When too many books are barely enough…

Hello gleemailees,

As you can imagine, we’re all exhausted after the incredibly efficient move back to our beloved  #49. I haven’t worked 4 days in a row since retirement almost two years ago, so the old pins were rather weary. But it was exciting and the newly renovated shop is gorgeous. Good riddance to the hideous old carpet we all - customers and staff - put up with for decades! Not to mention the leaking walls and creaking floorboards. Oh, I could go on…

The publishing model which has been in existence for many years, whereby publishers spread the risk they take on new books by publishing a lot of titles, is being challenged in the US by a new outfit called Authors Equity. Headed by three very experienced publishing people the new venture will not pay authors an advance but will give them ‘the lion’s share’ of any profit.  They’ll reduce overheads by having a skeleton staff and hiring freelancers as well as publishing fewer titles.  Time will tell whether it works.  I have always thought the publishing industry is  unsustainable on an environmental level. Too many books are published and way too many are pulped.  Needless to say, most publishers will disagree with me.

Having said all that, I’m so glad the books I’ve been reading lately were published. Prize-winning author of The Return, Hisham Matar’s novel, My Friends, is a beautifully written and poignant tale of three Libyan (like Matar) men exiled in Britain. It’s a heart-wrenching insight into what it’s like to lose your country and your family and to be a stranger in a strange land.  David Finkel’s An American Dreamer is a nonfiction account of a veteran of the Iraq war as he despairs over the fate of American democracy and the second rise of Trump.  His next door neighbour is an avid Trump supporter, echoing the sharp decisions in that troubled country.  I’ve also read the brilliant, poetic and quite mesmerizing Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Six astronauts orbiting the earth reflect on what they see through the spacecraft windows, on the strangeness of human life, of being suspended in the cosmos, counterbalanced with the day-to-day routine of their work and their all too human concerns.  Incredibly original and astounding in its complexity.

Morgan