This is a rant…

Consider yourselves warned.

There has been much wittering of late on the interwebs about how “literary fiction” is dying out, and how genre writing and the readers of same are somehow to blame. Tonight’s post is inspired by a few pieces Stuart Neville linked to from his blog (the post is called “On Vicky Cristina Barcelona and other insufferable tosh”, scroll down a bit and you’ll find it), and also the epic whinefest that was the Militant Writer’s post about not being able to get published because her stuff is “too literary” (I paraphrase, I’m not linking to the site again, you’ll find a link to it in my piece on Queryday if you’re bothered). For an idea of the kind of silliness I’m thinking about, have a look at this then take some deep breaths and come back to me. If you see nothing wrong with that post, close the tab you have this open on, we’re not likely to agree on this front at all.

This nonsense about the relative value of literary versus genre fiction has been going around and around in my head for a long time now, probably since I attended an evening where two “literary writers” compared notes about “bevelling their sentences” (I kid you not, the phrase was used) and wafted their MFAs around in a none-too-subtle attempt at disparaging the genre writer that sat on the same panel as them (and sells way more books than at least one of them). They came off as pretentious navel-gazing idiots whereas the genre writer was down to earth and far more enthused about writing in general – and far more willing to encourage any wannabe writers in the audience.

During the Agentfail fracas I first came across the phrase “speshul snowflakes” being used to describe both wannabe and published “literary writers” and dagnabbit but those two exemplified the phrase. The “speshul snowflake” considers themselves to be unique, important, fragile, and put-upon by the nasty reading habits of the great unwashed book-buying masses. They are the ones who will claim that they can’t get published / their book failed because it was “too literary”, personally I tend to mentally translate “too literary” into “too purple” and move on…but what really gets my goat is the notion that one type of fiction inherently has more worth than another.

For the people who require credentials before reading further, I have a degree in English Literature and Linguistics (double major, both honours, ta for asking), and so it should be apparent that I love words, I love stories, I love reading. I have read deeply and widely across many genres. I am not, however a book snob. I love good literary fiction and I lap up good crime and sci-fi with equal enthusiasm, I’m not even particularly averse to (the nebulously defined) “popular fiction”, it it’s between two covers and has pages I can turn, I’ll give it a shot.

If I had a manifesto, it would be this:

1. Literary fiction is not a genre.
It is a pseudo-genre that contains everything that doesn’t fit into an established genre, i.e. it’s not crime, horror, romantic fiction, historical fiction, or any other sub-genre of the great Fiction bucket.

2. Bad literary fiction is exponentially worse than bad genre fiction.
Why? Because at least bad genre fiction will have a plot, some pace, and a hook that got someone somewhere to sit up and pay attention. Bad literary fiction is the equivalent of being trapped in a room with a stoner who insists on revealing the inner workings of their minds in excruciating detail, telling you a story that doesn’t go anywhere, and taking several aeons to do it.

3. Writing good genre fiction can actually be harder than writing good literary fiction.
She said what now? I’m serious. Think about this for a moment. If you’re writing in a genre (say crime) you have to (a) know how crime books work, have read a lot of them, and know what people expect from them, (b) establish (and sustain) plot, characters and pace in a way that keeps your readers hooked, (c) know what the tropes of the genre are and either abide by them or subvert them (the twist being a classic example) and (d) create something unique in a well-established and well-trodden field. You’re writing literary fiction? Well, there are no rules for that, no tropes, no demand for plot or snappy pacing. You can write something as excruciatingly tedious as Hotel Du Lac and even win prizes for it. Lucky you, eh?

4. There is no way to tell high art from low art unless you see a lot of art.
Again, how the hell can people dismiss genre fiction out of hand without reading a fair amount of it? The “I only read literary fiction” crowd know not what they disparage, by their own admission. I don’t know how they think they have the right to dismiss everything else as worthless. So many of these people trot out Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown et al while they’re dissing genre-writers wholesale. Well, they aren’t what anyone would term paragons of genre-writing (or any kind of writing), but yeah, they sell. They have something to them that hooks people. If you want to champion good writing, you have to admit that good writing exists within genre fiction as much as it does outside of it. Because it does. To claim otherwise just makes you look foolish. Neal Stephenson? Tricia Sullivan? Stuart Neville? Gillian Flynn? Tana French? Brilliant writers all, genre writers all. Put them in your pipe and smoke some. If you want to complain about bad writing you should know of what you speak, and be prepared to cite examples (from your own reading, not quotes from bad reviews by Kakutani or Battersby or whoever your paragon of taste is).

