Day 13 — A Fictional Book

Fiction is a wonderful thing; letters form words form sentences form paragraphs form chapters form worlds.  Pick up a book and if it’s good it will suck you in; if it’s first person you become the protagonist; third person you’re the voyeur watching their world, hearing their thoughts and no matter how hard you try you can’t get them to listen to you and do as you wish.

Fiction gives us fully formed worlds, and it gives each reader his or her own fully formed world.  No matter how specific the writer has been each and every one of us sees something slightly differently, gives the characters slightly different accents, makes them taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, sparklier than the writer imagined, than the person next to you read.

A fictional book isn’t just something to while away the time on the morning commute for me, it’s something more.  It’s an experience from beginning to end.

It starts in the bricks-and-mortar bookshop browsing through the shelves – trying desperately to not to judge the tomes by the pattern of their binding – and failing.  Something needs to be the first thing to draw you to a book.  You may have gone into the shop with unbiased intentions, but they won’t last.  You find yourself drawn either to the realm of your favourite author/genre or the big display in the middle of the store where each employee has picked out their own favourite book and their recommending it in their tiny, scrawly handwriting.

How can you pick out a book without a little prejudice?  Are you going to pick up every single novel from every single shelf and read the blurb on the back?  No, you’re going to be drawn to the covers of books you recognise and associate with; be they black and sparkly with a hit of otherworldliness about them, or be they pastel-hued with shoes, lipsticks  and loopy fonts.

Next the title, does it sound like something you’d read?  Does it make you want to read more?  Does it tell you everything you need to know?  There are those book titles which are too vague to hold any interest, but they are far preferential (for me at least) to the overly elaborate.  The way I see it, if your book title need punctuation it’s not a title.

You’ve found a something aesthetically pleasing, but what of its cerebral effects?  To the back page!  The blurb should capture your interest and make you want to read the book, it shoudl tell your enough, but not too much…just enough to make me want to read the first page.

Once I’ve cracked open the first page, you’re a almost guaranteed to have me hook line and sinker.  The only way to lose me now is for everything that’s happened so far – the cover, the title, the blurb – to have diddly-squat to do with the first page.  To be honest, I don’t have any recollection of that ever happening, but it’s a good caveat to have in place – just in case.

We’ll take the exchange of cash / library card / asking to borrow as read and now!  I have a book to read.  If we’re being factually accurate about this, now  it would go to the bottom of my To Read pile and be rediscovered in a few calendar turns, but lets skip over my lackadaisical book turnover times and we’re now at the point where I’m reading the fictional book.  So shhh!  Can’t you see I’m reading?  Amuse yourself and come back when I’ve reached the end of the chapter.

Day 04 – My Favourite Book

According to my Goodreads page [which as statistical reading thingymajigers go is my most reliable] in the past two-and-a-bit years I have only rated 6 books out of the 110 I’ve read the chart-topping five out of five gold stars:

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
The Plague by Albert Camus
An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin by Gad Beck

If that list is anything to go by we learn I like kids books, books about Nazi-Germany and contemporary classics which wouldn’t go amiss in A-level English classes.  My favourite book, however, doesn’t appear on that list.  If my Goodreads stats are right I haven’t actually read this book in the last two-and-a-bit years, but I’m not sure I believe those statistics.  Maybe I just haven’t read the whole thing from front to back in the last two-and-a-bit years.  After all, I’ve read it that often I’m comfortable enough dipping in and out as I feel like.

I like The Picture of Dorian Grey.  I like it a lot.  I have three or four copies of it in English and one in German.  I only stopped myself buying a very fancy leather-bound copy in a musty bookshop in Paris by reminding myself that I can’t actually read French and if I were to buy it – no matter how much I wanted it – it would be wrong.  Books are for reading, and buying one just because is not acceptable [although it might have spurned me onto learn French, you never know].

The Picture of Dorian Grey is a timeless story: the Victorian Dandy who does as he pleases causing hell and havoc those around him, without so much as a care nor aging a day.  He might not be aging, but up in the attic [where all the best secrets are kept] is the portrait which reveals the true extent of his misdemeanours.

Over the past 100 years the Dorian Grey character has become something of an archetype, and familiar enough to Joe Public to not have to explain his back story.  He fought alongside Mina Harker, Captain Nemo and Mr Hyde et.al.  in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [well,  in the film at least, in not the source material]; he became slightly vampyric to cash-in on the Twilight trend in his own film, and Will Self dropped him into the heyday of the 80s and left him to do his thing in Dorian.

Grey is not a character you root for, he is a downright despicable man – and not in the way of the traditional Victorian bad guy [Professor Moriarty, for example] – Grey is much more your typical spoilt brat.  He does whatever he wants, not for some all-encompassing evil master plan, but simply because he wants to and if he doesn’t get to he’ll throw his toys out of the pram.

