How I Review Books

I should start by saying that the use of the personal pronoun in the title is not about egotism but an admission of ignorance. I do not know anyone else who reviews books. I am connected on Twitter to a few of them, but I think I’ve only met two of them in person, maybe three times in total. I do not come from an intellectual milieu. My background, if you want to get sociological about it, is the skilled working class. I come from fishermen, engineers and housewives in a small town in the north-east of Scotland. Practical people in practical times; about as far from London as you can go and still be in Britain. But at the same time, my maternal grandfather – who skippered a boat when that meant something in what was then a busy fishing town – was a self-educated man who read Burns, Pepys, and Darwin (I still have those books), wrote wry, comic, technically competent poems, and took the family to church in their Sunday finery. He was a lad of pairts, as they say, able to play the accordion, help raise a family with five children, discuss politics and literature, and captain a boat of eight men.

But the decline was not far away. In the 1970s Granny and Granda crumbled into alcoholism, their proud house fell apart, my mum became pregnant with my sister aged just 15 and moved into the new council houses at the edge of town. There she met my dad. He was a fisherman (of course) but was more enthused by books and music. He was a small-town uneducated bohemian, you might say: he loved, and made it his business to get his circle to appreciate, Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, krautrock, JRR Tolkien, and Frank Herbert, when those things were new and radical, but his education was partly institutional and mostly word-of-mouth. I don’t think he liked the fisherman’s life (it’s ferociously hard work) but he was a good galley cook, and he liked fishing for fun, in his own time. But as a small-town bohemian he was drawn to the hash-smoking itinerants who facilitated minor drug deals and always lived close to the edge - of poverty, of law.

Had Dad been born to another family he could easily have gone to university, read English, smoked a load of dope, talked a load of bollocks, got a Desmond and maybe wound up a music journalist, arts correspondent or small magazine editor. But he had to work. At age 25, he had three kids to provide for (I came a year after my parents were married, and a brother followed a year later) and fishing was the only way to earn a living. It paid better than the four factories in town, at least. Some part of him, I think, revolted. He drank heavily, he fought and beat up my mum, and he was no use as a father. Kids learn an aversion to drunken parents, their unpredictability, their slurred responses and sudden emotional neediness, and I still remember my sense of anxiety and disappointment when left with him one afternoon when he was already pissed.

So one day my mum took us and left. We wandered for a time – Aberdeen, Turriff and Thurso, in battered wives’ refuges. These times were not fun. The tenement flat we lived in in Aberdeen had an outside toilet, for example – this, in 1985. I remember minor details like being washed in the sink in Aberdeen, and starting school there and repeatedly collapsing unprompted into tears, but not much more.

We returned for a time, but I think Mum left Dad forever maybe a year later. Dad left town and I rarely saw him thereafter. He would pop up here and there, but never for long. One weekend my brother and I stayed with him in a caravan – not a holidaying caravan, but one owned by a local landowner for itinerants. Another weekend we stayed with him in a small flat the next village over. On the Saturday evening he snuck out to the pub having told us he was away to have a bath. After a time we’d got scared at the quiet, fearfully opened the door to an empty bathroom and immediately knew where he was.

A few years after this he met a woman and settled back down. By now he had dropped even the pretense of fishing and become a hash dealer. He was pretty small beer – selling eighths and scores of resin, I think – but in a small town supplies are unreliable so his house was quite a hub. I was often there, in his two-bedroomed council house, listening to the music (Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, Can, Hendrix, Deep Purple, Genesis, Hawkwind, Roxy Music, early Queen, Tangerine Dream, perhaps even The Orb) and making teas and coffees when asked (which was often). So I picked all that up, which was handy for being in primary 7 and otherwise usually being exposed to Radio 1 music.

But he also nudged me into reading some better books. I was just starting to move from Roald Dahl to James Herbert and Stephen King (I still love some nasty horror), but he got me into Tolkien and James Clavell. For this I will always be hugely grateful. When you grow up in a bookless house, you’re left only with what schools provide as recommendations, and these are of course necessarily tedious. They have to be nice, safe and unobjectionable - exactly what every ten-year-old hates. I wanted blood, thrills and excitement; I wanted to read about all the things I couldn’t do (which mainly meant the sex) and the places I hadn’t seen (which was everywhere. At that time I had been further south than Glasgow precisely once).

