True crime

Seen at my local Target, August 2013.

Does size matter? A tale of Jack Reacher

So, there's a new Jack Reacher book, A Wanted Man.  Oh Reacher, how I love you (and thankyou Lee Child for inventing him)!   For those who don't know him, Reacher is an ex-military cop, the hero of a wonderful set of thrillers where 'men want to be him  and women want to be with him'.  He's a modern day gunslinger, the guy who wanders into town to right some wrongs, then is gone when the job is done.  Oh, and he's described as 6'5", about 230lbs, and built like the proverbial brick shithouse.



My perfect Reacher would be someone like Ray Stevenson, rugged but not pretty, and not super young (Reacher is currently in his late 40s in the books).  <--------     Here's Ray!

And Hollywood gives us this -------->

Yes, you recognise the face, it's Tom Cruise... He bought the rights, hired a director and took the role. Now my initial reaction was utter jaw-dropped horror.  Which part of 6'5" was not clear to Mr Cruise?!

Lee Child has defended Cruise, saying Reacher's size in the books is a metaphor for him as an unstoppable force, which Child feels Cruise can portray.  Reacher himself comments that it's the small, whippy Special Forces guys (who could kill you with one finger) are the ones to worry about.

So, like Anne Rice when Tom Cruise was announced to play the vampire Lestat in Interview with The Vampire, I'm horrified.  BUT, I'm prepared to be persuaded, and I might even get a nice surprise, like Anne Rice did.  She so loved Cruise's portrayal of Lestat when she saw it that she took out a full page ad in Variety to retract her previous comments. 

I loved him as Lestat, but hadn't read the books beforehand.  I'll have to wait for Dec 21 to see how I feel about Cruise as Reacher.  Let's hope he isn't Jack-shit!

The Kindle - a moral dilemma

'To Kindle or not to Kindle, that is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous book prices,

or take arms against a sea of e-books,

and by opposing end free dowloads,

to read, to buy, 

purchase the file,

ay, there's the rub'

(with apologies to Shakespeare's  Hamlet, Act III, Scene I)

What's a girl to do in this day and age, hey?  And particularly, what's a girl who spent 15 years in the book trade to do? 

For a long time, I resisted the idea of a Kindle, my bookseller's heart rejected the lack of paper pages to flick, the impersonal generic-ness of reading from a screen, the empty feeling of one's hands holding not a wodge of paper but a bit of plastic, and even the absence of that wonderful book smell.

And then I left the book trade to finish studying and so as not to work weekends any more (kills your social life with your kids once they're at school!), and my endless source of free and cheap books, the river that had run through my life for 15 years, dried up in a flash.

In the past 2.5 years, I've bought books second-hand, got them from *hangs head in shame* Target, from eBay, from Amazon, read an awful lot of fanfiction (and that's another post!), even a few times bought them from proper bookshops like Dymocks, and ON A KINDLE (the horror!)!!!  Pretty much the only thing I haven't done is join a library, and that's because I'm too impatient to wait for favourite authors on a waiting list (yes, I will die if I can't read the latest Harry Hole or Sookie Stackhouse the week it comes out...).

I'm not sure where this pic originally comes from, but it was obviously taken in a real bookshop!!

I'm not sure where this pic originally comes from, but it was obviously taken in a real bookshop!!

And I have to say, I really love my Kindle and she is a lot of fun (her name's Enid).  I'm coming to terms with my place in a mutli-media book age.  And when I saw this quote from the wonderful Stephen Fry on the internet a few days ago, I felt at peace

Library porn for bibliophiles

Look at this!

This is the Mortlock Wing at the State Library of South Australia, and honestly one of the most lovely libraries I've ever been in (yes I know there are many other lovelies in the book world, but this one on my doorstep is a favourite).  This wing houses the State Library's South Australiana collection, which began early in the colony's lifetime as one trunk of books brought out from England in 1860, and now takes up 50 kilometres of shelf space in storage.

Yes, I had to read it twice when I saw it, FIFTY LINEAR KILOMETRES OF BOOKS = bookgasm!  You could basically shut me in there with a large box of muesli bars and not see me for 30 years or so.  Heaven.

The wing is named after one of the library's greatest benefactors, John Tennant, who left over $70K to the libraries of South Australia when he died in 1950, a phenomenal sum for the time.  And I'm jolly glad he did, as South Australia's libraries are superb.  Thanks John!