Every writer of reportage ought to learn from the Kapuscinski controversy. Creative non-fiction is a slippery slope

Had he lived a few years longer, Ryszard Kapuscinski might well have won the Nobel prize for literature. Although these things are shrouded in Vatican-like secrecy, I bet that he was on the Swedish Academy's rolling shortlist. Journalists in many countries would then have hailed him as the first "non-fiction" writer to win it since Winston Churchill in 1953. Now a huge row has broken out in his native Poland over a new book which suggests that his non-fiction was not so non-fictional, after all. This row has already blown round the world, because Kapuscinski's name is a global byword for a certain kind of literary-political reportage.

I have just read the book, which is called (in Polish) Kapuscinski Non-Fiction. Its author is the journalist Artur Domoslawski, to whom Kapuscinski had been model, mentor and friend, and it has been criticised on several grounds. These include his handling of the travelling writer's allegedly numerous love affairs, which I do find insensitive, and of his communist past and occasional contacts with the secret police, which I think Domoslawski handles well.

More broadly, the book is condemned as being a denunciation of a former mentor. Kapuscinski's widow calls it "patricide". This is not how I see it. I find that the author tries to be fair, allowing many different voices to speak. He captures the Ryszard I knew, starting with a brilliant evocation of his warm, nut-brown, disarming smile. Literally disarming in Ryszard's case, because that almost pantomime-humble smile got him through many a dangerous confrontation with armed men, in Africa and elsewhere. But this book is the protracted cry of a worried and even a disappointed disciple – one who, in his nearly three-year journey of investigation, found things that deeply disturbed him.

The heart of the matter, for Domoslawski, me, and probably the wider world, is the frontier-crossing between fact and fiction. Some of us have been worrying about this for years. In 2001, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy held a symposium on Witness Literature, delicately indicating that prizeworthy Literature, with a capital L, was not confined to fiction and poetry.

I gave a talk (now reprinted in my book Facts Are Subversive) in which I observed that "with Kapuscinski, we keep crossing from the Kenya of fact to the Tanzania of fiction, and back again, but the transition is nowhere explicitly signalled". In the same year, the anthropologist and writer John Ryle wrote a coruscating review essay in the Times Literary Supplement, documenting numerous inaccuracies, exaggerations and mythifications in Kapuscinski's writing on Africa. He argued that most of them tended towards what Ryle called the "tropical baroque", in which everything becomes more exotic, wild, savage, extreme and, dare we say, oriental. Now Domoslawski retraces some of the master's footsteps, to Addis Ababa, for instance, where Kapuscinski researched his famous book on the fall of Haile Selassie, The Emperor, or to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He finds Kapuscinski's own witnesses complaining of inaccurate and fabulated material. There are numerous examples.

What Kapuscinski did is really no longer in doubt. The question is what we make of it. One school is represented by the American writer Lawrence Weschler, whom Domoslawski quotes as saying: "What does it matter which shelf we put The Emperor and Shah of Shahs on: fiction or non-fiction? They will always be terrific books." A schoolfriend of Kapuscinski says The Emperor is "the best Polish novel of the 20th century". And of course those books were also about Poland. They were read by Polish readers partly as allegories of their own situation, and they might have been blocked by the communist regime's censors had they not been firmly presented as non-fiction about far-off reactionary places.

A second school, which one might call "Ryszard's handwringing defenders", is well represented by Neal Ascherson, himself the author of superb reportage from Poland and elsewhere. Kapuscinski was a great storyteller, not a liar, he writes on the Guardian books blog, and there is an important difference between the news reporting and the books. But then he makes this, to me, very surprising statement: "Almost all journalists, except for a handful of saints, do on occasion sharpen up quotes or slightly shift around times and places to heighten effect. Perhaps they should not, but they – we – do." Really, Neal? And how much, pray, is "slightly"? And how far may one go in "sharpening up"? In the rest of his blog, however, Ascherson goes on to worry that Kapuscinski did not make it clear enough to the reader what he was doing.

The third school, to which I belong, says that even if there is not – as Ascherson vividly puts it – a "floodlit wire frontier", there is nonetheless a vitally important line, or frontier zone, that writers of non-fiction should strive never to cross. If we do cross it, we should put a different label on the resulting product. Domoslawski names one reason for this: simple fairness to readers. Readers need to know what they are getting. After all, at least some of the excitement of reading a writer like Kapuscinski comes from believing these things actually happened. He was there. He saw it with his own eyes. He nearly died getting the story. The rhetoric of his own writing often beats that drum.

The second reason goes deeper. There are, it seems to me, few more responsible callings for a human being armed with a pen than that of being a veracious witness to great and grave events. In introducing that 2001 Nobel symposium on Witness Literature, the then secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, suggested that "truth is initially nothing but that which a credible witness certifies". This may not work as a universal philosophical rule, but it certainly applies to what writer witnesses do, especially when they stand alone amid tragedy or triumph. To bear witness to genocide, war, revolution and human courage amid inhumanity is – forgive the pathos – a sacred trust.

Yes, in our selection of facts, images and quotations, in our characterisation of the real people we write about, writers of reportage do work in many ways like novelists. But in recognition of that responsibility to history, as well as the "non-fiction" promise we make to our readers, we must stick to the facts as best we can find them. We must not change the order of events even "slightly", nor "sharpen up" anything that appears between quotation marks. We all make mistakes. No one sees the whole picture, or can be truly objective. Everyone has a point of view. But if I say I saw that, then I saw that. It was not in a different street, at a different time, or told me by someone else over a drink at the hotel bar.

I see two ways forward. One, humorously suggested by Domoslawski himself in an post-publication interview, is that in bookshops there should be a shelf between fiction and non-fiction, with a new category marked simply "Kapuscinski". The other is to learn from Kapuscinski's marvellous work, but also from his transgressions – and hence to bear truer witness.

Timothy Garton Ash will be talking with Jon Snow at the Frontline Club in London on 16 March

• Ryszard Kapuściński
• Poland

Timothy Garton Ash
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As Disney rebrands Rapunzel as Tangled, we imagine what other children's stories and fairy tales could be made more appealing to boys

Disney is taking no chances. Book publishers have long since realised that anything that sounds too obviously girly is a complete no-no for the unfairer sex – hence JK Rowling's books weren't published under the name of Joanne Rowling. Hollywood has taken rather longer to make the connection. But after less-than-spectacular US box-office receipts for The Princess and the Frog, the studio has decided to rebrand its forthcoming cartoon in an effort to win the little chaps back. So Rapunzel has become Tangled – complete with an all-action male swashbuckling hero. It's worth a go, I suppose. Here are some other titles boys might like to see.

Malice in Wonderland

Freddy Krueger has a day out in Alton Towers and picks off a coachload of schoolchildren one-by-one in a gore schlock-horror fest before a grinning Cheshire cartoon cat and his trusty dormouse lieutenant come to the rescue.

Red Riding in Da Hood

A young Che Guevara pimps his BMX bike and heads off to the Bronx to take out a gang of neo-fascist hyenas who have been terrorising the local community of multicultural zebras.

You Beauty and the Beast

It's the last minute of extra time in the World Cup final, the score is 0-0 and the game is heading for penalties, when Wayne Rooney starts his run in his own half. He beats one German Hofmeister bear, then another, and another, before curling the ball into the left-hand corner.

