Concrete Pencil: Ban the book pages

By Simon Hayes on July 21, 2010 4:10 PM |

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Dan Bourke

Dan Bourke finds none of the books he likes features on those best summer read pages in the papers, but stays cool about it.

Does anybody else get the feeling that they don't lead the kind of life that the publications aimed at them think they do?

"The best summer reads for your suitcase", promises everyone from the Guardian to the Mail.

Does anyone live that life?

Does anyone have a holiday coming up that they will spend sitting next to a swimming pool where they will read the best of this year's fiction and non-fiction?

Firstly, who has holidays like that? And where can I get one?

Secondly, I consider myself a reader. I can do between 30 and 50 in a good year.

But I don't sit about thinking - well, there's been an excellent new biography of Jim Callaghan that simply everyone is talking about so I simply must heave it into my John Lewis luggage for the fortnight in Koh Samui.

I, like everyone else I assume, read randomly, slowly and in a mess.

I used to feel bad about this, like I actually should keep up with the latest Labour bios and the coolest Booker longlist shoo-ins.

But it was ridiculous, another symptom of stressified and workified leisure time.

The features pages of newspapers seem endlessly to be telling us what we should be doing and how we should be doing it.

This is because they are mostly understaffed, and desperate for the help of the PR industry to fill out their pages.

What features should be about is what people do or are doing, or even better about, what one particularly interesting person or group of people is doing.

There is an excellent video on Vimeo (vimeo.com/11175747) about the guys who still paint adverts on New York buildings.

This is features journalism.

A long list of products that you should own but don't that leaves you with a queezy feeling that I'm missing out on stuff is not features journalism.

Your summer reading, like everyone else's, will, of course, be plundered at random from the pile beside your bed or recommended to you by friends or be impulse bought on Amazon or at the airport or whatever.

So I am boycotting book pages. I still want recommendations, though. If you have any, email dan.bourke@ mirror.co.uk.

The books I shall be reading as I continue to come to work every day except for two weeks of this months-long season are, just so you know, The Darkling Spy by Edward Wilson, Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami and Ghostwritten by David Mitchell.