In which Eris waffles on about nothing in particular, leaving you with the feeling you need to re-read this blog. (From Bucks Free Press)

In which Eris waffles on about nothing in particular, leaving you with the feeling you need to re-read this blog.

7:12pm Monday 31st May 2010

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There is a song from the early 1990's by a Scottish band named Del Amitri called ‘Nothing Ever Happens’. It reached number 11 in the charts (thank you Wikipedia), and I have it on my iPod. I have bizarre music on there – ranging from John Barrowman to Meat Loaf, from the Wicked soundtrack to My Chemical Romance. Among all this oddly jumbled together is this song. I quite like it, it ‘deals with the banality of everyday life’ (thank you Wiki), and one line got me thinking: “Bill holdings advertise products that nobody needs, while ‘Angry, from Manchester’ writes to complain about all the repeats on TV”. And this started me thinking about Sky TV or the millions of equivalents. I have seen every episode of Scrubs at least 10 times, and I own seasons 1-6 on DVD. But I will happily watch it if it comes on Comedy Central, even if I no longer laugh. And I don’t laugh anymore. I find it amusing, because I can remember that the first time I saw each episode I did laugh. And for me, that echo of amusement is enough to keep me sitting there for an hour (two episodes), still enjoying it, but in an odd nostalgic way – enjoying the memory (albeit subconsciously and mulled over afterwards), rather than enjoying the comedy for the 11th time.

And from there I moved to books in my musings. I have always been a voracious reader; my parents started me on the Puddle Lane books at a pre-school age, and I can sit for hours reading. I don’t really care what I read; I have favourites, of course. I adore the Odyssey, I read Jilly Cooper, Philippa Gregory and Maeve Binchy like they are going out of fashion, an internet acquaintance of mine has just released her second book (Sarah Rees Brennan – ‘The Demon’s Lexicon’ and ‘The Demon’s Covenant’ – read them, they’re awesome) and I love Chris Pascoe – he’s a local High Wycombe author (I met him once, he signed my copies of ‘A Cat Called Birmingham’ and ‘You Can Take The Cat Out Of Slough’ whilst I babbled like a crazy fangirl at him – I would clearly dissolve into a puddle of panic if I ever met Meat Loaf or Robert Pattinson – for very, very different reasons, but the moral of the story is I am terrible around celebrities).

The point of that horrifically long sentence is this: I cannot read a book just once. I am a skim reader – if a paragraph or page is particularly descriptive then on the 1st read I automatically skip it. I want to get to the meat of the plot – if I am very excited about a book *coughDeathlyHallowscough* then I have been known to read the back page first. There is an author called David Eddings, whose books (about 30 – 35 of them) I have read at least twenty times, and that is a conservative estimate. But the joy of skim reading is that I always find something new there – there is always a paragraph I have missed in the previous 19 readings. And this, for me, keeps the books fresh.

I know of people who read a book once and throw it away. I don’t understand this. Well, I hope not THROW it away, because people who throw a book away deserve a slap. Penn Bookshop is a wonderful place, books as good as new, a place I have been known to walk away from with three carrier bags worth of books. I have, at a conservative estimate, over 500 books, I have to keep some in the loft because they no longer fit on my 6 shelf bookcase, my 3 shelf bookcase, the two shelves over my desk or scattered around the house.

But here, I think, we see the big difference between TV / film and books – once you have seen a TV show / film once, maybe even twice or thrice, there is no suspense left. But a book....unless you are the world’s most meticulous reader there is no way you can digest every word of a 300 page book the first time. My other half, not such an enthusiastic reader, maintains that he reads the first 10 pages of a book, and then leaves it for a month, forgets what he’s read, and has to start again. He knows the first 10 pages of many books quite well. But he watches an episode of the Simpsons and can remember it perfectly, thus negating the need to watch it again.

This is a bit of a bizarre blog, with no clear motive, many unnecessarily long sentences and very little point. I guess what I am trying to say in a roundabout way is that, in my opinion at least, you can get a lot more entertainment out of a book than a box set of a TV show.

After all, ‘Angry, from Manchester’ never wrote to complain about all the repeats in a book now, did he?