5. False argument: “Literary fiction is worth more because we learn about ourselves and the world while reading it”.
Yawn. ALL good fiction teaches us something about ourselves and the world. Read some Ursula Le Guin and learn about gender politics, read Carl Hiaasen and learn about the environment and Florida. Heck even BAD fiction has learning attached – read Dan Brown and learn about something called the Gnostic Gospels (although you should probably read something else for real information on them), or Stephenie Meyer and get a window into the Mormon mindset.

6. False Argument #2: “Genre fiction is all about escapism.”
Ahem, for those not self-aware enough, ALL fiction is a form of escapism. That is what it is for. To claim that it’s more valid (or more worthy) to “escape” into a world created by Dostoevsky than it is to escape into one created by Joe R. Lansdale misses the point of reading altogether.

7. False argument #3 “Literary fiction doesn’t need believable characters or any sort of plot because it’s all about the beauty of a well-turned phrase.”
Now look, I love a beautifully turned phrase as much as the next person, truly I do, but the literary novels that I love the most combine beautiful writing with strong characterisation, believable and compelling dialogue, and an actual story (Dostoevsky anyone? Kundera anyone?). You may make the prettiest sentences in the world, ones that I’ll scribble down somewhere so I don’t forget them (yes, utter word nerd), but if you break my immersion by having all your characters speak in the same voice, regardless of background or personality, or if there is no tension or drama to your narrative, I’m not going to be a happy reader. I’m going to consider finishing the book as work, and I don’t like having one of the greatest pleasures in my life turned in to a hard slog. It makes me cranky. Also, as a bookseller, it makes me recommend other books over your book.

8. Finally: A good story well told, is a good story well-told.
That’s an indisputable fact, and whether your story is about the dying days of a failing marriage, the pursuit of a serial killer or the problems incurred in settling Mars, if it’s good, it’s good and it deserves to be read, period. One good book of any stripe is worth 20 bad ones. Truth be told, in and out of genre writing the ratio of good to great to utter duds is pretty much a constant.

Can’t we all just agree that good books are good books, bad books are bad books and lose the defensive genre-bashing and intellectual snobbery? It would make the world a much nicer place.

/end rant

Silence is not always a good sign…

Lack of posting due to (a) Back of Evil and (b) a seriously unlucky streak of reading.

I’m not going to go into too much detail here because I’m fully aware that the Back of Evil (and the pain of it) may be contributing to an air of general crankiness that makes it harder for books to impress me. Or for me to persevere with books that grate on me for some reason. Please bear that in mind when reading what follows.

At present I am still trying to make my way through More than it Hurts You by Darin Strauss and am hopelessly stuck at the start of part 2, having taken a week to get through a particularly nasty sequence at the end of part 1. Part of the problem is the horrible subject matter (Münchhausen by proxy) and part is the emotional manipulativeness of it all. I loved Chang and Eng but this is one I may have to put aside unfinished.

It also has taken me quite a bit of time to get through Tethered by Amy MacKinnon which I almost bought based on the blurb, and then discovered I had a proof of at home (they mount up those proofs). As it was an uncorrected proof, I’m going to posit that the finished version might be a bit less purple and the clunky bits have been smoothed out some. Still, it wasn’t great.

I did fly through reading China Lake by Meg Gardiner which is every bit as good as you’d expect an Edgar winner to be. And later today (on the way to get my MRI, lying around in bangy tubes FTL) I’ll be starting Tom Rob Smith’s The Secret Speech which, based on how much I enjoyed Child 44, should also be a fast and enjoyable read.

At least I hope so.

