I’m off today. Chances are you’re off today too. It’s Good Friday, and that means a four day weekend.
So let’s skip the marketing chatter and do something a little different.
Here’s four books I’ve read over the past 12 months you should definitely take a look at if you’re looking for something meaty to get stuck into this weekend.
(And go on, I’ll pop in some brief marketing takeaways from each, just to keep it on-theme…)
If you want to see how important punctuation isn’t, read Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Next time someone gets on their high horse about some bit of linguistic pedantry, point them to this. A Booker Prize winner with no paragraph breaks or quotation marks and neither hide nor hair of a semicolon anywhere. It’s a brilliant piece of dystopic fiction, taking the real world upheaval that happens when autocratic regimes take power and bringing it close to home (for the Western reader) by setting it in Dublin. The dehumanisation of the family should be eerily familiar to anyone who’s studied extremist regimes or who watches the news, which means Prophet Song is pretty bleak but a definite must read. A word of warning though, I finished this at midnight and had to spend an hour at the kitchen table with a cup of tea collecting my thoughts.
Spurious Marketing Takeaway: Message trumps punctuation. Always
If you want to understand the importance of truth in writing, read Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
When I was an office junior one of the proper grown-up copywriters1, Matt, told me I needed to watch The Thing and read Kurt Vonnegut. He lent me a DVD of the former that made literally no impression on me, and a dog-eared paperback of Mother Night that made me fall in love. I re-read it last year, and it was still magnificent.
You’ll learn more about writing and messaging from one Vonnegut novel than you will from all the wankfluencers on all of LinkedIn. Especially this one, about pretending and convincing and humanity and guilt. It’s a masterpiece.
Spurious Marketing Takeaway: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Especially when we’re writing for others. Truth is hard to find, but it’s far better for you than the easy lie.
If you’d love a reminder of how powerful the written word is, choose This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for long, you definitely have an idea of what I’m like. Constantly irritated, sarcastic, deeply, deeply cynical. So of course my favourite book of last year was an LGBT romance novel. I read it cover to cover on a beach in Greece, said something nice to the Mrs, then read it again.
It’s the structure as much as the story. Told as a series of letters between two loosely defined characters, Red and Blue, who fall in love despite never exchanging a word face-to-face. It’s a wonderful reminder that the written word is the most powerful tool at your disposal.
Spurious Marketing Takeaway: Words matter. Nobody falls in love because of a blue gradient. Not even Red.
And if you want a quick refresher on why experts are necessary, pick up The Moth and the Mountain by Ed Caesar
This is a biography of a WWI veteran called Maurice Wilson. Disillusioned with his life and tormented by his experiences, Wilson decides he’s going to fly to Tibet and climb Everest. He can neither fly a plane, nor climb a mountain. These issues may seem like insurmountable obstacles. Let’s just say there’s a reason you’ve not heard of Maurice Wilson but do know Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
You’ll probably work out the way this story is going on page one because he’s neither Edmund Hillary, nor Tenzing Norgay, nor a mountain climber, but you almost believe this eccentric Yorkshireman might just do it.
It’s a great tale of how far belief can take you.
And how far it can’t.
Spurious Marketing Takeaway: Sometimes sheer dogged belief fails when presented with facts, lack of experience, and giant frozen peaks. Some things should be left to the experts…
Honourable Mentions:
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley was recommended to me by a client and made me forget about the end of the world for a day or two. Humanity is nature’s perfect problem solving machine, and we should all remember that.
Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes is a book about Adolf Hitler rising from the dead and becoming a TV personality. It’s ridiculously funny and terrifyingly insightful in equal measure. Worth a read if you’re worried about the return of any political figures in particular in the coming months…
And The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is an autobiographical graphic novel about a life interrupted by the Iranian Islamic Revolution that’s personal, political, emotional and enthralling.
Enjoy the long weekend. Normal service will resume next Friday, along with a great ad to deconstruct and share. Make sure you’re subscribed. It’s a ranty one.
Oh, and if you’ve read any of these books, let me know below. I love a good bank holiday book chat.
He was 27 then. 27. Can you believe I’ve been doing this since 27 was some inconcievable future age?
Ordering Prophet Song. Cormac McCarthy does the whole no speech marks thing and some people can’t get past it but once you do you don’t even notice.