Support your local bookshop

In this weeks Sunday Times India Knight has written a piece entitled 'The bookshop strangler: It's a scary whodunnit' in which she looks at the fortunes of Waterstones, which took a nosedive over Christmas, and contemplates a future without this last remaining dedicated bookshop chain and various valiant independents and asks how did this happen and who is to blame?

Let us look at how the bookshop industry might have got itself into this situation. Online retailers and Waterstones themselves have huge clout with the publishing industry which allows them to demand large discounts on titles so they can sell them at less than cost price - hence the 3 for 2 offers and the huge discounting of new releases, independent bookshops can not compete with this and customers looking for 'value' buy books in droves from these sources hastening the death of the independent bookshops but without the independents the chains and onliners have no competition.

Equally, Knight points out, if a debut novelist wants his book not only published but distributed he is reliant on the large chains picking it up and promoting it, if they don't he's stuffed. Thus the large online retailers and chains control not only the price the customer pays for books but also the books that are available to buy.

Customers have turned away from local independents (and this goes for butchers, hardware and other shops) to large chain retailers who offer discounting and a one size fits all model with the only books available being the ones they deem to be the ones we want to buy - hence the sea of celebrity serial biographies. The result seems to be that the customer has got tired of this model, if the latest results from Waterstones are anything to go by, service, knowledge and not having to trek to the nearest large town or city for what you want may be something that book buyers are coming to appreciate we hope!

There is also a knock-on effect of the dirth of bookshops - how do you foster a love of reading and literature in the young if there are no bookshops in which children can physically pick up, touch and look at books. There is nothing like the wonder of a child who opens a book to find that the contents pop up towards them in an explosion of colour and fun or the thrill of picking up a book that you had never heard of a finding that you have read the first 10 pages without realising it. This is what we risk loosing if we loose our bookshops to online retailers, yes they may be cheap but, as Knight points out,

'Amazon is a huge and powerful behemoth that has crushed publishing in its fist. I know it’s nice to buy cheap books (Amazon demands massive concessions from publishers), but publishers have little or no margins as a result and authors’ royalties suffer, too.'

Support your local bookshop, its a place to browse, chat with knowledgeable staff and customers, it fosters the imagination in both young and old and will transport you away from where you are. What other shop can do this and all for an average price of about €9.99!

Teenage Book Group

I am involved in a secondary school book group as one of the required adult supervisors to any teen activity. What that actually means is that although the students pick the books to read I try to bring something to the meeting that they may not have thought of in connection with the chosen book in an effort to get them to 'think out of the box' - their English teacher brings chocolate brownies (Guess who's more popular!)

This months book is Mark Haddon's 'Boom' a tale of two boys who discover that two of their teachers are aliens who have a fiendish plot to take sci-fi fans and repopulate their world with them. It would be a great book for 9 - 12 year olds or those slightly older who are reluctant readers. Unfortunately I suspect the discussion on the book will not last the full hour we have available to us as, although humorous the book is not complex. I have therefore been casting about for ways to make the meeting more interesting and began to think about that other great alien invasion book H. G. Well's 'War of the Worlds'. There are at least two films of the book but far more interesting is Orson Welles' 1938 radio production which was broadcast on the night of 30th October 1938 - Halloween.

The production took the form of news bulletins which interrupted a programme of dance music and seemingly caused panic among the population. The original production is available on Youtube (in segments) and I have collected several newspaper headlines of the time not only dealing with the panic but, in an effort to try and put the public's reaction into context, of the surrounding political and world situation - the Australian Anschluss and the capitulation to Germany of their demand for part of Czechoslovakia and the unofficial war between China and Japan. The Americans of the time thought they were being invaded. The public had no TV and were not media savvy. All news was obtained from the radio or newsreels in cinemas and, if they missed the opening introduction, listeners had no way of knowing if what they were hearing was true or not. The task at the meeting is to get these 12 - 14 year old to imagine a world without TV where war is being openly talked about in a society that does not want to get involved in another European conflict.

I'll let you know how it goes!

Welcome to a New Year

Now that the Christmas rush is over and all the mince pies have been eaten it's time to sit back and look forward to the new year. I am busy preparing February's Book Newsletter for our customers setting out new releases for the month and news and info from the world of books. Delivered by email - you can request a copy of the newsletter by emailing us at the shop with your name and we will add you to the e-mailing list. We can post any book to you - subject to payment of postage. Have a look at the 'About Me' section of the blog for our email and phone details.

Snowed Under

Blogging will be suspended for a time whilst we work out new systems in the shop for streamlining what we do. Trying to keep up with blogging and dealing with new orders is proving to be problematic so we are taking a break until we sort out the issues and we can free up some time. Happy Reading

The City and The City - China Mieville

Science Fiction books are something that I read as a teenager and moved away from, despite the realisation that they were often the books that pushed at the boundaries of knowledge and ideas - looking forward rather than back. I like books that explore ideas and China Mieville's name has been on my radar for some time, previous novels have been packaged as science fiction and have been called the new weird, but they remained in the science fiction/fantasy section but with the publication of 'The City and The City' it is perhaps time to take Mieville's novels and put them firmly in the modern literature section. This does not mean that we are being given reality as we know it reflected back to us, we are being given a reality which has been stretched thin and wrapped around a murder mystery!

