Shot Down in Flames

It never ceases to annoy me how many 'new' non-fiction titles there are on the same old subjects. Obviously, publishers like to play it safe, knowing what sells, but too many such books are simply derivative hackwork. Granted, occasionally someone has something genuinely new to say, has a fresh angle, or is a real expert. If I could restore a Spitfire to full working order, for instance, I'd expect the right publisher to take me seriously if I proposed a 'How To' guide. But I know for sure what would happen were I to wake up one morning and think, "I know, I'll write a book telling the remarkable true story of how an amazing plane called the Spitfire won the Battle of Britain against all odds," then were to send off a proposal along those lines...

Werebeast Erotica, Anyone?

I see that Alara Branwen, author of such essential little ebooks as Banging the Werebear and Gangbang of the Werewolves, has written another mighty tome - all 28 pages of it - called ... wait for it ... With the Weretiger. (Yes, I've been 'egosurfing' again.) Come on, Alara, surely you could have thought of a better title than that?! (No, I can't think of one either.)

Reluctant Congregation

In 1906, Methodist missionary Archibald McMillan - seen here with a man-eating leopard he has just shot dead - recalled passing through a remote aboriginal village in central India one time in the 1890s and telling the headman he would come back the following day, sing some hymns and give the villagers the Good News. "To my surprise," he wrote,"on arriving [the next morning] I found the place deserted, the entire population having fled into the jungle!"

California Dreaming

I've only ever really been interested in the past (which is probably why I'm so hopeless at such mundane matters as earning a living). History to me means the untold stories of ordinary people. When I see old film footage, for instance, my eye is always drawn to passers-by, people in the background, faces in the crowd. I'll be watching an episode of The Rockford Files, say, and in the distance - too far away for them to be an extra - there'll be someone strolling along the beach of Paradise Cove. Who were they, I'll wonder, what did they do, and what became of them? But above all I'll be thinking, 'How I wish that was me!'

Order, Order!

I hate books. I've come to this startling realization after yet another failed attempt to organize my bookshelves. Just when I think, say, I've got all my Hemingways (books by and about) lined up together, I find a rogue volume that's ever so slightly too tall to fit, so it has to go on another, taller shelf. (Warning - crap doodle follows...)

The end result is I can never find anything (a problem compounded by varifocals - fellow wearers will understand). The thing with bookshelves is, you want as many as possible, but you have to make do with fewer, taller ones just so you can accommodate the occasional outsize volumes that some antisocial publishers will insist on publishing. (As for books that also stick out over the edges of shelves, don't get me started.) Paper comes in standard sizes, so why can't books? 

Carpe Diem?

Frederick Hicks, a Forest Officer in India, kept a diary. His entry for 15 March 1887? “Camp Sark—shot 2 tigers before breakfast.”

In Mysore in 1872, when aged 24, famed elephant-catcher George Sanderson once shot three leopards and a wild cat before breakfast. As he recalled: “We had had a capital morning’s sport. The arrangement had been perfect; the shooting had been—ahem! I will leave my readers to judge; nothing, even to the cat, had escaped us; and all this before ten o’clock!”

Personally, I'm not at my best first thing in the morning.

One in the Eye

I rather like the idea of getting your own back on someone simply by sticking pins in a doll:

Trouble is, such sympathetic magic (or any other kind of magic, for that matter) only works - through the very great power of suggestion - on people who genuinely fear it, and almost by definition that means the poor and downtrodden, not the rich and powerful. What we need, then, is some means of mass hypnosis whereby we can convince the bastards who actually deserve to be shafted that witchcraft really works. Then the rest of us can all go to bed happy for once.

Changing tack, as someone with an unhealthy interest in both fishing and tigers, this caught my eye while I was trawling the sewernet for something else last night:

According to the blurb at http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/display_title.asp?ISBN=9781742610832&Author=Maguire,%20Emily

it is "set among the louche world of Hanoi's expatriate community" and is all about "a woman struggling with the morality of finding peace in a war-haunted city, personal fulfilment in the midst of poverty and sexual joy with a vulnerable youth."

Not what it says on the tin, then.