http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-50-best-summer-reads-2003160.html

As for my summer reading, I’m not much of a planner, but I do have “C” by Tom McCarthy at the top of my list. Or I suppose it’s meant to be new books, isn’t it? I’m not very good at this. Anyone have burning recommendations – something you read recently and loved?

One site I’d add to Kinga’s list is Bookforum, particularly the blog section which gives a condensed daily list of interesting literary links. How about you? What sites would you recommend? How much time do you spend reading about reading, versus reading actual books?

It was the first time I’d been there in ages, because I always used to go to Prospero’s Books in Crouch End until it closed down over Christmas. This made me realise that I hadn’t bought a single book since Christmas. And, thinking back, I couldn’t remember buying too many in the last days of Prospero’s either. This surprised me, as I have always bought books pretty regularly throughout my life – in fact I generally buy books faster than I read them, ending up with piles of unread books on my shelves.

It’s not that I haven’t been reading lately – as you can see from my reading log, I’ve been getting through about a book a week all year. It’s that I’ve been borrowing a lot from the library, getting free review copies from publishers, and reading through the aforementioned backlog of books on my shelves. Before my visit to the Big Green Bookshop, I hadn’t bought a book in a long time.

Then I started thinking about the government’s recent attacks on funding for the arts. The Arts Council’s budget is to be cut by 15%, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council is being abolished, libraries all over the country are closing, the UK Film Council is being abolished, etc etc. I am as outraged as many other people, and have signed the petitions and written the blog posts and everything else. But then I realised I am doing the same thing as the government. My finances are stretched, money is tight, future income is uncertain. So I stop buying books. Not consciously, but instinctively. I could save a lot more money by tackling the big expenses – for example, moving to a smaller place and saving hundreds of pounds a month on rent. But that would be difficult. It would mean reevaluating my life, admitting to mistakes. Better to just stop buying books and save ten or twenty quid a month instead. It’s the same logic that the government uses when it saves a few million on cutting library funding and continues to throw away billions on the pointless nuclear dick extension known as Trident.

The impact on my life has so far been minimal. I’ve missed out on a few new books, but I’ve got plenty on my shelves and can supplement from the library. Similarly the impact of the government’s cutbacks on the arts will not be felt immediately. The arts are not critical in the same way as hospitals and fire stations. Books are not critical in the same way as paying the rent. But their loss will be felt sooner or later. Life gets poorer in so many ways.

So can I honestly criticise the Coalition Government for its short-termism, when I have been following the same logic as David Cameron in my own miniature economy?

Of course I can, and I will. But I will do so with self-knowledge, and with renewed determination to hold myself to the same standards as I demand of the PM. After all, behaving with more integrity than David Cameron really shouldn’t be too tough.

Well, in truth I probably could have managed OK – the discussion was fairly general anyway, and I could have just talked about the books I had read. But I don’t need much excuse to go on a reading binge. A lot of these books are ones I’ve been wanting to read for ages anyway, I told myself. So I stayed in bed for a week, apart from occasional trips to the British Library to find obscure titles, and basically just read constantly. It was wonderful.

To see the books I read, check out my updated 2010 reading page (yes, I know, Half of a Yellow Sun is set in Biafra, not London, but that was after the event!). Apart from enjoying myself enormously, I also felt well prepared for the event, and blew past my goal of reading 52 books for the year. The only downside is that now I have even more book reviews to catch up on!

That’s it. Nothing too difficult – I believe in setting realistic goals and actually meeting them (I only came to this belief after years of pie-in-the-sky New Year’s resolutions that came unstuck by the end of January). What about you? Any goals you’d like to share for 2010?

Happy New Year everyone! What have you been up to lately?

• American readers prefer romance; British ones prefer literary fiction
• Men make 35% of book purchases in the US; 42% in the UK
• In both countries, two-thirds of books are bought by people over the age of 42
• In fiction, mystery and romance account for 58% of purchases in the US, compared with 31% in the UK
• In non-fiction, religious books do well in the US; celebrity biographies in the UK.

Original source was a presentation at the London Book Fair by survey companies BML, who surveyed UK readers, and Pub Track/Bowker, who did the same in the US. At first I was quite struck by the fact that two-thirds of books are bought by people over the age of 42, and was going to start writing about how young people don’t read etc etc. But then I realised that probably two-thirds of adults are over 42 anyway, so actually it’s the sort of proportion you’d expect!

I guess the real question is why men don’t read very much. Certainly when doing publicity for my book, I’ve noticed that most of the people who turn up to readings and speaking events are women, and on sites like Goodreads or in book blogs, I’d say there are more women than men. That’s just my own experience, though – what do you think? Are there more women than men involved in reading and talking about books? If so, any idea why? (No need for proof or data of any kind – wild speculation is more than welcome here!).

The article title is a little provocative – neither author really argues that Google is making us stupid. But they do raise real concerns about whether our brains are being “re-wired” by online reading. Unfortunately there’s not much scientific research to draw on yet, so the conclusions are mixed. In fact, Carter points out the positive side of online reading – the active, “search-and-find” rather than “sit-back-and-receive” state. So, she concludes, “perhaps the cerebral tinkering that alarms Nick Carr and others is actually a kind of neural upgrade which will allow old brains to function better in the future.”

I am definitely aware of a big difference in how I think, read and behave online as opposed to, say, a library. I’ve always been a quick reader, and at university when I had hundreds of books on a reading list for a term, I frequently skimmed them, for example just reading the first chapter and last, and the first and last paragraphs of each chapter in-between. But that was the exception. In general, I always read quickly but methodically, from beginning to end.

Online, it’s a different story. I go on to check a fact for my book, and an hour later I have eight tabs open in my browser, have replied to a load of emails and am chatting with someone on Facebook while skipping between an article on child slavery in Cote d-Ivoire and a blog post on Gordon Brown, while simultaneously checking the football scores. What did I go online for again? No idea, so I close down, go back to my writing, and find there was a fact I was supposed to look up a while ago.

I have now recognised that I am simply unable to write while the internet is on. But more worryingly, I am also unable to write AFTER I’ve been on the internet. Even if I switch off my wireless card and have nothing open but Microsoft Word, I find my mind is less focused. It’s as if, having been foraging all over the internet for a million pieces of information, doing ten or twenty things at once, my brain doesn’t want to be tied down to the slower, more prosaic, isolated, demanding but decidedly one-track task of writing a novel.

So I’ve made a rule. On writing days, the internet stays off until I’ve done my writing for the day. If I need to look something up, I write it down and look it up later. It’s the only way I can function.

Does anyone else feel that they read or think differently online? Can you read long, serious articles online, or do you have to print them out? Can you stop and think deeply about something online, or do you find yourself engaging in a kind of “staccato” thought process? Do you think our brains are being re-wired? If so, is it for better or for worse?