The Thing With The Librarian And The Bookmark

Last week I went into the library to pick up some books that I had on reserve. 

When the librarian brought them up to the counter she noticed that one of them had a bookmark in it.

She said something along the lines of “Oh, someone forgot their bookmark, happens from time to time,” and removed it from the book, presumably with the intention of setting it aside. 

I made a throwaway “One of life’s little bonuses, I suppose,” comment and went to pick up the two books she had just checked out in my name. 

Librarian (sounding odd): “Oh do you want to keep it?”

Me (all flustered): “Uh maybe, what’s on it?”

Librarian (still sounding slightly off): “… It’s a summer reading list bookmark.”

Me (feeling awkward as hell by this point and acting slightly too cheerful): “Might as well.” 

Librarian: “Uh well, there you go… Enjoy!” (there wasn’t quite a question mark at the end of this statement but it almost felt like there should be)

Me: Cheers!!! (the extra exclamation marks are there to show I was being needlessly enthusiastic at this point).


The whole thing was just… Well, I blame the librarian.

You find a random, generic bookmark that was clearly not lovingly crafted by anyone’s grandchildren or a hand-painted memento of the trip to Venice that someone saved their whole life to take and you should just go ‘oh hey, a bookmark; lucky you, you don’t have to find one when you start reading’ and move on with your life.

Instead we ended up with one of those ‘I just congratulated someone because they said they were enjoying the change in weather and now I don’t know how to take it back without making it worse’ kind of exchanges.

When I said ‘one of life’s little bonuses’ I wasn’t talking about me, maybe it was a bonus for the library, hell if I care.
I didn’t mean ‘score’ or ‘truly my life is blessed and this bookmark was meant to come to me, thanks karma’ or anything like that.
I was just trying to say something less bland than ‘huh, how about that?’ and things got weird.

I mean, did the librarian think that I had been demanding the bookmark?
Because I didn’t really care.

And did she have her own plans for it which I was thwarting?
Because she was welcome to it, it’s just a promotional bookmark that they printed off when they made up the summer reading list.

And why had I asked what was on it?
Was I going to reject it if it didn’t live up to my standards or was advertising something I found objectionable or dull?

As I walked out of the library was she thinking ‘the hell happened there?’ and planning to go find her co-worker who was shelving books and tell the tale of the exciting and confusing exchange she had just had with some penny-pinching nutjob who was determined not to get screwed out of a free bookmark that was obviously her birthright!?

The thing about all of this is I have not spent days rehashing these events or analysing them from different angles like a detective in a procedural show who just knows that the answer is staring them in the face if they could just work out the right way to come at the problem.

All of these thoughts zipped through my head in the time it took to turn around and step away from the counter.

When I tell one of these stories to people or, for instance,  explain all of the considerations that occurred to me when I realised that people who don’t routinely wear hairpins will be at a serious disadvantage if they ever need to pick a lock in a survival situation* the level of detail I can cram in will convince them that I have been thinking about this for days possibly in the place of all the sleeping and taking medication they assume I should have been doing instead but these thoughts** take place at the speed of light.

I could possibly comfortably spend an hour outlining the expanded universe of ‘what would happen if I got stuck in an elevator with my handbag vs what would happen if I got stuck in an elevator without my handbag’ but that doesn’t mean I’ve been mulling it over in my spare time, just that I took an elevator this morning and in the space of time that it took to blink I realised that I would never be able to Bruce Willis my way out of a stuck elevator to safety what with their roof hatches all being locked these days, and I certainly wasn’t going to do a Resident Evil and try to squeeze myself out of a hole that was clearly not big enough to fit an adult human through, even a slender one, so my choices going forward would depend on a multitude of variables including the resources available to me at the time.

One of the side effects of this is that I am constantly having people try to soothe or calm me down as they are convinced I am working myself into a tizz.

I’m not.

I’m usually just trying to make conversation.

I think of these sorts of things at all times about all things not because I am over-invested in working out what happened/will happen and my place in it all and what that all might mean, it just makes everyday events more interesting.

Because everyday events are usually dull, as are the conversations that recall them.

