Books

Trash or Treasure

I was reflecting on silence today.  I was in anything but a quiet environment, given I was wandering through the Mong Kok and surrounding areas in Hong Kong, which is full of side street vendors, traffic, retailer after retailer, busy end of day crowds and  Occupy Hong Kong protestors.

The silence I was experiencing was not the silence of the external environment, but rather the silence one experiences when travelling alone.  I have been in Hong Kong on business and have spent much of the time outside of meetings not talking; something pretty unusual for me.

What has this got to do with books?  Well, I made reference to the restorative stillness and silence I enjoy when reading books in an earlier post (Bed-time stories for world leaders).  Usually reading takes me to a quiet place, but as I walked through the noisy crowds of Kowloon I realised sometimes I want a book to make a noise.  To scream, shout and explode.

Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was a book that did this well, as did Charles Bukowski’s Post Office and Women. But it was the books of my adolescence that I remember most for this; leaving me breathless for the next chapter or book in the inevitable trilogy or saga.

Fantasy is a genre I never read much anymore, but it is my first love.  The worlds of magic, war, political intrigue and myth created by my favourite fantasy authors provided the much-needed noise to match the moods of my teens and early twenties.  It started with a cult classic, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, borrowed from my local library, which transported in a thunder-clap of adventure that has rung in my ears for almost 30 years.

I have read a lot of fantasy since, with my favourites including pretty much everything by David and Leigh Eddings (The Belgariad series etc.), Raymond E Feist’s Riftwar Cycle, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, Terry Brooks’ Shannara Trilogy and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.

But are these books any good?  I have avoided this question for some time.  What prompted me to think about it is the book series I’m reading now by Hugh Howey that includes Wool, Shift and Dust.  While more sci-fi or dystopian future than fantasy, they’ve given me a very similar experience as the fantasy books of my youth.  They viciously pick me up, shout their story in my ear and angrily consume my time. I can’t put them down and don’t want to.

I am incapable of determining if these books, much like the fantasy that stoked my love of reading, are actually any good.  Usually I snobbishly cast judgement over a book within ten pages, but with these books my powers of criticism are powerless against the escapist storytelling, engaging characters and political nuance.

I know it is not to everyone’s taste, but one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and so I guess it doesn’t matter if they are good or not; I love them and their words pile up around me like Scrooge McDuck’s gold in his money bin, and much like Scrooge I enjoy diving in whenever I get the chance.

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Non-fiction is a fiction

Something has happened in the 40 odd years of my life that only struck me this evening as I was trying to come up with something for this blog.

In that time I have seen a revolution in the popularity of non-fiction in two waves. The first was the rise of the self-help book and the second was the rise of the Internet.

Self help books have been around since the earliest days of written wisdom (probably the Greeks, but I’m no classical historian). However until the 20th Century they were pretty much exclusively for the elite i.e. those who could read.

The 1980s saw a massive increase in the focus on material wealth and the need for self-improvement. What then followed was a succession of self professed experts claiming to hold the key to everything from health and wealth to spiritual awakening and sexual prowess. Tony Robbins and his contemporaries became the new spiritual leaders in Western society.

In contrast, when I was a boy, we watched in awe as the full set of Encyclopaedia Brittanica was delivered to our home, which my dad then read cover to cover. That was his self-help. Wisdom came not through the opinion of a guru, but through the collection of knowledge and personal experience.

Then, when I was at university in the early ’90s, I saw the birth of the internet. It was amazing how we gravitated towards Bulletin Board Systems to share information or, more often, flame each other.

The rise of the internet that followed these early days saw people start to rely on Usenet, then Internet forums, then Excite and Alta Vista and finally Yahoo and the all conquering Google, for all the information they needed; people stopped reading books.

The problem with the rise of the self-help book and its gurus and the “all-knowing” interweb is that they present themselves as authorities of knowledge. While not necessarily claiming explicitly, they imply complete objectivity. We get sucked in to believing the information to be objectively and self-evidently true.

Fiction on the other hand claims nothing of the sort; it isn’t pretending to be anything other than subjective.

A novelist writes from personal experience, but not as themselves and never claiming expertise.

The truth is many are more expert than the most prolific self-help guru or Internet wiki-hero.

