The last sentence of the novel I have just finished (SPOILER ALERT):

“Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all.”

Hey, thanks, literary fiction! Again! I wish the author had found a way to move that line somewhere up towards the beginning, thus saving me a lot of trouble.

In every interview I give – and there’s a lot of it about at the moment – I am asked to list recent favourite books and albums. ‘Recent favourites’ is a hard category, because we all have to read and listen to a lot before we find the things we love; I find myself giving the same answers over and over again, simply because I don’t have so much to choose from. And in these days of Google alerts, I worry that the people who produced these recent favourites might think I’m some kind of stalker. “He’s just recommended my book/album for the fifteenth time in the last ten days! Let it go already!” So apologies in advance to: Elvis Perkins (‘Elvis Perkins In Dearland’),  Speech Debelle (‘Speech Therapy’) Jess Walter (‘The Financial Lives Of The Poets’) Curtis Sittenfeld (‘American Wife’) and Laura Cumming (‘A Face To The World’). You are all recent favourites, and I will therefore be yoking your work to mine, over and over again, in an attempt to make me seem more interesting than I really am.

So ‘Juliet, Naked’ is published today (I think); promotion for the novel and for ‘An Education’, in the US, UK and Europe, means that I won’t be doing any writing for three months or so. That’s a big chunk of a working year gone, especially if you throw in the month-long summer holiday I’ve just taken.

I don’t read reviews – editors and other interested parties know that they have to provide a summary in one word or less, and, if the one word is a word I don’t want to hear, the name of the bastard responsible. So far, the reviews seem to have been good or OK, with one notable exception: the review in the Times was, apparently, hostile. It’s not often that a bad review provokes amusement in its victim, but this one did, because the Times paid quite a lot of money to run extracts of the book, over three days; the bad review ran bang in the middle of the run. Times readers must have been very confused – why were they being asked to plough on with a novel that had just been rubbished by one of their book critics? If you’re going to get a thumping, then it might as well happen in a way that leaves the paper looking silly.

One of the things I like the most about my job is that, for various reasons, I get to see and hear and read stuff before everyone else. Why this should be quite so pleasurable I don’t know: it’s hard to brag, when the person you’re bragging to has invariably never heard of the book or movie or album in question, what with it not having come out yet. I suspect that it’s because I’m both weak-minded and pig-headed, and thus will always react in some way to any chatter surrounding the arts. I like being able to decide for myself, in relative silence.

Anyway. Four things I’ve enjoyed recently that will be coming your way soon:

1) 500 Days Of Summer
I saw this at Sundance, and I would happily watch it again. It’s a romantic comedy for younger people, and yet it completely failed to exclude me: it had great jokes, a good soundtrack, terrific performances, a fresh and imaginative sense of visual style, and, unlike just about every romantic comedy I’ve seen in the last twenty years, it’s true.

2) Ben Folds Presents: University A Capella
I’d be surprised and delighted if I heard a better album than this in 2009. Ben Folds has recorded a whole bunch of top-notch university choirs who’ve been singing his songs a capella as part of their repertoire, and the results are just fantastic. Some of your favourite Folds songs – ‘Jesusland’, ‘Brick’, ‘You Don’t Know Me’, ‘Landed’ – have been re-arranged so that instruments and percussion are replaced by the human voice, and I’m completely addicted. And the lead vocalists put every single Pop Idol entrant ever to shame.

3) One Day – David Nicholls
A big, absorbing, smart, fantastically readable on-off love story that sprawls over a couple of decades. Nicholls is brilliant on the details of the last couple of decades of British cultural and political life, as lived by people who danced at the Hacienda or the Wag Club and who couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be anti-Tory stand-up comedians, or coke-addled Soho movers and shakers. ‘One Day’ is coming out in June, and is therefore the perfect beach read for people who are normally repelled by the very idea of beach reads.

4) Butterfly – Sonia Hartnett
I read Butterfly a while back, but I now see that it was published on April 2nd, so you could actually go to a bookshop and buy this book. That kind of defeats the point of me including it in this list: you could make your own mind up, and we don’t want that. Anyway, you should buy it, because it’s beautiful. ‘Butterfly’ is a dreamy, lyrical, sad novel about the relationship between a lonely girl and her equally lonely next-door neighbour in the Australian suburbs. It’s exquisitely written – you end up re-reading sentence after sentence – and unforgettable.

When I tell people that my recently completed novel is called Juliet, Naked, they pretty much always make the same joke: Oh, you’re trying to sell some books!  My stepmother and my mother-in-law both provided variations on this theme  within twenty-four hours of each other last week. Gosh, how we laughed!

