Mixed Messages

I am a bleeding-heart liberal.

Therefore, for my daily news-drip I read the Guardian. If I’m really going for it, the Independent. Essentially, I enjoy living my life trying to work out the ratio of dead polar bears to pilot lights I accidentally leave on during the day. What can I say… the guilt keeps me motivated and ensures I donate a suitable amount of time and money to London Zoo in return for penguin bothering and the hope that their conservation efforts will negate my accidental anti-polar bear actions.

No, really. That's me literally bothering a penguin. For the polar bears

What I am driving at is that, being a lefty, I tend to choose a paper which angles the news towards my own world view. If a government body publishes statistics on, say, immigration, (or polar bear death rates), the papers I read are likely to interpret those statistics in a different way to the right-biased papers. I am very much complicit in that bias. I do attempt to balance this occasionally by reading equivalent stories in the Telegraph or, if I’m in the mood for some ragey hysteria mixed with sexy side-panel side-boob, the Daily Mail.

... Stop the press. American owns gun. Bear shits in wood.

 But, on the whole I choose to form my opinions based on comment from people who broadly share my world view, and I don’t see anything wrong with that – as long as I interpret all the ‘facts’ presented with that in mind.

As every year 7 English student kno, it is important to set any work of writing within the context of who wrote it and why.

Any fule kno

This applies to works of fiction, non-fiction and daily newspapers alike. Sometimes, someone will write a book about cheese because, gosh darnit, she knows a metric shit-tonne about cheese. But, more often than not, someone will usually be trying to sell you something.

Not that this is a bad thing. I recently read a biography of Unity Mitford written by someone who clearly has a bugbear the size of Wales when it comes to the Mitford sisters. Now, to be clear, they were a family with some pretty hateful ideologies. All but one of the ‘Mitford Girls’ were paid up members of the British Union of Fascists. One of them (the titular Unity) was on close personal terms with old one-ball himself.

Bff

 Far too many biographers of the family prefer to smooth over this rather significant rumple in their reputations and focus on just how witty they were instead. 

But our own dear narrator takes things rather too far in the other direction. Rather than stick to the facts, presenting a balanced view of the family’s notoriety and troubling links with the Third Reich, he goes absolutely mental and starts insinuating satanic SS orgies, incest, and suicide pacts with the Führer into the text. Of supporting evidence, there is very little other than ‘my Granny said’. As a useful text for scholars of mid-20^th Century aristocracy, therefore, the book is absolutely worthless. As a hilariously over-the-top bitchathon featuring a family who have done very well indeed out of our nation’s rose tinted view of recent history, it succeeds wonderfully. In context.

This is Evelyn Waugh. Who, according to our dear narrator, wrote some or all of Nancy Mitford's early novels. Because why not?

When it comes to works of fiction, things become more complicated, however. Unlike non-fiction where; if the lack of references don’t tip you off to unnecessary bias, the screaming insanity of the content may just do – reading a novel requires the suspension of disbelief. Therefore it is harder to get a handle on just what the author’s intentions may be. I would argue that you really have to pick your battles when it comes to using fiction as a form of ethical persuasion.

There are two ways in which this can be achieved.

The Animal Farm method:

1) Take one country under the fist of a brutal dictatorship.

2) Analyse the history and social conventions of that country.

3) Analyse the regime and its systems of control and submission.

4) Get angry.

5) Write a searingly critical masterpiece in the guise of a story about pigs.

6) Ignore criticism and insist that book really is about evil pigs.

7)Break every horse-loving English student’s heart for the next 200 years.

The Atlas Shrugged method:

1) Think about Socialism.

2) Get angry.

3) Think about how great Capitalism is.

4) Have to have a pause, a cigarette and a bit of a breather.

5) Aim to persuade the world that selfishness is great.

6) Write a bloody awful book about it.

7) Garner praise and recognition across the world.

8) Boyfriend dumps you for younger woman. Lose your fucking mind because how dare he be so selfish?!?

9) Still garner praise and recognition, even after every single bloody economic assertion has been completely disproved by history.

10) Drive Bookseller bonkers when repeatedly told how great it is.

