Well, I was supposed to spend tonight guesting at a "drumming circle" in Dublin. I have never attended this event, but it is supposed to be a Winter Solstice celebration of some sort. One with a combination of Native American and Celtic overtones. But, a a mix-up in times, trains and other stuff resulted in my being home instead. I gather that last night may really have been the longest one, or at least that is what the ancient time clock at New Grange Monument said this morning (after 5,000 years its still pretty accurate). But, since some years its Decmeber 20th and some years December 21st, I figured that tonight was as good as last night to celebrate. Unless I was lucky enough to get invited to New Grange for a Sun Rise viewing (not likely, they have a long waiting list and it helps to be a V.I.P. of some sort). So, I've got a chicken slowly roasting in the oven and am waiting for husband to wake up from a nap to light a big fire in the drawing room. I don't know if we will stay up all night (he most likely will, he usually does). But it should be a nice, quiet evening with an around midnight dinner, at least I hope so.
Anyway, the trip to Dublin being canceled, I remembered that I had about seven or eight over due library books. This is easy to do where I live, because our tiny library is only open Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, with a couple of late hours Thursday night after the library has her supper. Bravely I ask husband if he can drop me off at the library for an hour or so and since he is already dressed to take me somewhere he agrees. He also wants to get some nuts and bolts for a project he and house-mate are working on. But he assures me he would take "his Cat" anyway. I'm just happy to be getting out of the house for a little while and get a chance to see if there is anything I can find to read.
Now I am used to very small town libraries. The town I grew up in, in California had a very small one. The difference is that although both libraries are about the same size, the one in California could order books from all over the place. Even the California State library. The other difference was it was free. Free libraries are something that Americans grow up expecting, but really are pretty rare in the civilized world. Here, I pay about 15 dollars a year to join our local one, and I can't even directly check out books from its larger branches. That may change, since the computer catalog just got on-line. The librarian and I even managed to find it tonight. But it hasn't changed yet, so to order a book I have to know what I want, and our poor librarian has to search for it herself when she does her hours at the main branch. With the catalog going on-line, sometime next year we may be able to search for titles ourselves. But the main library has been promising this for two years now, so I will believe it when I see it.
Still, its easier and more community friendly, to join our local library. Not to mention they are much more understanding when books are a month late, or even disappear for a few months into husband's office. As long as they get back at some point, reasonably undamaged, most fines are forgiven. Given my families history with library books, this is a very important reason for staying local. The disadvantage is, there really isn't much to read. And what there is tends to be books I've never heard of. Partly this is because I don't go in for top 10 thriller novels that have agent so and do saving the world five times before breakfast (after waking up from a night of passion with a lovely spy). There seem to be an entire shelf of this sort of book, along with similar ones that replace agent so and so with Military so and so who is going to stop the evil empire (almost always members of the 4th Reich, although Russians and Chinese also take leading roles). As you can tell, even though I don't really like this sort of novel, I have read a number of them now, mostly out of shear boredom and hopes that things will improve.
Since they haven't, I have also explored another popular group of books, at least in my library. These, at first glance, appear to be great Disaster Cat books. Why, the covers promise that the world is doomed in at least 57 ways (fire, flood, plague, war, solar flares, climate change, volcanoes, giant earthquakes et.c., etc...). The back cover has lots of quotes that say things like "gripping read" or "I couldn't put it down until I finished it.." Over and over again I check out these books, hoping to find something really Disastrous to entertain me. But most of the time I find out that its almost the same plot, just a bit warmed over. Once again, agent so and so (almost always male, though you now rarely get female versions) has to save the world against the evil plot, its just that this time it may be Mother Nature who is doing the plotting. Or more often, its those Nazi's fourth Richer s again, figuring out ways to de-stabilize the earth's core to prepare the earth for the Master Race. Yes, that was the basic plot of one I just read last month, I'm not going to name it. If you know which one it is, I'm sorry you wasted your time too. At least using the library, I'm not wasting my money as well.
Slowly, I am learning the language of dust jackets as I doggedly search through unknown titles in an attempt to bring something home in about 20 minutes or less:
"Wonderful Creative Effort" can be translated as "This book is really weird and I couldn't make and sense out of it, but it had lots different plot lines many of which were dropped in the middle and never seen again"
"A New Literary Voice" sometimes referred to as "a Fresh Voice" this translates as, "I haven't heard of this writer and after reading this book I can't think of anything else to say, so I'll repeat the fact that they are new..." Read at your own risk...
