Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld series of novels that have sold more than 55 million copies worldwide, said he was “stunned, in a good way” after receiving a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List.
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The mince pies are all gone, the turkey’s finished – or beyond the reach of mayonnaise to resuscitate – and eyes already bleary from too much festivity turn wearily towards the future. It’s time to look back on the year that was and ahead to the year that is to come.
One of the delights of web publishing (or should that be the terrors?) is that memories of what has gone before can be measured up against a stack of statistics, though the usual caveats apply. Editorial judgment can be stretched over the rack of click-throughs, downloads and dwell times. So in the same spirit of openness and self-examination summoned up last year, here are the top 10 stories of 2008 on guardian.co.uk/books.
And top of the pops, eyeing us all suspiciously out of the corner of his eye, is Malcolm Gladwell. Yes, the outlier himself is on top of the pile with an extract from his latest book. Not that it’s any good to any of us now, of course, as it’s off the site because the web rights have expired – though anyone who missed it first time around can get the gist from John Crace’s digested version.
Once again, Gladwell’s mixture of the bleeding obvious and the unnervingly precise seems to have struck a chord. This time it’s the observation, reassuring and alarming in equal measure, that to be really good at anything needs a combination of talent, luck and hard work that is completely alien to most of us. He has come up with a nice, round figure of 10,000 hours’ work as a kind of minimum requirement for joining the genius club – I, for one, was counting on my fingers in despair – and illustrated it with some catchy examples (the Beatles, Bill Gates, Canadian ice hockey players). His position at the top of our tree confirms not only his status as a non-fiction superstar, but also the appeal of the idea that we could all be truly great at something, if only we could find the time.
I’m going to skate rapidly over the second most popular story. It’s the list of the top 100 books of all time that was published in 2002 and was our most popular story last year. Why a list from 2002, you ask? Well, as I think I said last time, this is a demonstration of the power of Google, and of the place of literature in popular culture… and let us not investigate any further.
Third on the list is another golden oldie: a polemic George Monbiot wrote around the time of Orhan Pamuk’s trial for “insulting Turkishness”, comparing the Turkish way of banning discussion of past atrocities with the British way of simply forgetting about them. There’s a massive spike at the beginning of January, most of which seems to be attributed to the social news website reddit.com (they might want to take a look at their tagline “reddit.com: what’s new online”, but people in glass houses…).
Fourth is another top 100 list – see No 2 above – which I’m going to skate over even more rapidly (this one’s from 2003, by the way).
In fifth place is our top news story – and no, it’s not the Harry Potter sex scandal story I was imagining last year, it’s a story about a teacher in Indiana who was suspended without pay for using an inspirational bestseller in the classroom (apparently there’s a bit of swearing in it). It’s testament to the strong passions aroused by censorship in all its guises, and another case of the wishes of a vocal minority taking precedence over those of the silent majority, as I think I read somewhere or other at the time.
Coming in at No 6 is 10 of the most interesting and significant languages on the brink of disappearing, as selected by a professor of linguistics. They include Jeru (20 speakers), N|u (only 10) and Yuchi (five). With around half of the world’s 6,900 languages facing extinction before 2050, the situation is acute. The idea of being stranded alone as the seas of language retreat is at once terrifying and poignant.
No 7 on the list is a thoughtful piece by John Gray about how “secular fundamentalists” have got it all wrong. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, among others, are falling into the same trap as the religious extremists they oppose, he suggests – clearly a line that has proved popular with the readers of guardian.co.uk/books.
It’s a victory of sorts that sex, the subject that drives so much internet traffic, is relegated to eighth this year. This time it’s Franz Kafka who’s been caught with his trousers down, to the outrage of scholars but the wry amusement of Nick Lezard.
In a year when the best JK Rowling had to offer was The Tales of Beedle the Bard – though it was the fastest-selling title of 2008 all the same – coming in at No 9 was the latest “next JK Rowling”, Stephenie Meyer. Dan Glaister’s profile was published just as her latest Twilight book was published in the UK, and just before the backlash began.
Which leaves the final slot to the scramble to sign up Charlotte Roche’s first novel, Wetlands, due out from Fourth Estate in February. Great to see so much interest in debut fiction, you say. Well, it might have had something to do with the description of her in the headline as “Europe’s sex sensation”. Some things will never change.
Like the general rule of thumb that much of what’s most interesting around here goes on below the line. So following Billy Mills’s excellent suggestion, and pausing only to wish you all a happy new year, I’ll turn it over to you.
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2008 began with a look back to 2007 and the news that Letters of Ted Hughes was the title most frequently chosen as book of the year by newspaper critics. There was shock over the revelation that Marvel Comics was planning to turn back time and and dissolve Spider-Man’s marriage to Mary-Jane.
