A love letter to the hardback

It's been some 4 years since I took the plunge and bought a hardback. I feel it needs justification before I go and do something like that; hardbacks are expensive, for one thing, and if I'm patient I can get the same content in a more easily-accessible format inside the year anyway. Plus, these days I have a Kindle - that gives me both cheapness and a more comfortable reading format for virtually any book.

Despite this, however, I felt the need to buy A Dance With Dragons on Tuesday, the day of its release. It's a hefty volume. At 1,016 pages - in hardback, to boot - it weighs in at almost two kilograms. It's also the best part of three inches thick. It's unwieldy, ungainly, difficult to get particularly comfortable with. Unlike the Harry Potter hardbacks its two-dimensional cover size isn't that of a paperback. In short, it's a beast of a book.

But it's a magnificent one. There's just a certain quality about hardback books. Whilst it's always gratifying to see a fresh paperback waiting to be read, hardbacks have that extra something which marks them out. You can't bend their spines, hold them open by resting them upside down, rip the cover off (sacrilege though that it, people do do it). They're books for show as much as for reading.

With the dust-covers, they look good. The granddaddies of books which will later morph into something more friendly. Without those dust-covers, they look magnificent. Gold lettering stands out proudly on the spine, lending an air of old-fashioned quality. The covers may be cardboard rather than leather, but they still have that rough texture marking quality. And they have their own smell. Like paperbacks, they retain that odour of freshly printed paper which grows sweetly stale as the pages age, but they also have another smell about them, something like that of cut wood.

There's a romance to hardbacks. Whilst I can't justify buying every book I want when it comes out in hardback, sometimes it's nice to buy one just to remind myself of the majesty of books. Perhaps it's harder to love books with an aura of magnificence, but it is easier to get sucked into their thrall in the first place. I will probably get The Winds of Winter in hardback when it comes out (sometime in 2017, based on GRRM's current rate of productivity), as well as one or two others.

Kindling the imagination

I liked The Invisible Man. It would be fair to say I also liked the price-tag. Thanks to owning a Kindle, I was able to get hold of the H.G. Wells classic in a 20-novel collection for 71p, which works out at under 4p per novel. Don't mind if I do.

I doubt that many people would turn their nose up at the chance to read the likes of The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, The Lost World, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days for that kind of price. And that's just one thing that makes owning a Kindle worth it. I've also been able to download the complete works of William Shakespeare for 70p. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is another book I've enjoyed that came for a minuscule price tag; or, as most people call it, free.

There are quite a few books out in the public domain these days. In theory, they're all available for free, with the copyright having expired. And in general it is possible to get hold of these works for free (generally, you're paying for the work people have put in compiling them all into one electronic volume, creating the links and the bookmarks and the contents pages and what have you). And, what's more, it's worth it.

Reading Frankenstein over the weekend was highly enjoyable. For all its faults - as a modern reader would see it - such as stilted, unrealistic dialogue and occasional overwritten passages, it was a good old-fashioned story, a ripping yarn as some of us more rustic folk would say. And all after one click of a button. The same goes for The Invisible Man, which I shot through in just under 24 hours.

So what else is out there? For the more romantically inclined (in other words, not me), there's Pride and Prejudice to get stuck into. (My own personal opinion is that it's grossly overrated, but those thoughts are for another blog). Horror fans who haven't yet read Dracula can do so without spending over the odds for a Penguin Classic edition complete with a redundant introduction from a contemporary writer. And racists among us can enjoy Heart of Darkness free of charge (again, that's an argument to be made for another blog).

So there's loads of free reading material out there to get stuck into, if you have a Kindle. So what if you're not thumbing through a book itself; chances are many of these classics generally wouldn't cross your path and here's a great chance to try something new (or old, as the case actually is).

Next up for me and my Kindle is The Island of Doctor Moreau. I'm looking forward to it. Expect more posts about my Kindle fairly soon...

