Book Addicts Book Group

Print v iPads: books win!

Book Group Librarian — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:55:56 +0000

The speed race, at least. Books are faster and ‘more relaxing’ to read, but iPads and Kindles are ‘more satisfying’, finds new study

E-book readers might be heralded as the future of literature but a new report shows that it’s still quicker to read the old-fashioned print version of a book.

The study, by Jakob Nielsen from the Nielsen Norman Group, gave 24 people a short story by Ernest Hemingway to read – chosen because “his work is pleasant and engaging to read, and yet not so complicated that it would be above the heads of users”.

Each participant read their story using four different devices – a printed book, a PC, an iPad and a Kindle. While on average the stories took 17 minutes and 20 seconds to read, the Kindle experience was 10.7% slower than print, and the iPad was 6.2% slower.

The readers were also asked to rate their satisfaction of the four experiences on a one-to-seven scale: the iPad was top at 5.8, followed by the Kindle at 5.7 and the printed book at 5.6. The PC came in last, with “an abysmal 3.6″.

“They disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp, grey-on-grey letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad (actually, the iBook app) indicated the amount of text left in a chapter,” said Nielsen. He added that “less predictable” comments included participants saying that the book was “more relaxing” to use than the electronic devices. “And they felt uncomfortable with the PC because it reminded them of work.”

Alison Flood

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Box office hit Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ‘lost $167m’

Book Group Librarian — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:23:25 +0000

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is still deeply in the red despite being the ninth-highest grossing film of all time, according to industry blog

A hint of the true extent of Hollywood’s current financial travails has emerged after it was claimed that a film which racked up almost $1bn at the worldwide box office in 2007 still lost money for the studio that made it.

The industry blog Deadline yesterday published a leaked net profit statement for the blockbuster film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which stands at number nine in the all-time global box office chart, with a gross profit of $938.2m (£619m). If genuine, the statement suggests that Warner Bros is still yet to recoup $167m (£110m) of the film’s total budget.

The report suggests that Hollywood may be in a far more precarious position than previously thought – it is already well known that studios are struggling to find funding in the wake of the credit crunch and interest payments on loans and other calculations are not normally factored into a film’s official production budget. Order of the Phoenix is listed with costs of just $150m on the Box Office Mojo website.

The statement unearthed by Deadline suggests that Warner Bros incurred interest payments of $57m (£38m) on loans it took out to pay for the film to be made, more than a third of the official production budget. The extra costs may be due to distribution fees and adverts.

It also casts into doubt the efficacy of stars making deals that give them a share of net profits on top of their wages. On the evidence of Order of the Phoenix, few films can be delivering particularly large sums to those who sign up to such contracts.

Ben Child

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Robin Ince’s top 10 truly bad books

Book Group Librarian — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:40:23 +0000

From Sign of the Speculum to How to Marry the Man of your Choice, Robin Ince picks the best of the truly bad books he’s salvaged from jumble sales and skips up and down the country

Robin Ince is one of the UK’s most accomplished, versatile comedians with a string of awards and media appearances to his name. He was the Chortle award winner in 2009 and won the Time Out award for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy for his show The Book Club, which was also nominated for a British Comedy award and hailed by the Observer as “the outstanding literary event of the Edinburgh Festival”.

“Life on the road has taken me the length and breadth of the country and has allowed me to spend many an afternoon scouring second-hand bookshops, turning the yellowed pages of classics such as What would Jesus Eat?, rummaging through jumble sales, and even the odd skip, constantly on the search for the best of the truly bad. Over the last five years, my love of misguided guides and peripheral poetry pamphlets has bordered on obsession, in fact my tattered collection of “killer crab” novels currently stands taller than my child. This is my top 10 today, tomorrow it might include Mills & Boon’s Rash Intruder or God is for Real, Man.”

1. Sign of the Speculum by Jessica Russell Gaver

First, this is one of the most enigmatic titles on my bookshelf, at first suggesting a sequel to David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. Actually, it is a romantic fiction that is also an ethical guide. What should you do if you are a Christian in love with your gynaecologist? The gynaecologist love story is one of the smaller genres in the broad world of romantic fiction.

2. Temptation in a Private Zoo by Anthony Dekker

This goes in the top 10 predominantly for its fantastic title. It is a spy thriller with a little bit of bear-baiting and a brief critique on how to spoil a dinner party by offering after-dinner mints. It was found in the compendium Man’s Book – books especially compiled for “the rugged reading tastes of men”.