"I always rush out and buy new books by this writer" This was is really great, from a publishers point of view. It tells the reader absolutely nothing about the book in question, good or bad; and it lets the publisher use the same lines over and over again.
"The Continuing Saga Of._______" or "Book 2 of the _______Trilogy." My library has a number of these, a trait which it shares with our home library. The problem at home is that husband often has hidden books one and three somewhere about the house, leaving number two on the shelf for some unexplained reason. In our village library, I used to think it just meant that the other two books were at the main branch. Or maybe someone had checked out number three? But, tonight I discovered otherwise. Finding what looked like an interesting (and new) historical novel, listed as "Number Two of the ________series," I asked our long suffering librarian lady if she could order number one for me from the main branch. Her attempts to do so is how we discovered that the main catalog really is on line. The author has a weird last name, so we were able to find two books listed by them. Great! Obviously we can order book one and maybe book three isn't out yet...isn't that what a normal person would think? But no, this is a small library system, one without enough funds to buy very many books. So what has someone done? They have carefully bought two, not just one, but TWO copies of; you guessed it; book TWO. I begin to wonder at this point of some local curse has been put upon the local area, one that causes books to never be found in a series together. And if you can find more than one, make sure that its never the first one. Of if it is, make it very exciting and drive readers crazy when they have to skip to book four, because the two in between are MISSING! And this curse leads us to my next discovery....
And then, there is my favorite shelf of my local library. Not because of its great books but because of the way the small assortment of books combines with the book numbering system to produce a shelf combining Window's 95 Computing books with the "Occult Sciences Section"....Now I have friends that have suspected this about Bill Gates for some time, but I have never actually seen the Window's operating system presented as an Occult Science until now. But there it is folks, its official, my library says so: Microsoft Software belongs between "Astrology for You" and "The Prophecies of Nostradamus Explained.." I suppose that the quatrains of Nostradamus make about as much sense as some of manuals that came with my computer. That's it,I've figured it out, I'll bet there's a hidden code inside the Microsoft computer manual, when it is broken we will all understand Nostradamus, who will tell us to go look at the Mona Lisa, which will have a code behind it which will life the cures of the missing book series!...No wait, that was the other book, the one I read last week....The one that made the author millions and millions of dollars (and has a plot as thick as our village phone book).
Ok, so the best seller didn't really solve the mystery of the missing book series, but hey, its done wonders for tourism in France...
I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised that the book jackets tell so little of what is inside the books. Having lived with writers for years (and then married one) I know that authors of more than four or five books routinely get piles of free books sent to them. Books sent with notes from their publishers (who are also the publishers of the free books) asking them to "volunteer" to "write a little something" for the back jacket.
One ex-boyfriend of mine said,
"What the H......ll do you do when the book is a complete dog? It can be a real creative effort just to say something nice. Several times I have wanted to write, ' all words in this book are spelled correctly and the sentences contain both verbs and nouns.'"
I don't think he ever actually did this, but I'm not sure he didn't either....If he did, it would have been to see if his publisher even bothered to check before sending to the printers with the quote on it. It would not surprise me in the least if that happened.
Book covers art is almost as bad. There is a book out there that was written by a colleague of my husband's which the bored cover artist decorated with runes going around the front page. Closer inspections shows the "runes" to be modified English letters which say "These runes don't say very much but they sure do look nifty..." This got passed the publisher, the copy editor, the press agent etc....I'll bet the guys in the copy room were in on the joke from the beginning.
But, meanwhile, do partly to the high cost of local books, and that Amazon now charges more to ship books from the US than the books are worth* (this to get us to buy from the UK site, in Stirling for double the US prices) I will continue to search out books and support the efforts of our local library to bring literature to our village. Once in a while I even find something really good, that almost makes it worth it. Books on Irish Wild Plants, or The Great Famine. At the same time, I will continue to frustrate Amazon's attempts at European extortion by doing what ever other North American I know who lives here does. Buy books from the US site, ship them free to our families in the US who then, either mail the stuff over to us book rate or bring them when the visit. But I'm not due such a shipment until after the holiday season. I wonder if Amazon is in League with Microsoft and the Forces of the Nostradamus? Sounds almost like another book....*sigh*
Disaster Cat...thinking of turning on the TV at Kilmurry/
*note on Amazon US shipping costing more than the book itself - this seems to be true of low cost books, where is somtimes costs more for postage then the book costs to buy. Also, in the past, Amazon US used to combine orders to contain costs, now they seem to charge the same amount per book (at least they did on my last order. And they have done this to several of my friends as well. I'd be delighted to find out if this policy has changed)