Holiday Reading/Charity Shop Treasure (6)

The Bob Stanley book is from the library but those other two bricks of literature are charity shop acquisitions. The middle one is a nice paperback copy of the ‘condensed’ one-volume edition of ‘The Golden Bough’ (£1.99 from Oxfam) – to be honest, I’ll probably pick it up in the new year, get about as far as the ‘Beneficient Powers of Tree-spirits’ and then file it away next to ‘Religion and the Decline of Magic’ in the very small corner of the book shelves devoted to esoterica. ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’ is great, though: I’m about 130 pages in and just up to Merseybeat, avoiding the inclination to read it next to a laptop so I could Utoob a load of stuff as I went along and make the whole experience last even longer. Bob has a lovely, readable and concise style – you can almost pluck paragraphs at random but here he is, for example, on The Man In Black:

Cash stuck closer to country than any of his labelmates, yet eschewed rhinestones. He was big on causes, cutting whole albums dedicated to the working man, his homeland and to the American Indian, while also enshrining his outlaw status by getting busted for drugs several times in the mid-sixties; he started a forest fire that destroyed half a national park; he slept in a cave and had a religious awakening; most famously, he played shows in prisons. No one doubted that he was a free spirit.

That said I made the mistake of just sampling the first couple of chapters of ‘The Stand’ (99p from the MySight shop) when I got it home yesterday and I’m afraid that I might now have to put Mr. Stanley to one side for a bit and dive right in. It’s a lovely version, if a little battered: the first British paperback version of the ‘Complete and Uncut Edition’ – 1500 pages, tiny print, tissue thin paper but very readable, classic pulp…