3. Major Major by Terry Major-Ball

This is the delightful autobiography of John Major’s older brother. It is an image of an England seen predominantly in Ealing films. Terry fears women and Butlins, though comes to like them both. He knows how to make a cooked breakfast in the microwave too and he’ll tell you how. Remember to prick the egg yolk before microwaving though, or it will explode.

4. The Twentieth Plane: A Psychic Revelation by Albert Durrant Watson

An early 20th-century psychic, with the help of his deceased mother, has some conversations with Edgar Allan Poe, Byron, Shelley and other dead notables. This is non-fiction.

5. Crabs on the Rampage (and the other five) by Guy N Smith

Guy N Smith has written many horror books, but he is best known for his crabs series, chronicling the pipe-smoking crustacean adventures of Cliff Davenport, on the Welsh coast. A lurid mix of gore, some sex and moral lessons.

Moral lesson number one, don’t go swimming with your mistress: your adultery will lead to death by claw.

6. The Book of the Netherland Dwarf by Denise Cumpsty

A petcare guide book which has the reputation of a mystical tome created by HP Lovecraft that may open a portal to hell, populated by very small rabbits. Contains the most idiosyncratic drawings of the human hand holding scared rabbits.

7. Elvis: His Life and Times in Poetry and Lines by Joan B West

Who couldn’t love a slim collection of poems about Elvis from one of his brethren? What it lacks in traditional poetic skill it more than makes up for in passion for its subject. A strange beauty, enhanced by the delightful painting of Elvis on the cover.

8. Godless by Ann Coulter

If you want to know just how misguided anti-evolutionists can be and how determined to be stupid they are, Ann is a good start as she mulls on why, if evolution does exist, a worm doesn’t evolve into a beagle and how there aren’t any transitional fossils (apart from the ever-increasing collection of them). A magnificent view of what happens to your mind if you never let facts get in the way of it.

9. The Secrets of Picking up Sexy Girls by ??

A guide for the frustrated man who just can’t seem to pick up a sexy girl. Find out the advantages and disadvantages of rutting in a railway siding, why lesbians and OAPs are the same thing, how to spot a wig and why bras are bad.

10. How to Marry the Man of your Choice by Margaret Kent

The other side of The Secrets of Picking up Sexy Girls, Margaret will help women find a man to marry by persuading them to work in shoe sales or boat repair and reminding us that long fingernails “do not appeal to men”. Long fingernails suggest to a man that the woman is “unwilling to do household chores and is unavailable for recreational activities”.

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The News Where You Are by Catherine O’Flynn |Book review

Book Group Librarian — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 23:04:35 +0000

Fay Weldon applauds a second novel that fulfils the promise of its predecessor

Writing a second novel is a nervy business for a writer, especially when the first one has been unexpectedly and wonderfully successful, as was Catherine O’Flynn’s debut What Was Lost, which went on to win the 2008 Costa first novel and a cluster of other awards. But O’Flynn need not be nervous. Her second novel, The News Where You Are, establishes her as, let’s say, the JG Ballard of Birmingham. As Ballard dealt with the landscape of the motorway and made it his own, so O’Flynn deals with her particular city, finding poetry and meaning where others see merely boredom and dereliction. It is a most moving book. Lightly flinging a joke or two in the reader’s direction, a snatch or so of knowledgeable brightness, O’Flynn comes across as the mistress of compassion. To better sing the song of the normally unsung she deals in subtext, in the irony of events, in the archetypal, to great effect, so that the book gains a kind of driving energy, as if the lonely dead of the city’s past and present were determined to be heard.

O’Flynn is particularly good on old age and the consolations of helplessness. “His hearing aid is invisible, his need to piss every half hour easily covered up, but his hands dangle there at the end of his arms for all to see [. . .] He wonders why cosmetic surgery is never offered for hands. He stares at them until they seem entirely alien to him; two lumps of bone and gristle lying on a purple velvet cushion.”

O’Flynn’s protagonist is Frank, a presenter of Midlands TV regional news, noted for his bad jokes and lack of ambition. It is his habit to attend the funerals, often as the sole mourner, of those who have died alone and lain undiscovered for days, weeks, even months, but who win by their deaths a brief mention in the local news. He feels it is his duty to note their passing, even if no one else will. He is a good man, content to be one of the “future people” envisaged in his father’s architectural drawings, dotted about in paradisiacal landscapes, figures with featureless faces. Lego people.

