The almost tangible pain of being a book obsessive - This Week's #ReadItTorial

I've probably blogged about this many times but when I found the image above, it triggered the idea for this week's #ReadItTorial.

Just about every book blogger out there (and of course the wonderful folk who also just love books without feeling the need to spill their guts on a blog about them) fully understand what it feels like to be a book obsessive. Books creep into your daydreams, books surround you, you've probably got one or two tucked into your bag, or a whole brace of them stashed on your Kindle and it's nigh-on impossible for you to enter a "physical" book store and come out empty handed (this can become something of an occupational hazard unless you're a lucky chump who has a metric ton of disposable cash, of course).

I doubt many of you are old enough to remember a TV series called "The Twilight Zone" - NO it had nothing to do with sparkly vampires, but was masterfully written by Rod Serling, something of a genius when it came to writing dark tales for science fiction and fantasy shows.

He once wrote an episode of TTZ called "Time Enough at Last" which was a dark dystopian tale about the last man left alive on the planet. The man was a book obsessive, and finally realised that with nothing else to trouble his daily routine, he could sit back and indulge in his favourite pastime - reading - forever more. Unfortunately (SPOILER WARNING) the poor chap is terribly short sighted, and breaks his glasses at the end of the episode, meaning his dream is shattered along with his specs!

It's a roundabout way of trying to get folk who find book obsessives more than a bit scary (and this is something I've actually had people tell me I am) to understand what book obsession feels like.

I don't consider myself that well read, nor well spoken - but sometimes I'll encounter books that I just can't / won't shut up about until I find at least one other person who's similarly obsessed with them (both my wife and daughter sometimes do, but not quite to the extent that my weirdly wired brain finds agreeable).

As a shy retiring type, I don't often get the opportunity to talk about books with others - and when I do, I imagine the poor person on the receiving end of my gushing enthusiasm feels a lot like this guy:


(Sorry!)

Over the last two weeks a picture book (of all things) has completely gripped me and become the latest object of my obsession. It's the sort of book that will probably come and go from bookstore shelves in the blink of an eye. It may find a few appreciative folk who can see in it what I do, but it'll never win any awards, it'll never get anywhere near the kind of tedious over-exposure that "those books we all love to hate" do (you know the ones I'm talking about, that are plastered over all the underground station ads, pop up on national TV at peak times, and FFS even get cinema ads devoted to them).

No it won't be one of those books, but it's a book that just completely took my breath away and made me realise (sadly) that the publishing industry may be broken beyond repair, and we may now be locked into an endless slide towards utter tedium where books like the one I'm obsessing about are the rare jewels in a year's worth of utterly twee and trite releases.

It's coming up on the blog in a couple of weeks. I found it nigh on impossible to get across, in the space of a blog post, just how amazing this book is. It is a book of the week - how could it not be, but I doubt this will do anything to raise its profile to the point where I feel it truly belongs. It will, without a doubt, also be my book of the year this year unless something miraculous happens and another book wins me away at the last minute (Q4 is a tricky time in publishing, and normally by November / December we're left with very little to blow our minds as the inevitable onslaught of Christmas titles descends upon us like a green and red tinged fatberg of book releases).

On the flipside there are books that elicit an equally passionate negative response, and these are sometimes interesting in their own right but possibly not for the reasons the author, illustrator, agent or publisher would wish. Then I turn from a gushing fountain of enthusiasm into this guy...


(Sorry again!)

A book that arrived at ReadItDaddy Towers last week caused this reaction. It was (surprise surprise) a celebrity-written book, though the illustrator is well established in their own right and produces gorgeous books of their own. The story was dull, the structure was appallingly bad (name ALL the things you'd tell a would-be children's author NOT to do in their first submitted manuscript and they were in the FULLY PUBLISHED BOOK) and the few moments where the gorgeous illustrations managed to lift it up a tad were dashed within the next few spreads as the story built to a wet fart of a climax). We now can't review it, because we swore we'd never write a picky and negative review on the blog (what would be the point?) but maaaaan have I ranted about this one to anyone who'll listen.

I bet it still sells well though.

So there are definitely at least two sides to being a book obsessive, maybe more, maybe it's like a 20-sided dice rather than a coin flip.

See, I did it again. I started on and on and on about books. I can't bloody help it can I? :)