Now, in both those cases, the narratives can be read (with a bit of effort, on Atlas Shrugged’s part) as having very little to nothing to do with their ‘actual’ subjects. It is very easy to read Animal Farm as, literally, a book about Bacon with Big Ideas and possible to read Atlas Shrugged about... Whatever it’s about (railroads, industrialists, taxes… I never actually managed to finish it.) Therefore, without being explicitly overt or covert in their intentions, the books work as pieces of fiction written with a political agenda in mind.

Not all agenda books work as well. An example:

Water for Elephants: An entertaining and pretty inoffensive romantic melodrama. With a very unsubtle animal-rights agenda crowbarred in.

Here’s my problem with Water for Elephants:  I HATE ELEPHANTS.  No.I don’t. I am very sympathetic to the animal-rights cause. I just don’t want it crowbarred into fiction. Badly. There’s no subtlety to this. The grand romantic plot is pushed into sub-plot status in order to make way for the book’s raison-d’etre. Elephants.

Seriously. Dumbo  had the whole issue covered.

Gosh… those poor elephants. The book is so obviously campaigning on their behalf that every carny who mistreats a pachyderm is practically given a cackle and twiddly moustache. The anger is palpable. But wait…  the book is set IN THE 1930s.

Gonna 'splode me a heffalump

Here the book falters in its quest. The author wants to highlight the mistreatment of circus animals; which is certainly an issue that lingers today. But in setting the book in the 1930s, she removes the immediacy of its message. By making the abusers seem positively evil, she fails to acknowledge the cultural norms of the decade – which were less than enlightened. Rather than diabolical, the mistreatment of animals in the 1930s was horrifically mundane. Had she portrayed it as such (and I’m still not sure that a romantic novel was really the best setting in the first place), the reader may have been more affected by the continued existence of animal circuses, when so much else in the world of animals rights has moved forward.

Light romantic fiction is, apparently, riddled with such cases of activism. In some cases activism of such inanity it makes me angry. A colleague was recently looking up novels to gift to her newly pregnant sister. One recommendations site she found (Mumsworld.vom, thesocietyforarmouredprams.ram, smuglyfertile.grin or something similar) contained lots of mentions of such novels. ‘Contains positive mentions of breastfeeding’, ‘has a pro-ATP Parenting message’ etc.

If you could stop running me down for occupying the same mile of pavement as you... that'd be great.

Dear God but if I ever resort to reading chicklit to justify my parenting choices in the future, please take my child away. YOU ARE SEEKING POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT FROM FICTION. FICTION!

Fiction is a powerful tool. It can be used to illustrate examples, conduct thought experiments, horrify, delight and persuade. But there should, in my opinion, be two rules:

1) Fiction should never never be read purely to back up one’s own opinions. Please leave that to non-fiction, which at least has to show its sources.

Or is at least so insane as to give me a good giggle

2) If you’re passionate about something, and you want to write a book about it, make sure the narrative fits the message from the outset. Please. The world isn't ready for horror books with pro-beekeeping messages thrown in. Which, of course, is the next obvious step.

...Although....

An Astronaut's Guide to Life On Earth

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth

Chris Hadfield

When I was about five years-old, I found out that there are no such things as martians. In a moment of fantastic child-logic, I decided that the entirety of space must also have been a cruel adult lie. When, at the age of six, a teacher asked us what we knew about Mars I felt very grown up. I put my hand up and declaimed proudly: “It doesn’t exist, Miss”.

My teacher thought that I had been raised as part of a cult.

As a child, you come to doubt everything that seems fantastic. Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, aliens, talking animals, magic… all the things you implicitly believe in during infancy. It’s not your fault – these things are sold to you through a potent mixture of fairy tales, Disney and outright lies masquerading as traditions. Then, someone tells you that none of it is true.

Space, then, comes as a wonderful anomaly. Especially if you somehow came to doubt its existence in the first place. A boundless, unknowable realm of shooting stars and zero gravity…. that exists?! But Bernard and his stupid watch don’t exist?! AMAZING!

Bloody waste of magic

When I was ten, I was still fascinated by space. The very fact of its existence neither ruled nor regulated by humans struck me as incredible. Surely, if people had landed on the moon, they must now be doing so on an almost daily basis? I asked my parents. Nope. Turns out 12 people in total had (and still have) been to the moon, the last one 15 years before my birth. What a waste. I stopped looking up quite as much.

