Every so often you come across a new writer who is just such a damn good storyteller, always a good thing. I bought his after reading the Guardian review (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/18/the-shore-sara-taylor-review-kate-clanchy) - a great review, fair and well-written, enough to make me hit the search and buy button on my Kindle and start reading straightaway - such a strange feeling of decadence still, seeing a book like that and then reading it within seconds - no more waiting, no more searching book shops - no more ordering of books that "should be in next week". The corollary is that there is so much less browsing though actual bookshops, although I still do that. That's how I bought The Sleeping Giant - a book I wanted but I was seduced as well by the sheer size and weight and glory of its presentation - it felt good to heft it over to the counter even though I was paying quids and quids more than I would via Amazon.
The Shore though, is housed in quiet electronic bytes and bits, the colourful cover only really viewable on my Nexus, and I can't weigh it in my hand like I can a paper book - it's joined the other invisible unless I search books, books that do not sit on my bookshelves to be pulled out just when I catch sight of them, to be flicked through. That is a loss - there's a bit in Monique Roffey's With the Kisses of His Mouth where she describes a party that we were at, but it would be difficult to find - I'll have to search for the book, search through the pages - [perhaps use a search term like "Night of the Senses" then trawl though all the false hits, and then at the end not a well-thumbed page, but a few arrangements of pixels on a screen. Which is not to mistake the form for the content - I still like reading books on a Kindle or anywhere, but there is that loss of some of the experience, the ability to wearily toss the book aside and see it waiting reproachfully for you to pick it up again. The other book that springs to mind is Tim Lott's The Scent of Dried Roses: One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy which is a very well written account of his upbringing in the sixties and seventies in Ealing, his tales of past family that led to their Ealing home, his descent into depression and his slow climb out of it, and then the brick in the window, so to speak, of his mother' suicide just as he was recovering. I started reading his column in the Family section of the Guardian a little earlier and found I was enjoying his familiar, likable, warts-and-all confessional style, so bought the book. His writing lifts up several levels in the book - I enjoyed it for the sheer pleasure of his storytelling and prose, as well as the heady dose of nostalgia that it instilled. (Nostalgia for what I ask myself - I wouldn't want to go back in time any more than I am sure that he would, but it's that elegiac sense of a past that has been lost, which had a quieter less knowing feel to it). Now I'd love to be able to flick though the pages and flick through bits without all that harsh, clinical computery stuff. Well there's only one answer - I'll have to buy the paperback as well.
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