My Weekly Book

In Basingstoke we find the OBCZ as we remember it – if a bit denuded and largely populated with Young Adult paperbacks. Never mind! We are here to put this right. There are two wonderful titles there: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin (in a beautiful 1973 paperback edition that I think I am going to have real trouble sending on the road again) and With Nails, a hugely entertaining Hollywood memoir from Richard E Grant.

[Search for books at Bookcrossing.com]

Sadly we have both read the latter and decide that it’s only fair to leave it behind for someone else to enjoy. And we also take a flyer on Mischief by Mark Bastable (“The media muppets and the slimy celebs are running scared. Someone is out to humiliate and ruin theme – someone with a macabre sense of humour and an unknown grudge. The Trickster.”) A big, fat, discontinued library book of nearly 400 pages.

Looking forward to reading the le Guin. The other one could be anywhere between excellent and terrible – and strikes me as appealing to Mr Random. Certainly the sole Amazon review for this edition seems quite positive.

Let’s see how we get on. Serendipity is the name of the game, after all.

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Also, because we are weak-willed individuals, we bought the following:

• Count Zero – William Gibson
• The X-Files: Goblins – Charles Grant
• Angel: Shakedown – Don DeBrandt

[Search for these books on eBay]

Going on a Bookcrossing mission today. Off to the Official Bookcrossing Zone in the British Heart Foundation shop in Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK. Taking a pile of books either weeded off our shelves (largely duplicates) or collected from other Bookcrossers and which we now accept that we are unlikely to read. So time to get them back into circulation.

Will report back on successes or otherwise this afternoon.

Check out the books here

Because the original purpose of this journal was to write about Bookcrossing, before it got hijacked as a reading diary, I feel it would be nice to actually do a little bit on that subject. Especially since this morning I received an email notification telling me about the following journal entry:

http://bookcrossing.com/journal/1604564

This is for a copy of Max Barry’s dark-future satire Jennifer Government that I picked up for about a pound or so in a charity shop back in April 2004. Reading back in the journal entry, I discover that I took it up to Norfolk with me at the beginning of May and released it at the Official Bookcrossing Zone in a shop called Julian Graves in the Royal Arcade. We’d picked up a couple of absolutely smashing reads there and I felt I ought to Put Something Back, hence the special purchase.

It was nearly a year before anything happened which a) confirms my theory that some people use Bookcrossing zones as unofficial lending libraries and b) shows that it’s unwise to give up too quickly with this game. After that a Norwich-based reader called Ermintrude 75 (visit their bookshelf here) set up a ring that saw it sent to Brooklyn, New York, then back to London, then off to western Australia.

It spent several months with reader Gypsyrose02 before being sent, at the end of July, to a reader in New Hampshire, USA. My notification this morning was to let me know about a new journal entry saying it had arrived. So it’s now in the hands of its sixth Bookcrosser and we can only speculate about where it might end up next.

This is not the common Bookcrossing experience. Unfortunately, releasing a book still largely means never hearing about it again. But it just goes to show what can happen with Bookcrossing at its best – well worth a pound of anybody’s money, I say…

Just posted to www.bookcrossing.com. The book in question is Vladimir Nabokov's King, Queen, Knave, and I have just registered it as found:

“The previous reader dropped this off in an Oxfam book skip.

Having had the rare excitement of a very specific release alert pertaining to our neighbourhood, we couldn't resist seeing if it could be retrieved from the book skip. It could.

Well, that left a bit of a moral dilemma. On the one hand, why should Oxfam be deprived of its donated book? On the other hand, the book did go out with release notes.

We will therefore, be pleased to either return it after reading (think of this as a particularly liberal, if somewhat secretive, lending library) or to make a donation to Oxfam should we find someone else who wants to read it.

Apologies for the slightly unconventional crossover – but, hey, what would Bookcrossing be without the odd unusual encounter?

I'm, er, a bit concerned about reading it, however given my knowledge of Nabokov's other work and the glowing review it gets above.

Still, I'm prepared to give it a go. It's rare enough to find a book 'in the wild' without actually being fussy about the title as well…”

Well, my fellow Bookcrossing communitarians, what would you do? Retrieve the book, or leave it for the charity to collect? Watch for other Bookcrossers and berate them when they tried to find it?

We retrieved it, with a slightly uneasy conscience.

Your answers below…?

