"It is hard to imagine life today without the internet, and all of the benefits that it brings to our business and personal lives: convenient, cheap and instant communication across time zones and national boundaries; online shopping and banking; document and data exchange without the need to ship media; collaborative working and online entertainment; and free access to more information than previous generations could ever have dreamed of. This analysis assesses the various ways in which the internet has changed our lives, and the problems that it has brought. It also offers suggestions and advice as to how the effects of those problems can be mitigated in the future".

Melbourne named a UNESCO City of Literature

The Australian Bookseller and Publisher's Weekly newsletter reported, as did The Age, on Melbourne being named a City of Literature by the United Nations' cultural arm, UNESCO.

"At the heart of the bid was the development of a Centre for Books, Reading and Ideas at the State Library of Victoria, which will house literature bodies including the Melbourne Writers' Festival, the Victorian Writers' Centre, the Emerging Writers' Centre, the Australian Poetry Centre and Express Media.‘The five tenants of the new centre are mooted to move in in June 2009,' MWF director Rosemary Cameron told WBN. ‘It will be a beautiful and lively space where we will hold some festival events in 2009".

The announcement comes as Melbourne Writers' Festival is taking place over two weekends. I'll be off this week for the second weekend, intending to interview Andrew Davies for the Canberra Times and to listen to Kate Atkinson and Lloyd Jones in particular.

Canberra as a venue for big literary events/festivals

Well done to Melbourne. It seems a long time since Adelaide and Canberra's National Word Festival were the only two literary festivals in Australia. Conceived by Alison Broinowski, and followed up by myself and Marion Halligan, as Chairs for a decade, the NWF managed to secure big overseas names such as Doris Lessing, William Gaddis, Melvyn Bragg and Raymond Carver, alongside the best of Australian writers at University House, ANU. The Word Festival has long since disappeared. It was heartening to see the Canberra Writers' Festival, albeit on a much smaller scale, revive this year in its Gorman House setting.

The ANU Literary events, which used to feature 12-15 writers a year, no longer exist in the same numbers or format, but each week the ANU public lectures continue to cover a wide range of academic topics from distinguished experts. The Canberra Times literary events have also reduced in frequency to usually three or four per year.

Congratulations therefore to Canberra bookshops such as Daltons, Paperchain, Smiths and the University Co-op for their regular author book launches. Last weeks launch at Daltons of the Mary Ann Shaffer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Guernsey was beautifully crafted by Meredith Wright, with Chrissie Shaw reading from the book and Guernsey nibbles served alongside the Australian wine. Thanks also to Allen and Unwin and Deb Stevens for their support of this event.

Test your knowledge of Chinese literature

The UK Guardian says says you’ve had a fortnight to brush up your on Chinese literature in honour of the Olympics. Time now to see if you’re up to speed.

Which reference book would you like to see made into a movie?

The Guardian also reports that bestselling diet manual French Women Don't Get Fat is to get the big screen treatment. "Hilary Swank's production company has picked up the finger-wagging weight-loss manifesto that instructs us Brits on how to be as slim as our éclair-scoffing sisters across the Channel.

I can't wait for the scene in which Swank bakes a tarte tatin with cabbage leaves instead of pastry, and irons her own clothes for exercise (both top tips from the book). Stand by, too, for some hil-ar-io-us tipsy scenes: the book's author advises us to make up in fizz what we're skipping in solids (she is, incidentally, CEO of Veuve Clicquot)".

The Guardian's favourite non-fiction tomes:

1) The Joy of Sex

2) Eats, Shoots & Leaves

3) Who's Who

4) The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

5) What to Expect When You're Expecting

6) The Dangerous Book for Boys

7) The Oxford English Dictionary

8) The Michelin Guide

9) The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady

10) The Official Highway Code

Longlist for 2008 German Book Prize Announced

Deutsche Welle reports that mong the nominees from more than 161 German-language novels were well-known writers Uwe Timm, Marcel Beyer and Peter Handke. 2008 wasn't the first appearance on the longlist for several other nominees, including Ingo Schulze, Judith Kuckart and Feridun Zaimoglu.