GI Snow and the Seven Dwarfs

Matt Damon flies south to Colombia where he rounds up his cute band of seven undercover chihuahuas – Sneezy, Dopey, Edgy, Wired, Wasted, Psychotic and Sleepless – and destroys the world's largest cocaine factory.

• Walt Disney Company
• Animation
• Fairytales
• Film adaptations

John Crace
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Google and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage have reached an agreement to digitise up to a million out-of-copyright works at the national libraries in Florence and Rome, including some by Galileo.

And it's just two weeks after an Italian court gave three Google executives suspended prison sentences over a video of bullying on YouTube that had been removed once the company was told about it.

Google is not only to work closely together with the Italian libraries, but also with the Italian ministry of culture – the first time that the search engine has had a government department a such a close partner on such a project. Google called it a "groundbreaking deal".

"The libraries will select the works to be digitised from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy's most famous poets and writers," says Google's strategic partner development manager, Gino Mattiuzzo, in a blogpost announcing the deal.

While the costs will be covered fully by Google, the company will pass the scans on. The books will be available to groups including the EU's Europeana project, which already has scanned 6 million digital items of cultural value.

"We believe today's announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners," says Mattiuzzo.

Google has similar arrangements with Oxford University, Madrid's Complutense University, the Bavarian state museum and others.

However, it's not clear whether Google is creating the world's biggest library or the world's biggest bookshop. Some fear the search engine is exploiting cultural heritage as a cheap context for advertising.

Recently, a New York judge postponed a decision on whether the company should be allowed to display parts of books still in-copyright.

Google on the other hand claims good intentions: "We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius – like Shakespeare and Cervantes – are part of our human cultural history."

• Google
• Ebooks

Mercedes Bunz
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Let's play. Let's play with words. Let's start with a man and a room and see where it takes us. But is that room a hotel room, a bedroom, an office ...

And hello from my hotel room. I can't remember how many hotel rooms I have occupied since I last wrote to you, Best Beloveds, but they have been numerous and various and have served to confirm me in my belief that I should stick to the same chain if I can, because then I'll always be at home – in somewhere relatively cheap, neutral and suitable for typing. The beginnings and drafts of all my books have, frankly, spent more time in hotel rooms than even the most energetic Wag.

For those of you who read the previous blog, my cunning plan to divide my time between the play and the novel (while doing a bit of standup and a show in Bath) came somewhat loose on its hinges when the play won, became indecently insistent and ended up monopolising all the parts of last week, so that I didn't spend either flailing about a stage, or hurtling across railway platforms. The play is now with its intended recipient and he has agreed to take care of it – it's probably already peeing on his carpet, chewing his shirt collars and bleating endearingly when he puts it back into its box. For which I, of course, apologise. Very high-maintenance, plays.

And, as relative peace descends between meetings – I'm in London, which is where meetings happen, and muggings, obviously, which are just a kind of vigorous meeting … Anyway, I'm overdue for another chat with the novel. A new section is rattling about and needs to be expressed. But, before I start, I thought I'd look at the process of putting one word after another – the process that no one but the author really sees – the process that is difficult to examine properly, even in one-to-one sessions with students.

So. This won't end up in my novel, but let us say that I have the feeling there's a man about the place and that the place is a room. I wouldn't normally start with something that vague – it would generate an insane amount of rewriting – but this will at least demonstrate that, having written, we can scrabble around and see what the words suggest in the way of playmates they might need, and paths they might want to follow. With or without preparation, the picking and grinding and staring which will now ensue is inevitable – prior knowledge would simply make it more informed.

So.

So all over again.

A man and a room.

Right.

A man walks into a room.

We're off then. He's a man, definitely a man, not a lady, or a unicorn, or an urchin – not even urchin-like characteristics – unicorn-like, then? Does he seek out virgins? Not that I'm aware of. Was he at any time a lady? Nope.

A man walks into a room.

Sure it's not the man? Bit more definite – the man. That being the definite article and so forth. They're both rather boring, though. What about – our man? I quite, for no reason I can put my finger on, like our man. It has implications.

Our man walks into a room.

Present tense. Feels appropriate. Doing a lot in the present tense at the moment. Will we argue with the present tense? Not just now. I feel there is something – research, preparation – that tells me things will be revealed about our man and if he is in the present tense he will learn of them with us in real time and this seems a good thing. I will keep it for now.

Don't know about the a, though … The bounce in our man seems to render a room rather flat and translucent. He isn't a translucent chap. I don't think it's the room, either. I think it's his room.

Our man walks into his room.

Hmmm. Walks is, of course, appalling. Apart from the fact that we may just need the man in his room and may simply assume that he got there in one of the usual ways according to the laws of physics and no entering is necessary – walking is just tedious.

Hopping?

Yes, well, if you're not going to be helpful.

Limps.

Oooh, I quite like limps – he may have been to places and done things, our man. He may limp. I may hear the thump of that through a thin carpet on a wooden floor … But I'm mainly having a problem with into his – it is slightly difficult to say and therefore to think – it is gluey and unmelodious, somehow. Into his … I don't like it.

Our man is in his room.

Ah, now then – no mucking about getting there, don't need his life story – well, we may, but not at the present juncture. Yes.

Our man is in his room.

Sort of scans, that does. We need things to scan – presses them so much further and so much more easily into the dear readers' brains, and they notice them so much less. We need them not to notice, just to open up and let us be. Good. Possibly.

This is a very short sentence – is it a sentence? Are we doing the staccato thing, choppy entrance and then we'll settle down?

He stands.

Apparently we are.

His bottle of rye is in the desk drawer.

Yes, I knew we might wander off down some mean streets in a bit – shut up with your nonsense. He isn't thirsty, he isn't wearing a fedora, if you want to imagine he's Humphrey Bogart for a while, you're allowed to, because that may help. We like Humphrey Bogart. We have faith in him.

Our man is in his room. He stands.

Is he standing because he was sitting? Or has he been standing all this while? What need we imply?

The leather armchair his Aunt Maude gave him in 1976 squeaks beneath him as he rises in a way that reminds him of his fondness for rubber underwear.

I am going to give you such a slap in a minute. Expo-bloody-sition. Honestly.

He stands by the window.

Okay. Not enough, though.

He stands by the window and waits.

Not entirely unmelodious. Run that all by me again.

Our man is in his room. He stands by the window and waits.

That may do for now. And it may be that we're a bit choppy, because he's a bit tense, which is fine – he's our man – if he's tense, we all get tense.

The light of the sunrise highlights his broad cheekbones.

Right, I'm filling a sock with room service apples, taking you into the bathroom and hitting you with it until you either get a grip or die like the useless weasel you clearly are. Light and highlights? Because we love helpless and meaningless repetition? And highlights anyway? What height is the window – I was getting upper window myself – how is the bloody light striking him? I like that it's sunrise, but I'd prefer dawn, off the top of my head, and DON'T LET ME EVER CATCH YOU SLIPPING POINT OF VIEW LIKE THAT – WE'RE IN CLOSE THIRD. HE CAN'T SEE HIS OWN SODDING CHEEK BONES, CAN HE? WHAT, IS HE THINKING ABOUT HIS CHEEKS FOR SOME REASON? LOOKING AT HIS REFLECTION IN THE GLASS WHICH WOULDN'T EVEN WORK BECAUSE IT'S LIGHT OUTSIDE BECAUSE OF YOUR BLOODY SUNRISE – IT'S THE APPLE SOCK FOR YOU, MATEY, AND NO MISTAKE.