In other endings, the last man in the running for Romantic Novel of the Year award was ditched, and the Nestle book prize for children’s literature was discontinued after 23 years. However, there was a happier ending for a couple of small publishers whose funding had been threatened by Arts Council cuts.
In Nobel news, Doris Lessing received her award in London while thirteen people were arrested in Turkey, for reportedly plotting the assassination of novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.
James Patterson replaced Jacqueline Wilson as the most borrowed author in libraries, while Dr Alex Comfort’s seminal manual, The Joy of Sex got a makeover. It’s a dead cert that neither of those authors would be in the running for the Best of the Booker award which was announced that month.
We said goodbye to French “new novelist” Alain Robbe-Grillet.
March was the month of the fake memoir. First up was Misha Defonseca who admitted that Surviving with Wolves, her bestselling account of a childhood flight from the Nazis, was a work of fiction. Then Margaret B Jones fessed up that her memoir of growing up as a mixed-race foster child, dealing drugs on the mean streets of south-central Los Angeles, had been inspired by a creative writing class and that she is, in fact, Margaret Seltzer, a white, well-educated woman from the comfortable Sherman Oaks suburb of LA.
Academics pored over the latest batch of Philip Larkin letters to emerge. Numbering 2,000, they included his twice-weekly correspondence with his mother, Mop.
The Harry Potter Lexicon case kicked off in New York, with the prospect of JK Rowling appearing in court to explain why the encyclopaedia of all things Potterish infringes her copyright.
New York also saw the biggest auction of Dickens’s works for more than 35 years, while a rare first edition of Tolkien’s The Hobbit sold at auction for a world record-breaking £60,000.
But how many Britons have read Dickens or Tolkien? This month we learnt that one in 10 Britons admit cheating the system at school by watching film versions of classic novels instead of reading the original texts.
We said goodbye to the pioneering science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke who died at the age of 90, and to double Booker-prize nominee Julian Rathbone.
A slew of prizes saw Sonya Hartnett win the world’s richest children’s book award, Astrid Lindgren Memorial award for literature; Baha Taher took the inaugural International prize for Arabic fiction (the ‘Arabic Booker’) for his novel Sunset Oasis; and Kate Christensen won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner award for her novel The Great Man. A self-help manual, If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs, won the Diagram prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.
No faked memoirs this month, but a biographer fooled by the “the secret diaries of Louis XIV” caused Bloomsbury embarrassment when they had to postpone the launch of Veronica Buckley’s biography of Louis XIV’s mistress by two months while they corrected passages which cited the non-existent diaries as a primary source.
Michel Houellebecq had a spat with his mother, who hit back against her enfant-terrible son’s denunciations with her own book, L’Innocente in which she gives her version of her life.
Lily Allen dropped out as Orange prize judge, while the Queen’s English Society called for poems to have rhyme and metre.
In prize news, Lloyd Jones’s novel of a war-torn Pacific island, Mister Pip, won the Kiriyama prize; Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer fiction prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; and it was a double whammy for writer and critic Cynthia Ozick who was awarded the $5,000 PEN/Malamud prize for short fiction, and the $20,000 PEN/Nabokov award for “enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship”. Argentine poet Juan Gelman landed the Cervantes prize and Graham Robb’s Gallic cycling cultural history, The Discovery of France, won the Ondaatje prize.
May brought the shocking news that neither of the two skulls believed to be Friedrich’s Schiller’s are, in fact, the poet’s.
Following in the footsteps of Katie Price and Madonna, the literary world was delighted to learn that former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell has embarked on a new career as a children’s author with a series of books featuring – guess what – a small, vivacious, ginger-haired girl called Ugenia Lavender.
There’s excitement at a sodden Hay festival when George Monbiot tries – and fails – to make a citizen’s arrest of John Bolton, US undersecretary of state for arms control prior to the Iraq war. Hanif Kureishi describes creative writing courses as the “new mental hospitals”, children’s authors rebel against age-banding on books and Garry Kasparov attacks Gordon Brown for ignoring Russia.
It’s a bad month for gay penguins as a children’s story about a family of penguins with two fathers offends Americans, but a good year for Larkinophiles as the British Library acquires another archive containing letters and photographs of the poet. It emerged Larkin had complained to photographer Fay Godwin that taking his picture would be a thankless task: “my sagging face, an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on – depressing, depressing, depressing”.
Famously awful poet William McGonagall faced scorn during his lifetime but a collection of his broadsheets sold for £6,600 at auction.
