The starting point of all these pieces is essentially whether or not this is the book trade's 'iPod moment'. Aside from being the sort of lazy, whelk-brained journalism in the sort of style which explains Government budget announcements in terms of how they would affect soap characters, it simply isn't.
I did get to have little play with one last year and I'm not really sure why anyone would want one. It's an ugly, bulky piece of kit and it lacks the basic features which make books such a joy, such as being able to flick back and forth with great ease until the reference you were looking for flashes past.
I doubt even many early adopters, if I'm going to go down the road of using such clumsy jargon, are going to go for it. It's hardly revolutionary. It's stand-alone device, not even Mac compatible, which displays text in a format more familiar to devotees of the printed page.
The nearest it has to the high-tech world's Holy Grail of a 'killer app' is the ability, apparently popular with elderly Kindle users in the States, to enlarge the size of the font, providing an instant large print facility. This is certainly a wonderful benefit, but hardly a USP.
This is the flaw in the giddy enthusiasm of many commentators. We simply don't know who will use them and, more importantly, how. I keep reading accounts of how much easier it is to take an e-reader on holiday than half a dozen books. Aside from their undoubted weakness in the presence of sand, sea and sun lotion, is this really all anyone can come up with? A whole new market is not going to open up because of a small saving on Ryanair luggage charges.
I'm not Luddite enough to dismiss the possibility, even likelihood, that such devices will find a significant following. But I suspect it'll take up to a decade. I think foldable, rollable sheets impregnated with ink which can be made to form letters and images under the direction of an electric current will be key. But in terms of functions, I really couldn't say.
Anyway, it's Booker longlist day tomorrow and it's going to be an excitingly open contest again this race. I imagine all the newspaper coverage will focus on Salman Rushdie: clear favourite if he's included, clueless wittering about the lack of household names if he's not. It's the way it always is. I got asked by a reporter why F Scott Fitzgerald had never won the Booker a couple of weeks ago....
Still, at least there's no McEwan to monopolise what little space they'll give it. I might see if I can get my description of Sadie Jones' fantastic debut as the book Ian McEwan would write if he tried properly the whole way through and could write female characters quoted anywhere.
I'm not going to try to predict what'll be on there, as I'd simply be rounding up all the other opinions I've gleaned to make up the dozen or so were promised. There are too many potential candidates I've not read. But it would make me very happy, and slightly less splenetically inclined towards this year's Chair, the Right 'Orrible Michael Xavier Portillo, to see some of the following in contention:
- The Outcast - Sadie Jones
- The Language of Others - Clare Morrall
- One Morning Like A Bird - Andrew Miller
- Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
- In God's Country - Ross Raisin
- Breath - Tim Winton
Going by my usual record, however, in matters Booker, I have likely condemned all of them to omission. Sorry about that.
On the reading front, there's been Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief, the supposedly uplifting tale of a one-handed boy called Ren, who is rescued from an nineteenth-century orphanage to help out in various scams and thefts. I think it's supposed to be quirkily endearing, but I'm afraid I found Ren such a drip that I soon lost any interest in the fate of the stumpy little twerp and his motley band of cartoon hangers-on, the marginally most ludicrous of whom was the dwarf living up the deaf woman's chimney.
Currently, it's Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, which might well be worth adding to that list of Booker candidates. His last, Maps for Lost Lovers, was a sensationally beautiful novel eleven years in the writing, which sets an honour killing in a Muslim community in the north of England.
His new one brings together characters of sharply contrasting backgrounds and beliefs and puts them at the front line of the 'war on terror' in Afghanistan, a nation which was scarcely given time to recover for being s staging ground for the Cold War. Again his lyrical prose contrasts sharply with the senseless brutality which has been carried out in the name of ideology, whether Soviet, Taliban or American.
I've had a Channel 4 documentary about the sandwich industry on while I've been finishing this off. Not surprisingly, there an awful lot of poor quality food being sold in a deeply deceptive way. No mention though of the thing which bugs me most: the signs on the tills in Pret A Manger which say "We're legally required to add VAT to food to eat in. Nightmare!"
I quite mind being patronised by a sandwich shop.
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