Or … is Amazon becoming the publishing Industry?

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A recent Blog Kindle post asked “Is Amazon’s Kindle Destroying the Publishing Industry?“.  The post defends Kindle seeing the traditional publishers as reactionaries, whose business model depended on paper publishing and, effectively. keeping authors from their public.

However, as an author myself (albeit academic) this seems to completely miss the reasons for the publishing industry.  The printing of physical volumes has long been a minimal part of the value, indeed traditional publishers have made good use of the changes in physical print industry to outsource actual production.  The core value for the author are the things around this: marketing, distribution and payment management.

Of these, distribution is of course much easier now with the web, whether delivering electronic copies, or physical copies via print-on demand services.  However, the other core values persist – at their best publishers do not ring fence the public from the author, but on the contrary connect the two.

I recall as a child being in the Puffin Club and receiving the monthly magazine.  I could not afford many books at the time, but since have read many of the books described in its pages and recall the excitement of reading those reviews.  A friend has a collection of the early Puffins (1-200) in their original covers; although some stories age, some are better, some worse, still just being a Puffin Book was a pretty good indication it was worth reading.

The myth we are being peddled is of a dis-intermediated networked world where customers connect directly to suppliers, authors to readers1, musicians to fans.  For me, this has some truth, I am well enough known and well enough connected to distribute effectively.  However for most that ‘direct’ connection is mediated by one of a small number of global sites … and smaller number of companies: YouTube, Twitter, Google, iTunes, eBay, not to forget Amazon.

For publishing as in other areas, what matters is not physical production, the paper, but the route, the connection, the channel.

And crucially Kindle is not just the device, but the channel.

The issue is not whether Kindle kills the publishing industry, but whether Amazon becomes the publishing industry.  Furthermore, if Amazon’s standard markdown and distribution deals for small publishers are anything to go by, Amazon is hardly going to be a cuddly home for future authors.

To some extent this is an apparently inexorable path that has happened in the traditional industries, with a few large publishing conglomerates buying up the smaller publishing houses, and on the high street a few large bookstore chains such as Waterstones, Barnes & Noble squeezing out the small bookshops (remember “You’ve Got Mail“), and it is hard to have sympathy with Waterstones recent financial problems given this history.

Philip Jones of the Bookseller recently blogged about these changes, noting that it is in fact book selling, not publishing that is struggling with profits … even Amazon – no wonder Amazon want more of the publishing action.  However, while Jones notes that the “digital will lead to smaller book chains, stocking fewer titles” in fact “It wasn’t digital that drove this, but it is about to deliver the coup de grâce.”

Which does seem a depressing vision both as author and reader.

  1. Maybe unbound.co.uk is actually doing this – see Guardian article, although it sounds more useful to the already successful writer than the new author.[back]

Mathematics, Jewishness, and Direction

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When I was nearly 18 I was part of the British team to the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in Bucharest (see my account of the experience).  The US team were Jewish1, all eight of them.  While this was noteworthy, it was not surprising. There does seem to be a remarkable number of high achieving Jewish mathematicians, including nearly a quarter of Fields Medal recipients (the Maths equivalent of the Nobel Prize) and half of the mathematics members of the US National Academy of Sciences2.

Is this culture or genes, nature or nurture?

As with most things, I’d guess the answer is a mix.  But, if of culture, what? There is a tradition of Biblical numerology, but hardly widespread enough to make the substantial effects. Is it to do with the discipline of learning Hebrew, maybe just discipline, or perhaps is it that mathematics is one of the fields where there has been less prejudice in academic appointments3.

I have just read a paper, “Disembodying Cognition” by Anjan Chatterjee, that may shed a little light on this.  The paper is an excellent overview of current neuroscience research  on embodiment and also its limits (hence ‘disembodying’).  One positive embodiment result related to representations of actions, such as someone kicking a ball, which are often depicted with the agent on the left and the acted upon object on the right.  However, when these experiments are repeated for Arab participants, the direction effects are reversed (p.102).  Chaterjee surmises that this is due to the right-to-left reading direction in Arabic.

In mathematics an equation is strictly symmetrical, simply stating that two thinsg are equal.  However, we typically see equations such as:

y = 3x + 7

where the declarative reading may well be:

y is the same as “3x + 7”

but the more procedural ‘arithmatic’ reading is:

take x, multiple by three, add seven and this gives y

In programming languages this is of course the normal semantics … and can give rise to confusion in statements such as:

x = x + 1

This is both confusing if read as an equation (why some programming languages have := read as “becomes equal to”), but also conflicts with the left-to-right reading of English and European languages.

