23 Aug 2010 01:45:44
Something new about thrillers…again…It was a nomination in of top 'killer thrillers’ six hundred titles were nominated and more than 100,000 votes cast is a recent survey conducted by National Public Radio in America to identify the top 100 'killer thrillers’. Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs topped the poll, followed by Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls. Two contributions from (long-dead) British authors made it into the top 10: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. So what links them all (apart from a high body count)? In a word, Hollywood: all have been made into successful movies. Unduly cynical? Perhaps – and it is rather a big perhaps – voters did indeed make the effort to read the books rather than just slumping in front of the widescreen versions.
Lloyd Blankfein, Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs and one of the judges of the Business Book of the Year Award, decided to recuse himself when he realised just how many books on this year’s longlist (a third) dealt with the global financial crisis in which his company played a major role. Such self-awareness, rare in a banker, is to be applauded.
How many books are there in the world? One of the software engineers currently engaged in digitising the global word-hoard for Google attempted to answer the question in a blog posted on, well, you can guess where. Needless to say, as far as this Luddite was concerned, it all got somewhat technical but the answer, at the beginning of this month at least, was 129,864,880.
GalleyCat, a good source of book chat on the internet, came up with the 'Five Most Overused Put-Downs in Book Reviews’. They were: 'cardboard characters’, 'thin plot’, 'cookie-cutter characters’, 'the book falls apart at the end’ and 'I just didn’t “care” about the characters’. Surprisingly failing to make the top tier was: 'it would have been twice as good at half the length’. Anyway, I blame the novelists not the reviewers.
There is a fine tradition of established authors adopting a pseudonym when writing in a different genre. Gore Vidal, as Edgar Box, wrote a trilogy of crime novels featuring a strictly heterosexual amateur sleuth; Julian Barnes, as Dan Kavanagh, wrote a trilogy about a bisexual private investigator; and Agatha Christie became Mary Westmacott when she turned to writing romance. However, when the unknown Jay Morris, who will be publishing the first in a series of detective thrillers next year, was recently introduced to the world it was immediately revealed that Mr Morris is in fact Richard Price, author of Clockers and Lush Life – in other words, a thriller writer. To quote the last the words of Kenneth Williams: what’s the bloody point?
Once upon a time it was only buyers of top-shelf magazines who felt the need to disguise their choice of entertainment with an innocent wrapper. Now, though, a witty designer has taken to hollowing out old books so that you can hide your e-reader or iPod – and your blushes. You can see the splendid results at www.bustedtypewriter.com under the heading Don’t Judge Me.
Lloyd Blankfein, Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs and one of the judges of the Business Book of the Year Award, decided to recuse himself when he realised just how many books on this year’s longlist (a third) dealt with the global financial crisis in which his company played a major role. Such self-awareness, rare in a banker, is to be applauded.
How many books are there in the world? One of the software engineers currently engaged in digitising the global word-hoard for Google attempted to answer the question in a blog posted on, well, you can guess where. Needless to say, as far as this Luddite was concerned, it all got somewhat technical but the answer, at the beginning of this month at least, was 129,864,880.
GalleyCat, a good source of book chat on the internet, came up with the 'Five Most Overused Put-Downs in Book Reviews’. They were: 'cardboard characters’, 'thin plot’, 'cookie-cutter characters’, 'the book falls apart at the end’ and 'I just didn’t “care” about the characters’. Surprisingly failing to make the top tier was: 'it would have been twice as good at half the length’. Anyway, I blame the novelists not the reviewers.
There is a fine tradition of established authors adopting a pseudonym when writing in a different genre. Gore Vidal, as Edgar Box, wrote a trilogy of crime novels featuring a strictly heterosexual amateur sleuth; Julian Barnes, as Dan Kavanagh, wrote a trilogy about a bisexual private investigator; and Agatha Christie became Mary Westmacott when she turned to writing romance. However, when the unknown Jay Morris, who will be publishing the first in a series of detective thrillers next year, was recently introduced to the world it was immediately revealed that Mr Morris is in fact Richard Price, author of Clockers and Lush Life – in other words, a thriller writer. To quote the last the words of Kenneth Williams: what’s the bloody point?
Once upon a time it was only buyers of top-shelf magazines who felt the need to disguise their choice of entertainment with an innocent wrapper. Now, though, a witty designer has taken to hollowing out old books so that you can hide your e-reader or iPod – and your blushes. You can see the splendid results at www.bustedtypewriter.com under the heading Don’t Judge Me.
