Friday 9 January 2009

Endings (and modest proposal no. 134)

A slow start to the year, the gears rusty, because it’s cold and maybe because I’ve been thinking about endings rather than beginnings (I often turn to the last page of a book before I’ve read my way there, sometimes before I’ve even begun, a habit that enrages many but if the book’s any good it doesn’t spoil my reading at all). Endings and blogs – because I’ve been thinking about how a book might evolve from a blog (not this one, oh no), which is far from straightforward as the forms are so different (books with first and last pages, blogs present continuous), and also because it’s a year ago that the regular posts on a blog I was following stopped, and a few weeks later readers were informed in the comment box that the writer had died, and the rawness and shock of this news were somehow amplified by the (present continuous, public but intimate) medium. There are now around 90 comments from many different countries in that comment box, an invisible community coming together.

Something else: given that the exchange rates seem good for export right now, how about cash-strapped credit-crunched UK selling off the monarchy? – to one of those many countries that seem fonder of the royals than we do. It’d get my vote.

2 comments:

charles said...

Susan/Deborah, welcome. The blog was started to be about not me but the CBe books, and maybe help sell a few. As such it's hardly a success: online over the past month I've had more people wanting me to publish their own books than people buying the CBe ones. But after a point it doesn't really matter what the original intention was.

Z said...

I don't think I've found else anyone before who likes to check the ending of a book unless it's a whodunnit and they're apologising for cheating. I often do it and sometimes it determines whether I think a book is worth persevering with.