COBOL which was designed for business use, used English-like syntax, which did read left to right:

ADD Tiree-Total TO Coll-Total GIVING Overall-Total.

Returning to Jewish mathematicians, does the right-to-left reading of Hebrew help in early understanding of algebra?  But if so then surely there should be many more contemporary Arab mathematicians also.  This is clearly not the full story, but maybe it is one contributory factor.

And, at the risk of confusing all of us brought up with the ‘conventional’ way of writing equations, would it be easier for English-speaking children if they were introduced to the mathematically equivalent, but linguistically more comprehensible:

3x + 7 = y

  1. Although they did have to ‘forget’ while they were there otherwise they would have starved on the all-pork cuisine[back]
  2. Source jews.org “Jews in Mathematics“.[back]
  3. The Russians did not send a team to the IMO in 1978.  There were three explanations of this (i) because it was in Romania, (ii) because the Romanians had invited a Chinese team and (iii), because the Russian national mathematical Olympiad had also produced an all Jewish team and the major Moscow university that always admitted the team did not want that many Jewish students.  Whether the last explanation is true or not, it certainly is consonant with the levels of explicit discrimination in the USSR at the time. [back]

Osama Bin Laden – if only we had let him go to court 10 years ago

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Just hearing the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death and thinking what a waste of 10 years and numerous lives. Straight after 9/11 the Taliban put Osama bin Laden under house arrest and offered to hand him over to an international Islamic court. Just imagine the world today of we had taken up this offer. Instead of a Robin Hood figure and now a martyr, he would have been a criminal tried and convicted.

Osama bin Laden had few friends in the governments of the Mulsim world, even the Taliban, which had been secretly trying to get rid of him to the US for some years before 9/11. Maybe the Islamic court would have had him imprisoned or executed itself. Maybe it would have extradited him to the US to stand trial there. Either way it would have been under an Islamic aegis, rather than perceived as an act against Islam.

Just imagine the world now with no Afghan war, no perceived invasion of Muslim countries (although maybe the Iraq war would have happened earlier without Afghanistan to take attention). So many thousands of lives. Possibly no Bali, Madrid or London bombings.

One of the reason there was no public pressure at the time for this legal rather than military route was the lack of reporting. I was perhaps fortunate to be flying on 9/11 and spent the three weeks after in South Africa where the detention was well reported. When I returned home, it was mentioned just a few times in interviews and discussions and in each case the interviewer ignored it and moved on to a fresh questions as if it were too embarrassing to be discussed. I heard later that, in the early days after 9/11, the BBC was more open in its reporting, but got its ‘wrists slapped’ by government, and so, by the time I was back, was avoiding difficult issues; something that sadly seems to be the case since in many conflicts.

If 10 years ago we had cared more for justice than revenge, then Osama bin Laden could have been a symbol of unity between Islamic and Western worlds, jointly prosecuted and condemned for the killing of innocents. Instead he has become a cause of division, that is unlikely to end with his death,

A month away brain engaged and blood on the floor

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Writing at Glasgow airport waiting for flight home after nearly whole month away. I have had a really productive time first at Talis HQ and Lancs (all in the camper van!) and then visits to Southampton (experience design and semantic web), Athens (ontologies and brain-like computation) and Konstanz (visualisation and visual analytics).

Loads of intellectual stimulation, but now really looking forward to some time at home to consolidate a little.

During my time away I managed to fall downstairs, bleed profusely over the hotel floor, and break a tooth. My belonging didn’t fare any better: my glasses fell apart and my sandals and suitcase are now holding together by threads … So maybe safer at home for a bit!

Hierarchical grammars for more human-like compiler parsing

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Nearly twenty years ago, back when I was in York, one of my student project suggestions was to try to make compiler parsers operate a little more like a human: scanning first for high-level structures like brackets and blocks and only moving on to finer level features later.  If I recall there were several reasons for this, including connections with ‘dynamic pointers’1, but most important to help error reporting, especially in cases of mismatched brackets or missing ‘;’ from line ends … still a big problem.

Looking back I can see that one MEng student considered it, but in the end didn’t do it, so it lay amongst that great pile of “things to do one day” and discuss occasionally over tea or beer. I recall too looking at grammar-to-grammar parsers … I guess now-a-days I might imagine using XSLT!

