The Bedside Crow

Shaggy Blog Stories in the wild

Here is a picture of the book Shaggy Blog Stories, quite at home in an actual real live bookshop, cheek by cheeky cheek with Alexander McCall Smith, Dan Rhodes and Ian McEwan and not looking overawed in the slightest, despite such august company.

So why not boost its self esteem even more by calling in and buying a copy, that way it will feel even more like a proper grown up book, and you will feel even more like a proper grown up, though with a misty eye, because you will have made a contribution to comic relief and bought a book the old-fashioned way.

Of course, it may be that you are chained to a radiator in a darkened room with only internet explorer for company (or perhaps you just, like, don't live in Crystal Palace) in which case you can still go here. They ain't sold out yet and they won't until the world runs out of ink.

Jenny Turner: The Brainstorm

I first wrote about Jenny Turner's The Brainstorm a month ago, and I still think it has the best designed book jacket of any I have seen this year. I also finished reading the book itself and very good it is too. Sort of early Iris Murdoch in 80s London with added porridge and roll-ups.

Anyway, picking up on my comment that the jacket design went uncredited, Jenny sent me this charming email:

I'm very pleased you picked up my novel, The
Brainstorm, and appear to be enjoying it. But I wanted
to write and tell you more about the cover, which you
particularly liked - as do I. It was designed by
Suzanne Dean, who works in-house for Random House  and
the way she set about doing it was interesting. I told
her I liked plain, typographical covers - she read the
book, and presumably thought, OFFICE, OFFICE, TENSION,
TENSION! - and thus, the agonised elastic bands.

She did a few, in fact, including another one I liked,
with scraps of Post-Its skewered to a board with a
staple-gun, and the writing all wavy, as though hit by
a great wind blowing ... All in all, she unified the
ideas in the book much better than I did.

The other  thing about the cover is this. The way
Suzanne actually made it was, she took an old book,
covered it with white paper, then put all the bands
round it, then photographed it. She's sent me the
original, and I let my three-year-old son look at it,
until he pulled one of the bands off. But now,
whenever he sees someone handling a copy of the book,
he gets  irate and says, That's not real! That's not
real! That's only a photograph!

Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow by Zak Smith

Pretty bloody stunning if you ask me.

What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn

A couple of days ago somebody told me that I had the best job in the world. Normally when people say this they are implying that it must be great to just lounge around listening to Miles Davis whilst reading Shelley and discussing post-scarcity anarchism with whoever might pass by. And of course it's exactly like that.

In our dreams.

In our dreams the carpet hoovers itself, the books sell and re-order themselves and then magically re-appear on the shelves, and all invoices are self paying on 120 days. Oh, and there's an extra day at the end of every week when the kids are looked after by Mary Poppins and the day is entirely devoted to reading.

And so it was very refreshing, last weekend, to visit my sister at her health farm and to be waited on hand and foot whilst lounging around reading (with the occasional break for a football match and an excellent Chinese meal) as Fred had a sleepover in the country and the star Nottingham Forest striker Nathan Tyson became his new best friend - boy can that lad sign an autograph!

Even better, then, that the book that I read, What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn, was, as has been noted elsewhere, so good. It is both funny and mysterious and absolutely compelling and it's set in Birmingham and partly in a record shop.(What more could you wish for?). There is even shop-floor dialogue like what you sometimes get here (only better). It reminded me a little of the contemporary films of Stephen Poliakoff and also of an urban version of the Graham Swift novel, Waterland.

Whatever, it deserves to be a massive word-of-mouth hit, every bit as famous as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and would, dare I say it, make a fantastic selection for the next round of Richard and Judy.

So that's its chances completely buggered then.

Sorry, Catherine.

Shoe the kids here.

Animal Tracks and Signs

This, by a long country mile; snow on the ground, a nip in the air; up hill and down dale, is our favourite book of the moment.

Not only is it beautifully produced with love and care, but, heck, it works. Our friend Simon purchased a copy on Wednesday morning and by the afternoon he was able to recognise the paw print of his own cat! How cool is that.

Visit Simon here. You really should.

and speaking of Lewis Buzbee

By coincidence Nicholas Clee reviews The Yellow Lighted Bookshop in todays Guardian.

I like a book with a bird on the cover

Particularly when it's a corvus, and even more particularly when it's been painted by Russell Chatham and adorns the cover of Returning to Earth the new novel by Jim Harrison, of whom Lewis Buzbee said, a writer who should have parades in his honor.

In other news I still have a stinking cold and I haven't shaved in two days because I am staging a *dirty* protest until Sainsbury's actually get their logistical act together and put some razor blades on their shelves. It surely can't be just me and David Beckham using the old Mach3's can it? The best a man can get - he should be so f*cking lucky.

Oh, and I've been blowing off here. Would be great if some other booksellers joined this discussion, bit busy myself at the moment, but I shall return to it later...

What am I doing to my children?

Dad runs away with the Circus by Etgar Keret and Rutu Modan is one of Freddy's favourite books at the moment. The author and illustrator helpfully say, the book is about how grownups have dreams too, and about how life can become a circus if you let it.

Reading it together in bed last night Freddy asked if I had ever skipped it to the big tent. I said, well I've worked with a few clowns in my time and there was that time I spent in publishing, but no, I've never learnt to juggle, wear a leopardskin leotard, or eat fire.

We finished the book and he flipped it over to the back cover. Look, he said, no blurb.

Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

I have just spent the last six weeks or more, including a large chunk of time when I had no family at home, reading The Lay of the Land the new novel by Richard Ford. So far I am only 214 pages in and the book is 485 pages long. One thing is pretty clear; I am not the dovegreyreader of Upper Norwood. Not by a long country mile.

(The same dovegreyreader, incidentally, who wishes me visited by men in stripy shirts called Stallion - the shirts not the men. The men are more likely to be called Henry and Tristan and possibly Jeremy - for I fear she thinks I might explode and, that, that will be funny.The sauce! How nice is that - community nurse indeed.

She is forgiven however because she lives in Devon and must be literally surrounded by those self same men. I think I read somewhere that she has a gun. Probably very wise. That said, I am on my guard for the merest hint of a stripe although all will be well so long as they remember the manners their nannies once taught them).

Anyway, I figured that if it had taken Mr Ford 11 years to write The Lay of the Land I might be equally generous with my time. Well maybe not equally; 11 years would be an awfully long time to read a novel, but lets just say I wasn't going to rush it, for, in common with the two novels that precede it in this (so far) trilogy of books featuring Frank Bascombe, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, it is not a novel to be rushed.

What is more, since The Sportswriter was first published in 1985 (my copy is inscribed; with the distinct pleasure of laying eyes on you again), and Independence Day in 1995(by which time, though still inscribed, Mr Ford had managed to forget ever laying eyes on me at all- no big deal), it is fair to say that I do feel as though I have been reading the the story of Frank for a large part of my adult life. And whilst Frank is a few years older than me he still feels like my contemporary, which is an attraction, but also alarming, in that, without looking, I didn't realise that I had got so old.

Oh, and by the bye, I may yet still explode. I am expecting seven boxes today including five copies of The Lay of the Land. I have just checked on-line. Four of the boxes have reached Vauxhall but are unlikely to make it up the hill until tomorrow. Two more of the boxes are still in Norwich, leaving just the singular to darken my door.

small is the new big

Okay, at the risk of completely trashing my Bohemian credentials, I confess, I like reading Fast Company sometimes, and I like reading Seth Godin. He reminds me of Brian Eno - and not because they are both bald.

His new book is in part taken from his blog, and is a collection of short, pithy, almost always interesting posts like this one here.

Shoe the kids here.