Our man is in his room. He stands by the window and waits and outside the sun is rising and he watches it. There is a slowness about it that he likes.

Maybe. We're less choppy – he seems rather more smooth and substantial here, but I don't like that second it. Its can get awfully woolly and, as established, repetition makes me tetchy. About it that – bit of a tongue twister.

There is a slowness to its progress.

Maybe.

There is a slowness in its progress.

Maybe

There is a slowness in the heat of it that he likes.

And again?

There is a slowness in the heat of it he likes.

We're not shaking the it, but it seems more excusable … Can't miss that beat though, I don't think. Once more from the top.

Our man is in his room. He stands by the window and waits and outside the sun is rising and he watches it. There is a slowness in the heat of it that he likes.

And is this a hotel room, or a bedroom, or an office room? Has he been up all night? Does he sleep usually? Is there someone with him? Are they asleep? Why does he like slowness? Does he have a limp? Is it possible to write that without hearing the silent comedy question – a limp what?

And on we would go, round and round and round until it's as good as we can manage. And then some more.

Welcome to the rest of my evening. Onwards.

• AL Kennedy
• Fiction
• Words and language

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Below is a selection of items from the writer's archive, newly acquired by the Harry Ransom Centre, including his first ever poem, a first handwritten draft of Infinite Jest, a letter from the startled editor getting his head around the novel's vast scale, and one of his lists of 'VOCAB'

• David Foster Wallace

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Manuscripts, annotated books and juvenilia to be made available following the acquisition of the late David Foster Wallace's archive by the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Centre

Look at a selection of items from the archive here

The archive of the late David Foster Wallace - which includes everything from draft manuscripts to childhood poems - has been acquired by the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin. Scholars and fans will soon be able to explore the painstaking reading and writing that went into works including his vast novel of entertainment-addled America, Infinite Jest.

Wallace, whose reputation as one of contemporary America's most significant writers continues to grow, took his own life in 2008, aged 46.

As well as manuscripts for Wallace's books, stories and essays (with his meticulous edits marked in different coloured inks), the archive includes research materials, his own often heavily annotated library, and early work stretching back through his college and graduate school writings to a poem he wrote as a young child. This last, "Viking Poem", was composed at around the age of six, and shows Wallace experimenting with his signature as well as revealing early signs of the acute comic sensibility that would mark his later work. ("If you were to see a viking today" the poem advises, "It's best you should go some other way / because they'd kill you very well / and all your gold they'd certainly sell / For all these reasons stay away".)

A further curiosity of the archive are the lists - sometimes jotted in the endpapers of books, sometimes typed - of unusual "VOCAB" (as Wallace heads one such sheet). Perhaps unsurprisingly for an author with such a gymnastic style, he carefully marked down words such as "primipara" ("woman who's [sic] pregnant for the first time"), "tardive" ("adj – having symptoms that develop slowly or appear long after inception – used of disease"), and "sciolism" ("pretentious air of scholarship") for use at a later date.

Bonnie Nadell, Wallace's agent, who helped his widow organise the archive, said the papers were left in fairly chaotic condition, but "as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful ... We want readers to see how he thought, because how he thought was unique and beautiful and precise. Anyone looking through his drafts and even his books will see the level of thinking that went into every sentence and every page."

Don DeLillo – another of the many contemporary authors whose archives are now held at the Harry Ransom Centre, and with whom Wallace corresponded while he was writing Infinite Jest – commented: "The work of David Foster Wallace, so vitally and fearlessly attached to the culture around it, will be a source of exploration for generations to come,"

Publisher Little Brown has donated its editorial files relating to Wallace, dating back to 1993, to the collection. The files include materials for Wallace's posthumous novel, The Pale King, but these will not be added to the collection until the book's publication, scheduled for April 2011.

Michael Pietsch, Wallace's longtime editor, said: "David's letters are delightful to read in themselves, and we hope that scholars will benefit from finding his notes to his editors and copy editors in the same archive with his draft manuscripts, journals and other correspondence."

The Wallace materials are currently being processed and will be available to researchers and the public in autumn 2010. A small selection of items are being exhibited until April.

• David Foster Wallace
• Fiction

Lindesay Irvine
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From Petronius to John Steinbeck and Evelyn Waugh, the novelist considers books that have mastered the art of dialogue, ensuring that 'they always speak to us, not least between the lines'

Born in Chicago but educated in England, Frederic Raphael is probably best known as the author of Glittering Prizes, and its sequel Fame and Fortune, both of which he adapted into acclaimed TV and radio series starring Tom Conti as writer Adam Morris. This month, he publishes a third volume in this series, Final Demands, which finds Morris contending with middle age and its discontents and which he has also adapted for BBC Radio 4.

Raphael is also a prolific author of some 20 other novels, as well as history books, biographies and film screenplays. Last year he completed a strikingly contemporary translation of Petronius's Satyrica, (published by Carcanet, priced £12.99).

Buy Frederic Raphael books at the Guardian bookshop

"Dialogue brings a novel to life. It is possible to compose fiction without it, just as Georges Perec was able to write an entire book without using the vowel "e", but one had better be a genius to affect such forms of composition. And once is quite enough. It may also be possible to contrive great blocks of prose, in which landscapes are described and psychological states analysed as never before. But a writer who cannot make characters talk, and have their conversations require us to listen to them, is locked into airless formality.

"Dialogue tells us what people say and it hints at what they do not. It encourages readers to bring a book to life by enticing their participation in it. They then supply their own reading of how loudly or softly, truly or falsely, words are exchanged. When a writer allows his characters to talk among themselves, he grants them their freedom. If only because the subconscious can then chime in, his premeditated scheme never wholly dictates what someone will say.

"Dialogue in a novel is like stained glass, the surrounding prose is there to frame and support it. Even Marcel Proust, who certainly delivers paragraphs of dense prose, used dialogue brilliantly; and silence too. His greatest character, the Baron de Charlus, is arrogant, garrulous and caustic. But when an arriviste hostess finds the nerve to banish him from her house, his inability to find any kind of crushing retort signals the moment when the narrator, Marcel, is able to stand away from his mentor's shadow. Thenceforth he is free to depict him with merciless accuracy. Dialogue can be used in various ways and various registers, but a writer who masters its nuances will produce novels that always speak to us, not least between the lines."

1. Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

O'Hara was a keen observer, above all of the Pennsylvania Dutch inhabitants of the town he called Gibbsville (a permeable disguise for his birthplace, Pottsville). He could mimic local speech and vocabulary so that the reader can overhear it. The story of the life and death of Julian English is a masterpiece of erotic suggestion and narrative economy.

2. The Satyrica by Petronius Arbiter

Petronius, who lived during the reign of Nero, who ordered his suicide, wrote a sprawling picaresque novel of which only the chapters concerning the gross Trimalchio, a millionaire ex-slave, have survived in their entirety. Petronius was a master of elegance and of its low cousin, scorn. The adventures of Encolpius, his anti-hero, and his louche companions are salacious and farcical by turns, but they are brought to life by the often absurd and obscene chat which comes directly from the gutters of Roman life. As I discovered when translating Petronius, dead languages can still have raucous voices.

3. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

Lewis was nicknamed "Red", more for the colour of his hair and livid complexion than on account of his politics, but his capacity for catching the vocabulary and aggressive philistinism of middle-western America was as boundless in print as it was, we are told, in person. In company, he was a mimic who did not know when or how to stop; in print, he made accuracy into satire. Babbittry entered the American language as the style of salesmanship and humbug to which John Updike surely paid rhyming tribute in his creation "Rabbit" Angstrom, a salesman in the Lewis tradition.

4. A God and His Gifts by Ivy Compton-Burnett

The last novel published in Ivy's lifetime was one of the first I ever reviewed. I am glad that I recognised genius when I saw it; a limited genius perhaps, but there it was. Ivy's novels were always a tapestry of dialogue, formally phrased but full of hidden poisons and traps. Her milieu was the Edwardian upper middle-class, on the surface polite, savage underneath. She described very little, but lust, violence and greed all emerged from the seemingly prim dialogue. Melodrama was never more elegantly articulate.

5. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch was a philosopher and a romantic, with a sensuous intelligence and a keen ear. Her novels contain slabs of rather too colourful landscape and gushing description, but her great strength lay in the clever edginess of her conversations. I wrote the movie script of A Severed Head and it was, I confess, an easy job: unlike most writers', much of her dialogue sounded good out loud. I remember, for instance, an unfaithful wife saying, "It's all or nothing" and the husband's answer: "Let me recommend nothing." Facile? You do it.

6. Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham

Maugham is regularly dismissed and as regularly resurrected. He had no grand opinion of his own work, but he learnt early on, when writing plays, that a capacity for amusing dialogue supplied the best means for capturing an audience. Cakes and Ale (the title comes from Twelfth Night) proves that the literary world of the 1930s, with its cliques and claques, is not very different from that dominated by today's Michaels and the ubiquitous Antonias. It is said that Hugh Walpole soon came to recognise his own voice, and character, in Alroy Kear and, no doubt, Thomas Hardy in Edward Driffield. What is a novel of manners without a serrated edge?

7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

When I first opened Steinbeck's great novel about "the Okies" – migrant sharecroppers from the 1930s dust-bowl of Oklahoma – I found their dialogue, phonetically reproduced on the page, quite incomprehensible. But read it aloud and the voices of the Joad family come out fighting, as it were. The family's trek to golden California has plenty of cruel incident, but when I think of Rose of Sharon, for instance, I hear her name "Rosa-sharn" the way Tom Joad said it, and says it.

8. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Most pundits now proclaim Brideshead Revisited as Waugh's enduring masterpiece. Its purple passages have their nostalgic glamour, but isn't there something lamingly absurd in all that well-spoken snobbery? Waugh does so love a Lord. The earlier Scoop is a satire on pre-war Fleet Street and has a savage larkiness that never visits Bridehead. What does one remember in particular? The line "Up to a point, Lord Copper", the nearest an employee dares come to disagreeing with his tyrannical (Northcliffian) boss.

9. The Golden Fruits by Natalie Sarraute

Sarraute was one of the "new novelists" who set out to renovate French fiction in the early 1950s. Her novel, like Cakes and Ale, is a satire on the literary world, this time in Paris, written almost entirely in dialogue. Its title refers to a novel which is only talked about in her text. It is first saluted as a masterpiece and then slowly picked to pieces by critics and envious friends of the author.

10. A Roman Marriage by Brian Glanville

The story of an English girl seduced and enchanted by an Italian lover is told with appropriate irony by a man who knows and loves Italy almost as well as England. His novel Along The Arno is early evidence of his ability to bring characters to life by reporting them, so to speak, with curt accuracy. A Roman Marriage is a comedy of incompatible manners, Anglo-Saxon and Latin. I confess, if it is a confession, that A Roman Marriage is dedicated to me. It is not a sign of corruption to speak well of one's friends, not least when their work deserves it.

© Volatic Ltd 2010

• Best books
• Fiction

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Doomsaying precludes the possibility of ingenious solutions – and indicates a morbid vanity that we must be the saviours

Isn't it welcome to have Ian McEwan as an advocate for a little optimism in the climate change debate? His hope, expressed in his new novel Solar, that humanity will prove ingenious enough to solve the problem through the skill of coming generations is a welcome change from those who portray our descendants as helpless victims of our "excess".

Their injunctions to "save the world for our children and grandchildren" fly in the face of history, which repeatedly shows how progress – from the wheel to the internet – transforms the world picture as time marches on. The doom brigade has its moments, such as the collapse of the classical world in Europe, the Black Death and the first world war, but they are exceptions to learn from. And we have learned.

Not to the extent of mastering clairvoyancy, however. Like miserabilism, a constant in human behaviour is the inability of Today to successfully imagine Tomorrow. The archive of prophecy and science fiction contains some good guesses, but in general the seers get it wrong. Which of my grandparents, addressing me in the 1950s, could possibly have foreseen today's IT? Which of my grandparents' grandparents had a notion of the bicycle or national parks?

This is true of scientists as much as of the more general type of wise person. Science is too often mistakenly treated in the way that history was by those 19th-century Germans who thought that one day the whole truth could be set down. Certainty is not absolute. Scientists are ambushed by novelty – see Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein – as often as the rest of us.

None of this is to argue against the risks of global warming or prudence in facing them. It is to warn against vanity, in the form of the exaggerated belief that it is all down to our generation: here, now, hurry, rush. It's also an appeal against pessimism, because of the limitations glumness places on the very potential which, odds-on, will prove the planet's salvation.

A writer in the Economist's most recent green supplement made this point neatly by questioning assumptions (rather reminiscent of Catholic dogma in Galileo's day) that spending the world's limited resources on Tomorrow rather than Today is necessarily morally right. The Economist's writer said: "Since future generations will probably be much richer than we are, it makes no more sense for us to sacrifice our wellbeing for them than it would to expect 18th-century peasants to go without gruel so we can buy more computers."

That is the sort of sally that deserves a wide hearing. If we stall Today's wonderful spread of international knowledge, travel and general prosperity, we risk a future like Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, where unknown Miltons remain mute and inglorious and village Darwins never get further than their shacks.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change
• Ian McEwan

Martin Wainwright
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Should you be getting an e-reader for the planet's sake? I'd always thought not, but a new study has made me think again

The recent announcement that Foyles are soon to launch the bebook is further proof (as if any were needed) that the e-reader bandwagon is well and truly rolling. News that the New York Times book review will soon be available in e-reader format, meanwhile, also points the way to an increasingly interesting future for what we used to know as the "print industry".

The ability to buy something I wouldn't be able to get in a better format elsewhere (so long as the UK remains starved of the glory of the Sunday NYT delivery) even makes me think I might possibly find a use for an e-reader. Up until now, they've struck me as less pleasant than books, far more problematic in terms of copyright theft and – at least for personal use – rather decadent. They're a big computer that can only read books and so, I've always assumed, a waste of resources. But a bit of research has led me to question even that assumption.

I've only managed to find one report – on the Kindle (by The Cleantech Group) – but it backs up suggestions that so long as e-readers are used as book replacements rather than supplements, they soon start to pay back in carbon terms. The report states that a book uses up "approximately 7.46 kilograms of CO2 over its lifetime" and that the Kindle produces "roughly 168 kg" during its lifecycle, making it "a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle."