Banjo Paterson poems found in war diary

A nunber of papers picked up on the news that original poems of legendary bush balladeer Banjo Paterson have been found in a 109-year-old war diary. Brisbane's Courier Mail reports the discovery of an 1899 cash book, in which the final pages reveal Paterson's original and unseen poetry, has thrilled Australian literature buffs. Major G.L. Lee, who commanded a squadron of NSW Lancers in South Africa in the Boer War in 1899, used the book for inventories and to write his private thoughts...Paterson travelled with him on that journey as a war correspondent aboard the SS Kent

Self-described "nosey parker" and former soldier Ian Hawthorn found the ballads while snooping through old documents in an archive storeroom at Australia's oldest military base, the Royal NSW Lancer Barracks in Parramatta."I pulled out this cash book and started to read it," Mr Hawthorn said yesterday. "The diary itself is hugely significant as the personal diary of Major Lee who led the regiment fighting the Boer War. "But at the back of the diary there are a series of handwritten poems signed Banjo Paterson. "Most are known Banjo Paterson poems that predate the publication dates, and in some cases have significantly different verses in the diary than in the the published editions."

Unidentified librarians have verified Paterson's signature but an official authentication is still needed.

Top 10 literary global destinations

Here are the top 10 literary destinations, compiled by the TripAdvisor. The name of a famous author linked to the city is in brackets.

- London (Keats)

- Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare)

- Edinburgh (Arthur Conan Doyle)

- Dublin (James Joyce)

- New York (Arthur Miller)

- Concord, Massachusetts (Louisa May Alcott)

- Paris (Victor Hugo)

- San Francisco (Allen Ginsberg)

- Rome (Virgil)

- St. Petersburg (Dostoevsky)

I'm lost without a book!

Jane Shilling provides an entertaining weekly blog in the UK Times. In her latest, she states, "I'm lost without a book - and lost in one. The steps I take to avoid being left bookless would shame a hardened and devious alcoholic. I always have some sort of little book stashed in my handbag, just in case. And another little book for good measure. I once spent New Year's Eve scouring Lisbon for something to read and knew that the coming year wasn't going to turn out well when all I could find was Lorna Doone.

Occasionally, being trapped in the company of a book you dislike can bring about a miracle conversion. Ages ago I travelled from Aberdeen to King's Cross with nothing to read but The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which I had already attempted and discarded with loathing. I tried looking out of the window, but it was winter and the light failed early. In desperation I reopened the book and began again at: “I wish either my father or my mother... had minded what they were about when they begot me...”

Read more about her reading here.

Her previous column, "The write stuff: there's no substitute for ink and paper" is fascinating.Extracts below

"Ted Howard is an 82-year-old retired farm worker and machinery demonstrator from Cambridgeshire. One day in the summer of 1948 he was at a village fair when a girl jumped off a carousel and ran into him. Her name was Mollie and he knew her by sight. She was a farmer's daughter and he used to wave to her from his tractor when he drove past the field in which she was cleaning mangelwurzels.

After she ran into him at the fair they started courting, and for the next seven years, as his work took him travelling through England, Ireland, France and Holland, he wrote her almost 100 love letters. One day, in a fit of pique, she tore them into tiny pieces and stuffed the shreds into a cushion from which, 40 years later, Ted retrieved them. He spent 15 years, on and off, sorting the fragments, sticking them back together and photocopying the restored originals. Now he plans to write a book based on the letters, to be called A Week at Stanton, as a tribute to Mollie - who became his wife, and died three years ago after 50 years of marriage.

The details of this story are so resonant that it would be hard not to imagine it as a lost novel by Thomas Hardy - the girl cutting mangelwurzels, love blossoming after the chance encounter at the village fair, the seven-year courtship, the love letters written by a man who left school at 14, took a single exam (on ploughing) in his life and says that writing “made me sweat more than carrying sacks of corn”; then the impulsive destruction of those letters by the woman to whom they were written - were it not for the unHardyish happy ending of half a century of married life, three children, six grandchildren and the letters pieced together and made into a book.

But the detail that struck me when I saw the story was that this is the second time in a couple of months that I have read of letters being shredded and stuffed into a cushion. In his memoir, Nothing to be Frightened of, Julian Barnes describes an object brought home by his father from India. It was “a circular leather pouffe...I used to drop my full adolescent weight down on to it, with a kind of aggressive affection...eventually, the seams began to give way...and I made the sort of discovery psychoanalysts might relish.” The pouffe, it turned out, was stuffed with the torn-up letters of his parents' courtship and early married years. “How could they have taken their love letters...torn them into tiny pieces, and then watched other people's fat arses hunker down on top?” Barnes wonders. Then a further thought strikes him: “Here's a haunting would-you-rather. Would you rather tear up your own expressions of love, or the ones you had received?”

