"Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle, the Lady of Shalott is entwined in thread, Silas Marner is enclosed in his loom - why have spinning and sewing so often been associated with danger and isolation?"

In the regular Guardian series of '10 Best', they have now reached in their entry of June 21 of the top 10 best smells in books. The list begins with Miltons' "Paradise Lost as nothing smells better than Paradise", includes the Casino smells of early morning in Ian Fleming's Casino Royale and naturally includes includes Patrick Suskind's Perfume.

Terry Pratchett Finds God, or Does He?

I will be reviewing two books on Terry Pratchett's novels for an upcoming Saturday Book Page. In the meantime, the headline in the June 11 issue of the UK Daily Telegraph raised some eyebrows amongst Pratchett fans when Rob Davies stated "Terry Pratchett hints he may have found God".

The text inferred that Pratchett has found God after years as an atheist, citing that an unexplained experience had caused Pratchett to reconsider his beliefs. Pratchett was quick to reply in the UK Daily Mail.

"There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist. But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should...

But since contracting Alzheimer's disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is that I really, if anything, believe... I have never disliked religion. I think it has some purpose in our evolution. I don't have much truck with the 'religion is the cause of most of our wars' school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.

The machine, which On Demand describes as an "ATM for books", prints, binds and trims paperback books with four-colour covers, on demand and at point of sale... New consumer research from The Bookseller into the reading habits of 1,000 adults found that 30% liked the idea of being able to get out-of- stock books printed while they wait in a shop".

After the Espresso comes Cooking the Books!

Alexander Gavrilov, the organiser of the Moscow Book Festival is quoted in the Moscow Times that he intends to stage an event called “Writers feed the Russian people”, at which authors of both novels and nonfiction works were required to cook for the audience, relating their dishes to the subjects of their books.

Crime writers beware! Marion Halligan would be a winner here on both counts!

The Ten Best Books of the Past 25 Years. Entertainment Weekly

To celebrate its 1,000th issue, Entertainment Weekly polled its staff and came up with a list of the ten best books of the past 25 years. Naturally a very US List!

1. “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy

2. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” J. K. Rowling

3. “Beloved,” Toni Morrison

4. “The Liars’ Club,” Mary Karr

5. “American Pastoral,” Philip Roth

6. “Mystic River,” Dennis Lehane

7. “Maus,” Art Spiegelman

8. “Selected Stories,” Alice Munro

9. “Cold Mountain,” Charles Frazier

10. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” Haruki Murakami

J K Rowling

J K Rowling came second on the list above. Her recent commencement address, 'The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination', to the Harvard Alumni Association has now been published by the Harvard Crimson. There's also a video available of her address on the website. There are interesting reflections by Rowling, a few reproduced below.

"I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better".

Robert Sabuda

I'm grateful to Meredith Wright of Dalton's Bookshop for the following reference to this article about Robert Sabuda, the self-taught American paper engineer who has given new life to the child's pop-up book. According to the article, his new book 'Encyclopaedia of Mythologica' will be released in July.

Book Groups

Book groups continue to proliferate. It would be interesting to know what are the most popular books with Canberra reading groups, but probably difficult to collate unless the relevant bookshops in Canberra or the ACT Libary Service are able to provide data. Certainly the secondhand bookstores often have one or two copies of popular titles but rarely enough for a whole group. So multiple copy availability often influences choice?

An unusual American take on book groups comes in Robert Gray, writing in Shelf Awareness, who asked booksellers and authors "What is the most innovative or unusual book group you've seen?"

Extracts include:

"The most unusual book group I know about is the e-mail 'cousinette' book group one of our customers belongs to," says Mary Gleysteen of Eagle Harbor Books, Bainbridge Island, Wash. "it's a way for cousins of various ages and political persuasions around the country to keep in touch despite vast distances and differences."

Author Patricia Wood, whose novel Lottery was shortlisted for the Orange prize this year, checked in with an "aloha" from her sailboat in Honolulu: "I do about two book clubs a week all over the country by speaker phone, SKYPE, iChat and in person. Living in Hawaii and being so isolated has made my participation in these groups critical to my outreach as an author in the development of my career."

Marie Leahy of the Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, Vt., notes that "one of the members of my book group belongs to another group that developed something appalling: bylaws! The guidelines require that everyone come with a typed list of questions to present; if you don't attend four meetings in a row, you may be kicked out; and there has to be a birthday celebration for each member. One person developed these guidelines and others went along with it, until my friend put a stop to it. People barely have time to read the book; how is everyone going have time to type up questions for each meeting?"

The Future of the Academic Monograph

I recently published an article 'Scholarly Monograph Publishing in the 21st Century: The future more than ever should be an open book' in the US Journal of Electronic Publishing.