Take for example Hilary Mantel’s historical novels of Thomas Cromwell; pure fiction but ridiculously well researched giving insights in to a time and people that triggered earth-shattering changes in Western society. Mantel doesn’t pretend to be anything other than subjective but helps us understand some of how we came to be where we are now not through a profession of factual expertise, but through pure fantasy.

Extensive historical research aside, novelists also use allegory through their fiction to impart more compelling lessons than non-fiction writers. The Bible is an early example and more recently consider the novels of Mitch Albom and Paulo Coehlo.

When a friend in London, Donna Wright, told me about the impact Coelho’s The Alchemist had on her and a friend of hers I took notice. Donna is an intelligent, generous, hilarious woman, who doesn’t suffer fools and is not readily impressionable. It was a novel she described as something that could change your life, not through expert opinion but though a fable and pure allegory.

Albom has the same gift. If you can put aside the “preachy” nature of the parables, his books are infinitely more powerful than any non-fiction book or Google search result.

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading well informed research and commentary. But I read with a skeptical eye aware it is a reflection of the author’s bias (unconscious or not) and will always avoid popular non-fiction pretending to be something it’s not.

Give me a little fantasy any day for an insight in to the truth.

Wordsmithing

I love words. What’s not to love? There appears to be a never-ending supply of them. If you Google “How many words are in the English language?”, you get answers like this one: “There is no single sensible answer to this question. It’s impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it’s so hard to decide what actually counts as a word.” (oxforddictionaries.com)

Good writers have an almost cosmic-size vocabulary.  Mine’s pretty limited in comparison, especially going by some of the words I’ve been noting down in a couple of books I’ve read recently; words I either loved the beauty of – the way they form in the mouth, or the sound they make – or had never seen before and had to look up the meaning of. Here’s a selection of recent ones: sophistry, alembics, capricious, palpebra, crepitation, eidolon, astrakhan, lachrymose.

But the difference between a good writer and a great writer is not the size of their vocabulary, it’s the way they use words.

Great writers bring words together, extra-ordinary and very ordinary, in ways that enlighten our minds, imagination and our hearts. They create new worlds, challenge us to think differently about our existing one, or simply make us discover parts of ourselves buried deep under layers of years, routine or mass media messages.

They understand the power of grammar.  The subtle, but no less impactful, way it alters meaning or sets the dynamic, tone or pace of a message.

They wield metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia and other literary devices taught in high school English like a maestro guides a symphony orchestra.

In W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, for example, the conversations Philip Carey has with the drunk poet Cronshaw are a case in point.  They are the very essence of the book, even the name of the book reflects them.  Maugham is clever, his writing smooth, weaving simple words to guide the reader through complex ideas of philosophy, faith, dogma and politics.  He’s also funny, “You’re not a bad fellow, but you won’t drink.  Sobriety disturbs conversation“.

It’s why I love great books and advocate, in my small way, for a world where we celebrate intelligent writers and voracious readers rather than tolerate dumbed-down, lazy, mediocre writing.

But don’t mistake it for wordsmithing.

I was thanked for wordsmithing a proposal for one of my teams at work recently.  While well-intentioned, this really bothered me.  Wordsmithing carries with it an implication you’re just superficially micromanaging some words. That’s not what I had done.  The author’s ideas were completely buried in awful syntax, dreadful presentation and complete ignorance of grammar. I did not play with some wording, I rescued his ideas, pulling them out of quicksand. His ideas deserved to be rescued.

Francis Bacon once said “knowledge is power”.  It’s seductive in its simplicity and apparent self-evident nature.  But I’ve always thought it was hogwash.

Acquiring knowledge and doing nothing with it is intellectually anaemic. The use of knowledge is power. Until then it is no more powerful than ignorance.

It’s the same with words.  On their own they are nothing more than letters on a page.  But an idea well articulated can be the most powerful thing on the planet.  So here’s to a world where words are combined with intelligence and grace presenting ideas that make our minds leap and hearts soar.

Waving the white flag

I’m really competitive; not what you would describe as mucho, Wolf of Wall Street competitive.  I do play sport – tough, physically demanding, contact sport – and as a young man I was the guy on the court or pitch who would argue with a referee/umpire convinced that he was variously blind or biased and very often both.  It’s not something I am particularly proud of, just part of my experience growing up.  While I may never completely grow up I  am well past this stage of my life.