There are still problems. Crucially, the report states: "Amazon declined to provide information about its manufacturing process or carbon footprint" – so we're still really dealing with educated guesswork. I was also curious about whether the report has taken into account the role of books as "carbon sinks". My theory was that books last a long time before they are destroyed – often longer than their source trees ... And even when they aren't furnishing rooms they have a useful second life under the floor of motorways and similar.

When I contacted the author of the report, senior research analyst Emma Ritch, she said: "While some of the carbon stored in the forest will remain stored in paper, the majority will be emitted into the atmosphere. There is a significant amount of carbon stored in the soil, the roots of harvested trees, the usable saplings and other understory vegetation. These release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere when they decay, or when they are burned as energy sources for the pulp mill."

So it seems I'm – literally – barking up the wrong tree. Even wood sourced from sustainable forests uses a lot of energy (not to mention water) when it is being processed, and yet more when transported afterwards. (Books are heavy, after all.) Ritch also made the point that textbooks are often updated – and so become obsolete – every couple of years, showing another clear advantage to ebook readers. There are also plusses for academics ploughing through multiple journals and probably even for professional book reviewers.

However, I parted company with Ritch's positive view of e-readers when she suggested a further advantage: "the consumer who purchases an ebook often has the rights to use it on five or more devices, meaning multiple users within a household would not have to purchase multiple physical versions of a book." I'd actually view that as a problem, as far as fiction goes. Five or more devices probably gives the ebook a lifespan of little more than 10 years if my experience with such machines is anything to go by – and that's if you don't share it. A book (so long as it stays together) can be shared with hundreds of people over hundreds of years.

I also have concerns about the supply side. There's no information available about the energy required to run Amazon's "whispernet" and it's hard to work out the amount involved in supplying other books for download. The internet is too often thought of as a cost-free resource in carbon terms – but it's recently been suggested that Google alone produces as much as some nation states. Ritch suggested a good comparison would be that "a physical book purchased by a person driving to the bookstore creates twice the emissions of a book purchased online." But of course, that depends on someone driving rather than walking to the shop.

Nevertheless, I'm part-way convinced. There are clear advantages to using e-readers in schools and academe. At home, I'm less sure – especially when you factor in side-issues such as the toxicity of the heavy metals used in ebook readers and their batteries. I also hesitate because the devices are so new we still know little about how they're used.

Here, I'm hoping an informal survey here might shed more light. So tell me: if you own an e-reader, how often do you use it? (Have you for instance topped off the 22.5 books The Cleantech Group require to break even with traditional books in carbon terms?) Are you buying fewer books? How long does your battery last? Have you had to replace it? Do these carbon savings seem realistic to you? And has that influenced your decision to buy one?

I'd also be curious to know if other ebook agnostics are likely to be converted by the idea that they could be more environmentally friendly. I know it makes me waver. But then again, won't an iPad be more useful? Even if that does mean my reading could be interrupted by emails … And you can't throw the thing across the room when whatever you're reading gets too annoying …

• Ebooks
• Amazon.com
• Carbon emissions
• Ethical and green living

Sam Jordison
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Arrrr all film pirates really from Bristol? The secret of a good review; Can scratched glasses be repaired or must they be replaced?

What was the regional accent of the stereotypical 17th- and 18th-century pirate?

I think you mean, in films, why are all pirates from Bristol? Simply, because they arrrrr!

Steven Edgar, Bristol

For many people, myself included, the archetypal pirates' accent was that popularised by Robert Newton, who appeared in more than 50 films, most notably as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, a role he reprised on TV in the mid-1950s.

Newton was born in Shaftesbury, Dorset, and spoke with a distinctive West Country accent. Aboard most English/British ships, there were significant numbers of Scots (William "Captain" Kidd), Irish (Walter Kennedy), and Welsh (Admiral Sir Henry Morgan) sailors. It seems, however, that the largest group of sailors came from the south-west of England (Edward Teach, AKA "Blackbeard" was a native of Bristol and Francis Drake was from Tavistock in Devon) than anywhere else, which is unsurprising, given the pre-eminence of Bristol as the main trading port with the West Indies. So Newton's accent may well have been historically accurate.

Nader Fekri, Hebden Bridge

The accents must have been diverse. Reference to Black Bart Roberts and The Book of Welsh Pirates and Buccaneers, both by Terry Breverton, shows the birth places of captured pirates in the early 18th century to include Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Greece, Ghent, Liverpool, Antigua, Bristol, Canterbury, Whitby, York, Devon, Cornwall, Wiltshire, Berwick, Jersey, the Isle of Man and London.

Additionally, substantial numbers of crew members were escaped slaves of African descent from Antigua, and seamen from Sierra Leone. All crew members were treated equally, regardless of race, and shared the spoils.

Lewis Burrell, Ty Sign, Risca, Gwent

It's probable that the pirate William Dampier, born in 1651 at East Coker, spoke with a Somerset accent, at least in his early years. He possessed remarkable intellect, and while engaged in questionable buccaneering activities he studied the animals, birds, botany and weather systems encountered on his travels. Later, as a more respectable captain of a Royal Navy ship, he circumnavigated three times and reached Australia before Captain Cook. His early home still stands in East Coker, and a plaque in the church reads: "To the memory of William Dampier, Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer."

Mollie Vearncombe, Oadby, Leics

Why are bad reviews more fun to read than good ones?

Partly schadenfreude, partly the fact that the most successful artworks are those that are beyond the descriptive powers of language. (For the same reason, Dante's Inferno is a much better read than his Paradiso.) It's almost a definition of a great critic – a Shaw, Tynan or Kael – that s/he is as compelling when writing about artistic triumph as about disaster.

David Cottis, London SW15

Because the writer has much more fun writing them.

Chris du Feu, Beckingham, Notts

My optician swears my scratched glasses, with the non-scratch coating, can't be mended. Is this to force me to buy new lenses, or is it true?

Occasionally I have had shallow scratches polished out but usually new lenses are needed. You could ask your optician if they could be replaced under the manufacturer's guarantee, which varies between different types of coatings. One of our suppliers provides an anti-scratch/anti-glare coating that has a two-year unconditional warranty where lenses are replaced, no matter how many times they are damaged during that period.

We have only had to replace one set, and that was for a farmer whose specs looked as if they had been mangled by a combine harvester.

Chris O'Neill, Jack Brown Eyecare, Glasgow

Why does the Doctor always regenerate as a Time Lord, not a Time Lady?

In The Doctor's Daughter (series four) Jenny (played by Georgia Moffett, daughter of a previous Doctor, Peter Davison) is a clone of the Doctor, so surely regeneration into a Time Lady is perfectly plausible. And anyway, doesn't this mean that the Doctor is not the last of the Time Lords? Unfortunately, Jenny now seems to have disappeared to the farthest reaches of the space-time continuum, rather than featuring again, even in the farewell episodes – what has happened to her?

Carolyn Reid, Sandy, Beds

Any answers?

A new film, Centurion, suggests that a Roman legion (the 9th) was wiped out in Scotland in AD117. Did this really happen?

Brian Smith, Leeds

What is there in a song that makes someone like it? I love key changes, but no one else seems to – why?

Emma Wilkinson, Exeter, Devon

Who owns the moon and its resources?

