Literary Life
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Tagline of the year: for the forthcoming paperback of Jason Goodwin’s The Snake Stone, featuring a sleuth called Yashim: ‘The Ottoman detective may be a eunuch - but he’s not missing anything.’
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Most obvious put-down of the year: Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street received rave reviews here but so far the Americans have not been impressed. Publishers Weekly declared: ‘It’s much ado about nothing.’
Most over-the-top title of the year: Eric Nuzum’s Boo: A Ghost Story About Friendship, the Search for Truth, the Downside of Recreational Drug Use, Guilt, Punishment, a Little Girl in a Blue Dress, Finding and Losing True Love, and One Irrational Fear will be published in 2009.
Most desperate title of the year: Skinny Bitch in the Kitch: Kick-Ass Recipes for Hungry Girls Who Want to Stop Eating Crap (and Start Looking Hot!). Publishers Weekly commented: ‘Perhaps not a great gift book for grandma (unless she happens to be a foul-mouthed vegan)’.
Breakthrough of the year: Peter James - whose Not Dead Enough sits high in the bestseller lists - has made his mark not only in Britain but also around the world. Croatia and Israel are the latest of 30 countries to buy the rights to his Brighton-based thrillers.
Boob of the year: the reviewer of Patricia Cornwell’s Book of the Dead in the Times Literary Supplement somehow got the sex of a crucial character - featured in a previous Cornwell thriller - wrong. Then, the reviewer has made no secret of her own gender reassignment.
Trojan of the year: Jeremy Black, who has 50 mentions in the bibliography of Brendan Simms’s Three Victories and a Defeat: the Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714-1783.
Shop assistant of the year: the nameless nitwit who, when asked for the Booker shortlist, said: ‘Remind me, who’s it by? Are you sure you don’t mean Schindler’s List?’
Padded rear of the year: Jon Latimer’s 1812: At War with America, which contains 229 pages of appendices.
Staggering statistic of the year: the thrillers of Dean Koontz sell 17 million copies annually. So far that’s more than 325 million books.
Hostess of the year: Tina Brown, at whose launch party at the Serpentine Gallery for The Diana Chronicles the Bollinger never ran out (even if the book soon ran out of steam).