Agents feel the wrath of the interwebz

For those of you who don’t do Twitter, there are some interesting goings on there at the moment for anyone interested in how to get themselves a literary agent.  Or how not to get one. Earlier this month, an agent on twitter started a hashtag (a way to link tweets on a specific subject) called #queryfail. Over the course of the day, other agents followed suit and added their own messages about how not to submit an application for consideration. This created a whole lot of drama – and to be honest, I fail to see why. They advised would-be clients to follow their submission rules, not to brag about the quality of their work, not to try to sell themselves over their book, etc. etc. Some of the tweets were a bit snarky, but nothing was anything more than you’d expect from people who are deluged every day with stuff from writers who think they can ignore all submission guidelines, submit work of a genre that the agent doesn’t represent and are basically sofa king special that the agent should drop everything else they’re doing to read their magnum opus, then contact them immediately to beg for the honour of representing them. Ack! To see a fair sampling of the advice offered on #queryfail you can either use the hashtag in Twitter search or go to this blog post that offers a synopsis (with quotes, some of which made me cry laughing). So that was #queryfail the first. #queryfail the second is due to take place on the 17th of this month. I’m looking forward to it, and sincerely hope that the #agentfail debacle doesn’t interfere with it happening.

So, what of #agentfail? #agentfail happened yesterday when a literary agent posted on her blog, inviting comments from would-be/published authors (despite it being April first) who have issues with agents they feel are doing it wrong (as they say on the web). There were some acceptable points made in the 200+ comments, but most of it was vitriol from writers who have obviously had one rejection letter too many in the recent past. A large proportion of whom posted anonymously as they are in touch with reality enough to know that posting so nastily under their real names would be the kiss of death to any career as a writer.

Now, regular readers here (hello all three of you!) know that I take part in Nanowrimo every year, obviously I do this because I have a rather hackneyed dream of seeing something I’ve written in print someday, and it helps to know I can actually come up with a story and work up a draft if I set my mind to it (and have a deadline!). Despite “winning” Nanowrimo two years running, I still don’t have anything polished enough to even consider starting the querying process. However, a few years ago, when I was a lot more confident cocky, I had started writing a story I thought was special, and fired off query letters to a few (well, okay, two, I wasn’t that cocky) agencies. I didn’t harass anyone for a response in a specific timeframe, I followed submission guidelines and I honestly didn’t expect to ever hear back from either agency. Guess what? I heard back from both. One said my project wasn’t the type of thing they represented, and the other said that they really liked the story idea, but felt that my way of telling it lacked something. Full disclosure, I was at the time being a pretentious tosser and attempting to write something “literary” and the prose was god-awfully purple – both rejection letters were nicer than I deserved. In retrospect I feel terribly sorry for the poor soul who had to read the stuff I sent them, and I’m especially grateful to the agency that sent the more detailed rejection because it made me realise I’d been writing in such a self-consciously “literary” fashion as to distract from the story. Now I write in a style that is more “me” and less, er, pompous. I’m still very much aware that what I’m writing now may not be to anyone else’s taste, but at least I’m not trying to be someone I’m not. I don’t write with an eye on publication, I write because I always have, and because I enjoy it. I won’t stop writing if I’m not good enough to be published/represented, because I don’t know what I’d do with myself otherwise.

All of the above personal stuff actually has a point btw, the point being that I am fully cognizant of the fact that in approaching an agent you are “seeking representation”. You are asking someone to take a chance on your work. You’re looking for someone to champion something you’ve worked hard at, desperately hoping that there is someone out there who will care as much about your story as you do. It’s a tremendous ask.

Basically, when you submit to an agent, you’re asking them to read yet another query letter and sample chapter package, another one on top of the hundreds they get a week, on the infinitesimally small chance that your work, out of all that they read will be special enough to prompt them to ask for more. If they do ask for more, there’s an even slimmer chance that the full thing (complete ms) will be what they hoped for. Even if it is all that they hoped for, there’s still the hurdle of whether it is “saleable” or not. An agent might love a book, but they need to find a publisher that loves it too, and that means there has to be an identifiable market that wants it. See that infinitesimally small chance get smaller? If you’re being realistic, you should.