The cities of the title are Beszel and Ul Qoma, they are located somewhere towards the Balkans in an otherwise identical world. Each city has it's own characteristics, food, fashion, colours and administrative systems. The point of departure from the conventional is that the two cities occupy the same physical space. The citizens of each city live their lives around the citizens of the other city having learnt to 'unsee' from an early age, the penalties for 'seeing' or Breach, being severe.

The book is narrated from the point of view of Inspector Borlu of the Beszian Extreme Crime Squad, a woman's body is found in a run down area of the city of Beszel and it soon becomes clear to Borlu that the murder involves the illegal passage between the two cities or Breach. The murdered woman is involved in an archaeological dig in Ul Qoma which is recovering mysterious artifacts, as the investigation progresses it becomes clear that the murdered woman had become convinced that there is a third city, Orciny, which exists in the spaces between Beszel and Ul Qoma unseen by the occupants of both cities and which wields power greater than that of Breach. As Borlu pursues his investigation he travels to Ul Qoma and both he and his Ul Qomaan counterpart slowly begin to believe that Orciny may be real.

China Mieville has created a novel that deals with our modern busy crowded urban lives. We all 'unsee' things we don't want to see from the beggar in the street to that big chap coming towards us on a dark night. He has taken this idea and stretched it to create this engrossing murder mystery which offers us a view of how we deal with the chaos of life lived in the city.

2009 Man Booker Prize Longlist

The Man Booker Prize Longlist was announced yesterday and the contenders for the shortlist which will be announced on the 8th September are:

The Children's Book - AS Byatt

Summertime - J M Coetzee

The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds

How to Paint a Dead Man - Sarah Hall

The Wilderness - Samantha Harvey

Me Cheeta - James Lever

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantell

The Glass Room - Simon Mawer

Not Untrue and Not Unkind - Ed O'Loughlin

Heliopolis - James Scudamore

Brooklyn - Colm Toibin

Love and Summer - William Trevor

The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

Check out our reviews of The Wilderness and The Little Stranger. We will bring you reviews of the other nominees in due course.

American Rust - Philipp Meyer

Philipp Meyer's debut novel and his writing have been compared to Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, J D Salinger and Cormac McCarthy. This is heady stuff - as is this novel.

Buell Pennsylvania is a steel town, or it was. It is now in the Rust Belt of America, the steel works have been closed and the only jobs are those involved in dismantling the mills and at WalMart - packing groceries. In a period of twenty years

'the area had lost 150,00 jobs-most of the towns could no longer afford basic services; many no longer had any police...It was like this all up and down the river and many of the young people, the way they accepted their lack of prospects, it was like watching sparks die in the night.'

Two of these young people are Isaac English and Billy Poe, high school friends who have been left behind in Buell where others their age have fled. Isaac steals $4,000 from his invalid father and plans to head west, to California to study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His friend Billy, a High School football star agrees to accompany him on the first leg of his journey. But when they shelter from rain in a disused mill and encounter three homeless men, Billy refuses to run and Isaac kills one of the men. It is from this morally ambiguous incident that Meyers builds and layers his novel.

The two boys panic and run instead of going to the police. Billy is eventually arrested and charged with murder. Isaac, unaware of his friends arrest, fleas as originally planned. The novel explores the consequences of the boys actions on themselves and those around them, Billy's mother Grace, Isaac's sister Lee and Bud Harris the local Chief of Police. Each chapter is narrated by a different character which allows Meyer to focus in on various aspects of the repercussions of the murder but also explore the consequences of the economic decline of Buell.

This is not just a story of a murder but an exploration of the choices we make, be they large ones such as not investing in new technology and maintenance of a mill or the relatively smaller one of not taking up employment in a city because it would mean moving your son from the school where he is on the football team. Also how people are swept aside by history, marginalised and overlooked. Meyer gives us the modern dispossessed, living in trailer parks and disused houses, the corruption of municipal politics and the barely contained violence of a maximum security prison.

Throughout 'American Rust', below the surface and waiting in the wings, is nature herself. The Mon valley where Buell is situated is a lovely verdant area and with the decline of industry and the depopulation of the towns nature is beginning to reassert itself. Deer walk down deserted streets and those people that remain are turning to almost frontier lifestyles of growing their own vegetables and hunting their own food. Is this a simpler time? The people of Buell are living lives of quiet desperation.

Meyer puts hardly a foot wrong in this novel, there are however two niggles, the lack of interest in even looking at an alternative scenario to the murder theory and whether anyone awaiting trial would be sent to a maximum security prison. These are very minor criticisms which do not detract from a novel that explores the economic and personal reality of decisions made at the highest levels of government and at the intimate and individual level.