Connected Concerns III

I work in a bookshop. Therefore I dressed up for World Book Day.

This was a sudden decision, that the three of us in that day would do dress up. It was largely made because Walker were sending a Where’s Wally? outfit and I didn’t want to wear that, so my manager wore it instead; the rest of us dressed up so Wally didn’t look quite such a wally.

I’m glad I didn’t wear it. The shop’s very cold and the outfit’s very thin. Without layers underneath, it leaves little to the imagination.

I was a Shadowhunter instead because black jeans, T-shirt and boots was never going to be a stretch for my wardrobe. Plus a colleague lent me an eyebrow pencil so I could draw easily washed-off runes on myself. Simple but effective.

It occurred to me a bit late — that morning — that I could have been even more overly excitable about the whole thing and gone with Nathan from Half Bad which would actually have been very cool but, y’know, not a lot point thinking these things on the train to work.

Customers proved themselves typically rude. And stupid.

Well done, general public. You never let me down.

“What are you meant to be?” / “Why aren’t you dressed up?” / “Why do you all look stupid today?”

Well it’s World Book Day and this is a book shop. That’s my excuse – what’s yours?

I was particularly proud of how I didn’t gut the woman who said:

“And why aren’t you dressed up?”
“I am. These runes aren’t real.”
“Oh. Well what are you then?”
“I’m a Shadowhunter.”
“Why. Kids won’t know what that is. I don’t know what that is.”
“Doesn’t mean kids won’t. Teenagers certainly will. Did you want help with something?”

The “who are you meant to be?” question directed at Wally was especially flooring and just seemed even more ridiculous after another lady had commented earlier on Wally being a legitimate sex symbol.

Which was flooring in itself, to be fair.

I have got back into my books. Funnily enough, the thing that always pulls me back into them is Young Adult, because I just love the genre; it’s so full of ideas and imagination and emotion and power and no one’s trying to be clever or bleak or literary.

I really hate literary fiction. Although I should probably quantify that as I really hate literary fiction that is trying to be literary fiction; the stuff that works really hard at being clever and symbolic and deep and bleak, often at the cost of being readable.

Be clever and symbolic, by all means, but please remember to tell a story while you’re doing it.

Ink & Bone remembers. It’s clever and symbolic and tells a brilliant story.

I finished that this week. I essentially read it in a week. This shows that when I put my mind to reading and make time for reading, I can actually read.

I forget that. Reading is always one of those things that falls by the wayside in day-to-day life.

I’ve made time for it for about eight days now. There have been a couple of days where I haven’t had chance to sit down and read a chapter — this is my daily goal, sit down and read a chapter, that isn’t exactly a vast ask of my schedule — and so the next day I’ve just made sure to sit down and read two, instead. I had that wonderful moment on Friday night of realising just how close to the end of the book I was and powered through four chapters before I went to sleep.

It’s a bloody good book. It builds carefully and quietly, subtle with its clues as to what lies beneath the surface of the story, and then by the end you’re just a raging geekgasm of passion and fury.

I hate The Library. They’re insidious and calculating, manipulative and hideous.

I love Wolfe. He’s a wonderful character invention that you know is more than he appears at the beginning but you love to hate him along with the postulants, but by the end of the book my heart just cried out to him and the position Jess had been put in made me want to SCREAM.

In the best possible way. All the negative that book makes you feel is the best kind of negative, the kind of emotion that just shows how involved you are, how effortlessly, brilliantly created and developed these characters truly are by the end.

Plus the world-building. The world-building.

It’s so fully realised and so ingenious. The originality and the imagination is on fire. The only thing I question about the entire book is the cover design, which doesn’t do the story or the themes or the feel of the entire debacle any kind of justice; it doesn’t feel like the book I just read when I look at the cover. Where’s the Alexandrian influence? That unique Greek/Egyptian/Roman car crash of cultural identity that could have led to some amazing cover work? The formulae, the Obscurist glow and the look and feel of a Blank?

Yeah, the cover could well be better. I see the Kindle edition is an improvement, much more the right colour scheme and feel…and it looks even better in the US hardcover. I look forward to a series rejacket just before the last book, because that always happens.

Doesn’t it, Cassandra Clare…the new Mortal Instruments jackets are brilliant. So I’ve started collecting them as I’ve only read book one (harder than it sounds, as they have the same ISBN as the old edition…well done, good job, thanks for that). But I’ve already got the boxset of The Infernal Devices in the old covers, so I may have to read them…pass them on…then buy the new covers.

Because they’re nicer. And they won’t match if I don’t.

I don’t want people looking at my bookshelf and wondering why they aren’t dressed up and look all stupid today.