Two items about books. First the challenge to Amazon’s purchase of The Book Depositary on Monopoly grounds. Good Job. Secondly, the awful development of ‘soundtracks’ linked to digital books. Isn’t the Audio book enough? Most will probably be aimed at children, forgetting that it is in the power of pure reading, of actually using the pure imagination that real imaginative force, and atunement to language, forms. Don’t kids have enough forms of interactive or all consuming entertainment already? It is one of the problems with the proliferation of books, but decline of serious reading.
But Daisy Goodwin was very funny about the track attached to Jay Macinierny’s Bright Lights, Big City. In the novel he uses the phrase ‘Bolivian Marching Powder’, as a metaphor for Cocaine. The dorks doing the tracks attach the sound of marching boots! I suppose it might have been worse if there was the sound of snorting, or Homer Simpson was probably in charge, but apart from the double meanings of language, the power of metaphor at the heart of language, one of the reasons readers often get so upset about films of books is that it is the unique union of the author’s creative vision and your own imagination bringing it to life, off the magic page, that makes reading such a uniquely personal and vivid experience. If a writer is any good, you will hear that wind in the trees, those screams, those shouts of joy, deep inside the mind, but also have constructed a world that is somehow uniquely yours.
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