Frank’s father was an architect who neglected his family to build the new Jerusalem in Birmingham, which the ungrateful city now tears down, just as in his turn Frank’s father once demolished the city’s Victorian heritage. “The past has gone, the future is yet to come, and what remains is a stalled present,” Frank observes, as he sees schemes for new developments redrawn or scrapped altogether as grand designs for the future are whittled away, dreams always defeated by cold reality.

There are vivid portraits here: the failed joke-writer, Frank’s trusting daughter, the female TV presenters, obsessed by age. Most strikingly Frank’s mother, meanly urging her dutiful son not to visit, as he stubbornly insists on doing. And on a visit to a tea shop:

“What anyone else might consider heart warming, the sight of an elderly couple enjoying each other’s company and a slice of fruit cake, would invite scorn from Maureen. ‘Look at them! Bored out of their minds. Nothing to say [. . .] Why aren’t they screaming?’”

There is a plot of sorts – who killed Frank’s predecessor, the famous one, whom old age was about to conquer had not a hit-and-run driver got him just in time? – but it’s a wispy kind of plot, and suspense hardly matters in this blend of Dickens and Alan Bennett, written in the kind of stripped-down, flat style that so suits its time and place. I loved it, and am haunted by it. While What Was Lost benefited from the existence of an actual child ghost, forever vanishing round the corners of a shopping mall – which was the reality, that product of the human imagination the mall, or the ghost? – this book is set in a less metaphorical, less fanciful world, but it has equal power. If you can write two good novels you can write another and another and another: I am sure O’Flynn will and I look forward to them.

Fay Weldon’s Chalcot Crescent is published by Corvus.

Fay Weldon

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Re: TV Bookclub Summer Read 2010 The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Book Group Librarian — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:15:03 +0000

oh good! I haven't listened to a new audio book in… too long!!

Back to the Hugos: Ringworld by Larry Niven | Sam Jordison

Book Group Librarian — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:44:26 +0000

Larry Niven’s blend of wild imagination and hard science is positively intoxicating

Larry Niven’s 1970 Hugo award winner, Ringworld, is arguably one of the most influential science fiction novels of the past 50 years. As well as having had a huge impact on nearly all subsequent space operas (Iain M Banks’ Culture series and Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns are just two), the book has helped generate a multi-billion-dollar industry. The Ringworld of the book’s title is a direct ancestor of the Halo system that in turn provided the name for the Xbox killer app. Niven’s ideas have played a part in the lives of millions of people and helped console games on the way to being among the most important and impressive cultural artefacts of our time.

The Ringworld in question is not whatever filthy thought came to your mind when you first registered the book’s naive title but one of science fiction’s most successful Big Dumb Objects. It’s an advanced form of a Dyson sphere: a huge, ring-shaped planet built by design rather than nature. The thing is supposedly a million miles wide, 93 million miles in radius and thus around 600m miles long. It provides its own gravity by spinning; it gets energy from the star it orbits; it has walls thousands of miles high at each rim to hold in air … I could provide endless statistics and facts about this creation and many have, most notably in this interactive map (complete with soothing music in case all the number-crunching makes your brain ache). The important point for the purposes of this blog, however, is that it’s awesome. Niven serves up a blend of wild imagination and hard science that’s positively intoxicating.

A measure of how seriously people take the science of the Ringworld – and how daft it has driven them – comes in a story from the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention, when excited students from MIT apparently crowded out the venue chanting: “The Ringworld is unstable!” Apparently, the Ringworld would need giant thrusters to maintain orbit around its sun (a problem that Niven addressed in a follow-up 10 years later). The significant thing isn’t that Niven was wrong but that people took so much of the rest of his science seriously enough to worry about such matters. His ideas have traction. The Ringworld is splendidly improbable but perhaps not impossible.

So much for the science. The fiction is a similar mix of the wobbly and the earth-shaking. The book kicks off as a fairly pedestrian pastiche of the frequent Hugo winner Robert A Heinlein, complete with that Heinlein standard, an ageing wise-cracker – Louis Wu – who has a talent for seducing younger women, daft 1960s party scenes transmuted to the space age and invented hep slang (most notably the swear word “tanj”, an acronym of the Heinlein complaint “there ain’t no justice”).

