I let last week's TLS run on for another week because I didn't want to cut off conversations mid flow; apologies to those of you waiting for the new review list.

This conversation, from the last thread, particularly caught my eye:
alanwskinner:

I've been on a small and so far fruitless crusade to find some worthy self-published books, which means mostly ebooks.

There's been quite a few from Amazon's and the i-bookstore's free lists; as well, I have downloaded a great many samples, which I read first and then paid for and download the full book if the sample promised something worthwhile. So far, I've downloaded only a handful or so complete books, few of which justified my optimism and none made me feel as if I'd discovered something wonderful. I've tried to be impartial with regards to genre, sampling and reading books from erotica to paranormal to SF and literary fiction. Interestingly, pickings among literary fiction are slim, especially when those which market themselves as such generally exhibit either a highly-developed hubris by the author, or an understanding of what constitutes literary fiction which is very different from mine.

I've distracted myself along the way with a few others that can be found for free, or close enough to it not to matter: Jack London's Iron Heel, which made me feel I was re-living my political ripening as a young teenager in the 60s (not necessarily a bad thing); Dryden's translation of Virgil's Aeneid, Ecologues and Georgics, which is a book my mother bought me many years ago but fell into the hands of a friend, never to be seen again (the Aeneid has one of the great opening lines in literature, which Shaw later used for his play Arms and the Man); and a few others, which helped keep up my strength during my search for a decent self-published book.

So, if anyone here can recommend a good one, let me know, because my endurance has run out, I'm wasting my time, and I've quite forgot why I was doing it in the first place.

TimHannigan replied:

Your worthy attempt to give self-publishing the benefit of the doubt highlights the fundamental problem with the beast, one that so many of its champions seem to refuse to acknowledge: whether or not good – brilliant, even – self-published books do exist out there, finding them, and finding genuinely impartial guidance towards them, is virtually impossible and not something any disinterested reader should be expected to waste their time doing.

There's a tendency for champions of self-publishing to demand that readers "make the effort". But there should be no onus whatsoever on readers to do any such thing! In the reader-writer relationship it's the writer who has to make the effort! And in any case, your experience shows the practical impossibility of "making an effort" anyway.

It's a sad situation, and I by no means refuse to allow the notional possibility of there being absolutely fantastic self-published books out there. But old clichés about needles and haystacks are very apt indeed, and given that the public conversation on self-published books appears to be overwhelming dominated by self-promotion, endless ulterior log-rolling, and the ceaseless back-and-forth trading of five-star reviews the whole thing is exceptionally off-putting to people who just want to read.

PaulBowes01, summed it up succinctly:

And incidentally, it's worth pointing out that while finding a needle in a haystack is difficult, finding a dozen needles in a haystack is not much easier.

I blogged a while ago inviting for authors to tell us about their work, including self-published writers. The blog was very popular. So popular, infact, that it became clear I had bitten off far more than I could chew, so I parked the thread while I thought how to progress. This conversation has spurred us on to double our efforts to find a way. alanwskinner don't give up!

Here's the list of books we'll be talking about this week, subject to last minute changes, of course.

Non-fiction

• Wave: A Memoir of Life After the Tsunami by Sonali Deraniyagala
• Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War by Charles Glass
• Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth Century by Lucy Lethbridge
• Silence and the Christian Tradition by D MacCulloch
• Shipton and Tillman by Jim Perrin
• Creation: The Origin of Life / The Future of Life by Adam Rutherford
• The Love Wars of Lina Prokofiev: The Story of Lina and Serge Prokofiev

Fiction

• The People of Forever are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu
• The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
• Schroder by Amity Gaige
• How to Get Filthy Rich in Raising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
• Among Others by Jo Walton

Children

• Easter picture book roundup

Podcast

• Colm Tóibín on The Testament of Mary