When do review books become homework?

Now then, peeps!  We all love ARCs.  Who wouldn't?  Free copies of lovely shiny new books, ahead of publication, and often in those not-quite-done covers that make you feel just a teeny tiny bit special because your copy looks different from everyone else's...

But at what point, I wonder, do review books start to become homework?  It came to my attention this week that four of the six books I've read so far this year have been review copies.  One of the two books I'm currently reading is also a review copy, as is the book I'm planning to read after that.  At the moment, every time I finish a book, the question isn't, "What do I want to read next?" but "What do I need to read next?" or even "What should I have read last week but couldn't quite get to in time?"

Admittedly, part of the reason for my skewed reading priorities (and the self-pressure that inevitably follows) is the fact that I had that almighty chunk of non-reading time at the start of 2012.  Now that my time is more balanced again (books, music AND telly, thank you very much) I'm finding myself with a stack of unread review copies clamouring for my attention.  If I miss more than one or two I feel really, seriously guilty.  After all, this one might have been The One, the one I would have raved about and recommended to anyone and everyone!  I haven't done my reviewerly duty!  I'VE LET EVERYONE DOWN!

Meanwhile the books continue to pour into my house from other places too.  We all know that no matter how hard I try to stoke up my willpower, I'm powerless to resist the siren call of book shopping for long.  The books I've chosen for some of my challenges this year remain firmly on the shelves.  New titles pile up under the bed.  I try to refrain from buying anything else but of course, that always fails sooner or later.  Books I've bought this year, books I was given for Christmas, books I was CONVINCED I would read almost immediately because I JUST COULDN'T WAIT - all left shiny and unloved.  And let's not even talk about the sixteen library books that have been sitting on my windowsill since December...

So, with all this in mind, and to clear my head ready for another round of review-book fever, I've decided that after The Snow Child and one of the many young adult ARCs I'm 'meant' to have read in the last week or so, I'm going to have a little break from review copies and enjoy a book or two off my own shelves!  It'll be nice to have a couple of weeks of following my own reading whims instead of choosing my books based on what's being published next.  After that I'll be more than happy to go back to review copies again for a while, but I think I owe it to my shelves to give them some love every once in a while!

Over to you!  How do you balance the demands of review copies and ARCs with the other books you want to read?  Is there ever a point at which you just say 'Enough!' and back away from ARCs for a little while?  Or do you think it's more a matter of good planning?  Do share your thoughts, tips and advice in the comments!

"Where's Your Non-Fiction?" and Other Tales of Half-term Joy

Hell's Bells, I hate the half term holidays.  They're noisy and chaotic and I have to keep running round like a blue-arsed fly trying to rescue our books and new gifts from being ruined by everyone else's badly behaved children.  I've had a headache EVERY SINGLE DAY and I'm ready for a day off, when I fully intend to lie on my bed comatose and not talk to anybody...

To illustrate my point with a couple of choice examples from the last day or two:

YESTERDAY I found a nasty pile-up in the wake of a giddy child in the kid's section.  One of our loveliest new children's books was spread-eagled haphazardly on the floor, with an upside-down red plastic chair on the top, followed by a cuddly dog perched above everything.  At the very bottom of this delightful mountain I found a squashed baked bean.  Nobody was eating, we're across town from the nearest chippie... HOW THE HELL DID IT GET THERE?!

I also had a gentleman inform me that he would gladly pay £2 for a hardcover railway book he'd been looking for forever, 'because that's a fair price' - but the £2.75 I was asking for a hardcover travel book was just 'not good value for money'.  His friend informed him that he was embarrassing himself, paid for the book without a second thought, and dragged him out of the shop.  I could have kissed her!

Right after this I had the pleasure of serving the most miserable, sullen 40-something woman, mysteriously dressed in an enormous checked lumberjack's padded shirt... and a hat shaped like a koala.  Literally shaped like a koala.  The kind of hat that might have been kooky on a 17-year old girl, but was just plain wrong on the grumpy specimen standing in front of me.

TODAY I've just had the stupidest woman ever in here.  One of the 'non-fiction brigade' - the ones who toss the term around without having a bloody clue what it means.

Customer:  Excuse me, do you actually have any non-fiction books in here?
Me: Er, yes, it's everything that's not fiction.  So everything that isn't there (*gestures to fiction island*) or there (*gestures to crime and sci-fi island*).
Customer: Well, yes, I get that (*clearly doesn't*) but I'm looking for true books.  You know, like survival stories, that kind of thing.
Me: You mean autobiographies?
Customer: No, not autobiographies - true survival stories!
Me: That'd come under autobiographies, in the corner there.
Customer: (walking back to her friend) *world's smallest violin voice* Nooo, nothing here.... I didn't want autobiographies...

