John Baker’s Blog

Amazon’s reply to criticism of its recent POD announcement, insisting that POD publishers use its own BookSurge publishing service.
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Joan Didion’s memoir about trying to come to terms with her husband’s death became ‘the indispensable handbook to bereavement’. Then her 39-year-old daughter also died. As The Year of Magical Thinking arrives in London, David Hare describes [...]

Giosuè Carducci, an Italian poet, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1906. He was born in a small town near Pisa. Carducci began writing poetry when he was a child. He was enthusiastic about the ancients and demonstrated a strong revolutionary tendency.
Carducci led an active political life and his poetry inspired many [...]

A taster:
It’s a lousy Napoleon cake. The cream should be a pale yellowish white and light, but this one is feverish yellow and sticky. I eat just the top and leave the rest on the plate. I ought to complain, hold the cake up in front of the lady at the counter and say: “This [...]

Can we gain any consolation from sad books? What is it about them and about us that makes them worthwhile?
While I’m sure that a well-written, truly sad story, can also be life-enhancing and consolatory, it is very difficult to understand the mechanism that makes this possible.
There’s the pleasure we take from the writing, the beauty [...]