Book-blogaholica

My blogging friend, Mary Beard, came into the TLS office yesterday, looked around, as usual, to see which new classics books I'd 'borrowed' from her desk and said that that there was something about me in The Independent.

I must have flinched.

Times have changed. The Independent is not my bitter rival as it was in the 1980s and 90s. I am not now the Editor of the newspaper it was attempting to supplant.

But a trace memory of something nasty perhaps remains - particularly in the early office morning. During all those battling-for-circulation 'Times vs Independent' days, any mention of me in the opposition paper was unlikely to be something good.

'No', she said. 'There's a review there of a new book about literary blogs and it's very nice about yours'.

A new book about literary blogs?

Bizarre.

We'll be blogging about books about blogs about books next - a meta-feast for meta-critics everywhere.

I did, however, find the Independent piece - on-line.

Indeed, it was as favourable as Mary had said it was.

I should have been more grateful.

I denied that my initial flinch was because I objected to someone merely buying The Independent.

I had no objections at all. I haven't had the slightest one since 2002 when I ceased competing against it..

Quite why, in this internet era, anyone might need to buy it, is a different question.

I did, in fact, buy a copy yesterday. Maybe my mother might like to read a piece a of real paper in which a book praises her son's 'classical predilections' for Sappho and Martial.

Mary found hers free on a train.

The book the reviewer was writing about is called The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs, by Rebecca Gillieron and Catheryn Kilgarriff.

In Chapter Six, the Editor of The Times Literary Supplement is given credit - and five pages of citation - as 'the literary editor who was first off the mark to join the blogosphere'.

Which may be true - well here in Britain anyway.

Or not. After years of experience I'm taking the smooth with the rough in this regard. Bucolic? Bookaholic? Both fine.

The chapter heading is 'The Literary Establishment and its blogs'.

We can't have everything.

A distinguished publisher and I get our positive appraisals ('lively and erudite' for me) between the sexual obsessives of Chapter Five, 'standards high for gentle female erotica' and the cybercultural crooks of Chapter Six, 'there's no better place to create mass hysteria'.

The author's text is appropriately bloggish - with a lightly questioning more than lecturing tone.

Early reviews seem guardedly favourable.

The list of lit-sites at the back is already proving very useful. Without it I'd have never checked out The Good Girls Kill For Money Club.

I'm sure it's available on-line somewhere.

But there's still nothing quite like a book-about-a-blog-about-a-book.

Comments

[nigel williamson]

Peter,

Enjoyed reading this particular blog enormously. It reminded me of the morning in your office immediately following the first free-and-fair elections in South Africa in 1994. The Times had spalshed on alleged 'ballot irregularities' in Kwa-ZuluNatal. The Independent had splashed on a highly emotive story from the SA correspondent saying 'I watched history being made as black nurses queued all night to vote for the first time in their lives before going to work'... you threw the Indy on the table and said 'this isn't journalism,it's an emotional spasm'. Everybody else dutifully nodded in agreement. As home news edtor, I said I thought the Indy's splash had hit the moment and we had missed it...

The shocked and silent reaction told me that in that moment I had cooked my own goose (where does that phrase come from?) but I'm still very glad I said it - and I harbour the hope that today you may well feel that I was right!

All the very best to you, because despite the above, of the three Times editors I worked under, you were by far the most open-minded and challenging !

[Susan Balée]

That nurse must be "Dovegrey Reader," Candadai, and her blog is indeed a delight.

Glad you've made the grade, Sir Peter, and your response to it shows that you are, indeed, the good egg the writers recognized when they held a candle to your blog. Okay, that's an analogy that threatens to run away from me, but the hatching plot of my novel is on my mind these days....

Congratulations and long may you prosper!

[Candadai Tirumalai]

I liked the tribute in "The Independent" review to "the community nurse in Devon with a mind of her own".

[john problem]

I can read Sappho and Martial but not this piece - there's too many off-putting blue bits in it. What was the article about?

[Tony Francis]

Sir Peter, Andrew "Don't Taze Me Bro" Meyers has had his charges dropped. The police were cleared of any wrong doing. (And they say lawyers don't earn their money!)
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5224
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/all-scores-settled-in-dont-tase-me-bro-affair/?hp
In another matter, you have provided a link to the wikipedia article on The Independent. I notice the wiki entry for The London Times is in need of "copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling."
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Times
And the offering for the Times Literary Supplement appears somewhat sparse, although there is a common vulgarity for flatus:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Literary_Supplement
Sir Peter, your wiki article is called a "stub", whatever that means:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stothard