John McGill, Cambridge

Post questions and answers to nq@guardian.co.uk. Please include name, address and phone number.

• History
• Television
• Doctor Who

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Everything you need to know about Stieg Larsson, the bestselling author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

▶ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was originally published in Sweden as Men Who Hate Women, a title English-language publishers rightly thought read, Don't Buy This Book. It is the first of the Millennium trilogy, a series of contemporary Swedish thrillers featuring Lisbeth Salander, a semi-psychotic hacker, and Mikael Blomqvist, a leftwing investigative journalist. The film adaptation opens on Friday.

▶ Stieg Larsson conceived the Millennium books as a series of 10 novels, but he died of a heart attack, aged 50, before the first volume was even published. Because he was himself an investigative journalist, there were unsubstantiated rumours Larsson had been murdered. An outline manuscript of the fourth book is believed to exist, but his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, refuses to let it be published.

▶ Despite the edgy nature of the protagonists and its themes of violence against women and political corruption, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a surprisingly old-fashioned story of a large dysfunctional family set in a closed community. The writing is also old-fashioned: Larsson allows no "I" to go undotted nor "T" uncrossed as the story continues for another 60 pages after the main denouement.

▶ Because Larsson and Gabrielsson never married, his estate has been the subject of a long legal battle. Under Swedish law, Gabrielsson has no right to inheritance, despite being mother to Larsson's child, and she is locked in a dispute with Larsson's father and brother who copped the lot. A 1977 will, in which Larsson left all his assets to the Communist Workers League, has been deemed invalid as it was unsigned.

▶ The Millennium trilogy is published in the UK by Christopher MacLehose, the man who brought other Scandinavian writers, such as Henning Mankell and Peter Høeg, to a British audience. The trilogy was originally offered to the publishers Orion, who turned it down because they believed it was impossible to make a household name out of a dead thriller writer in just three books.

• Stieg Larsson
• Crime books
• Crime

John Crace
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If the party is to reconnect with its soul, it needs to revive the passion for culture that seems to have ended with Michael Foot

Michael Foot was a name I knew long before I was old enough to vote Labour. My dad's fading paperback copy of the first volume of Foot's biography of Aneurin Bevan was one of the familiar volumes on the bookshelves at home. I don't think I knew he was a politician, but I did know he was a writer. Much later on, as a sixth-former, I read his collection of essays Debts of Honour – well-written and sensitive homages; model essays. Foot was the real thing: a cultured radical. But how many of those are left in the Labour Party?

I hate to be a party pooper. If Gordon Brown's political renaissance continues and he holds the line at the general election, I will be ready with the champagne. I've never voted for any other party and never will. But what happened, please, to the culture and learning that once flourished on the British Left? Where is the Labour passion for poetry and language that Foot epitomised?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I can't think of a single convincing book or article on an artistic, literary, musical or architectural theme that a leading and current Labour politician has published since 1997. I can't picture anyone in the cabinet who has a prominent passion for Keats – or even Bob Dylan, for that matter. They all seem completely cultureless. There may be a lot of economic learning in New Labour, but a zeal for the arts (as opposed to a desire to be associated with fashionable art) is nowhere to be found.

I'm not accusing them of lacking taste. I'm accusing them of lacking soul. Art, in the end, is the vehicle of feeling: Foot had deep feelings that he could perhaps express better by writing history and criticism than he could by leading the party. And surely the philistinism of the Blair and Brown years has been a reaction against what might have seemed the impotent intellect of old Labour.

But please: if the good news holds and Labour really does have an electoral future, let's bring books – and passion – back into it. The history of our working-class ancestors is what makes many of us vote Labour; and we get at that through poetry, because it is a feeling.

• Art
• Michael Foot
• Poetry
• Labour
• Arts policy
• Arts funding

Jonathan Jones
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Indian militant groups are adopting celebrities to push their cause in civil society, bypassing dialogue with the state

Manifesting different aspects of the divine essence, Indian gods and goddesses are often portrayed seated upon or beside the animals deemed to be their particular "vehicles". The elephant-headed Lord Ganesha, for example, has a rat as his vehicle, as if to demonstrate in a manner both quotidian and profound that the least of creatures might bear the greatest of truths. On the plane of India's politics, however, where truths and untruths both require vehicles, celebrities have come to serve as the beasts of choice for groups seeking to publicise their causes.

Such figures sometimes make unwilling vehicles, as the recent cases of MF Hussain and Taslima Nasreen illustrate. The first, an eminent artist living in exile after threats from Hindu militants objecting to his "pornographic" depictions of a goddess, has just accepted Qatari citizenship. The second, a Bangladeshi writer who went into exile after threats from Muslim militants objecting to her portrayal of Islam, has been accused of writing an article against veiling that provoked violence in the Indian state of Karnataka.

Both cases have prompted a great deal of soul-searching about freedom of expression in the Indian press. But celebrities do not always make the best political vehicles, as the failed agitation against film star Shahrukh Khan illustrates. The actor was accused by the same people who attacked Hussain of being unpatriotic, because he spoke in favour of picking Pakistani cricketers to play in the Indian Premier League

On the heels of these much-publicised events, we now have the writer and activist Arundhati Roy chosen as a mediator by Maoists conducting an insurgency in the country's hills and forests, with India's largest peacetime deployment of troops ranged against them.

Of course Hussain, Nasreen and Khan were merely targets of opportunity for small groups seeking publicity and power by a display of violence, since the "offence" caused by their work would at other times have gone unremarked. The Maoists are a different proposition entirely, and their celebrity vehicle has been carefully chosen.

After all, Roy is known internationally for her campaigns against the violence of states and private corporations, both of which have been making inroads into the hills and forests where insurgents find support. But this makes the Maoists' need for such a vehicle all the more interesting, celebrities hitherto being the favoured sponsors of urban organisations alone.

Unlike these latter, the Maoists cannot even represent themselves, with their leaders in hiding and no sympathisers ready to act as mediators. For Indian communists are more severely set against the Maoists, seen as threatening their parliamentary legitimacy, than are the country's capitalists, who routinely make deals with them over the use of forest lands and resources.

Apart from providing them with the visibility and legitimacy they lack, Roy and other activist intellectuals like her allow Maoists to participate in the lively debate that characterises India's civil society, liberating them in one stroke from the highly specialised and secretive negotiations that states are wont to conduct with terrorist and insurgent groups. But this turn to civil society cannot be purely instrumental, simply a way of advertising the Maoist cause.

Indeed militant groups of all sorts, such as the Indian Mujahideen, who in 2008 carried out a number of bomb blasts in several cities, are increasingly in the business of addressing India's civil society rather than its state. Generally these are outfits that have no institutional presence but possess a voice thanks to technologies of information and destruction. The turn to civil society, represented in this instance by celebrity sponsors, might indicate the greater participation of its members in political life, albeit outside the representative institutions of the state.

On the other hand it is as likely to demonstrate a depoliticisation, with insurgents and terrorists no longer the potential leaders of a state but private actors fighting for private interests, much like the corporations that Maoists both defy and depend upon.

Yet it is not the corporation so much as the non-governmental organisation that appears to provide a model for such groups, which have by and large forsaken the revolutionary rhetoric of the past to focus on setting in place "alternative" or "community-based" forms of governance in specifically designated areas.