Everyone seems willing to engage in the world’s most boring theoreticals (eg, ‘what I would do if I won the lottery’, always the same answers: pay off various debts, travel, buy a house, buy a Tony Stark-esque garage full of classic cars, develop an addiction) but no-one wants to have a crack at the ones that actually require some world-building, thinking, or fun (eg, if there was an EMP event and all tech got knocked out for long enough for our various cities and suburbs to devolve into feudal city-states do you think that they would be able to go back to ‘normal’ once we got tech up and running again or would the shift to small local government be permanent?)

TL;DR, I got a new bookmark.



*I mean I don’t personally know how to pick a lock even if I did have a hairpin, but thanks to TV I’m convinced that a hairpin is technically a valid lock picking tool and that at some point some McGyver-esque person is going to turn to me saying ‘Thank god, there’s a woman here! We’re all saved! Miss, I need your hairpins!’ and I’ll have to explain that I don’t actually use them because my hair tends to spit them out like a toddler spits out vegetables and everyone will sit and stare at me mulishly for being a substandard woman until we all die, trapped for want of a hairpin.

**Like, should I start wearing hairpins just in case I’m ever in a survival situation? I would probably be better off putting a couple of paperclips in my pencil case because I already own paperclips and they’re actually a bit sturdier than some hairpins…***

***As a result of writing this blog post there is a possibility that I am considering adding a small number of paperclips and a packet of chewing gum to my handbag just in case. I would hate to a) die because I didn’t have them b) be a disappointment to McGyver.



UPDATE: You guys probably won't believe me but I swear to all that is sacred and/or delicious that when I got home after writing this post I found a hairpin on the floor of my bedroom!
WHERE DID IT COME FROM!?
I honest to Glod do not own any hairpins! 0_0

Wait, How Do You... Everything?

From the things I post you would probably think I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the collapse of society.

I don't really, it's just very interesting, much more interesting than the complex and ultimately impractical structures and devices I design when I'm bored.

Anyway, the collapse of society!

So, society has collapsed!

The EMP has knocked out all our technology or the zombies have sent us into a panic or a disease has wiped out 70% of the Earth's population or I guess aliens?

The point is shit has gotten real.
No-one is manning the power stations.
The chain of supply has been interrupted.
We're on our own.

Shit!
OK!
No!
Keep calm!
Right!
What first!?
We have to be smart about this!

Shelter!
Water!
Food!
Medicine!
Clothes!
Furniture!

I guess loot it?

No!
Shit!
Everyone else is looting it!
And even if we do manage to loot it, it'll eventually run out!
Crap!
OK, uh...

How do you grow your own food?
How do you preserve that food?
How do you make your own materials?
How do you make your own clothes?
How do you build your own house? One that doesn't rely on all the shit we don't have any more to function properly!
How do you source safe drinking water?
Does anyone know how to make penicillin?

Nope.

And there's no electricity because the zombies ate all the power plant dudes or the tech is all fried because of the EMP aliens, so we can't check the internet.

TO THE LIBRARY!

Fuck!
Everyone else got here first!
Some people cleared out all the reference books and some people wanted to burn the fiction section to stay warm in winter and then there was a big fuck off battle between the cultureless weenies and the booklovers!
Crap!

If only I had compiled a survival library before this happened!
Survival for Dummies!

Wait!
Society hasn't collapsed yet!
It's not too late to squirrel away a reference library of helpful instructional tomes to keep you and yours alive in the challenging years to come!

Look!

OK, they probably don't have 'How to make Penicillin for Dummies' but that's where you have to branch out and get books like this!

I grabbed me up a copy of this recently and while I haven't actually got it behind glass, it is sitting there calmly reassuring me that I will have some idea of what to do should the world as we know it end*.

And while I can't say that I am putting together a 'How to Everything for Dummies' library with assorted references and instructional texts, I can't promise you I'm not.

Also this is why we should make sure that local government doesn't shut down our libraries.
We'll need them when the shit hits the fan.
But we probably shouldn't mention the zombies in our letters to our local members of parliament... People get weird about stuff like that.



*Realistically I know what I would do is panic and die or get gathered up into some hey-feudalism-so-great-let's-try-that-again! warlord's harem or something.

Sucked In

There are some books that just absorb you totally. You pick them up, fall into them and you can’t put them down.

Sometimes it’s the subject matter, sometimes it’s how they’ve been written, sometimes it’s the mood you’re in.

It can be a convergence of these elements.

Maybe a character or an event resonates with you.

This is a particular danger for me if I tear through a book in one sitting.

It can cause some very disorientating cognitive dissonance.

