‘There’s a gulf between what we are seen to be reading and what we’re really reading.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
T HE the British reading public are a bunch of hypocrites. A recentchanges list of Waterstone’s top-selling paper books of 2015 Compared with the top 20 ebooks Purchased from Amazon In the same period, HAS revealed the gulf between what we are seen to be reading and what we’re really reading. The real book versus ebook list is like seeing Dorian Grey’s public face right up against his portrait.
While on paper we dole out our wages to prop up the careers of Colm Tóibín, Ian McEwan and Richard Flanagan, what we read on our Kindles is very different. We’re like the American winos, hiding our cheap, nasty, yet oh-so-satisfying liquor in brown paper bags – or the dead gray plastic of a Kindle. We sip fine literary wine in public and neck any old drain clearing hooch When We’re left to our own (e-reading) devices: harrowing first-person accounts of abuse, marshmallowy love stories, gritty killings, True Crime, contemporary commuting -based psychodramas with “girl” and “train” in the title.
We like our fictional characters to be multidimensional (except for Ana Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey, who’s as thick as a post), but as readers we the remain resolutely two-faced. I’m not surprised, though. Who would not be desperate to find out the ending of Dare She Date Again? by Amy Ruttan, in the Mills & amp; Boon Medical Romance line? It’s about a widow, – a paramedic turned air ambulance pilot – who falls for her hunky trainee. Genius.
Related: The Girl on the Train tops Amazon’s UK ebook sales this year so far
And right now in the Amazon Kindle Top 100 I am Excited to See Stone Deep: An Alpha Bad Boy Romance by Tess Oliver and Anna Hart at number 86, and Cover Model Village Devon Hartford at Number 89. Both feature striking cover images of nameless, faceless, oiled beefcake – and, no, I ‘ m not talking about a late-summer barbecue platter from Lidl.
Meanwhile, copies of untouched prize-winning novels languish on our shelves, impressive but remote, like an exhibition of Elizabeth Taylor’s evening dresses. The hardbacks are what we feel we ought to buy, or better yet give as gifts, Which show our high-mindedness while Ensuring That we pass the reading burden on to someone else.
We tout our beautiful Edwardian- Green Virago Classics or zingy orange Penguin Classics, giving a little eye sparkle of recognition to the other person on the train reading That year’s much-admired novel-that-Proves-the-novel-isn’t-dead. We pay for hardback editions of thoughtful, exquisitely written meditations on something or other, Which took years to write.
But They only take a few seconds to shelve and forget. What we really RESPOND to ice the old kiss-kiss-bang-bang, the thrill of the Penny Dreadful, the glitter of the music hall, the big-screen swoon. Well, we yearn in our imaginations; perhaps not in life, where pee-pee etc would disrupt the school run. Your Kindle library is like yourpersonal dark web, the place where your basest instincts and Truest, rawest, subconscious urges settle like slime at the bottom of a forbidding lake. Indeed, Slime at the Bottom of a forbidding Lake is the title of my forthcoming enovel, Which I am generously releasing on to the market for 99p, complete with authentic spelling mistakes, a cover image ripped from Shutterstock and the promise of a sex scene on everypage That does not have a murder on it.
The Real Book versus ebook list is like seeing Dorian Grey’s public face right up against his portrait
Let’s embrace the truth. In our hands we have highly wrought prose about highly wrought Characters and Their personnel, political and cultural issues. In our heads it’s all bums, willies, magic amulets and blood-soaked corpses. I think it’s time to come out of the Kindle closet and admit the strain of Maintaining A Double Life. Time to upload venerable and worthy works on to our e-readers, place them care fully into a drawer and forget about them, then hit WH Smiths at Heathrow Terminal 5 and go crazy buying what we really want.
The fine literary novels can wait for our retirement years, When Natural Resources will be low and we can burn them for fuel. In the meantime, we need to liberate ourselves, Reclaim the misery memoirs, overripe pseudo-medieval swords and sorcery bunk and PG-rated romantic fantasies, and flash That trash with pride.
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