Herein lies one of the many differences between myself and Major Chris Hadfield. At 9 years-old, Hadfield – along with the vast majority of the world’s population – watched transfixed as man took his first tentative steps on alien soil.

 From that moment on, Hadfield knew he would dedicate his life to becoming an astronaut.

Back to early 1990s London. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss space exploration if I had been aware that, instead of sending mission after mission up to the moon, NASA and Roscosmos (their jovially named Russian counterparts) had been busy building and expanding the Shuttle program, Mir and the International Space Station – all with the aim of testing the limits of human capability and endurance in (understatement alert) inhospitable environments. Sadly, in my life, a brief but lively infatuation with Boyzone and the phenomenon known as ‘hair-mascara’ took over.

Excellent for that 'dipped head in Dulux' effect

Instead of taking this reviewer’s route of interested defeatism, Hadfield dedicated his life and career to helping us understand that little bit more, and taking us one step closer to long-term colonisation of the stars. As a small boy growing up in a country with no space-programme or stated interest in space-exploration, his determination and success must be seen as nothing short of astonishing.

"Fortunately, we now have an interest in Space!"

That he wrote a book about it is even more miraculous. Commander Hadfield thumped back to Earth for the final time on the 12^th of May 2013. On the 1^st of October 2013, a proof copy of his book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth, landed on my lap. That’s a total writing time of under five months. Five months, disregarding the period shortly after his return during which his spine was recompressing back to usual size and he was in no fit state to drive, let alone write an interesting, witty and inspiring memoir. Five months. It’s taken me three days to get over sinusitis. And you bet I’ve used that as an excuse to watch TV instead of cracking on with this review.

Eyebrows... stinging. *cough* tell.. family... I love them...

What I hope the reader has gathered so far, amidst my waffling and badly-disguised jealousy, is that Hadfield’s book leaves us in no doubt as to his phenomenal drive and self-control.  Every chapter sees him learn a new talent, push himself further, drive himself to be a more rounded individual. Most astronauts, he casually states, must have a rudimentary knowledge of surgery. You know… just in case.

Average member of public asked to 'pick up a bit of surgery'

Surgery. The man is already an astronaut/fighter pilot/scientist/Youtube sensation! How many more strings can one man add to his bow? What does his bow even look like by now, a harp?  Because, oh yes, he’s also a pretty good writer. Without being dull, the Commander manages to speak in plain, unpretentious terms about his experiences.

When he does allow himself some flowery language, e.g.: to talk about his 2 EVAs (space-walks, to you and I), the sudden change in tone makes his descriptions all the more beautiful:

“…I check behind me, to be sure I haven’t accidentally activated my backup tank of oxygen, and that’s when I notice the universe. … Imagine you’re in your living room, intently reading a book, and then you look up casually and you’re face to face with a tiger. No warning, no sound or smell, just suddenly, that feral presence. … The black velvet bucket of space, brimming with stars. It’s vast and overwhelming, this visual immersion, and I could drink it in forever.”

He also writes extremely movingly about how he faces up to the very real possibility of death. The NASA team run ‘sims’ (simulations), questioning and analysing how each person involved in a mission would deal with any given scenario. Potential death is not excluded from this. Hadfield recalls a sim where he and his wife sat there, calmly analysing how his death should be announced to his next of kin and to the media.

That’s… pretty heavy. But, as with all the challenges in an astronaut’s life, absolutely vital. When the Columbia disaster occurred in February 2003, the shuttle disintegrating on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, Hadfield personally knew every astronaut in that mission. The commander, Rick Husband, had been a close family friend. Although the sims could never prepare anyone for the personal grief and trauma inflicted by the disaster, at least they could prepare one to go through the motions of damage-limitation, running on automatic.

Here it is necessary to make like a news anchor and introduce an awkward segue.

 For although Hadfield does not make light of the dangers and discomforts inherent in his work, neither does he eclipse the lighter moments with false gravitas. My personal favourite sections of the book are those moments when Hadfield discusses rituals and superstitions. And, my gosh, are there a lot of them, culminating in the extremely odd visual of a Russian Orthodox priest liberally dousing every out-going astronaut head to toe in holy water, moments before they climb into the ship. 

"As it says in the Bible, I say unto you: WATER FIGHT!"

