The Birthday Books

This is the birthday book-haul – all except for Maya Slater’s Mr Darcy’s Diary which we are reading for book group this month along with another book of the same name by Amanda Grange.

And very pleased I am with my bibliophilic stash , too. Since taking this picture over the weekend, The Chameleon’s Shadow has already been polished off (great characters, totally didn’t see the end coming) and Sepulchre is now underway. Except, I can’t read it in bed as it’s too heavy, so David Baldacci’s Absolute Power is still going strong at night (had to leave DB on one side in favour of Minette for a day or two) and Sepulchre is the new lightbox book. As that means it sits on the kitchen table it’s also the making a cup of tea book, the wandering through to sort the washing out book and the oh dear I appear to be in the kitchen reading Sepulchre again book…

Scott Pack (who appears to share my birthday, lucky him) had an interesting thing on his blog today about the possible end of hardback fiction and I, both as writer and reader would be glad of same. I don’t usually buy books in hardback, too expensive. But Ms Walters is an exception – I must have hers as soon as a new one comes out. Terry Pratchett and the Other Half, ditto. And, though I probably would have waited for Sepulchre in paperback, somebody else was kind enough to buy it for me in hardback. And Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl? Well, I was sufficiently intrigued by Dovegrayreader’s review when she was doing her Bookerthon to buy it. And who knows, it may not appear in paperback…

One thing which did occur to me when spending my book tokens was the disparity of advertising on the hardbacks. Ms Mosse seems to me to have been guaranteed massive sales of Sepulchre given that Labyrinth sold over a million copies in paperback, so why did her publisher feel it necessary to buy her such a lot of prominent shelf-space in Waterstones? It seems to me that this would be better given over to authors like Peter Ho Davies (and me, come January) whose careers need to be launched and whose lovely books need to be given publicity. But there he was, tucked away in Fiction under D. And I bought the only copy. I hope they’ll replace it.