some stuff, and most likely some things too.

I’m becoming increasingly tired of picking a book which has glowing reviews on it, or I’ve heard good things about from friends, only to find it’s at worst a pile of dross, or at best mediocre. I don’t stick to just one genre either, it’s happened over a broad series of books in the past year. Authors that people rave about such as Christopher Brookmyre, I read one of his (Country of the Blind) and was utterly underwhelmed. Books with praise heaped upon them, like Moshin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, turned out to be 200 odd pages of basically nothing. Philip Pullman, author of my much loved ‘Northern Lights’ trilogy said, “The author has managed to tighten the screw of suspense almost without our being aware it is happening, and the result is a tale of enormous tension.” Nothing happened!! Absolutely nothing!! I never got to a point where I understood his fundamentalism, as the book just wasn’t convincing enough for me.

Even in my preferred genre of sci-fi, the dross is present. Andrew Robert’s ‘The Snow’ is a perfect example.  Glowing reviews? Check! “Intriguing, convincing and well thought-out” (Simon Withers SFX magazine) The plot? Snow started falling & didn’t stop. Millions of people died. All sorts of theories abound. Guess what? Aliens did it. Fucking aliens. How entirely unoriginal. Some of the conspiracy theory’s the characters in the story came up with were much more plausible & more entertaining than fucking aliens! Seems I am not alone, the customer reviews of this book on Amazon seem to be of a similar opinion to mine. It was so bad that I have been put off reading any of his other work. Or indeed anything! I didn’t read a book for almost 3 months after getting so fed up with everything I read turning out to be rubbish! Eventually I picked up Charlie Brooker’s  ‘Screenburn’ and started enjoying books again.

Combine the fact that I rolled in drunk around 2am on the Saturday night/Sunday morning, therefore staying in bed til well past midday, with the fact it’s still too damn hot at night and you get the picture. Not sleepy enough to sleep and too hot to anyway. The worst thing about this kind of night isn’t so much the lack of sleep (although that obviously sucks too), it’s the bizarre dreams you have when you do occasionally drift off. Exact details of the dreams are mostly forgotten within 10 minutes or so of waking up but certain things stay with you.

For instance, I had been reading various articles online that afternoon with reference to philosopher and author Alain de Botton and his reaction to an unfavourable review of his latest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. It interested me as he had personally commented on the blog of a colleague of mine who was rather unimpressed with the book. She said this to which he replied (first comment under the blog)…”blogs like yours make me want to be sick, you ignorant vindictive and mean-spirited person”, which seems a tad over the top to me. Seems like he makes a habit of offending total strangers, more evidence in the comments section of this Guardian article and the comment with regards to New York Times book reviewer Caleb Crain’s blog . Totally childish overreaction or perfectly justified response by an author worried that a negative review will adversely affect his book sales? The former, in my opinion. He is, in his own words, an author with 9 books published in 25 countries. Surely he has a well established fan base, a following if you will, who will buy his work no matter what various reviewers or critics say about it? Surely the man who wrote ‘The Consolations of Philosophy’ can be confident enough in his own abilities to brush off a negative review every now and then? And all this begs the question, how does he find this stuff? Fair enough, he probably reads blogs of well established reviewers such as the NYT, but my colleague’s blog is hardly the Guardian, or even the Metro (excellent thugh it is!). So, does he sit at home and Google himself? Well here’s the test, I’ll add ‘Alain de Botton as a tag to this entry, and if he finds it somehow it’ll just be proof that he’s a sad case with nothing better to do than search for mentions of himself on the interwebs. And in the interests of fairness I will read his book before passing judgement on it.

But what does this have to do with my dreams? Well, in one of them de Botton was in my work throwing a hissy fit, shouting at my colleague that she’d ruined his career, and was being forcibly removed from the premises by security. I don’t remember much of the details but I remember a real sense of aggression. Then after waking up a few times and drifting back off again I had one of those ‘I’m late for work’ anxiety dreams, where I’m convinced something is preventing me from getting to work and I have no way to contact them. I dreamt I’d missed St Enoch somehow so got off at the next station, which was Bridge Street. But the way I come in to work on the subway means Buchanan Street is the next one, not Bridge Street. Also, it looked totally different, in that way that places in dreams do, yet you know where it’s meant to be. There was a big motorway overhead and a huge shop, a HUGE shop, that sold nothing but cheese, crackers and wine & I couldn’t make up my mind what to get. So when I woke up I was a tad confused as to what time it was, but thankfully I wasn’t late. Still, lack of sleep & so many weird dreams left me a bit discombobulated for the first few hours of my day.