Now there's a question for us all to ponder as we press the Send key that wings on its way a txt msg to our sweetheart that reads “Luv U 4Evah”. Nobody's bum's going to be resting comfortably on that in years to come, for sure. Then again, no stranger is going to find himself marvelling at its Hardyesque resonance, either. Which might also, I suppose, be regarded as a blessing...

To celebrate its milestone, OUP has organised a range of events and publishing activities for 2008. The Australian National Dictionary, first published in 1988, will be made available free online as the Press's 'gift to the Nation' and, in October, OUP will publish Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian English by Bruce Moore, Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre.

Great Scott?

The Guardian reports that Edinburgh University Press has defended its decision to publish two works, written by Sir Walter Scott long considered inappropriate for publication.

"Scott wrote The Siege of Malta (an account of the defence of Malta against Ottoman forces) and the unfinished novella Bizarro (the story of a 19th century Calabrian brigand) in 1831 and 1832 after being sent abroad for his failing health. His son-in-law and biographer John Gibson Lockhart judged them undecipherable and unfit for publication, and later expressed the hope they would never see the light. John Buchan's 1932 life of Scott asked "that no literary resurrectionist will ever be guilty of the crime of giving them to the world".

But Edinburgh University Press has now published the works in a combined edition which it says remains "broadly faithful to the manuscripts", while also "tidying them up". "Most of it is incredibly chaotic," said John Sutherland, Scott biographer and professor of modern English Literature at University College London. "It does indicate a very wonderful mind, completely buggered up by explosions in the head. ...

Editor Ian Alexander said the controversy arose around the decision to give the works "a proper edit", providing punctuation, undoing Scott's habit of "repeating words very close to each other in a clumsy way" and correcting spellings. "There's no sense that there is anything disrespectful about this," he added. "We have spent our lives working on Scott and nobody has more respect for him than we do. He was an enormously admirable writer, even when his powers were failing."

Addressing comments that the publication of the works was "literary grave-robbing", Sutherland said that it had "happened before" in rather more literal fashion, when Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his wife Elizabeth's coffin to find a notebook of his poems he had buried with her. "And if you're grave-robbing anywhere it might as well be Scotland - Burke and Hare invented the thing," he added."

Onward, ye literary pilgrims

The Times Literary Supplement comments on a remarkable gazetteer by Daniel Hahn and Nicholas Robins's, 'The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland'.

"Because admirers bring custom, institutions and municipalities eagerly advertise associations. On occasion, indeed, they have exaggerated the links. Schools and colleges hoard, and sometimes exhibit, memorabilia from past pupils. Thus, the curious may stare at Johnson’s teapot, Philip Larkin’s spectacles, numerous locks of hair, quills and inkhorns, even, in the case of Jeremy Bentham, his embalmed body. More orthodox stimulus comes from portraits and busts. In the dining hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, hang images of Byron and Tennyson. The Long Room of the eighteenth-century library at Trinity Dublin, boasts Roubillac’s head of Jonathan Swift, which is placed among the serried ranks of stern divines and forgotten scholars. Hull University Library proudly displays personal mementoes of Philip Larkin. In the Tate Gallery, the mawkishly mauve corpse of Chatterton, dead in his garret, in Henry Wallis’s posthumous image continues to fascinate...

The Guide alerts readers to so many recondite associations that, overwhelmed by the trivia, they may ask ungratefully: what does it signify? To stand in the cramped quarters at Haworth, Chawton, or Shandy Hall is to grasp something of the enforced intimacies. Among poets, novelists and dramatists, surroundings trigger invention as well as reportage. The real and unreal are mixed together.

The Guide’s aim (wonderfully achieved) is to amuse and inform. It is not conceived as an aid for the earnest, battling in high winds with a linen-backed Ordnance Survey map on the bonnet of the tourer. Yet the lavish format hardly lends itself to consultation in the Welcome Break during a sat-navigated quest for the setting of the latest television adaptation of Jane Austen or Inspector Morse. Instead, in its prodigious plenty, it updates the inconsequential charms (and annoyances) of Napier’s Homes and Haunts".

