Should Man Booker do away with its longlist?

If you read one book this week

One Kick by Chelsea Cain (Simon & Schuster) R180

A promising start to a new series from the author of the Gretchen Lowell novels, this one features possibly one of crime fiction's most damaged and disturbing protagonists ever: 21-year-old Kathleen "Kick" Lannigan, who was rescued, aged 12, from child pornographers. Various therapies to deal with the trauma of her ordeal followed, but nothing worked as well as the lessons in marksmanship, martial arts, boxing, archery and knife throwing. Now two more children have gone missing. Vengeance follows.

The issue

Some grumbling among booksellers and publishers following the announcement last month of the Man Booker longlist. Five of the 13 novels had yet to be published, and retailers missed out on "Booker longlisted" marketing campaigns. Readers keen to get their hands on these titles were also thwarted. Publishers, meanwhile, had to revise production schedules. Fourth Estate, according to the London Sunday Times, had to bring forward Joseph O'Neill's The Dog to the end of July, while Jonathan Cape changed the publication of Howard Jacobson's J from the end of September to mid-August.

David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, Ali Smith's How To Be Both and David Nicholls's Us are yet to be published. Some commentators are even suggesting they do away with the longlist altogether, and just have a shortlist, which is being announced on September 9. The winner will be announced in mid-October.

Crash course

They say comedy's hard and that most comedians are just not funny. But then you have someone like Omid Djalili, the British-born Iranian entertainer who seems to have fallen into a vat of natural funny as a child and has been full of it ever since.

I read an extract from his forthcoming Hopeful: The Autobiography at the weekend and can report he is hilarious. As a child, his father got him a job as a translator in a London hospital to help doctors with Iranian patients, many of whom were delighted by the boy's presence. All went very well, of course, until the 10-year-old Djalili told a patient a joke about a homosexual chicken. The man had just undergone a kidney transplant and literally split his sides laughing.

Further to wannabe comedians, Jeremy Paxman, the veteran British journalist and broadcaster, has had a bash at it with Paxo, his one-man show, at the Edinburgh Festival. Response from the critics was one of lukewarm indifference. Its best line, apparently, wasn't even meant to be funny: "News should be something that somebody, somewhere doesn't want you to know." It is mostly not that, nowadays.

The bottom line

"The system churns out an endless procession of more or less uniform human specimens." - Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz (Free Press)