No, I am more the kind of person who just really hates mediocrity and mediocrity in myself is not something I am comfortable with.  And that’s a problem, as it leads to chronic procrastination, not wanting to start something until I am absolutely convinced I can be moderately successful, and certainly never last or the worst at anything. Geez, I sound like a real piece of work.

When it comes to reading, I like to think I’m pretty widely read.  I absorb anything that comes my way like a gravitational singularity inside a black hole absorbs matter.  While studying a post-graduate degree I loved reading detailed, highly technical academic journals and I’m a veracious ‘Googler”, reading up on anything that spikes my curiosity from quarks to syllogistic logic, and sometimes I even understand what they’re talking about.

That’s why it is so hard to admit I have been defeated; resoundingly, thoroughly and completely defeated.  I tried, I really tried.  My form was flawless and nothing I had faced got close to bettering me.  But in this case I wasn’t good enough.  And the protagonist of this humiliating defeat is a book.

What makes it worse is that this book is described by some critics as the most important book of the 20th Century, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The first time I picked it up I was really looking forward to it.  Of course I had the usual trepidation I feel faced with a monster read – it is long, very long, at 933 pages (see my previous post, I’m a coward) – but I’ve read Joyce before.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a modernist masterpiece of creative, intellectually stimulating poetic prose.  I devoured it, enjoyed it and even understood it.  But Ulysses was too much for my feeble mind.  It is opaque and reading it is like wading through quicksand.

Since then I’ve tried twice more and each time I haven’t got past page 137 (of 933) … that’s less than 15%, not even close to a 50% pass mark.

Sure, the language is complicated.  In the process of writing Ulysses Joyce effectively invented a new dialect of English.  According to Wikipedia he used 30,030 different words out of the 265,000 words in the book.  But I’ve read complicated, modernist books before, so this can’t be it.

May be it’s because of its parallels to Homer’s poem Odyssey, which has been translated in to English dozens, if not hundreds of times, over hundreds of years.  I’ve read a little of the Illiad, but none of Odyssey and Joyce apparently once wrote to his aunt Josephine that, ‘If you want to read Ulysses you had better first get or borrow from a library a translation in prose of the Odyssey of Homer.’.

May be I just didn’t get in to the story or Leopold Bloom.  The ‘hero’ is indifferent and in the 137 pages of I have read of the novel I just haven’t warmed to him.  Or it could be that each time I have tried to read it, it has been at night, before going to bed; Ulysses could be a day time book, needing the soft warmth of the sun and higher ultraviolet or infrared light; may be the production of vitamin D helps an unmalleable mind be shaped in to a form capable of appreciating the story.  Now I’m clutching at straws.

Whatever it is, it has beaten me.

The book still sits on my book shelf, in fact right at the top of a pile of similarly silvery-spined books I have managed to consume my wife has curated on our colour-coded shelves.

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One day I may be ready to read it, but I suspect I’ll procrastinate for many years to come.  In the meantime I have waved the white flag.

I’m a coward

There are a lot of things in this world to be scared of – spiders, snakes, terrorism, Britney Spears.  Books shouldn’t be one of them.

But I have to confess I am a bit of a coward when it comes to some books.

I wrote in a previous contribution about how I often choose books because of their cover or title (You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover).  If you haven’t tried it yet, you should.  But I omitted to say that I will also judge a book by another superficial criteria – how thick it is. If it’s thicker than two of my fingers, then I balk – I’m a coward and a wimp.

I look at the book, it looks at me.  Everything else around goes out of focus; all I see is the spine of the book in wide-screen, high-definition, digital, Blu-Ray clarity.  I hear a faint buzzing sound in my ears and the thump thump of my rapidly increasing pulse.  I break out in a cold sweat and I’m almost overcome with a wave of self loathing – “you nob” I think “you’re such a hypocrite – an intellectual snob on one hand, yet you don’t have the balls to tackle a really meaty story.  What a lightweight!  Ohh poor you, your hand will get sore and it will take you a while to read it and it will be heavy in your bag … boo hoo you little baby”.  Well that last part might be an exaggeration, but you get the picture.

And even if I do close my eyes, grit my teeth and go against all instinct and buy the book, I can never quite shake the feeling.