2008 update: no-one had the slightest problem with the idea of these being recovered, in the event…

I’m about to Bookcross a couple of books to Official Bookcrossing Zones:

• Jennifer Government by Max Barry
• Dead Famous by Ben Elton

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Jan 2008 update: Jennifer Government turned out to be one of our biggest ever Bookcrossing successes, with a ring starting up and it being sent all over the world. Dead Famous, by contrast, succumbed to The Curse of the Basingstoke OBCZ and has never been heard of since. We think this zone is used as an unofficial lending library/free source of books by people who don’t log anything.

I’ve just finished this travel book picked up from the Official Bookcrossing Zone at Julian Graves in Norwich and I would say that it was definitely a successful experiment.

Neither this, nor the other book we picked up there – Waterland by Graham Swift – are books that it would have occurred to me to have read of my own accord. The Swift, as earlier entries state, was a raging success. This too, I enjoyed, and I found myself absorbed in the travel narrative and engaged by the writer’s encounters with people in Vietnam.

Mr Random has already said most of what needs saying on the Bookcrossing journal, and I won’t repeat it. I was shocked by the couple’s actions at the end of the book – I won’t reveal what they are and spoil the narrative – and by the way that this turns out to be the bit of the trip that has life-changing implications for them.

I found myself shaking my head over the folly of what was happening, although that was easy for me to do, sitting on the London Underground on a sunny Saturday rather than facing the situation on the ground in Vietnam.

But the questions raised by all this could keep you thinking for hours. On the whole, a recommended read, I think – even if it has never occurred you to read a travel book or to go to Vietnam.

I’m glad I read this, but I came away feeling that Alexei Sayle needs nothing so much as a good editor. Why do I say this? Because roughly a third of the stories in this book are excellent. The eponymous opener is worth 10 minutes of anyone’s time. Roughly another third are what estate agents refer to as ‘a great opportunity’. And the remainder range from ‘not very good’ to ‘GCSE writing project’.

I’ll list which I think are which at the bottom of this entry, where you don’t have to look at it if you want to make your own mind up.

If Mr Sayle had had a good editor, maybe the bad ones would never have made it in, and the middling ones would have been kicked into touch until they resembled the very good ones, and he would have been hailed as a fantastic writer of short stories by someone more meaningful than Loaded.

Don’t come to this book with too many preconceptions, however. I was expecting a lot of it to be so silly that my eye would just skim straight over it in self-defence. That didn’t happen once. Definitely worth a read, especially if you are interested in the short story form.

My likes and dislikes as follows (IMHO, of course):

Very good indeed: Barcelona Plates, The Minister for Death (my favourite, I think), You’re Only Middle-Aged Once, Locked Out, Bad Samaritan, Good Samaritan (two independent stories).

Showing a spark of something good, but not quite making the grade: Back in Ten Minutes, A Shrinking Circle of Friends, Lose Weight, Ask Me How, The Last Woman Killed in the War.

Not really very good at all: My Life’s Work, Nic and Tob, Big-Headed Cartoon Animal, This Stupid Smile.

• Bookcrossing journal entry

Found in the Official Bookcrossing Zone at Julian Graves, Royal Arcade, Norwich, on January 28 2004

This was a truly inspirational find. I’d not really come across Graham Swift before, but will certainly seek out more of his work. It’s an odd mixture of fictional autobiography, murder mystery, local history and natural history in a part of the world that we are tangentially familiar with. It raises questions about the nature of history and of the authorial voice – the whole story is an attempt by one man to explain and perhaps justify pivotal events from his own past. We have only his account, which he presents as meticulously-researched history. But, like Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights, to what extent can we believe his account both of events and of his own motivations?

It is a gripping story enclosed within an impressive examination of what it means to tell a story and the various elements of various stories, including that of the narrator, the European eel, a fenland family and the twentieth century itself, are taken apart and rewoven as more of the sum of their parts.

There are elements that are not for the squeamish, but they are not so pronounced that they spoil the book. The crucial fact about it is that, for all its delving into byways, and pedagogical examinations of various subjects, and narrative experimentation, it has a cracking good story at its heart and the action continues unresolved until the last sentence of the last page.

I discovered after I’d finished it that it had been nominated for the Booker Prize.

• More about Graham Swift
• Bookcrossing journal entry for this copy
• OBCZ – Julian Graves
• Hunt for books in Norfolk