A while ago coalescent mentioned The Gone-Away World to me. I've yet to see my copy. Stephen Poole reviews it in today's paper and makes it seem fun and exciting, albeit a bit long. Mind you, they said the same about The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters and we know how that turned out.

The People's Act Of Love was my favourite novel of 2006. James Meek's new novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, also looks good.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the Guardian got a staff writer to review Matter, rather than Brown or Brooke. Favourite quote:

The reader has to wait, unfortunately, for all this to kick in, because it rapidly becomes heart-sinkingly clear that here, the particular society in which the Culture might or might not intervene is one of faux-medieval fantasy fiction. The uniquely hopeless odour of leather, horse-like animals, stale sweat and tortured syntax wafts from the pages, and there is a tedious drizzle of invented proper names.

The Guardian seem to have gone mad for SF recently with loads of posts appearing on their blog about it. This time they are tackling the New Weird:

When M John Harrison started the debate that would crystallise definitions of the term "New Weird" in 2003, much of the creative energy that had driven the movement had already moved on. As editor Jeff VanderMeer says in his introduction to the first comprehensive anthology of the movement, the New Weird is dead. Long live the Next Weird.

Alfred Hickling has long been my least favourite reviewer for the Guardian (excluding Eric Brown, obviously.) However he has surpassed himself this week with his review of The Glass Books And The Dream Eaters. Not only does he get the title of GW Dahlquist's novel wrong but he also clearly hasn't read the novel. His one sentence summary is factually wrong on two major points:

Three principal characters - a prostitute, a physician and a blind assassin - become involved in a shady society whose sadistic rituals Dahlquist dwells on at dubious length.

From the Guardian Review's letters page:

What is it about Nineteen Eighty-Four that makes it science-fiction? A characteristic of the genre is the active role of supposed future technology, but the video screens are hardly enough to count. The future setting? That's not enough either, otherwise every account of a future utopia or dystopia would qualify.

John Mullan has just finished a four part examination of Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake in the Guardian.

Part One: Disorientation
Part Two: Words
Part Three: Atwood's view
Part Four: Readers' responses *

My own review of Oryx And Crake for The Alien Online.

* There seem to be tantalising hints that Atwood plays World Of Warcraft.

There is a profile of Darren Aronofsky in today's Guardian. It rather bizarrely describes The Fountain as an "ecological science-fiction fantasy" but most interesting for me, in the light my review of that film, is this paragraph:

After the collapse of the original production, Aronofsky had also lost his lead actress, Cate Blanchett, but was in no hurry to replace her with his own partner. No reflection, of course, on Weisz's acting abilities. "I was just dead against mixing business with personal stuff." It was Jackman's idea to cast Weisz, and when the two actors clicked instantly, Aronofsky knew it was the right choice. "Rachel and I agreed to be professional, and to not talk about the film at home. There were a few potholes, but I think it worked, pretty much."

A Darkling Plain has won the Guardian's Children Book Prize. Good. Haters, get bent.

Unless, of course, you are hating on benpeek. He deserves it.

PS Poll haters: polls are for polling, foo'.

Peter Bradshaw's not very positive review of Cars contains the following paragraph:

Wilson's co-star is Paul Newman, another famous real-life racer from the movies voicing a grumpy old 1950s car called Doc Hudson, who turns out to be a famous race star from half a century back and who, in spite of himself, begins to mentor hot-headed young Lightning and teach him some old-school racing moves. Lightning's fast-talking agent was originally voiced by Jeremy Piven from, among other things, TV's The Larry Sanders Show, but for the UK release this character has been awkwardly dubbed in by leading local petrolhead Jeremy Clarkson.