A number of years ago I read Illywhacker by Peter Carey.  When I bought it, it met all of my criteria – great title, great cover, an author I have been encouraged to read for years – everything; except it is a monster of a book.  To my eyes it’s a foot thick, weighs in at 150 kgs, is written in 4pt font single spaced and the page edges are intermittently serrated or razor-sharp.  Each day I would pull it out of my bag and I’d think I’m never going to finish it and even if I do I’ll be 87 and won’t have remembered what happened at the start of the book, so I’ll have to read it again.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it.  I read all 817 pages (I feel nauseous) and it was a great read.  Not many authors can use words the way Carey can.  It’s clever, funny, well researched etc etc.  But even today, it frightens the living hell out of me.  I’m tired even thinking about it.

Now, years later, the feeling is still there.  When considering the prospect of a long book I look like Homer Simpson faced with a day without doughnuts or Paris Hilton faced with the prospect of wearing polyester – totally and completely petrified and out of my depth.

Other books like 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (925 pages) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (933 pages) had just the same effect, worse in fact in the case of Ulysses, and if I can bring myself to, I’ll make that the subject of a future blog all it’s very own.

Now excuse me while I get back to enjoying the 201 pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister.

I hate speed readers

I’m not one of the those people who reads books until the wee hours of the morning.  I used to be, in my adolescence, when I would devour whole tomes of fantasy in marathon sittings.  I was hungry for the escapism they provided and the kaleidoscope worlds they weaved in my imagination.  But those days are gone.  My life now is infinitely more complex, though equally more rewarding, and the responsibilities that come with working full-time, owning a house, having two children, a beautiful wife etc mean the wee small hours of the morning are reserved exclusively for sleep – not that my kids always respect this. Sweet, sweet sleep!

But I do manage to read my fair share of books, not as quickly as I once did, but may be a new book on average every 3 or 4 weeks, depending on the length of the book and my commitment to it.

But I am not a speed reader.  I hate speed readers.

To me reading is a full body experience; a contact sport.  From the trip to the book shop (yep I still like doing it old skool and going to a real bookshop), to scanning the shelves for inspiration, to the smell of ink on paper and the combination of smooth book cover and coarse pages.  It’s the weight of the book in my hand and the cramp I get holding it open with one hand while avoiding bumping in to people as I walk down the street staring at the pages.

I just don’t think it’s possible to fully experience the story, and the experience of reading the story, if you’re having to make the trade-offs required to ‘speed read’.  Imagine trying to read One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez) in a single sitting or really appreciating the comic timing and love of words Flann O’Brien weaves together in At Swim-Two-Birds while skimming or meta guiding.  The winner of the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane, requires the reader to invest heavily and carefully in the experience of reading, to be rewarded in droves for the commitment to an extraordinarily creative use of the English language.

But speed readers are just so damned chuffed with themselves.  They wear it like a badge of honour – flicking through the pages like someone looking up a word in a dictionary.  There’s an intellectual arrogance to it.  It’s like they are all in a secret club complete with secret handshakes, where with one look they can instantly recognise each other as members of this club.  They’re the freemasons of reading.  I can’t stand it.

It would be easy to say I’m jealous, but I just can not believe speed readers are able to comprehend the story at all the subtle levels the author intends, or that they are able to make connections between the story and their own collective experiences.  This is what I love about books; and I don’t want to rush it.  Therefore, to my mind, their arrogance is misplaced, and misplaced arrogance is foolish and dangerous.

If it takes me an hour to read a page to fully appreciate what the author is saying and I have to sweat, grunt and cringe my way through each and every page, paragraph, line and word, then so be it.  I’m content with reading without gimmicks, techniques or a stop watch.  Just watch out if you see me walking down the street, my head buried in the pages of my latest book.

Bed-time stories for world leaders

I have a couple of children, and one of the things I’m distracted by from time to time is a nagging worry about what sort of world they are growing up in; a world of superficiality (Kardashians, “Big Brother”, pop music) and where a large percentage of people didn’t buy or read a book in the last year (some often quoted stats in the interweb suggest up to 80% of US families).

Just consider for a moment some of the stupid/scary/evil/comic people who actually run our little planet – Kim Jong-un ( North Korea); Bashar al-Assad (Syria); Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe); not to mention the likes of Islamic State.  It drives me nuts that they are so driven by myopic ideology that they fail to comprehend something Henry Ford eloquently said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”  It’s ground hog day; it’s like watching a car accident in slow motion. The comic caricatures of these people are sometimes so accurate it makes you cringe – if you haven’t seen Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police, then you must if only for the depiction of Kim Jong-il.

