The Smithylad/Crawfish
Stardust Weblog

25-Jun-2005

Total Number Of Books I've Owned
It's a little complicated because all my books are mixed up with my wife's and also because I have worked in the book trade all my working life, wherein its very easy indeed to accumulate lots of books. So it's going to take some bodged calculations to come up with some semblence of a total.

Total number of shelves of books = (3 bookcases x 6 shelves x 2 books deep) + 3 shelvesworth piled on top - 3 shelves storing other things + 1 shelf work books - 3 shelves only 1 deep + 2 cummulative shelvesworth scattered scruffily throughout the office + 1 shelf ready for sale on Amazon marketplace) = 37 shelvesworth
Average number of books per shelf = 26
Total number of books owned by my wife and I at present = 26 x 37 = 962
Approximate percentage of those which are mine = 50%
I own at present approximately = 480 books, give or take
Number of books I have disposed of = 300 -> 500 (samples to booksellers, given to charity, copies of my own books sold, books lent to friends and not received back)
So, the total number of books I have owned in my life would be somewhere between 800 and 1000.
I don't even want to think of what that would be worth, monetarily.

Another good question would be how many of them I have read! Oooh, I daren't even get into that.

The Last Book I Bought
Steve Jacobi's Laughing Matters. Steve is a friend of mine who has had a couple of novels out, and I saw this in Waterstones Trafalgar Sq London this week. It is Steve's story of his foray into the arena of the stand-up comedian. I'm about two-thirds of the way through it and I'm really enjoying it.
I always make a point of buying anything by any of my friends as I always appreciate it when they do the same for me. The hard bit, sometimes, is sitting down and reading it, as the fear is if the writing is poor that you have to face them and admit that you haven't enjoyed it, or find a way to say something positive when it possibly doesn't warrant it. Happily, nothing by any of my friends has been so bad I couldn't honestly look them in the eye and state clearly and without equivocation that I had enjoyed it. I don't mind passing on constructive criticism once I've been able to be generally positive. So the basic requirement of things written by your pals is please, let it be competent. Provided I have that, anything else I can handle.
Actually, that's not strictly true. I know far too many people who write and never finish anything, and that's the saddest thing in the world. If a story is finished, it can be fixed up, mended, edited. If a story isn't finished, it dwells in a drawer for eternity where it's no use to anyone. I spend a lot of time badgering different friends to finish what they have started, because I know why they stop, and it's generally to do with the need to write literature, the fear that regardless how good the story is, it will never be as good as they would like it to be. It's debilitating for someone to do the spadework on a project only to run out of confidence in it. They stop enjoying writing it, and I think that's one of the issues: there's a point within any creative enterprise where it becomes hard damn work, when the potential rewards seem to diminish in a haze of unresolved plot-points and inconsistent character action, and it's all too easy to give up at that point amid the distractions of other aspects of life. So my advice to my pals who are writing (and I spoke to two different friends over the last fortnight both of whom had recently started out on novels) is to finish the thing. Forget literature, finish the thing. Once that's done, then they can go back and make the thing as great as both they are willing it to be.

Prior to Steve's book, the last things I bought were 2 Sin City comics/graphic novels, The Big Fat Kill and The Hard Goodbye. Both excellent: I only got into them because of the buzz around the film, which is always a little bit embarrassing to admit, but I will certainly be buying more.

As a reader, writer and because I work for a publisher, I am always wondering about books in series. From the publishing angle, a successful series allows for a certain momentum to carry itself through the publishing programme from conception to completion to sales and marketing. It's a safe bet for all concerned, because people - the authors, the editors, the salespeople, the marketers, the bookshops and ultimately the end customer - know what they are getting. It gives a framework and structure, and to some degree a formula. Within a novel, it's great to find the same characters up to more antics, Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves and Wooster, the Famous Five, Hardy Boys, James Bond, Harry Potter, Flashman, the various Mr Men, Tales from the City, etc. Within computing books, a structure means that all the knowledge that the learner requires is where it is needed.
Where series fall down is when the formula becomes too easy, too formulaic, too predictable. This boils down to the people responsible for it not putting enough effort into it to keep the content fresh. It's the same with TV series and films, and it's always galling when you feel a much-loved franchise is milking it. It feels like they are taking the mickey, or that they have lost their touch. It's all the more impressive, then, when they managed to keep it together year in year out, keeping up the creativity and the passion and finding something new to say about the human condition or Perl or whatever. It's a rare skill.
With the Sin City books I have read so far, the series thing has taken care of itself. They share a common set of characters and a common setting, but as Miller features a different character in each one, it seems like each is an individual character study, with the other characters dropping in and out as appropriate. (I must reiterate, I've only read a couple and seen the film, so I may be wrong, but this is how it appears to me so far).

