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? :)

Regular blog followers will already have noticed just how utterly chaotic our "Book of the Week" slots on Friday have been over the past few weeks. I'd like to think that things will eventually calm down, and that we'll be able to get back to our normal "1-2 BOTW plus a chapter book winner" format, but September and October's scheduling has been a real challenge, and we're also faced with the prospect of November being quite a squeeze too!

It's a fantastic and enviable position to be in, don't get me wrong - and it's fair to say that it definitely has been becoming more and more the case that at this time of the year, the industry really does pull out all the stops and has done ever since we started blogging back in 2010.

I like pattern analysis - and for us the blogging year always seems to stack up like this:

Q1 seems to be for book releases that somehow 'slipped the net' and missed out on the pre-christmas build-up. There are loads of good reasons to launch a book in Q1, not least of all to cash in on all those folk who (quite sensibly) get book tokens for Christmas!

Q2 is all about books that are out to win the annual awards, or be highly prominent at the early-in-the-year / spring bookfairs. The books that will make reading programme lists, and of course the books that will be vying for your attention as the nicer weather begins.

Q3 is, oddly, a bit of a desert. There are releases to cash in on the long summer holidays, and various reading programmes that exist or are prominent during this time, but release-wise it goes fairly quiet in the summer compared to the rest of the year. Summer is of course the time for the great Book Festivals, and many titles will launch off the back of exposure at those.

Q4 is an absolute avalanche as book releases try to catch the 'back to school' trade, and of course the inevitable "September onwards" build up to Christmas, and of course lots of author / illustrator school visits.

It's a comfortable pattern and it seems to work for the industry, but sometimes Q4 really plays merry hell with our usual sane and sensible review schedules meaning that:

• The Book of the Week days are crazy. We write the blog 1-2 months ahead, which means if we get copy 'late' (ie either a day or two before a book is set to be released, or long after it's hit the shelves) the "blogger impetus" has slowed down, and interest in those titles will have waned slightly. 

• We try to be timely but sometimes find it impossible. We don't want to try and cram more than 2-3 reviews onto the blog for any given day (considering also articles such as these ReadItTorials or other bits and bobs) so books end up being moved towards the next month's (or more likely the 'next-but-one' month's) review schedule

• Chapter books are all out of kilter. In fact in the chapter book roundups we end up at least a month out from most books' official release dates, preferring to cover stuff we've actually *properly* sat down and read that month rather than trying to be bang on time.