I was going to write something terribly interesting (or perhaps merely terrible) about writing and technology but that can wait. I'm going to rave about someone else's book instead.
There are many ways I choose what to read, ranging from browsing idly to discovering something by an author whose work I've enjoyed before to a sudden craving for an old favourite. And then there's the method which is more me than any other: going off at a tangent.
In the past this has led to some fantastic finds, particiularly when I've applied the priniciple to music (an interest in David Bowie's more obscure work leading to Iggy Pop singing Belgian jazz, for example). The book I'm reading now is one I came across originally as part of a gift set when I was a student, which I suppose comes under idle browsing because I liked the look of the set but couldn't get to the blurb. And it's an old favourite, establishing itself as such on first reading as one of the books I wish I'd written (although to have done so I'd have to been a) much older and b) deceased by now, which would make this blog marginally more interesting). But I've come back to it through a classic piece of tangentery. I shall take you through it in stages so you can tell if you too choose books by this method.
1. Over the Christmas holiday, the 1983 film Wargames was on TV. I knew I'd loved it as a kid but couldn't remember enough about it to know why. About ninety minutes in, John Wood turned up and I realised that was why, he'd made a huge impression on me when I was about nine.
2. So after the film I tried to think what else I'd seen him in, which meant a browse on the Internet Movie Database, very useful for settling 'oh, it's whatersname from thingy, oh you know, no, not her, you fool' arguments in our house.
3. And I saw that in the 1960s he'd been in an adaptation of Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, playing the poet Richard Cadogan.
4. Richard Cadogan is one of my Fictional Men For Whom I Have A Soft Spot.
5. John Wood would have been excellent in the role.
6. The series does not seem available to watch now.
7. Therefore I am rereading The Moving Toyshop and it is every bit as good as I remembered - and it's been a while since I read it so a lot of it is coming to me almost as new and it is a huge treat.
So, in a roundabout way that is no kind of useful review at all, I recommend that you try Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen novels, solving Oxford crimes decades before Inspector Morse while wearing an extraordinary hat. Except Swan Song because that wasn't as good as the others.
Which brings me back, in a tortuously roundabout way, to my original question. How do you choose your books? Do tell...