When I was a teenager, I curled up in an armchair one afternoon, my legs folded beneath me and read my way all the way through Wendy Orr’s Peeling The Onion.

Just as I was closing the book, the phone rang and I automatically leapt to my feet to go and answer it.

After wrapping myself so completely in a tale of serious injuries and a difficult rehabilitation, I was so amazed that I could actually walk that I almost forgot how and only just saved myself from face-planting.

There are a few books that have grabbed me like this.

At the end of each of the Lord of the Rings books I had to remind myself I wasn’t a hobbit.

At the end of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods I was relieved to find the fate of the world didn’t actually rest on my shoulders.

After Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns I was the most grateful I have ever been to find myself in a life where I am neither endangered or limited in my options by my gender.

As I finished up Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, I once again emerged with surprise into my own life.

I couldn’t identify with the challenges and the self-destructive behaviour that put her on her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail but once she was on it, I was sucked right in.

The exhaustion and fear and doubt and anger and wonder and moments of joy had me.

Even the moments of shocking honesty covering experiences that I didn’t connect with at all weren’t enough to shake me loose, they just drew me deeper into her story.
So when I turned that last page and found myself back in my home, I was surprised and pleased to find my feet were in good nick and I still had all of my toenails.

Like with some other absorbing books, I was also a little... not disappointed... but there's a sort of moment of sadness as you finish the book and step back.

While I don’t ever want to be in a car accident, have to oppose great evil, have to navigate a moral minefield, experience domestic violence and social repression, or lose a loved one or my sense of self so totally, I often envy the key characters the strength they’ve found and the challenges they’ve overcome.

Those victories weren’t without their suffering and loss but they are valuable.

With Wild, I envied Cheryl the sense of self-confidence and self-reliance she built over the course of her journey.

I know that following her trip she had plenty of other issues to work through, plenty of other things she had to achieve before she got to the place she is in now, the place she had to be in to write this book, but she’d already achieved so much.

She had somewhere to begin.

Books like these don’t just capture you for the duration of your reading experience, they also inspire you to look at your life, to try new things and sometimes just open your eyes to certain truths or possibilities.

They don’t come along at regular intervals but when these books turn up, they remind you what the real power of reading is and what it can do for you.

I hope everyone has the chance to experience this, to have their attention so thoroughly caught that disengaging at the end actually feels like a kind of surfacing.

If you have and feel like sharing, please let me know.

I’d love to see if your books can catch me up in the same way.
Even if they don't, just knowing that they've done that for someone else gives them a weight and power.

Kickstarter Swag

When done right Kickstarter seems to be a fantastic idea.

Creators get to pitch ideas directly to the public, the public gets to throw money at an idea that they support that might not have gotten funding from suspicious and short-sighted financial peoples, and the project can get done right.

The failsafes in place - the project has to be deemed viable and the person running it non-scammy before it is put on the site, and if the project isn't fully funded no-one gets charged - helps you feel that if you fork out dollars you should get something back.

I've only started paying attention to kickstarter recently because Amanda Palmer was suddenly all over my internets explaining that she was making a new album.
I knew I'd missed a kickstarter she'd done with Neil Gaiman and had been bummed out about that so I decided to get in on this one at ground floor.

So I signed up for Kickstarter, chipped in, and seeing as Amanda Palmer's project got super-funded in a short amount of time I knew that was a lock, I started looking around at other things.

These are the projects I've flung happy wads of cash at so far.

Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra's Theatre Is Evil CD and Art Book

This is the one that finally got me to sign up. If you watch the video you'll see why.
Unless you don't like Amanda Palmer, which is OK, she's a divisive artist.
I like her passion and her nutso vocals.
And the great thing about it is that with how the funding turned out they've managed to produce the album for public sale as well.
So those who contributed get lovely extras and we got to make it available to other fans who might not have had the money at the time.

So far the digital download has been made available for backers and by all reports has been rocking socks all across the internet.
The live shows have been going off and the physical packages are arriving all around the world for people who are waiting by their mailboxes like this is Christmas.

This track that they've released - Want It Back - shows you what sort of stuff you can expect from the album and the inspiring music videos that it has already produced.