When asked what proportion of astronauts are religious/atheist/other, Hadfield says that they run the gamut from die hard atheist to devout believer, with each taking from the space experience a renewed faith in their personal convictions. Somehow, somewhere, I’d like to imagine that Richard Dawkins is reading those passages, biting his knuckles and screaming…

“BUT IT’S JUST NOT SCIENTIFIC!!!”

That would… please me….

Other lighter-hearted moments of life in space are well documented on Hadfield’s Youtube channel as part of his social media drive to re-ignite public interest in space exploration. Take this PSA on how to cook spinach, space-style. 

nom indeed

Other videos tackle puke, toothbrushing, and a microphone which seems determined to drift slowly but surely into Hadfield’s face. Most famous of all, however, is the music video Hadfield created covering Space Oddity. In space. (Please note: in the book, Hadfield criticises his photography skills. Bear that in mind as earth looms into shot behind him, then think about that next time you take a selfie).

It’s just brilliant viewing, and an inspired method of re-invigorating humanity’s interest in all things space. 

This, ultimately, appears to be Commander Hadfield’s goal in life – to encourage others to see space in the same way that he does, as a fascinating environment which must be explored. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth is a compelling insight into his life, and an important tool in achieving that goal.  

He is not alone. On the day that the Mayans predicted the world would end, Chris Hadfield was on his way to the ISS. In comparison, I was at the Hammersmith Apollo, watching the great and the good of Science and Comedy put on an evening of scientific wonders. A scientist (whose name, embarrassingly, I have completely forgotten) came onto the stage. He announced that, after the NASA shuttles were retired from service, he had acquired video footage of all of their missions. After hours of painstaking work, he spliced together footage from every single one, including the disasters of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. The edited footage was played, accompanied by an astonishing soundtrack composed especially and played live by ‘Sheffield’s loudest band’ 65daysofstatic.

The experience of reading Commander Chris Hadfield’s book was not unlike the experience of watching the stage that night. Exhilerating, exciting, motivating, and leaving one with the distinct impression that we as a species, with the technology and experience at our fingertips, have a duty to continue to push the boundries of space exploration. It challenges us spiritually, physically, scientifically, and demands a level of international cooperation vital to our continued existence. 

Bookquakes

I moved house recently.

In hindsight... this may have been a better way...

It’s one of those situations; like popping out a child, successfully not crashing on a tricky roundabout, or replacing a bike tyre, which literally thousands of people complete successfully every day – but which makes you,  briefly,  feel like an absolute Don. A God amongst men.  The super-hero(ine) this generation has been crying out for… ‘I did that!’

In my case, moving was always going to be a spectacular hassle. With the brief exception of University, I have spent the better part of my 26 years on this Earth living at one address. I am also, it must be noted, a hoarder. Not on the ‘get the social involved’ level, but not a million miles away, either.

As well as my mountains of ‘objets trouvés’ (see above photo for a small window into the life of a girl who finds My Little Ponies on the street and chooses to display them); there was the small matter of my cassette collection (mainly Boyzone), my sticker collection (mainly bunnies, for some reason) and my stamp collection (a collaborative project with my dad which was aborted early when I discovered that no one foreign wrote to me and there’s only so much interest in first class postage… or, indeed, stamps in general).

But, like the house-moving heroine I now count myself to be, I overcame those challenges. With a mainly rap-metal soundtrack blaring in the background, I tidied, packed, donated, binned and heaved my way into my new flat. Two days later, I helped my boyfriend do the same. Like a Pokémon, I evolved. Meet… Removals Girl!

Like this but with more packing tape

Sadly, a few days later, Removals Girl was brought crashing to earth with the realisation that her old room was still full of books. I should have taken a photo. I didn’t. But I should have. Honestly, it looked like I hadn’t even moved. Because books had been stacked around every available surface, removing the content simply left a table-shaped hole in the book stacks here, a bed-shaped one there…

Help...Me....

The upshot of this is that I have had to make drastic cuts to my book collection. Unlike the stickers, stamps and cassettes, I found this excruciating. It was like a bibliophile’s Sophie’s Choice. If I take one of the first fiction books I ever worked on in an Editorial capacity (Neverland, by Simon Crump), do I then have to leave behind the huge book on Punk music that an ex-boyfriend gave me for Valentine’s Day?