The Arthur C Clarke award went to Richard Morgan’s science fiction thriller, Black Man; Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen won the Independent foreign fiction prize for his novel Omega Minor; Will Self wins the Wodehouse comic fiction prize – as accidentally revealed in the Hay festival programme a month earlier; and Derek Landy scoops the Red House children’s fiction prize with Skulduggery Pleasant.
We said goodbye to Irish writer Nuala O’Faolain.
Booksellers were shaken and stirred by Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks, which became Penguin’s fastest-selling hardback fiction title ever. Elsewhere, there is an outbreak of grumpiness as VS Naipaul and Derek Walcott feuded after Walcott launched a stinging attack on the Nobel laureate, in verse, Wendy Cope rules herself out of the poet laureateship by describing it as “ridiculous” and “archaic”, and the age-banding debate rumbles on bad-temperedly.
Moving swiftly on to more jolly June japes, Rose Tremain wins the Orange prize with The Road Home while Joanna Kavenna wins the 2008 Orange award for new writers with Inglorious. Lebanese author Rawi Hage, writing in his third language, wins the £100,000 Impac Dublin literary award for his novel De Niro’s Game.
Carnegia and Kate Greenaway medals go to Philip Reeve and Emily Gravett respectively, and Gravett reveals that the secret to her success is rat pee; Nikita Lalwani wins the £10,000 Desmond Elliot prize and gives the money away to Liberty; and Mark Lynas’s grim exploration of the implications of global warming wins the Royal Society award.
To nobody’s great surprise, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children is crowned Best of the Bookers, and it’s also a good month for JK Rowling who is revealed as the richest celebrity, worth £150m, and for Kate Ryan, who is named US poet laureate.
JK Rowling finds time to say no to age-banding, and publishers pledge that they will consult authors.
There is controversy among the gongs as the Frank O’Connor award judges break with tradition and jump straight in with Jhumpa Lahiri as winner of the world’s richest honour for a short story collection, missing out the step of issuing a shortlist.
Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year award breaks the wall between genre and mainstream fiction by rewarding Stef Penny’s The Tenderness of Wolves, while Henrietta Rose-Innes wins the Caine prize and Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher wins the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.
Rushdie is having a busy summer. He threatened legal action over a book which claimed he was nicknamed “Scruffy” by his police protection officers. The authors admitted falsehoods and amended the book, Rushdie received an apology – and spurned any cash – at the High Court.
Random House also gets amending. Just three complaints about the word “twat” in Jacqueline Wilson’s My Sister Jodie force it to be changed to ‘twit’ in the reprint.
The ongoing saga of The Jewel of Medina began. The romance novel about the child bride of the prophet Muhammad was withdrawn by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, over fears of terrorist reprisals.
The Kite Runner was voted reading group book of the year for the third time in a row.
National grief in Palestine followed the death of poet Mahmoud Darwish. We also said goodbye to Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prizewinner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and playwright and author Simon Gray.
British independent publisher Gibson Square bought The Jewel of Medina and promptly got firebombed. Martin Rynja, the publisher whose home was targeted, has pledged to go ahead with publication.
JK Rowling finally won her case against the Harry Potter Lexicon, while the author of the banned book announced plans for a Harry Potter travel handbook instead.
Carol Ann Duffy took a more peaceful approach to insult and responded in verse to the news that an exam board had ordered schools to remove one of her poems from its GCSE curriculum because it supposedly glorified knife crime.
Comic fantasy children’s author Eoin Colfer described the opportunity to write the sixth Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book as “like suddenly being offered the superpower of your choice”, but a blip in an otherwise shining year for Salman Rushdie is the news that his Enchantress of Florence is omitted from the Booker shortlist for being “not good enough”.
Perhaps it just needs a better title. Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers won the accolade of the oddest book title of the past 30 years, while Patrick Ness wins the Guardian Children’s Fiction prize with The Knife of Never Letting Go.
We nearly said goodbye to Horse Whisperer author Nicholas Evans after he was poisoned by mushrooms. Fortunately, he made a full recovery, but we did say farewell to David Foster Wallace, who was found dead at his home in California.
The permanent secretary of the Swedish academy Horace Engdahl caused a stir when described American writers as “too isolated, too insular”. So it came as a huge surprise a week later when John Grisham was named Nobel laureate. Only joking. It went to the French novelist, essayist and “author of global reach”, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio.
The British Library pleased Ted Hughes scholars with its purchase of the poet’s enormous literary archive, spending £500,000 on 220 files and boxes of poem drafts, journals and diaries.
The Booker prize was won by Aravind Adiga’s first novel The White Tiger in a year in which the shortlist (described by the chair of judges Michael Portillo as “page-turning”) failed to register much enthusiasm among bookbuyers.
