Inside Jacket

Let’s all do the Page 99 Test – coined by Ford Madox Ford – to see if a book is worth reading. Just open to page 99, have a gander and if it sounds interesting head to the beginning. If it sounds not so good, then…..

I’ve just opened The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, which is supposed to be pretty good, and scanned page 99. There appears to be two people talking about yoga, which is an instant turn-off for me. One paragraph gives me hope – someone called Logan explains his hero is a person who cut off their own arm with a penknife after being pinned under a huge rock.

Got that back-to-school feeling again? Take a gander at our literary tribute to teachers and students in literature. My personal favourite from this list of 25 memorable books is Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue. The head porter, Skullion, is a wonderful creation and a truly crafty individual. Having spent 10 years living in Oxford, I am positive there are many Skullions in reality. I’d out The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury as a close second simply because Howard Kirk such a completely awful person. Again, I’m sure there are many Howard Kirks in reality. The list also includes Miss Jean Brodie, Mr Chipping, Sebastian Flyte, plus his teddy Aloysius, from Brideshead Revisited and much more. Go back to school with Tom Wolfe, John Knowles and many other wonderful writers.

Dwight Garner writes about the 40th anniversary of Deliverance by James Dickey in the New York Times book review.

Dickey wrote about men, neither dudes nor (although they were fathers) dads. The men in Deliverance meet real monsters and recognize their ability to become, in Dickey’s phrase, countermonsters. Deliverance had its moment. The book got ecstatic reviews; its author was interviewed on Today. Deliverance tangled on best-seller lists with Love Story, The Godfather and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It was an unsettling book that arrived, as if on cue, at an unsettled time. In its primitive violence readers caught echoes of Vietnam, the Sharon Tate murders, even of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In its elegiac lament for a disappearing river, the book chimed along with America’s budding environmental movement.

The articles goes on….

The novel has the primal witchery of Lord of the Flies, but attempts to teach it in classrooms have mostly been rebuffed: the novel’s homosexual rape scene, and its musky sexuality throughout, are too much for many. Deliverance has its detractors among Southerners, too, for its portrait of mountain people as toothless sociopaths. When he was governor of Georgia, the future United States senator Zell Miller placed it on his list of most hated books.

I have been away on vacation for the past week. I thought it would be nice to not think much about books but, of course, they kept cropping up everywhere. My summer holiday reading was a copy of a collection of Sports Illustrated’s best essays. It’s a thick book and I didn’t even get close to finishing it. It’s becoming rather dog-earred now as I kept carrying it about with the hope of reading it but I usually failed. The kids each took a bag stuffed full of reading matter. The eight-year-old continues to devour more Michael Murpugo books and Gawain and the Green Knight is her latest favourite. She seemed to delight in the fact that the Green Knight is beheaded in the middle of Arthur’s court but didn’t really seem to notice that ladies were continually trying to seduce Gawain.

Before leaving, we took out three audio books from the library – Tigger Comes to the Forest (voiced by Stephen Fry, Judy Dench and others), and two Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles books. We listened to Pooh many times over as we drove around British Columbia. As time went on, I became convinced that the most likeable animal in Hundred Acre Wood is Eeyore. I love how he describes the other animals as stupid and dismisses Tigger as some kind of freak.

The Spiderwick books grew on me. At first, I didn’t know what to make of them. My eight-year-old loves them and answered our questions about why there were giants, dragons and fairies in Florida. Our favourite characters from the books were the Nixies – water spirits who live in fresh water and speak in a sing-song fashion.

We visited a wonderful used bookshop in a place called Penticton where I found a copy of Essential John Arlott: Forty Years of Classic Cricket Writing. How odd to find what is now an fairly obscure cricket book in a small town buried in rural western Canada? The eight-year-old spent her pocket money on Harry Potter 5 and we’re now fighting our way through this behemoth chapter by chapter each evening.

Back to reality, back to the here and now.

Retail property owners worry that they will be left with vacancies if Barnes & Noble decides to close some of its stores.

Can the perfect author photo really increase book sales?

This isn’t New York City’s first hot summer. Ed Kohn, author of “Hot Time in the Old Town,” talks about the 1896 heat wave that killed 1,500 New Yorkers.

Fairmont Hotels has partnered with Random House and Kobo to lend e-readers to luxury hotel guests.

McNally Jackson Books will introduce an Espresso Book Machine, a device that can print and bind a new book in minutes, to its New York City store.

Are public readings an essential part of every writer’s job?

American remaindered book shows continue to draw bargain-hunting booksellers from overseas.

An author named John Savage is suing the British comedian Ricky Gervais, saying he stole his ideas when he wrote the “Flanimals” series of children’s books.