In Western democracies governments are often hamstrung by self interest and ideological point scoring.  Whatever your political affiliations, what most people I talk to just want is a government that is allowed to get on with delivering for the benefit of the community … if they do a bad job, we’ll let them know at the next election.

We are a world of bad news and pessimism where only disasters (natural and man-made) and mistakes of policy makers are news; if you can find news that isn’t about celebrities’ dating or dieting habits.  Are we really a world on the brink of climate destruction, economic malaise, Ebola, war, a widening gap between rich and poor? Perhaps, but we do seem to be a world of leaders totally incapable of visioning or communicating a future of hope and optimism and thus paralysed from acting gently and with grace.

Arrghh!

But there are moments of stillness when these thoughts are swept away. For example, when my children were young, each evening pessimism was swept away when I sat down with them and read a bed-time story – sometimes chosen by my son, sometimes by my daughter and sometimes by me.   The choice of book was not as important as the ritual itself.  The ritual of getting ready for bed, gathering the family around, staring at the bookshelf, choosing a book – sometimes at random, sometimes with much forethought – sitting on the floor or the bed and then enjoying the story – the flow, the illustrations, the humour, the moral and the pantomime of reading it out loud playing the various characters.

The ritual had a restorative effect.

It provided me the opportunity to bond with my kids, which was so valuable given I work full time and don’t get the chance to spend a lot of time with them during the week.  It gave me insight in to their developing personalities and gave the kids an appreciation for my sense of humour and that adults are allowed, and in my world, encouraged, to be silly.  Aside from this there is so much evidence that reading to children is amongst the single most important things you can do to improve your kids chances for success in school.

Imagine what we could achieve if we could replicate this ritual with our political leaders; if we could read a bed-time story to the presidents, prime ministers, sultans, premiers, chancellors, Taoiseachs, kings, queens and princes of this world.

All this got me thinking one day years ago, and an image popped into my mind; there I was sitting on my daughter’s bed with Vladimir Putin propped up on one of my knees and Barak Obama on the other (an impossibly comic image).   In my mind both men were listening in rapture as I read Hunwick’s Egg by Mem Fox (possibly the greatest illustrated children’s book author of all time).

I have often fantasised about the power of this simple act over the years.  The power to fundamentally sweep away ideology and dogma, if only for a few minutes, so they can share and contemplate a story with a simple universal moral – the power the imagination has to change the way we see the world – in just the same way the ritual of reading a book with my kids restored my faith in an optimistic future.

My kids are independent readers now; which means I’m just one step closer to that redundancy all parents inevitably face.  They no longer need me to read with them.  But I still find that stillness when I pick up a great book at night … sometimes annoyingly sharing passages with my patient wife that have particularly inspired me with their poetic beauty or astonishingly ambitious syntax and sometimes as I quietly absorb a simple, clever story.

I’ll never need batteries for a book

I’m pretty comfortable with technology.  I wouldn’t say I am a first mover or even an early adopter, optimistically a fast follower. I’ve had a Facebook account for >10 years, a LinkedIn account since about 2005, I have an iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro, Sonos etc etc. The thing about these technologies, hardware and software, is they are genuine innovations.  They created something new; they were original; solving a problem in a better way than the past or perhaps creating a solution to a problem people weren’t aware of.

But I will never use an e-reader.

I won’t argue that the Kindle isn’t a brilliant, elegant piece of technology and ridiculously convenient. It is. The fact you have access to thousands of books anywhere in the world is truly amazing.  I even bought one for my wife.  But to me it is a backward step: it is an inferior technology replacing a superior one.

For one thing you never need a battery for a real book.  It never runs out of power literally or metaphorically.  The idea that I can’t keep reading a book, not because there isn’t enough light available to see the words, but because it won’t turn on is ridiculous.  You can’t turn on a real book, because it is never off. My wife asked me last night when we went to bed, to remind her in the morning to plug in her Kindle, I promised I would and rolled over and opened my current book, Bend Sinister (Vladimir Nabokov), which I know will always be there for me to read, no matter how long it lies waiting on my bedside table.