If I take the whole of C.S Lewis’ Narnia series, am I just cutting out a shelf-worth of space I could dedicate to proper ‘grown up’ books?

And, of course, the perennial question: can one have too many Discworld books?

No.

Thankfully my parents, unlike the Nazis in Sophie’s Choice, were willing to negotiate.

In return for frequent tech-support, I retain some shelf-space in my old room. The leaning towers of Puzos, however, had to go. Each individual decision was a struggle. Eventually, I dug out a couple of suitcases and reluctantly filled them with books destined for Oxfam. I had to get my mum to take them. Both my dad and I knew that, given that task, we would have returned with half of our original donation, plus a few ‘extras’.

I'm back from the charity shop!

This, then, is my eulogy to absent friends. Goodbye, GCSE Geography textbook, I hardly knew ye.

There were two silver linings to the whole operation, however. Firstly, my bibliogralarm (books falling on my head when asleep) is no longer a thing. I now set an electronic reminder on my phone, rather than a Graham Greene hardback at a certain angle on the stacks, when I want to wake up at a certain time.

tech.

Secondly, it forced me to really look at my collection. As a result, I spent several hours re-reading books I forgot I had, as well as reminding myself to take another run at books I have set aside.

‘Taking another run’ is a strange concept. When I give recommendations to customers at work, I generally encourage them to take a seat, read ten pages and see if that’s enough to hook them. In the past, I have abandoned books at the wayside after a meagre three or four pages due to complete lack of interest.

Recently, however, I have given a few titles the benefit of the doubt after abortive first attempts. This has paid off, and now my whole philosophy is in a tail spin.

 The Orphan Master’s Son is a good example. When I initially started it, the slow pace of characterisation and utter misery into which the author plunged his characters put me off. Fifty pages in, I felt no empathy towards the lead character. This is never a good start. I abandoned it in favour of a re-reading of The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

Suitably refreshed by Fforde’s hysterical romp through a slightly alternate version of Swindon and its even more alternative fictional counterpart (can’t explain… just read it, please), I prepared to read something new.  And then I got ill. With nothing to distract me but the slowly buffering adverts on Channel 4 OD and an out of date copy of Q magazine which insisted on running another glowing feature on Kasabian (overrated), I turned reluctantly back to Adam Johnson’s novel.

Stop. It. You're only encouraging them.

Oh. My. Gosh. It’s brilliant. As before, the first hundred or so pages failed to grab me. But after watching the DFS advert start, buffer and fail on 4OD for the hundredth time that week, I ploughed grimly on. Suddenly, I found I was hooked. The empathy issue dissipates as, in tiny tiny increments, your support for our hero, Pak Jun Do, grows. As we follow his life in the People’s Republic of North Korea; from orphan child to tunnel fighter, kidnapper, spy, prisoner and national hero, Pak reveals the dark, twisted lunacy behind a country that is often represented as a global joke. Watching news reports gently mocking the regime becomes a lot harder after having read this novel.

‘Ah,’ (fictional) detractors may say, ‘but it was written by a westerner. What do they know?’

Yes, ok, fair point. There is only one book that I have read (and one more that I haven’t) which present North Korea from a native’s point of view. Nothing To Envy by Barbara Demick collates interviews with defectors, both willing and unwilling, from the regime. She quizzes them about their lives within the state, their escape stories and their arrival into South Korea, the most high-tech nation in the world. To Westerners, we can only imagine the culture shock by trying to imagine jumping from the 1940s straight to the modern day – Internet, mobiles, space landings… everything.

In terms of authenticity, clearly real life experiences will trump fiction at every turn. But Johnson has done his homework. In an article for The Daily Beast,(click and read!) he writes about his own visit to North Korea, and the bizarre impression which dawned on him there: that no one native of that strange state is the center of their own universe. The state spins a story, and the players adjust their lives to fit the narrative. By devoting some chapters in The Orphan Master’s Son to a propaganda spin on events, Johnson succeeds in letting us glimpse how every action, scripted or not, is woven into the fabric of the ruling dynasty’s narrative. As Marvel or DC sometimes retcon their characters' histories in order to take the stoies to new places, so the giant behemoth that is Korean State media (and any citizen with sense and ambition) takes what is outside of their control and spins it to fit the official canon. The novel succeeds, therefore, in being a thrilling adventure story of one man’s struggle to live his own story, and an exceedingly creepy study of the machinations of totalitarian power.

ha...ha?