However, over on the blog of the poor unfortunate who dared to ask for criticism (clicky) there is a parade of folks who are steadfast in their refusal to be either realistic, or, for that matter, reasonable.
They post about taking agents “off their list” (lucky agents!) because they have the temerity to take a few minutes a few times a day to tweet, or to post on their blogs, when they should be devoting all their time to reading query submissions. Um? Having a life is illegal? Also, have these people forgotten that agents also represent authors, and have to do that part of their jobs sometimes too? Or should they be mired in queryslush 24/7? They object to requested font sizes in submission guidelines (How hard is it for these people to “select all” and change the font/formatting to the requested style? Takes all of 30 seconds!) and suggest they should have a good optical plan….?! Riiight, you cba following the guidelines, but the person you are asking to champion you should get their eyes tested? Those two gems were from the first page of comments, I wish I could say they were in the minority, but they’re not.

There seems to be a species of wanna-be writers out there who believe that they should be the centre of the universe (so many centres, only one universe….), that they merit special treatment, that they can ignore submission guidelines and still have their application considered, and that the book they feel so strongly about (only natural this part) should be any agents first priority (not so natural…). Some of them also seem to think that their time is more valuable than the agent’s time (Uh? If the agent is not yet your agent, they are reading your query, and possibly your entire ms, for FREE. It would be most wise not to forget that. If the agent looks for a reading fee, then they’re not a proper agent and you shouldn’t submit anything to them, much less give them money.).

All of this nonsense seems to stem from the fervent belief that the author is hiring the agent to work for them, rather than the more accurate version that the author’s work is seeking a space on the agent’s list. If the work (and by extension the writer of it) makes it on to that list, then the agent will be working for that book, not “for” its author. An agent is not the employee of an author. Sending a query to an agent is NOT the equivalent of interviewing THEM for a job. Understanding those two simple facts should have prevented the unleashing of the bile on agents in general yesterday.

Sadly, it didn’t. No wonder so many of them were downbeat on twitter today. They don’t deserve that kind of treatment, nobody does. #queryfail was set up to help prevent writers from making mistakes in query submissions that would lead to their queries being discarded, unread. In no sane universe should the response to that effort lead to the agents being roasted. Those “centre of the universe” types that busily vented their spleen yesterday live in a different universe to me….

I am drowning in books…

Which is why I have not been posting. Spent a lot of yesterday (when not repairing my sister’s laptop or being a good little hostess – my days off are….weird) trying to figure out if I could fit another bookcase somewhere in my sitting room.

Looks like I can, but it’ll be full as soon as it’s constructed. This is not good. Even if I get it together enough to buy, build and fill the thing, there will still be books creeping up the sides of it *sigh*. The room is big and already has four (count ‘em!) big bookcases (one built in) and still…..still there is overflow.

Anyway, I am currently reading four books (I don’t really know how that happened…seemed to have a different book in my work-bag every day and I need something to read at lunch so…) and they are all good, so I will probably post about them later. For the curious they are: “Mad, Bad and Sad” by Lisa Appignanesi, “Tiger, Tiger” by Galaxy Craze (yummy first edition to set beside my much-read copy of “By the Shore”), “Breakneck” by Erica Spindler (which I sincerely hope is great as we have something like 30 copies of it at work, and that means hand-selling with heart!) and a proof of “Dark Places” by Gillian Flynn (who won some well-deserved CWA daggers with her first novel “Sharp Objects”). Will post reviews when I’m finished them all.

And on a note of geekishness, I installed tweetdeck and keep being distracted by it making a sonar blip-esque sound every minute. Feels a bit like being on a submarine with a lot of expansive sea-dogs. Yarr me hearties….

“I’m not just intolerant”

Announced a customer to me, out of the blue the other day.

I boggled. Then she decided to expand: “I’m not just gluten intolerant, I’m lactose intolerant.”

Again a boggle. I mean, why walk up to a bookseller and announce this? Next she starts wittering about the Patrick Holford clinic in London (I think I was supposed to be impressed) and how they had “diagnosed” her (quelle surprise etc.) as having food issues that they could treat for her. So she wanted a book (eventually this came out) that they had told her to buy (along with a bucketload of Holford snake oil pills). Oddly enough the book  wasn’t readily available, which caused her to have a strop, which I guess proved that she is intolerant… and that what Holford says doesn’t make books sell. Thankfully.

