PETRONA

Ecelctic conversations with a scientific accent

Nature Network makes interesting reading for those who might think it is a highly technical, niche website for highbrow, specialist discussion.
For example, Brian Clegg, author of 31 (or 112, depending on how you look at it) books in his "ouevre", starts a fascinating discussion (certainly for those like me, on the outside) about publishers' advances, royalties, and whether you can earn your living as an author or just eat ice-cream with your earnings.
And what about the dandelions? Cath Ennis writes about her weekend work in her Vancouver garden; by reading her comment thread you can find out a great deal about dandelions, including useful things to do with them, how to get rid of them (and why they are so prevalent; this is a scientific site after all). Tomatoes and Japanese knotweed get a look-in now and again.
Jennifer Rohn feels the womanly force at a "power lunch for women", at which topics such as "why many at the table were earning less than their male colleagues, [and] how UCL could get away with allowing a particular science committee to be held at an all-male private club" were discussed. Jennifer can't imagine male-only groups focusing exclusively on gender issues. Cue a hugely wide-ranging comment discussion about discrimination (check out those Nobel prize statistics), playing musical instruments, and how rubbish is disposed of in various parts of the world (Finland is the best).
With its free-ranging forums, groups and blogs, Nature Network is a nice place to hang out on the occasional evening. Who needs Facebook?
 

Books off the beaten track

Catching up on a few reviews read over the weekend and last week, Frank Wilson, Emeritus Book Review Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, provides his reaction to a poetry collection,  'Save the Last Dance,' by Gerald Stern. "This isn't the chant of a high priest so much as the rhythmic riffing of a master jive-talker", writes Frank. After that sentence, I defy you not to go and read the rest of the review!

Amanda C. M. Gilles, a new and welcome reviewer at Euro Crime, very much likes Steel Witches, by Patrick Lennon, "an extremely enjoyable book. It is a fairly easy read, is very cleverly written and is an ideal book to lose oneself in." After reading Amanda's review, this book is definitely going on my list, and that's saying something, as I'm not accepting new submissions at the moment;-). Incidentally, while you are at Euro Crime, you can win a copy of Spider, by Michael Morley, should you so wish to answer the fiendishly difficult question set by Karen (who has evidently been taking lessons from Norm Price of Crime Scraps).

Table Talk features a review of Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn: I had rather mixed views of this book when I read it, but it won last years New Blood dagger award for first crime novel, so worth checking out via this review.

Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise provides her perspective of Thirty-Three Teeth, the second in Colin Cotterill's idiosyncratic "Coroner" series. Kerrie writes: "One of the things I enjoyed about this book is Cotterill's underlying humour. There are also glimpses of forensic pathology far removed from the world of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs. For those of us whose countries fought in the Vietnam War, this is also a look at the post-war world of Laos."

Colin Cotterill certainly has a vivid imagination, but perhaps the most bizarre creation on the crime-fiction block at the moment is The Prophet Murders by Mehmet Murat Somer: "a killer is on the loose, and transvestites are being murdered, the modus operandi becoming increasingly bizarre with each death. Our protagonist – fellow transvestite, nightclub owner and glamour puss extraordinaire downs her lipstick and ups the ante in the search for the religious nut." Karen Meek of Euro Crime interviews the author - fascinating stuff! There are reviews of the book on Crime Scene NI and on Shotsmag, if you can't resist finding out more.

Sunday Salon: internal life of characters

Thank you very much to the 22 Salonists who commented at the post I wrote last Sunday, about the direction of the Sunday Salon. I have replied, but you have to click on the arrow to page 2 of the comments to see: the signpost is not very clear I am afraid. I am especially grateful to Debra, not only for setting up Sunday Salon in the first place, but for going to all the considerable trouble of maintaining the site, setting up the RSS each time someone joins, and so on. Debra has made an addendum to the Sunday Salon main page and encourages further discussion at her blog, the DEblog, about the goals of the Salon.
Briefly, what has emerged from those who have expressed an opinion at all (less than 10 per cent of the Salon's members), is that it helps to have the RSS feed set to provide full posts; most people prefer to read, and do write, a dedicated Sunday post about reading; several people feel as I do that posts about other topics might be better not added to the Sunday Salon feed but can be regular blog posts.
The last two books I read made me think about how the filtering of the narrative through the persona of the protagonist can transcend a book into another level. Dead Point by Peter Temple, which I somehow managed to find time to review briefly, is a case in point. Taken at face-value, the detection plot is interesting enough, particularly as there are two separate mysteries and the author is an assured writer. But because we see everything filtered through Jack's internal landscape, the book achieves a deep richness and beauty: it is as if one is reading a poem in which one experiences sadness at the gradual destruction of a magnificent wild landscape; at loss of love; and at the death of the old ways and the birth of a new, harshly superficial culture. Crime fiction becomes literature, or crime-fiction is literature, whichever way you like to look at it.
The book I read subsequently, Not in the Flesh by Ruth Rendell, is written on a smaller canvas and is less ambitious. But the same applies. As a detective story, it works -- again, there are two mysteries, this time interweaving and converging instead of being in parallel. But what provides the emotional heart is the fact that we see the events through Chief Inspector Wexford's consciousness. He's an old man, coping with junior colleagues both more able than him (at information technologies and politically correct nomenclature, for example) and at the same time, much more callow and, in his perception, insufficiently valuing of (his) experience. The author is old herself, and so is this particular reader, so the book "spoke" to me in many subtly humourous yet sadly familar ways, such that I felt a kind of solidarity and emotional connection with both the character and the author -- which made me readily forgive the slightly unlikely aspects of the denouement.
This type of shared solidarity at a changing world is a comfort. An example is the strange sense of empathy and support I feel on my daily commute of misery bordering on the unbearable, when I think of Colin Cotterill's books, and how his Coroner, Siri Paiboun, survives deprivation (far worse even than the combined forces of South West Trains and Transport for London/Kings Cross Station) by his mental attitude.