In short, I am extremely glad that the combination of sickness and a terrible internet connection drove me to give this novel a second chance. I can’t, however, promise that I’ll be picking up every discarded book and giving it the same treatment. Joyce’s Ulysses  will remain unread beyond paragraph three, and that suits me fine.




And Finally: This.

Why It All Comes Down To Men In Wigs

Regular content has been suspended this week. In light of recent events, Siouxsie will be holding back her piece on representations of North Korea in modern literature. This week’s article has been penned by RAGING FEMINIST SIOUXSIE. Normal service will resume just as soon as my faith in the 50% of humanity bearing meat and two veg in their underwear is restored. Thank you for your attention.

It is a sad fact that sexism and misogyny are alive and kicking in the 21^st century. It is a tragic fact that this is true not just of the real, flesh and blood world of politics, media representation and day to day interactions, but also of the ‘meta’ world of fiction, publishing and bookselling.

This is not a new topic. A few posts ago, I vented my incredulity at the jaw-dropping level of incompetence that went into designing the special edition anniversary cover of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Let’s just remind ourselves of that particular travesty:

Oh God. It's still so horrible...

Oh, yep. There we go. It’s a novel about the feminine condition. Make-up must be involved to some degree. Look, she’s having a pout. Bet that sorts out her hysterical depression. Women, eh?! AMIRIGHT?!

I was quite happy to have made that point and reassured that feedback from readers and customers (yes, I ranted at work, too) broadly mirrored my point of view. Although I am a card carrying feminist, this is a book blog, and I hadn’t intended to make a regular feature of my raging against the patriarchy. Rather, I wanted to write about North Korea. But, over the past couple of weeks, the two worlds collided in somewhat spectacular fashion.

      1)      I was told that certain members of head office believed my displays were too ‘male-centric’. I should, it was intimated, be tailoring feature space with clear demarcation between books ‘for the girls’ and books ‘for the boys’.

Look. I have nothing against chick-lit. If Sophie Kinsella, Marian Keyes et al. are happy for their books to be marketed in a certain way with a certain demographic in mind, so be it. As a category generally spanning romance and low-level family drama, that’s fine. But to assume that that is all women want to read is insulting. As insulting as assuming that all men want to read are books listing the ballistic power of various types of military hardware a la Andy Mcnab and Tom Clancy. 

This one go BOOM

None of the above, by the way, feature anywhere in my displays.  They sell perfectly well from the shelves. In between the stereotyped fiction are a million variations on the concept of literature with no specific demographic in mind other that ‘people that like books’. As a bookseller, it is these people that I am aiming to please. Sorry if this comes across as snobbish, but with our tables featuring themes such as ‘Cult’ ‘Great American Novels’ and ‘Best of British’, I’m not sure where any of the above would really slot in.

But maybe I am wrong.

     2)      On recommending ‘The Eyre Affair’ by Jasper Fforde to a customer who had shown interest in alternate history. “Oh. I’m afraid not, darling. The main character’s a girl. I can never identify with female characters”.

Really. You can’t? You read fiction, a genre dependent on the suspension of disbelief. Furthermore, you’re a fan of sci-fi and alternate realities. You, as a reader, are capable of imagining yourself taking off from Earth, into space, onto an alien planet and into a giant mech suit with a plasma gun. But all this is dependent on testosterone? You can’t imagine yourself out of your penis and evolutionarily irrelevant nipples for two-hundred pages?!? Your capacity for basic empathy has been so stunted that, although the concept of aliens is hunky-dory, a female protagonist in a novel that doesn’t even begin to tackle anything linked to the feminine condition is just too much? Dude. What have you got against boobs?

You need help. Also, don't call me darling.

The ultimate mind-fuck

      3)      On showing a customer around the sci-fi/fantasy section, our (female) specialist bookseller - who has garnered a certain amount of notoriety online and in our local area for her encyclopaedic knowledge of her section – is approached by a second customer.

“Excuse me,” he interrupts as she recommends titles from her shelves, “but sci-fi’s kind of my thing.”

 He then proceeds to man-splain her own section to her.

