Stuart, A Life Backwards

Stuart, A Life Backwards (amazon link)
Just like the book before this (Boy A) its also been subject to a TV programme and it also has to doom ridden small font. The saving grace tho, is the layout. Its rich with paragraphs, good margins, varying font sizes for featured sections and even the odd drawing thrown in to break things up. With a decent font size this could have been waaaay up in the 4 or even 5 stars, but as it stands its only getting a 3 from me. Stuart is a pretty unique book, covering a life in reverse from nutter to lovable child. Hope plenty of people check this one out. I’ve not read it yet, and I’ve only half seen the TV programme, but I’m looking forward to settling down to it.

Review:
I am reading ‘Stuart: a life backwards’. Its about a documented life of a homeless person told in reverse to the point whereby he went from a innocent lad to a twisted psycho, nick named ‘Knife man Dan’. Recommended reading if you care about people caught up in a world and fighting for a way out. This is a funny, yet informative read, which forces you to care about someone you would normally keep well away from.

Boy A

Boy A
This isn’t a well formatted book. Infact the only reason I bought it, is because its going to be aired on TV shortly and is loosely based on the story surrounding a famous case in the UK involving a couple of child killers. Boy A has shortish chapters and about 250 pages, but that’s all… everything else is standard. Loads of descriptive text with blocky paragraphs throughout… plus my ultimate pet hate, a small font. With a small font everything else is useless, the kerning and linespacing is irrelavant. For me this is a hard read and I know I’ll probably get distracted by something more spaciously laid out… however its saving grace is the tv series, ‘if’ I get to catch it…. I’m sure i’ll continue reading the book, just to keep up with it, otherwise, this book is probably doomed. Keep an eye out for the TV series, if you like it, buy the book.

Selecting a good book…

How do I select books?

I stand infront of a section of shelves and quickly scan each book, looking for bright colours, funky fonts and thin books. Once the ‘first pass’ is complete, and assuming I haven’t picked any off the shelf to look at. I scan the entire section again, this time a bit slower, reading the words on the spines. I’m looking for cool titles, catchy words, contemporary words. Once done, if I still haven’t selected a book I move on to the next section. This continues for the entire Fiction section of the bookshop (if I have time) and I can do a decent sized Waterstones in 20mins.

When I find a title that looks interesting. I’ll pick it off the shelf. Immediately feeling the weight of the book, which indicates the quality of the paper, and viewing the cover. If the artwork looks good, nice photography or design etc… I’ll ‘thumb fan’ the pages, looking at the font and formating and paper quality. If the font is small, kerning tight and bad formatting, there’s a very high chance it’ll go back on the shelf without a thought for reading any of the (inside) pages. If the font is a decent readable size, the line-spacing, margins and kerning is good… and a big bonus, being printed on decent white paper… then I’m on to a winner.

Its very rare that I read the back cover or inside the covers, if I don’t like the paper and formating. If the book is well presented throughout, I can stomach any genre or storyline.

first!

This is a book review site. MY book review site. However I don’t read (much) … and struggle to (ever) buy any books. Yet I still visit bookshops and select the ones I like and reject those that I dislike. I am judgemental. I am opinionated…

… I judge books by their covers.