It novel itself isn’t particularly well written [but it's Wilde, it's still better than anything I could ever dream of doing].  It’s barely a novel in length, pedants probably refer to it as a novella – and it’s longer than it needs to be.  If you’ve ever read it, you’ll know the chunk in the middle which is pure extraneous filler – the chapter which waxes lyrical about fabrics and colours, jewels and treasures.  It’s the kind of thing that any editor worth their salt would have taken a thick red marker pen to.

I think I like it because it isn’t perfect.  Grey is neither a hero nor an anti-hero, he’s just a bloke.  The book isn’t the best thing ever written, it’s not even the best thing Wilde wrote; it does – if I am honest – get terribly wanky in places.  That said, it never get tired or trite;  it never plods along nor does anything which seems out of character for the book.  As you would expect from Wilde there are amazing turns of phrase: “I want to be good. I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”, “Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner”.

This isn’t the book that could serve as a decent introduction for Wilde-virgins.  It does show his weaker areas of writing, Wilde can do conversation like no one, but the prose framing  the conversations is weak and lengthy [as my NaNo mentor would say, "show, don't tell"].

Despite The Picture of Dorian Grey being my favourite book, I wouldn’t recommend it.  It’s not a being selfish thing and keeping the good book to myself [for that's the last thing you should do with a good book] but I don’t think it’s a book that can be recommended.  I think the pop culture aspect of the Dorian Grey myth is now widely known that those who have not read the book will expect more from the book than is there.  Dorian Grey has become a supernatural myth, alongside those other prominent Victorian figures: Dracula, Jekyll, Hyde, Frankenstein’s Monster – but those characters were created and live in their own supernatural environs; Grey comes from a social commentary disguised as a supernatural suspense.

I love it, but I can’t explain why; it’s all every-so slightly wrong and doesn’t quite do what it sets out to do nor does it the way you expect it to [not in a "I never saw that coming way" more of a "what...?!" way].  So there you have it, which if my last 900 words are anything to go by, isn’t very good and isn’t worth reading.

Buy A Book

The latest “victim of the recession” is purporting to be Borders Bookstores [UK branches].  The stores are currently having last-gasp closing down sales with ridiculous percentage reductions desperate to get every and any last penny they can for what’s left on their now near-empty shelves.  The strange thing is, it’s busier than I’ve ever see it before.  I don’t, honestly, believe they are truly a “victim of the recession”, instead I think they hadn’t adapted their business model for the UK, they simply copied the version they have for America.

The Boyf has been – quite rightly – complaining about the Facebook groups and petitions set up to try to prevent the impending closures; the quasi-crusaders are claiming that if Borders closes they will lose a social meeting place.  These quasi-crusaders don’t seem to realise that Borders is not a meeting place, it’s a shop.  It has a profit to make.  If they really wanted Borders to stick around then they should have bought books in the first place.  Of course the non-book buyers aren’t the only ones to blame, there does seem to be a flaw in Borders business strategy: in-store Starbucks.  These social meeters wouldn’t consider meeting in Tesco or Topshop and sitting around for hours not buying anything, why shouldn’t the same be true of Borders?

Yesterday, while waiting for the bus, the Boyf and nipped into Starbucks-in-Borders for some festive-themed caffeine.  Sitting at the table next to us were a pair of girls from one of the local universities doing some exam-cramming.  Between them they had purchased one coffee and were trying to revise Physics [it was potentially chemistry: one girl was have difficulty getting the hang of it, I felt equally sorry for her and the entry requirements of the university as it was equations I remember from Higher Physics and could still have a fair attempt at].  Having difficulty getting the hang of frequency equations and the changing hertz into megahertz [and also lambda [λ], calling it “that funny upside down v”, surely it’s more of an upside down y, is it not?] she did the only thing she could think of: go and borrow a book off the shelves.  After all that’s what they are there for, isn’t it.

At another table behind us, was a mother and her old-enough-to-know-better child; she had given her child a pile of books to keep him amused while she drank her froufrou coffee, when they got up to leave she sent him to put the now-read books back on the shelf.

Herein lies the flaw in Borders: people treat it like a library because Borders has set itself up so it can be used as a library.  I, personally, would feel completely awkward about going into a bookshop, picking up a book, reading it over coffee and then leaving.  I feel awkward enough if I read more than the back page synopsis; once I crack open a book I feel I have to buy it.  Other people, however, don’t have that issue at all.  Discussing this in the office, some people believe it’s okay to read an entire magazine in the supermarket or newsagent and then put it back on the shelf.  I wouldn’t even pick it up unless I was going to buy it.  I’d read the front cover, and even then only the parts which aren’t obscured by the magazines beneath and to the side of it.

What I find most strange about this whole thing is that people treat Borders like a library, whereas the number of people borrowing books from actual libraries is down.  Where they have the opportunity to legitimately borrow books they don’t take it.  Why?

Sitting in Starbucks-in-Borders The Boyf and I came up with the perfect solution to the impeding Borders closure.  Don’t close it, simply re-programme the tills so instead of paying for books they are simply date stamped.  They would probably make as much – or more – money on late fees alone.  It’s only now I see the problem with yesterday’s seemingly foolproof plan: if you tell people they can borrow the books they won’t want to.