The Cheeky Brit Guide to Bookshops

So you walk into a bookshop and are immediately assaulted by thousands of books you can choose from. What’s a person to do? Thankfully, Benjamin Rainbird, writing for the satirical website Rum and Monkey, has a handy advice guide for the clueless bookbuyer. An example:

**

THE LATEST THING**

Have you read it yet? Oh, you absolutely must! It’s the latest thing!

At some early stage in this book’s gestation, the writer signed some

infernal document in their own blood, The Powers That Be thereby

declared that it would become a record-breaking bestseller, and that

everyone would spend their free time reading it and talking about it.

The Latest Thing can belong to any genre – it doesn’t matter whether

it’s about merciless criminals stabbing eachother in the head or a

psychic milkman, it’ll be snapped up by anyone and everyone, because

everyone else is doing it and they want to fit in. For several months

the book will be all over the media, it will dominate the droning

dinner party conversations of eminently shootable middle-class pseuds,

it will silence all rational criticism with the sheer magnitude of its

blanket marketing power. You may dislike it, you may openly rubbish it

as terrible derivative old toss, but it won’t make any difference.

Everyone has already been assimilated. You are alone in your opinion,

your attempts to escape The Latest Thing are feeble. You may as well

just hide in an old fridge for three months until everyone’s forgotten

about it, at which time The Next Thing will appear. Still, at least

it’s a book and not a sodding reality TV show.

Rainbird also suggests for those William Gibson writer wannabes that if they they are  interested in “ cybernetically enhanced people who walk around in trench coats and take themselves too seriously,” just visit Birmingham. Hmm, you mean the cloning experiments are already taking place over there?!