Shakespeare: fantasy icon

I don't wish to alarm anyone, but I've been thinking. There's a lot of debate around at the moment about literary fiction against genre fiction. So we have the literary critics on one hand cherry picking genre works they like and effectively declassifying them from SF, horror, detective or fantasy story status because they want to. And then we have the proud genre defenders who denounce anything vaguely literary as pretentious.

Time to throw a spanner in the works of both arguments.

I'm not going to say that all SF is good literature. Neither am I going to say that some 'literary' work isn't pretentious. Some SF and other genre work is nothing short of escapist pulp (the production of which gives the biggest genre critics ammunition to shoot down and condemn the entirety of genre fiction as being meaningless rubbish. And it's also safe to say that some literary work is pretentious - especially when it deliberately tries to be obtuse.

It's also more than possible for literary and genre fiction to overlap. And this is true to a surprising degree. I'm not talking about the usual suspects that literary buffoons have 'declassified' from genre status and made acceptable, like 1984 and Brave New World. I'm talking about surprising things. Like the work of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was a great fantasy writer. I can see the literary critics having massive heart-attacks at my statement already (should any ever lower themselves to the level of a mere human being after so many years of being the demi-gods of fine taste in art). But it's true. At the end of the day, he was a fantasy writer, at least to a small degree. I say that considering the context of the times in which he lived. A lot of the things he wrote about we know to be impossible (hey, King Macbeth, there's your old mate's ghost over there, you know, the one you killed...), but they were genuinely held superstitions back then. But then you look at A Midsummer Night's Dream and you realise that he wrote at least an element of fantasy.

It's about fairies, for heaven's sake! You're not telling me that Puck and Oberon, to name just two, aren't creatures of fantasy.

So there we have an argument for both sides just laying down arms and making peace in the issue. The greatest writer of all time wrote what would today be regarded as genre fiction. And frakking good genre fiction at that (argue that point all you want, but we're still discussing Hamlet senior's ghost over 400 years after the play was written - I'd say that alone makes it good genre fiction). At the same time as writing that genre fiction, he was writing literary work that would influence the English language's development like no other single man has ever managed.

I doubt that anyone else will actually spot this (one side's too busy deliberately ignoring any genre elements to their darlings and the other's too busy ignoring the existence of half of the darlings of their enemy). But on the off-chance that someone does, just think about what a pointless debate the whole thing ultimately is when there's such a massive overlap between the two.

December ramblings

After recently getting practically no time to do any writing whatsoever beyond scribblings in legalese, I may finally get the opportunity to get stuck in to a meaty bit of fiction over the next couple of weeks.

I'll freely admit that I don't expect it to be any good. It'll be a matter of bringing myself back up to scratch through doing a bit of editing and tinkering before starting on anything new, but then it's hardly my fault I'm shockingly out of practice. Uni takes priority, and it will continue to do so during the holidays (the target is to do both pieces of coursework - totalling 7,000 words - and at least 3,000 words of my dissertation over the three weeks off). But with no seminars or SPSs, I stand a chance of being able to get at least one story done, and I have an idea of what that story will be.

In other news, I got a rejection the other day for a piece of flash fiction I sent off. It had been previously rejected in perhaps the most pretentious manner possible (resulting in that website going on my blacklist - no, I'm not bitter at all), so to get this rejection back was a breath of fresh air. It was helpful, pointed out the flaws they believed the story had and seemed almost apologetic that they hadn't taken it on. I'm definitely submitting there again. As for the story, it's gone off again for the final time before time is called on it and it's posted up here.

One thing about uni has been that I've been able to get plenty of reading done in the evenings, when the cricket isn't on. Recent readings have included Isaac Asimov's Complete Stories (volume 1), Stephen Baxter's quasi-history Evolution, and, for my Law and Literature module, The Trial. At some point I may review them on here.

But in the mean time, Christmas is coming. X-Factor number ones, socks from your grandmother, dodgy Christmas specials on the telly and the inevitable Boxing Day murder of an aunt by your sister after she bought the wrong colour bobble hat.

Oh joy.