Bookworm: ‘Outside, it’s raining Danielle Steel’

SNIPPETS you may have missed from the past week in the literary world.
By The Newsroom
Published 24th Nov 2012, 00:00 BST

VERVE OF STEEL

Around this time of year, books editors are busy ringing round the nation’s authors to find out their favourite reads. These are seldom the ones that sell the most copies: it’s a fair bet that few of those asked will pick Fifty Shades of Gray. That dissonance between popular and critical taste is nothing new: as Anthony Lane, the New Yorker’s British film reviewer, pointed out 20 years ago: “Books editors would like to believe that they bring readers together beneath an umbrella of civilised discourse – but outside, it’s raining Danielle Steel.”

Well, it still is. But the next Danielle Steel isn’t like anything she has written previously. In A Gift of Hope (Bantam Press, January) she writes about her work helping the homeless in San Francisco. In it, she explains that, while she had always been frightened when homeless people approached her on the street, the suicide of her bipolar son Nick in 1997 made her change her attitudes. “Whenever he saw a homeless person,” she writes, “he would stop what he was doing, go to the nearest restaurant and buy them a meal and a pack of smokes... So I knew that helping the homeless 
would have been meaningful to him.”

PRAY GIVE THANKS

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It’s not too far from that to Psalm 102 in The Book of Common Prayer (“he turneth him unto the prayer of the poor destitute: and despiseth not their desire”), which this year has been in use for 350 years. It is also the 30th anniversary of the publication of Lorimer’s New Testament in Scots, and to celebrate both sacred texts as part of Book Week Scotland, the Scottish Poetry Library is holding an event with Richard Holloway and James Robertson on Thursday at 6pm (tickets £7/£5 concessions).

RANKIN AND THE CROOK

Finally, if you want to save one of the country’s oldest pubs, and one with the greatest links to Scottish literature, the good people leading the community buy-out of the Crook Inn at Tweedsmuir want to hear from you. Cheered up by a substantial cheque from Ian Rankin, they now need only £50,000 to bring a pub that was one of the first four to be licensed in Scotland (in 1604) back into use as an inn and community hub. They need the money (if you can manage £100 or more you’ll go on a Wall of Thanks) by 31 December. See savethecrook.org.uk for more details.