Today, 18 years on, while scanning David Unger’s publications I discover that he actually did this in the Java parser at Sun2.  I don’t know if this is actually used in the current Java implementations.  Their reasons for looking at the issue  were to do with making the parser easier to maintain, so it may actually be that this is being done under the hood, but the benefits for the Java programmer not being realised.

While I was originally thinking about programming languages, I have more recently found myself using the general methods in anger when doing data cleaning as often one approaches this in a pipeline fashion, creating elements of structure along the way that are picked up by future parsing/cleaning steps.

To my knowledge there are no general purpose tools for doing this.  So, if anyone is looking for a little project, here is my own original project suggestion from 1993 …

Background
When compilers parse a computer program, they usually proceed in a sequential, left-to-right fashion. The computational requirement of limited lookahead means that the syntax of programming languages must usually be close to LL(1) or LR(1). Human readers use a very different strategy. They scan the text for significant features, building up an understanding of the text in a more top down fashion. The human reader thus looks at the syntax at multiple levels and we can think of this as a hierarchical grammar.

Objective
The purpose of this project is to build a parser based more closely on this human parsing strategy. The target language could be Pascal or C (ADA is probably a little complex!). The parser will operate in two or more passes. The first pass would identify the block structure, for example, in C this would be based on matching various brackets and delimiters `{};,()’. This would yield a partially sequential, partially tree-like structure. Mismatched brackets could be detected at this stage, avoiding the normally confusing error messages generated by this common error. Subsequent passes would `parse’ this tree eventually obtaining a standard syntax tree.

Options
Depending on progress, the project can develop in various ways. One option is to use the more human-like parsing to improve error reporting, for example, the first pass could identify the likely sites for where brackets have been missed by analysing the indentation structure of the program. Another option would be to build a YACC-like tool to assist in the production of multi-level parsers.

Reading

1.  S. P. Robertson, E. F. Davis, K. Okabe and D. Fitz-Randolf, “Program comprehension beyond the line”3, pp. 959-963 in Proceedings of Interact’90, North-Holland, 1990.
2.  Recommended reading from compiler construction course
3.  YACC manual from UNIX manual set.

  1. For more on Dynamic Pointers see my first book “Formal Methods for Interactive Systems“, a CSCW journal paper “Dynamic pointers and threads“[back]
  2. Modular parser architecture with mini parsers. D M Ungar, US Patent 7,089,541, 2006[back]
  3. Incidentally, “Program comprehension beyond the line” is a fantastic paper both for its results and also methodologically. In the days when eye-tracking was still pretty complex (maybe still now!), they wanted to study program comprehension, so instead of following eye gaze, they forced experimental subjects to physically scroll through code using a  single-line browser.  [back]

the real tragedy of the commons

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I’ve just been reviewing a paper that mentions the “tragedy of the commons”1  and whenever I read or hear the phrase I feel the hackles on the back of my neck rise.

Of course the real tragedy of the commons was not free-riding and depletion by common use, but the rape of the land under mass eviction or enclosure movements when they ceased to be commons.  The real tragedy of “the tragedy of the commons” as a catch phrase is that it is often used to promote the very same practices of centralisation.  Where common land has survived today, just as in the time before enclosures and clearances, it is still managed in a collaborative way both for the people now and the for the sake of future generations.  Indeed on Tiree, where I live, there are large tracts of common grazing land managed in just such a way.

It is good to see that the Wikipedia article of “Tragedy of the Commons” does give a rounded view on the topic including reference to an historical and political critique by “Ian Angus”2

The paper I was reading was not alone in uncritically using the phrase.  Indeed in “A Framework for Web Science”3 we read:

In a decentralised and growing Web, where there are no “owners” as such, can we be sure that decisions that make sense for an individual do not damage the interests of users as a whole? Such a situation, known as the ‘tragedy of the commons’, happens in many social systems that eschew property rights and centralised institutions once the number of users becomes too large to coordinate using peer pressure and moral principles.

In fact I do have some sympathy with this as the web involves a vast number of physically dispersed users who are perhaps “too large to coordinate using peer pressure and moral principles”.  However, what is strange is that the web has raised so many modern counter examples to the tragedy of the commons, not least Wikipedia itself.  In many open source projects people work as effectively a form of gift economy, where, if there is any reward, it is in the form of community or individual respect.

