IS this the end of the Booker Prize as we know it? From now on, individual publishers can only enter two novels (instead of three, as in previous years), and whereas readers couldn't care less about this rule change, some of the leading publishers are so incensed that they're considering boycotting the prize altogether.
A case of biting off one's nose to spite one's face, I would have thought. And yes, I realise that the new decree cuts down a publisher's chances of winning, but as the prize is generally won by really boring books anyway, who outside the industry gives a fiddler's?
I mean, did you (cross your heart and hope to die) actually get to the end of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, A.S. Byatt's Possession or Ben Okri's The Famished Road? Did you get beyond the first five pages of Keri Hulme's The Bone People? (You did? Liar).
These snooze inducers were considered preferable to such real books as Molly Keane's Good Behaviour, J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, John Banville's The Book of Evidence, Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, John McGahern's Amongst Women and Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy. Indeed, it came as something as a shock when Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the prize a real book bought by real people who had never heard of the Booker how was that possible?
So even though Dan Franklin of Cape may feel "outraged" by the new rule change and may wail that it's "absolutely appalling" and that "it makes life completely impossible" (get a life, Dan), the rest of us will wait instead for the day when the Booker Prize whether with two entries per publisher or not bears some relationship to the reading tastes of the majority of intelligent people.
FOR those of you who have found it murder trying to successfully follow the recipes of chefs, John Lanchester has added a few tablespoons of actual murder to the ingredients.
Mr Lanchester, deputy editor of the London Review of Books (and until recently restaurant critic of the Observer), set out four years ago to write a novel in the form of a cookery book. The result is The Debt to Pleasure, to be published later this month by Picador, who are so excited by the book that they're breathlessly comparing Lanchester to Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift a real English stew, if you ask me.
Lanchester got the basic idea from his extensive reading of books about food. It struck him that many of these books were really disguised autobiographies, and he says that he found the tone for his murderous main character, Tarquin, in Richard Olney's famously patrician book, Simple French Food. Tarquin's tone, Lanchester says, "is madder than Olney's, but along similar lines
And though there aren't quite as many recipes in the novel as in Olney's treatise, there are still quite a few including tips on how to make bouillabaisse and Irish stew (Lanchester's Irish mother no doubt helped him there).
Whether it will turn out to be the brilliant literary success hoped for by Picador, it might help to start a trend a torrid tale of monkfish and murder in Co Cork, perhaps, as recounted by Darina Allen.
WHEN the first cut price Wordsworth books appeared a few years ago, I made an unfortunate purchase from their array on the shelves, finding when I got home that the Thomas Hardy novel I'd bought had thirty pages missing from the middle and thirty other pages repeated at the end. Well, not that unfortunate, really how far wrong can you go when a book costs a mere pound?
Still, it made me a little wary of this imprint, even if the pioneering lead it had set had forced Penguin and others to follow suit, thus making the basic classics available to everyone for next to nothing.
I've got over my wariness now, though, having recently bought some titles from the company's Wordsworth Reference imprint, available in Eason's bargain basement and in other shops (The Exchange in Dalkey has a particularly good selection). These sell at £2 each and include Skeat's famous Concise Dictionary of Etymology', Partridge's Usage and Abusage, Fowler's Modern English Usage, and an excellent recent book by John Ayo called Dictionary of Foreign Words in English, which is both genuinely informative and a pleasure to read.
There is also an indispensable Dictionary of Musical Quotations, compiled by Derek Watson, which features among its thousands of entries one of my all time favourites, Max Reger's letter to a critic "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me." A pity, though, that no room was found for Frank Zappa's eloquent description of rock journalism "People who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."