What does the Man Booker Prize mean for established, perhaps even great writers, who have not become huge mainstream successes? Alan Hollinghurst, who famously takes many years to write a book, said it buys time to write. Read more

A few weeks ago, someone on this blog posted a comment about how he found blurbs from authors on the front and back covers of books to be most useful recommendations. From what he said, it seemed to me that he was the sort of reader who would actually pick up a book because of its blurb(s). Read more

The feelgood element is much overrated in literature. Literature is a different kind of salve, and the thrill, sense of uplift, instruction and delight it provides should in no way be directly proportional to how well things turned out in the end. The ‘happy ending’ (or, in a phrase much used in literary – including, very much, publishing – circles, the ‘redemption and hope’ held out in the final pages) is also much overrated. Read more

I’ve been rereading a fair bit in the past month, and what better at such a time than to stumble upon a beautiful piece in the New Yorker on - what else but? - rereading? Read more

A kindly soul has sent me a copy of a book I have been looking for for months now: The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America by the Scottish writer, Andrew O’ Hagan.

The New York Times has called the 41-year-old O’Hagan the best essayist of his generation (he is also the author of three terrific novels – Our Fathers, Personality and Be Near Me, and The Atlantic Ocean shows you why. Read more

Are books meant to make us feel good? Are they meant to make us cheerful? I don’t think so. Not always.

Books are meant to make us feel awed and humbled. The pleasure they provide – the pleasure of the mind, the joy of seeing worlds created by words – is undimmed even if they are about catastrophic subjects, even if they are nihilistic in their approach or end in tragedy or are untouched by redemption. Read more

Making lists is an amusing parlour game. When it comes to books, it’s probably trickier than, say, making a list of the best opening batsmen ever or the best guitarists of all time.

So much of our response to what we read depends on when we read it, and how. In my early teens, I used to be besotted with Richard Bach. By my late teens, I had begun to think of his stuff as sophomoric pseudo-philosophy-lite. Read more

We read, as the 17th century English poet John Dryden told us, “for instruction and delight”. We read, as the Victorian novelist George Eliot said, because “art is the nearest thing to life”. What that means, the critic Louis Bayard explains, is that “to approach the mystery of our own condition, we have to grasp the mystery by which words make worlds”. Read more