For me books are a whole body experience; a contact sport.  From the cover (see my earlier post ‘You can judge a book by its cover’) to the weight and the texture and smell of the pages.  Each book is different and the experience of reading it should be too.  A real book engages at least three, if not four, senses uniquely for every book.

Each book creates a different sensory experience – sight, touch, smell and even hearing.  With an e-reader the process of reading is the same whether you’re reading a complicated mountain of a novel like Ulysses (James Joyce) or a short, clever fable like Fup (Jim Dodge) – the physical experience is the same.

In a real book, the pages can be different textures and sizes – smooth, rough, tall, wide – or different shades of white, cream or  grey.  I have an edition of Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish published by Picador where the text subtly changes colour throughout the book from black to khakis to purples, greens, blues, navy and brown; it’s beautiful.  And then there’s the incredible paintings of fish, for which each chapter is named, by the real Van Diemonian (Tasmanian) convict artist William Buelow Gould.  You can’t possibly experience the whole story without appreciating what these fish look like through the eyes of a man, for who’s life the story is a fictionalised account of.

And then there’s the joy of sitting in a room and looking at a shelf full of books.  Each book brings back memories of time, place and experience that no flat, rectangular grey piece of plastic, circuitry and lithium-ion could ever do.  I love being able to browse books in my and other people’s homes.  While my wife has a Kindle, she appreciates the physical presence of real books, having one day, when I was out of the house, reorganised the books on our bookshelves by colour.  Granted this system drives me mad, as I prefer a more logical filing system using that wonderful thing called the alphabet, but I will agree it looks brilliant.

A bit sentimental? OK, so let me take a more rational approach.  While there appears to be some debate, most credible sources suggest there is less environmental impact through the production of real books than e-readers and if I ever contemplated disposing of a real book, not that I would, I could simply put it with my other paper recycling, or even bury it, knowing it’ll break down and feed the garden like it fed my mind.  An e-reader on the other hand will require me to drop it off at my council’s local waste collection facility – a sad, cold, wasteful exercise.

It’s certainly getting harder to buy real books, as physical book retailers in the Western World suffer the shifting tastes of consumers and the economics of running an increasingly low margin retail business.  I recently bought some books online for the first time ever.  It wasn’t the same as going in to a bookshop, just a necessary step, and some evidence I’m not a Luddite.  However I will always prefer the experience of buying real books in real bookshops from real people and I will only ever read real books, even if I have to end up printing them myself.

All power to the readers of e-readers out there, but ideas bound up in pages of reconstituted wood pulp and ink will always ignite my imagination and soul more powerfully than any electronic technology.

You can judge a book by its cover

I love books.  They are an important part of my life.  And I hate bad books … may be a little more passionately than the average person perhaps. And I reckon I’ve stumbled on to a great way of easily avoiding really crap books.

Around 5-10 years ago I started to notice that certain books attracted me time and time again.  I found myself being drawn to these books like iron filings to a magnet or my son to mischief, or whatever other metaphor you might choose to use.  I’ve tried to break the habit to avoid the risk of reading some clone of a book I had read previously, but I just can’t help myself; and it has absolutely nothing to do with the story, genre, author, book reviews or recommendations.

I have come to realise that a sure fire way of choosing a great book is to choose it purely by the cover (or the title).

I know it’s superficial, but I am absolutely convinced I’m right.  Perhaps I am superficial but all you have to do is go into one of the big chain book stores (if there is still one near you) or online to see the range of covers available and you will start to get the idea – Jackie Collins vs. Haruki Murakami; Stephen King vs. Peter Carey; or Mills & Boon vs. Penguin Classics.

Obviously a lot of marketing effort goes into making sure books attract people to buy them … but it has to be more than that.  The conclusion I have come to is that the cover of the book is a reflection of how much the publisher(s) has fallen in love with the story – they have gone out of their way to make sure the design is as high quality as the story; the story deserves a cover where just as much effort has gone into getting it right as went into getting the story right.  They care enough to pay a real designer or artist, rather than a marketer, to use the story as inspiration for the creation of a unique work of art; a visualisation of the story in images rather than words.

The title of a book is just as good a guide, and a great title often goes hand-in-hand with a a great cover, which I hypothesise goes hand in hand with a great book.  How could you not buy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Torday), The Man Who Was Thursday (Chesterton), A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole), Tuesdays with Morrie (Albom), The Devil and Miss Prym (Coelho), A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Lewycka), The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In (Magnus Mills), Legend of a Suicide (Vann), From the Mouth of the Whale (Sjón), A Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Murakmi).  A real mix of genres, themes and eras, but all spine-tingling great books.