Clearly, there are examples in the world today where many individual decisions (often for short term gain) lead to larger scale collective loss.  This is most clearly evident in the environment, but also the recent banking crisis, which was fuelled by the desire for large mortgages and general debt-led lives.  However, these are exactly the opposite of the values surrounding traditional common goods.

It may be that the problem is not so much that large numbers of people dilute social and moral pressure, but that the impact of our actions becomes too diffuse to be able to appreciate when we make our individual life choices.  The counter-culture of many parts of the web may reflect, in part, the way in which aspects of the web can make the impact of small individual actions more clear to the individual and more accountable to others.

  1. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859 (December 13, 1968), pp. 1243-1248. … and here is the danger of citation counting as a quality metric, I am citing it because I disagree with it![back]
  2. Ian Angus. The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons. Socialist Voice, August 24, 2008[back]
  3. Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J. A., O’Hara, K., Shadbolt, N. and Weitzner, D. J. (2006) A Framework for Web Science. Foundations and Trends in Web Science, 1 (1). pp. 1-130.  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13347/[back]

Dhaval Vyas’ PhD

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I was very pleased to be part of the committee for Dhaval Vyas‘ PhD defense last Friday.

Dhaval’s thesis “Designing for Awareness: An Experience-focused HCI Perspective”1 is well worth a read with ethnographic studies of academics (!) and designers at work; and also technical interventions in both situations: Panorama a public screen photo-montage-style display and CAM a way to tag and discuss physical objects.

While reading the thesis I also realised that ‘awareness’  is one of those slippery words, that has a slightly technical meaning in CSCW, and one you sort of understand by example and diffusion, but is surprisingly hard to pin down. Dhaval does not have a precise definition and neither do I: the HCI textbook says “generally having some feeling for what other people are doing or have been doing” – hardly precise!  I have some half-formed thoughts on this, but will leave them for another post.

I first knew Dhaval when he was doing his MSc at Lancaster in 2001/2002.  He has always been dedicated to pursuing an academic career and it is wonderful 10 years on to see this come to fruition.  There have been a lot of barriers on the way and so this is a testament to Dhaval’s strength of character as well as intellectual attainment.

  1. Dhaval Vyas (2011). Designing for Awareness: An Experience-focused HCI Perspective. University of Twente. download thesis (PDF 4.9Mb). DOI: 10.3990/1.9789036531351 (not yet resolving).[back]

announcing Tiree Tech Wave!

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Ever since I came to Tiree I’ve had a vision of bringing people here, to share some of the atmosphere and work together.  A few of you have come on research visits and we have had some really productive times.  Others have said they wished they could come sometime.

Well now is your chance …

Come to Tiree Tech Wave in March to make, talk and play at the wind-ripping edge of digital technology.

seascape

Every year Tiree hosts the Wave Classic, a key international wind surfing event.  Those of us at the edge of the digital wave do not risk cold seas and bodily injury, but there is something of the same thrill as we explore the limits of code, circuit boards and social computation.

iconsThe cutting edge of wind-surfing boards is now high technology, but typically made by artisan craftsfolk, themselves often surfers.  Similarly hardware platforms such as Arduino, mobile apps for iPhone and Android, and web mashups enabled by public APIs and linked data are all enabling a new maker culture, challenging the hegemony of global corporations.

artworkThe Western Celtic fringes were one of the oases of knowledge and learning during the ‘dark ages’.  There is something about the empty horizon that helped the hermit to focus on God and inspired a flowering of decorative book-making, even in the face of battering storms of winter and Viking attacks of summer; a starkness that gave scholars time to think in peace between danger-fraught travel to other centres of learning across Europe.

Nowadays regular Flybe flights and Calmac ferries reduce the risk of Viking attacks whilst travelling to the isles, broadband Internet and satellite TV invade the hermit cell, and double glazing and central heating mollify the elements.  Yet there is still a rawness that helps focus the mind, a slightly more tenuous connection to the global infrastructure that fosters a spirit of self-reliance and independence.

LEDsOver a long weekend 17 – 21 March (TBC), we plan what I hope will be a semi-regular event.  A time to step out, albeit momentarily, from a target-driven world, to experiment and play with hardware and software, to discuss the issues of our new digital maker culture, what we know and what we seek to understand, and above all to make things together.