This event is closely linked to…

      4)      I am standing at the tills. A customer approaches, with what can only be described as an Inspector Clousot expression on his face. ‘Who writes your recommendations?!’ He barks, pointing at our film bay. “We do,” I answer. His expression morphs in to a Baldrick-esque parody of cunning.

“     "Really?” he sneers. “So who wrote the card for A Clockwork Orange in Nadsat?”

“I did.”

“No you didn’t. It’s not a girls’ book.”

“Actually, I wrote part of my dissertation about it at uni.”

“Sure.”

And he oozes off, hopefully to be run over by a parked car.

These are all genuine examples of sexism that have occurred in one bookshop, in one city, to myself and one other bookseller over the space of a couple of weeks. Am I alone in being horrified?

As I have mentioned before, I studied English Literature at university, then fell straight into the worlds of publishing and bookselling. Unlike what I witnessed during a brief stint in bar work and catering, the book world is DOMINATED by women. At university, my course was split 60/40 women. In publishing, although the board level roles are still skewed towards the men, companies I have worked for are staffed largely by intelligent, hard working women. The same goes for bookselling.

So who’s propagating the stereotype of the illiterate female? Are people under the impression that male literature students study 18th Century literature and war poetry whilst female students gaze at the ceiling, writing emoticon ridden essays about Little Miss Naughty and Spot the Dog?

I think Spot's motivation is that he wants his teddy. A lot. LOL.

Do people really believe that some girls learned to read SOLEY so we could slowly pick out the letters in Fifty Shades of Grey, then immediately forgot again as the concept of shoes returned to dominate our tiny brains?

Such people must be constantly bamboozled by current literary trends. Hilary Mantel, a multi-award winning female novelist who writes about the political intricacies of the Tudor court. No. Frickking. Way. She must be a man in a wig. Women haven’t even heard of Thomas Cromwell. Or history.

Cromwell? Was he, like, cute?

The current Booker longlist is made up mostly of female writers? Sorry. No. Men again. In wigs. ALL WOMEN IN LITERATURE ARE MEN IN WIGS, have you not got this yet?

Responsible for all of the work attributed to Zadie Smith.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Although it is no longer strictly necessary for authors to write under male pseudonyms - a la George Eliot - in order to be published, many of them do. Still more choose to initialise their first names in order to maintain ambiguity over their sex in the early days of their careers (I’m looking at you, J.K Rowling).

And that’s all folks. I have no solution. No clever way of eradicating this hateful trend. Despite every piece of evidence we offer them;  university figures, knowledgeable booksellers, fantastic female novelists writing prize-winning works of art, every single woman they’ve ever seen reading classic literature, sci-fi or political treatise on a bus or train, some men would rather believe that we’re stupid by virtue of our ovaries. Because attacking our intelligence is the quickest way of convincing themselves that we’re not equals. That we cannot run companies, let alone countries. 

Ovaries. FEAR THEM.

Burn, Hollywood, Burn

Adaptions. They’re funny little beasts. Whether it’s from book to movie or vice versa, our reactions are generally negative.

What do you mean there's no giant squid bit?

This was exemplified rather beautifully when my (at the time) new boss at the bookshop took one look at our ‘Read it First’ bay of Hollywood adapted novels and suggested that we re-title it ‘Burn, Hollywood, Burn – The Book is Always Better’.

Fearing a backlash from our Head-Office, the new title suggestion never made it past concept; but it is an accepted fact that for every well-adapted screenplay (Game of Thrones, Dexter etc.) that makes it onto our big or small screens, someone somewhere has earmarked a piece of literature for a jaw-droppingly hamfisted adaptation starring Kiera Knightley or similar.

Mental illness, a la Knightley

Acting lessons, a la Simpson

This is not to suggest a one-way street of poor decisions, however. Picture a motorway: zooming up the fast-lane northbound, hogtied in the back being abducted by the cast and crew involved in that particular travesty is Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Now cast your eyes to the southbound lane. Here we see The Lost Boys (admittedly not a cinematic great, but a fun 80s film nevertheless) being carried off by a ghostwriter in a twirly moustache intent on evil deeds and terrible narration – seriously, the book was awful. Not even amusing, just awful.

I will ruin your childhood memories...