This article looks at the global trends and issues in scholarly book publishing and offers some solutions in terms of institutional e-press publishing, given the problems of publishing research monographs in the social science and humanities through inter alia traditional Australian University presses. The average global sale of an academic monograph, according to British Academy figures of 2005, was only 300 copies and there is no reason to think this has increased since then. The academic book is still a key factor in the ever increasing 'Publish or Perish' trend in research assessment exercises.

The figures quoted for the ANU E-Press are significant in contrast. ANU E Press complete PDF and HTML downloads from January to November 2007 totalled 1.16 million. The top five ANU peer reviewed E Press titles downloaded from January to November 2007 were: El Lago Espanol - 62,408 ; Ethics and Auditing - 44,204; The Islamic Traditions of Cirebon - 23,507 ; Indigenous people and the Pilbara mining boom - 20,2279 and Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - 18,473 downloads.

Matthew Reisz, writing in The Times Higher Education Supplement for June 26, quotes Paul Collier, who is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford, as well as the author of The Bottom Billion. "Since the Nobel prize and the RAE," Collier argues, "the incentives have been heavily skewed towards peer-group opinion; writing for a broad audience is seen as an academic death sentence ... Of course, peer pressure has brought many good things: the lazy tail of the profession has been squeezed out, and the technology has greatly advanced. So, paradoxically, economics has more of value to contribute than a generation ago, but less incentive to do so. I fear that there is also less competence to do so: the searingly tough training involved in becoming an academic economist leaves no room for functional literacy beyond the most rudimentary level. Many economists are incapable of expressing themselves."

As an aside, a recent address by the Public Orator at Oxford University had a nice take on academic indifference.

"The Emperor Qin’s approach to academic research was bracing: he buried alive 460 scholars with whose conclusions

he disagreed ...In the Middle Ages the University of Bologna had a similarly vigorous retention policy: death for any professor over fifty who accepted a post elsewhere. At least it stopped any other institution returning them to the RAE.

Real Snail Mail!

The Chronicle of Higher Education's 'Wired Campus' commented this week on their use of real snail mail.

"Researchers in Bournemouth University, in England, have literalized a retronym: They've created real snail mail. In a project that combines technical prowess with art and whimsy, the researchers have designed a system for delivering messages by using actual snails. An e-mail is sent to a tank containing snails fitted with RFID chips. If and when a snail wanders by the e-mail collection site, its RFID chip will pick up the message. Then, if and when that snail wanders by the drop-off point in another area of the tank, the e-mail will be delivered (at that point, via the Internet, of course).

RealSnailMail's creators apparently intended to comment on the role that speed and efficiency play in modern lives. "Culturally, we seem obsessed with immediacy. Time is not to be taken but crammed to bursting point," Paul Smith, an artist and RealSnailMail co-creator, told the BBC. The project will officially launch in August at a conference in Los Angeles. In the mean time, the researchers are testing out their mailmen. According to the RealSnailMail Web site, three snails have managed to deliver 16 e-mails--but Agent 003 (Muriel) hasn't exactly been pulling her weight. Her deliveries so far? 0. But hey, maybe she just has an aggressive spam filter."

Check out the Real Snail mail website.

Amis and McEwan on Islam

Martin Amis raised some hackles earlier this year with his views on Islamic religion hardliners, now Ian McEwan is quoted in The Independent of June 22nd defending Amisunder the title 'I despise Islamism':...Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on - we know it well."

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Martin Amis has pointed out that the word Kafkaesque has become so devalued that a long queue in a British Post Office is now described as Kafkaesque.

As one who has recently stood in several British Post office queues with a number of stations unattended and an unusual mixture of clientele, including pension recipients. I understand the allusion after recently trying to post books back to Australia from a post office in Lancaster on a rainy pension day!

I am a devotee of the wonderful social vignettes which Victoria Mather and Sue Macartney-Snape produce on a weekly basis for the UK Telegraph magazine. A number of these have been collected and published by John Murray. The latest collection is entitled 'The Wicked Teenager' and includes an essay on the Post Office queue by Mather, aided by Macartney-Snape's wonderful illustration.

"Steam is coming out of Mrs Scimitar's cast-iron perm because all she wants to do is collect her pension. She has staggered to the top of the queue ('M'legs aren't what they were, love') and is now stuck behind a man transferring money to Montenegro - just when she thought that by wheezing, and rootling at their ankles with her walking stick, she bypassed the Polish builder with the red t-shirt (sending money to Krakow) and the arty type with his poncy purple scarf (buying travel insurance to go to Thailand and do druggy things on beaches she shouldn't wonder). She is cross."

Macartney-Snape's illustrations can be found here.