As Feargal Sharkey once said (well, almost) a good book these days is hard to find.
No, on second thoughts let me immediately retract that, it’s not. (Yeah, get a grip Sharkey!). There are plenty of good books out there. My problem isn’t the books. It’s the finding.
I’m not (and this doesn’t just apply to books) a natural shopper. I shop like the SAS. That is to say I get in, get the job done, and get out again as soon as possible; I don’t mean I break in through the window. So, for example, I find it very difficult to go into a bookshop and simply amble around browsing. Like going to a restaurant and being handed a menu the size of a telephone directory, it’s too much choice. Just where do you start?!
Obviously it’s easier if you’re really into a specific author, or a particular series of books. As a kid I’m certain I read a lot of Famous Fives and Secret Sevens (although I can’t remember a thing about any of them now) and also a lot of books about a character called ‘Doctor Who’ which were so popular in my childhood I’m often surprised nobody has thought of adapting them for the small screen.
As an adult, however, much more difficult. I’ve only ever bought two books ‘on impulse’ – The Colour of Magic (which probably lured me in with some sort of ‘the next big thing after Hitch-Hikers Guide’ blurb on the cover); and They Came from SW19, which I bought entirely on the strength of the title.
But, those two exceptions-that-prove-the-rule notwithstanding, and to recap, I’m no good at browsing… which has presented a problem now that I’ve come to the end of what has for a very long time been a very large ‘To Read’ pile. The penultimate entry was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy which, although it has rather too many chapters where characters with strange names sit around telling us about all the exciting things that are happening just ‘off screen’ nevertheless builds to a really compelling climax. And the very last of the pile is Wiped! It’s a book all about the lost episodes of Doctor Who (turns out somebody made a TV show of it after all, who knew) so in other words a bit of a weepy. Especially when the last surviving copies of The Massacre and The Myth Makers are blown up in the late-nineties.
In talking about books, of course, there’s an expectation to be aware of the underlying themes, on what the story has to say about the human condition, on what (and sometimes in apparent defiance of the title or the blurb) on what the book is actually about; but I don’t think I ever pick up on that stuff. I mean, it’s possible that Wiped! has something to say about nihilism and the ineffable resilience of the human spirit, but if so it’s entirely passed me by.
This probably accounts for my lack of browsing confidence, in other words I feel dreadfully underqualified; and is in turn probably a niggling echo from my A-Level English course. One of the books there was a play called Translations which the entire class unanimously pronounced as by far the dullest and least inspiring of the texts on offer. But our lecturer, who I think it only fair to say was in a better position to judge than we were, considered it one of the very best of the bunch – and it struck me then that perhaps I was naively falling into the laypersons’ trap of judging the text based on the actual words.
Amateur psychology aside though, and whether we’re talking about the stuff between the lines or just the lines themselves, I have found myself running out of things to read. There have been several helpful suggestions from Facebook, and the crisis has for the moment been averted – I’ve borrowed The Thursday Murder Club from Mum and Dad (which, as a hugely-successful debut novel, serves both as an inspiration and an irritation to any would-be author.)
After that… maybe it’s time for a new chapter.
Although don’t read too much into that!
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 