Of course, she returned to the desk five minutes later with a nice misery memoir... that she'd found in the autobiography section...  I couldn't resist: as I rang up the books I said "Next time you're looking for a survival story, you'll find it under 'Autobiographies'.  In just about any bookshop."  She had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed.  :)

On a lighter note, a guy just bought a nice old edition of The Pickwick Papers, because he'd been thinking about trying it for a while - and a fancy bound copy would look 'more intellectual' on the family bookshelves.  "Pfffft, sure!" his wife snorted, fussing with their baby's pushchair, "it'll look really intelligent next to all our Maisie Mouse books!"

Soooo, now I'm just waiting for another day to come to an end so I can go home, have a hot shower, eat a deliciously sinful plate of hash browns, fried eggs and baked beans, and go to bed...  Roll on Tuesday and two glorious days off!

Desert Angel, by Charlie Price

REVIEW: DESERT ANGEL (2.5*)

by Charlie Price (Corgi, 2012)

Oh dear me.  I had such high hopes for this one!  I was looking forward to a tense thriller with plenty of suspense, a dastardly villain, an exciting hunt, and a young heroine I could really root for.  A little like Belinda Bauer's Blacklands, with an added dose of Katniss Everdeen's worldliness and sheer will to survive.

Sadly, the novel turned out to be a big disappointment.  The 'cat-and-mouse game' promised on the cover never really materialised, and Angel, the fourteen year-old protagonist, on the run from the abusive and dangerous man who has just killed her mother, isn't the most likeable of characters.  Taking off across the Californian desert, she must depend on everything she's learned about the evil Scotty, and the kindness of the families nearby, to keep her safe.  But with Scotty's shady contacts watching the area, and his finely-honed prowess as a hunter, how is she ever going to be free of him - and at what cost? 

Unfortunately, Angel very quickly veered from being a sympathetic girl who had just lost her mother, to being plain irritating.  Her manic ups and downs and her constant desire to flee from everything were never really explained as side-effects of grief or of her upbringing, so that got confusing.  She came across as a deeply self-absorbed character incapable of considering the people around her, knowingly ignoring adult advice and putting whole families in danger just so she could 'go it alone'.  I wasn't stirred to feel any sense of sadness or pity towards her plight, because she seemed so distant as a character.

Perhaps because of that, a lot of the other important facets of the novel didn't click either.  The suspense didn't really have a chance to build, because either too much or too little was always told.  The best parts were the fleeting and unexpected moments where Angel missed a sign that Scotty had been watching her, or he committed an act of casual brutality in her wake, which were quite chilling.  I thought perhaps the suspense would have been higher had Scotty had a 'voice' in the novel - maybe a few sections in between Angel's narrative where Price could drop hints as to what was happening, how close Scotty might be, and explore how his mind worked to give a real sense of danger.  The big climax was a damp squib, and there were certain patches of the novel that suddenly veered horribly towards dullness - for example, the overdescription of the bleak landscape, which ironically meant I had a harder time picturing it for myself.

All in all, it was a reasonable enough way to kill a few hours on my day off, but I won't be holding my breath for more of Price's novels.  Then again, many of the other reviews I've read have been very positive, so perhaps you just need to read it for yourself and see whether it hits the spot a little more satisfyingly than it did for me?  

Note:  Many thanks to Random House Children's Books, who sent me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Loaded, by Christos Tsiolkas

REVIEW: LOADED (3.5*)

by Christos Tsiolkas (Vintage, 2011)

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this little book, having read such mixed reviews of Tsiolkas's better-known novel The Slap.  But this one - his first, and pretty short at 151 pages - sounded right up my street, so I thought I'd give it a go!

I was actually very pleasantly surprised.  It is an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative from the fascinating mind of Ari, a nineteen year-old gay Greek boy living in Melbourne.  Ari is simultaneously an aggressively confident young man, and completely conflicted about everything, veering between vehement certainty and utter helplessness.  He isn't entirely at ease with his sexuality, his friends come and go around him, he despises the confinement of traditional Greek life, and he has absolutely no sense of where he's going - despite his occasional protestations to the contrary.  All he really knows is that he loves movies and music, sex and drugs, and that being loaded keeps him calm, quiet and almost content.  The novel drags the reader along for a 24-hour ride inside his head as he snorts, shags, drinks and meanders his way through another day.

A few times as I was reading I found myself thinking, "Wow, THIS is what I wanted when I read Catcher in the Rye!"  I didn't identify with Salinger's whiny Holden Caulfield at all, but I rather liked Ari.  His voice is angry, passionate, intelligent and provocative, and even when I didn't agree with him I couldn't help but feel a admiring respect for his brutal arguments and perceptive observations.  I think as a character, he is so interesting because he can so readily see the beauty of other people and places and situations, yet seems to be incapable of translating that beauty into his own life and future.  I really felt for him!

