"Much niggly bitching in the wake of Stef Penney winning the Costa book of the year award," notes Madame Arcati. "The central niggle is that Penney's novel successfully evokes the barren tundra of northern Canada even though she's never visited the country. Her starting point for 'colour' was the library not the airport: oh woe! At least one can say that her novel is, from a mileage perspective, carbon neutral. Agoraphobia might yet be the salvation of the global environment ... Let us celebrate the sinew and pliability of the remote (or even cursorily familiar) creative imagination to evoke other places. After all, if literary credibility is contingent on number of air miles, why isn't Alan Whicker a celebrated novelist?"
"I wrote about the young men in the trenches of the first world war," agrees Susan Hill, commenting on Madame Arcati's post, "as indeed did Pat Barker. Both our novels were well received, but neither of us has been either a man or in the trenches of the first world war ...So the lady has not been to the Canadian tundra. So?"
"Congratulations for what sounds like a remarkable book," offers Petrona, although she, too, is irritated by "the extent of the media coverage that has been given to the fact that she has never been to Canada, in comparison with discussion of the book itself. Since the invention of the papyrus and parchment, people have written about events and places that they have witnessed only in their imagination. It is interesting to be able to write convincingly about somewhere you have never been, but not overwhelmingly so."
"While Penney got all the accolades in the media, the real beneficiary of hosannas is her publisher, Quercus," observes Sarah at GalleyCat. The small press "found its way with an unusual path - combining 'contact' publishing (or packaged books) with trade books such that the money made from one sector allows editors to buy within the other ... Crucial to the small houses' marketing power has been a consortium called the Independent Alliance. It combines the sales and marketing efforts of seven small publishers, including Faber, Canongate and Profile, to achieve competitive scale. 'Without the alliance, we never would have had the reach or visibility for [ The Tenderness of Wolves ] that we had before the award,' said Mark Smith, Quercus's CEO."
"Wading through Henry James's books seems to me to be the literary equivalent of wearing a very stiff and uncomfortable shirt simply in order to attend an endless speech given by a dull and pompous old headmaster ..." Sam Jordison's provocative post on the Guardian's books blog prompted hundreds of users to register their own literary pet hates. "I couldn't get into Henry James much either," agrees CheererUpper, and "I haven't got very far with Gabriel García Márquez, but that's because I suspect he's completely full of shit. All this dying and being born and Tragedy and Drama crammed into every single paragraph. Everything so extreme and passionate all the time. Yeah, right."
"Jack Kerouac ... inexplicably people seem to believe not only that the fact he wrote On the Road makes him a legend, but also that the fact they have read it makes them legends by association," sighs Suraby. "It is absolute and utter crap. And, yes, The Return of the Native - hours of my life I'll never get back. Hardy, you owe me."
"Jane Austen. Any of the Brontës. Awful, frothy, 19th-century chick lit," opines buckethead. "Oh, and William Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury really did signify nothing for me."
"The question," muses garsidepotter, "is not whether we like a book, but whether it is important. Do you imagine the greatest creative artists did what they did because they hoped that one day somebody would 'like' their work? I don't 'like' Shakespeare very much, but who am I in the face of the overwhelming weight of his achievement? ...A lot of liking depends on our age - I couldn't get enough of Márquez and Grass and Rushdie once, now I can barely read a page. But that doesn't diminish my respect for them. We need to think about this more - there are many novels that schoolchildren should be kept away from because they will not be able to make anything of them. One more thing - the person who said something negative about Faulkner is doomed to get everything wrong."