By waging war on these movements the Indian state is trying to turn them into political actors, and by appealing to intellectuals as mediators the Maoists seem to be trying to entrench themselves within civil society. What results is not simply a battle between marginalised forest traditions and capitalist modernity but a fight for the future of politics itself in the age of celebrity.

• India
• Arundhati Roy
• Islam

Faisal Devji
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To mark World Book Day last week, Crisis and other charities held a day-long 'human library' project, part of a growing movement in the US and Europe. Instead of borrowing a book, you borrow a person

John Domokos

The Taqwacores is really a film about individualism – but attention is likely to focus on the music and its sexual content

The Taqwacores, a film directed by Eyad Zahra based on the novel of the same name by Michael Muhammad Knight, is playing at the media and music extravaganza South by South West (SXSW) in Austin this March. It's exciting to imagine who will be watching at a festival that features guests such as Spike Lee, Chuck D and Devo.

I had the pleasure of seeing the film at a sold-out screening at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah last month.

Author and screenplay writer Michael Muhammad Knight and I first began communicating in 2005, when he originally reached out to me to play the character of Jehanghir in an adaptation he was scripting with a Brooklyn-based film-maker named Cihan Kaan. Budgeting issues proved fatal for that iteration, and Mike went through a few other directors before I left our fledging Taqwacore scene in America for Lahore.

It's been surreal to come back to the US three years later to a complete film and cast. In an interview, the celebrated director of Night of the Living Dead George Romero mentioned how Hollywood vetoed his first script for Diary of the Dead because it had a non-white lead.

I was reminded of Romero's words when I saw the vibrant, all-minority cast of Eyad's film. In many ways the book The Taqwacores should have been an impossible adaption to produce, with no major white characters, and its heavy ruminations on Islamic theology. In America and the UK, white audiences are not only unresponsive to minority leads, but overexposed to Muslims in particular.

The odds are stacked against the film. Eyad has taken Knight's book and trimmed it into a clearer narrative – one that begins and ends with the main character Yusef, played faithfully by Bobby Naderi. The movie follows Yusef on his safari through punk rock in America, which will likely surprise audiences. Yes, there are Muslims along the way, but the main subject in this film is Yusef's flirtation and growing disillusionment as he tries to navigate through both punk and religion. If there is a message to take from Zahra's film, it is that only you can only take what you can from the world around you. This is played out by each of the characters in their own way: burqa-cloaked Rabyah, reimagined by Naureen DeWulf, crosses out verses from the Qur'an that she finds problematic.

During the question-and-answer session after the screening, an elderly Muslim man asked the cast and crew how an unmarried woman who is obviously pious enough to wear a burqa could perform oral sex on a man. One of the crew members said that women are complicated, and dress is not a determinant in how she acts. The man said: "Muslim women do not act like this." There was a tense moment where the crew member responded: "Are you trying to tell me you know more than I do, a Muslim woman, about myself?"

This movie is likely to be seen as the defining moment for Taqwacore, the way Wild Style was the defining moment for hip-hop. Many think that it was a unique feature of the Taqwacore music scene to have been inspired by a book, but so much English punk owes its own "ultraviolence" to a fiction as well. Academics will eat up the self-referential elements of the subculture as some evidence of Generation Twitter, or whatever we've been touted as. But this relationship between people is as old as artists of different mediums being inspired by each other. In some ways, hearing my band's music open and close the movie was a testament to my enduring friendship with Knight over the past half a decade.

For other people, I anticipate The Taqwacores will be polarising. Many responded to the Muslim punk angle, which accounts for its uniqueness. But these elements are only a shrink wrap, and Eyad's adaption is not a Muslim-punk film any more than Kubrick's adaption of A Clockwork Orange is a Slavic-punk film. The film is about individualism, and how even the most rigid dogmas are, in effect, ideas we've come up with on our own. For those who are curious, the documentary Taqwacore is also being screened at SXSW.

• Punk
• Film
• Film industry
• Pop and rock
• Islam
• Religion

Basim Usmani
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The author and illustrator of the perennially popular Spot stories shows how he draws 'my little puppy' and explains how fell into writing the books almost by accident. Photographs by Martin Godwin and Ladybird

I love all the new literary platforms filling my days with fresh pickings, but I also miss taking one book at a time

Two years ago, I had a very straightforward reading pattern. Every few days, I'd read a book. I would immerse myself in its characters and storylines, swim in its style, snatch every opportunity throughout the day to return to its enveloping world. Then I would finish it, and start another one.

Things were so simple then.

I wish I could blame it on the Christmas eReader, but my evolution into schizophrenic multimedia literature butterfly started long before it landed in my lap – via iPod and Audible, Twitter and Gutenberg, and brick-like new-writing magazines that take weeks to digest. My reading has taken on a strangely driven, guilty quality, as I try to justify the cost of all those subscriptions and all that hardware by consuming fiction in an unprecedentedly multiplicitous and simultaneous way. Secretly, I long to return to a world in which I had a loving, stable relationship with one paperback at a time.

A day in my life as a literary butterfly starts at 7.30am, with a few snatched paragraphs of the short story in last weekend's Sunday papers over a morning cup of tea. By 8.30am, I'm fully plugged into my latest audiobook as I stride to the station. On the tube, it's the rush to plough through the story and poems in the latest, expensively imported edition of the New Yorker, before next week's lands on my mat. Throughout the day, I might catch up on a Twitter novel every few minutes, or check out the latest freemium offering from an enterprising new author. Lunchtime, and it's this quarter's Granta, now so stuffed with good things it has become Bolaño-weight and lives on my desk, banned from travelling. Back on the tube, I crack out the eReader, scroll past the 100 free books I haven't even dipped into, and try to settle into the download I just had to buy to see if it worked. Finally, at bedtime, I open my book – my real, smelly, prefix-free book – and fall asleep, waking six hours later with ink on my face.

A recent study by Stanford University's Department of Psychology has (in the time-honoured fashion of research) told us something we know all too well: we children of the long tail economy pay the price of unlimited choice with the misery of the always-something-better-out-there syndrome. "Even in contexts where choice can foster freedom, empowerment, and independence", says the study's author, Professor Hazel Markus, "it is not an unalloyed good. Choice can also produce a numbing uncertainty, depression, and selfishness."

As psychologist Barry Schwarz puts it in his brilliant TED Talk on the Paradox of Choice, "there's no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare." And it's true: I love the fact that I can download some great new author's self-published PDF onto my screen, that I can carry the electronic Riverside Chaucer wherever I go, that I can access almost any obscure old tome from Amazon marketplace and get the cream of the fictional crop delivered quarterly to my door. But it's a long time since I experienced the intense pleasure of leisurely browsing; the careful selection and devoted reading of a single text. For me, reading has become a fractured competitive sport.

There is joy in this cornucopia of ways to consume quality literature, but there is also anxiety and loss – I feel like an alcoholic pushed into a permanently stocked bar, and I can't even taste the merlot because I'm trying to down a tequila and sip a martini at the same time. I'm dying to return to the mono-media of paper and glue. But I'm just not sure that I'm strong enough to resist the lure of that Dickens in my pocket; the new Jim Crace short story nestling in that mega-zine; the stream of Pepys updates scrolling down my screen.

