Tag: books

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Culture

hardbacks vs. paperbacks

John Barlow has this to say about hardbacks:

Personally, I think hardbacks are a disaster for the emerging writer. Who the hell wants their book out at $25 instead of $15? It’s crazy. How many readers regularly plump for new/unknown writers in hardback? It’s an extra ten dollars that you are risking.[…]

My first book came out in the UK in hardback, and just to cap it all they upped the cover price to a fairly steep £15 ($25ish) just before publication. Who on earth was going to pay that for an unknown writer of short fiction? Even friends winced. The book flopped on the Roman scale, and paperbacks were never mentioned.

(via The Reading Experience)

His comments on the economics of the thing seem like good sense to me (not that I’m a publisher or an economist). But also, on a personal level: I hate hardbacks. I can’t be the only one. They’re heavier, they take up more room in your briefcase/handbag/pocket/luggage/bookshelves/bedside table, they have pointy corners, and the dustcovers go missing or get ripped. Offered a choice of paperback and hardback at the same price, I’d take the paperback every time. Having to pay an extra tenner for the hardback just makes me feel ripped off, and I only do it if I’m very very eager to read something. Far more often, I see something that looks good, decide to wait for the paperback, and never get around to buying it. It is, basically, a fucking stupid system, and the sooner publishers make paperback originals standard the better.

Categories
Me Other

England vs. India

I must admit, after the humiliation in Pakistan, I was starting to lose faith, but England’s performance to tie the series in India without Vaughan, Trescothick, Simon Jones or Ashley Giles, and for the last game without Harmison and Cook as well, was seriously impressive.

BTW, isn’t Marcus Trescothick just the perfect name for the hero of a bodice-ripper? Even better than the current Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education and Skills, whose name is Lord Adonis. I kid you not. Perhaps Lord Adonis could be the scheming, predatory English aristocrat, and Marcus Trescothick could be the swarthy, taciturn Cornishman who rescues the heroine from his clutches.

“Oh my darling, I know I’m vulnerable to well-pitched-up deliveries outside off stump, but can’t you see I love you?”

Categories
Culture Me Other

Homemade bacon

I’ve been enjoying Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Big Book Of Meat. It’s incredibly thorough in giving you all the information you need to understand how to buy, prepare and cook meat for the best results; even without any recipes it would be worth owning. I’ve just tried his recipe for curing your own bacon.

Basically, you make a cure mix of salt, sugar, bay, juniper and black pepper, and rub it into a piece of pork belly once a day for five days, pouring off any liquid that gets pulled out of the meat. And that’s it. If you also include saltpetre, it keeps it pink, but I didn’t bother with that. I’m using chunks of it in a beef and Guinness stew – HFW is very keen on the importance of adding bacon to stews – but I fried a couple of scraps to see what it was like, and apart from going white when cooked it tasted just like proper, high quality bacon. Presumably if I’d used saltpetre it would have stayed pink. This is my lump of bacon with a lump cut off it:

EDIT:

I forgot to say: one of the less important things I like about the HFW book is that all the measurements are in metric. In this country, we’ve theoretically been moving to the metric system for the past 40 years, and still everyone uses a mishmash of units – feet and inches for people’s heights, metres for building specs, miles for road distances, pints for beer – and it’s ridiculous. We should just get our collective act together and stop whinging about it. Food is sold in metric units anyway, by law, so why do all cookbooks still have two sets of quantities in all the recipes?

Categories
Culture Me

holiday reading suggestions, please

When I go on holiday, I like to take reading matter which is appropriate to the place I’m going. The theory is that both the book and the place are enhanced by each other. A couple of years ago, I went to Tivoli and greatly enjoyed Howard‘s recommendation – Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography. Really, read it, if you haven’t.

This time I’m going to Andalucía, and I’m looking for suggestions again. So, something related to Andalucía, or Spain more generally; could be biography, fiction, history, poetry or whatever. Any ideas?

Categories
Culture Other

‘How Language Works’ by David Crystal

I’ve just finished How Language Works by David Crystal, the linguist who wrote the excellent The Stories of English.

It’s a slightly odd book to be marketed as popular non-fiction, in that it doesn’t have any central hook. Rather it’s a broad survey of all aspects of language; it reads rather like an introductory text for an undergraduate course in linguistics. Perhaps that what he had in mind before his publisher decided to try and cash in on the success of Stories. Anyway, it consists of 73 chapters, all phrased as answers to a ‘How?’ question. He compares it to a car manual, with each chapter designed to be pretty much self-contained. i.e., picking some fairly random examples:

How we make speech sounds
How we peceive speech
How we learn to read and write
How we analyse meaning
How conversation works
How we know where someone is from
How the Indo-European family is organised
How we cope with many languages: translate them

Obviously, any of those is a subject that could fill a whole book, so even at 500 pages, the book can only skim over them.

If you’ve read your Steven Pinker most of this stuff will be broadly familiar, but he still held my attention all the way through. It’s clear, interesting, well-written, quietly entertaining, and Crystal obviously knows his stuff. I hope the lack of a clear USP doesn’t restrict sales too much.

Categories
Culture

‘The Sorceror’s Apprentice’ by Tahir Shah

I’ve just finished The Sorceror’s Apprentice by Tahir Shah. It’s the (apparently) true story of his journey to India to learn the secrets of magicianing. It feels a tad embellished to me, but it makes an entertaining read nonetheless. Or because.