Kindles can't stop a bullet!

Books, famously, furnish a room, and arguably a soul.  They also furnish a handbag, a backpack, a messenger bag and a pocket.  Especially a pocket.  It has been suggested that, back in the days when Penguin were publishing what are now described as design classics fit to feature on mugs and deckchairs, but back then were, you know, books, artful seducers used to carefully select just which book would be just visible jutting jauntily from their (tweed) jacket pocket, ensuring that any impressionable young woman might note that the dashing chap at the end of the bar was familiar with Lady Chatterly, and opening up the possibility that she might play ‘Mrs Mellors’ for a short time.

Books are also something of a comfort.  There’s a reason why the ‘YA’ section of your average high street book store is enormous, it’s because the only thing that teenagers consume more of than fiction about misunderstood young people is haribo and zit cream.  If, as a teenager, you are so confused that you don’t even understand yourself (except for your feelings about Lizzy Feathergrew who sits across from you in double chemistry, your feelings for her are very, very clear, but you wonder if she’s into girls) then it’s good to read about teenagers struggling with being teenagers.  If they also have to struggle with vampires, alien invasions or oppressive regimes, then so much the better.  Just read that shit up and wait until you’re twenty six, sitting at your desk or standing at your lathe or slinging latte or assisting at lambing time or whatever, and you go bolt upright (very much like you used to do at the thought of Lizzy Feathergrew) and say, out loud, ‘Fuck.  Allegory!’.  Then move on.

We take books into uncertain environments.  There are rightly celebrated relics of the battlefield, books that have stopped bullets because the soldier in question was either clever or fortunate enough to have a book, for instance The Bible, in a pocket that covered an important organ (not The Mighty Wurlitzer).  That The Bible has saved the lives of so many Tommies because of its ballistic blocking abilities is less to do with its miraculous heritage and more, I would suggest, to do with the fact it records everything from the creation to Armageddon.

Ironically, if our gallant soldier was carrying a slim volume of verse by a poet reflecting on the horrors of war, he’d be fucked.

The moral of the story, if you are going into battle, read Stephen King.

Sadly, there are still too many battlefields.  There are also many uncertain environments.  And no environment is more uncertain than ‘abroad’.  That is why the choice of holiday reading is so important.

If it’s a beach holiday, then the prime directive is this; you must not be precious about the bottom of your book absorbing around a litre of perspiration from the tummy you rest it on (hopefully yours, if you rest your book on somebody else’s tummy whilst on holiday, you are reading the wrong blog) and being forever impregnated with the scent of suncream.

As an arch bibliophile (look it up before calling the police) I find the notion of giving away a book about as disturbing as the notion of trying to track down Lizzy Featherstone on social media years after she left school.  Without saying goodbye.

Anyway, despite requiring counselling if I lend somebody a book, I am tremendously impressed by the libraries that spring up in resorts, where tourists drop off one book and pick up another.  Like literary STDs.

There should be a military imprint of bestsellers, with Kevlar front and back covers.  If nothing else, this would enable some squaddie somewhere to proudly show off his copy of ‘Fuck the French’ with a bullet embedded in the front cover (a picture of Jeremy Clarkson, in leather jacket and jeans, looking incredulous).

Bullet position?  Head or crotch.  You choose.

As might the enemy.  As with ‘Mrs Mellors’, might your attention be drawn to a cheeky cover poking out of a pocket and, if you were a foreigner might you think ‘Ah, Clarkson’?

Books, you see, are the best defence.  Ask a teenager.

Review - Thursdays in the park

Oh Jesus, make it stop. 

Reading this is like literary waterboarding, with slurry.

It’s worth noting that this edition at least had 1.5 line spacing, so it’s actually a slim novel. 

Better still if it had been anorexic. 

The first page has a husband criticising his wife because she drinks too much.  Certainly reading this book drives one to the booze, so actually being a character in it would inspire a terrible thirst one would imagine. 

So far, so formula, the reader gets all of two thirds of the way down the first page before wondering when the first vicar is going to pop up.  In that at least, the book does not disappoint (page three, in case you were wondering).

