Pen & Notebook

Readers' Block

Like patients with particularly trustworthy doctors, customers at the Little Bookshop often come to us with embarrassing questions, one we're often asked in the shop is "Can you help me find a book that will get me back into reading."
 
Diagnosis: Reader's Block
 
Causes:
Reader's Block can come about for a variety of reasons:
 
Sometimes you feel like you haven't the time to read, and building up the momentum to really get involved with a book gets harder and harder.
 
Coming to the end of a particularly brilliant book or series of books can leave you feeling like nothing you read next can match up.
 
And occasionally there's one particular book that bogs you down - which is what happened to me recently - halfway through the book, I stalled and couldn't get back up to my usual pace. Worse, I found that picking up any other book made me feel guilty,so obliged did I feel to finish this book.
 
Cure:
The cure for Reader's Block must be administered as quickly as possible to avoid it becoming a habit.  The cure is three-pronged and can be summarised as the Three Fs.
 
Funny - PG Wodehouse is the master of the funny book, but I also love Jonathan Coe and Neil Gaiman for their incredible ability to make me laugh aloud.  
 
Fast-paced - Any book that keeps you turning the pages compulsively is a great cure, this can be a crime series - I love Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther books for this - but really anything that drives you to know what's going to happen next, for example David Nicholls' One Day.
 
Familiar - There's nothing like going back to an old favourite book when you're under the weather, and it can be a great way to get yourself back into the reading habit. Any Agatha Christie (preferably one where you've forgotten whodunnit), a favourite children's book (Little Women is always my first choice here, or another classic (Reader's Block is a great excuse to re-read Jane Austen).

My own recent bout of Reader's Block was ultimately cured with a combination of the three Fs.  Amy Bloom's Where the God of Love Hangs Out, a collection of interlinking short stories, walks an elegant line between humour and poignance. I found James Frey's Final Testament of the Holy Bible absolutely gripping, and I had to know how it ended. And in memory of Diana Wynne Jones, I re-read my well-worn copy of The Lives of Christopher Chant.

Bokseling for fules

The Big Bookshop's been in trouble in the Spectator this week - a journalist came across a 'recommends card' in the store for Brideshead Revisited that referred to Evelyn Waugh as she.  A heinous crime, undoubtedly, and compounded by the fact that the bookseller he took the matter up with also admitted to not having read the book in question. 

The article (which can be read here) is titled 'Bookselling for Illiterates' - and bemoans the fact that the Big Bookshop's parent company once "employed only men and women who had degrees in English Literature".  And indeed, many of my colleagues there do, myself included.

I suspect, however, that the article's author, Michael Henderson, isn't too familiar with the contemporary English literature BA syllabus, which certainly doesn't include Waugh, as he's frankly a bit lightweight - they don't appear on a degree syllabus anymore than would PG Wodehouse or Jerome K Jerome.  Excellent novelists all three (and some of my favourites), but not exactly the highest literature, and - let's face it - a bit dated.

And booksellers really can't be expected to read everything - with new novels to keep up with, the classics do often get left behind.  Henderson admitted himself in a 2008 article that it took him a month to read Philip Roth's American Pastoral, which is all of 432 pages.  All I can say is that he's lucky not to have been encouraged by his workplace (as we were at the Big Bookshop) to read The Passage last summer, which is twice that.  He'd probably still be reading it. (Incidentally, in that same article, he takes Philip Hensher to task for saying that Natalia Ginzburg's translation of Proust into Italian is particularly good.  Which I'm sure it is, as Ginzburg is one of the best writers in the Italian language.  If the English translation was done by one of the great 20th Century memoirists, Proust would probably be better read in this country.)

I'm certainly fond of Waugh, and yes I know he was a man.  In fact, I worked on a film when I worked at the Integrated Multimedia Content House, with his grandson.  Which probably brings me closer to the great man than Henderson, who describes Waugh as "the greatest writer of English prose in the last century", which is surely laying it on a bit thick, as the century also included a positive glut of better authors, from William Golding to AS Byatt, and that's just in Great Britain.

As to his other charges of poor writing on recommends cards, including the aforementioned 'she', 'did' instead of 'had', and 'entierly', I fear Mr Henderson does not quite comprehend the writer's situation when it comes to producing these short critiques.  Booksellers are not given a quiet space and access to all the dictionaries and thesauri they need.  We are often required to produce dozens of the things in a short space of time, while also serving customers. Of course this means that mistakes are made.

Actually, speaking of having an English degree, I do also have a Masters degree in journalism, and so I know how much harder it is to write a dozen recommends cards at the Big Bookshop than it is to write an eight hundred word article about how badly written they are.

World Book Not

I am optimistic that World Book Night will be a great success. 

If you don't know what it's all about, let me give you a quick rundown.  Booksellers, publishing types and librarians (I think), were invited to send a list of their favourite books, of which a certain percentage had to be by British or Irish authors, and a certain percentage by living authors.  These lists were collated and a committee again of booksellers and publishers used them to create a list of 25 books.  They are now recruiting 20 000 volunteers to each champion a book and to give away 48 copies on World Book Night itself, 5th February.

