At the time of writing this I've just finished my 18th novel of the year and for the most part I've enjoyed nearly all of them. That is probably about the same number of books as I've read in the last five years combined. More important than that is that I can once again genuinely confess to a love of reading in a way that I've failed to feel for over a decade.
I thought it was me. I thought my life had become too busy for more than three or four books a year, I thought I now preferred the short story, I thought perhaps I had already read my fair share of novels or that there wasn't really anything new out there worth the time and effort. I'm not entirely convinced the last reason isn't partially true. Not the nothing new bit, but rather the time and effort.
You see, books got fat and books got flabby. Books became great big slabs of word count, thick bricks of paper, visually large enough to justify the big fat price on the back cover or appear so much more of a bargain for the discounted price as stickered on the front.
Now I'm neither a curmudgeonly old miser or a hater of all large books but once upon a time there were some fat books and there were a lot of thin books and they were genuinely the right size they needed to be tell the story inside. Sometimes, if you had a particularly large story to tell, it even took more than one book but these were very wonderful and rare beasts indeed.
But somewhere around about 1990 books became just products, subject to discounts and BOGOF deals. Supermarkets and foreign investors got involved and slowly, so very, very slowly, the book publishing industry flipped its thinking about how it would make its money.
Working for a high-street book chain at the time the Net Book Agreement was torn up, I'll admit that some books got a bit cheaper and a select few had their prices slashed. Although you didn't half have to shift a lot of units to make it worth while. Those selected titles dominated store windows, display tables and stole whole shelves all to themselves. But for the vast majority of the other new books, all the publishers could do was bulk the buggers up and make them look like you were getting more for your money. The common or garden paperback grew taller and wider and broader and so much more like those big water injected plum chickens or that one big type of bright red strawberry that travels well down the motorway from the airport. And the back stock of perennial classics, the much loved old favourites either got a magic make-over or just fell out of print.
It took me a while to realise how forced-fed and fatty the vast majority of what I was reading had become. In fact I didn't. I just slowly went off it, thinking my tastes had changed or a much enjoyed pass time had simply fallen out of favour with the passage of years.
Oddly I still bought a lot of books but mostly 2nd hand and as much for the pleasure of beach combing charity shops for lost artifacts and half forgotten treasures as for the promise of one day reading something I had missed reading the first time around.
So with my shelves reaching critical mass, I have embarked upon this 2017 read-a-thon in order to divide my collection into either; Keep or Pass On, by the end of which the shelves will have been at least partially cleared.
February purchases.
Steve