Full disclosure: writing this review was something of a challenge, as the most straightforward way of conveying my opinion of this book would to be to take a well-used carpet knife and gouge the words ‘THIS IS SHITE!’ into the cover of the book. 

Then smear it with excrement.

Then torch it.

I freely acknowledge that this is an over-reaction.  There is no place for the exclamation mark in any considered review.

So just how bad is it?  Let me express it this way.  If the Taliban’s media strategy had been to post one of their trademark fuzzy, foam flecked rants on Youtube with some bearded arse pointing to a copy of ‘Thursdays in the park’ and screaming ‘this is where educating females to write gets you’, and not ‘let’s shoot schoolgirls’, then I’m not saying anyone would be any more accepting of their wicked message, but maybe, just maybe, they’d be playing a little less dodge-the-drone every time they popped out of the cave for some fresh milk.

This is a sad, unhappy and deeply cynical book.

Why cynical?  The author has clearly thought carefully about the demographic of her readers and how to convey that her principal character is successful and affluent.  Hence, early on, it is established that the main character’s kitchen has Bosche appliances and is decorated with National Trust paint.  Mid-range appliances and a paint brand more associated with heritage and tea shops than actual decoration sends a message alright, and that message is ‘the author looked round her kitchen and described what she saw’. It’s cynically judged to appeal to people who either want it confirmed that they have achieved the sort of middle-class life that they read about, or who aspire to owning a Bosche cooker and decorating with National Paint.  It’s also not right.  Affluent people who live in leafy suburbs of London have Agas and decorate with Farrow and Ball paint.

Sad and unhappy because it’s full of sad and unhappy characters.  Everyone in this book is, to a certain extent, sad and unhappy and that includes, by about page seven, the reader.  The principal character is unhappy because her husband has moved into the spare bedroom and won’t explain why.  Her daughter is unhappy because her husband is annoying, the husband is unhappy because he is an unappreciated artist, the bloke the principal character meets in the park is unhappy because, oh, I don’t know, either he’s a widower or allergic to trees or something.

There are a couple of toddlers involved. 

In fairness, they are not unhappy. 

But by Christ they’re irritating.

The toddler also provides the plot driver for the Great Peado Scare.

It has a plot so formulaic that this novel could have been packaged not so much as an e book but rather a powerpoint slide at the sort of desperate conference held at a hotel chosen for its convenient transport links rather than its beauty, where the chef is on the run and the rest of the staff are hoping to be deported back home any day now.

Positives?  Well, it’s quite short, and it confirms all the prejudices one might hold about the sort of people who frequent health food shops, but essentially it’s an exercise in grinding frustration unhappy married to a failed attempt at being a novel seeking to examine the relationships of family life across generations and the effect dramatic change can have on what are thought to be certainties.

e publishing

It’s called a Kindle because it’s the next best thing to burning books!  Centuries of traditional type and publishing have given us everything from the Bible to Penguins – the books, not the bird or the biscuit.  Ten minutes with electronic publishing has given us fifty fucking shades of fucking grey and fucking fan-fucking-fic.  Time was when you wanted to read filth discreetly you wrapped a copy of the Times around your Razzle and the only thing fans produced were scary shrines and purple-printed fanzines advertised for sale in the back of the NME. 

And what of the second-hand bookshop?  These are among the greatest places on Earth, what will happen to them without any second-hand books?  And what about the smell, slightly musty, slightly academic, wholly bookish?  What about the proprietors of these magical places?  Do you know how hard it is to find a job in retail that enables you to open and close when you want to and to wear carpet slippers on the job? And what about their smell, slightly musty, slightly academic, wholly bookish?  Do you know why so many wannabe writers complain that they could paper their walls with rejection letters from publishers?  I’ll give you a clue, it’s not because editors, agents and publishers are all sadists.  Time was when self publishing was rightly described as vanity publishing and was the only way the otherwise unprintable memoirs of retired men with forthright views about foreigners saw the light of day.  Now, any idiot with an iPad and a few hours to waste can publish their ‘original’ moody bloody vampire novella.

As for digital magazine downloads, what a shocking idea.  Every edition of the ‘People’s Friend’ had a free rain-hood stuck to the front cover. Try giving away free essential old-lady apparel as a digital bloody download.