In this slow beginning, there’s a lot of jargon, heavy technological exposition and background, the latter particularly relating to the intergalactic status quo and the aliens who feature in the story: a race of “cowards” called Puppeteers who have two heads and brains in their belly, and a race of “warriors” called Kzinti, who have leonine features and brains more traditionally led by their balls. There’s some curiosity value to these pages, a few half-good jokes from Louis Wu and a smattering of intrigue relating to the lead Puppeteer’s attempts to convince Wu (together with a Kzinti and unsurprisingly attractive girl called Teela Brown) to travel on a dangerous mission into the unknown. Mainly, however, it is dull. If I weren’t expected to blog about it, I might even have put the novel aside, which makes me all the more glad that I’m doing this series. Because when the Ringworld finally hoved into view, it was little short of marvellous.

The planet is rendered in superbly detailed 3D with just enough information given to make it seem convincing but enough held back to enable us to share the mystery that greets Louis Wu and friends. How was Ringworld made? What was it made from? How and why did its civilisation disappear? These become questions of real fascination. Travelling over the planet, meanwhile, with its vast oceans, lost cities, floating castles and tribes of people slowly reverting to barbarism and religion as they lose their grasp on the knowledge of their ancestors, is a visual and imaginative feast.

OK, I still had a few quibbles. There remained absurdities and unsuccessful plot strands. Teela Brown, in particular, made for a boring love interest, and there was a singularly unconvincing back story about her having been bred to optimise her luckiness. Yet so impressive was the rest that any such problems were easy to forgive and forget. It’s clear that Ringworld hasn’t just become a cultural staple because it’s a good idea: its inspirational power comes from Niven’s success in bringing it to life. The sense of scale and wonder is joyful. I challenge you to read it without feeling awestruck.

Sam Jordison

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Re: TV Bookclub Summer Read 2010 The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Book Group Librarian — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:53:42 +0000

This is one of my Favorite books. The Audio is worth the listening to. It's very well done!!

Thomas Carnacki, king of the supernatural detectives

Book Group Librarian — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:37:38 +0000

Through the character of Thomas Carnacki, ghost-finder, William Hope Hodgson – who celebrates his centenary this year – shows us that detective fiction and the occult can be a perfect match

Publishing trends have ebbed and flowed over the past century, but two genres have consistently flourished: tales of the supernatural and detective fiction. Put them together and you have, at least for me, a winning formula. What’s not to like about a character with the foibles of a Holmes or a Poirot bringing their mighty powers of deduction to bear on creatures of the night? The sub-genre is at once a perfect fit (mooching about in dark, unsavoury places is second nature to the detective) and interestingly discordant (detectives deal in logic and facts, and ghosts, by their nature, move outside such things).

Sherlock Holmes did, of course, dabble in occult cases, his most famous being The Hound of the Baskervilles. But reason generally won out in the end and his supernatural mysteries usually turned out – like Scooby-Doo and the gang’s adventures – to have a rational, criminal explanation. But there are plenty of detectives whose investigations don’t return such earthbound conclusions, and for me the greatest is Thomas Carnacki.

Carnacki wasn’t the first supernatural detective – that honour probably goes to Dr Martin Hesselius, created by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in the 1870s. But Carnacki, who first appeared in the Idler magazine in 1910, has all the elements in such perfect proportions that he deserves to be crowned king of the occult ‘tecs – especially in this, his centenary year.

Carnacki was the creation of William Hope Hodgson, an author who had already gained literary renown for The Boats of the Glen Carrig and The House On the Borderland. The Carnacki stories always follow the same format: the great detective (I’m sure Holmes will excuse me appropriating his title for Carnacki in this instance) issues invitations to a group of friends to attend a dinner at his home at 427 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. After a repast during which nothing is said of the story to come, Carnacki gathers them round to relate his latest adventure. The stories are narrated, Watson-like, by one of the crew: Dodgson, a man so close in name to the author that we can safely assume Hodgson was inserting himself into the stories.

The series appears under the name Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, and that’s pretty much what he does. His reputation leads him to be invited to the rambling family piles of influential and moneyed types, to sort out the hauntings. What’s especially refreshing is that, despite his experience, Carnacki is often as much of a scaredy-cat as the rest of us. In his first adventure, The Gateway of the Monster, he positively bottles it at going into a haunted room after dark.

And not all his cases turn out to be the work of the supernatural. Sometimes, just to keep things grounded, Hodgson throws in a pedestrian explanation – crooks trying to scare yokels away from a big house, for example. But when the case proves undeniably otherwordly, Carnacki finds cause to fight fire with fire: he draws himself and his helpers into pentacles and sigils to protect them against demonic incursions (see the truly terrifying sequence in The House Among the Laurels for a fine example).