Then today, a co-worker tells me that they had a customer the other day who had a complaint about dictionaries. It was unique in that she wanted a dictionary that contained only “hard words”. As an example she opened a dictionary to an random entry and announced “Hygiene! See I already know what that means. That’s no use to me. I need something that only has words that I don’t already know.”  The bookseller boggled a bit before explaining that dictionaries contain all kinds of words, and that people who are learning english (for example) may not know the words she considered to be “too simple” for inclusion. Not good enough. Apparently the dons of Oxford should psychically produce personalized dictionaries for customers like her. And possibly label hers with her name too, and only produce one copy and arrange to have it shelved somewhere she’ll be sure to come across it. Yeah….

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, people manage to surprise you.

Yay, time off = reading time!

So, time for an update on the reading so far this year.

First up, I finally got around to reading “Water for Elephants” (yeah, way behind, I know, but we kept selling out of it) and I loved it. I’m not at all surprised that the book became a wildfire word-of-mouth success in the U.S. (and lately over here). It’s one of those books that is very very hard to put down, even when you know you should close it and get some sleep. The circus setting helps (regular readers may be aware that I adore anything to do with carnies and con-men – provided it’s done well) but the characters are all extremely well-drawn, flaws and all, and the story while not overly complicated is consistently gripping.

I liked the device of telling the story through an old man’s memories, and intercutting them with his daily existence in a nursing home. It made for some extremely clever segues and tugged at the heart-strings more than you would expect. If you’ve missed out on this one, like I did, be sure to read it before the movie comes out later this year. I can’t see them messing with it too much, but you never know. Better to read it now.

Next up was “Bleed a River Deep” the third Inspector Devlin story from Brian Mc Gilloway. I know I’ve never posted about his books before, so here’s a heads-up – “Borderlands” (the first novel in the series) was a debut that managed to be a great read while also holding out the promise of a series that would be worth keeping up with. “Gallows Lane” while not as accomplished as the first (to my mind, because I guessed who did it very quickly due to somewhat heavy-handed clue-dropping) still read well and had the added benefit of being plugged into the news at the time – corrupt Gardaí in Donegal, faked arms finds etc. For this, the third, he is even more on the pulse, with a gold-mining operation, people-smuggling, a bog-body and enviromental issues all to the fore.  The story opens with a bang (not really a metaphor in this case) and the  pace never flags. There is less about Devlin’s home life, and what there is of it is well-managed and on-point. What jurisdictional muddiness there is is pointed out and dealt with (Devlin is based very close to the border, and spends a lot of time stepping on the toes of the PSNI) efficiently. The plot strands are numerous, and handled very confidently with no extraneous characters added for the sake of colour or mis-direction, and there is a bad guy introduced who promises a lot more business for Inspector Devlin in the future, the kind of bad guy you love to loathe and hope to see more of.  The book comes out in April, giving  anyone who likes the sound of the series (honestly, I’m loving it) a chance to catch up on the first two books in readiness for the third.

And thirdly, there’s “The Cream of Tank Girl” which is a sort of ramble through the creation and brief life-span of one of my favourite comic-book characters. She has been revived recently in 2000AD but I haven’t had a chance to read any of this new stuff, my allegiance being fully with her as realised by Hewlett and Martin back in the days of Deadline, but the book (while telling the story of how she was created (sort of by accident as a cameo character in another strip called Atomtan) and how she ended up in Deadline, and how the movie killed her (damn you Hollywood!) seems to be lacking in a certain something textwise. I did snigger at a broadsheet newspaper article which managed to spell Jamie Hewlett’s name as “Hewlitt” all the way through while repeatedly calling himself and Alan Martin “dour”. Bad journo – no garibaldi!

The pics are worth the price though, with every Deadline cover featuring Tanky, or Booga, or even art by the Hewll) lovingly reproduced, and a couple of pages of the strip comic “The Sixteens” which Hewlett and Martin tried to branch out into after the movie pretty much killed off the Tank Girl manga comic. They’re worth seeing for what they did to Barney (my favourite psychotic ex-waitress) alone. There are also some bits from lesser known (uncollected) stories, but it doesn’t by any stretch include all the Deadline-only material. There’s lot of my favourite stuff that never made it into the books missing from this one, which means that while it’s a joyful re-intro to Tanky and  a reminder of how good she was in her heyday, it’s by no means an exhaustive retrospective.

