Narrowboat holidays

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Barry

For years Cheryl & I have fancied holidaying on a canal boat, but none of our friends were interested in joining us. With only the two of us the cost of hiring a boat is pretty steep and handling the locks looked as if it could be labour intensive, so we never made it. Then I came across this website: www.tragara.co.uk .

Tragara is a narrowboat designed as a floating hotel that accommodates just two guests. It is owned and operated by Glynn & Ann Evans, a retired couple who do this more as a hobby than a business. We’ve just come back from four nights with them on the Kennet & Avon canal – and it was a real treat. Not only do they operate the boat, but they also provide all meals – and do so at a price that is considerably less than just hiring a boat. They are totally flexible and will stop at every pub along the way if you fancy eating ashore.

They are interesting company with many a tale to tell of their lives and travels. Ann is a talented artist who writes short stories.

We were very lucky with the weather. It was simply delightful to potter through the beautiful Wiltshire countryside gazing at the flowers and wildlife – swans with their cygnets; geese & goslings; ducks & ducklings; kingfishers; barn owls; swallows; wagtails – and a grass snake that swam across the canal in front of us. It proved an excellent introduction to narrowboating and put our minds at rest about coping with the locks – so we’ll be off on our own soon. It’s so peaceful on the canal that I couldn’t help thinking that a prolonged stay would be very good for writing productivity. The idea is forming that 12 months touring the country on a narrowboat could be a very interesting and productive experience.

Waterstones to sell Kindles

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Barry

James Daunt is the CEO of Waterstones who was appointed by new Russian owner Alexander Mamud. A few months ago Mr Daunt launched a media offensive against Amazon, ridiculing the experience it provided for book-buyers and describing the company as ‘a ruthless money-making devil’.

It is hard to believe that that was the same Mr Daunt who has just announced that Waterstones will soon be stocking the Kindle, Amazon’s own ebook-reader.

To say that this has come as a shock to the book industry is very much an understatement. There has been a rumour (now clearly unfounded) that Waterstones was about to announce that it would be stocking the Barnes & Noble Nook, in a similar tie-up to that between W H Smith and Kobo. The rumour was readily believed because it appeared to make perfect business sense. Now the book industry is reeling as everyone tries to make sense of the development.

The Los Angeles Times has provided a useful summary of the media reactions here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/05/waterstones-deal-sell-amazon-kindle-dismaying-many.html . The overwhelming feeling is that the UK’s leading High Street book retailer has shot itself in the foot.

The reaction that really caught my eye compares this deal with the one between Borders and Amazon, describing that as one of the contributing factors towards Borders decline into collapse.

The brief announcement raises a lot of questions. For example, what is Waterstones going to do about all those customers who have bought one of the Sony ebook readers it has been selling in recent years. Those readers use ePub files (as do Kobo, Nook and all the Apple devices) and do not support the mobi files used by the Kindle range.

A further announcement is to be made in August. I doubt if an announcement about books has ever been so eagerly awaited.

Virginia Woolf vs John Locke

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Barry

These two authors, both enormously successful in their own way, probably represent the opposite extremes of fiction writing. One advantage of the eBook format is that it gives the reader inexpensive access to both.

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf is currently available on Kindle for only £1.95 – and if it hadn’t been so cheap I wouldn’t have bought it. From time to time over the years I have had another look at Woolf’s work. She has such a reputation as an influential, modernist writer that I can’t help feeling that my inability to appreciate her books must be due to some failing in me. So, I grabbed the £1.95 bargain and had another go.

It’s no good; I simply can’t cope with the 250-word, oddly-punctuated sentences and the strange perception of what is important. She can spend pages describing the trivial and then deal with the death of a central character in a single phrase. It’s time I accepted that I really am afraid of Virginia Woolf.

John Locke could hardly be more different. An American writer, who sold well over one million copies of his eBooks in five months, has shown what digital publishing can do for independent publishers if they are prepared to totally embrace the new technology. Before taking up writing Locke had already made himself a millionaire. He started selling life insurance door-to-door and was so successful that he grew his own life insurance agency to 7,000 salesmen. He expanded into property and owns a dozen shopping centres. He has applied the same hard-nosed business practices to eBooks.

He decided on a genre that he thought would be popular (thrillers about an ex-CIA assassin) and wrote several books with the same central character before really launching his marketing campaign which basically relied upon efficiently working the social networking websites. He has gone on to write in two different genres, but all being undemanding, pure entertainment books. Locke has turned down a conventional publishing contract, but has entered into a distribution agreement so cheap paperback copies of his books will appear in retailers like Walmart. His eBooks are cheap – he has the stated ambition of being ‘the world’s greatest 99c author’.

His reviews show that readers either love him or hate him. He certainly isn’t bothered about making a contribution to the arts.

Given a choice of novels between a John Locke or a Virginia Woolf, I know what I’d choose.

The Moonstone: Wilkie Collins

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Barry

Wilkie Collins was a very popular Victorian writer with 30 novels, 60 short stories, 14 plays and a very large number of non-fiction articles to his name. Those non-fiction pieces cover a very wide range of subjects and reveal him to be a highly intelligent and thoughtful man.

He was a long-term friend of Charles Dickens and they worked together on projects: Dickens’ magazines carrying Collins’ stories, and Dickens’ theatre company putting on some of his plays.

Collins studied law (somewhat reluctantly it seems) and was called to the Bar in 1851, the year he met Dickens. Dickens regarded lawyers with contempt and ridiculed them in many of his books, so it’s interesting that Collins never practised after qualifying.

Many years have slipped by since I last read The Moonstone. I was reminded of it when it was suggested as a Book Club read and thought it must be time to take another look – particularly as it is now available as a free eBook. The book tells of the disappearance of a rare diamond, the Moonstone. The events surrounding its disappearance are related in turn by a number of individuals, each of whom is involved to some extent.

The book is a delight. There is a lot of humour, particularly in the first half when it feels like a combination of P G Woodhouse and Charles Dickens. The characters are captured perfectly; even those on the fringe, such as Ezzra Jennings, or the street urchin known as Gooseberry, left me wanting to learn much more about them.

A couple of things caught my eye this time around. The book is frequently referred to as the first detective novel, but the detective in it says, ‘It’s only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake.’ So, presumably, detective novels were already well known.

We may think that the cult of celebrity is an invention of our times, but writing in 1868 Collins says, ‘In our modern system of civilisation, celebrity (no matter of what kind) is the lever that will move anything.’ It seems that we can’t even invent our own idiocy.

A beautifully written book that gives a fascinating insight into attitudes of the time, as well as being an entertaining ‘whodunnit’. The only downside lies in the eBook version. The formatting is dreadful and is a distraction that is hard to ignore, but it’s difficult to complain when the conversion has led to the book being available free of charge.