I think the list of books is excellent - both popular and well-written - books that sell very well by themselves and that could probably still benefit from a word of mouth boost.  And they are all books that I often recommend to customers, according to taste.  (Which reminds me that I have a post about One Day sitting in my drafts folder).

I did enjoy the comments on this Guardian article, which swing almost within minutes from "Is this another example of book snobbery, implying only 'important' books should be enjoyed?" to "That list above is institutionalised dumbing-down. Marian Keyes, for fuck's sake." 

But I won't be volunteering to be a giver, for a few reasons. 

The most obvious reason, and the one that's got a lot of booksellers hot under the collar, is not one that particularly bothers me.  I'm not of the belief that giving away 1m backlist books is going to have an enormous negative impact on bookshops. The Little Bookshop is a consumate indie, with brilliantly well-read and interesting customers, and of the books on the list, only One Day sells at a particularly brisk rate.  The others tend to sell if we put them into the customer's hand (after listening carefully to what they're looking for), or if he or she has had a recommendation from a friend, which is something that WBN might well encourage.  Indeed at the Big Bookshop, we're already being encouraged to use it to sell books, by engaging customers in conversation about what's on the list.

No, my main reason is that I think 48 books is too many.  I have bookish friends, and I enjoy lending or giving them books, but I do not have 48 friends who I would like to give the same book.  One of the best things about being a bookseller is being able to pick out books for individuals that you think they'll love, based on what you know about them. Giving out books in bulk is just difficult - and I can't help but feel that it would be a shame to waste a book on someone who won't enjoy it.

The second reason is about giving books to strangers.  Of the five books on the list that I might have chosen to give out (Case Histories, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Beloved, Northern Lights and Fingersmith), two are children's/crossover books (which adults don't always like to be recommended, it really depends on the adult), two involve the violent death of a child (which a lot of parents say that they particularly don't want to read), and one is a really fantastic book about Victorian lesbians, not everyone's cup of tea.  I would hesitate to give any of these to someone I didn't know fairly well, or whose taste in books I was confident in.  And again, finding 48 strangers I think would enjoy any of these books, in one night, seems like an impossible task.

This post on the Guardian book blog makes much the same point, and several commenters suggest that they will be following the bookcrossing model, and leaving the books to be found in cafes or on buses.  But that seems to be contrary to the point of the event, which is that you're passionate about a book, and you want to tell people about it.

Eight books would have been a much more manageable number, to my mind, but it would have meant having eight times more volunteers, each of whom would need to be vetted to make sure they weren't going to hoard the books or sell them.  Stil, eight would be just the right number for a trip to the pub, where you'd make some new friends and give them a book each.

I doubt I'm the only booklover who's had some concerns - the fact that the volunteering deadline has been put back twice suggests to me that there hasn't been the grand rush they were expecting - but as this is the inaugural WBN, I'm hoping that they'll iron out the kinks and get things absolutely right next year.

iPickle

So I finally managed to wangle an iPhone out of my mobile provider, which I am absolutely delighted with.  I've been an epic customiser of phones since I first got my hands on a T610 back in 2003. And I've been a loyal SonyEricsson customer since then because of the incredibly awesome Themes Creator, which allowed me to build entirely new themes for my phones in Photoshop.

The iPhone, then, is not so modifiable - I'm not a jailbreaker by nature - but I've managed to get my traditional ringtone onto it (the recorder part from The Boy with the Arab Strap), and a custom wallpaper/holdscreen, which is about enough.

And I'm sharing the holdscreen with you, my lucky reader!  I wasn't entirely sure whether to put this on here or on Pickle's own site, but she can have her own iPhone post later.  To download it - visit this page on your iPhone then tap and hold on the image and select "Save Image", you can then set it as your hold screen from the Settings menu.  Oh, and this is for an iPhone 4.

 

Books at Festivals

I've just got back from End of the Road, a very civilised festival on the Dorset/Wiltshire border.  Even though it's a music festival, I was surprised to see how much literary activity there was.

End of the Road has its own bookshop, the fantastically named Beer Wolf Books, which sells both new and second hand books, including a lovely selection of vintage Penguins. 

More uniquely, however, End of the Road has its own lending library in the woods, from which festival-goers are invited to borrow books on the promise of returning them at next year's festival.

The library also hosted a mini literary-festival, with three authors speaking to an audience who might not have expected to hear about books rather than bands.

Literary events at festivals aren't anything new, however, Latitude Festival in Suffolk has a dedicated literary stage, and even a poetry stage.  These have hosted authors including Jonathan Coe, who I was lucky enough to see last year reading from most recent - and then unpublished - novel The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.

What's great about having literary events at music festivals is that readers who might not go to a bookshop event or a traditional literary festival can meet authors and hear them read from their own books.

There always seems to be quite a bit of waiting at music festivals: the bands don't usually begin until after midday, and keeping a book handy is a fantastic way to pass the time.

If you'd like to get into the festival spirit without having to go four days without showering, have a listen to my bookish songs Spotify playlist - see if you can spot the literary references. Or you could pick up a copy of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, Simon Armitage's Gig or John Powell's How Music Works.

Share your favourite books about music, or indeed music about books in the comments.

Edited 6-10-10 12.17 - this post was originally written as part of a job application and contained links to a relevant website, I have edited the links to go to LibraryThing.