Death and the Penguin*?
So Pearson and Bertelsmann have merged Penguin with Random House, and the best name they could come up with for the venture is Penguin Random House.
Which strikes me as the most lamentable missed opportunity for awesome branding. I mean, why oh why didn’t they call it Random Penguin?!!!
On a more serious note, I do hope that this means good things for the future of books. With all this digital reading stuff and more and more independent bookshops disappearing, I can’t help but worry that my generation will be the one that might see the death of the printed book.
AND I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT PAPERBACKS!!!
* …by the way, is still one of the gaztrillion books on my to-read list.
Although Neverwhere had left me 
Oh-kay, weirdness alert. I wasn’t really sure about the whole Thursday Next series, but decided to give it a go after several friends recommended it. And I’m afraid it ends for me with volume one. Although the meta fiction thing grew on me about halfway through the book (when the actual plot finally kicks in after some over-indulgent introductory rambling), the concept behind it seemed just a bit too chaotic. Special detectives protecting our literary heritage? Cool. Real people and fictional characters jumping in and out of books? If we’re going that way, fair enough. A Nineteen Eighty-Four inspired setting? Well, if you must crush us with references, okay. It was when the time travelling came in that I got a bit of overload, and when it moved on to the vampires and werewolves, I finally had enough. It’s a shame that Fforde had to hopelessly over-clutter The Eyre Affair by cramming in every possible aspect of fantasy literature he could think of. Because the bit about moving between the real world and literary world would have been pretty awesome without all the rest annoying the hell out of you.
A collection of short stories from one of the funniest comedians around. From a dude in Montana who makes his money hoovering prairie dogs out of the ground, to a teenage girl who invites hundreds of thousands of MySpace friends to her house party, to the author of a business book entitled Highly Successful Secrets to Standing on a Corner Holding Up a Golf Sale Sign, this book is full of fantastically messed-up characters. And behind each story – most of which, admittedly, are a bit off weird – you discover the very touching truth of human encounters. And that’s what makes Rich Hall so good and so funny.
What can I say! Adrian Mole has been one of Britain’s favourite literary characters for decades, and finally I am one of his many fans. Sue Townsend is a complete genius, and not just because of her uncanny ability to get into the head of a teenage boy. It’s Adrian Mole’s entire world – from the early 80s West Midlands small-town life to the 90s Soho food renaissance – that makes these books such an unbelievably delightful read. To me, a German with a not very solid basis in British history who has spent the last four years trying to figure out this country, the Mole Diaries have been a most enjoyable lesson in recent cultural history. And I also very much wish I’d known Adrian Mole when I was a teenager, because it would have made being a teenager infinitely more bearable. I cannot tell you how much I love these books.
Another German provincial murder mystery, part three of Rita Falk’s bestselling Franz Eberhofer series is mostly more of the same, which in this case means more hilariously entertaining micro-cultural comedy with a bit of a crime story in the background. To be fair, I probably only love these books so much because they are set around my home town and feature a whole range of characters and customs that could have been plucked straight off our road in the village. Most of the fun in this series is based on regional culture and dialect, so this one’s probably best enjoyed by German natives / native speakers, which means we can move right on to the next book.
I had almost given up on Christopher Moore in the light of the recent, largely disappointing additions to my bookshelf. But then, just in time, along came Love Nun to sway my opinion of his writing back into more favourable regions. This is a great adventure, with a good story that’s nutcase enough to have you laughing out loud but doesn’t go completely off the rails in terms of the plot. A washed-out pilot stumbles onto a remote island, where a vaguely mental doctor and his evil wife are doing some not exactly ethical stuff with the cannibalistic natives under the guise of an old cargo cult. Much madness ensues. This could also make a fantastic movie, by the way.
Oh wow, that was dark. Prattchet’s teenage witch has certainly grown up, and for a witch that means facing a whole lot more than puberty. This book made me realise once again why I love Pratchett so much: It’s comic fantasy, but there’s a balance, a kind of very practical-minded morality to it. With Pratchett magic’s not all sparks and glamour; it has consequences and requires sacrifices. And so I Shall Wear Midnight reveals that Tiffany’s dallying with her magical powers in the previous volumes didn’t only lead her into immediate showdowns with mythical enemies, but has also conjured up a much more complex force from a deep, dark corner of history – one that’s frighteningly human. Where there’s witches, there’s always people with a stake, and history tends to go in cycles and repeat itself. And with the ancient spirit of a powerful witch-hunter on the loose and turning her land against her, the stakes are high for Tiffany. Meanwhile, there’s still that issue with boys being idiots…