War and Peace in 635 easy parts

When it comes to books, there’s one phrase guaranteed to depress. (Well, maybe there are two.) Whether said as an apology, boast or sidestep, “I’ve no time to read” crops up whenever books are mentioned. (And it only ever applies to books – when have you ever heard anyone say they don’t have time for TV or music?)

Repeat after me

After a Christmas of Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop, the BBC has lined up Little Dorrit as its latest adaptation. Expect the “Bleak House treatment”: a smattering of stars, soap-like scheduling and enough swooshing camerawork to leave viewers of a delicate disposition suffering from whiplash. All this and an Andrew Lloyd Webber-helmed search for kids to star in a new production of the musical Oliver! to tide you over until next Christmas’s cinematic outing of A Christmas Carol. Is anyone else getting Dickens fatigue?

Elsewhere, Jane Austen still reigns. After her back catalogue was exhausted by last year’s ITV season, a new spin is required. ITV offers us Lost in Austen about a modern reader who (feminists, read on with caution) “longs for a man who can spark the fires that lie within”. And lo, she is transported into the pages of Pride and Prejudice. The BBC, meanwhile, has created a drama about Austen’s own life (especially her romances), Miss Austen Regrets, a conceit recently explored in the BBC-backed Becoming Jane.

Indeed, it’s cinema that seems to be stealing all the good books. Despite their classic status as TV series, both Middlemarch and Brideshead Revisited are going to Hollywood, much like Joe “Atonement” Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (though the BBC got their own back here by unnecessarily re-making Sense and Sensibility).

Even what is original seems curiously familiar. Cranford was trumpeted as something new, but it’s actually the third Elizabeth Gaskell novel the BBC have brought to life in recent years. The most unique thing about it is that adaptor supremo Andrew Davies was nowhere to be seen (perhaps too busy with Fanny Hill and A Room With A View). While current Sunday night success Lark Rise to Candleford is less well-known, its genteel humour, strong female cast and surplus of bonnets surely induces feelings of déjà vu.

If television’s collected works of Austen is well thumbed, there are reasons. Drama is expensive, especially period pieces, so risks are to be avoided. With their wealth of characters and episodic structures, Austen and Dickens lend themselves to multi-part programmes, and they’re also hugely exportable, especially to America, where they are lapped up by Anglophiles when shown on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre.

However this greatest hits and cover versions approach to adapting English literature leaves other writers and books languishing. Isn’t there a crime writer worth thinking about other than Agatha Christie (there’s been around 30 Marple or Poirot adaptations since 2000)? And what of the other great Victorian writers – Wilkie Collins or Samuel Butler, perhaps? Or 20th-century novelists like Jean Rhys or Angela Carter? Even international authors or, whisper it, a book from this century?

Still, the BBC may be a step ahead. Announcing their new production of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the publicity material says Thomas Hardy is arguably “the most neglected of our great literary authors”. Quite right too; it’s been three years since his work was last shown on television.

Books for Valentine’s Day and beyond

AJ Jacobs is a man on a mission, again. After reading all 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica in an effort to become the smartest man alive (as documented in his book The Know-It-All) and living a life without lying, he’s gone biblical. Not just Ten Commandments biblical, but following every law and decree in the Old and New Testaments. Some of this is easy (no eating owls, for instance), some inconvenient (not wearing mixed fibres) and others not just difficult, but potentially illegal (stoning adulterers, for one). The results are published in The Year of Living Biblically and show Dave Gorman and Morgan Spurlock for the half-hearted charlatans they are.

Six months after it charmed, delighted and wowed almost every American critic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is at last published in Britain. The story of a family from the Dominican Republic who’ve settled in Brooklyn and the Tolkien-obsessed, nerdish and obese Oscar. By turns dark, sad and gleefully exuberant, the story is held together by a curious mangling and mashing of language as inspired by Dominican folklore as it is by Doctor Who. The debut novel of short story writer Junot Diaz is one of the most original American novels in years and a much-needed challenge to the hegemony of Updike, Roth and DeLillo.

Originality is also in abundance in British fiction. Like Robert Harris’s The Ghost, Gordon Burn continues to blend fact and fiction in his work (having previously written about Peter Sutcliffe and Myra Hindley) by looking at the British media and its interplay with politics. Born Yesterday is set in the dramatic summer of last year, a time of flux at the top, failed terror attacks, flooding and a missing toddler – all themes and issues still trundling on months later.

On a less grand note, James Collins is gaining a lot of attention for his debut. While some are impressed by his deft plotting, fresh approach and combination of wit and romance, others content themselves with raising eyebrows over a man writing “chick lit”. Regardless, Beginner’s Greek is a tale of love and destiny which unfolds after a Wall Street banker and a Classics teacher meet on a plane and everything conspires to keep them apart.

From the bright young things to the embarrassingly irrelevant. Martin Amis aims to kill his credibility once and for all with his collection of journalism about the events of September 11th. His writing on “Islamofacism” is bombastic and deeply unpleasant, fuelled by ignorance and an unrivalled sense of self-importance, it might have been better called “I’m not racist but…” For a more insightful view on the world since 2001, Robert Fisk is also publishing a collection of his columns, The Age of the Warrior while Michael Burleigh gives us his cultural history of terrorism in Blood and Rage.

And finally, the dreaded VD. Whether celebrating or consoling, Penguins Great Loves are a good bet for February 14th. No “I wuv woo” banalities here, the 20-strong series celebrates the anguish, pain and passion of love with authors as diverse as Hardy, Kierkegaarde and Chekhov and the same price as a couple of wilting roses reeking of the petrol station they were bought from.

Unsavoury scenes

Cinema and food has a complex relationship. There’s the gastronomic pleasures of Chocolat and the vitalisation of wine in Sideways, but personally when I think of film and food I remember the less pleasant scenes. The cooked lover in The Cook, The Thief…, the live squid eaten in Korean shocker Oldboy, the boy forced to eat an entire chocolate cake in Matilda …