Lynne's Regular Column

Blogging seems to be the word on everyone’s lips right now and I’m always moaning about what a horrible word it is. I know it’s short for weblog but we should have stepped in and invented something much nicer, too late now.

Apart from the time I spend sweating over my own, I do spend some time visiting others. It’s a bit like doing the social rounds of an extended group of friends who are out there blazing a trail and holding regular parties. You build up a circle of wagons and you all start chatting to each other.

I am really enjoying the Transita blog, that’s one busy party, glasses clinking all over the place (wine not spectacles.) Fascinating to get the authorial first-hand points of view and responses to comments and also to see what the readers are experiencing. I haven’t come across another publisher doing this, most publisher blogs are written by the owners and their stable of writers (that’s another funny expression don’t you think?) are all off on a blogfrolic of their own.

A recent exchange on the Transita blog about differing interpretations of a book has set me thinking.

I often seem to find myself swimming against the tide of popular opinion about a book I’m reading, especially if it’s been on the receiving end of massive media hype. Books that have had such a build up have a very long way to fall and inevitably have to work much harder to impress me.

I won’t court unwelcome publicity here but I do it occasionally on the blog and suffer the consequences because there are plenty of people who will have loved what I haven’t and will leap to its defence. I read quite a few very high profile books last year that left me cold and quite mystified, (you’ll just have to hazard a guess or seven) but that was just me. I rarely if ever come out and publicly rubbish a book, I think it’s counter-productive and nasty and there’s enough people being paid money to put their heads on the block and do that in the literary supplements. Most book bloggers are not out there pretending to be literary critics; it’s all about sharing a love of reading and spreading the word on good books.

I usually take full responsibility for my own reading failures, it’s down to my own inadequacies, time and context in my life at any given time or perhaps my own life experiences which have made me view a book in a certain way. Sometimes I might miss the writer’s point altogether or interpret what they are saying in completely the opposite way they had intended. To be honest, that’s tough, how I read the book is down to me alone and although debate may be heated it may never change my point of view about that particular book at that particular moment in my life.

None of that makes my reading experience any less valid than anyone else’s and to me that’s fine. A writer releases a book into the wild and it must find its own way from then on, it’s been nurtured and coddled but now it’s time for it to be a grown-up and I can’t imagine what that must be like, bit like sending your baby out into the snow I suppose.

This is going to sound ridiculous because I bet everyone would love Transita to have a blockbuster, market leader, best-seller but I’m actually pleased and delighted that all these books currently appear on a very level playing field. Each one fills a particular moment for me, it’s usually one of those fraught, life’s a bit too much, too fast moments when I need to sit down with a pot of tea (sorry don’t do alcohol, sometimes wish I did but it doesn’t like me) and immerse myself in ordinary lives. No pre-conceptions, no headlines, no battery of reviews for a book to live up to, just a good read that I can quietly pick up and really enjoy.

With a day job like mine (health visitor for 30 years) I have come across thousands of real life plots that you would be hard pushed to make up, yet still I turn to books and reading for more of them. I could probably do a good line in selling plots. Perhaps I should set up on eBay? The trouble is I’m not sure anyone would believe them.

It’s a lottery this reading lark. Sometimes they’ll make me laugh, sometimes I’ll cry, sometimes I won’t like them, sometimes I might not finish one, sometimes I’ll love them. But it will be me who decides.

That’s reading.