• I’m working my way through David Corbett’s rich Do They Know I’m Running?
• About a Mountain by essayist John D’Agata
• Philip Pullman courts controversy with The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
• Another lifeline for writers and other artists, Eric Maisel’s Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions
• Walter Mosley returns with his second Leonid McGill mystery, Known to Evil
• Still Alice by Lisa Genova
• I still haven’t finished The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
• Ditto Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City
• Sleepless, a thriller by highly regarded Charlie Huston
• And for something completely different, Mark W. Moffet’s Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions

Well, here’s an interesting post from one of personal genomic’s assiduous and astute chroniclers, Daniel MacArthur at Genetic Future. Check out ‘Where to next for personal genomics?’ about sudden regulatory interest in this field in the United States.

Lanchester even returns to this notion at the end of his must-read book. He suggests a reason why the post-GFC world has raised no alternative models: ‘Capitalism no longer has a global antagonist, just at the moment when it has never needed one more.’

How interesting! The kernel of a novel suggests itself to me . . .

• Graeme Blundell, whose crime fiction recommendations always chime with me, heads his review of Michael Robotham’s latest, Bleed for Me, thus: ‘Crime rarely gets as rewarding as this.’
• Blundell’s review of Never Look Away, the fourth stand-alone from Canadian Linwood Barclay, claims that ‘Barclay has Harlan Coben’s gift for simple, shattering plot kickers and Lee Child’s uncanny ability to find plot twists where the reader least expects them.’
• The rarely effusive James Bradley reviews Willie Vlautin’s Lean on Pete and concludes it is ‘a gem’.
• I’ve baulked at adding to my list Michael Scammell’s much lauded bio Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. A praising review tips the scales.

Eisler’s simplifying post looks at the ‘battle between paper and digital’ epitomized by the Amazon-Macmillan stoush and points out that with digital books Amazon maximizes its margins, so it’s driving prices down. Publishers resist because they’re losing their precious hardback margins.

The thought occurs to me that if this dynamic continues and eBooks flower as they seem to be doing, eventually publishers won’t be able to operate as they do. The prices of what they release as eBooks simply won’t support their centralized production and marketing departments. Will there come a day when authors need to deliver eBooks in shippable versions, complete with typeset quality, covers, etc.? Will authors need to deliver marketing campaigns? Will the role of publishers retreat to that of quality endorsement?

I greatly enjoyed the blast given by Daniel MacArthur, who runs the excellent Genetic Future blog.

I can understand Long’s qualms but MacArthur’s rebuttal is effective. In the end, some people will want full information about themselves, while others won’t. It’s free choice. And personal genomics is here and growing.

• Will we end up organizing and interpreting our own genetic tests or will doctors end up as the organizers, as they do with blood tests?
• Who will control the data? (Simplistically I imagine I’ll always be in the position of incontrovertibly owning my own genome test results but it seems nothing is so easy.)