The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World

I hate metaphors. That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal

The people read like real people with real personalities, the arguments read like real arguments that those people would have, and she’s an incredibly sharp and witty social observer.

And either way they are written as a weird form of small dumb asexual adult, not as an authentic child.

A completely unnecessary conflict erupting between love interests and/or the protagonist and their allies two thirds of the way into the book, generally based on a misunderstanding caused by either idiocy on the part of previously intelligent characters or absurd contrivance, and serving solely to up the stakes in an incredibly lazy and arbitrary way and signal to producers that if they buy the rights you can use this bit for the act two crisis.

Someone told me once that if you are a 7 foot tall college graduate in the USA you have a 17% chance of playing in the NBA and a 2% chance of writing Jurassic Park.

It’s a great line but apparently it’s not quite true. The numbers are close to that but I don’t think anyone’s been able to stand up those exact numbers and actually Crichton was “only” 6’10.

So generally speaking when you buy a book about 10% of the sale price will go to the author (although most of that will likely just go against the advance the author has already been paid).

When you borrow a book then in addition to the author getting that 10% when the library bought the book they also get library royalties known as Public Lending Right (PLR). PLR isn’t very much, in the UK it just increased to 30p a loan from a rate of 11p it had sat at for many many years. But it’s not nothing. (altho yes it also generally gets swallowed up by the advance).

Even so if you think the average price of a paperback is, what, £8? So the author royalty on a new sale will be about 80p. So one sale is worth about three library loans. So yeah the author would probably rather the sale if that was the choice but it often isn’t is it? Often if you didn’t borrow the book you wouldn’t buy it. In fact you’d have to buy one book for every three you borrow for the odds to be more in their favour if you walk into a book shop than a library, and I think for most people that’s not the ratio.

Here’s another one that some people don’t know, although it applies more to non fiction: authors also get royalties each time their book is photocopied. However because these royalties are very very small and very very hard to calculate it is not possible to directly enforce royalty claims. Instead what happens is libraries, schools, universities and other public institutions where a lot of book photocopying takes place have to buy a licence to provide that service. There are a number of different licence sellers of which CLA is the most common. Then those licence sellers conduct random sampling and based on that random sample data they allocate the profits they made from selling those licences among the authors who are members of their schemes in proportion to the number of times they estimate their book was photocopied. TBH I’ve never heard of an author making more than money for a couple of beers that way, but every little heps.

I adore the one for Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Salman Rushdie wrote it for his son Zafar who was 11 at the time and who he felt he couldn’t see without endangering because he was in deep hiding as a result of the fatwah. The book is both a children’s story and an allegory for what Rushdie was going for and his explanation to his son as to why he was absent. It goes like this:

Z embla, Zenda, Xanadu

A ll our dream-worlds may come true.

F airy lands are fearsome too.

A s I wander far from view

R ead, and bring me home to you.

Il miglior fabbro is a classic, and I like the spitefulness of dedicating Dulche et Decorum Est to Jessie Pope, which is now pretty much the only thing she’s remembered for.

But maybe this is cheating because it’s a fair old chunk of the intro but I love the dedications in Slaughterhouse Five:

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn’t much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.

He sent O’Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:

“I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope that we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.”

I like that very much: “If the accident will.”

…

And the sun went down, and we had supper in an Italian place, and then I knocked on the front door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V. O’Hare. I was carrying a bottle of Irish whiskey like a dinner bell.

I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicate it to Gerhard Müller, the Dresden taxi driver, too. Mary O’Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to be.

Mary admired the two little girls I’d brought, mixed them in with her own children, sent them all upstairs to play games and watch television. It was only after the children were gone that I sensed that Mary didn’t like me or didn’t like something about the night. She was polite but chilly.

“It’s a nice cozy house you have here,” I said, and it really was.

“I’ve fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered,” she said.

“Good,” I said, and I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two straight-backed chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table top was screaming with reflected light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared an operating room. She put only one glass on it, which was for me. She explained that O’Hare couldn’t drink the hard stuff since the war.

So we sat down. O’Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. I couldn’t imagine what it was about me that could burn up Mary so. I was a family man. I’d been married only once. I wasn’t a drunk. I hadn’t done her husband any dirt in the war.

She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn’t sit still. She was moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off anger.

I asked O’Hare what I’d said or done to make her act that way.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.” That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me.

So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of belts of the booze I’d brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were coming back, but neither one of us could remember anything good. O’Hare remembered one guy who got into a lot of wine in Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take him home in a wheelbarrow. It wasn’t much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers who had looted a clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of clocks. They were happy and drunk. They were smoking huge cigarettes they had rolled in newspaper.

That was about it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She finally came out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator, banged it in the sink, even though there was already plenty of ice out.

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then!” she said.

“What?” I said.

“You were just babies in the war – like the ones upstairs!”

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

“But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

“I – I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: “Mary,” I said, "I don’t think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

“I tell you what,” I said, "I’ll call it ‘The Children’s Crusade.’ "

She was my friend after that.