Bargain Basement

I'm a member of a book club. It's not the discussion group kind, and it's not the postal kind where they lure you with free hardbacks and then make you buy expensive stuff you don't want for the rest of your life. And when I say 'club', I don't mean anything exclusive (obviously, as they let me join.)

This book club takes place in an enormous warehouse run by a company that buys remaindered stock from publishers for absolute peanuts and flogs it on to discount bookshops. Once a month, they open the doors to everyone who has paid the princely subscription fee of £2 a year, and we can choose from thousands of titles of every genre at a bargain 20% of the cover price.

As a writer, I really ought to disapprove of this. The experience of wandering for hours among shelves of unwanted books ought to be depressing. The amount of hard work, time and emotional investment that has gone into writing them all is enormous, let alone the persistence that got them published. And yet they sit unloved in this last chance saloon, where someone might or might not think they are worth a quid.

Not surprisingly, the place is teeming with celebrity biographies – vast quantities of Ashley Cole's My Defence sat there for months before presumably being pulped – but the famous mingle with the not-so-famous and much of the stock is by writers I identify with as people who put in the hard graft and went through the slushpile. In a particularly poignant moment, I saw a stack of books that had all been signed by the author – and still no one had bought them. Sometimes I spot books by writers I know, and have occasionally rescued copies just to give them a good home.

It would be easy to become despondent and think it's really not worth trying to add to this book mountain. What's the point of spending years crafting a story only for it to end up as a disposable commodity that someone will only buy because it's cheap enough to give to the charity shop if they don't like it?

In addition, none of those thousands of authors will make any money from books bought here. It's not exactly fair trade. The publisher recoups a small amount on their remainders but the poor soul shivering in a garret, eating Aldi Instant Mash and breathing on their ink to stop it freezing, won't be sailing off on a luxury yacht any time soon.

So, as a writer, I really shouldn't approve. On the other hand... I'm also a reader, and this makes the place an absolute paradise. When getting purchase-happy and chucking anything with a nice cover onto my trolley, I've discovered some brilliant authors I might never otherwise have heard of. I've found obscure stuff that would never make it to the local library, and tried out many a book that I wouldn't usually have bothered with. This 'last chance saloon' has been a first chance for me to become a fan of certain writers... and I've gone on to buy their new books.

If I discovered a pile of my own books, I wouldn't therefore be too disheartened. I would rather they were read than destroyed, and they might even reach someone who would appreciate the next one... that's if I resisted the temptation to buy them all and bring them back home!

Ahhhh...Books! (Review: The Book Thief by Markus Zusack)

Two years ago, in order to stimulate my limited reading preferences, I set up a book club. Our group, all friends of mine who would normally have met over dinner, have since fallen into a happy routine of meeting every six weeks to review a book. This gathering doesn’t involve dinner, just a few nibbles and strangely enough, at book club, we don’t over indulge in the wrath of grapes either. Book club has become a real forum for...er, books.

So, over the past twenty four months, I’ve read many different genres that otherwise I wouldn’t have touched with a proverbial bargepole. I’ve escaped the reading rut I was in, that of reading commercial beach fodder only. And though I’m still rather partial to a beach bonk-buster, with nine members of both sexes, the book club choices have forced me and others to reach past our self imposed comfort zones. Most of the times, I’ve liked the book. Some of the times, I’ve loathed the book and quite often, I’ve loved the book to the point of passion. I’ve wanted to shout from the rafters, any rafters, that everyone should read this book! The latest author to come under our scrutiny, Mr Markus Zusack, writer of the magnificent ‘’The Book Thief’ has provoked such emotions in me.

‘The Book Thief’ took me ages to get into. If it has a fault, that may be it, but I soon forgave it because after an initial feeling of ‘What the...’ – I loved this really remarkable book. Narrated by Death itself, it tells the story of a young girl, Liesel Hemminger, in Nazi Germany. This unusual narrative device, expertly delivered by Zusack, gives Death an often sympathetic voice, for example when he questions the human race saying “So much good, so much evil...”

The characters are superbly drawn with Liesel’s disparate foster parents, Rosa and Hans Hubermann, providing as safe a haven as possible in war torn Molching; a town close enough to Dachau for Liesel and her foster family to witness streams of starving Jews marched slowly to their fate. Liesel is taught to read by Hans and a love of words and language creates a longing desire for books (used to fuel Nazi fires) prompting her to have to steal them.

Liesel learns compassion when her normally short tempered foster mother agrees to hide a Jewish man in their basement, without question or concern for their own well being. She learns to love and laugh in the company of best friend Rudy Steiner and together,be it by stealing apples or leaving a trail of stale bread for the Jews on the road to Dachau, they do their bit to fight the oppressive regime they live under.

This novel celebrates the power of words and language, both in the telling and content of the story. As a reader it left me wanting more and as a writer left me feeling – that’s how it’s done. And without offering spoilers, I think I can share with you that in THIS example of writing, the last line was even more powerful than that all important first, when Death reveals ‘I am haunted by humans.’
I still get a lump in my throat thinking of the impact of that line.

Following Caro’s piece yesterday on authors' responses to book reviews, I trust Markus will be happy when I shout from the rafters 'Yay Markus! You made me laugh and smile, you made me cry. You made me stare at your words in wonder.'
Yes. All of the above. 9/10