Pattinase's forgotten books

Via Declan Burke of Crime Always Pays, I've discovered Patti Abbott's blog -- Pattinase. Patti is running a series on Fridays called Forgotten Books, which this week features Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. I first learned about this Swedish series of 10 police procedurals via Norm of Crime Scraps (see here for a subsequent post on the topic by Norm: and here for his list of all ten books). Harper Perennial have republished all 10 in the past couple of years, in a fantastic paperback format in which a different crime-fiction author writes an introduction to each book, and other material about each novel is bound into the back of the text. So far, I've read only three of the series; they are so good that I'm not rushing them. My brief reaction to reading the first, Roseanna, is here; and my reviews of The Man Who Went up in Smoke and The Man on the Balcony are on Euro Crime. I am anticipating the next seven with pleasure.

Some ideas of forgotten books in the genre? Hunt by A. Alvarez would be one of my suggestions, as would be Laidlaw by William McIlvanney. A third is Total Eclipse by Liz Rigeby, an exciting mystery story featuring a scientist-protagonist, which is unusual. There are lots of nice touches in this exciting book, maybe I'll read it again and review it for the new series.

A couple of choices at other blogs: Peter of Detectives Beyond Borders chooses the Harpur and Isles series by Bill James (a few of which I have acquired at his recommendation, but have not yet read); and Declan himself nominates Horace McCoy’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye over at Crime Always Pays - by reading the post I'm reminded that McCoy wrote the excellent They Shoot Horses Don't They?

If you'd like to know more about Patti Abbott's Forgotten Books series, see here for the first week's post, and more details. And here's a list of blogs that have participated in week two. Now all they need is an RSS feed so that all the posts and links can be collected.

Dead Point by Peter Temple

Dead Point is the third Jack Irish novel by Peter Temple. It is brilliant. Although I've very much enjoyed every book I've so far read by this author, in this one he joins the pantheon, in my opinion. Crime fiction does not come any better than this.
As the book opens, Jack and his racing "syndicate" suffer a double loss: their horse is injured so can't finish the race; and Cynthia, one of the team, has been mugged while collecting on the winnings from the previous outing. Jack and Cam swear to find the culprit.
Another of Jack's low-life associates, Cyril Wootton (of whom Jack has suspicions in the Cynthia affair), hires him to find Robbie Colbourne, a local barman who has been missing for some time. Wootton's client is a Judge, Colin Loder, and although Jack doesn't entirely buy Loder's reasons for wanting to find Robbie, he is unexpectedly charmed by Loder calling him a "colleague".
Essentially, the book tells the story of these two cases. Jack is depressed by the Melbourne winter, his love-life is not going well and change is all around him. Even the footy group are wavering in their support of their Fitzroy substitute team. And Charlie Taub, the cabinet maker for whom Jack works, is away visting his extended family for a suspiciously long time, leaving Jack to supervise the installation of a beautiful library that he and Taub have made for Mrs Purbrick, a rich customer with high-society connections.
I read this book slowly for three reasons: one, because of the rich, detailed plot, one's attention cannot wander; every paragraph contains information that might be relevant. Two, the quality of the writing is breathtakingly superb. And third, the evocation of a lost and changing world is completely involving. Jack's internal thoughts and emotions about the city, the people he meets, the world, women: it is all just perfect. The humour, his network of shady but charming rogues, various samidzat policemen, and the people Jack encounters on his search for the missing man, together create a unique and almost mesmerizing whole.
A final strength of this book is that the denouement is less dramatic than in previous novels, and hence more believable. Political machinations are involved as usual, pots of money and contracts (a leisure resort hangs like a miasma over the story), but passions are at the root here, which makes this book seem more rounded than the previous installments, and mean that events don't spiral out of control of believablity.
If you haven't yet read Peter Temple, you have a total delight in store. If you have, you will be like me and not able to bear to wait for the next Jack Irish book, Shooting Star (UK publication September).

I would like to thank Quercus for my copy of this book.

