This photograph was taken by Cheanguehuae.

In the last post referring to my move, I mentioned that I had all my books in piles. That’s still the case, however the reason is no longer repairs, it’s the far simpler fact that we’ve not yet got bookcases.

Nevertheless as a typical book lover I’m looking to start organising because it’s been too long and those ARCs are still somewhere in the stacks.

My thought today is multiple copies, only this time it’s not me by myself. We have roughly 20 books that are duplicated. We have different views about book spines (deal breaker right there?) and forgive me the following pessimistic thought, but giving away one of each duplicate would cause an issue if we ever split up. So the duplicates will be kept, and most do have differing covers, so that helps, but what do we do? Where do they go?

Could we put them together? It would look like we had a hoarding problem vastly less understandable than having copies of a couple of favourites (and we haven’t the option of saying we wanted the lovely Penguin Classics hardback edition, and so forth). The initial intention was to amalgamate everything but I do wonder if it’ll look odd.

I still want to organise by author name, keeping the exception for certain books, such as Peirene Press and Vintage Classics being grouped by publisher. Books by different authors that nevertheless share a visual theme.

Assuming that at some time everyone has shared shelf space with another, how have you chosen to organise those shelves?

I decided to read Lindy Woodhead’s Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge because I am quite the fan of the ITV series. I find myself really enjoying learning about and watching the emergence of modern retail and wanted to know more about the man from the ‘source’ (the source being the book that is secondary rather than primary material).

Whilst I knew the book would be different as television and film makers always change things when adapting, it surprised me just how big a difference there is between Woodhead’s biography and the ITV show. In brief, there is very little similarity beyond the shop itself and a few elements of Selfridge’s life.

Of course as a person who prefers accuracy lest she learn falsehood, the discovery that I was watching an entirely inaccurate portrayal of a real person and family shocked me, because the show is far more different to its source material than any other I have come across. (This excludes programs that are simply based on characters, of course.) However, I was utterly compelled by the comparison, because in reading the book it is easy to see why ITV changed the story so much.

When you think of a show like The Tudors, you wonder why the makers couldn’t have just used the real history. There is no reason why TV Henry couldn’t have had real Henry’s two sisters; there is no reason TV Catherine of Aragon couldn’t have had real Catherine of Aragon’s hair colour, and so forth. This is because no matter what you think about Henry, tyrant or virtuous prince (as David Starkey calls the young Henry), there is plenty of excitement to be found within the pages of any well-written book about the king. As my eight year old self discovered, all those wives make for a lot of interesting stories, and as my teenage self discovered, when the wives are added to the Reformation and the murders and the affairs, you’ve one fascinating era in store to find out about.

This isn’t the case with Harry Gordon Selfridge. TV Harry helps the war effort for Britain, real Harry’s application was dismissed. TV Harry is a family man for all his affairs, real Harry wasn’t particularly interested in his children. TV Harry has good relationships with his staff and women have good jobs, real Harry was aloof from his staff and the women weren’t as high up.

For myself I think it’s interesting that even though I value accuracy, in ITV’s case I understand and value the changes they have made. It may be interesting to read about Harry Selfridge, even if Woodhead’s writing is a bit dry, but put that man on screen unaltered and few would be tuning in to watch. Is it sad? Yes, in a way, because Selfridge’s career ended so badly that it’s a double blow – but at the same time ITV have created a show about a man more likely to be revered in general for the extras of family and staff interest. And thus remembered.

Mr Selfridge may be a show that is completely inaccurate except for its basis in the department store (even the labelling is inaccurate – the real Selfridge never put the name of the store on windows or doors) but it introduces viewers to a man they are far more likely to go looking for more information about, versus if television had shown the straight-forward truth.

For once this stickler for accuracy has to say she’s happily admitting defeat.

What do you think about accuracy on screen and have you ever found a show or film that changed your view (be it for or against accuracy)?

Subscribe to this site via email and you’ll receive 3 posts a week. If you use Gmail, you may find the posts are stored in your ‘social’ or ‘promotions’ tab.

After much time spent considering, I’m closing my blog’s Facebook page. Admittedly I don’t spend much time on Facebook. I prefer the real-time interaction Twitter provides and even though I often forget to visit Pinterest, I prefer the reason d’etre of the visual network.

However my reasons for finishing with Facebook aren’t about preference. There are three reasons. The first is that I’m getting bored of being locked out of my account due to ‘suspicious activity’. Perhaps if I had thousands of likes on Facebook I would understand this, but I have a grand total of 23. I rather suspect that what is truly happening is that Facebook has taken issue with the changing nature of IP addresses and decided it means that various people are trying to sign in when really it’s me every time. After a couple of ‘confirm who you are’ attempts that worked, I now have to ‘explain what I was doing when it happened’. After doing this once and finding myself having to repeat just a couple of weeks on, I see it as time wasted. I could be having a conversation about books on Twitter instead.

I expect that the 23 followers I have on Facebook likely subscribe to the blog, or follow me on Twitter and so on. And this leads me to my second reason for opting out – since Facebook changed their foremost consideration to paid advertising, very few followers of any Facebook pages whose editor isn’t spending money are seeing any updates. Reports vary but the numbers of followers seeing updates are very low across the board, as low as 1%. This means that if you’ve a few thousand followers, perhaps a few dozen are seeing your updates. If you’d bought followers, then obviously, like Twitter’s purge of spammers, it’s not such a bad thing. But it’s surely not right when a person who decided to follow your page sees no updates from that page.