Despite all this, I didn't give Loaded a higher rating, because although I was completely absorbed in Ari's world, it was quite slow going (perhaps surprisingly, given that Ari is sky high for half of it) and I don't think it will ultimately be a particularly memorable read.  There were one or two moments that really made me cringe, particularly the scenes in various clubs around Melbourne which invariably contain awful descriptions of dancing - frequent mentions of 'jumping around', and what moves Ari's 'working in' from his dance repertoire.  I found these parts incredibly jarring - though perhaps Tsiolkas intended them to be that way, to reflect the way Ari's drugged mind made some unnaturally slow and conscious decisions about even the most mundane of things?  Who knows - all I know is, I didn't like it much.

At any rate, Ari was a wonderful guide to the seedier underbelly of Melbourne life - the dark alleys for fumbling liaisons, the tangled, insular existence of the many different ethnicities on the outskirts of 'skip' society - and I liked the novel enough to give The Slap a try at some point.  I also ordered the screen adaptation, Head On, which I'm rather looking forward to.  Recommended for those who don't mind their literature buzzing, explicit and occasionally a little uncomfortable, even as it forces them to stop and think about the world from a new perspective. 

Notable Quotables:

• "In the three minutes it takes the song to play I'm caught in a magic world of harmony and joy, a truly ecstatic joy, where the aching longing to be somewhere else, out of this city, out of this country, out of this body and out of this life, is kept at bay.  I relive those three minutes again and again till I'm calm enough to walk back into life again."
• "They walk past me, up the hill, disappearing in the glare of the sunlight.  I watch them, fascinated.  A long time ago I was a chattering child, walking with my family along this strip of road, walking up the hill.  I'm thinking that in a few years those parents are going to want to kill that chattering child, are going to worry themselves sick over the chattering child.  I'm thinking, Christ, Mum and Dad are going to kill me."
• "They'll tell you God is dead but, man, they still want you to have a purpose.  They'll point to a child and say there it is, that's purpose, that's meaning.  That's bullshit.  A child is a mass of cells and tissues and muscle that will grow up and will become Jack the Ripper or the president of the world.  Maybe.  More likely it will grow up and become a dole statistic.  Worse, it will grow up and become an accountant."

How to Leave Twitter, by Grace Dent

Yes, I finished a book!  Though this isn't going to be much of a review, considering I read it on my stupid Kindle and now can't be bothered to shuffle through finding pithy funny bits or locating the contents page to make sure I've covered everything...  Which is why I'm getting rid of the Kindle - but more on that another time!

REVIEW: HOW TO LEAVE TWITTER: MY TIME AS QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE AND WHY THIS MUST STOP (4.5*)

by Grace Dent (Faber and Faber, 2011)

I'm not sure some of the other reviewers on Amazon have been reading the same book as me.  Two and a half stars as an average customer rating?  Shocking!  Hopefully I'll tip the balance a little bit in Dent's favour because I LOVED IT!

For me she absolutely nailed the Twitter experience on the head.  At the very beginning, she writes about how you join Twitter: the vehement hatred and outright denial of the pre-Twitter individual, and how their curiosity eventually gets the better of them and they become hooked, just like everyone else.  I DID THAT.  She explores the kinds of people who inhabit the Twitter universe, the online personas, the different breeds of celebrity and how they interact with the masses, how people use it in everyday life, the conversations, the viral videos and links, and Twitter cliques.  There is a glance at the social politics of following and unfollowing, and the etiquette of messaging other people without looking like an eejit.  The good, the bad and the downright ugly, it's all here - and as far as my own Twitter wanderings go, it's absolutely spot-on.

Perhaps I enjoyed this book so much because I (unlike some of the other reviewers, it seems) adore Dent's snarky, pithy, perceptive and relentlessly barbed brand of humour.  Sooooo, here's the deal: if you love writers/comedians/funny people like Caitlin Moran, Charlie Brooker, Chris Addison and Marcus Brigstocke, and are an actual bona-fide Twitter user, this might the book for you.  If you despise social media or prefer your humour a little softer and more cuddly, you might want to give this one a miss.  Hey, you can't win 'em all!  

P.S. Of course, Grace Dent is still on Twitter.  It's like Hotel California - you can check out but you can never leave!  You can follow her at @gracedent.

Spring Fair International - and more snow?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I've been having a wonderful time kicking my agoraphobia's little butt of late!  As you may already have read, two weeks ago I went to Liverpool to visit my sister - something I haven't even been able to consider until now without going into a complete panic - and had so much fun, it was wonderful!



