Books Make Great Gifts

I write book reviews of fairly obscure books – never those in the top 100 best sellers, probably not even the top 10,000! This week I decided to publicise them a bit with a Squidoo mini lensography called Books Make Great Gifts.

I’m using a Christmas theme for now but, in the New Year, I’ll change it.

I’ve made the point that books make great gifts for birthdays and Christmas as I don’t want it to be seasonal. I wrote about why they make good gifts and the importance of matching the type of book to the recipient. I’ve done separate modules for different genres: Mysteries and Thrillers, Historical Novels, Classics, used Featured Lens modules for my book review lens links, Amazon Spotlight and Amazon list modules for newly published books in the hope of making some sales. I also put in a couple of polls. I want to make the page more than just a list of my lenses, I want to make it interesting in its own right too.

Making this kind of mini-lensography gives me a new lens and it might draw in traffic to existing book reviews I’ve written. If I make a few sales from it, that will be a bonus.

When you really don’t know what to write about next, take a look at the lenses you’ve done so far. Hopefully, you will have written some on a similar subject so that you too can make a mini lensography. You can always add new lenses to it as you publish them.

Called “…And the Ladies of the Club”, the story revolves around the members of the Waynesboro Women’s Club and their families and friends covering a period from 1868 to 1932.

Yesterday I finished a review of this book on a Squidoo lens. Because the book is so long, my copy is almost 1200 pages, I found it very hard to give a good synopsis of the story.  So much happens to the characters during that period, it’s just not possible or even desirable to include specific events in a review.

Even so, the lens has already been well received with good comments, many saying they like the sound of the book and might read it. As I’ve read this book twice with an interval of nearly 30 years between the two readings, I hope people do read it. I think it repays the effort of getting through so many pages. In fact, I was so captivated by the characters and their lives that the book never felt too long.

The Dark is Rising Sequence

I now have a total of 92 lens on Squidoo and I need well over 100 to give myself a chance of making the Giant 100 Club because the definition is 100 outstanding lenses and not all of mine might qualify as outstanding.

I’m going to do the best I can in the time I have left – just 30 days as the final date is June 30th. If I don’t have the required number of the right standard by then, I will have to wait till the end of September to apply again. I have decided that I won’t beat myself up if I don’t do it this time, though. That way I won’t be so prone to the ‘headless chicken’ syndrome – going crazy doing nothing because I have so much to do that I can’t make up my mind what to concentrate on!

I’m a bit disappointed that lenses I think are good don’t do well and haven’t been picked up by Google. One of these is The Dark is Rising Sequence, a series of fantasy novels for children that I think are as good as the Harry Potter ones. I read them when I was in my 30s even though, since I’ve been an adult,  I’ve never made a habit of reading children’s novels but these captured my imagination.

I wrote about a series of books for adults, The Revelation Space Universe. After I read the first book, I found the series compulsive. It’s proper science fiction, not fantasy, so maybe not as universally popular as other best selling books. I defy anybody who like sci-fi to read one of these novels without wanting to read the rest immediately!

Another lens that doesn’t get the traffic I think it should is The Historic City of Bath, England. It’s got lots of pictures of Bath plus some videos taken in the city. I’ve also written about its history and the places to visit there. I live fairly close to Bath and, before I moved last year, I lived just 12 miles away. My dentist was there and it was the place we went when we wanted more than just basic food shopping. I know it well and I love the city. I hope that comes through in what I’ve written about it.

Oh well, next month I’ll go through the lenses that don’t do so well and either delete them or try to assess what’s wrong with them. Doing that isn’t as interesting as writing something new but I’m wasting the work I’ve already done if I don’t try to make them more popular.

I am somewhat reassured after writing to Seth Godin and getting a reply from him and seeing his and Megan Casey’s posts in the Squidoo forum saying that they are looking into the worst abuses of the system and are definitely cracking down on plagiarism.

Squidoo is a great resource for writers who don’t want to run their own website or find that it is very difficult to get an audience for a small independent site. I really want it to succeed and to maintain the high standards of the best lenses and their writers.

To prove my commitment, I’ve published my latest lens. It’s not going to be a blockbuster because it’s about 19th century writer Wilkie Collins, most famous for The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Some people credit him with being the inventor of the detective novel but that accolade probably belongs to Edgar Allen Poe who wrote the Mystery of the Rue Morgue almost 30 years earlier.

I wish my interests were more popular or that I could get interested in popular topics. Oh well! I’ll just continue writing about things that interest me and hope a few other people like them too.

Right from the start you know that the beautiful Lady Audley is the villain. The questions are:

• How far does her villainy go?
• Will Robert Audley, her husband’s nephew, find enough evidence to unmask her?
• Because Robert’s uncle is besotted with her, what will he do if he does find the evidence as he dreads hurting his uncle?