Design on X-ray structures

  In a guest post by Scott Keir at the Nature Network London Editor (a.k.a. Matt Brown)'s blog, I learn that the picture on the left, Dorothy Hodgkin's famous crystal structure of insulin, was used as the inspiration for the wallpaper design on the right. Dorothy Hodgkin's structure was the first time that anyone had used the X-ray diffraction pattern from a crystal to determine the three-dimensional, atomic structure of a protein. This particular molecule is of great medical significance for the treatment of diabetes, so Professor Hodgkin's achievement was doubly magnificent. Since I first learned of this achievement many years ago now, I myself went on to use the technique of X-ray diffraction to determine the mechanism of action of muscle fibres (which have the structure of a crystal lattice), though my feeble attempts were nowhere near those of the brilliant Prof Hodgkin. When she won science's ultimate award, one contemporary newspaper headline shouted "Housewife wins Nobel prize" (so the story goes). She was also a wonderfully generous person: in her later years, even though super-eminent and rather old, she quickly acceded to my sister's request to attend her and her fellow-undergraduates' end of year meeting, to talk to them about her life in science. People like Dorothy Hodgkin are such admirable role models: anyone interested in finding out more about her might like to check out the very good biography of her by Georgina Ferry.
But to return to the wallpaper. According to Scott, table surfaces, lace, plates, carpets, wallpaper, glass, fabrics, and even ashtrays were created from this Robert Sevant design, as part of the Festival of Britain in the 1950s, to celebrate the “essence of Britain” being “of Newton, of atomic research, of Captain Cook, of nuclear physics, and great works of humanity”.
For more information, see "From Atoms to Patterns", an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London, from now to 10 August. Scott writes that it "succeeds in provoking questions about designers’ inspirations, the beauty of science, and the attitudes of the science and design communities to each other, then and now. It contains a fascinating insight into British science, British design, and British optimism for a modern future, at a key moment in history for all three."

Become a better blog citizen

Via Information wants to be free (a "library 2.0" blog, if I may characterise it thus), I learn of a project to improve our blog citizenship. Apparently it is considered bad form to be a blogger but not to comment or track comments. Therefore, a "comment challenge" has been set up.  

"We would like to challenge participants to be better blog citizens tracking who is the commenter with:

• The most comments on a wide range of blogs (not just the “top” edubloggers)
• The most high quality comments that thoughtfully reflect on the topic
• The comments that provoke and promote the most learning
• And one more - we need your input! add to the activities page please."

Lots more at the link, which is also a wiki, so very collaborative. The whole thing is sponsored by "co-comment", an RSS-based comment tracker service. I tried it on two or three separate occasions before giving up on it. Basically the idea is that co-comment is a website that tracks all the conversations you are having in the blogosphere, so you can participate more efficiently. It didn't work for me, though, as the site was often down and the number of blog platforms that were supported was not great. Sometimes I would go to the co-comment page and it hadn't updated for days or weeks (not much use at blogosphere pace).  I might give it another go, in case it has improved, though I have found various "workarounds" (to use a technical term in regular use in my circles) to the problem in the interim. 
If the idea appeals, May has been designated the "31 day comment challenge" in which you are asked to undertake "focused commenting to become a better blog citizen, actively participating in conversations and sharing your learning."

Flooded with garbage

Nancy Banks-Smith (who has been going for even longer than me, and is still hilarious and razor-sharp) on The Flood, part 1 of which I watched last night. I shall not be watching part 2 (half because of the execrable adverts, trailers and sponsor messages, longer than the actual segments of movie, and half because I've it all before in Towering Inferno and various other disaster movies of the 1970s, down to every last cliche and detail):

"Tom Courtenay, however, saw it all coming. Suchet is typically decisive. "No man on the planet knows more about storm surges! We Need That Man Here!" Courtenay, who saves the film and London single handed, plays an absent-minded professor, slightly vague, almost vacant, but, on his own subject, precision itself. As he tells Suchet: "The danger areas include the Docklands Light Railway, 68 underground stations, 30 mainline stations, three world heritage sites, eight power stations, dozens of museums and art galleries and, of course, Whitehall." His daughter-in-law, the lovely Samantha (Jessalyn Gilsig), runs the Thames Barrier. She is Canadian, because Canada put up some of the money. His son, Rob (Robert Carlyle), is the head of the reassuringly named Defiant Engineering.They are all estranged from each other but the flood should fix that. That's what biblical floods (and towering infernos and crashing aircraft) are for."

"........."We must prioritise," said the police commissioner briskly. There's a woman who obviously lives in Kew not Lewisham. The royal family are airlifted to Balmoral. You really would expect them to know better by now. The Queen is well aware that it is her job to stand on Buckingham Palace balcony in a Burberry, waving to encourage her surviving subjects, who are hanging on to the Victoria Memorial for dear life."

Well, quite: the special effects may be good, but you need a decent plot (it was, truly, terribly predictable and clunky) and characters: here all, without exeption, terrible. Joanne Whalley, the only good thing about it, was wasted; the two "loveable common men" (straight from Pirates of the Carribbean, one, I am told, actually) were awful: they and the other actors delivered unbelievably hammy lines with varying degrees of lack of conviction. But the main issue was, why didn't everyone just go upstairs, instead of sitting for an hour in a car in the ground floor of a car park until the wave hit them, etc? Truly dreadful -- not to mention reinforcing my prejudice that it is always a mistake to watch live TV, especially on a commercial station.   