And though it’s true that all extra sales accruing as a result of promises made in the title will be welcome (and we cannot, I’m afraid, refund anyone who might be disappointed when they discover that Juliet, Naked is the title of a fictional album), I think the days when people are prepared to shell out for prose nakedness are long gone. Now that each of us possess the means to watch real women having sex with real men, or real women, or real animals, at the click of a mouse, I¹m not sure there’s any real money to be made by from a few paragraphs of fictional smut.

Incredibly, those days existed even within my lifetime. Who now would dream of reading the almost unreadable Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the hope of arousal? And yet when Penguin published the book in 1960, it sold two hundred thousand copies on the first day, two million in the first year. Many of us can remember our fathers buying copies of Lady C, as it became known, and then John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, written in 1749, but banned for over two hundred years; I can even remember seeing a copy of Couples by John Updike in the boot of my dad’s car, and I doubt he’s read an Updike novel since.  Another book marketing tool gone; another advantage nullified. We’re doomed.

A long time ago, I interviewed Jilly Cooper for the Sunday Times, and asked her about an image in her latest novel that troubled me: she had compared a pair of  female nipples in a state of obviously extraordinary arousal to a couple of biro caps. ‘Awful’, she agreed cheerfully. ‘Terribly unsexy. It was probably because I was writing in a great hurry and casting around for some image and there were masses of biro caps all over my desk with no biros in them …’ Perhaps we writers only have ourselves to blame.

During the month of March, I have been given my own table at Waterstones bookshops. I have chosen to fill it with the books below:

Field Notes From A Catastrophe – Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert talks to the scientists who really know what’s going on with our planet, and her conclusions are devastating. A scrupulous, elegant, frightening book.

Samaritan – Richard Price
All of Richard Price’s novels are brilliantly plotted and utterly convincing. This is as gripping as his best, with an ethical dimension thrown in for nothing.

Brilliant Orange – David Winner
A clever, erudite, imaginative book about…football. Yes, it can be done, but you have to be as original a thinker as David Winner.

This Boy’s Life – Tobias Wolff
Funny, moving, and entirely without self-pity, this book taught a whole generation of writers how to approach autobiography.

Sweet Soul Music – Peter Guralnick
This was one of the all-time top five favourites of Rob Fleming, narrator of ‘High Fidelity’. And if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough  for me. Definitive.

Scenes From A Revolution – Mark Harris
The sharpest book about the movie-making process that I’ve ever read. And like all the best non-fiction, it’s about a lot more than its subject.

Naples ’44 – Norman Lewis
Hilarious, tragic, surreal – a great travel writer’s non-fiction version of ‘Catch-22′.

What Good Are The Arts – John Carey
This book, together with the equally brilliant ‘The Intellectuals And The Masses’, should remove all those stubborn and lazy prejudices you’ve been having trouble with.

Spies – Michael Frayn
A moving, simple, clever, layered novel about the topography of childhood. Michael Frayn is a national treasure, and this, in my opinion, is his best book.

Birds of America – Lorrie Moore
I know, I know, you don’t like short stories. How can I convince you that Lorrie Moore’s are as rewarding and memorable as just about any novel you hold dear?

The Child That Books Built -  Francis Spufford
An awe-inspiringly intelligent memoir about our first contact with books – what they did to us, and why they did it.

A Complicated Kindness – Miriam Toews
A fresh, quirky fictional voice telling us about a community of which we know nothing. What else do you need from contemporary fiction?

Stasiland – Anna Funder
Horrifying, of course, but also weird, and packed with extraordinary narrative incident, this book is a people’s history of the twentieth century’s strangest, cruellest and most ambitious thought-control experiment.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
A deeply satisfying, brilliantly-imagined epic about mid-twentieth-century America, as seen through the prism of its comic books and the young men who created them.

Random Family – Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
An important, astonishingly ambitious piece of extended journalism about two young, attractive, winning and doomed young women, as illuminating and gripping as Michael Apted’s TV series ‘7 Up’.

The Republic Of Love – Carol Shields
A novel about love that is both smart and deeply romantic, and there aren’t too many of those. Carol Shields’ wise, warm and witty voice is still deeply missed.

Skellig – David Almond
Refusing to read this book because you are not a child makes as much sense as refusing to read crime fiction because you are not a criminal. A deep  and lovely book.

The Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters’ historical fiction is serious entertainment, like all novels should be, and ‘The Fingersmith’ has one of the most startling plot twists you’ll ever read.