Robert Audley is an aristocratic young man who trained as a barrister but has never taken a case. He is languid and does not exert himself, even in those sports like hunting and shooting traditionally popular with the upper classes. He meets up with his old friend George Talboys who he hadn’t seen for some years as George had been in Australia prospecting for gold. Because he’d married against his father’s wishes, he’d been cut off without a penny so left his wife and baby to make his fortune.

When he arrives home, he discovers his wife had died and his son is in the care of her drunken father. He mourns his wife bitterly. A year later Robert and George visit Robert’s uncle and his wife. Lady Audley manages to avoid meeting George until the two men are due to go home when George leaves Robert asleep on a riverbank where they had been fishing, and goes to the uncle’s house and meets Lady Audley. He disappears without trace.

Robert Audley quickly becomes convinced that Lady Audley has murdered his friend and sets about gathering the evidence to prove it. To do this, he must show that she is not the person she pretends to be and her past is quite different to the little she had revealed.

We see Robert Audley grow and develop as he mourns his friend and sets out on his quest to bring the culprit to justice.

It is really a quick and easy read and I highly recommend it.

It’s got some of the poems I loved as a child like Sea Fever, the Smuggler’s Song and The Donkey. Although they were all written many years ago, I think they have really stood the test of time and are enjoyed by children today. As with the funny poems, it’s the rhythm and rhymes that makes them so popular. Children don’t generally want experimental poetry!

I can vividly remember saving up for five weeks to get a particular paperback book, The Children Who Lived in a Barn. Finally, I received my pocket money on Saturday as usual and I thought I had enough money but, when I counted it, I was one penny short. I was so upset. Luckily, my aunt was visiting us and she not only gave me the penny I needed, she gave me the whole amount. Virtue rewarded!

To show how long ago this happened, the book cost 2/6 as we used to write it which was two shillings and sixpence, the equivalent today of about 22.5 pence (50 cents approx). I got sixpence a week pocket money which is how I know how long I’d saved. I can still remember the book today and was amazed to discover that it’s been reprinted in the UK by Persephone Books and is for sale on Amazon.co.uk.

I love poetry and have many books of poems which I dip into often. My love of poetry began at infants school when we were read poems like Edward Lear’s The Jumblies and The Owl and the Pussycat.

I always encourage children to read and love books. I give any children of family and friends books as Christmas or birthday gifts. The only surprise for them is which book or books they’ll get. It seems to have worked well because those children that are now grown up all love to read too but I can’t take all the credit. Their parents encouraged their love of reading and books by reading to them and taking them to the library to borrow books. There have always been lots of books in their homes too and their parents set them a good example by reading a lot themselves.

My Squidoo lens about some of my favourite children’s literature:
Classic Funny Poems for Kids
The Dark is Rising Sequence
The Wind in the Willows
Richmal Crompton, author of the William books

I’d also like to do some ‘How to’ articles, again I’m undecided about the subject.

When I received commissions to write articles for magazines, it was easy. The editor would ask for 2000 words on a particular subject and give me a deadline plus information if he or she wanted a particular angle. I’d research it using the internet and old-fashioned things like books. While I was doing the research, I’d find that the way I’d tackle it would form in my mind so I could sit down and pretty much write it straightaway when I had enough information. I’d leave it for a day, read it again, go through and take out repeated words and phrases, unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, and reword anything that was clumsy. If I had time, I’d leave it another day, read it again and do any polishing that was needed.

I found that my articles were used without any or much sub-editing because I took so much trouble to refine them myself.

The difficulty I have writing online is that I can choose any subject I like. It’s so hard to decide sometimes. I like it when a topic pops into my mind and I desperately want to write about it. My big problem, particularly on Squidoo, is that I’m spoilt for choice.

Next I’m going to read Kim by Rudyard Kipling, a story of a young boy in India who is the orphaned son of a British soldier taken in by an Indian woman. He’s completely assimilated in Indian culture and gets caught up in the ‘Great Game’ of spying between Britain and Russia. I’ve read it a few times and I always find it entrancing. When you read this book, you realise that Kipling was no racist. On the contrary, it is obvious the respect he had for Indians and the culture of India.

I’ll write about what I’m doing, my thoughts on current events and quirky happenings, my dogs, and anything else that interests me. Of course, I hope that it will interest other people as well.

I live in Wiltshire, a county in the South of England, my health is not great so I’m semi-retired but still write compulsively, mostly on Squidoo where I was recently made a Giant Squid – trust me, that’s good!

I’ve worked on specialist newspapers and magazines for many years but went freelance in 1988. I’ve had two books published on buying antiques as well as articles in magazines and writing online for 10 years now.

Not only am I a compulsive writer, I’m on a compulsive reader too. I read all kinds of books from thrillers to classics. I’m passionately interested in politics and current affairs. I believe if you don’t vote, you shouldn’t complain about what politicians do. Watching people in South Africa, after the fall of the apartheid regime, standing in line for hours to vote for the very first time in their lives brought tears to my eyes. It brought home to me how lucky we are in the UK and other democratic countries to have this right.