Mindless games

Via Cottontimer, who has an orange mind:

Your Mind is Purple

Of all the mind types, yours is the most idealistic. You tend to think wild, amazing thoughts. Your dreams and fantasies are intense. Your thoughts are creative, inventive, and without boundaries. You tend to spend a lot of time thinking of fictional people and places - or a very different life for yourself.

What Color Is Your Mind?

Some reviews of recent crime fiction

In one of the comments to my previous post, Kerrie mentioned that she finds not many crime-fiction books reviewed in the Sunday Salon group. I'll mention a few recent reviews here that I've read over the past few days, although knowing Kerrie she's probably read not only the reviews but the books as well! Here goes:
Random Jottings reviews R D Wingfield's Killing Frost (last of an excellent series), Reginald Hill's A Cure for all Diseases, and The Death Pictures by Simon Hall. I could be wrong here, but I don't think I've heard of Simon Hall before, and his books sound well worth a try from what Elaine (of Random Jottings) writes. The publisher, Accent books, also sounds like the kind of publisher I'd like to support -- this is how Accent's founder, Hazel, describes herself: "I'm the mother of triplets, manage my own publishing company, Accent Press and live in a lovely old school, at the top of a valley, in Wales. Previously I've been a jeweller, worked on cruise ships, in the Duty Free industry and run an organic wine business. I've lived in the US, Indonesia, Middle East and France. I guess it was time to settle down! Life is busier than ever running our own company but it's also enormous fun - I finally seem to have grown up and found out what I want to be......".
(Elaine, incidentally, has also recently seen the film The Golden Compass and asks for opinions on the film vs the book, if anyone wants to pop over.)
Musings from a Muddy Island posts an early review of Martin Edwards's latest, Waterloo Sunset: "The pace is well judged throughout - it has its breathless, nail-biting moments and more than one dramatic, revelatory climax near the end, but these are interspersed with pauses for reflection - so it manages to be a page-turner while still allowing the reader to breathe normally part of the time." I've read this book too, as it happens, and highly recommend it. 
Crime Scraps reviews Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison, an author new to Petrona: strong medicine indeed from the sounds of it, which Norman sums up as "a very gripping read with some memorable characters and a well thought out plot which is entirely believable knowing the foibles of human nature".
International Noir Fiction tackles Camilla Lackberg's The Ice Princess, which I haven't read but am certainly planning to. The review compares the setting with the reviewer's own experiences of Sweden, and of other crime fiction from the region. Glenn's opinion of Ice Princess is mixed, but he feels the author has captured "both the dark underside and the real daily life of her fictionalized village". I'll certainly be reading this book at some point.

Sunday Salon: is this the end for Petrona?

As a member of the Sunday Salon since it was first created by Debra Hamel and Clare Dudman about 4 months ago, and having written articles on other book blogs at that time to spread the word, I have been experiencing the group's evolution with interest. There are now more than 130 participating blogs. I feel that for me the time has come to take stock and question what I am gaining from, and giving to, the Salon.
As invented and presented by Debra, the Sunday Salon is an "informal, weekly, mini read-a-thon, an excuse to put aside one's earthly responsibilities and fall into a good book". And for the first few Sundays, this is what it was -- maybe half a dozen bloggers writing about and exchanging views, on a Sunday, of their reading -- sometimes about different books, sometimes about the same book if reading experiences either coincided or were stimulated by Salon posts.
I subscribe to the Sunday Salon in my RSS reader. I've therefore become aware that more and more posts are being tagged Sunday Salon but being written on other days of the week. These, and Sunday posts, are often not about book-reading, but about why the blogger was too busy or ill to read that week, or about other matters related to books but not about actually reading them. Given the increased membership of the group, and hence the greater number of posts to read, I begin to question how interesting I am finding all of this and therefore whether I want to be spending my time reading or scanning these posts, compared with reading about reading, which is what I like doing most in the blogosphere.
Of course, it is up to people to decide for themselves what to blog about. But time is very short, and I am thinking quite seriously of unsubscribing from Sunday Salon and instead subscribing on an individual basis to the half-dozen or so blogs that I've discovered through Sunday Salon to be very much to my taste (and keep my subscription to the blogs I already followed before they joined Sunday Salon - and which, as a result, I now read twice!). Then my Sunday (and other day) blog reading would return to the ruthless pre-Salon approach of frequent unsubcribes via RSS when the 'time taken--value obtained' equation tips too far in favour of the former. 
I would be interested in the thoughts and experiences of any Salonists (or anyone else familiar with the Salon) reading this post.

• Do you spend a dedicated amount of time on a Sunday writing a special post about the week's or day's reading?
• Do you regard the Salon as a discussion, i.e. do you read and comment on all the other Salon bloggers who post on Sunday (and on the days since last Sunday)?
• Do you write a post for Sunday Salon that you would have written that day anyway, and are in the group mainly to reach the particular audience, without much interest in the discussion aspects?  

