Put Out More Flags: The Library is Open

Well sort of. You can borrow actual physical library books again anyway. This is how it works, You let them know which books you want, they pull them off the shelves and get in touch with a pick up slot, you go at the prearranged time and pick them up. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Which it is, in theory. In practice it turned out a little bit more complicated. 

I ordered four. The library rang me up. One of them I couldn't have because it was just on order and hadn't actually arrived yet. Why then did it feature in the catalogue I ask myself?, but I didn't ask them,  because they're trying to be helpful and give us a library service and they don't deserve people like me getting snotty and querying their cataloguing practices. There was another one I couldn't have because it was out on loan and items out on loan aren't covered by the new service. I did feel they might have mentioned this when they put out details of the new way to borrow, because who would have assumed things were this way? If they are using the reservation service for you to put in requests and quarantining books for 72 hours when they come back, there seems no difference to me to reserving a very popular book, with a long waiting list, in normal conditions and reserving it now and going on a list. I'm sure they have a good reason, I just can't figure out what it is.

This left me with two and I picked them up with great joy and anticipation and since then the joy and anticipation have turned to ashes in my mouth. If I had been able to see these books on the library shelves and browse them  I would never have borrowed them because I would have seen they weren't really my sort of thing, so to that extent the new system is a bit  pot luck. But it is better than nothing and I've requested a few more which I go to pick up on Monday. 

Of the two I got one was James Meek's To Calais in Ordinary Time. It has been lauded and nominated for lots of prizes and I am sticking with it to see if I can find out what all the fuss is about. It has however irritated the hell out of me already because of the weird archaisms, some of which I suspect he invented, despite acknowledging the usefulness of the OED. Whenever authors do this sort of thing I wonder whether they are clever or just pretentious and I usually end up convicting them of pretentiousness. I hesitate to do that with Meek since better men than me Gunga Din think this is a brilliant book, but he is hovering close to the pretentious side of the divide and I'm not yet convinced he won't be firmly  planted there in due course. 

The other was The Girl with all the Gifts by M R Carey.which was mentioned in a Guardian review and spoken of very warmly. So warmly that I was a bit surprised the library actually had it to be honest, but there you go. I began to have my doubts when I saw the sentence 'Kazuo Ishiguro meets The Walking Dead' in the plaudits on the book jacket. It wasn't a concept that I could quite get my head around, and as Knightley says to Emma 'for reason good', which is that this novel and Ishiguro have about as much in common as a plastic snowflake and the real thing. I read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go years ago, long before anyone thought of making a film of it, and it has haunted me ever since. I wouldn't go so far as to say I wish I had never read it, because it is heart breaking and lyrical and thought provoking and beautifully written and very much worth reading. But I wouldn't read it again and I wouldn't give it to an impressionable teenager either. Carey is not a writer who can do lyrical or heartbreaking or beautifully written. He has cardboard characters ( and that doesn't include his vampires), a rip off plot and a crash bang wallop style. I got to page 200 and then gave up, which isn't something I often do with a book, but even in lock down life is too short. 

Better luck with the next lot, eh?