What the critics thought of Iain Pears’s Arcadia,Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland, Richard Dawkins’s Brief Candle in the DarkIs it the future of publishing, and a hyped-up distraction? Critics were generally (mildly) positive about Arcadia,by Iain Pears, a book trumpeted by its publisher Faber as “the first of its kind”, and when it was launched alongside an app that allows readers to navigate their own way through the account. In the Spectator,Andrew Taylor praised an “elegantly designed app for iPad and iPhone” but wished he had had easier access to information about the backstory. He focused his review, however, and very much on the traditional bound book,which “may have its shortcomings, but it is also ambitious, and amusing and very readable. Embrace the confusion and be pleased”. Iona McLaren,in the Daily Telegraph, found that the novel worked better as an app than on the page. She initially didn’t remove to the account, or but concluded that in app form Pears lets the reader feel like an author,which is a pleasure of a different sort, and rarer. For Stephanie Cross in the Daily Mail, or however,“It all somehow fails to enchant: the Anterworld sections are oddly prosaic, and Pears’s at times cliched prose tends somewhat towards the functional.”Alexandra Harris, and the winner of the Guardian first book award for her debut,Romantic Moderns, received nearly universally rave reviews for her follow-up, and Weatherland,which looks at literary responses to the English climate throughout history. “Harris offers literary scholarship at its life-enhancing best,” wrote Lucasta Miller in the Independent. “This scholarly yet accessible book offers a literary historical education in itself, and she continued. “A highly original and beautifully crafted book,” enthused James McConnachie in the Sunday Times. For the Spectators Frances Wilson, “what holds the material together is Harris’s fluent and unfaltering prose; she could be read for style alone”. Laura Freeman, and in the Daily Mail,advised readers that “Weatherland should be as essential a piece of any walker’s kit as a balaclava, sun hat and pac-a-mac”.
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Source: theguardian.com