 

Smut Peddler

Smut Peddler is a collection of sex-positive, queer-positive indie comics with some incredibly sweet love stories mixed in with all the lovely smut.
There are a variety of different stories for people of different tastes (in art, in story style, in smut) and there is a very accepting feel to the whole thing. Not everything will fit everyone's personal inclinations but it's very much a case of 'your kink is not my kink and that's OK' and even if you aren't engaged by a particular story, the art is still lovely.

They did a wonderful job of presenting different sexual identities, relationships and dynamics of varying configurations in a very natural and respectful manner, making all the pairings or groupings seem very casual and natural and fun.
Some of the stories are also funny as hell which is nice.

My backer PDF turned up recently and phew is it steamy in places. Very very nicely done.
I can't wait for the physical copy.

All of the contributors turned out excellent work.
I'd already heard of and seen work by Jess Fink, Erika Moen and Leia Weathington before but I was really really impressed by the technical art skills of other new-to-me contributors like Betty Jean Doe, E.K. Weaver, Nechama Frier, Lee Blauersouth, Theo Lorenz, Dechanique and their writing partners like Alice Hunt and Abby Lark.

The Smut Peddler PDF is now available for sale to non-backers.

 

Tome

Tome is probably the biggest and most ambitious of the projects I've backed.
A hardcover anthology of art in what is shaping up to be a glorious annual series. This particular volume will be about vampirism and will feature the art of Ben Templesmith, Becky Cloonan, Dave McKean, Francesco Francavilla, menton3, Molly Crabapple and many others. Those listed here are just the ones I recognise instantly, I expect to fall in love with the art and music of the other new-to-me artists when it comes along.
Yep, that's right, it has a music component.
From what I've seen of the work in progress and what I know of the quality of work the contributors are known for, Tome is going to be a eye meltingly beautiful.
I cannot wait to have this ginormous book of art in my arms. And it will literally be my arms. It'll be too big to just hold in my hands.



The very best part about the projects I've backed so far is that there is a gap between funding being successful and the product being produced and mailed out so by the time it finds its way to me I will have completely forgotten it's on its way!
Thanks past-me! You're a gem!

If you've been looking at Kickstarter but haven't been sure I guess the advice I'd give to you is to pick projects you're excited about, hopefully by people who are known for their passion for their work and their joy in creating and give it a shot if you're in a position to.
It feels really good to be part of the process, knowing that you helped something amazing be made.

The Long Haul

This book is going to be the death of me.

This is the second time I've borrowed it out and both times I renewed it twice and this time it's overdue.

A month overdue.

Do you have any idea how much I hate having overdue books out from the library?

It's a lot.

But I cannot cannot CANNOT return this book until I've finished it.

Not this time!

And the really sad thing, the incredibly sad thing, is what the book is.

It's Australian Politics For Dummies.

How much of a dummy do you have to be for it to take you this long to read a book?

I keep picking it up at the end of the day and either I'm too tired and I start nodding off or it's making me tired.

The material is interesting enough but obviously it's very factual and a bit dry and you aren't really motivated to rush to the end and find out 'who did it' because it's politics, they all did it.

I would honestly have chucked it in the first time round except for three things:

1. I refuse to be defeated by any book with 'For Dummies' in the title.
2. This is stuff I really feel I should have a good handle on by now seeing as I'm an adult voting person.
3. I HAVE ALREADY WRITTEN IT DOWN IN MY READING JOURNAL AND ONCE I HAVE WRITTEN IT DOWN IN MY READING JOURNAL I HAVE TO FINISH IT.

The Reading Journal is a sacred trust.
I can't have unfinished entries in my Reading Journal.
It would be unthinkable.
I know a lot of people have rules about how much of their time they'll give a book before they give it up as a bad lot.

Wil Wheaton has said he has a '100 pages or 1 hour' rule and if it hasn't caught his interest by then, it's toast.

I can respect that.

Life is too short to waste it trudging through terrible books.

Normally I don't have that trouble because if a book is truly TRULY that heinous, I'll have noticed before I get around to jotting its details down in the Reading Journal.

Some cruddy books I'll finish out of a sort of perverse bloody-mindedness because I want to be able to tell other people in excruciating detail exactly how bad it was from one end to another.

But this book isn't bad, it's just dense because of its subject matter, and I'm just being weird and lazy about getting it read.

I've been avoiding reading it because I can't be arsed but this means I haven't been reading much else either, and I miss reading, proper reading.

So now I am rolling my sleeves up, taking myself by the ear and not putting up with any more of my rubbish.

I will finish this book in the next few days.