It is very pretty though (in a grungy way) and for a coffee table book it’s more interesting than your usual. Plus it’s made me want to check out the new Tank Girl stuff in 2000AD, so all of that is a plus. Having said that, if you have no idea who (or what) Tank Girl is then this is no place to start, albeit a better place to start than the movie (grr!). I think the Penguin graphic-novel style collections are still available, so grab one of those if you want to meet the comic character that grabbed the UK and Ireland by the throat in the late ’80s/early ’90s and carved her own little foul-mouthed, ‘roo-loving, violent and socky-smelling niche out in comic-book history.

Um, yeah, I know I said I was going to read “Due Preparations for the Plague”, but I guess I haven’t started that one yet…my bad. I am currently reading a proof of “The Manual of Detection” so I’ll get to it in a little while (possibly).

Best of 2008

Okay, seeing as it’s the last day of the year, I decided to have some fun thinking about all the books I’d read this year, all the best-of lists I’ve seen over the past month, and both of those activities led to me making my own year end “best of” lists.

I’ve broken stuff up into categories that are pretty arbitrary, and as you’ll see some categories simply have a “best” rather than a Top 5 – just the way it worked out if there weren’t enough notable books (that I came across) to pad things out.

Top 5 Crime novels of 2008

1. Blood Runs Cold by Alex Barclay, for reasons detailed elsewhere, and because nothing else appeared in the latter days of ‘08 to knock it off its perch. It is being (criminally) discounted by some booksellers at the minute so there’s no excuse not to read it. (Edit Jan ‘09 – ooh, the prologue is up on the nicely revamped Alex Barclay homepage here. Click on the book cover to be taken to it.)

2. Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, because it brought me back to the first time I read Gorky Park, and it has every right to become as much of a classic.

3. The Likeness by Tana French, again for reasons detailed elsewhere, prime among them mixing a police procedural with The Secret History and managing not to be in the slightest bit naff.

4. Nemesis by Jo Nesbo, because the man can do no wrong, and this was every bit as gripping as the previous two.

5. When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson, another outing for Jackson Brodie, this one is every bit as good as the first (Case Histories), and miles better than the second (One Good Turn).

Top 5 Novels of 2008

1. The Believers by Zoe Heller, no question about it. Hilarious, painful, moving and at times uncomfortable reading, there wasn’t a box that this one didn’t tick.

2. The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson, southern gothic family drama meets murder in a tale that can’t be called a thriller as it’s more about the people than the crime. Funny, touching and downright scary in places.

3. The Dissident by Nell Freundenberger, a tangled and memorable tale about art, deception and culture clashes.

4 A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, my own favourite on the Booker shortlist this year. A stunning debut, and ties with Heller in the black humour stakes.

5. The Monsters Of Templeton by Lauren Groff, because it stuck around in my head for a long time after I finished it, and because it managed to add something different to the “returning home to a small town” story that has been played out many times before in other novels.

Speculative Fiction Book of the Year

Anathem by Neal Stephenson, because it’s as epic and brilliant as you’d expect.

Kids Book of the Year

The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch. Hands-down the cleverest, funniest, page-turniest (?)  and downright coolest book for kids I have read since I was one  myself.

Funniest Book of the Year

Dilbert 2.0 by Scott Adams, 20 years of Dilbert cartoons in one beautifully-bound book (with a bonus dvd), unwrapping this on Christmas day sent me to geek and hilarity heaven.

Honorable mention: When you are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris. Not as funny as he can be, but still good for a few giggles.

Non-fiction  Book of the Year

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, for a geek like me, the combination of woo-dismantling and experiments to try at home coupled with Goldacre’s wit and erudition made this an easy choice.

And finally, the inaugaral inductee into the “Publishers, what were you thinking?!” Hall of Shame!

Turkey of the Year (all categories)

Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain. Just plain nasty, in every sense. Not a single redeeming feature, other than the fact that it has a last page.