Although I tried to be a regular, sporty, football-playing lad like all the boys in the nearby streets, somehow it didn’t fit on me. I enjoyed playing football, sure; but I kept doing things that perplexed them, like remembering all the words to songs, or referring to lines from books, films and TV in conversations. They rejoiced in the changing room banter (the smell of post-shower Lynx deodorant was huge); as the youngest of their group, I was the dogsbody and butt of jokes. I was by some way the worst at football, which meant something in that environment. But I knew how to work computers better than they did, I remembered football songs better than they did, and apart from football I was increasingly getting into music, as Guns N’ Roses exploded ferally into my life. So I felt generally unabashed, even perhaps oddly confident in my choices, despite my social frailties.

It helped that I was generally a top of the class boy and had always liked reading. I had gone from Enid Blyton to Roald Dahl to horror and now Tolkien. There was no-one to guide me here. Our house was, apart from a few Reader’s Digest anthologies and kids’ encyclopedias etc, essentially bookless. My mum took me to the library every week or two, and I perused the shelves with great care, but it was a small library in a small town. I had no interest in sci-fi and teen/tween books were often from the US, which meant indulgent, upper-middle-class crap. So I made do with horror (though only Stephen King really satisfied – Herbert and Hutson were too pulpy for me even then) and books on Nazis and the occult. For maybe six months I rampaged through the Fighting Fantasy books, and I tried things like a book on quantum mechanics (the cat inside the box – or was it?) and biographies of everyone from Liberace (it didn’t mention he was gay) to Goering.

What I’m trying to convey is how it is to grow up with a passion for reading and a rage for books but without any guidance or education. School was no help: not until I was in 14 did English provide any book I was interested in (Educating Rita, Lord of the Flies and Kes). I often felt there was a huge world out there, of ideas and intelligence and information, but knew we weren’t accessing it at home. For example, on Sundays we always had a two tabloid newspapers: the Sunday Mail and the News of the World. But one day, when about 14, I had a sudden itch to buy what I thought as a “proper” newspaper (I didn’t know they were called broadsheets). I had literally never in my life seen anyone reading one. Ever. But I had this itch. So I bought an Observer, and struggled manfully with its pages, and sort of appreciated it, though it was like entering into a conversation which had long since started. But thereafter on Sundays, when my mum was cooking the traditional full breakfast, I would ask to go buy the papers before anyone else was told to. I would buy the Scotland on Sunday (then a very good paper) and a tabloid, usually the Sunday Mail. I thought this fair.

But it caused a huge amount of consternation. We didn’t buy broadsheets! They were uppity, snobbish, not for us! This was not quite fully articulated: what my brother and sister did castigate me for was buying a paper just for me, and one for everyone else. Quite why they couldn’t read the Scotland on Sunday was never made clear, though I understood well enough. I had breached the wall. It was like tuning a builder’s radio to Radio 3. All of this is ultimately rather comical (Susan Townsend gets a huge amount of material from this in the Adrian Mole books) but at the time it was deeply vexatious. You feel you’re going against your roots and your family, though mentally (or, dare I say, intellectually) you know it’s right.

Nonetheless I was an ambitious reader. By 16 I had read at least something by DH Lawrence, James Joyce, William Burroughs, EM Forster, JRR Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, John Betjemen, George Orwell, Frank Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, and Martin Amis. So English was the natural subject for university, when it came.

After University
What do you do after you’ve studied English? The joke might be now that you work in Starbucks; the most common choice might be teaching. But what goes unsaid before you study is that your social class remains the largest determinant in your subsequent success. If more working class people are going to university, then naturally they won’t be getting the top jobs. Oxbridge and the public schools still got them, boyo. Unless they choose a vocational course, their first employment will probably be a service job.