The editors of the Idler obviously knew they’d struck gold with Carnacki, and on his third adventure, in their March 1910 edition, they printed a disclaimer with relish: “Complaints continue to reach us from all parts of the country to the effect that Mr W Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki stories are producing a widespread epidemic of nervous prostration! So, far from being able to reassure or calm our nervous readers, we are compelled to warn them that The Whistling Room, which we publish this month, is worse than ever. Our advertising manager had to go to bed for two days after reading the advance sheets; a proofreader has sent in his resignation; and, worst of all, our smartest office boy … but this is no place to bewail or seek for sympathy!”

Carnacki’s success spawned many more occult detectives, most notably Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin who appeared in Weird Tales for most of the second quarter of the last century. But who are the supernatural sleuths who deserve Carnacki’s crown in the modern era? Urban fantasy is a flourishing sub-genre at the moment, and the private eye with one (gum)shoe in the grave is big business – Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books have made the leap to TV, and F Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack has appeared in more than a dozen novels and even a series of spin-off Young Adult novels charting his teenage adventures.

For my money, though, the best of the current crop is Felix Castor, Mike Carey’s trenchcoat-wearing exorcist who comes with a strong pedigree: Carey wrote the adventures of the comic world’s greatest occult investigator, John Constantine. And just to prove that not all supernatural detectives are hard-boiled tough guys, the undisputed queens of the genre have to be Brenda and Effie, the women of a certain age who populate Paul Magrs’ eye-popping version of Whitby.

Now, in the words with which Carnacki always brought his post-dinner tales to a close … out you go!

David Barnett

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Tarzan set to swing into 21st century with new series of novels

Book Group Librarian — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:15:15 +0000

Edgar Rice Burroughs estate backs new series of children’s books by author Andy Briggs, designed to bring the bare-chested jungle hero up to date

Jane has an iPod and Tarzan is facing up to environmental catastrophe: following literary excursions into the childhoods of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, readers are now set to venture into the teenage years of a 21st-century Lord of the Jungle.

Tarzan first swung onto the page in 1912 in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes. After his parents Lord and Lady Greystoke, marooned in west Africa, were killed, their baby was adopted by a great ape and raised as one of them, before falling for another castaway, Jane Porter. The star of 24 books by Burroughs, the bestselling story of the “brown, sweat-streaked, muscular” Tarzan has also been adapted for film, comics, television and radio.

Now the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate has backed a new children’s series about the bare-chested hero, set in modern Africa and aimed at nine to 11-year-olds. By Andy Briggs, author of the Hero.com and Villain.net books, the series is promising to “bring Tarzan the Eco Warrior to the PlayStation generation” as an “edgier and more feral” character. Briggs, a long-time fan of Tarzan, believes the character is ripe for a reboot. “I think now more than ever Tarzan is a relevant character,” he said this morning. “He was the first eco-warrior, and I wanted to hold on to that.”

Set in and around the Congo, the Tarzan of the new books will be aged around 17 or 18, while Jane, whose father is part of an illegal logging expedition, gets lost in the jungle at around 14 years old. “The original Jane is a classic character, but she’s not a modern woman,” said Briggs. “I wanted her to be tough, to be Tarzan’s equal. Not physically – she’s not jungle savvy – but I wanted her to be a tough kid. She’s had a very hard life but she’s been brought up with technology – she’s part of the Facebook generation, she owns an iPod. But as she goes deeper into the jungle, she sees its beauty.” The first book in the new series, Tarzan: The Greystoke Legacy, will

be published by Faber & Faber in 2011, followed by the second in 2012, during official Tarzan centenary celebrations.

“I didn’t want to steamroll all over classic characters,” said Briggs. “I think fans of the original books will be pleased – I’m not just straying off and doing something completely different, it’s a nod to the original. It’s the same action adventure but with a more modern storyline, and hopefully feels fresh and new.”

Tarzan’s new adventures follow the successful launch of Charlie Higson’s Young Bond series in 2005 by Puffin, and the first outing this month for a 14-year-old Sherlock Holmes in Andrew Lane’s Death Cloud.

Alison Flood

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Book Addicts 5th Birthday – July 2010

Book Group Librarian — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 12:14:08 +0000

Happy Birthday to US!!!!!!!!!

Yes we are five this year and to celebrate, we will be having lots of fun things for you to do on the site during the month of July which is our birthday month!

Stay tuned for more details!

NB: Please note that during this month, registration is closed on the forum. If you have been referred by an existing member, please contact us by using the contact form here on the blog.