Audiobooks, however, scarcely get a mention. Other than the brilliantly awkward spoof reading of Fifty Shades of Grey by actor and ‘voice of Alladin’s Iago’, Gilbert Gottfried…

…audiobooks haven’t really appeared on my radar since the long, interminable drives to Scotland or trecks across heatwave-ridden France trapped in the backseat along with rapidly maturing and increasingly fragrant gooey cheese that counted as holidays during my childhood. Even then, they were slightly patronising affairs; educational classics read by well-respected people from the BBC who totally failed to adapt their voices based on the age, gender or emotional state of the characters they represented.

Once. Upon. A. Time. There. Was. A. Little. Girl. Hello. The. Little. Girl. Said.

Back to movie adaptations. When Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, dropped into the shop on a signing tour, it wasn’t, therefore, much of a surprise to discover that he didn’t hold out particularly high hopes for the forthcoming World War Z film. In particular, the controversial issue of 3D seemed to be a favourite bugbear of his:

‘I went to see The Great Gatsby in 3D’, he said (declaimed). ‘It was like… HAVE A MARTINI!!!’ (shoving an imaginary cocktail at my colleague’s face).

No, lady in the second row. You can't drink Gatsby's martini...

I’ve since found a piece of footage in which he voices his concerns somewhat more rationally.

Worryingly, whilst searching for this URL, the most popular search was 'Does Max Brooks believe in zombies'.

I’m no puritan. I understand that narratives have to be chopped and changed in order to turn a wonderful book into a wonderful movie. But the trailer, reviews and synopsis of the movie version of World War Z do seem to, as Brooks says, have nothing in common with his work other than title. Rather than an oral history of the zombie uprising, laying bare our emotional and political weaknesses which would in real terms limit our capability as a species to fight as a unified force for survival, the movie version is set in the present day, dispenses with such geopolitical questions and features RUNNING ZOMBIES.

RUNNING ZOMBIES.

Look, it’s fine to tinker with folklore. Many films and books play around with the issues of ‘zombie top speed’ (‘Moves faster than a well-greased tin man’ – Renowned speed-similie expert, Jeremy Clarkson). 

But since Brooks has created not only a fictional narrative but an accompanying guide explaining the parameters of his canon universe, it would be at least polite to stick to the facts as he defined them.

But not so. Zombies run and there’s a romantic sub-plot. Although I won’t judge anyone who does see and enjoy this film, I for one am out. And this despite the presence of Brad ‘probably the longest-serving celebrity crush’ Pitt.

I will forgive this man many things.

That’s not to say that no adaption exists for fans of the shambling, speed-restricted ghoul. Remember the terrible audiobooks I mentioned before? Well, it would seem that the genre has evolved. After hearing two of my colleagues rave about the World War Z audiobook for a good few hours, I decided to get my mitts on a copy and give it a go….

Ladies and Gentlemen, do you need an excuse to run that extra half-hour at the gym? Do you need motivation to stay in and wait for hours for a parcel you suspect never made it onto the delivery truck? Do you like being creeped out by simple narration from an all-star cast? GET THE WORLD WAR Z AUDIOBOOK. If you’ve already read the book, no matter – this will remind you how great the story is. If you haven’t, it’s a brilliant introduction.

  

And, Hollywood, you can keep your Brad Pitt. This adaptation features Mark Hamill!

Mark Hamill!

Also, Max Brooks himself, Henry Rollins and Simon Pegg, but mainly…

MARK FRICKIN HAMILL!

The style is minimalistic. Brooks, appropriately, plays the part of the interviewer; travelling around the world documenting the testimonies of key players, heroes and victims of the zombie uprising. Each character (Thank God) is played by a different voice actor rather than one actor trying to invent enough accents to go around. Each chapter ends with a little spooky music, but, otherwise, bells and whistles are conspicuous by their absence. The effect is exceedingly creepy.

A lesser-written novel would rely on all sorts of trickery-pokery in order to really capture the audience. This, perhaps, is why the audiobook is a bit of a forgotten genre. Hollywood has huge budgets, CGI and well-known faces to beef up any lacklustre storyline.

When all you have is a voice and some music, flaws are much more niggling and obvious. It really takes a book like World War Z to bring the medium into its own.

So go out, get the audiobook and enjoy. First, however, a couple of warnings.

1)      Find the unabridged version, obviously.

2)      Do not use World War Z as something to listen to whilst drifting off. I had some very interesting dreams last night.