Bibliophobe’s revenge.

Here's a fact to completely astound
Any reader who keeps books around.
There's a breed on this globe
Called the bibliophobe:
The mere sight of a book – he's unbound.
http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?Word=bibliophobe.

You could say that again, boys and girls. Take it from me. If you want to turn a bibliophile like me into a frothing-at-the-mouth bibliophobe, the surest way to do it is to hand him a coffee table book admeasuring 300mm x 223mm with a 28mm spine and insist he uses it for reference. I’m speaking from recent hands-on experience. Only someone as weird as Cosmo Kramer could have come up with the very idea of the coffee table book, I can vouch with total conviction. http://edition.cnn.com/books/news/9805/12/coffee.table.cnn/. It’s one thing to open one of those obscenely oversize books on a coffee table top and insouciantly turn the pages barely glancing at the pretty pictures – making arty-sounding remarks just to show the present company how hip and with-it you are. It’s quite another, believe me, trying to read the text printed in an undecipherable small font and trying to make sense of it. They should at least set them up in large print like books for the visually impaired – if they want what’s printed in them to be taken seriously. A look at Large Print Books.com http://www.largeprintbooks.com/ tells me that art books are not included in its fairly comprehensive repertoire that boasts chicken soup series, children’s books and even Harry Potter for that matter. In other words, no sensible soul expects what’s written in art books to be taken seriously. Ergo, look at the pretty pictures. Don’t read the drivel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_table_book. [New Learning about Ye Olde Attitudes: Did you know that according to the Ulverscroft Group, one the biggies in the large print publishing business http://www.ulverscroft.co.uk/ the English-reading universe comprises the UK, Ireland, South Africa, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand only?]

Music-to-your-ears last words:

This odd word, bibliolater, looks
Like a person who can't get his hooks
On enough things to read,
But I ask you, indeed,
Can a reader have too many books?
http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?VerseId=57201.

Let barking dogs bark. Even if it's in the dead of the night.

I read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The curious thing about it is that it’s labeled ‘Children’s Fiction’, even won the Whitbread Book of the Year Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Booktrust Teenage Fiction Award last year. No, I don’t mean its winning all those prestigious awards is curious. I mean it being slotted as juvenile fiction. I know its chief protagonist is an autistic 15-year-old with Behavioural Problems and Level A High Math ambitions. The content is strictly grown-up, though, dude. Look at the question the child poses. Does God exist? What happens when you die? And, stuff like that. And, though his ‘model’ for the mystery novel he’s writing is The Hound of the Baskervilles, the dénouement is far from conventional. Haddon’s interview: http://www.powells.com/authors/haddon.html.