Tales from the Bedroom Floor: WhoWhatWhyHowWhen?

We’re all guilty of hoarding, of keeping things for longer than we should. It’s human nature to think we can find a use for the odd little knick-knack which came with the vacuum cleaner we chucked out a decade and a half ago. Why wouldn’t we? It’s got a nice shape which looks like it might fit under the thing, if the thing ever jams, and if we can work out which thing we’re referring to. It’s pure Darwinism – just as finches shaped their beaks adapted for their specific habitat, so the third drawer down from the top adapts to that household’s misplaced optimism.

I myself am from a family of hoarders. In an ideal world the Stanleys would extend property indefinitely, upsize forever, if it meant keeping every series of Red Dwarf, including Smeg Ups and Smeg Outs, on VHS cassette. Though as a unit we’re on the right side of being crushed by four years’ worth of local newspapers (just about), those ingrained habits are tough to break. Even now, years after flying the coop, my own loft is full of empty boxes for gadgets I’m using and which I assume I’ll have to repack to avoid the kind of catastrophic damage which could really crimp a visit to the Antiques Roadshow.

Books are no exception to that. After finishing a relationship and moving back into my old box room, I had to take the tough decision either to have room to sleep or be surrounded by works of great literature. In the end, I decided I’d just have to live my life without the AA Book of Great British Days Out 1995 to call upon, and donated a large portion of my collection to a jumble sale. When the bloke came around to collect them in his Polo, he’d assumed ‘just a few old books’ meant perhaps a couple of bags. As he drove away, there were more sparks coming from under his car than if he’d just run over the Mael brothers.

But yes, I am a bookworm and sometime writer. I think I’ve always assumed that being surrounded by books is the way to become good at writing them, as if the information they contain can be leeched out by touch alone. If this were true I’d be writing from a golden mountaintop castle, having described the human condition so completely that it would be impossible for anyone not to worship me as a deity. In reality, the last time I was near publication was when I posted in the ‘Entered’ category of a flash fiction horror site in 2017.

I still adore owning books, though. I’m attracted to the covers, the feel and the heft of a book: the well-worn spine, the musty pages of a loved hand-me-down. At some point in every bibliophile’s life there is a tipping point where they own more books than they will ever read, which is infinitely worse if you own an ebook reader. Suddenly I can take ten thousand books for a week on a Greek beach and still find nothing to read, and I’m probably not the only person who has felt that sense of outrage. The solution, which is to write the book I want to read, is too treacherous – by the time I’m finished, I hate the bloody thing.

But I continue to write, and it was suggested by my wife that I could kill two birds with one stone by varying my writing by starting a book review blog. I’m steadily filling our house with books and she thought it was high time that I read a few of them. They stack up next to my bedside table, slowly losing their looks until I push them further under the bed.

So that’s why I’ve started Tales from the Bedroom Floor. Despite the suggestive title (which I thought might snare some Twitter weirdos who mistake it for a Red Shoe Diaries kind of thing), this is a simple blog about the next book in the pile: what it’s about, who wrote it, whether it’s any good and whether or not I think you ought to read it.

There are no hard and fast rules bar one: I have to own a physical copy of the book. This means no ebooks, and no library editions. I have absolutely no problem with either of those things, but these are objects I wanted to own at some point in my life and they deserve a chance to be read. No matter if they’ve been in my life for a decade or for an afternoon, the aim is to read them all.

Other than that, there will be no order, no snobbery, no choice of fiction over non-fiction. There will be plenty of both, from either gender and any genre, so some you’ll like, some you won’t. But most you won’t have heard of and hopefully, there’s the interest. I’ll have a good old rake over the literary coals and it’ll be my honest thoughts. I’ll write when I finish a book, which could take a week or a month.

So each blog post will tell you when it was published, who the writer is/was, a basic precis of the plot or premise, and a review. There will also be a decision made as to whether this particular tale from the bedroom floor will make it onto my metaphorical bookshelf. At some point the ones which don’t make it will be shipped out, and I’d imagine my wife will be watching that space with keen interest. But as all bibliophiles know, the struggle for book space is real, so I make no apologies if something I’ve written swells your own collection.

This is Tales from the Bedroom Floor. I’m your host, Chris Stanley. Now get tucked in – this will be a mild ride.