Salonists' views on these questions, and any other views they may have about how Salon membership is different from following individual blogs of mutual interest, will help me to make up my mind one way or the other. Thank you!

Tribute to an old hand

A wonderful but very sad post by Dave Knadler of Dave's Fiction Warehouse blog, on his last day as an employee, looking back over his long career in the newspaper business:

"I sat down at my desk, spooled paper into my Royal typewriter and stared at it. I knew a feeling of total despair. I could not leave until the story was finished, and yet as far as my memory served, absolutely nothing had occurred.
Fortunately, I had kept meticulous notes.... I went to work, faithfully transcribing the contents of my notebook into a chronological narrative that was, if anything, more tedious than the meeting itself. I know it took longer to write.
I left the whole mess on the editor's desk and got the hell out of there. It was long past midnight. The next afternoon I was afraid to look at the paper. But there was my story, on the bottom of page one. Except it wasn't my story. The beginning was different. Also the middle, and the end. And it was very short. I reread it and it dawned on me that a long-suffering editor had...pared away the worst of the crap to arrive at something at least marginally useful.
The rest, as they say, is history. I became a copy editor and a news editor and have passed the intervening decades fixing the work of others, excising cliches like "The rest, as they say, is history." Sometimes I've helped save reporters from catastrophic mistakes; at no time, I hope, have I ever made anything worse or harder to understand."

See also Dave's previous post, The ship has sunk.

Memes, history and crowd control

Apologies to those who have kindly nominated me for two recent memes - I am not a very meme-y person and I am afraid I could not write a list of things about myself in an interesting form however hard I tried. I hope that you won't mind, therefore, if I default to Brian McGilloway, who is a jolly good writer, and who has posted in fascinating vein six random facts about himself. I couldn't come close. There is another review of his latest book, Gallows Lane, at International Noir Fiction, by the way.
While on the topic of books and reading, Sharon Wheeler asks for recommendations of good historical crime fiction, to "lure her to that side of the genre". She writes that she does not usually like historical crime fiction, but enjoyed "RS Downie's delightful Medicus series, where a beleaguered Roman quack finds the Brits more than a tad troublesome, and CJ Sansom's dark, intense books set during Henry VIII's tumultuous reign and featuring lawyer Matthew Shardlake." I haven't read these two authors, or come to think of it, very much historical (by which I mean pre-1900) crime fiction. Name of the Rose, Daughter of Time (which doesn't really count);one or two Brother Cadafel books, probably a few others that I can't call to mind just now. So I must check back to see if Sharon received some appealing recommendations. (There are already some for Denise Mina's Paddy Meehan series but someone of my age does not call the 1980s "historical").
What is of interest historically (if local to the UK) is what the Romans would have done about the congestion charge, information conveyed by the peerless Mary Beard. Their solution would not have worked for Kings Cross underground station, which in terms of (pedestrian) crowd control is truly dreadful, and evidence of a total absence of planning, care or thought about what would happen to this already overstretched venue when the St Pancras International Eurostar terminal opened. Make passengers' daily life a serious form of torture, that's what.

Science isn't religion, officially

From today's issue of Nature:

A religious group has had its application to offer Master of Science degrees rejected by Texas authorities.The Institute for Creation Research — which backs a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the creation of Earth in six days — was seeking a certificate to grant online degrees in science education in Texas (see Nature 451, 1030; 2008). But the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board voted unanimously last week not to grant the institute's request, following the recommendation of Raymund Paredes, the state's commissioner of higher education.“Religious belief is not science,” Paredes said in his recommendation. “Science and religious belief are surely reconcilable, but they are not the same thing.” The institute has 45 days to appeal or 180 days to reapply.

Charles Darwin forges ahead

I'm continuing to enjoy Charles Darwin's blog. Here's a current example:

"Huxley did much to establish science as an independent profession here and had an unforgiving tongue: when my persistent critic Bishop Soapy Sam Wilberforce was thrown from his horse and killed by a head injury Huxley commented: ‘For once, reality and his brain came into contact and the result was fatal.’ He made the comment to the physicist John Tyndall who had nothing to say about the gravity of the accident."

Mr Darwin is also now venturing out on Nature Network, commenting on others' blog posts and providing clarification on important matters such as the apparent inconsistency between his early religious belief and his ideas on evolution:

"I was, as I wrote in my autobiography, quite orthodox on matters of theology until I spent five years being seasick on HMS Beagle. It was not merely the earthquake at Chiloe, the Galapagos hummingbirds, it was five years hurling over the side of the ship and groaning ‘oh God!’ with no result."

I highly recommend signing up to Mr Darwin's blog, educational and very, very funny.