Molly Flatt
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Stop worrying if you find this legendary modernist masterpiece unreadable – I can sensationally reveal that the author couldn't make much sense of it either

People often wonder, rather unfairly, what exactly academics do with their time; what purpose they serve for culture and society. And now we know: they spend three decades making minor adjustments to Finnegans Wake. Well worth the time and effort, I'm sure you'll agree.

No, I'm joking – sort of. Certainly, it's good that there are still people like Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon in our world, who devote themselves to something as knotty, exhausting and defiantly uncommercial as their new edition of that labyrinthine book. It's good that some people still do things for the love of art.

On the other hand, in this case, the fact is that all their labours won't make a lick of difference because James Joyce's famously unreadable novel will unquestionably remain, well, unread. Finnegans Wake has attained mythic status, not because of inherent greatness or influence but because most people are unsure if it actually exists, since they've never met, or even heard about, anyone who's finished it. Rose and O'Hanlon say the new version is a "smoother" read – but this is clearly a fib, because Finnegans Wake is not, and never will be, comprehensible to anybody outside of, maybe, God. Maybe.

As I understand it, the book consists of one single word of approximately 550,000 letters. It's the work of linguistic gobbledegook that all other works of linguistic gobbledegook reverentially call "The Supreme Being". Within days of publication, an entire Finnegans Wake-based industry had sprung up in academia, with eggheads under such pressures of production that they had to sub-contract much of the meta-textual and semiotic analysis work to factories in the Far East. For the rest of the literate world, however, it has remained an impenetrable morass of fevered gibberish, stylistic showing-off and made-up words that you can't even check in the dictionary.

And today I can reveal – in the kind of sizzling, book-sational exclusive our slugabed competitors can only dream about – that even James Joyce himself can be included in that group. The author of Finnegans Wake couldn't read his own book.

On the basis of the mountainous Joyce scholarship, I had always presumed the documentary archive was pretty much worked over. Then, the other day, browsing in an antiquarian bookshop near the Ha'penny Bridge in Dublin, I picked up an exorbitantly priced (and predictably "pristine") first edition of the Wake inscribed by the author to modernist lunatic and sometime Trotsky lookalike Ezra Pound. Turning out of idle curiosity to the terra incognita of the closing pages, imagine my surprise when a letter, signed with an unmistakeably flamboyant JJ, fluttered delicately from between the sheets.

"Re. your telegram: Yes, it's true – I've never quite managed to finish it. I know I probably should, being the writer and all, but Christ, it all just gets too much, doesn't it?" Joyce, whose writing earned him adulation, notoriety and extremely poor sales in about equal measure, confesses that the main problems with the book were "a lack of plot", "too much of that stream-of-consciousness crap" and "the way it all gets really confusing, and then even more confusing – my head hurts just thinking about it."

"Nothing really happens, does it?" he continues, in a surprising mea culpa, "The guy falls off a ladder, loads of weird stuff goes down, and then it just sort of finishes. That's not going to make me want to keep turning the pages, and I wrote the damn thing. And all those portmanteau words and free-associating screeds and what-have-you … who needs that when you're trying to relax with a good book?"

He recounts how he really, really made a big effort to get through the whole thing by finding the comfiest armchair in the house and pouring himself a nice glass of port. But, he adds, "God, it just feels endless after a while. By about page 340 I couldn't take any more linguistic virtuosity or multi-layered intertextuality. I kept saying to myself, 'Give me a bit more action, dammit.' Or a nice romance. Even some vampires would do."

The letter ends with Joyce bemoaning, "That bastard (TS) Eliot's going to have a field day when he finds out about this."

Nestled alongside Joyce's shock missive was an unsent draft reply from Pound, adumbrating some suggestions for improving the enjoyment of his own masterpiece. They included: "Hold the book upside down; drink half a bottle of absinthe before beginning; pay someone else to translate it into readable English while you chug-a-lug that absinthe; skip every second word; invent your own back-story for the characters of Earwicker and Anna Livia, possibly involving futuristic cloning techniques; read something else."
 

• James Joyce
• Fiction

Darragh McManus
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In what is predicted to be a pivotal year for ebooks, with next month's iPad launch, the number of books available as iPhone apps now exceeds the number of games

The electronic book passed another milestone this month, with the number of books available on the iTunes App Store passing the number of games for the first time. According to data released earlier this month by the mobile phone advertising company Mobclix, there are more than 27,000 books now available as apps. Games lag behind, with 25,400 published this year, followed by entertainment, education and travel.

It's a trend that seems to be gathering momentum, with the number of book apps outnumbering games almost two to one over the past month. Next month's launch of the iPad, Apple's new tablet reader, alongside a dedicated book store, is set to accelerate the shift to electronic reading still further.

"The iPhone has always been perceived as a games-centric device, said Canongate's digital editor, Dan Franklin, "so the idea that books are outranking games is very exciting."

Franklin, who moved into digital publishing a year ago, said that his first thought on getting the job was, "When are Apple going to do something?" because "they have form". A move from Apple into the ebook market will "bring new people to reading like they have brought new people to music with the iTunes store", he added.

"It's a very exciting time," agreed Penguin's digital publisher, Jeremy Ettinghausen. "It's very exciting that people are using iPhones to read books."

"I travel on the tube every day," he continued, "and you do see people reading books, reading newspapers and playing games. As publishers we need to be on the things that people are using during that distraction time, that commuter time."

But he argued for caution in focusing on the number of titles being published, stressing that "it's very easy to produce books for the iPhone".

"It's interesting to see what's selling," he said, "rather than what's being submitted – quite a lot of the books are free downloads, whereas the games tend to be paid for. I'm more interested in what's going out than what's going in."

A significant proportion of these apps are free downloads of out-of-copyright books, but according to Franklin the recent surge in book apps can also be attributed to improvements in Apple's approval processes.

"Initially books weren't seen as being top of the pile," Franklin explained, but with the launch of the iBookstore imminent, "Apple are now taking more notice of book submissions".

"With the iPad due next month, and Google looking like they're going to launch their Google Editions, this is the key year for electronic books," he said.

• Ebooks
• iPod
• iPad
• Publishing

Richard Lea
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Paper continues transition from print-focused to multiplatform model with launch of supplement on Sony reader

The search for revenue by deconstructing the New York Times into its most valuable pieces for various platforms continues. Up next: the New York Times Book Review for e-readers.

The NYT marketing executive James Dunn mentioned the new subscription effort during a session of the Digital Publishing Alliance (DPA) and E-Reader Symposium, according to Poynter's Bill Mitchell. After the session, he told Mitchell the standalone subscription should be available on Sony digital readers in the next couple of weeks, with Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook versions to follow.

Dunn didn't share any pricing details. The Book Review is already
sold as a standalone print subscription for $1.75 a week surface mail,
$3.75 a week priority, which may offer some guideline.

The Book Review is part of the Sunday edition via Kindle, where a monthly subscription runs $13.99; the crossword puzzle isn't.

The Times sells online subscriptions for its famed crossword puzzles at $39.95 (free for print subscribers) and licenses a subscription mobile version that runs $1.99 a month, $9.99 for six months and $17.99 for the year.

Related stories

New York Times annual report stresses advantages of online over print advertising

NYT Hit 75 Million Mobile Pageviews In December; Reached 3 Million iPhone App Downloads
NYT Starts Serving Up Intrusive Ads in Its iPhone App

• Digital media
• Newspapers
• New York Times
• Charging for content
• Ebooks

Mercedes Bunz
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