Milan Kundera became involved in a scandal involving espionage and the secret police when the Czech writer and political dissident was accused of denouncing a western intelligence agent to communist authorities in the 50s. He has vehemently denied the claims.
Roberto Saviano, the author of the book that inspired the prize-winning movie Gomorrah, announced that he was fleeing Italy after almost two years’ spent hiding from the mafia. Ian McEwan is among the 200,000 petitioners to condemn the “thuggery” of the mafia.
Google, meanwhile, spent $125m (£87m) on lots of books via its deal with publishers and writers to make in-copyright material available online.
Mick Imlah won the Forward prize for poetry with his second collection, The Lost Leader, 20 years after his first was published.
We said goodbye to Pat Kavanagh, doyenne of literary agents.
Nominations are invited for the new poet laureate with the public invited to make their feelings known on the matter. Andrew Motion also offered some wise words for his successor.
Rachel Johnson declared herself to be “honoured” to win the Bad Sex award. According to the judges: “All the entries were equally awful this year, but Rachel Johnson had the worst metaphors, and the worst animal metaphors.”
Henry Hitchings’s The Secret Life of Words was the first non-fiction book in six years to win the John Llewellyn Rhys prize; Andy Stanton wins the first Roald Dahl funny prize; and Patrick Ness wins the Booktrust teenage prize.
We said goodbye to Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton.
Finally, as the year draws to a close, there is some reprieve for the misery memoir. Constance Briscoe’s bestseller Ugly is NOT fake, a judge in the high court declared. Briscoe was defending a case brought by her mother whom she had accused of childhood cruelty and neglect in the book.
Kerouac’s On the Road went on the road … to the Midlands.
Potter midnight magic flared just once more, with the release of JK Rowling’s charity project Beedle the Bard. And, guess what, it sold really well.
Barmy season set in with vengeance. We learnt that women are impressed by men that read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom; that Christian Voice isn’t very good at stopping poetry readings after all; and that a high school in New York thinks that books for 15- and 16-year-olds should be censored by having the pages ripped out.
There was a resounding victory for Alex Ross at the Guardian first book award with his history of modern music, The Rest is Noise.
Finally, we said goodbye to the playwright and poet Harold Pinter.
And the very last news of the year? A “heart-rending but heartwarming” tale of the Holocaust, hailed by Oprah and due for publication next month has been dropped by its publisher over concerns about the story’s veracity.
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A full version of this interview is available at the British Library website
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The creator of a fantasy world borne on the back of a turtle swimming through space, a jazz crusader, two former musical hell-raisers and a 91-year-old grande dame of letters are among those honoured in the arts this year.
Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld novels have won him legions of fans, said he was “flabbergasted” to receive a knighthood.
“There are times when phrases such as ‘totally astonished’ just don’t do the job. I am of course delighted and honoured and, needless to say, flabbergasted,” said the author, who has sold more than 55m books worldwide.
Last year the 60-year-old announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, an affliction he described as an “embuggerance”. He has since campaigned to raise awareness of the disease.
The saxophonist Courtney Pine, one of the UK’s best-known jazz musicians, is awarded a CBE for services to music. “This acknowledgement for what I think of as a noble mission in uniting people through sound could not have been realised without the love, support and dedication of my family, management, band and the many supporters of music throughout this land,” said Pine, 44. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Robert Plant, the former Led Zeppelin frontman who has gone on to enjoy a sedater breed of fame through his duets with US bluegrass singer Alison Krauss, also receives a CBE. John Martyn, who immortalised his fellow singer Nick Drake in the song Solid Air, gets an OBE.
Diana Athill, the editor, memoirist and novelist who spent half a century in publishing, tending to the works of VS Naipaul, Norman Mailer, Jean Rhys and Philip Roth, receives an OBE for services to literature. As does Victoria Barnsley, who has been in publishing a couple of decades less than Athill and is chief executive of HarperCollins UK.
Two thespians are awarded. Liz Smith, the 87-year-old actor who has graced many of Britain’s favourite sitcoms including the Royle Family, receives an MBE. Michael Sheen, whose eclectic CV boasts turns as Tony Blair, Kenneth Williams, a werewolf and David Frost, earns an OBE.
Rosalind Savill, who has worked at the Wallace Collection since 1974 and been its director for the last 18 years, becomes a dame, as does Jenny Abramsky, the BBC’s former director of audio and music and now the chair of the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
Interior design guru Kelly Hoppen gets an MBE, as does fashion designer Anya Hindmarch.
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Obituary letters: The television work of Harold Pinter was formidable and useful in making his name known to the masses
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