‘Theme’ is just another word for ‘gimmick’

It’s all about books now. I just can’t get enough of them. I’ll tell you my thought progression just so you’re a little closer to understanding. I’ve had this recent ennui regarding my work. Now by my work, I mean the place I go for a few hours out of the day in exchange for money. It’s a terrible habit, but a necessary one. It so happens that I work in a bookshop and it was there that I came across a very liberating idea, in a book, no less.

Stick with me here.

All of this time I’ve been damning the fact that I’m stuck in a measly nine to five retail death-crawl. Such thoughts have plagued my mind for months giving me cause for spasms of panic and seizures of profound anxiety. But just recently, I’ve had an epiphany – and a sickeningly obvious one at that. Instead of longing for a perfect place and purpose, the healthy thing to do is to convince myself that I am exactly where I ought to be.

To put it the short way, instead of nurturing hope, it’s better to embrace despair and accept that this is as good as it gets.

Don’t try to get what you want, try to want what you have.

Resistance is futile.

There’s no escape.

So being that I spend most of my waking life surrounded by books and book related paraphernalia, it’s only sensible that I should come home and write about them too. So, here it is, a new dawn for Novelty Central – a place where I go to talk about books since it’s now obvious that I can’t avoid it.

But anyway, on to business.

This week’s theme is...hang on, I’d better clarify that I’m going to have a theme every week, why not, right? ‘Theme’ is just another word for ‘gimmick’.
So this week’s loosely-binding gimmick is ADHD. It’s a good place to start, I reckon, with the assumption that everyone else is as easily distracted as I am.

If that’s the case then I offer you my top 5 really short books.

That is if you’re still reading, of course.

All My Friends are Superheroes – Andrew Kaufman

Being that this book is barely 100 pages long, it didn’t seem like that much of a challenge but that’s not why I read it. I was promised by everyone who had read the book that it would literally make me cry with happiness.

Real tears.

Imagine my excitement at such an opportunity – the chance to feel something strongly enough to squirt water out of my eyes.

Needless to say, I was disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely little book, but I came away from it with dry eyes. The story relies on the assumption that the characters’ most prevalent traits are actually super-powers, for example, the Frog Kisser is a girl who always falls in love with the loser. As soon as the relationship takes off, the ‘frog’ turns into a prince and the Frog Kisser loses interest completely.

If you want it boiled down to a genre, I’d call it a Rom-Com for comic book fans.

Fup – Jim Dodge

This has nothing to do with any Fair Usage Policy. It’s actually a book about a duck called Fup, Fup Duck (spot the spoonerism). To sum it up so is to make it sound like Spot the Dog or Little Bunny Foo Foo, it’s a bit stranger than that.

The setting is a small ranch in the American wilderness where 90 year old Jake maintains his immortality with a homebrewed whiskey called ‘Old Death Whisper’. There he lives with his grandson, a giant by the name of Tiny who spends his time building fences for no good reason only to have them torn down by a mysterious nocturnal warthog.

It sounds a little wacky and to be honest, it is, but it’s also very funny and even if the ending makes absolutely no sense, getting there is a fun ride.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives – David Eagleman

This does what it says on the tin. Sum is a collection of little musings about possible scenarios you might meet after you expire. Eagleman is a neuroscientist so he’s bound to know what he’s talking about, right? As books for the attention deficit go, it doesn’t get much better than this. Each little chapter shows the hereafter in a different light, some more agreeable than others but mostly they all sound better than ‘lights out forever’.

It’s a good little book to make you think but be careful – you might just get wrapped up in the idea of a five-month spell of sitting on the toilet and attempt to weave a religion around it.

You’ve been warned.

Silk – Alessandro Baricco

This book tells the tale of Hervé, a trader in silkworm eggs and his travels to and from Japan. It’s part romance, part historical fiction and its use of language verges on poetry but if you ask me, it’s just nice. It’s a nice, delicate little story that won’t amaze you or haunt your dreams or inspire you to become a silkworm-egg merchant, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll be glad you read it.

Alternatively you could watch the 2007 movie based on the book but in all likelihood, that would take more time, cost more money and give you one more excuse to hate Keira Knightley. And that would be one excuse more than anyone needs.

And finally...

The Iron Man – Ted Hughes

I think I’ve saved the best for last here. So what if it’s a kid’s book, the Iron Man is a work of genius. If you don’t already know, the book tells the story of a huge robot that somehow arrives in the English countryside to wreak havoc on all of the tractors.

Some might call it a fable masking an anti-war protest but they’re just looking too far into it – it’s a modern fairy tale complete with scary space dragons (it had to come from space as all of the earth dragons were extinct).

If you’re going to get the book, don’t settle for anything that isn’t illustrated by Andrew Davidson – his drawings give the story the weird metallic darkness it deserves. The modern illustrations look like they were scribbled by a child and aren’t in the least bit scary.

So there you have it, five books that you can easily read before you...oh, that’s a funny colour...