Some recommendations for your reading club

I love reading books. In fact, I love reading anything I can get my hands on. Having the attention span of a goldfish with ADD, I can never finish a novel, which is why I read a lot of short stories- the shorter, the better- one of my favourite books contains 101 stories each 101 words long. I devour magazines, metaphorically speaking of course. I have stacks and stacks of books and magazines cluttering up my room and my offices and I have read most of them twice. At breakfast, I will read the cereal packet. In the evening I will read the box of teabags.

Books make excellent gifts. They are full of interesting knowledge or insight, stories to cheer you up or take you into another world. Though the internet has much to offer and most of the classics are available online for free, there is nothing like the feel and smell of a book, its weight in your hands, the crisp paper and vivid ink. Books are great.

But not all books are great, I think. There are several terrible books, most of which have been made into terrible movies. There are also several stupid books, most of which are given away by stupid titles.

There is for example a whole series of educational books by Kenneth Davis with titles such as “Don’t know much about history”. Now maybe it’s my just me, but if he doesn’t know much about history, why is he writing a book about it? Should I believe what I read in the book or is it all made up? Does he really need to tell people how clueless he is? And do we really need to know that he doesn’t know much about history (and mythology, the Bible, the American Civil War, Geography and the Universe)?

Mr Davis is either ignorant or, as I hope, he is joking. He’s telling us that it’s actually we who don’t know much about anything and therefore should buy his books because he knows everything.

Then there are the some books with rather unfortunate topics. I am not making these up::

• Do-it-yourself brain surgery & other home skills by Stewart Cowley
• Do-It-Yourself Coffins: For Pets and People by Dale Power and Jeffrey Snyder

• How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way? by Hiroyuki Nishigaki

There are also those books that remind me of those silly lists of made-up book titles you’d find in children’s joke books (things like French cuisine by Sue Flay, and Unemployed by Anita Job). Actual books like:

• Death in early America by Margaret Coffin
• Motorcycling for Beginners  by Geoff Carless

No wonder Geoff is interested in motorbikes. He’s car-less.

There are also several children’s books I won’t be ordering online anytime soon, such as:

• Walter, the Farting Dog by William Kotzwinkle, Glenn Murray, and Audrey Colman
• Penelope and the Humongous Burp by Sheri Radford and Christine Tripp

Like I said, books are great. But sometimes, the writing on the cereal packet makes more sense.

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