At least books on the recession are doing a brisk trade
Monday October 26 2009
I am now struggling to find space on my bookshelf to store the plethora of books I have received on charting the current economic crisis. It seems that you're at nothing these days, as a financial journalist, unless you've penned a book on the crisis.
David Murphy and Martina Devlin's 'Banksters' flew off the shelves, Matt Cooper's 'Who Really Runs Ireland' is selling incredibly well and Shane Ross is just about to publish his long-anticipated take on the credit crunch.
As the recession slumps along, one way of easing our troubled minds is by settling down with a good book. Or a bad one.
Publishing may be facing the same problems as other businesses, but some genres of books are booming.
Escapist romantic fiction is in the pink. Mills & Boon is selling three books a second, and the likes of Cheryl Cole and Jordan have been awarded multi-million euro deals to write romantic novels and autobiographies.
Interestingly, the sales of misery memoirs, by contrast, are dwindling: the pleasure of wallowing in someone else's unhappiness, is, it seems, less appealing in hard times.
The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century -- through wars and depressions -- the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace.
Now, the advent of Kindle and other electronic reading devices that allow you to down-load thousands of books onto one gadget, is looming large as the new bogeyman in the publishing industry.
But clearly the recession has created a thirst for economic enlightenment, a subject many found baffling and boring until the crisis began to bite.
Marx is selling well, as is Keynes. Galbraith's 1954 thesis on the implosion of Wall Street, 'The Great Crash, 1929', has become required reading: politicians make a point of claiming to be rereading it -- a sure sign they have never read it before.
Sales of Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope have jumped by more than 15pc in the past few months, as readers hark back to a Victorian world in which financial uncertainty was ingrained in daily life, and the soul-deadening pursuit of money ruthlessly satirised.
Novelists and playwrights, however, are relative latecomers to making the most of the crunch.
Visual artists were the most prescient, perhaps because they themselves were part of the investment bubble.
Damien Hirst's 'The Golden Calf', a preserved animal with 18-carat gold horns sold for €11.3m at Sotheby's on the same day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
This downturn is too important to be left to the specialists. The financial crisis is producing some intriguing work, but it has yet to deliver the killer punch.
I am still waiting for the one novel that captures the spirit of these times. A portrait of a gilded society intoxicated by wealth and property who saw it all disappear in a heartbeat. 'The Great Gatsby' of this era.
But until that book has been written, I would settle for any of the following novels that still sit in the library of unwritten books:
- 'The book I should have written', by Bertie.
- 'Inside the mind of Dermot Desmond', by Dermot Desmond.
- 'How to own your own building society', by Michael Fingleton.
- 'The curious incident of loans moving in the night', by former Central Bank governor John Hurley.
- Sean FitzPatrick's memoirs. Suggested title on a postcard please.
Irish Independent