I will return it to the library.

I will apologise profusely and pay my fine.

Then I will get on with my life.

There are too many other books waiting for me out there to let this go on any longer.

A Rose By Any Other Name...

"Why is it that you still keep your journal in books?" my Dad asked me the other day as I was scribbling earnestly. "I mean, is there any particular reason you can't do it electronically?"

Well, no... but yes.

It'd just be... wrong.

Apart from demonstrating that I'm such a Luddite that even my father has overtaken me, happily keeping all his affairs in order on a tablet, his question made me wonder why the idea of keeping an electronic journal bothered me so much.

I guess there are a few reasons.

• A Beginning And An End - I like the idea of a journal being a finite length. It captures a chunk of your life, as much as you can fit into those pages. It can span years or months, depending on how much you have to say, how much has been going on. It has a beginning and an end. Once you've run out of pages, as long as you're around to do so, you start another one.
  An electronic file can theoretically go on indefinitely, stretching out in a long and cumbersome fashion that takes an amount of navigation to find anything you may want to read again.
• Fidelity - Sure a book journal could get wet, get mildew, be burnt or lost or ripped or stained, but that would be down to location and bad luck. And even when damaged, it may still be decipherable. Data files corrupt. They can do it for no particular reason, or your computer may get a virus or overheat or shut down or just plain die. Then your memories would be gone. We have books in museums that have survived since the advent of books, scrolls and parchments from earlier still which are still legible.
  If it comes to a choice, I trust paper.
• Handwriting - Not long ago when asked why he still handwrites his first drafts, Neil Gaiman pointed to studies* that have been done that prove your brain interacts differently with language when you write compared to when you type. It has to pay more attention as you form the words and sentences in your mind, then has to direct the nerves and muscles involved in moving your pen across the page. It's more involved.
  You get to chose different coloured pens for different moods or events, different kinds of inks, different types of pen that affect how your writing looks and how you feel about the act of writing. For some people writing a journal can almost be an artistic act.
  The fact is that a lot of the history and memories tied up in journals aren't just in the words but are in the physical item, the visual cues. The feel of the book, the scent, the handwriting, crossings out, misspellings and sketches of your younger self, the stains or tears or marks it may have gathered along the way all evoke deeper memories or associated feelings.
  
  

These are some of the many things that make re-reading old journals so rewarding, enjoyable and immersive. Not just the words themselves but how they're presented, how you recorded them and how you get to re-experience them.

So yeah, Dad, I guess there is a reason why I still keep my journal in books.
Because it's beautiful and it's the act of creating something as I write that keeps me interested in keeping a journal at all.
The memories are precious but so are the package they're housed in.



*I didn't bookmark the specific article at the time and have no hope of wading through his twitter feed to find it so here are two lifehacker articles on the subject: A Defence of Writing Longhand and Why You Learn More Effectively By Writing Than Typing.

That's SIR Terry Pratchett, I'll Have You Know

There are some people whose work you just can't imagine your life without.

For me one of those people is definitely Terry Pratchett.

I have been losing myself in his books since I was about 14 and I often find it difficult to believe that so many varied characters, so many worlds could come out of one person's head.

I have trouble believing that some of those characters and places aren't in fact real, because who could have written something so complex and wonderful starting from scratch?

Well, he could.

And he does it in the same way as most of the people I truly admire do such things, by being genuinely and persistently interested in absolutely everything and filtering that interest in through their ears and eyes and then out through their fingers and into their work.

Hearing him speak was a fantastic experience.

I had been a little worried about how he would go as he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007 but apart from the occasional pause to try remember the word he was searching for, he didn't have too much difficulty.

Just hearing about some of the things he has researched for his own interest which may never find heir way into his books was fun, it made me feel like going out to a bookstore and picking up a handful of completely random books and seeing where they take me.

I'm not disappointed that I didn't get to meet him as I tend to believe that I'll make an arse of myself in front of my heroes and wouldn't be able to think of anything original to ask or say.

I might like to have a signed copy of one of my favourite books but apart from the fact I don't think he's really doing that any more, I think I'd be tempted to stop reading it as I would want it to stay pristine for as long as possible and that's not right.
Books are meant to be read.

Speaking of which, now I'm going to have to go home and re-read my entire collection.

It won't take as long as you might expect, familiar words move quickly past the eyes.


