On Books : Including Judging The Odds On A Future Book

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well I finished reading the latest library book. Here it is:

The Norm Chronicles - Michael Blastland & David Spiegelhalter

The idea of this 2013 book is this. Life is full of risks. That is a fact of life. What the authors do is to examine the perceived risks of a subject (including the facts of life) and then through statistics look at the actual chances of you being affected by the relevant subject.

The way they do it is that each chapter is devoted to a specific subject and starts with a story involving three characters and their differing attitudes to risk. Norm (I get it), Prudence (I get that too) and Kelvin (No. Over my head). After which they go for the reality of the actual risks based on statistics.

And it's all interesting in the beginning. Then the stories start to irritate. Then the statistics. Too much information. I'm getting fed up.

About half way through though I suddenly get a revelation. I realise that unwittingly I've read this book wrong. It is I realise the sort of book that you don't go all glutton and read from cover to cover. The way to treat it is as a form of literary snack. Say read one or two chapters a day. Put it down and absorb the facts whilst doing something else. You will trust me appreciate this book a lot better. I know I did when I read it this way instead.

To me the most interesting thing about Nick Alexander's 2017 novel Things We Never Said is that about a third of the way through the book I wasn't sure how I felt about it.

On the one hand the basic story. A widower receives a package from his wife containing pictures and photos and one by one she over a cassette chats about the picture and their life together. Well I've read and seen variations on this theme before. So it's not new.

On the other hand there was a mystery within it. For me that drove the book along. For everything about their relationship could turn on it's resolution.

However eventually a third of the way through I did come to a view.

I hated it.

Leaving aside the basic storyline being unoriginal I was annoyed by the author's use of the cliché of the Muslim sex pest. Eighties and current tropes such as anti nuclear demonstrations and Brexit are wedged in cowboy builder fashion. But perhaps the most annoying was the miner's strike where the wife went to demonstrate at the notorious Orgreave incident. She calls those who crossed the picket line "so called scabs".

Now whether you believe they were scabs or not (and for the record I do) if you went to the demonstration there is no way you would have called them "so called scabs". They would have been scabs pure and simple.

Then there are the emotional ebbs and shifts to the novel. The more I read it the more I felt I was being played. Now you might say that all fiction writers "play" with their readers and this is true. But when that thought enters your head as you're reading it means the writer has failed.

And that mystery I mentioned earlier? Resolved two thirds into the book. Leaving it's conclusion really becoming a damp squib.

This is the second book by this author I've read this year. The previous one was a "Brits in a villa" novel The Half Life Of Hannah. I didn't like that one either.

I've another one in the Kindle. The odds are not looking good.

Until the next time.