In a packed blog tonight, a crop of current bookish news stories is presented for your edutainment.
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I was amused to read a snippet, in one of the free papers that decorate our train carriages, concerning the flood of 'Fifty Shades' volumes into charity shops. This is, of course, due to their former owners having realised that they had not in fact purchased the definitive treatise on minimalist interior decor. If this influx grows too voluminous, i suppose we may see one of our best-known charity chains altering its name to (Bond)age UK.
I have striven mightily, but failed, to resist observing that the proud new owners of these tomes will be literally paying money for old rope.
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Inspired by the phenomenal success of the fasting diet book which took Christmas by surprise and shows no signs of loosening its grip on the population, I have conducted some modest private research to transfer the concepts involved into the literary arena. It transpires that, given a properly and finely calculated regime, it is perfectly possible to read any number of populist, superficial novels containing no grain of improving content nor any challenge to traditional narrative structures and not suffer any decrease in aesthetic or intellectual trimness, provided that, for two days in each week only, you adhere strictly to ingesting the approved canon of Difficult, Serious (and preferably Foreign) Books. This may seem counter-intuitive, but, with the aid of my new series of books and related products, including my patent Literary Calorie Counter © (which will, once fed some basic information about a novel's tone, protagonists and vocabulary, assess it's Literary Purity) remarkable results will be in your grasp. Pre-order now for my special introductory offer.
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The annual Bookseller Industry Awards were announced recently, and congratulations are due to Sainsbury's for having come away from the event with the children's bookseller of the year prize in their basket. This set me to thinking about some possible supermarket-oriented reworkings of literary classics, and to inflict the following upon you:
Morrison's and Lovers
Tesco of the D'Urbervilles
Asda You Like it
The Lidls of the King
etc....
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