Although I have never read Nobelist Naipul, I am with him on Jane Austen,

I thought halfway through the book, ‘Here am I, a grown man reading about this terrible vapid woman and her so-called love life.’

In a nice piece of symmetric marketing over the weekend Naipul is interviewed in The Sunday Times

“After nearly 170 years, starting with Dickens, everything that a novel could do has been done …” He pauses. “These are private views.”

and found over in The Guardian writing about Derek Walcott,

My copy of 25 Poems is beside me now. The cream soft cover is brown at the edges, though the pages with the poems are in fair condition. The very narrow spine is frayed: more the effect of bookshelf light than of handling. Fifty years on, I see more than I did in 1955.

Quite a long interview with Gibson, whose latest novel Spook Country is set in the present. Cut-out quotes,

I have become convinced that it is silly to try to imagine futures these days.

…

Well, as time has gone along, it has become more apparent to me that people don’t sit down in parliament and say, “What this country needs is the iPod!” This stuff is called into being by people trying to make a buck, or out of curiosity, and it is now completely out of control.