At university I remember careers fairs, with the Big 5 (as they then were) and the civil service, but not media. Careers for the competent but not the connected. It was a plate-glass university, pleasant enough in its way – I often thought it was better than the students deserved – but lacking any great intellectual ambition. Any creative endeavor was pretentious, and low-scale drug taking was seen as the thing, more than anything - hard drugs were out, and there were plenty sporty types, who left it all alone. The prevailing atmosphere was of mediocrity. The union nightclub played naff cheesy music four nights out of seven, or something ludicrous like that. People loved it; it was familiar, undemanding and nostalgic, and could be enjoyed ironically – which came increasingly came to mean unironically, embracing the naffness.

Although I had been active in Scouts before uni, I somehow did not continue with extra-curriculars, subsiding instead into hash-smoking. The lack of structure induced an aimlessness, so different from my school days, which I filled with idle reading and hash smoking, rather than substantive or fulfilling activities. There was also the fact that I was a poor student, living only on the small grant without any parental contribution, which meant I had only £40 to live on per week after rent, with food costing about £15 and a night out about £10-15. Buses, laundry, books, clothes, everything had to come out of the rest, which in effect meant nothing to spend on anything cultural or enabling self-development, which seemed to inhibit the entire point of being at university. (There were numerous wankers who took this too far, though, as students will: I remember seeing a group of goths in Tesco with the ringleader striding around wearing a cape and holding a cane topped with a skull.)

So after uni I subsisted on a number of service industry jobs: first in a nightclub, not earning enough to live on, and then in a hotel, earning about enough to subsist. I drank too much, ate badly, saw too little sunlight and accomplished very little. My reading did not move on much beyond what it had been at university. I got deeply stuck in a rut, and was terribly unhappy. But eventually I decided to have a go at becoming an English teacher. As as shy introvert, I had not thought myself up to it, but I had to try something.

In the event, my initial self assessment was correct. I didn’t much like teaching, and wasn’t much good at it. But after flunking out I moved to China. I figured teaching at a university would be easy enough. So it was – the students were so pleasant, so interesting and generally so easy to to talk with. I then moved to Tianjin, where there was an ex-pat magazine which advertised wanting freelancers. At last, there was the way in I’d been looking for all that time. I worked my way up from there and in Beijing eventually landed a job as a magazine editor. There I began reviewing books, and found I had a knack to it. Books spoke to me and I knew their ways. And so from there I’ve slowly managed to spread out to a number of regular outlets.

My Place In The Firmament
As in every other endeavour, there are classes in book reviewing. At the top come the celebrities and the genuine experts. You might have Martin Amis or Irvine Welsh or JK Rowling reviewing a novel; or you might have Martin Wolf on economics or Kerry Brown on China or Al Gore on the environment. Fair play to those people, they’ve earned their status and so editors seek them out. Then there are regular reviewers. I am not familiar with this category, but each newspaper must have its squadron of regular reviewers, to whom the editor directs books to be sent. (Orwell writes pitilessly about these poor sods in “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” - how books make them feel suicidal, how they desperately strive to feel anything towards the multitudinous books they take on every week). I imagine that the generalist book reviewer has rather gone out of fashion: there are so many experts in so many fields seeking publication in so many titles that there must be specialists.

Then there are those, such as me, who are mere freelancers. In a way this is nice: I am free to pitch any book I fancy to an editor, so my chance of reviewing a dud book is actually quite small. But concomitantly I have a much larger chance of being rejected. To take my own situation I have written freelance reviews books for four outlets: one an English-language magazine based in China (for which I reviewed one book a month, of basically my own choosing, within their own parameters); one a major newspaper in Asia (for which I pitch to the editor several suggestions about once a month, with one offering usually selected); one a book review journal, where the section editor is generally agreeable to my approaches and where copy is not rushed for an imminent publication day; and a high-selling current affairs magazine, in which I have only ever had two reviews, despite perhaps one email pitching maybe three or four books every month for about two years.

The higher the prestige of the outlet, then, the lower the chances of my pitches being successful. This no doubt relates to me being neither a celebrity nor an expert. I am merely an enthusiastic amateur in my particular subject area. It no doubt also relates to the volume of pitches the editor(s) receive. I have also tried to reach out to other newspapers, but without any success. This probably relates to the absence of personal connections. For the journal I had a direct connection with the editor (having interviewed him and reviewed his book positively). For the newspaper and UK magazine I was introduced via email by a contact to the book editor. I have tried leveraging such contacts as I have elsewhere, though never successfully. It is clear to me, though, that contacts are utterly essential in the media game. And as I do not live in London and literally do not have any personal contacts there whatsoever, my pitches tend to fall on deaf ears.