The World’s Wife – Carol-Ann Duffy
In which Mrs Van Winkle, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Midas and others tell their side of the story, with bitter humour and a weary perspicacity.

The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut didn’t write an ordinary novel, which means that there are a lot of neglected gems: this, which contains a convincingly mundane explanation for why we are all here, is one of my favourites.

Sixty Stories – Donald Barthleme
Barthelme’s short fiction was enormously influential on a whole generation of American writers; it’s also funny, unique, otherworldly.

David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
It could have been any of them, just about. But this one is right up there with Great Expectations: comic genius, manic narrative energy, and some – a lot! – of his most memorable characters.

Father And Son – Edmund Gosse
The first misery memoir, but you won’t find any others as self-knowing, as deeply-felt or as well-written as this one. A Victorian ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’.

Molesworth – Geoffrey Williams and Ronald Searle
The only work of comic literature which makes me laugh every time I read it -  a comfort and a joy.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
A “children’s classic”, according to some . Yes, well, that and one of the best and most imaginative descriptions of what it means to be an American.

Chronicles – Bob Dylan
A brilliant, angular portrait of the artist as a consumer of art, and the most thoughtful autobiography of a musician – of a performer in any medium – that I have ever read.

Mystic River – Dennis Lehane
Most works of literature do not compel you to walk into lamp-posts while reading them. But this is a work of literature, and it will.

Fun Home – Alison Bechdel
There have been several wonderful graphic novels published in the last few years, but  this is perhaps the richest, and the most moving – it’s as dense and as complicated as a “proper” book.

The Accidental – Ali Smith
A dazzling tour-de-force, a novel about the ordinary and the extraordinary, a book that is both experimental and readable…Ali Smith is a true and valuable British original.

The Railway Man – Eric Lomax
A harrowing, deeply moving memoir, full of an awe-inspiring tolerance and forgiveness.

The Giant’s House – Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken has written two brilliant novels and a beautiful memoir. This, her first book, is a luminous, heartbreaking modern classic.

Empire Falls – Richard Russo
An epic, large-hearted, funny, downbeat and altogether magnificent portrait of a dying small town, and the people who just about get by there.

Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, written a quarter of a century before ‘Gilead’, her equally dazzling second; a slow, extraordinary, yearning, mystical book about the dead and how they haunt the living.

Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant – Anne Tyler
This book changed my life: I didn’t know novels could be as warm and wise and engaging as this until I picked it up. I’ve been trying and failing to rip Anne Tyler off ever since.

The Wife – Meg Wolitzer
A razor-sharp novel about the sexual politics of writing. And if that sounds like a narrow subject, then it shouldn’t: after reading this, you’ll wonder whether fiction is about anything else.

Collected Poems – Sophie Hannah
Funny and melancholy, shrewd and real; Sophie Hannah is the heir to the brilliant Wendy Cope’s throne.

The Invisible Woman – Claire Tomalin
A terrific biography, as absorbing and as  acute as any novel, about the complicated domestic arrangements of our greatest novelist.

The History of Mr Polly - HG Wells
Wells didn’t only write SF – this is a sunny, optimistic comedy about a man who refuses to settle for his lot.

The Blind Side - Michael Lewis
‘The Blind Side’ combines tactical analysis with an account of a young sportsman’s astonishing life and career. With this and ‘Moneyball’, Michael Lewis has written the two best sports books of the last five years

How to Breathe Underwater – Julie Orringer
As fresh and as accomplished a first book as you could hope to find. Julie Orringer’s sad, clear-eyed stories are hard to forget.

And here’s a piece I wrote for ‘The Times’, attempting to elucidate:

It can happen anywhere: a dinner table, a pub, a bus queue, a classroom, a bookshop. You have struck up a conversation with someone you don’t know, and you’re getting on OK, and then suddenly, without warning, you hear the five words that mean the relationship has no future beyond the time it takes to say them: “I think you’ll like it.” This phrase is presumptuous enough when used to refer to, say, a crisp flavour; if, however, you happen to be talking about books or films or music, then it is completely unforgivable, a social solecism on a par with bottom-pinching. You think I’ll like it, do you? Well, it has taken me over fifty years to get anywhere near an understanding of what I think I might like, and even then I get it wrong half the time, so what chance have you got?  Every now and again I meet someone who is able to make shrewd and thoughtful recommendations within the first five years of our acquaintance, but for the most part, the people I listen to I’ve known for a couple of decades, a good chunk of which has been spent talking about the things we love and hate.

