I read quite a lot. Not as much as I'd like but I get through about a book a
week, year in, year out, near as dammit. I'd like to think it was more but I
did once keep a book journal for almost a whole year, back in the 'eighties,
and that's about how it worked out. I don't imagine I've upped my count
significantly since then.
It does vary according to what I'm reading, of course. And what I read has always been fairly random. Before I worked in a bookshop, I did most of my book-browsing in charity shops, market stalls and car boot sales. Other than working in one, which I liked a lot, I've never been keen on bookshops, neither new or second-hand. They're too performative for my taste and too well-curated. I like a bit more serendipity in my selection process.
For the past quarter of a century, while I was working at the bookshop, I got used to getting most of my books for free but it meant I was mostly choosing from whatever publishers were trying to promote. I read a lot more Young Adult and Middle School fiction and Cosy Crime than I might have done otherwise and a lot more debut novels, too.
I get through most those a lot faster than I would the massive fantasy epics or heavy mainstream novels I'd have been more likely to pay money for. Two or three of those a week, sometimes, so maybe my annual count might have been a little higher after the millennium than it was back in the twentieth century.
The irony is, the whole time I was working in a bookshop, I hardly bought any new books at all, except as presents for other people at Christmas and on birthdays, even though everything was half-price for me, thanks to the very generous employee discount (Which I retain for life, thanks to my quarter-century's service.) Fifty per cent off is a great deal but it can't compete with free. Actually, it can't even compete with used book prices on Amazon or in charity shops, which is where I'll mainly be shopping from now on, I imagine...
All the time I was employed to sell books (Or, more accurately, to move books from one place to another, which was at least 75% of my job, one way or another, the entire time I worked there.) I felt obligated not to discuss the process in public. I also felt uncomfortable about reviewing anything I read, here on the blog.
I could have, if I'd chosen. There were no restrictions placed on me, other than those that would apply to any employee of any business. Certainly, there was nothing to stop me reviewing any of the books I read after they'd been published, other than my own discomfort. I felt, probably entirely unreasonably, that since I was getting the books for free because I worked there, I had a moral obligation to submit any review I wrote to the company's website, where such submissions were actively encouraged.
And that would have been fine. For certain, more people would have read my reviews there and made more use of them, too. I'm not averse to having a wider audience. But reviews on the company website would have had to include my full name and the city I worked in, which was a condition of submitting them, and I was leery of the exposure.
There's another problem, too. Probably two-thirds of the books I've read since the turn of the millennium have been publishers' proofs. You can review proofs - it's one of the reasons publishers send them out - you just can't quote directly from them. They all have a notice printed somewhere on the cover or inside saying "Not for quotation".
That's for a couple of reasons. One is that the text isn't final. There may be further changes before publication. I've occasionally checked the published version against a proof and spotted that something's been added or left out.
The main reason, though, is that proofs haven't had their final pass through the legal checks. You might quote something that later turns out to be problematic and, theoretically, that could involve you in litigation. I don't know if that's ever actually happened but who wants to be the first?
While I'm on the subject of proofs, the way publishers produce them and send them out is just nuts. The entire time I worked in bookselling, every branch I visited had huge piles of unread proofs just taking up space. Bear in mind the shops don't ask for them. The publishers just ship them out to every bookshop in the country (Every high street bookshop, anyway. I don't know how they handle the independents.) without any encouragement. They're an absolute pain to dispose of, too, so I bet a lot of shops would prefer not to get them at all.
In the old days, when we used to see publishers' reps, they'd deliver cartons of the things by hand but even without that personalized service, which ended about a decade ago when the company changed hands yet again (Happened four times in my tenure alone. Twice before that, I believe...) they kept on arriving in the mail every day. Often it's just a single book in a padded envelope, sometimes it's a few in a cardboard wrap and not infrequently it's ten or a dozen in a box.
Most are proofs, six months to a year prior to publication; some are just free copies of something that's just been published. Plus we always had a bunch of freebies for whatever we were promoting as "Book of the Month", except that ended up being about half a dozen books of the month - Crime, Sci-Fi, Non-Fiction - so we had multiples of all of them...
There was a brief moment in the early twenty-teens, when it looked as though most of this might stop. Ebooks were going to be the future and there was a move to distribute proofs electronically rather than physically. There was also an initiative to have booksellers request specific titles online instead of being deluged with stuff they hadn't asked for.
Some of that did happen and for a while, the numbers of physical copies seemed to decline but after a while it just built back up again without anyone really saying anything about it. By the time I left, things seemed to be pretty much back to where they'd been before.
As for eBooks, they turned out to be an entirely separate business and revenue stream with a completely different distribution and marketing process. In the bookshops now, it's as though they never existed, even though once we had a big display of eReaders at the front of the shop and we all had to be trained how to use them and explain them to customers. That was another future that never happened.
It has always seemed to me indicative of the underlying problem with the publishing industry that, even in a bookshop filled with people who are damn nearly addicted to reading, the huge majority of all the proofs we ever got just sat there, unread by anyone. Even for free, not one of these voracious readers would take them. If you can't give most of your product away, even to addicts, what are your chances of selling it to anyone else?