Likewise, I have never had an editor get in touch with me as a result of anything I’ve written. This might be because I’m not up to much, but more likely it’s because they are overwhelmed with work and need people they can trust to get stuff done. Relying on your personal network is a natural response. (I know how it goes – when I edited a magazine I worked around 70 hours a week, if you include the events and schmoozing).

But three outlets should suffice for any person. Given that I have a day job, I can only really review about two books a month. I managed that in 2017, though my pace has slackened in 2018 as my hours are now less congenial.

Trying To Freelance When You Work Full-Time
This is, frankly, bloody tricky. Philip Larkin used to write in the evening, but he had neither wife nor children. Last year I worked from home and took my daughter to extra-curricular classes. I therefore spent a lot of time in dancing classes, swimming pool viewing seats and Chinese classes at yawn-inducing weekend mornings underlining and scribbling notes on books I was reviewing. Regularly, when deadlines were upon me, I could be seen at these locations with my laptop, struggling manfully to get the article in before the deadline. (One thing I know: get your copy in on time - literally nothing else compares).

Working in public can be a pain. When my daughter had swimming lessons during a school holiday, I was forbidden from using my laptop in the viewing seats, for fear that I was taking pictures. It can be hard to motivate yourself to write at 9.30am on a Sunday morning in a cold empty school cafeteria – or so I find. And the phone is always a distraction, with its Twitter and Facebook and Reddit apps, with their interactivity and responsiveness and endless content. And there’s not even any acclaim. And is there any ego boost from being head down in a book – do people ever express any interest? Not a chance. Nonetheless, if you’re serious about getting the work done then you’ll snatch any free moment. The Scottish football journalist Graham Spiers has written about writing articles in traffic layby’s and local swimming pool cafeterias. I feel ya, buddy.

The Books
Where do you get the books? I don’t get them sent from an editor so I have to pitch based on what is forthcoming. And how do I know what’s coming out? As with so much in modern life, I use Amazon. There’s a nice search function which enables you to look at the books in the next 90 days, or in any particular month, and to filter by various fields (subject, language hardback vs paperback, reader age, author, etc). I search here and look for anything promising and suggest them to editors.

If the editor is interested I then email the publisher asking for a review copy. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. You would think that a reviewer asking for a copy and mentioning the outlet would have a publisher instantly on you in order to try to facilitate a positive review. But no. Publishers are in my experience the laziest industry in existence. This might be down to the proportion of staff coming from public schools (seriously, look at their LinkedIn profiles). It’s a nice industry to work in, but the money is crap, so it appeals to upper-class people who don’t need to make a family-supporting salary when living in London.

But trying to get a response to an email to a press contact is like trying to wake a slumbering bear. Rarely do I get a reply on the first attempt. I hate writing “I’m just following up on...” emails, but they are essential, I would say, 70% of the time. Sometimes I have had to send four or five emails just to get a reply. Then there’s the trouble of publisher’s websites. Since all the houses have been bought over and amalgamated and centralised into a few firms, a book from Chatto and Windus, say, or Doubleday etc will you find actually on the Penguin website, with contacts for each house, maybe – instead of each still having their own site and contacts. No doubt it’s more efficient for them, but then so are phone banks in Bangalore.

Usually I get sent a hard copy of the book. Maybe one in eight asks if I would like the digital file, or just sends it anyway. If asked I decline, saying how I need to read on the go. This is true, but really I am savagely greedy for books and always welcome more of them on my shelves. But on maybe four occasions the publisher has sent two copies – at different times, I mean, not in the same parcel. Then I have recourse to eBay or Amazon. (Hey, why not?) Then I read when I can and during the weekend before deadline write up the piece.

This, obviously, has been a fragment of autobiography with book-reviewing as the launchpad for some memories and moments. But books are essential to my life, as solace, guide, comfort, moral guide, stimulant, educator, informer and siren-call. The thrill of a parcel arriving with a new one to read is undiminished. May it always be so.