This is all about technology and people: the physical device that sits in our hands, the data.gov.uk mashup that tells us about local crime, the new challenges to personal privacy and society and the nation state.

Bring your soldering iron, and Arduino boards, your laptop and API specs, your half-written theses and semi-formed ideas, your favourite book or even well-loved eReader (!).  The format will be informal, with lots of time to work hands-on together; however, there will be the opportunity for short talks/demos/how-to-do-it sessions.  Also, if there is demand, I’d  be happy to do some more semi-formal tutorial sessions and maybe others would too (Arduino making, linked data).

Currently we have no idea whether there will be three or three hundred people interested, but aiming for something like 15 – 30 participants.  We’ll keep costs down, probably around £70 for meeting rooms, lunches, etc. over the five days, but will confirm that and more details shortly.

Follow on Twitter at @tireetechwave and the website will be at tireetechwave.com. However, it is still ‘under development’, so don’t be surprised at the odd glich over the next couple of weeks as we sort out details.

If you are interested in coming or want to know more mail me or Graham Dean

Books and books about books

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A combination of things (several rail journeys and flights including two long haul, waits at airports due to snow, an unexpected 2 day diversion to a hotel outside Istanbul again due to snow,  a few days illness after Christmas, and a power cut lasting a whole morning) have all meant that I have spent more time reading than usual.  Now it is not that I do not want to read, and it has always been one of my chief pleasures, but as an academic, paradoxically, for many years my reading has narrowed to the next report, thesis or paper to review shutting out not just reading for pleasure, but any academic book or article that was not immediately necessary for the next deadline.

However, I have been wonderfully forced by circumstances back to the page.

I have already written about one of these “The Shadow of the Wind” while I was travelling, itself a book about books, and while travelling I also read Kathryn Harrison’s “A Thousand Orange Trees” (an eye opening but unrelentingly depressing vision of women’s life during the Spanish inquisition), Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” (a sometimes depressing, but also glorious account of a hard Irish childhood), Jodi Picoult’s “Change of Heart” (on the death penalty and religion) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Ruth” (a wonderful book about the small mindedness and great generosity of the human spirit, especially remarkable when seen against its time).

… and then I had some new books for Christmas …

At first Keith Gray’s “Ostrich Boys” seems like a classic boy’s book with three friends ‘kidnapping’ the ashes of their friend Ross in order to give him a proper send off at Ross in Scotland.   Like all journey stories, a mixture of going on against the odds and self discovery, not in the league of Cynthia Voigt’s “Homecoming“, but more likely to be read by boys wanting a good adventure and being stretched in the process.

Mal Peet’s “Tamar” is clearly for ‘young adults’, a claustrophobic tale of war time resistance in 1945 cut through with a ‘modern day’ tale.  This parallel tale is a hard genre, and, like Joan Lingard “Natasha’s Will“, I felt Peet managed the 1945 tale better than the current day one1. Although Peet is writing for an older audience, I was reminded of the way Nina Bawden manages to get me to identify, however unwillingly at times, with the flawed characters in her children’s novels.

Susan Hill’s “Howards End is on the Landing” is, like “The Shadow of the Wind“, a book about books, but whereas Zafon’s Novel is set against a fictional library, Susan Hill tells us about her own bookshelves, which seem to coat and fill, like windblown snow, every wall and nook in her house.  She decides to spend a year reading only the books she already has on her shelves, a decision that coincides with a resolution to minimise use of the internet:

Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while, one’s ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted.  Information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready-meals and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition. (p.2)

This reminds me a little of Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” except Susan Hill says it more succinctly and elegantly.

Hill’s reading is both eclectic and catholic, encompassing Ian Flemming along with Trollope and Chaucer.  She takes Enid Blyton and J.K. Rowling seriously for their contribution to literacy (although unlike me does not re-read the former), and is happy to say that she never feels comfortable with Austin.  As she describes the titles she finds, sometimes lost between unlikely bedfellows, I am inspired to read them all and also to look to my own shelves:

A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. (p.2)

Susan Hill’s knowledge is amazing and the book is filled with anecdotes about authors she has met, known and corresponded with, giving hints of the inside story of many 20th century writers.  Sometimes I am surprised at her choices or rather not what she chooses, but more what she rejects.  In her list of books she has not read she includes:

Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann

I want to read this . I mean to read this. I really do.

but also:

Romola. George Elliot

I do understand how I can have not read it.  (p.70)

Why?  Does she mean she can understand why it has not crossed her path, or that she does not want to read it? It is a book I have re-read several times, although always wishing the ending could be different.  I know she does not like “A Tale of Two Cities” feeling that Dickens is at his best when dealing with (for him) the contemporary; maybe she fears the same is true of Elliot?

