The curse of a good book

Reader, I apologise for being so abesnt over the last months. I promised myself that I would not, could not allow anything so pithy as a degree and the work I had to undertake thereof to stall my frequent harranguing of the proverbial ears you lend me. Clearly, I was wrong.

However, had I not been so Preometheanly chained to the rock of higher education while my coursework pecked at my internal organs, there is no way in which I would be able now to nejoy the respite with any way near as much gusto. It is this freedom, the liberation to read and write what I like now while merely dabbling in this strange trifle called revision, which bring us our next topic of grumbling.

I have a, at times unfortunate, love of books. Can't help it, that's that, it's the way my mother put my hat on (cheers Rob), etc. And now that I'm free to read what I want, I am- with some brilliant and some more tarnished results.



Over the past weeks I have read Girlfriend In A Coma, The Wind-Up Girl, Room, A Week in December and Bill Bryson's The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Of these, four have been brilliant and one has been brain-numbing; three have come to a prefect onclusion for their own stories while two have left me wanting more than is given; four have ended when the book ends and only one, the one that I was enjoying the most and not page-counting my way through (an awful habit I have), only one decided to employ the cruel trick of padding itself with more pages than there actually are in the book that I paid money for.



This was, I am both sad and incredibly happy to say, Bryson's Life and Times. Now, I am happy in that it has reawoken in me a love of both reading and Bryson's humour that I laid to rest a while ago in the knowledge I had to slog through the dreaded Set Texts for three years. And yet I am disappointed that such a cheap trick of publishing houses is deployed all the more regularly to bulk up to 400 pgaes by including a chapter or two of teaser for the next book or, in this case, the first or second of that author's works.

As it was, given the extra fifteen pages in between my right forefinger and thumb, I was gutted, cheated when the last chapter finished and I was looking on to read more.

I believe a large part of knowing a book is about to close is feeling a book is about to close. If there is still a chapter-sized set of pages left, the reader doesn't adjust accordingly to an early ending. As such, Bryson's last line fell flat, despite its poignant potential, as I thought I'd turn the page and read on for another closing. The impact of his words was lost because of a printing house's error in judgement to conform with the now done thing.



The subsequent pages hold description of his other bestselling titles, including Neither Here Nor There. So, given the quality of the book just read, the quality endowed upon the other titles by the esteemed reviews (The Times, The Observer etc) and the punchy, wit-alluding blurbs written by the publishers to illustrate how good his other books are (all similarly punchy to the blurb encouraging Bryson novices to read the book they are in), it's surprising that the chapter sample is from his second book, Neither Here Nor There.

There's no denying it's quality as an opening chapter, but given the two-decade gap since it's original publication, there's every denying it a place as a tantaliser for more of the original words I bought the book for, and every denying it the space I was readying myself to read having never seen it before. I'm issuing one simple plea to the publishers of this world- stop ruining the ending of good books with an unfulfilled promise of more. It's oddly deflating, and before long we'll all hate you.