Quercus to increase its publishing programme

Via the Bookseller, "Quercus Publishing has set out to reach annual sales of £20m in three years, as it aims to grow from a small publisher to a medium-sized one. Results put out today showed that the company saw sales rise a massive 140% in 2007, with trade sales up by 194%, thanks to its two prize winning authors, Stef Penney and Peter Temple." The company's chief executive, Mark Smith, said: "This has been a transformational year for Quercus, with both our Contract and Trade Divsions contributing handsomely to revenue growth of 140% over the prior year. The board believes that Quercus is now well placed for further growth and over the next three years the group will continue to evolve, build the publishing programmes..." etc. That last part, about the publishing programmes, is very good news for us readers, as Quercus produces some jolly good books by authors including Michael Walters, Colin Cotterill, Adrian Hyland, Martin Walker and many others (see Euro Crime or Petrona for reviews).
I can, incidentally, exclusively reveal that Mr Smith is a very forward-thinking person, being kind enough recently to listen to a rhapsody by me on the subject of blogging, as a result of which he and his esteemed colleague Iain Miller are now in receipt of Petrona's List (for those not reading in RSS, see left-hand sidebar "great crime fiction blogs").

Our friends in the North (well, New York)

Via Jenny Davidson of Light Reading, I discover that there has been a literary debate at Columbia University: as reported by my fellow "If"-admirer, Ed Champion, Sven "Birkerts had come into town for a debate with Jenny Davidson, moderated by Andrew Delbanco, styled Blogging: Good or Bad for Literary Culture?“I can’t tell if we’re positioned at odds,” whispered Birkerts to Davidson before the proceedings started, a foreshadowing of the stalemate to come."
Well, as Jenny puts it in her post drawing attention to the debate: "I must confess that I feel I am having excessive home-court advantage, in that anybody who writes a blog post on this topic is presumably mildly to moderately strongly pro-blogging!"
Ed's post is well worth a read. Here's an excerpt of the perfectly articulated opinion of Prof Davidson:
"By far, the most reasonable participant was Davidson, who advocated blogging, but pointed out that blogging could not directly replace newspaper criticism. She pointed to both the constraints of word count within newspapers, and simultaneously observed that there were certain advantages of concision within the short-format blog post."
However, I couldn't agree more with Ed's conclusion: "It has become evident that the biggest problem with this “debate” is the surfeit of stubborn souls unwilling to consider the alternative form, whether it’s the blogger who refuses to consider the virtues of editing or thinking through his post a bit or the print advocate so terrified of anarchic fun that he cannot find it within himself to trust his instinct from time to time. I’d like to think that this can be bridged."
One way to bridge it, I suppose, is to have a foot in both camps, as an increasingly greater number of people are doing.

Charles Darwin joins the blogosphere

Charles Darwin has started a blog. It is welcome, even essential, reading. From his first post ,"More than a marble Darwin could stand", written in the Natural History Museum cafe (photo at blog):

"I overheard that some American has had the nerve to make a film called Expelled traducing natural selection and championing something called ‘intelligent design’. I thought we had settled Mr Paley’s watchmaker nonsense in 1859.
I am used to bad reviews: I was much savaged in the press when I published The Origin of Species, but Expelled holds me responsible for a particularly vile chapter of genocide which occurred in the 1930s and 40s. I do not recall advocating genocide, indeed distinctly remember writing with anguish about the massacres of the Indians in South America during my voyage on HMS Beagle. Could it be that my critics have formed opinions about my work without actually reading it? Surely not." Read on, please do.
In his second post, Charles is reading today's Sunday papers. "I had assumed that with this modern society being so dependent on the work of scientists, that the newspapers would ring with their achievements. I was delighted to see The Observer (which was in print when I was alive for the first time) and fell on it with a glad cry.......Science is mentioned....in a story about a mother and baby infected with something called a ‘superbug’, although I cannot see what is super about a bacterium that has evolved immunity to most of the treatments we have against it. Given that penicillin was not used clinically until 1942, this I think shows that evolution does not need millennia to show its effects, especially when a population is subject to selective pressures. If I may use a phrase I overheard used by a seaman on HMS Beagle, creationists, ‘may take that and shove it up, mate! Sideways.’ "

This blog is a great discovery - plenty more in the same vein may be read there. I trust that Mr Darwin will have the energy to continue writing posts. I am glad to see that he has decided to blog on Nature Network, which means that you can visit his profile, make him a friend or contact, and follow his writings with ease.

Sunday Salon: heat and cold

I am struck by how many second books in a series are set in the opposite season to the first -- among those I've read, at any rate. I've recently finished Ann Cleeves's second Shetland Islands/Jimmy Perez novel, White Nights, for example, which is set in midsummer. In these northern climes, daylight never really ends; in an understated way the novel is permeated by the effect on the characters, who are overtired and internally disturbed by the lack of night's blackout. The first novel in the series, Raven Black, was set in the opposite season, where the metaphorical and literal darkness formed the contextual atmosphere for events.

This contrast of darkness with light (as John Harvey called one of his recent novels) is by no means unusual. The first two of Ake Edwardson's Chief Inspector Winter series do the same thing. Sun and Shadow took place in seedy, snow-ridden Stockholm (though there is a sunny Spanish interlude); its follow-up, Never End, was set in the intense heat of the Swedish holiday season. The next in the series, Frozen Tracks, I haven't read, but from the title it is going to be a return to the winter I imagine.

