Sunday, December 13, 2009

From The Times
The Times WHSmith Paperback of the Year:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society


Bookshop shelves are groaning with paperbacks, but how do you choose the best? A new award is the answer, says one of its judges, Alexander McCall Smith


Click here
for the longlist of 50 Paperbacks of the Year


There is something very appealing about a paperback book. Hardbacks have a certain gravitas and, in the hands of a good book designer, can become objects of great beauty. But they are entirely unsuited to air travel (wrong weight), difficult to read in bed (wrong shape), and it is counter-intuitive to throw them away if one does not like them (wrong price). So even enthusiastic buyers of hardbacks will tend to find a place in their reading life for that wonderful icon of 20th-century design — the paperback.

My early reading years were dominated by hardbacks. Children’s books in those days tended to be made to last, and every William book I ever read — and I consumed them all — came in small, red-bound editions that were capable of withstanding the sort of treatment that children mete out to the volumes in their library.
Then, as a teenager, I became aware of paperbacks. I remember the bright covers of Agatha Christie novels and, of course, the Penguins, with that simple, classic design that has survived so well and which now appears on everything from notebooks to aprons. These editions were not simply a matter of convenience — they were a piece of profoundly important cultural democratisation. Paperbacks brought literature within reach of people whose budget might not stretch to hardbacks. People loved them for that, and still do.

But there are rather a lot of them published each year, as the shelves of any large bookshop will reveal. Many of them are ephemera — the bland, predictable thrillers and chick-lit romances are churned out in their millions. Others are of greater value, and include works that may be appearing in relatively impermanent paperback form but that will survive many editions in this format. How to separate the wheat from the chaff? Some bookshops do this by having a section marked Literature. That makes the point, I suppose, even if some sympathy must be felt for the writers who are demoted to Crime or some other ghetto.
Where would one put Hemingway, for instance? Is he Literature or is he Action? Or is Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to be put in Romance, which it undoubtedly is, or Literature, where of course it properly belongs. As the author of a novel entitled Portuguese Irregular Verbs, I know all about this, having on more than one occasion seen myself in Foreign Languages.

The Times WHSmith Paperback of the Year award is the first UK award specifically for paperbacks. This helps, because it recognises the particular role of the paperback, and it provides another means of drawing attention to good books published in the form.
I agreed to be a judge for this award in an unguarded moment. Literary competitions are not easy to adjudicate because there is often no single book that stands head and shoulders above the others. By the time the ranks of titles under consideration are reduced to a manageable number, the differences between the books may be quite small. But
Read McCall Smith's full article at The Times online.

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