Our public library, which is great by the way, has a display of new, or newish but high demand, books which have the FastRead label on their spines. That label refers to the restricted time for a library loan on these books with no comment on the page-turning quality of their contents: 4 days with no renewal as opposed to 3 weeks with an indefinite number of renewals for fiction books without the FastRead label. The library will usually have multiple copies of such high demand books with only one or two placed in the FastRead category.
It’s always tempting to look through the books there, but I rarely sign one out. I often have multiple books on the go at any one time and setting everyone aside for a 4-day sprint read doesn’t always put one in the best reading frame of mind. It’s even more challenging if you end up spending two of those four days out of town in non-reading pursuits (dread phrase!). This past weekend I found myself engaged in just one of those intense reads that I try to avoid. Fortunately the book was worth it – William Gibson’s Zero History.
There is something about Gibson’s writing that catches and holds a pace, inundating the reader with a surfeit of brand-molested detail that feels as highly produced as the music his character, Inchmale, tends to be orchestrating for clients like The Bollards. The weave of fabric is no bad metaphor for Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy as espionage (national and industrial), fashion, marketing, and addiction are carefully intermingled. He’s got good cloth and a superior cut with fine finishing. Is it any wonder that Zero History is as desirable as Pattern Recognition and the under-valued Spook Country?
But try not to get it out on a FastRead loan from the library. Take your time and enjoy it.
The FastRead collection in your local library has two functions for those unwilling to treat books so lightly. Firstly, the presence of books in the collection is an indication that these books are really hot reading in locally (whether this makes one more or less likely to pick up the work is a matter of taste). Secondly, it is an indication that the library would really appreciate donations of these books (whether you’re willing to part with books are having read them is, again, a matter of taste).
Hi Stuart,
Donations may work that way at your public library in New Zealand, but here that does not seem to be the case. Here is the policy on book donations at the Waterloo Public Library.