It looks like feature length SF reviews have disappeared from the Guardian. The capsule reviews are still there though. They printed the following letter today:

I recently came across the science- fiction section by Jon Courtenay Grimwood in Review (June 10). Being an avid reader of science fiction, I'm always keen to see the genre covered in the mainstream press. However, instead of finding out about new science fiction, I found myself reading reviews of werewolf heroines, half-demons called Xavier and brains being transplanted into the bodies of executed serial killers. I'm sure the contributors, editors and readers of the Review section probably don't read a lot of science fiction. But surely they can tell the difference between science fiction and pulp fiction and techno-thrillers, which need book reviews as much as McDonald's meals need a culinary review.

It was probably easier for HarperPerennial to discover Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners collection than the Bookseller implied ("The bookseller", June 17). She has been raking up awards for a couple of years now. Nebula, Hugo, Locus and BSFA awards, among others, have all gone her way, and many of her stories have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Best New Horror and other annual collections. Also, why trawl blogs when your target has been listed as one of Time's best books of the year? The other reviews have not exactly been lax with the superlatives either. HarperPerennial can hardly be considered to be taking a risk with it.

Yesterday's Guardian contained a letter from one Andrew Vincent:

Wouldn't Peter Bradshaw rather do a job he actually enjoyed? The nine films he reviewed on March 24th mustered 18 stars out of a possible 45 - four of them only getting one star each. His total tally is often in the teens some weeks. Why does the poor man put himself through it?

brisingamen

Last year I read John Burnside's impressive but flawed Living Nowhere. It now seems clear this was a dry run of sorts for his memoir, A Lie About My Father, published this month.

Neil Cross also recently published a memoir, Heartland, about his traumatic relationship with his (step)father. I read his last novel, Always The Sun, last week. It is an extremely bleak novel and, as with Burnside, the interaction between novel and memoir is clear. However where Burnside's novel looked to the past, Cross is looking to the future.

Unrelated but it has a good hook: Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing?

Update: Interview with Burnside in today's Observer.

The tale, then, of a confused, contemporary young person, a young man overlooked by the public, a person of meagre accomplishments, a person of bad temperament, but a guy who nonetheless has a very large collection of compact discs!.

Rick Moody, 'Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set'

Though not the worst writer in the world, Moody is a contender for the most exhausting.

Geek novels in the Guardian (sbisson seems to be the first commenter.) Usual bold/itallics/plain drill.

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham 21% (19)

I think I read all of those before I was 16 (with the exception of American Gods and Cryptonomicon which hadn't been written.)

Probably see Harry Potter tomorrow. Peter Bradshaw closes his review by saying:

But what confident entertainments the Harry Potter films are, speaking boldly and intelligently to their fanbase. The Star Wars prequels were ropey; the Matrices died of embarrassment; the forthcoming Narnia movies have yet to prove themselves. It may yet be that the Harry Potters will outpace even Peter Jackson's revered Tolkien epic.

From today's Guardian:

The adventures of severed foreskins

Will the French wear Mandelson's shrunken CAP?

Free crosswords until 6th November.

EDIT: Gah, the applet is breaking my computer. Damn your charity, Alan Rushbridger.

Martin was right says Design Observer:

The main problem with the front page is the fold. This creates a visible surface smaller than a tabloid and, when turned sideways on a newsagent's shelf, it does little to attract attention. The unnecessarily large teasers and the masthead monopolise more than half of the visible area. Unfolded, the front page is attractive, but it remains to be seen whether the new five-column grid, which replaces an eight-column grid, has enough flexibility. In the first week, the paper used two picture placements twice on the front page — a slightly worrying sign. The row of news summaries at the bottom further reduces the space available to create striking lead stories. So far, the front pages have lacked the old Guardian's news focus and drama. They are trying to squeeze too much in.

All the time in this journal I play off like I hate fandom. Which is true to an extent, except that I am a massive Guardian fanboi. If anything could make me squee it would be today's relaunch. There was a hardcopy teaser in Saturday's paper and then last night the editors were blogging the launch, all of which whipped me into a frenzy. I rushed out and actually bought a copy before getting on the train this morning.