All the time I worked in bookselling, it looked to me as though publishers basically had just two rules for success:
- Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
- Look at what everyone else is doing and if it looks like it's working, copy it.
That's the model.There's a lot of talk about finding and nurturing new talent but what everyone's really looking for is something exactly like whatever the last thing was that made a shed-load of money. And I guess it works although it must be incredibly wasteful, what with all the books that get published that no-one wants to read.
Still, at least we stopped receiving popular titles by the pallet-load, storing them unopened for a few months, then returning them, still shrink-wrapped, to be pulped or used for landfill. Packing them up and sending them back was my job for a few years, back in the 'noughties. A lot of them used to go to a prison somewhere near Liverpool, where the inmates supposedly drilled holes in them so they'd absorb the water better when they went to be pulped. I know that's where they went because I was the one printing out the address labels...
As a result of my ethical uncertainties, I've reviewed very few books since I
started working in a bookshop, either here or anywhere else. (I reviewed
plenty before...) The few I have given more than a passing comment have
usually been ones I paid for myself or got given as presents. I never felt any
of the same obligations if money had changed hands. Now I'm fully retired, I
feel free to say pretty much what I like about both the books I read and the
job I used to have, always provided, naturally, that what I say is true to the
best of my knowledge and belief.
Don't worry. Inventory Full isn't going to turn into a book blog. I did consider starting one but apart from splitting my audience, which is small enough already, I can't imagine having the time to keep two blogs going. I can barely manage one.
Instead, I was thinking I might review each book as I finish it. If I'm reading fifty a year, at most, that's only one a week. It would make for a neat feature. But I fear it could also turn into a bit of a treadmill after a while. I've long entertained a fantasy of having regular features here but I've never really done anything about it. It's probably a bit late to start now.
What's more likely is that I'll review books the way I do TV shows, a few at a time on an irregular cadence, as and when I feel like I have enough for a post. That might work out at something like once a month. Or I could do it the way I do the music posts, which I try to get done once a fortnight. Something with a loose structure that doesn't feel like I have to get it done to a deadline. Although I'm actually good with deadlines...
But what are these books that I'm going to be reading? Where are they going to come from, now the firehose has been switched off? Never fear! I have a plan for that, too.
When I retired officially a couple of weeks ago, I did two things right away: I applied for my free bus pass and I re-joined the Library. I could have done either of those while I was still working - I've been eligible for the buss pass for a couple of years and I used to use the library a lot until I fell out of the habit - but they both seemed like the sort of actions that mark the transition into full-time leisure, so I saved them up for that purpose.
With the two cards in my wallet, I can get the bus into town to go to the Library to borrow physical books (I could drive but it's actually both cheaper and more convenient to go by bus.) plus I can borrow eBooks and audiobooks online. Or I could, if they had anything I wanted. I spent a couple of hours browsing the available stock last week and I was not impressed, especially bearing in mind I have two large city libraries to choose from.
In a way, the problem is one of success. It seems the online reservation system, which didn't really exist in its current form back when I last used the Library, is so popular and well-used that pretty much anything anyone would want to read is booked up weeks - sometimes months - in advance. If you want to borrow Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, Exit Party, as I did, you're going to have to wait until May 2027!
I don't read that way. I read by mood, whim and whimsy. I am not going to be able to predict today what I might want to read next week, let alone next month or next year. That just leaves me with the option of going into town and browsing the shelves, where I can be sure all the good books won't be because someone will have reserved them.
I was surprised to the point of being shocked, too, by just how poor the available range in the library system is now. I searched for several authors I'd consider to be standard back-catalog staples, people like Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz, and there was barely anything. One the plus side, if you're looking for Dr. Who novelizations, the Library has you covered - they've got dozens of the things and no-one's reserving any of them.
There are also quite a few books in the house that I've never read. I'd guess at least fifty, maybe a hundred. The problem with unread books, though, is that they're usually unread for a reason and that reason is often that I don't want to read them. I tend to read books I want to read very soon after I get them. If they linger, it's a bad sign.
Occasionally, though, something just gets overlooked. As part of my re-reading program and since her name was in my mind after my fruitless library search, I took Tama Janowitz's debut novel, American Dad, off the shelf yesterday and started reading it. I thought I'd read just about all her books - there aren't all that many - but it turns out I'd never read American Dad, even though I've had a copy for a long time.
Although not this copy I'm reading. That one, I bought in a charity shop over the summer. Where my original copy is now, I have no idea. It's entirely possible I was fooling myself about ever having one. (See yesterday's musings on memory.)
I'm reading it now, though, and a review - or at least a few opinionated paragraphs - may appear here at some point. I've no idea who wants to read biased reviews of decades-old novels but if I want to write them, who's going to stop me, at least now my conscience has retired, along with the rest of me?
The first of my re-reads, which I finished yesterday, was Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. When I sat down this morning to write a post,that's what I thought I was going to write about. It wasn't, though, and now I'm already more than two thousand words in and I've only just gotten around to mentioning it, so I guess the review have to wait for another time.
This feature's off to a great start, isn't it?
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