We are asked to believe, usually by critics, that the most important factor in our response to a book should be its objective quality – a good book is a good book – but we know that’s not true. Mood and taste are important, self-evidently, but mood and taste are formed by educational background, profession, health, amount of leisure time, marital status, state of marriage, gender (men don’t read much fiction, depressingly), age, age of children, relationships with children, and parents, and siblings, and, possibly, an unfortunate experience with Thomas Pynchon’s ‘V’ as an overambitious and pretentious teenager. All of these and thousands of others are governing factors, and many of them are wildly inconstant.

As it happens, I have been asked to choose forty-odd books for a writer’s table at Waterstone’s, and I think you’ll like them. I think you’ll like a few of them, anyway, although of course I have no idea which one or two, and I certainly have no idea who you are, or what state your marriage is in. Like many readers, I fancy myself as a pretty good recommender of books (up until the recent economic calamities, I had been entertaining the idea of turning pro, but this might not be the right time), and so being given the chance to drop my enthusiasms and discoveries onto a grateful public is a thrilling privilege. But where to start?  How are we supposed to decide which books are still important to us?

In one important regard, it seems to me, books that have shaped and guided our tastes at crucial stages of our lives are like friends from the past: you wouldn’t necessarily want to go on holiday with them now. If I were to re-read John Fowles’ ‘The Magus’, would I do so in eighteen hours straight, with an open mouth (and lots of attendant dribble, presumably), just as I did more than thirty years ago? The novel hasn’t stayed with me, but the experience of devouring it has; it’s one of the reasons why I am a constantly hopeful reader, even now, prepared to believe that the paperback I’ve just picked up will absorb and inspire and change me. “If I were sixteen, I might have thoroughly enjoyed this book,” one Amazon customer reviewer says, crushingly; “it all seems awfully silly now,”  says another, who has revisited the novel since her youth. I suspect that I shouldn’t look at it again, not least because I can recall the gigantic narrative trick that took our collective breath away in the 1970s. I won’t be fooled again, unfortunately.

I am glad that I read Hardy’s fiction when I was a student; I had plenty of appetite for misery then. There is already enough anxiety attached to parenthood, without having to worry about our children hanging themselves because of our inability to provide for them, as Jude Fawley’s children do. The first Dickens novel I ever read was ‘Bleak House’, and for some time, even after reading most of the others, I was pretty sure that it was his masterpiece. I re-read it a couple of years ago, and I was shocked to discover that Esther Summerson, who narrates a big chunk of the book, is an insufferable drip. Why hadn’t I noticed? Am I a more observant critic now, or was I simply kinder and more indulgent when I was younger? If we are lucky, we read the right books at the right times, and both the books and the times should be left alone. Have you read Moby-Dick yet? No? Well, don’t go back to ‘The Catcher In The Rye’, then. It was great once, and maybe you’re asking too much of it if you want it to be great all over again. This is not to diminish the books that we read at earlier stages in our lives, not to make the claim that, as we get older, our critical faculties get sharper – the sad truth is that we lose as much as we gain.  Just about every single book on my table I have read in the last five years, and most of them have been road-tested on friends and family. You may not like them, but at least I know what I think of them now, and I can stand by them, defend them, argue for them. I’m not sure I could do that for ‘Sons And Lovers’, or ‘On The Road’.

I don’t think you ought to read everything on this list, and nor do I think you should have read them already; I hope you haven’t, in fact. The most frequent complaint I hear from readers is that they are stuck, in a rut, bored by the literary routes they usually take. If, as a result of these recommendations, someone sets off on a reading journey that they wouldn’t normally have taken, and that journey ends in the sort of blissful, all-consuming absorption we all used to feel further towards the beginning of our reading lives, then I’ll be happy. Meanwhile, if anyone knows of a book that will enthral a fiftysomething as much as ‘The Magus’ enthralled his nineteen-year-old self, please let me know.

“While reviewing generally is not very reliable anywhere, I really think that English reviewing is getting absurd. There are far, far too many novelists reviewing other novelists, There is far too much consideration for books that are obviously going to get nowhere, and far too little understanding of what it is in books that makes people read them.”

-Raymond Chandler, letter to Jamie Hamilton, 11/11/1949.
 