First Impressions

It's smaller! And fatter! In some ways this is a shame because I liked the slender nature of the old Guardian. It doesn't fold in half as nicely.

G2

The most noticeable change is that the cover article is pushed back into the paper behind other shorter columns. I'm not sure about this, it makes the G2 seem a bit bitty. This persists through the section and is something I think they'll have to work on.

As you know I'm not a fan of byline photos but these have got worse with the change. Not only are they now colour, they are cropped below the shoulder instead of at the throat. John Sutherland in particular comes off very badly.

The TV guide is given the two pages it needs in this day and age which means - hooray! - that the quick crossword is on the backpage where it belongs. Wonderful. Where's Doonesbury though?

G3s

The other sections are now the same size as the paper proper which works very well for the Media section. I like the strong top right corner branding and the new format makes for a much less disposable feeling read.

I have only a passing interest in the Sport section but this is the first section that really shows off the visual impact of going full colour.

The main section

It's a real shame to see David Hillman's iconic masthead disappear but if you are going to overhaul everything you might as well do everything. Not convinced this is the right replacement though. It is crowded and indimidated by the teasers above, which are substantially bigger than the masthead itself. Likewise at the bottom of the page single paragraph article leads clutter the page. This is also slightly unneccesary since there is an expanded and emboldened table of contents on page 2.

Inside the headlines are smaller which is a bit of a problem, especially when accompanied by subheadings which are almost the same size. For some reason Simon Hoggart loses his photo byline. Good. However if they are going to intersperse comment with news they need to find a clearer way to differentiate between the two.

Their new press means they can print across the margin so the centre pages are a doublespread photo. (There's some cognitive dissonance between the modernity of the format and the old-fashionedness of the content - it is of British soldiers in riot gear on the streets of Belfast.)

An expanded comment and analysis section (three instead of two pages) and a page each for editorial and letters is very welcome. Call me easily bored but a splash of colour makes it a lot easier to get through the finance pages. Reviews are stranded in the no man's land between the obits and the weather.

And the digital version is available for free until 26th September.

In her unending quest to be crown Queen of Jack The Ripper Patricia Cornwell has a full page advert in today's Guardian about how she is right and everyone else is wrong. There's lots of other interesting book stuff in there as well. (Though not, regardless of what coalescent says, a review of Specimen Days.) First a couple of things from earlier in the week:

Dan Green and Patrick Hayden Nielsen take opposing views of Tim Clare's article on getting published, informed no doubt by their differing relations with the publishing world.

Robert Collins's ten favourite dystopias. He has an interesting definition of "dystopia" because both Idoru and Crash make his list.

The big story - because all newspapers love lists - is the Vintage-sponsored best 15 novels of the 20th and 21st Centuries, whittled down from a longlist of 100 and voted for by book groups across the UK. They really should have made it just the Twentieth Century because the list is grotesquely slanted to the last ten years. Despite making page three (!) of the main section, as well as the Review, it's bloody hard to find any mention of it on their website, or indeed anywhere else. Here's the article and here's the alphabetical list:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (1994)
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980)
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (1993)
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969)
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (1997)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (2003)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2003)
Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor (2003)
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962)

Apparently book groups are fairly middle brow. Who knew? I've read nine and don't have much interest in reading the ones I haven't, except for the Solzhenitsyn and the Fowles.

Finally, I'm going to be reading Kate Atkinson's Case Histories this weekend. If you've got a copy you might want to as well because she will be discussing the novel over at The LitBlog Co-op on Monday.