My third reason is that whilst I understand Twitter and Pinterest, I’ve never really known how to make Facebook different other than to spread posting across all three social media accounts and thus seem to be online only sporadically. My Facebook posts inevitably end up being similar or the same as my tweets, and though I could always work on my knowledge of Facebook, this reason is simply just another reason – the other two reasons already made the decision for me.

So from now on I’m concentrating exclusively on Twitter and Pinterest. I may use time saved from Facebook to work on my Booklikes account or I might just spend more time on Twitter.

Have you thought of giving up a social network/have you actually given one up?

This photograph was taken by Palo.

I don’t know whether to speak of this in terms of something I ‘have’, ‘deal with’, ‘find an issue with’ or simply just neutrally. I will sometimes start reading a new book only to find, a few pages in, that I’ve not truly been reading. The first few pages have gone over my head; the only thing I’ve acknowledged is the oft-cited-to-be-important first sentence. Sometimes it’s annoying. I’ll go back and re-read those pages. Other times I simply accept that it has happened like so many times before, and that I’ll be truly into the book by the start of the second chapter. (This of course depends on chapter length – if the chapter is long I’m reading perfectly already by chapter two.)

I find this… phenomenon… happens regardless of whether or not I have high expectations for the book, but that it happens most often if I’m really excited to read it. (I reckon you can be excited to read a book with low expectations – I would be excited to read Cranford, but as I didn’t like North And South my expectations would be low.)

I’ve thought about it over and over again, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it stems from the excitement of wanting to read the book taking over the actual present enjoyment. Rarely are the first few pages of a book amazing, and indeed I’ve often found that a dull beginning can herald a brilliant book. An epic novel is always going to need to spend time on the background information. I think there is something to be said for being so excited that you want to get past that background as quickly as possible. And as much as we often lament having already read a book and being unable to ever go back to quite the same state of wonder as when we were in the midst of it, it’s natural to want the reverse before you’ve begun.

Often going back and re-reading the pages works, but sometimes it doesn’t and it’s a case of skimming them for any names, locations, and so forth, and letting the rest go. The pressure, whether felt or not, of knowing you’ve not taken the information in and knowing you should have, can have a negative impact, ultimately meaning you won’t succeed if you tried, anyway. A remedy can be found in putting the book aside for a while, but when you’re excited you don’t want to do that.

I’ve accepted this oddness in my reading, though obviously I feel guilty and sometimes a bad reader for it. But the good thing is it doesn’t impair your knowledge of the work in general, and if or when you re-read the book, the position you are in then of having read it before and thus containing a difference of excitement, means you’re far more grounded. And that happens whether you missed pages the first time or not.

Does your excitement over a book affect your reading of it in any way?

When it comes to spoilers I am almost always in the ‘don’t like them’ camp. I find a lot of pleasure in reading a book I know little about and find that, for example, a thriller or mystery will seem more fast-paced if I know nothing about the plot or reveals. Then there are occasions when a spoiler will make me want to experience the story for myself. This does happen more often in regards to film – I don’t know why, perhaps because films don’t take such a big chunk of your time? – but it happens enough in my reading that I would find it awkward to say ‘I hate spoilers, the end’.

There are a few specific cases where I really don’t want to know anything at all about a book. Somewhat ironically, given their general fame, these are the classics and in particular books from the 1700s and onwards. Where great classic epics are concerned I like the idea of making my own conclusions without the prior influence of the media, for example.

I liked and very much appreciated that I knew nothing about Pride And Prejudice other than that there was a character called Mr Darcy whom it seemed everyone had an opinion on. (Somehow I got through my pre-Austen years believing he was a bad man.) Similarly I was completely ignorant about Jane Eyre. And I think it’s telling that these are my favourite books. Of course I’ll never know how spoilers may have affected my reading of those novels, but given they were such a good fit for me I think I can say that I may not have enjoyed them so much if there had been less to discover.

I know that I feel a little disappointed that I know what will happen in Anna Karenina, and a little wary nowadays of reading opinion pieces that start on a different topic and then move on to specific books. However I know that I picked up the book a few weeks after it was spoiled precisely because it had been spoiled – it was a case of ‘I might as well just read it now’, knowing I’d never forget that spoiler and that I might end up never reading it if I didn’t make the effort straight away.

And in the case of the Anna Karenina spoiler, it’s interesting – the spoiler made me think the book would be far better and more thrilling than I’m finding it to be. The spoiler raised my expectations.

It really depends on what’s spoiled and how. If the ending is spoiled, you might not feel the need to read the book. If the theme is revealed you might jump at the chance to study it.

When we watch the film before the book, which inevitably happens even when you try to avoid it because it’s not always obvious, the book is spoiled. The film spoils the book far more than your average remark or quotation, and yet it feels different. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that you tend to actively choose this sort of spoiler, but there is surely much to be said for knowing that the book is always going to have more content, that the film will lack the author’s writing style, and that there is still a lot to discover. Somehow a film is less of a spoiler whilst being far more of a spoiler. And it’s perhaps most likely to make the book appealing.

I’m not keen on spoilers but I can’t say they have ‘destroyed’ any books for me. And as much as I’d like to not be able to say this, sometimes they improve my reading. (Though you can keep those Brontë, Dickens, and du Maurier secrets to yourself.)

How do spoilers affect your reading? (Please refrain from including spoilers themselves!)