Asa Larsson's brilliant debut The Savage Altar (known to me as Sun Storm) is another winter chill story, as Rebecka Martinsson visits her childhood home in the dead of winter and uncovers a lot of nasty secrets buried in the snowdrifts. The second book, The Blood Spilt, takes place eighteen months later, starting out at Rebecka's law firm's midsummer party and describing events of that season.

Mari Jungstedt has also taken this route. Her highly recommended debut novel, Unseen, is set on the (Swedish, again) holiday island of Gotland in the summer; one of the angles is the pressure on the police to solve the crime quickly to protect the island's main revenue, its tourist trade. The follow-up, the equally good Unspoken, is set at the fag-end of the holiday season, and the colder climate is an apt setting for the bleakest of the novel's plot threads.

I am sure there must be other cases of alternating seasonal background, or perhaps it is just chance that I've come across so many of them in the past year or so of reading. Maybe it is a device that appeals to those writing about the North? 

Following from Kerrie's lead, I'll pick out some other reading-related posts from Petrona since the last Sunday Salon, for readers who don't follow the blog through the week, in case they are of interest:

• Only four of twenty finalists on the longlist for the Theakston's crime-fiction prize are women. I provide some suggestions that I feel would and, in some cases, should have passed the peer-review stage.
• If you are reviewing a book, read it first, or else you are worms on toast.
• Even half a sequel is too much for readers as far as the DaVinci Code is concerned.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica opens up to bloggers.
• A week's round-up of reviews and other book news.
• Finally, as picked up by The Guardian, the British Library has become too groovy for scholarship.

(You can follow the links above or just scroll down.)

Thoughts on reading and education

A superb rant from Susan Hill about a survey claiming to show that when women have babies they stop reading sensible books like War and Peace and turn to chick lit and material such as Colleen McCloughlin's autobiography. Each to her own: I used my own brief periods of maternity leave to catch up on Middlemarch and re-read some weighty Dickens novels, as although one could not read for too long at a time, one had plenty of short timeframes at many intervals during the day and night during this strange phase of life.
Susan goes on to fulminate against the Daily Mail who recruited "some jobsworth to talk to us about the survey, explain it to us, and make us feel OK about it or .. or otherwise justify her pay packet.  This woman is called Director of the 2008 Year of Reading.l I bet her pay packet is pretty thick. Anyway, she says, ( or rather, let`s get this straight, she is QUOTED by the Daily Mail as saying, ) ' It`s really important to read what you love and what fits in with your lifestyle.' Excuse me ? Who the bloody hell IS this woman and how dare she patronise me in this way, tell me what it is good to read, talk to me about my 'lifestyle' ??" And so on.
Susan also has a go at an article in the Wall St Journal in 2000 by one Harold Bloom, "a man, as you may well never have heard of him and I wish I had not, who claims to know what the Best Books, or the Literary Canon, are, and why and to tell us how Important they are. I want to tie him up and force feed him with John Carey`s little masterpiece, 'What Use are the Arts?' until he says he is sorry. Of J.K.Rowling he said, after being extremely rude about the Harry Potter books, 'Is there any redeeming educational use to Rowling?' When said H Bloom has got as many people reading, longing to read, staying up until midnight to get their hands on a book and then sitting down on the pavement to start it, when he has done the zillionth fraction of what Jo Rowling has done for books and reading and so, indirectly, for education, then he has the right to pontificate."
Absolutely. As Miss Jean Brodie pointed out, 'education' comes from the Latin 'to lead out'. Stimulating the imagination, 'leading out',  is what education is all about: honours are due to J K Rowling in that regard. Education isn't about force-feeding people with what some establishment politburo (or Mr Harold Bloom) thinks they should know. With her extensive Latin knowledge, Miss Brodie pointed out, again correctly, that this is an 'intrusion', not an education.

Petrona (and Theakston's) in the Guardian

Alerted by the ever-vigilant Crime Fiction Reader of It's a Crime!, I bring you the breaking news that Petrona features in today's (Saturday) Guardian newspaper (review page 23). My post about my lunch with Dr Grump (Too groovy for scholarship) features as the first item in a group of blog posts discussing overcrowding in the British Library. Fame! Readers of the newspaper edition are referred to the Guardian books blog online, but nothing is there. At 1920 in the UK, the top post is dated Friday, so perhaps entries go up a day late. There is no sign of  the piece on the newspaper part of the website either. But "tomorrow is another day".  

While on the topic of book blogs, Karen at Euro Crime has highlighted the Theakston's Old Peculier "crime novel of the year" long list, with links to reviews of the books concerned at Euro Crime. Karen points out that of the 20 books, only four are by women. Shocking! Most of the books that I have read on the list are good, but certainly recent works by Ruth Rendell, Kitty Sewell, Diane Setterfield, Anne Cleeves, Jessica Mann, Tana French, Mo Hayder, Nicci French, Laura Stratton and Catherine Sampson are the peers of those on the list I've read, and I gather so are Catherine O'Flynn, Aliya Whiteley, Deanna Raybourn and I am sure others. The Guardian (again) is sniffy about the prize in any event, because the readers don't really get to choose the winner, even though it is a "readers' " competition. In the comments to the Guardian piece, Maxim Jarubowski points out that small, independent publishers are unfairly omitted in favour of "all the usual suspects with marketing budgets behind them". He doesn't give examples, however. I've read great fiction this past year in books published by independents such as Bitter Lemon Press, Arcadia and others, but they've all been translations, which I think are not eligible.

