Alibi's top earning crime writers

Is Michael Crichton really a crime writer? First Great Train Robbery, I suppose. Bit of a stretch for Ian Fleming, come to that.

Is there really a novelist called Docx? I look forward to Pdf and Rtf.

Can someone who accuses genre writers of being amateurish get away with the sentence "we are lead to believe"?

... by The Sensational Alex Salmond Gastric Band.

Bohemian Anchovy
Bjork and Blessed
I am Nick
Stand and Deliver

And Nicholas Lezard usually talks sense (see section in brackets at end):

But whether or not there is some trauma that Chabon prefers to skate around, or underplay (his parents' divorce when he was 12, perhaps?), there is no gainsaying his pleasing niceness, a kind of all-consuming tolerance which manifests itself in a wide-eyed appreciation of the geekier areas of the imaginative universe. Star Trek, the "American Flagg" comic strip, Sherlock Holmes and MR James stories, Doctor Who . . . there's a recurrent strain of Anglophilia in these writings that won't hurt his popularity here at all; one of the sweetest moments in Manhood for Amateurs occurs when he stupefies an English expatriate with his family's knowledge and deep appreciation of Doctor Who. The Englishman doesn't even know of the Russell T Davies reincarnation of the show. "'It's a pretty good show,' I said, but I knew that my tone and my posture and the wild fannish tenor of my voice were saying It's the greatest show ever in the history of television." (I would like to make a substantial bet that he is a fan of The Lord of the Rings too; there are hurried nods to Tolkien's imaginarium here and elsewhere, but of all the means for professional suicide that are available to the writer, expressing affection for Tolkien is one of the most effective.)

See: http://www.youtube.com/user/undergroundfilm

Several hundred animated shorts - see, say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecobsIyonPM&feature=channel_page and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql_Eml3_BBw&feature=channel_page


Weird stuff

I haven't written up my visit to Lewes yet - but note the description here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/02/thomas-paine-festival-lewes

Read, unfinished, hated (I don't do much hating, but the second and third groups meld). Note some series as series, and Banks. 145 titles; 24 read, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25.

Kobo Abe, The Face of Another (1964)
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
David B, Epileptic (1996-2003)
Nicholson Baker, Room Temperature (1990)
Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet (1833)
Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835)
Iain Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room (1960)
Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins (1954)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006)
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (1951)
Sybille Bedford, A Legacy (1956)
Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift (1975)
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale (1908)
John Berger, G. (1972)
Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (1986)
Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (1943)
William Boyd, Any Human Heart (2002)
Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil (1945)
Fanny Burney, Evelina (1778)
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Ron Butlin, The Sound of My Voice (1987)
Albert Camus, The Outsider (1942)
Angela Carter, Wise Children (1991)
Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)
John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles (1929)
Colette, The Vagabond (1910)
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
Jim Crace, Being Dead (1999)
Jim Crace, Quarantine (1997)
Daniel Defoe, Roxana (1724)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Julie Doucet, My New York Diary (1999)
Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (1965)
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (1956)
Shusaku Endo, Silence (1966)
Anne Enright, The Gathering (2007)
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (1986)
EM Forster, Howards End (1910)
Michael Frayn, Spies (2002)
Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky (1992)
John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848)
André Gide, The Immoralist (1902)
André Gide, The Vatican Cellars (1914)
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)
Knut Hamsun, Hunger (1890)
LP Hartley, The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944)
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)
Hermann Hesse, Narziss and Goldmund (1930)
Paul Hornschemeier, The Three Paradoxes (2006)
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days (1857)
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)
Henry James, Washington Square (1880)
Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare (1954)
BS Johnson, The Unfortunates (1969)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Molly Keane, Good Behaviour (1981)
Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk (1955)
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
DH Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie (1959)
Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz (1932)
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962)
Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley (1939)
Jack London, Martin Eden (1909)
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947)
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (1946)
Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk (1956)
Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (1957)
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901)
William Maxwell, Chateau (1961)
FM Mayor, The Rector's Daughter (1924)
George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859)
Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (2002)
Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet (1982)
Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955)
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)
Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (1973)
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (1930-32)
VS Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
Kenzaburo Oe, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (1969)
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (1972)
JB Priestley, The Good Companions (1929)
Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (1993)
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27)
Piers Paul Read, A Married Man (1979)
Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs (1915)
Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930)
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)
JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Cora Sandel, Alberta and Jacob (1926)
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (1993)
Carol Shields, Unless (2002)
Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)
May Sinclair, The Three Sisters (1914)
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Family Moskat (1950)
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (1991)
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005)
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)
Noel Streatfeild, Ballet Shoes (1936)
Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno (1923)
Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)
Elizabeth Taylor, Angel (1957)
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (1945)
Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship (1999)
Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 (1982)
William Trevor, Death in Summer (1998)
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862)
Miguel de Unamuno, Peace in War (1897)
John Updike, The Rabbit Omnibus (1960-90)
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)
Alan Warner, Morvern Callar (1995)
HG Wells, The History of Mr Polly (1910)
Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (1957)
Antonia White, Frost in May (1933)
Patrick White, The Tree of Man (1955)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson (1812)

Irvine Welsh reviews Murakami Ryū's latest novel in today's Guardina - "The dustjacket of Ryu Murakami's latest novel, Audition, somewhat pompously describes the author as a "renaissance man for the modern age"." Except that I saw Audition, the film based on this novel, some point around 2000 and it came out in about 1999. It's based on a novel by him - although the Wikipedia entry doesn't make clear which.

Charlie Brooker gets it:

So it's here at last. The dawn of the dumb has broken in earnest. Two mistakes occur - first Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross overstep the mark with an ill-advised bit of juvenilia, then someone decides to broadcast it. Two listeners complained, but that's by the by: it shouldn't have gone out. But then the Daily Mail - not so much a newspaper as an idiot's guidebook issued in bite-size daily instalments - uses the incident as the starting point for a full-blown moral crusade. Suddenly everyone's complaining, whether they heard the broadcast or not, largely on the basis of hysterical, boggle-eyed descriptions of what the pair said. Poor Andrew Sachs, who, having been wronged, graciously accepted their apologies and called for everybody to move on, looked bewildered by the sheer number of cameras stuck in his face. Because, by then, apologies weren't enough.

The Mail was so incensed, it printed a full transcript of the answerphone prankery under the heading "Lest We Forget" - and helpfully included outtakes that weren't even broadcast, so its readers could be enraged by things no one had heard in the first place. This was like making a point about the cruelty of fox-hunting by ripping a live fox apart with your bare hands, then poking a rabbit's eye out with a pen for good measure


Lest We Forget, of course, has rather significant meaning at this time of year as we don poppies, whether red or white or both.

Where are the books by women with big ideas?

Books like Freakonomics, defining significant cultural or economic trends with a punchy title, never seem to be produced by women. But why?

Apparently Naomi Klein and Susan Faludi don't count; nor Greer, Russ, Millett, Carter, Woolf, Wollstonecraft, Rowbottom, Paglia, Rubin, Dworkin, Gilbert and Gubar, Showalter, Jardine ... Why do I think The Guardian bookblog is actually trolling rather than saying something serious ever? Make brain dead statement and step back. Hey, I can do that...


On the other hand, maybe women know the truth: it's not the size of the idea that matters, it's what you do with it.