[Edit: Ooh look! In July they posted a video of his talk online!]



If you don't like embedded videos, here's the link to the Wheeler Centre webpage instead.

The Call

I'm getting that urge again.

As reliable and inevitable as the tides and driven by the turn of the seasons.

It is time to read Dracula for the bajillionth time.

I think everyone has a book that makes very specific repeat appearances on their reading schedule and mine is Dracula by Bram Stoker.
Whatever that says about me.

I have several books that I read at least once a year - American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams and Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman amongst them - but Dracula is the only one prompted by weather rather than mood or memory.
The only one I can't say no to.

When the weather cools and a touch of frost enters the air I start thinking of grand old buildings, abandoned and decaying; formal language and a society built on and constricted by convention; strange happenings and otherworldly creatures driven by dark appetites that are only a magnification of our own; the kind of dread that only comes from the gothic classics, from a time when the world was still mysterious, the old world doubly so, when people believed in souls and that they could be lost; of courage and convictions.

And it's time to read Dracula again.

Unanticipated Anticipation

Next week for the very first time I am going to attend a book club.
This as far as I'm concerned is A Good Thing.
I have been very lazy with my reading for quite a while now and this is going to introduce me to new books and authors in a way that will probably snowball and completely decimate my free time.
That's all for the greater good as well. I waste the hell out of my free time.

As I know and quite like the people who are going to be there the only wankery and pseudo-intellectualism I'll have to look out for is my own*, so I'm not worried about that.
I'm worried about My Turn.

The rules, as far as I remember them, are:

• We take it in turns to pick the book we're all going to read for that month's meeting
• It has to be something that none of us has read before
• Um... yeah, that's all I remember, that might be it.

The first book chosen was A Thousand Brilliant Suns by Khaled Hosseini.
I've just finished it and it was brilliant.
The pacing of the story and the presentation of the themes were both done in a very effective way and the manner in which the author describes things is deceptively simple and very stirring**.
I'm going to talk about the use of timing so hard on Thursday...
Ahem, excuse me.

Anyway, my concerns are as follows:

• Like I said, I've been fairly lazy with my reading lately so I'm going to have to go looking for new books. Usually I just go down to the library or the bookstore and wait for something to catch my eye.
• I hate, hate, hate recommending books that I haven't read before. What if they're terrible? What if I've just wasted your precious time and made you read something you can't unread? Like many things in life I'm perfectly willing to accept and forgive this sort of thing happening if somebody else does it and treat all knowledge and experiences as valuable in their own way, but if I do it...
• Nobody in the group is a genre-snob but I'm probably a bit more zombie/sci fi/crime fiction oriented than they are. If I pick something in my usual range I'm going to have to make sure it's well written and accessible to everyone rather than just hilarious and/or interesting to me.

But even now that I'm thinking about it on a Freak Outs register of 1 to 10 this is barely registering a 3.
Despite my reservations I am more excited than apprehensive.
Much more excited.
Oh my God I'm going to read so many books!
Deploying Glee in 10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1!

Glee!!! ^_^



*I majored in literature in university, I only know one way to talk about books and that is pretentiously.
**See what I mean?

Eternal Curiosity In The Face Of Wisdom

Some years ago I got onto a train heading into the CBD and I found an abandoned book.
It was a cheap paperback with a pulp sci-fi cover and yellowing pages.
It looked lonely and wistful.
I had half an hour to kill so I started reading it.

I don't remember the title.
I don't remember the author.
I do remember that the hero of the piece was a brash, mouthy spaceman who was experiencing technical difficulties with his super awesome spaceship and who had to stop on the nearest planet.
Which had been colonised by Nazis.
Of course.

The Space Nazi dialogue had been compiled by watching a catalogue of the worst war movies ever made.
The mouthy spaceman's dialogue seemed to be a loving homage to Ash of the Evil Dead movies as written by a fourteen year old boy.

And it was terrible.
I know it was terrible.
It must have been because I put it back down when I left the train.
Partly for someone else to find and partly because it was so terrible I didn't really want to read the rest.

I'm certain that the plot was awful and that I could predict with almost 100% accuracy that mouthy spaceman would somehow manage to blow up or decimate Planet Nazi and abscond with one of their blondest women, probably one not overburdened with intelligence.
I'm SURE it was tripe.

And yet I've just spent the last two hours googling the damn book because all these years later I STILL want to know how it ended.