‘Book Bites’ for Thursday 16th April 2009

Canongate gun for worldwide Pi consumption – I’ve had a copy of Yann Martell’s Life of Pi on my bookshelves since last June. It’s one of those novels I’ve always wanted to read, but have never seemed to have got around to doing so. Well thanks to the UK’s publisher of the novel, Canongate Books (one of my fav publishers as if you didn’t already know )), I’ll soon have a good reason to blow the dust off the book and dive straight in. They’ve launched an initiative (and associated website – worth visiting just for visiting’s sake) to get as many people as they can signed-up to join a global readalong of Martell’s bestseller in August. I’ve signed up! I hope you do too (even if you’ve already read the book).

Tim Adams’ “The joy of brief encounters” – Nice little article by Tim Adams at Guardian Books on one of my favourite literary forms – short stories. He runs through a few tasting looking ‘just released’ anthologies, and also lists his 8 favourite shorts of all time. What I love most about Tim’s article though is his sublime ‘take’ on the short story format:

There is always a loneliness to great short stories; they isolate individual lives and choices. We don’t see characters in Chekhov’s stories, or Raymond Carver’s, as having an existence outside the claustrophobic confines of their few pages; we sense them, rather, as being pinned and trapped in the particular corners of a recognisable stylistic world, an instinctive moral universe, that their author had already made his own before they wandered in.

John Madera’s treasure trove of novella recommendations – If I’ve got a passion for short stories then I’ve got just as much love for the slightly longer story form of the novella, and I’m always researching for the best ones to read. Now thanks to John Williams at The Second Pass for pointing me to it, and John Madera for creating it, I’ve hit the jackpot and found a real treasure trove of novella reading recommendations.

The recommendations, which must total in the hundreds, were assembled through John asking 60 different authors for a list of their favourite novellas. Putting aside the subtle intricacies of what constitutes a ‘novella’ (which gives rise to an infinite debate on its own – John succinctly states ‘one person’s short story is another’s novella, one’s novella is another’s novel’), the recommendations are both sprawling and magnificent, and for me the discovery of John’s blog couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time (more on that later).

Note: you can either skim through John’s summary post on all of the recommendations, or click through to the individual response posts from each of the authors, which if you have the time is the better option, because most provide a brief reason for selection, for each of their choices.

‘Book Bites’ – bringing you tasty bite-size morsels of bookish news and delight, from around the web.