Noisy row breaks out in libraries over fines

The Guardian also reports that library fines could become a thing of the past if a group of librarians get their way. A fiery debate has been raging for the past week between librarians, with anti-fine campaigners describing the charges as punitive, old-fashioned and creating a negative impression of libraries.

"Libraries are facing competition from television, magazines, the internet, e-books, yet they have this archaic and mad idea of charging people money for being slightly late," said library consultant Frances Hendrix - a loud voice in the debate which has been taking place on an online forum for librarians. "It's all so negative, unprofessional and unbusinesslike; like any business, libraries need not to alienate their customers." Liz Dubber, director of programmes at reading charity The Reading Agency, agreed. "My personal view [is that] they're past their sell-by date because they do sustain a very old-fashioned image of libraries which is out of sync with today's modern library environment and the image libraries are trying to project - tolerant, responsive, flexible, stimulating," she said.

Rates of fines differ around the country but range from between 10p to 20p per book per day to a maximum of around £5. The anti-fine faction of librarians believes that fines are alienating their users, and with book prices plummeting have also reached the point where they are sometimes more expensive than purchasing the book. One librarian wrote online: "I've met plenty of ex-borrowers...who say they paid a few medium-sized fines and decided it was cheaper and more convenient for them to buy the books - and stopped using the library."

The other side of the debate points out that without fines, customers are unlikely to return their books. Alison Wheeler, adult services manager at Suffolk Libraries, told the Guardian that her personal view was that some people do need the "occasional financial nudge" to remind them about doing the right thing. "No one would argue against a parking or speeding fine - if we didn't have speeding fines it wouldn't mean that people behaved better on the roads," she added.

One librarian suggested adopting the ancient practice of some monasteries, in which monks who offended in the handling of books were publicly cursed. Another pointed to Soviet Russia, where they said that offenders' names were published in newspapers to shame them into returning their books. In New Zealand town Palmerston North next week, library users returning late books are being challenged to beat librarians on Guitar Hero to have their fines waived".

Interview with Michael Holroyd

The Times has a long interview with Michael Holroyd, whom they term, "Britain's top biographer". His new book, 'A Strange Eventful History', covert Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and the Victorian theatre world.

"In the end he(Holroyd) found his canvas had stretched over 130 years, a parade of discarded wives and husbands, lovers, mistresses and illegitimate children, lives buffeted by passion and betrayal, triumph and tragedy, fortunes gained, lent and squandered: as much a saga of family politics as a portrait of the dominant theatre culture at the end of the 19th century.

Holroyd was drawn to explore the drama of family relationships, he thinks, because of his own fractured and often bewildering childhood: “When I was growing up there were stepmothers and stepfathers walking on to the stage, so to speak, saying a few words and then disappearing. With this book there must have been some need in me to pull it all together; to make a story that adheres".

The week in books

From the UK Higher Education Supplement notes the following two books.

The Last Amateurs: To Hell and Back with the Cambridge Boat Race Crew by Mark de Rond, reader in strategy and organisation, University of Cambridge. Icon Books, £17.99, ISBN 9781848310155

"There is a Zelig quality pervading The Last Amateurs. De Rond insinuates himself more and more into the story, relating his dreams, what he, 'the boys' and Rebecca the cox had for breakfast, and even details of his bodily functions that many readers might prefer not to know. His pre-race nerves are at one point so out of control that he has to be calmed down by the coach."Daniel Topolski, The Guardian

The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel by Tim Whitmarsh, lecturer in Greek language and literature, University of Oxford. Cambridge University Press, £55.00 and £19.99, ISBN 9780521865906 and 684880

"Shopping and f---? Magic realism? Pirates? Road trip? ... Sex toys? Murder? All are covered by the authors examined in this volume, who had all the tricks of soap operas and cinema, nearly 2,000 years before such genres were invented ... This is not a primer, but a wealth of rumination and research on the prose that has turned up at Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere." Tibor Fischer, The Sunday Telegraph

Odd Book Title

Kathy A Price. The Zen of Bowel Movements. A spiritual approach to constipation. Rock House Publications 1995.

Debbie Campbell, Director, Collaborative Services Branch, National Library of Australia has kindly offerd each week to link the odd book title to the Libraries Australia database. Unfortunately, Australian libraries seems bereft,however. of bowel movements, but Debbie has found it in WorldCat.

Quote of the Week

'The women's pole vault is an image of everything that I thought feminism should be'

Simon Barnes The Times