Haven’t done one of these for quite some time. Not sure what, but I temporarily got out of the habit of reading regularly, which is of course a VERY BAD THING for a writer. I’m now making a concerted effort to get back into the habit, and maybe doing this will help me to keep focus.
So here we go.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This was every bit as good as everyone said it was. It’s a not quite love story set in the world of gaming software development, which is oddly refreshing: yeah, geeks have feelings, too. I know very little about gaming – mainly because I know that if I were to ever allow myself to get sucked into it, you’d never see me again – but the software development aspects of the plot rang very true, and the characters were all too believable. A great book to get completely absorbed in.
White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector by Nicholas Royle. I’ve been meaning to get this ever since it came out. It’s the story of the author’s obsession with collecting old-school Picador paperbacks, amongst other things. The first thing to say about it is that the book itself is a loving recreation of the Picador style, even down to the typeface used on the cover. That alone sold it to me, because I also used to be quite obsessed with that Picador look, to the extent that I would buy books purely based on the fact that they were published by the imprint. But what I really enjoyed was the chance to spend a few hours inside the head of someone really interesting, which I guess is what successful memoir writing is all about. This is a book where you come for the account of collecting mania but stay for the odd unexpected byways that Royle’s narrative takes you. Highly recommended.
Shadow Lines: Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf by Nicholas Royle. Or to put it another way, White Spines 2. This delves further into the world of secondhand books, seeking out odd ‘inclusions’ (improvised bookmarks) and annotations, as well as an entire chapter on the unexpected back story to the illustrations in Rev W Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine books. Even more so than White Spines, this is one of those books where you can never be sure where the author is going next, and is all the better for it. Also highly recommended, and I’m very much looking forward to the third book in the series, whenever Royle gets round to writing it.
Penguins Stopped Play: Eleven Village Cricketers Take on the World by Harry Thompson. Taking a leaf out of Nicholas Royle’s book, I bought this at the excellent secondhand book shop at Hestercombe Gardens (well worth a visit, by the way). I really wanted to love it, but I came away just slightly disappointed. The problem with this sort of bloke-lit pointless quest book (and they are always written by blokes, because women have much more sensible things to do with their time) is that they can easily run out of steam halfway through, especially if there’s a rotating cast of excessively quirky characters like there were in this one. Also, given the descriptions of several of the characters, I began to wonder how some of it had got past the lawyers, which in turn led me to wonder how much of it was real, which in turn undermined my belief in the validity of the quest.
One thing I did find fascinating was the extent to which some of the gags seemed a bit off – even for a book that was written in 2005. On page 138, for example, there’s a reference to ‘an elderly Yemeni lady in a chador, whose letterbox eyes burned into mine for several hours.’ I’m now wondering, of course, if another writer who got into trouble for the same phrase a few years later might have nicked it from Thompson. After all, it’s not inconceivable that Boris Johnson might have read this one.