Tough times mean that misery lit has lost its appeal - only epic page-turners can make us forget the gloom, writes Orna Mulcahy
I'M ON Amazon's website browsing and wondering if I can get away with giving everyone a book for Christmas. Even brand new titles have their prices slashed, and the idea that the lot could arrive on the doorstep in three days' time, gift-wrapped and all, is tantalising. It will save me hours mooning around Easons among the three-for-two stands where I can always find two books worth reading, but never a third.
I'm armed with book choice pages pulled from various newspapers, including a download of the New York Times's100 Notable Books of 2008, and ready to fill a cart, but even so, I'm hesitating. Some of these notable books come across as a little, well, insubstantial. Worthy, maybe. Entertaining, I wonder. Value for money, probably not.
Whimsical first novels, bravura tales of city living, touching accounts of migrant workers in rural China or sexual awakening in Afghanistan are about as tempting just now as those searing accounts of poverty-stricken childhoods in Hull that are thankfully drifting out of fashion. Misery lit is losing its appeal now that we could all be heading in that direction once again.
I find descriptions like "bleak", "forthright", "gritty", "bittersweet" or "deliciously ironic" eminently resistible at the moment. Things are bleak and forthright enough in my circle without giving people heart-rending tales from the slums of Punjab or accounts of shattered lives in the wake of 9/11 or even gripping emotional dramas filled with explosive revelations and devastating consequences. All in a measly 199 pages.
Bring back the thumping good read, I say. Big, long books are what people need to see them through the long, chocolate-eating, sofa-bound days of Christmas and beyond. I'm thinking books of no less than 700 pages of closely written type, that a true storyteller slaved over, rather than the slight but brilliantly presented musings of a graduate of creative writing classes. Forget taut accounts of turmoil in far-flung places, and think towering novels that span generations and continents and that have characters with easily pronounced names.
Classic big reads like Forever Amber, a 972-page saga that zips through the bedrooms and drawing rooms of Restoration England and covers the Plague and the Great Fire of London into the bargain. Irwin Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man, Colleen McCullough's epic The Thorn Birds,Herman Wouk's The Winds of War, Rootsby Alex Haley - all of them made into enthralling mini-series that got us through the depressed bits of the 1970s.
Then there's Gone With The Wind. Even speedy readers will take about three days to get through its 1,000-odd pages, from the first garden party with the Tarleton boys to the final wrenching scene at Tara. Margaret Mitchell wrote it during the Great Depression and it sold a million copies in the first year, and stayed top of the bestseller list for two years. They are all still in print, as is Thackeray's Vanity Fairwith Becky Sharp giving Scarlett O'Hara a run for her money. Let's not forget plucky Emma Hart from Barbara Taylor Bradford's masterpiece A Woman of Substance.They're all there on Amazon, some at ridiculously cheap prices, along with the complete works of Jackie Collins, whose books have never been out of print.
Younger readers might find all these books old hat, what with people talking in weird English, or willing to kill or die for what now seem like ridiculously tiny amounts of money.
For them there's Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts's triple A-rated 900-pager, water-damaged copies of which are practically legal tender among the gap-year brigade.
Or the RSI-inducing Baroque Trilogyby Neal Stephenson, an enthralling blend of history and sci-fi running to an astonishing 2,700 pages. That should see them through the winter.
You might say it's ridiculous to judge a book by it's heft; that it's in the same territory as buying books by the yard to show off. Yes, a slim volume of Samuel Beckett can stand up to a door-stopping Proust any day of the week, but still, there are slim volumes out there that just aren't worth the money. I'm thinking of the last book I bought - a literary thriller set in New York with such enormous print that the whole 200 pages could have been condensed to about 50. It was really a novella, maybe even a short story that had been strung out and priced at €14.99. It wasn't the wooden characters that got me, it was the fact that it was pretending to be a bigger book in every way.
By the way, if you can't face reading at all, if you have no time because your company has let so many people go and dumped the extra workload on your desk, or if you are stressed out by not keeping up with the girls in the book club, then here's a hint. Take up poker instead. A friend tells me that three good pieces of gossip will get you into her poker circle. No preparation necessary. Diamonds are de rigeur, that's if you haven't sent them to O'Reillys to be sold.