The small screen's big impact

Isn’t it strange what you uncover when you try something new? There you are, going about your usual routine, happy and content, and then you take a different path and discover another world you barely knew existed but, given a new light, suddenly becomes interesting.

All right, I’m only talking about reading a few new books, but it’s strange how the mind works.

Readers may have guessed - from my knowledge of the work of Charlie Brooker and Mil Millington, who both first found significant fame in the Guardian – the identity of my newspaper of choice. I particular enjoy the Saturday edition, when I pretty much read the entire issue from cover to cover – apart from the Review section.

Typically, I only glance at the Review section. I like to give it the once over because I’m interested in literature and didn’t want to miss out on anything, but now it’s one of the first supplements I pick up, and although I still might not read it from cover to cover, I certainly pour over it more than before.

All of which is a long-ish introduction to the TV Book Club, which I chanced upon in midweek on More 4 (first shown on Channel 4). Of course, books on television has become fashionable, thanks to Oprah and Richard and Judy’s respective televised clubs either side of the Atlantic, and it’s the mastermind behind the Richard and July version, Amanda Knox, behind this project as well.

As I mentioned regarding World Book Day, anything which tries to encourage reading must be a good thing, although I found the selection of the presenters – comedians Dave Spikey and Jo Brand, actors Laila Rouass and Nathaniel Parker, fashion guru Gok Wan and, in the episode I watched, Richard E Grant – to have been scattergun at best and completely bizarre at worst.

Incidentally, I’m aware that the view above (encourage reading = good) is rather simplistic; that the books which feature on such television shows get propelled to the top of the bestseller lists while others, shorn of the same exposure but perhaps more deserving, founder in their wake potentially to the detriment of the industry as a whole. But that debate’s for another day – perhaps January 1st next year…

Anyway, the series has now been Sky+’d (we’ll wait to see what the Wench makes of that use of the small percentage of memory we have remaining…) and, in topical fashion, the book that was being discussed when I tuned in was the latest from George Pelecanos, The Way Home.

Coincidentally, he’s an author I’d never read before starting this challenge, and I’d actually turned the last page on the second book of his to be included in my 100-book challenge, Right as Rain, just minutes earlier. Isn’t it strange what happens when you embark on a new path?