Rob Kitchin’s post about the publishing industry looking for minor variations on a theme rather than new and interesting works has prompted this particular ramble. I can sense Rob’s frustration as an author trying to get something ‘different’ published and I thought I’d share that readers (or this reader anyway) are equally frustrated. Sadly I don’t have any great insight into getting publishers to acknowledge this.

Over the past 2-3 years I have changed my reading habits considerably. I used to read loads of the ‘well done but already done’ books that the publishing industry loves. I relied almost exclusively on what was on offer at local chain stores which was usually the massively popular authors (James Patterson, Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, Karin Slaughter etc). If that’s not all the chains stock it’s pretty much all they promote and they usually offer them cheaper than the quirky or the translated or the oddball books and price is a big factor in book buying in Australia. I was actually starting to read far less than I’d ever done because I was bored to tears by most of it but didn’t know where to go to find stuff that might interest me.

Sometime during early 2008 I stumbled across the Aust Crime Fiction website and was simply astonished. There were Australian crime writers? Who knew? I’m being a little facetious there (I’d read books by Jennifer Rowe, Gabrielle Lord, Shane Maloney and one or two others) but I had no idea there were dozens of Australian crime writers. I had soon tracked down a few new titles and was enjoying the pleasure of reading something different. After that one website I got a bit more deliberate in my searching and discovered even more brilliant resources, like Euro Crime, and started following a few book bloggers who seemed to be enjoying their reading more than I had been.

And so a monster was born (a monster being defined as a 150+ item TBR pile).

In 2009 I finished 126 books and 74 of them were by new to me authors. So far this year 41 of the 79 books I have finished have been by new to me authors. Over the past 18 months I’ve read 28 books that weren’t first written in English which doesn’t sound like a terribly high number until you consider that in the 40 years prior to that I’d probably read about 3 translated books in total (and one of those was The Little Prince when I was in primary school). In short, I have been taking risks as a reader and have been on what I called a few weeks ago a discovery kick.

Of course I haven’t loved all the books but I am enjoying the experience as a whole. I am reading more books more eagerly than ever because each new book, each reading risk, offers the potential for something wonderful. And along with the comfort reads (there’ll always be a place in my heart for a jolly good English police procedural and ‘my’ American private detectives) there are books that aren’t easily categorised. The books that Rob calls well done but not already done.  My favourite books of the last two years (2008 and 2009) are a world away from what my lists of the previous years would have been (if I’d kept lists then) (which I didn’t).

But on the increasingly rare occasions I venture back into a local bookstore I don’t notice much change from what I call the dark days. Because I know what to look for now I can fossick out the lone copy of the odd translated book but it’s still the Pattersons et al that are promoted on most of the shelf space. Sure this week all the stores have displays featuring Truth by Peter Temple but it wasn’t nearly as prominent when it was published back in December (I found a single copy on the bottom shelf of a local store only a few days after the book’s publication).

Do publishers believe we all want to read the same thing over and over again because it’s true? Or do they make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by commissioning few alternatives? Why are they looking for the next Stieg Larsson (I must have read two dozen articles on this theme in the past 10 days)? Surely they can grasp that at least part of the reason the Millennium trilogy has been so successful is that it is quite different from what’s already on people’s shelves. Readers have enjoyed those differences. Embraced them even. Wouldn’t it be great if the publishers were looking for the next batch of new authors with something different again to offer?

I have just given up on a book. I’m not going to tell you what it was because it was provided to me by the publisher and my review policy says I will only write reviews of books provided this way if I finish them.

But every book I read (or half read) teaches me something about myself and this one made me see really clearly what it is that I like (and don’t like) in my thrillers.

The book is marketed as a political thriller. I agree that it is political but found it about as thrilling as making the bed. Because this was a review book I put a little more thought into what I specifically didn’t enjoy in comparison to other similar books.

If a thriller has

• A twisty, turn-y plot that clips along at a decent pace and offers a pay-off for my investment of time (e.g. family reunited/world saved/justice done)
• At least a couple of characters who, if not exactly three-dimensional, provide enough humanity that I care whether they live (or die), triumph over adversity (or fail) or right a wrong (or don’t).

it will probably get a rating of 3 (= decent/solid entertaining read) on my personal scale. There is a chance of extra points for humour, above-average excitement levels, deeper than usual exploration of a theme that interests me, a male character who doesn’t view every woman he meets as a potential bed mate or a female character who doesn’t look like a supermodel yet, miraculously, proves to have some value to the world anyway. Keeping the car chases short and detailed descriptions of weaponry to a minimum also scores bonus points.

The book I stopped reading (at page 187 of 380+) didn’t have either of the two basic elements I look for, let alone the features that might have scored extra points.

The plot wasn’t very twisty or turn-y. I don’t want to give away stuff that might identify the book but it essentially was a tale in which a woman was brutally killed and lots of people who bore partial responsibility for the event spent the next 180+ pages trying to assuage their guilt and/or shift the blame by having phone conversations where they denied being responsible to anyone who would listen. Yawn.

What the story didn’t offer me was an incentive to keep reading. There was no chance of a pay-off. The world was not going to be saved from total annihilation. No innocent person was to be kept from the electric chair. No child or puppy dog was to be plucked from the jaws of death. No heinous political scandal was going to be uncovered so that justice and goodness would reign, even for a moment. No ancient code would be broken to reveal a monumental human truth. At best the book offered the opportunity to learn which one of several unlikable, self-absorbed cretins would end up being blamed for the death that started the whole sorry mess.

And then there were the characters.

I could not have cared less about them. The women I can recall were stereotyped male fantasies: we had a victim; a lesbian and a drop-dead gorgeous gal who made all grown men drool. There was also a shrewish, unscrupulous harridan of a journalist but she was over 30 and therefore irrelevant (no prizes for guessing she got killed off before the half-way point). The men were corrupt, stupid and full of vengeance or a somewhat ironic outrage. But not one of them was engaging enough to engender a flicker of interest in seeing if they would live let alone triumph. Nor were any of them evil enough for me to want to watch them squirm and die a painful death. I literally could not possibly have cared less about the characters in a book than I did about the characters in this one.

Happily, this is a pretty rare experience for me. I have a weekend stretching ahead and about 150 unread books to choose from. Joy.