I stumbled upon a website called 'I love reading' a few weeks ago, which as one might imagine is a site devoted to books. What is good about this site from my point of view is that one is able to read the first chapter of most of the books, which allows one to form a good opinion of the book's qualities and the writer's style. Amazon has something similar, but for only a small selection of books; also ILR allows the chapter to be downloaded as a pdf file, whereas Amazon displays a non-printable first ten pages on the screen (and those ten pages often include a title page and a contents page, so it's not even ten pages).
I went through the different genres and read a few opening chapters of books whose description had caught my fancy. It's just as well I read those chapters, as most of them solidly dissuaded me from even thinking about purchasing the books. But in the biography/autobiography section, I stumbled upon a minor gem - "Tales of the country", by Brian Viner. This is the story of a family that undergoes the metropause, which can be defined as the midlife urge to leave the city, to swap a tiny garden for several acres and to exchange the sound of hooting traffic for tha of hooting owls. If I hadn't done this myself nearly thirty years ago, I would be tempted to do so now.
After reading the opening chapter (which as usual gives a slightly misleading hint as to the tone of the book), I resolved on the spot to order the book. The recommended retail is seven pounds 99, but lovereading were prepared to sell it for five pounds 99. Out of curiosity, I checked the book at British Amazon, where it was selling for only three pounds 99. As ordering one item is normally not cost effective regarding the packaging, I decided to get an item residing on my wish list - the dvd of the second season of "William and Mary".
The book arrived on Sunday, after a few days after my order. Reading the first chapter again was revelatory as I discovered that the online version was slightly edited from the real thing: not enough to make a real difference, but disconcerting none the less. I read the book all the way through (as I always try to do with new books) during the course of one evening.
The book is throughly entertaining, as one might expect from a newspaper columnist (Viner writes for The Independent as well as freelancing), but on finishing the book I was left with a slight taste of disappointment in my mouth. To be sure, the book did tell about the Crouch End family moving to deepest Herefordshire and how they passed their first year, but a large amount of the material was anecdotes which came from the mouths of the odd collection of characters that the Viners met in their new abode. An uncharitable person might consider this to be padding.
Viner comes off as a lower quality Bill Bryson, which is a shame as he could have written a lot more from his own (or from his family's) perspective instead of always settling for the bon mot. The name of Viner's column is indeed "Tales from the country" (although it only became this after he moved), and he paraphrases some of the items which appeared in the columns along with their responses. Although a collection of the columns might be considered simple recycling, printing a few ad verbatim might have produced more original material which could have replaced the borrowed anecdotes - unless of course the columns themselves contain the same stories.
Minor carp aside, I can definitely recommend this book to anyone who has heard the siren call of the metropause as well as anyone who enjoys Bill Bryson or countryside anecdotes.
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