Blogs: My Books 
I’ll try to review the books I’ve read, so it’s more than just a list of books
In need of a new genre
I have read crime thrillers for yonks now. I have enjoyed reading various series, such as Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series, Lee Child’s Reacher series, Kathy Reichs’ Tempe Brennan series and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series. This was all well and good while there were plenty of books to go in the series, but now I am stymied because I have come to the most recent book in each series — except the Cat Who… books by Lilian Jackson Braun, the next of which isn’t in on the shelf in Heffers or Waterstones; it’s on my Amazon wishlist, though (hint, hint!) — in paperback, which is my preferred format because paperback books take up less shelf space, which is scarce in my house.
Novels in paperback typically come in two sizes: what I call normal sized and tall paperbacks. You might have guessed that I prefer the smaller, normal sized one. Recently, more and more books seem to be of the larger size. This irritates me because I have double rows of novels on each shelf, so having a tall paperback makes the shelf look untidy because not only are tall paperbacks taller, but they’re also wider.
The nice man in Heffers told me the penultimate time I was in there that tall paperbacks are B size boks and normal ones are A. He said people prefer the B size ones because they’re easier to read. I find them more floppy. I pointed out that tall paperbacks are environmentally unfriendly (everyone’s very up-in-arms about that, so I thought this was a good argument against the tall paperback!) because you need more paper to print a tall paperback than a normal one. You might be thinking that this isn’t true because you can get more words on a page in the tall paperback one, but it doesn’t work like that. They simply enlarge the size of the writing. The nice man saw my point and said he would pass it on to the publishers, although he wasn’t sure how much good it would do.
Publishers also keep changing the style of the cover design in a series and so it looks odd when you begin buying books with one style, then suddenly it changes to another. Some of the earlier books in my Harry Bosch series have the newer style, because I missed them out at first because I didn’t read them in the right order to start with, being naively unaware it was a series. And now it seems that even though the cover style stays the same, the size of the book changes, for example the Tempe Brennan books. The most recent of those in paperback is only available in the tall size, much to my annoyance. I don’t know whether to just buy it or to wait for it to come out it normal paperback, if it ever will. Anyway, I digress.
In Heffers yesterday, I looked through the crime thrillers, and didn’t fancy any. Another problem is that I don’t know which ones I’ve got and which ones I haven’t, unless I make a concerted effort to remember these things or to write them down. LibraryThing isn’t as useful as it could be because there doesn’t appear to be a mobile version of the site, so when I did try to access it with my phone once in Heffers to see if I already had such-and-such a book, it took so long to load part of the page, I gave up and didn’t buy anything. I thought to myself, I need a new genre.
I hadn’t a clue what genre I wanted to read, though, so I went to the general fiction shelves, which foxed poor Colin, when he was fed up of being in Heffers. After judging several books by their size, author, title and spine, and some even by their blurb, I finally picked up one by David Lodge, Deaf Sentence. The blurb starts “Retired professor of linguistics…”. Well, I had to get that, being a linguist and all. I read the rest of the blurb, and it seemed quite interesting, so I thought I’d get it. I typically buy novels in threes; don’t ask me why because I don’t know. It’s nothing to do with the three for two offers often found in book shops. So I only had two more to find.
I spotted Colin on at least his second trek round the shop looking for me. He’d been to the crime fiction section and presumably the languages and linguistics section, and was looking decidedly narked by this point. I should point out that if the general fiction novels shelves carried on the straight line from the stairs down from crime fiction, he’d have seen me easily, but they jut out slightly before going back against the wall, so I was hidden. I caught up to him, and enlisted his help on finding two more books. He had no choice really, because he wanted to leave and I wasn’t going anywhere till I’d got my three books. Eventually, I also got Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald because it’s set in East Anglia and Tangled Roots by Sue Guiney because, well, I’m not sure, really. It just seemed different.
Deaf Sentence and The Rings of Saturn are tall paperbacks, and Tangled Roots is what I call a hardback size paperback, which I especially hate. They have to go on a special shelf with the genuine hardbacks because they’re so big.