However, Hill never assumes that her tastes are her readers’ tastes, she does not select the ‘good’ books, but the books she wants to read.

Sadly she does not supply a list of all the books she read during the year, but at the end she gives a ‘top 40’ list, with some I know well such as “The Mayor of Casterbridge“, some I know of but have never read, such as “A Passage to India“, and some I have never heard of such as “Flaubert’s Parrot“.  An instant Amazon Wish List!

Top of her top 40 are the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible (King James Version) — in the text (p173/174) deliberately in that order, but for some reason in the list at the end the Bible comes first, did she rethink after writing, or is it an editorial decision to make the list look neater?

This reminds me that I need to retrieve my battered school bible from underneath the pew where I left it after the Christmas morning service.  Also, the last of my Christmas reading (helped enormously by the enforced internet blackout due to the power cut), a book of Fiona’s “Whose Bible Is It?” by a biblical scholar and champion of inter-faith relations Joroslav Pelikan.  It is a book about a book, or rather a book about books, as Pelikan reminds us that the word “Bible” strictly means “little books”. I know some of the history of the forming of the modern Bible, but Pelikan’s encyclopaedic and detailed knowledge shines through.  I had not realised that it was the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Tanakh (Old Testament) that is quoted by the New Testament writers, making odd the decision of the early Protestants to excise the ‘Apocrypha’ (the writings in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew).

It is a short and very readable book, but at times I found myself wanting to know a little more on some points.  When discussing the dates of the Gospels Pelikan notes that Mark is usually dated at 70CE, but doesn’t explain why.  Previously I’ve seen the same date quoted with the reason being that the Gospel appears to predict the fall of Jerusalem which happened in 70AD and therefore must have been written after.  This argument seems to presuppose that prediction is impossible and by analogy would inevitably lead to future historians excising or re-dating  several of Vince Cable’s statements prior to the 2008 financial crash. Maybe there is a better reason, or maybe, like other academic disciplines, biblical scholarship is a servant of its assumptions.

And now … no more power cuts and the internet is flawless, but trying not loose momentum with Sheila Stewart’s “Pilgrims of the Mist“, Mike Parker’s “Map Addict” and George Basalla’s “The Evolution of Technology” all on the go … maybe another post in a couple of weeks.

  1. Try also Susan Cooper’s “Victory” for a story that blends past and current narrative with equal conviction.[back]

book: The Shadow of the Wind, Zafon

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I’ve been reading “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Zafon.  It is actually a gift from Sinterklaas as I had the joy a few weeks ago to be with Mari-Carmen, Theo and Andrea in Utrecht at ‘Sinterklaas‘ (5th December, St Nicholas Day), the day when Santa delivers presents in Holland (maybe his dry run each year to get into shape ready for the big run on Christmas Eve).  I hadn’t expected Santa to remember me in Utrecht as he will be visiting Tiree this week.  However, to my joy I also had gifts including this book1.

What can be more enchanting than a book about books, a book that starts with the finding of a book, where the protagonist is brought up in a bookshop, has parents who met in a bookshop and who falls in love during the reading of a book.

Zafon creates an entangled plot where the characters in the book and the characters in the book that is in the book sometimes seem to almost merge into one another; a whodunnit ranged around dusty bookshelves, tattered undelivered letters, the lonely, the haunted and the deranged, all set in the rain-soaked streets of post-war Barcelona.

The Shadows of the Wind is full of wonderful phrases, often wry or ribald, but always perceptive, which cry out to be quoted:

On Latin: “There’s no such thing as a dead language, only dormant minds”

On the impact of TV: “Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era.”

On courtship and gender: “you’re the man, and must take the lead … One has to pay some price for being able to pee standing up.”

On the sound of teachers: “Years of teaching had left him with that firm didactic tone of someone used to being heard, but not certain of being listened to.”

On action: “destiny does not do home visits. You have to go for it yourself.“

Just as The Shadows of the Wind starts with a book and a secret, so it ends with a book and a secret, stories repeat, but sometimes get rewritten.

  1. I strongly suspect that Mari-Carmen helped Sinterklaas by advising a good choice of book.[back]