My Very Official Visitor ID

Then on Tuesday I kinda cemented my new confidence by heading off down to Birmingham's NEC (about an hour and a half away) for the Spring Fair International trade gift show.  Oh My God.  It made me really wish that either a) I was there for several days shopping for my own gift emporium, or b) everything was available to buy individually like a normal shop so I could buy stuff for myself.  I wanted it all!  Stunning wall art and lovely stationery and clocks and funny wooden signs and beautiful towering ironwork for the garden...  Anyway, buying lust aside, we visited some of our current suppliers to check out their new products, and found a couple of other companies we might be interested in stocking, AND it once again proved how far I've come agoraphobia-wise because I wasn't nervous or fazed AT ALL, so it was a good experience!



Brochures and swag, yay!



Anyway, enough with all this city-hopping giddiness; let's get back to the books, shall we?  I'm still reading Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded - it's fairly intense to read so I'm taking it slowly - and Nick Krieger's fascinating trans-memoir, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender, which is one of the shortlisted books for this year's Indie Lit Awards.  Besides that I've finally sorted out the hundreds of photos that have been dumped in a PC folder marked 'New Pics' over the last couple of years, which is a weight off my mind.  They're all sorted, filed, deleted, whatever, and I've ordered a couple of hundred prints to get me up to date with all my favourites.  Another huge job done and off my mind, hooray! 

Now, today's quiet and very cold (more snow expected this afternoon, possibly - brrrr) so I was going to have a go at this week's BTT question - "If you could only pick five books to read ever again, what would they be and why?" - but when it came down to it I could only settle on one.  The rest were still whirling around in a howling vortex of "Ooooh!  Pick me!  Pick me!"  So I decided not to bother.  Possibly this time would be better spent reading!  And trying to work out how I'm going to carry everything home if it snows again this afternoon.  Damn you, unpredictable British weather!

One girl, one boy, one airport, one missed plane...

Hooray, I finished a book!  It's been a long time coming - three weeks or so?  Jeez.  But on Wednesday I finally sat down, turned off my iPod, closed my laptop and re-engaged with this one, and I was really glad I did because it was lovely.  I'm now continuing reading Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded, which I had also left hanging, and I started Nick Krieger's fascinating 'trans-memoir' Nina Here Nor There, which is on the shortlist for the Indie Lit Awards this year. WATCH THIS SPACE!  RIGHT HERE!  Okay...

REVIEW: THE STATISTICAL PROBABILITY OF LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT (4*)

by Jennifer E. Smith (Headline, 2012)

The concept behind this sweet little novel was pretty irresistable.  It is about one American girl, one English boy, and the coincidences that throw them together at a New York airport, changing both their lives.  Hadley is four minutes late for the plane that was due to take her to London to watch her father marry a woman she has never met.  But when she meets Oliver - who is waiting for the next plane to London for a family gathering of his own - she realises that this day might not be so awful after all.

This is a really lovely little debut - the kind of concentrated whirlwind of activity that would make a great movie, in fact.  Neither Oliver nor Hadley have a massive amount of depth - as you might expect from a novel with a 24-hour time frame, I suppose - but they are both witty and sparky characters and the the culture clash and gentle teasing between them is quite amusing.  Their romance is the stuff daydreams are made of, but happily it never veers into cliche and Smith keeps her plot firmly on the right side of plausible.

One of the most interesting and surprising aspects of the novel, for me at least, is how much it focusses on Hadley's family issues.  This isn't just a whimsical story about finding your soulmate in an unlikely place; it is also a very insightful look at what happens to a child when a family breaks down.  How does it feel when that child finds out that their parents are splitting up?  How does it feel the day one parent moves out of the home, taking their familiar belongings and their physical presence away?  How does it feel as those parents move on with their lives?  And what happens when issues of any kind go unresolved between a parent and child for too long?  It was surprisingly moving to read, and emotionally spot-on.

All in all, I really liked this book.  It is a quick and easy read, but one that delves quite firmly into the mechanics of family life and relationships, as well as a supplying a screen-worthy romance that made me sigh happily as I finished the last page.  I'll be keeping an eye out for Smith's next novel, out next year! 

Notable Quotables:

• "The truth was, even if they were still dating, her father's wedding was pretty much the last place she'd ever be inclined to take somebody.  Having to endure the night in a disaster of a bridesmaid dress while watching a bunch of adults do the 'YMCA' would be hard enough to bear on her own; having company would only make it worse."
• "Hadley understood.  It wasn't that she was meant to read them all.  Maybe some day she would, but for now, it was more the gesture itself.  He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how.  He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses."

Note: Many thanks to Headline, who sent me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.