Worms on toast

We have all read articles by authors who are not happy about reviews of their books, but I have great sympathy with Brian Clegg, author of The Global Warming Survival Kit and many other titles besides, on this particular occasion. One of Brian's gripes is that, as authors so often say in his position, the reviewer does not seem to have read the book. Brian has various pieces of evidence for this, but the most incontrovertible is that the review "says at one point Clegg offers tips on how to prepare a worm sandwich. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in the text about worm sandwiches. There is a section with a heading Worm sandwiches – and that seems to be as far as he has read."

QED.

By the way, as well as being the author of many books, Brian runs the Popular Science website, which I can highly recommend, as well as his entertaining and frequently informative blog Popsci.You can learn useful things, for example that you can buy 2Gb of mobile phone memory via Amazon for 99p, or you can choose to pay £20 for the same thing at a "High Street retailer".

Making readers happy

Reactions of three groups of typical readers to a web redesign (in this case, Dilbert.com):

"The first group is the ultra-techies who have an almost romantic relationship with technology. For them, the new site felt like getting dumped by a lover. Their high-end technology (generally Linux) and security settings made much of the site inconvenient. Moreover, the use of Flash offended them on some deep emotional level.

The second group objected to the new level of color and complexity, and the associated slowness. They like their Dilbert comics simple, fast, and in two colors. Anything more is like putting pants on a cat.

The third group uses technology as nothing more than a tool, and subscribes to the philosophy that more free stuff is better than less free stuff. That group has embraced the new features on the site and spiked the traffic stats."

I think Scott Adams missed the group that are never satisfied with anything. They weren't satisfied with the old design and don't like the new either, for all kinds of reasons which they provide in exhaustive and exhausting detail (and, probably, with great pleasure). Maybe he doesn't get those kinds of visitors.

A touch of common sense

The British Library story rumbles on. This is what my favourite Times columnist, Richard Morrison, had to say about it, with his ever-fresh, "common cultural man" perspective:

The extraordinary newfound popularity of the British Library among undergraduates racing to finish their dissertations - or simply using the place as an upmarket pick-up joint - has supposedly made life difficult for other users. But there's a simple answer to the Reading Room's overcrowding crisis. The BL is open for just 58 hours a week. Indeed, only on Tuesdays does it stay open after 6. But I seem to recall that there are 168 hours in a week. Yes, I am making an outrageous suggestion - but I'm also serious. The BL should turn itself into a 24/7 operation.
Why not? The prospect of studying in total peace through the night would appeal to many scholars. Quite a few are night owls anyway. And the BL can hardly complain that it doesn't have the staff or money to stay open all hours. It employs more than 2,000 people. And it owes us. We taxpayers forked out £500 million to build it, and now pay well over £100 million a year to keep it going.
If my local Tesco can manage to stay open all night without a penny of subsidy, the BL should be offering at least as good a service to the long-suffering public.

Makes sense to me.

Maintaining the dignity of plants

Owing to some of my recent less-than-serious posts, I have to assure you that what follows is not a joke. The Swiss federal government's ethics committee on non-human biotechnology has mapped out guidelines to help granting agencies decide which research applications deeply offend the dignity of plants — and hence become unfundable (see Nature News, 23 April 2008; subscription required). All plant biotechnology grant applications must now include a paragraph explaining the extent to which plant dignity is considered. The Swiss constitution says that the 'dignity of creatures' must be taken into account in the gene-technology arena, which is why the term has been adopted into the regulations. The government called on the advice of its ethics committee two years ago to help develop a definition for plants. The committee has created a decision tree presenting the different issues that need to be taken into account for each case. But it has come up with few concrete examples of what type of experiment might be considered an unacceptable insult to plant dignity. Hybridization of roses? Shelling peas? Treading grapes? Or, as suggested by one online commenter, mowing the lawn?

Web 2.0; Da Vinci 1.5; readers 0

Via 101 reasons to stop writing blog, I learn that Dan Brown is to revise the Da Vinci Code to correct various minor and not-so minor errors in the previous version. Although small changes have been made in various print runs, this new project is a proper revision, named Da Vinci Code 1.5,  that will be "like re-reading the book for the first time".
From the stop writing post: "When asked if the revisions made substantive changes to the plot of the novel, Brown replied, "Oh sure. When you take out all the factual errors, baseless conjecture and flawed reasoning, the whole storyline basically collapses. All you’re left with is a guy who’s good at solving puzzles running around Europe for no reason. I don’t even like Europe. The new version is entirely set in Connecticut, so I could fact-check everything myself without having to drive more than two hours." "
Read on at the link for the full horror. Unfortunately, owing to work load, the publication date of the revision has slipped from 1 April to 31 April. Can't wait.