In fact the inspiration for the name of this blog is my favourite book title of all time, But Soft: We Are Observed by Hilaire Belloc. In five simple words it conveys so many layers of meaning, even if, by today’s standards, the phrasing is a little anachronistic (it was written in 1928). It’s almost atmospheric; I can’t say it without whispering it: imagining myself in a dark room of a quiet house, my pulse starting to race in the realisation I may have been discovered. And when was the last time you saw punctuation in the title of a book? The only other one I have on my bookshelf is They Shoot Horses Don’t They? by Horace McCoy.  The use of the colon shows just how powerful grammatical devices can be.  It forces the reader to think about the title, to look ahead, wondering why we have to be careful or quiet, who “we” is and who has observed us. It lays down a challenge to a prospective reader – I dare you to not pick me up and start reading. I love it.

So have a think about how you buy books and next time you’re in a book shop, or more likely, scanning Book Depository or Amazon, don’t fight your intuition, be superficial and let the cover or the title choose you.

Books don’t grow old

I have been thinking about why I like old books recently; those eternal masterpieces of language and ideas from decades or centuries past.

It could be that I am a snob and a book wanker, but I do remember reading ‘Norwegian Wood’ by Haruki Murakami in 2007 when I came across a great passage about why one of the characters only reads books by authors who have been dead for 30 years:

“That’s the only book I trust”, he said. “It’s not that I don’t believein contemporary literature,” he added, “but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.” … “If you only read books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that.”

Now that I have some inspiration, forgive me while I evangelise for a while…

Why do so few people bother to read old books? We seem to have a fascination with ‘newness’.  For fear of being left behind, we aspire to own new cars, constantly update our wardrobe, trade up to the latest flat panel TV, upgrade our iDevice, even find a new spouse.

Sometimes it is for very good reasons like the fact the ‘things’ we are replacing no longer perform the way they once did or simply wear out. Other times it is simply to do with envy, greed or a superficial desire to conform or consume.If you look around you, most of the ‘stuff’ we buy is actually designed to be replaced.

But books never do. They are timeless. They never become superseded. There is never a latest and greatest version promising better viewing angles, smoother skin, increased prowess. Sure, the context can become a little outdated, and the language changes, but even modern books can do that. But they never stop being just as good as they were … assuming they were good in the first place obviously (there are a lot of crappy books out there).

Effectively books are the only thing we buy for our minds, our bodies and our homes that don’t wear out and never need updating.

I know it can be pretentious to rabbit on about ‘classics’, but this a poor reason to ignore them. In fact, we ignore them at our peril. Why run the risk of missing out on great stories and important lessons that have the potential to make a real impact on your life, or just simply provide entertainment?

I couldn’t imagine missing out on books like: ‘Utopia’ by Thomas More, which gave me an insight into the mind of a polymath; ‘The Idiot’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which was a fascinating tragedy about mediocrity; everything by G.K. Chesterton who has given me both entertainment (‘The Man Who Was Thursday’, ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill’ and ‘The Flying Inn’) and beliefs I hold dear articulated in a way I would never be capable of (‘What’s Wrong with the World’ and his collected essays); and ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ by John Kennedy Toole which is a masterpiece of two distinct stories – one an absurdly comic work by a tragic genius, the other about a loyal mother dealing with her grief for a lost son.

I think we ignore these old books first because we have created a world that distrusts anything older than yesterday; second because we make reading old books so painful at school (I will never read Dickens after been forced to read that monster of a book, Great Expectations); and third because so few bookshops actually sell, or more importantly, promote them.

I don’t know the answers to these problems, but perhaps we start in the home. Track down the odd old book and read it and surround yourself in your home with them. Show them to your spouse, your friends, and most importantly to your children – so they can develop a respect and love for the ideas of the past and pass these lessons on to others.

A great, if a little pessimistic, old saying applies really well here – ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. Perhaps we should spend less time aspiring in vain for newness and the latest ‘stuff’ or to fix old problems with new solutions, and instead look to literary masterpieces of the past for inspiration, motivation, entertainment, great ideas and paths to fulfilment.