Runner up (or should that be dishonorable mention?): No time for Goodbye by Lynwood Barclay – one of those books that sells by the truckload and gets lots of press, for seemingly no good reason. “Twists” that are signposted in mile-high letters for anyone with a passing familiarity with crime books, and characters with simply unbelievable psycho(path)logy. Not pretty, and not fun.

Books from blogs part deux….

Since Diablo Cody has (deservedly) won her Oscar for “Juno” (while being backlashed at all over the net for her allegedly not-very-good-at-all follow-up “Jennifer’s Body” – google it yourself, if you care) – I feel it may be a good time to revisit the whole books-from-blogs thing…especially in light of the imminent Irish contribution from slightly famous Dublin blogger (as in he has won awards and has a much bigger following than me (ie thousands of people actually look at his blog every day) and even a wikipedia page, pointing all of the above out in order to cut the inevitable trolls off at the pass) Twenty Major.
The book is called “The Order of the Phoenix Park” (see what he did there, see?) and is a (takes deep breath) satire/adventure/escapade/avert-global-catastrophe-with-yer-mates type thing. All very well and good, since reading about his mates on his blog has always been fun. Sadly, it works best in small doses. The book comes across not so much as a satire but as a massive personal-grudge-settling endeavour, with his personal gripes and ham-fisted (nearly as bad as a Sindo journalist) similes that bludgeon politics into every available cranny of the text – those that aren’t concerned with how many times he wipes himself after taking a dump and other such “witticisms” that may amuse 14 year old boys. The plot, such as it is, isn’t too bad, in that there is one and it is quasi-amusing if a bit join-the-dots-y, but the pointless digressions into “hilarity” do nothing but undermine the story and grate on the reader’s patience. Well they grated on mine to such an extent that when I reached the end of it and realised there was going to be a sequel I groaned out loud…I won’t be reading it that’s for sure, it took me days to get through this one…
Or maybe I have no sense of humour (though I did check by watching “Black Books” and cracking open “A Confederacy of Dunces” to make sure I hadn’t temporarily misplaced my funnybone, apparently I hadn’t because they both made me (as Twenty would say) piss myself, as usual). Maybe the book will be a phenomenal success and he’ll be the new “Ross O’Carroll Kelly” a hero to the inner 12-year-old of the nation. Best of luck to him!

Is that anyone’s idea of good shelving?

Bugbear number 3 gazillion and 22. Some genius (possibly of the genus cantbearsedus or just plain old lazysoddus) has been having a whale of a time making a mess of our shelving system at work. Not only are they shelving books with the pages rather than the spines facing out (so you can’t tell what the book is…duh) but they’ve been making some very silly decisions about where to put things.

Today Arnold was driven demented while looking for a book called “The History of the Eye” which should have been in science, but instead turned up in the first aid section of health, then he found “The Biography of Zero” (about the number) in biography, and then he also discovered a book in the same section about a history of some bomber plane or other. Well, as he said himself; “Planes do have very eventful lives.” but we both thought that was what our military history section was for… Seems I’m not the only one getting very tired of having to engage in massive lateral-thinking sessions when looking for particular books, the store manager found a books I’d spent hours looking for yesterday in the Irish history section, sandwiched between books on the troubles – the book? “Ryanland” which belongs in travel writing. It even says so on the back. While returning it to its rightful home I discovered that the travel writing section was looking like it had been shelved by a dyslexic/aphasic hippo, and had to spend 20 minutes re-alphabetising it. (Note: we shelve alphabetically by author’s name. It says so on the shelves.). Whoever had messed it all up couldn’t decide whether to shelve by the first name or surname of the author, or by the title of the book. It would seem they settled on a mixed system. A system which means they were shelving stuff randomly. Which is a big help. Not.

It was Christmas eve babe…in the book-bank…

Every year the same thing.

“Why do you not have the book I’m looking for?” shouts sweaty, stressed and furious customer (at least three times per hour).

Because it’s Christmas EVE, and everyone else was more organised than you, did their shopping on time, therefore getting here before you and buying up all available copies of whatever damn book it is you want. And NO I cannot get another copy of it here before we close today. I am a bookseller, not a magician.

Why don’t you shop earlier next year?

Grrr