Wasn't Arts & Ideas Supposed to Be Dead By Now?

Not that I'm complaining, as Saturday's NYT had two fairly interesting book-related stories in it. Dinitia Smith's profile of G.P. Taylor, an Anglican vicar whose Christian-themed YA fantasy, Shadowmancer, is selling like hotcakes on both sides of the Atlantic, is worth a read, even if she can't seem to decide whether he's Jesus' answer to Harry Potter or not. Early on, she suggests:

The best-selling author J. K. Rowling gives too much power to the forces of evil in her books, he told parishioners. Well, one congregant replied, why not write your own book then? So Mr. Taylor created a story deeply imbued with Christian imagery and set on the 18th-century Yorkshire coast in Britain with its rugged cliffs, hidden caves and smuggler's legends.

(Which immediately puts me in mind of Moonfleet, but that's another story, ha ha ha.) Halfway through the story, however, Smith reverses direction:

Mr. Taylor, who says he was influenced by the X-rated rapper Eminem as well as Jesus, insists he didn't set out to write a book against Harry Potter. He has never even read the Potter books, he says, though he has seen the films. "I liked parts of them," he said on the telephone from Yorkshire, "though I found some of them theologically a bit difficult to handle... Shadowmancer isn't an alternative to Harry Potter," he says, adding that he was simply writing "as a Christian."

Now, either he wrote the book in response to Harry Potter or he didn't. I believe the question could honestly go either way, but surely it has to go one way.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton's memoir underwent some changes for its British edition, as Edward Wyatt reports. Basically, all the times where American readers get Clinton's unfiltered belief that Kenneth Starr was attempting to suborn perjury by strongarming people like Susan Macdougal, British readers will simply hear about the independent counsel's efforts "to prosecute those who refused to tell him what he wanted to hear," in an apparent effort to avoid possible litigation under the much stricter libel laws of the United Kingdom.