Diversity awareness

HB: I was in Borders a few weeks back and saw across the aisles a stand entitled "Books you might not have heard of before" or something snappy like that. Hooray, thinks I, some attempt to bring non-standard material to a broad audience. Not so. I gets closer and I finds that the neglected novelist in question is Pulitzer prizewinning bestseller Michael Chabon. (The Yiddish Policeman fella, remember?) I threw one of my writerly tizzes & had to be calmed down with a soya decaf frapuccino with plenty of sugar substitute.

But now - wa-hay! - Waterstones has had the guts to really go for it. The idea is that big name authors - Philip Pullman to start with - get to choose the 40 books that have meant most to them, and those 40 books are out on a table with all the 3-for-2s. PP being the Big Man that he is, he's chosen such tough books as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and Musil's Man With No Qualities (a tome which I have to admit to never having finished. But I suspect I'm hardly alone there. I've read as much as I need to.)

let's enjoy this while we can. I'll bet you a pound to a penny that Waterstones discovers that Musil's MWNQ doesn't shift books at the rate of Patty Cornwell's latest, so that sooner or later we'll be looking not at PP's top 40, but Katie Price's top 20. When that day comes, it'll take more than the soya decaf to calm me down.

(NB: if you liked this, you might like ... Boyd Tonkin's article on the same topic in the Indie.)