Diary

naomi patrick

I love Penny Smith's Diary - please make her a regular contributor!

teledu

If this was "Woman's Own" fair enough, but I've no desire to read vacuous, name-dropping, pretentious drivel in The Spectator.

Stephen E. Andrews

Re. 100 Must Read Books For Men
Thanks again for the free publicity, Penny. You’re clearly still smarting after most of the venomous, selective and politically correct comments you aimed at my latest opus on Open Book were edited out in favour of my opinions. Good thing too, or you’d have come across even more as a woman who detests men because they are often different to women, whether you like it or not. Or as a celeb dilettante who subscribes to the paucity of imagination displayed by the hegemony by the more small-minded members of The British Literary Establishment. I’m delighted you’re afraid of my modest little volume.
So let’s look at the evidence. List books : a terrible thing, aren’t they ? After all, Open Book, The Times Culture Supplement, Anthony’s Burgess’ Ninety-Nine Novels and The Oxford Companion to English Literature all ‘list’ books they feel are of value too, don’t they?. Oh, I forgot – I’m only a mere bookseller, with just twenty-five years of experience of speaking to readers of all kinds every day. What can I know about books? Penny, however, knows that men who read books like mine and the books I recommend only read lists. Balderdash. The majority of the books I cover have been read by many men I know, men who read voraciously, men who read books of all kinds. I can give you plenty of names and addresses if you like. I even know women who’ve read some of them.
When I was young, as a novice bookseller and questing reader, I found ‘list books’ useful, as many people still do. They encouraged me to read works that were forgotten or ignored by the critical consensus. Therein lies the real complaint – I have dared champion subjectivity, diversity and individuality, instead of bowing to the Canon of dull social English novels of character, family, relationships and social mores that are regarded as the only serious fiction by the critical consensus. The books that surely, we must all agree – you, me, vacuous celebs, Richard and Judy, critics, students – are Great Works. Not so. Just as the critical hegemony would dismiss anyone who denied that human beings are diverse (to avoid being thought of as fascistic), they paradoxically decide that ‘good books are good books and everyone human will recognise their intrinsic human value’. If we respect diversity, we must allow difference, which means that at times we must allow exclusivity. The most exclusive of groups is the individual. In appreciation of art, the individual is King. Subjectivity is truth, as Kierkegaard would have it. Only in science and sport can we measure ‘the greatest’. The football team who scores the most goals wins the game and are the best. The correct scientific theory is proven by repeated experiments that always yield the same results. In art, things are different, as there are no objective measurements that really confirm what is ‘best’, as art doesn’t fully exist until the audience enters the equation. In that audience, there may be some individuals, who ultimately decide for themselves. Their experiences are different, so their pleasure (or not) in a work of art will vary too.
Wilde’s famous quotation about good and bad books was a riposte to those who questioned the morality of certain content. He may have said that there are only well written or badly written books, but who is to decide? Aesthetic arbiters like Penny Smith? Critics who never speak to readers from different classes, different backgrounds, different sexes and so on? Many of the works I cover in 100 Must Read Books For Men contain ‘transgressive’ subject matter (hence Penny’s dislike of them, proving my argument that men sometimes differ to women in their literary tastes), and many of them are brilliantly written even by the standards of people like John Dugdale of The Guardian( who also dislikes my book), which brings me to the selectivity of journalists: neither John nor Penny mentioned the more obscure literary works with huge critical acclaim featured in my book. Writers like Dino Buzzati, James Salter, Melville, Isabelle Eberhardt...I could go on and on. No, they mentioned only the books that they think support their weak arguments, books which nonetheless have great value to many individuals. For the views of the real reader on Penny’s novel Coming Up Next, look on Amazon. I think if anything attracts flies, it’s Penny’s conventional, decaying, received-wisdom attitudes, rather than my book, which encourages readers to explore various avenues, instead of uttering that they’re simply not worthy of intelligent attention.
How does Penny get her writing gigs? It’s this simple - Penny is a celeb, so she is guaranteed publicity by other journalists, which leads to sales. Think about it. A lot of the books you buy are publicised in some way, only some are recommended by friends or discovered serendipitously. This isn’t a cynical interpretation, it’s a fact. Prizewinning books sell because the prizes are publicised. We, the public, buy these books, many of us find them disappointing at times and never read another book by the winning author again. In my day job, I’ve seen this over and over again. Sales figures prove it. I used publicity myself, expediently – by using Tim Lott’s dismissal of The Orange prize in my press release, I landed press and Radio coverage for my book, which has to stand or fall on its merits as I’m not a media luvvie who will get publicity in the same way Penny is guaranteed it. Consequently, I attract the fury of the Literary Establishment, but get some sales and hopefully open some minds.
So the lesson is, don’t challenge the authority of the critics, despite their pettiness and selectivity. Dugdale claims I can’t spell because of typos in the contents pages of my book. Yet had he bothered to read it, he’d have seen those errors are correct in the actual book entries, proving he didn’t read the book, but instead disliked the implied attack on the canon he relies on to keep him in work. In the segments of the Open Book interview that remain unbroadcast, Penny only mentioned books that she believed supported her conformist argument. But then, she likes The Lord of the Rings, one of the few Fantasy novels it’s acceptable to like, since it’s so popular. I bet she’s never read The Broken Sword, Gloriana or Viriconium, though, But then she wouldn’t have, as they’re not probably not accepted by people like Dugdale as Great Works. Luckily, there are still some individuals out there. – if you’re one of them, I’m for you.