(And if you’re interested, Times Online wasn’t keen and the Daily Mail wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it all, but felt de Botton was ‘sneering’ at low paid workers. )

Further to my post ‘Random Book Purchases’ (go here: Random ) I have discovered today that Russell Hoban’s ‘Riddley Walker’ is part of Border’s ‘BOGOHP’* offer on a range of fiction with the tag-line ‘Dystopian Fiction’. Some pretty damn good books in there if you ask me! Go here: Borders for the full list. Given how recently I discovered this man’s work, I feel this is indeed an omen, I am meant to read it! So come payday I’ll be buying myself a copy with a brand new introduction by Will Self. If he’s a fan I’m sure I’ll not be disappointed.

People who walk down the street reading a book annoy me. They have no awareness of their surroundings. I saw a guy doing that tonight, and to make matters worse, he was listening to music on headphones. Totally oblivious to everyone around him, almost bumping into people who he wasn’t even aware of. How these people reach middle, let alone old, age totally mystifies me. I mean, you know me, you know how much I read, but I draw the line at that!

They can be fun, they can be disappointing. But they don’t usually have a connection to one of my favourite bands.

I picked up a book in a charity shop a few months ago as the story appealed to me. It’s called The Bat Tattoo, and it’s by an author I’d never heard of before, Russell Hoban.

“Roswell Clark’s life had arrived at the point when he felt he needed to get an optimistic-looking bat tattoo on his shoulder. His ideal bat image was featured on an 18th century bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but strangely, on a visit to the museum, he encountered a woman called Sarah Varley, who was clearly compelled by the same bat. What did it mean? Sarah dealt in antiques and Roswell soon ran into her stalls in Chelsea and Covent Garden. His calling, which grew out of an obsession with crash-test dummies, was a bit harder to explain. It led from the invention of a popular children’s toy to lucrative commissions from a Parisian sybarite for wooden working models with very adult moving parts. Both Roswell and Sarah had lost their spouses and were still grieving in their different ways. And then Christ started putting a hand in — not in the “born again” sense, but literally — a hand, a fragment of an ancient crucifix that fetched up in one of Sarah’s antique lots. Between some compulsion conveyed by this hand and Sarah’s natural urge to make improvements in people, Roswell’s work took a surprising new turn. Russell Hoban’s delicious new novel combines much about art — traditional and conceptual — with new angles on Christ, crash-test dummies, antiques and pornography — a pleasure on every page and as mysterious and uplifting as bat wings.”

It’s been lying on the shelf until this Wednesday when I needed something new to read, and I decided that was the one. I looked over the back cover again and saw this quote, ‘…completes a trilogy of masterful late works…’, as in, not a parts 1-3 type trilogy, but novels woven together by the same characters and themes. So, I decided to put it back on the shelf and see if I could find the previous books. When I did a search for him I discovered he had written a book entitled ‘Riddley Walker’ and almost immediately the Clutch song ‘The Rapture of Riddley Walker’ started going round my head. So I looked up Clutch’s website, checked the lyrics section, and sure enough, got this:

“Read Russell Hoban’s ‘Riddley Walker.’ It’ll explain everything.”

So now I am intrigued. Hoban seems to be a well respected, almost cult status author, and I’ve never heard of him! To be fair, neither have two of my colleagues who work in the fiction section, and from what I’ve read about the man he seems to be a ‘word of mouth’ author, who has a highly devoted fanclub. His biggest selling books are actually a children’s collection about a badger named Frances! I’ve discovered that the books I should be looking for are ‘Angelica’s Grotto’ and ‘Amaryllis Night and Day’, so off I go on a hunt!