Back in the monster thread on reviewing I mentioned that I thought proportionality was an important thing for a reviewer. This is the idea that differing types of responses were valid depending on the work under review. In today's Guardian I think Peter Bradshaw gives a good example of this. First, 5x2:

To travel backwards in time like this is piquant; it imitates the over-the-shoulder glance we give to our lives. But 5x2 does not, in fact, tell us the whole story of Gilles and Marion: the five scenes are interleaved with four silences, missing chapters whose inferences we must fill in as best we can. It is almost like the disinterment of five discrete archaeological strata, under all of which there is yet more that cannot be discovered. Ozon's film does not simply proceed from effect to cause, and solve a riddle in five recessive stages; neither does the mood lift progressively as the deterioration is reversed. It is much more complicated than that, at least partly because the jinx turns out to have been there from the beginning: the dark spark of spiritual wrongness that ignites the whole unhappy tale.

Keanu Reeves must be taking some kind of super-strength Botox to look like this. It is beyond anything as vulgar as bad acting. Those exotic chops are patently not in receipt of electrical impulses from the brain in the conventional manner. Maybe Keanu is shooting up Botox with the calibre of needle they use to subdue a rhinoceros; or maybe he is munching his bodyweight in Botox brownies in the location catering van or smoking rock after rock of a special kind of Botox crack.

jonathanstrahan

Enough, Peter Bradshaw! We've all got the point after your four references in 12 lines to Keanu Reeves and Botox in your review of Constantine. I normally enjoy your reviews, but this was just plain lazy. What was the matter - all tired out after watching 5x2?
Chris Bull
Leeds

Via coode_street Jonathan Strathan wonders what to make of this Guardian article by Stephen Moss on end of the year book roundups where the moderately famous are given a paragraph to talk about what they read. Fun or worthwhile? To which I reply: they're fun, treat them as such. You get to spot the occasional intriguing sounding item that has slipped under your radar, you get to pat yourself on the back for each one you've read, you get to see what your most beloved writers are reading and you get to revise your opinion of disliked talking heads by virtue of their impecable taste. Moss is right on the money when he talks about "AS Byatt, Beryl Bainbridge and JG Ballard, who have been giving us their annual selections since Dickens was producing collections of his journalism" though. Moss also has a mild snark about ""writer, actor, musician" Kwame Kwei-Armah" but this is exactly what makes these lists enjoyable. Kwei-Armah's entry is:

I immensely enjoyed Eizabeth Costello, the latest novel by JM Coetzee but my favourite of all time is his book, Disgrace. I like his mind so much; it's like an exploration of the world from vegetarianism to Afro-centrism. I adore him. I find he writes with economy but soul. Sometimes, when writers want to create a feeling of soulfulness, they flower up the language but he just glides to it. I also liked Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker, a satirical story about someone wanting to assassinate George Bush. It was written like a play. My favourite of the year is a novella, Old School, by Tobias Wolff. It's set in a Fifties school in New England. It is written with such soul.

Last week Barbara Ellen wrote an article for The Observer about how every time you see a clever, funny or innovative advert it will always be for a male product.* The adverts for female products in contrast will be bland, patronising, etc. As if to highlight this along comes McDonalds.

McDonalds have a core product (fried processed meat) and a core demographic (teenagers, the lazy and the poor). This is not quite the situation they want though, especially with junk food in the front line of the debate on the fatness of the nation.

McDonalds have seen the way the wind is blowing. They don't want to advertise grease, they want to advertise lovely wholesome things like salads. And we all know who likes rocket and cherry tomatoes, don't we? That's right: women.

Unfortunately McDonalds seem to believe that to be female is to suffer from a bizarre mental illness. The three women featured in the adverts are such appalling cliches that the unfortunate viewer is left in an incredulous daze. To watch these adverts is to be filled with murderous rage and as the Incredible Hulk says "don't make make me angry, you wouldn't like it when I beat you to death with Justin Timberlake's trousersnake." And they're on the bloody radio too!

* Allow me to digress for a moment. The Guardian's search engine is bollocks. The obvious solution to this is to search the site using Google. Except The Guardian usefully bungs prefixs like "observer", "books" and "media" onto various parts of its site, successful derailing Google's attempts to locate what you want.