…book tour in the US, I became aware of two American celebrities I’d never heard of before. One was the brilliant satirist Stephen Colbert, whose book ‘I Am America (And So Can You)’ is a huge bestseller; the other was Joel Osteen, pastor of the Lakewood super-church, where forty-seven thousand people worship on a weekly basis. (Lakewood wasn’t always a church. It used to be the home of the Houston Rockets basketball team.) Osteen’s book ‘Become A Better You’ was everywhere – the first print run was three million – and Osteen seemed to be promoting it every time I turned on the TV.
 It is, perhaps, unfair to come to the conclusion that there is some kind of cultural civil war going on in the US, using only the bestseller lists as evidence. Katie Price and Ian McEwan, who both sell lots of books in the UK, would probably struggle to find common ground at a dinner party, although my feeling is  that they might not actually come to blows, and that Katie would respect McEwan’s work, especially the bits that involve Keira Knightley. It’s difficult to see how Colbert and Osteen co-exist, however. Colbert’s politics can be deduced from his astonishing, and buttock-clenchingly brave, speech at the White House Correspondents’ dinner last year.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa-4E8ZDj9s

Joel Osteen is a socially conservative, pro-life Southern evangelist, so it seems unlikely that he’ll  be out campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Surely sooner or later the followers of these two media personalities are going to have to divvy up the country? I hope the liberals get to keep California.
 
 I saw one woman buy the Osteen book, at Bush International Airport in Houston. She was sobbing. She ran into the airport bookstall, tears rolling down her face, and went straight to the hardback bestsellers pile. My guess is that she’d just been dumped, somewhere between gates 15-17, and there’s an awful warning to feckless American men here. Dump your girlfriends or wives and they will turn evangelical, and possibly start World War Three. Whatever the  problems in your relationship are, put up with them.
 Tom Perrotta, the author of Little Children and Election, has written a very good novel about liberalism versus Christianity entitled ‘The Abstinence Teacher’. It’s funny and convincing and timely, and anyone who is mystified by the state of the States should read it when it’s published here next year. You won’t find any answers, because there aren’t any. But  you might end up  understanding a little more.

…I had a book out, I appeared on stage with Francis Spufford, Blake Morrison and Andrew O’Hagen, debating the value of literature. For the publication of SLAM, I have shared a stage with Darren the rapper, various DJs, and half-a-dozen fifteen-year-old girls wearing hotpants. I have signed several skateboards, two cheeks (the facial variety, I hasten to add), and two pairs of trainers, one pair of which was, frankly, malodorous in the extreme. I have even signed some books. I am a great admirer of Morrison, Spufford and O’Hagen, and I’m sure they will understand when I say that it will be difficult to return to those discussions.
 

Literary festivals are a little like football clubs: just about every single town has one, and when it comes to attracting performers, geographical location provides a decisive and unfair advantage. Football clubs can compensate by chucking money at the problem, which is why Brazilians end up playing in some of our less attractive industrial cities, when they could have gone to Spain or Portugal, but there is no money in literary festivals so it really is all about where you’re at. Parati, in Brazil, doesn’t seem to have had too much trouble reeling in authors; ditto Mantova and Reykjavik.  When I was invited to speak at a festival in Gavoi, a small town in the middle of Sardinia, earlier this month, I found that, for reasons I probably don’t have to explain, I wasn’t as busy as I’d thought. 

I probably don’t need to explain how much fun it was, either. It was hot, and the food was good, and the people were nice, and the hotel had a great pool, and I’ll shut up now, before you start thinking that a writer’s life isn’t, after all, filled with despair and difficulty. Weirdly, one of the most memorable parts of the weekend was having my picture taken, usually a terrible waste of time even if you’re George Clooney. Every year in Gavoi a local photographer takes a portrait picture of all the writers appearing at the festival; the following year, the portraits are displayed on walls around the town, and if you happen to own one of these walls, then you are the curator of the portrait – you put it up and take it down each day, keep it clean, maybe even feed it and water it. It’s one of the many ways in which the people of Gavoi are invited to feel a part of the activities.   The photos are all taken indoors, and so the photographer looks at you and then decides where she would like to shoot you; in my case, she decided that she would use the cool, clean and admirably uncluttered house of an elderly lady in the centre of the town. (Don’t ask me why, but it’s almost certainly something to do with me being bald. It usually is, when it comes to photographs.) When we got there, the elderly lady had gathered various friends and family members for the occasion, and my wife and I were served delicious meringues, a local delicacy, and I talked to a rabid Juve fan about Patrick Vieira; it certainly beat being made to feel like a twerp for thirty minutes in a hotel lobby, which is what normally happens with photoshoots.  It’s not right, though, only going to festivals in nice places. I feel I should do some kind of penance. If you live somewhere irredeemably unattractive, and you’re trying to put on a festival, please invite me, and I’ll come. I wonder if anyone will own up to how they feel about where they live….