together. It seems to make a lot of sense.

A bientôt.

Guest Blogger: Phil Norman

“Why?”

That's the reaction it's odds on you'll get when you tell someone you want to write a history of toilet books.

“Well,” goes the hopefully polished and not-at-all shrill reply, “it's an area of literature that's been completely ignored, sells millions every year, and tells more about us than any list of the 'nations favourite classic novels'. Plus it's filthy. What's not to like?”

“Yes, but... just... why?”

You can't win sometimes. It's fine for scientists to grow a pig's ear on the back of a Cadbury's Crème Egg but start making notes on the life and times of Gyles Brandreth and people will queue up to tell you you're wasting your time. As you sink reluctantly into the third Wicked Willie sequel, you find yourself dangerously close to agreeing with them.

Fortunately history proves to be well up to the task. History never disappoints, especially not the history of what desperate people will do for an easy shilling. The story of the toilet book contains as much sex, intrigue, stupidity, jealousy and backstabbing as you can swallow, along with considerably more in the way of swearword-bargaining summits with the staff of WH Smith.

So by way of an answer to “why?”, here are ten momentous dates in the 500-year history of the Great British Toilet Book every lavatory academic should know.

1526: John Rastell publishes A Hundred Merry Tales, widely regarded as the first English language joke book, crammed with randy wenches, randier donkeys, daft Welshmen, goose strangling, upended toilet seats and copious farting. Shakespeare pinches gags from it and Queen Bess calls for it on her deathbed. Lavatory literature has arrived.

1600-1699: The golden age of the chapbook - cheap penny pamphlets sold by travelling hawkers to the semi-literate, with tempting titles like Funny Dick's Grinning Made Easy, The Merry Pranks of Roger the Clown, and Concerning Some Men Who Have Had Wonderful Great Genitals. No-one mentions "dumbing down".

1700-1780: The heyday of Grub Street, a motley assortment of writers turning out populist fluff to scrape a living. Among the throng are the first collection of toilet wall graffiti (1731) and the first surreal comedy spin-off book written by Cambridge students in drag (1751). Looking for a bit of extra cash, Jonathan Swift dashes off The Benefit of Farting Explain'd, then spends most of the rest of his life pretending he didn't.

1731: The freshly-minted middle classes get hot and bothered about all this bawdy silliness, and retaliate with the Tatler, the Spectator and hundreds more moralizing publications, which quickly descend into libellous gossip about whose daughter's been copping off with whose footman. Still, they mean well.

1806: Meek Leicestershire rector the Reverend James Beresford writes The Miseries of Human Life, a collection of grumpy one-liners such as: "In the depth of winter, trying in vain to effect a union between unsoftened butter and the crumb of a very stale loaf." Is it just him?

1825: Publication of the most ambitious trivia book ever, William Hone's Every-Day Book. Published as two 1700-page volumes, it's heralded by the author as "a literary kaleidoscope to annihilate both space and time". Said author spends the rest of his life in enormous debt.

1925: First recorded moan about Christmas books published in The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs: "For nearly a quarter of a century English publishers have confronted us with masses of illustrated books such as they would never have dreamt of letting us see at any other time of the year."

1953: Britain's first celebrity toilet book published by Britain's first bona fide TV celebrity. The Gilbert Harding Treasury of Insult sees the grim one from What's My Line? guide suburban housewives through the dying art of brusqueness: “Good robust insult needs red beef; a man cannot storm on tinned Danish loaf!”

1971: Monty Python's Big Red Book starts the TV comedy tie-in market rolling, amusing readers, offending the professionally offended and confusing booksellers with its bright blue cover, Victorian nudity and pull-out Radio Times section printed on authentically waxy paper. Eric Idle reads Marshall McLuhan and declares the toilet book's medium more important than the message. Michael Palin worries there's too much smut in it.

2002: Schott's Original Miscellany arrives, giving toilet books a leg up the respectability ladder from the bin of faded paperbacks to the smart shelf of nifty hardbacks with their own bookmark. The toilet book finally makes the move from Radio 1 iniquity to Radio 4 respectability. Then Michael O'Mara publish Shite's Original Miscellany and it's back to square one.

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Phil Norman is the author of Closet Reading, presumably the world's first history of toilet books. I have read it. It is very funny and, perhaps surprisingly, genuinely fascinating. He has unearthed some real historic gems and shows a flair for combining the absurd with a real love of books. I would politely suggest that it would make the perfect Christmas gift for the person in your life who likes to read on the loo.