Heaven for readers? Or something else…?

Hi, I’m Philip.

I took the photo above on holiday in Lisbon. The Livraria Ler Devagar in the LX Factory is a wonderful book shop. It almost overwhelms with the sheer amount of books you can buy. Book, after book, after book, stack after stack, down corridors and floors - all the new stuff a reader could want.

My problem was, I fell out of love with new books a few years ago.

My idea of a great couple of hours used to be two hours in Borders in Brighton.

I especially loved all the new book display tables at the front of the shop as you walked in. They were just so exciting. All those lovely covers! The promise of what was inside! The newness of them all! The multi-buy discounts! Every single book was so desirable, I’d buy them in armfuls.

After a while I realised something was wrong. 

I got bored.

I had to struggle to finish most of these new books.

The ones I did manage to finish I soon forgot.

I begin to disengage.

I abandoned books halfway through, or after forty pages, or even less.

I started to wonder. Maybe all these fancy new books just weren’t very … good.

Why?

Sturgeon’s Law says ‘90% of everything is crap’.

When I buy a book, I’m looking for the top 10% of books. The 10% which are blessed with almost supernatural impact and legacy. So where can I find them?

Time helps sift. Anything that has lasted fifty years or more and is still being read is probably going to be worth reading. 

Time removes the competition and leaves the good stuff — but what makes a book as good as that in the first place?

• Some books glimmer in our minds ‘like jewels in the dark’ 

• Some books take root in our lives 

• Some characters are more real to us than many of the humans we know

• Some words ‘glow like burning coal’ and ‘pour off every page’

• Some stories jump off the page and enter our lives

Why are those books so great?

Why do we remember them?

Often it’s because they have been turned into TV shows or movies or even songs. (But why were they picked and not others?) 

Sometimes it’s because we loved them as children. (But why did we love those books and not the rest?)

I have lots of my own theories. Some of them are deeply technical, and rely on ideas about story structure, character design, and mythic underpinning.

I don’t have to go so deep though. I reckon books like that have at least one (probably several) of these things:

• A unforgettable scene (e.g. Dracula’s ship arriving at Whitby)

• An unforgettable character (e.g. Paddington Bear)

• An unforgettable world (e.g. Ghormenghast) 

• An unforgettable feel (e.g. Starship Troopers)

Fifteen unforgettable things

These scenes I’ll never forget. Any of them work for you?

1. The death of Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring

2. Alice falling down the rabbit hole

3. The death of Gwen Stacy (The Amazing Spider-Man 121)

4. Tess of the d’Urbervilles being captured at Stonehenge 

5. Robinson Crusoe finding the single footprint on the beach 

6. The lanky Rabbit playing basketball with the boys at the beginning of Rabbit, Run 

7. Scrooge seeing Marley’s face on the door knocker

8. Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway watching the fair roll into town in Something Wicked This Way Comes 

9. Robin Hood shooting his last arrow - he’ll be buried where it falls

10. The mysterious moaning noises booming across the moors in Lorna Doone

11. Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost appearing at Heathcliff’s window

12. Mr Toad driving his car

13. Kim sitting on the Zam Zammah cannon in Lahore

14. Steerpike climbing up onto the roof of Ghormenghast

15. Heaven swallowing the smoke of Beowulf’s funeral pyre

Time is short

Forget ‘high-brow’, ‘low-brow’, or how ‘worthy’ or ‘correct’ a book is. These days, I only want to read books that make my life warmer and leave me with vivid memories.

Classics are reliable, but sometimes I want great stories that talk about today. The problem: how do you tell the classics from the 90% without wasting a whole lot of life reading a whole lot of the 90%?

The problem is that while some new books may live for two hundred years, most die in three weeks.

The online review system is fatally compromised, and conventional reviewers never proved useful for me in my Borders Buying Days.

How do we sift through the 90% of chaff to find the good books without the benefit of 50 years’ perspective?

We can’t, not reliably.

So I’ve decided I’ll have to write my own.

Now, look. I’m just a jobbing writer, and I’ll never feature on any Top 100 Novels lists.

Even so, I never knowingly write rubbish.

The books I write work for me. Maybe they’ll work for you too.

Here’s my ambition

Firstly, I don’t want (or need) to sell millions of copies.

I’ve had audiences of many millions for the TV episodes I’ve written. That itch has been properly scratched and I explain why I left TV here.

This time round I want to find the people who want to read what I was put on earth to write.

For those people (and there may well be only twenty five of you!) I want to write the very best books possible.

• Books that only I can write — and only you will enjoy

• Books you won’t abandon after 40 pages

• Books you’ll want to pass on to the people who understand you most

• Books you might even remember for 50 years

If that resonates with you, then I’ve written a manifesto. A short piece that lays out the territory. It will show you what I’m up to, and why. It’s also a call to arms for people who sense there is so much more to be had, even in the heart of a traditional genre novel.

Manifesto — Stories that run deeper >>>