The Last Book I Read
The Sin City books were the last 2 I finished. I also recently finished A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, which was incredibly good. I tried some of Bryson's travel writing but I found it a little bit smug. A Short History, however, may have been critical at times, but in general it was wonderfully generous, and that always appeals to me. I don't care for nastiness and I love stories where credit is given where credit is due, and this book is so much about giving credit where credit is due, (or blame where blame is due - the same guy, I learned from this, who put the lead in petrol to reduce 'engine knock' also invented CFC's. Thomas Midgley Jr, hang your head in shame).

Five Books That Mean a Lot To Me

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Carter Beats The Devil by James David Gold
My Dark Places by James Ellroy
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole

or

Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
Why Brownlee Left by Paul Muldoon
The Branching Stairs by John Ash
Collected Poems by Robert Frost

or

I Wish I Was Me by Pete Waterman
Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald
In The Sixties by Barry Miles
To Be Loved by Berry Gordy
Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie

or

1984 by George Orwell
Any Jeeves and Wooster
Money by Martin Amis
Hi Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

I have deliberately avoided mentioning anything by my pals. I could easily have included:

Zoom by Simon Armitage
Doll by Tracey Sinclair
Everything You've Heard Is True by Peter Sansom
The Fulmar and the Rock by Hugh Gunn Ross
An Evening of Long Goodbyes by Paul Murray
(I don't actually know Dave Murray but I do know Lyndon Hayes, who did the very fine original artwork for the paperback. I bought the artwork from him, my first pieces of original art! The book is very good, too, though it does have a different jacket now, which is a travesty).

But I think I will go for:

Goalkeeper's Revenge and Other Stories by Bill Naughton
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Popism by Andy Warhol
45 by Bill Drummond

Goalkeeper's Revenge was the first book I recall reading, (though I did read A Pair of Jesus Boots and a few Hardy Boys books). Wonderful short stories for teenage boys.

American Tabloid is the first of a trilogy where Ellroy establishes a 'seamless versimilitude' of American politics from the 50's to I assume the 70's. Kennedy appears, as does Martin Luther King. It's a fantastic book, leaping around all over the place from Vietnam to Cuba to Dallas. Compared with Cold Six Thousand, the second of the three, it is so easy to read. Cold Six Thousand seems to go out of its way to be hard to penetrate, Ellroy picking a preacher's exclamatory voice throughout the entire book which I wouldn't have had a clue how to get into if I hadn't seen him read. I hope he returns to a more traditional story-telling mode for the third book: I'm the only person I know who made it through Cold Six Thousand, and if he wants people to read it, he needs to be a bit more approachable.

Breakfast of Champions. The first Vonnegut I read. Vonnegut's skill is deceptive - it takes attempts to emulate his writing style to realise how good he is. His characterisation and indeed his plotting sometimes seem a little cartoony, but I don't mind that, and I love the humanity within all his work. For a while I thought his books were strictly for an early-adult-orientated audience, but I went back and read them all recently and they are just as good as I hoped they were and speak just as kindly to all people of all ages.

Popism. A wonderful depiction of the inside of the whirlwind. Warhol is an excellent self-documenter. Tragic, beautiful, inspiring. I always enjoy the backstory to any period of creativity, whether that's The Two-Tone Story or Men of Tomorrow, about the originators of the great comic book superheroes, and this is one of those books. A freakishly influential cast of characters and stunningly iconic art as it first took New York City and then the World.

I adore 45. I reading it during a week I took off work to finish the first draft of Super-8, (I also got through Simon Armitage's Little Green Man, which is a fine book). Magnificent essays about pop music, art and the tangents of an artist's life. Actually I am just having a dilemma of whether to include this or Re-possessed/Head On by Julian Cope. Both fantastic books written by genuinely charismatic British pop figures who had long associations with each other.

Yep, I'm pleased with that selection, even if I managed to sneak 6 in rather than the requisite 5.

And now I need to work out to whom to forward the baton. Smithylad Permalink/Comment