Authors Electric

Goodbye and good riddance, February 2016. You were a hideous month, a month that robbed us of two great writers: Umberto Eco and Harper Lee. I’m not going to attempt a critique of Eco’s and Lee’s respective contributions to literature – that’s already been done, and done far better than I could do it. This is just a very small personal tribute to two writers who made a big difference to me. It’s a small, belated ‘thank you’ to two people I’ll never be able to thank in person. Umberto Eco. Image credit: Bogaerts, Rob / Anefo | Wikimedia Commons I gobbled up Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in just a few sittings. It was for this mediaeval murder mystery, of course, that Eco was best known, at least in the English-speaking world. The novel was an instant, international success, and I like to believe that this was – at least in part – because Eco, in these dumbed-down times, never underestimated his readers’ intelligence. He was an unabashed intellectual, a professor of ...

There's been a fair amount of silence on this site recently about the ethics of e-book publication. I haven't heard the word sock-puppet mentioned for ages, although the perennial problem of Amazon reviews and which of them to take any notice of at all clearly hasn't gone away. Why would it? We all believe, possibly with very little evidence indeed, that lots of five-star reviews lead to lots of sales. Look up Fifty Shades of Grey, or the latest Dan Brown, and I bet you'll find a million reviews, or possibly a squillion, but they won’t have shifted any extra copies. One of the most fascinating byproducts of the social media has been a mass outbreak of critical diarrhoea. Everybody has an opinion – that hasn't changed – but now everyone can not only express it, but get it up in lights. And the critical kind, like most forms of diarrhoea, is almost always shite. Look at the beating poor old Harper Lee's been getting over Go Set a Watchman. I happen to think...