Surfing Amazon.com in Your Spare Time is Dangerous

Thankfully, I don’t actually have a credit card and still have a sufficient sense of self preservation, which has so far stopped me from organising a debit card.

But it’s still dangerous.

It’s not dangerous in an exchange-rate sense: not right now.

But it’s dangerous in the sense that books look sexy on Amazon.com: the site seduces you into thinking that maybe you really do need a trilogy of novels set in a boarding school with a haunted east wing.

At least, that was what I ended up considering last time I was browsing the site.

But this time, I’ve come across Cara Lockwood, and I’m even more conflicted.

According to her Wikipedia page, she’s published a number of novels that I’ve never heard of.

Keep reading, and you’ll find that apparently the novels “most identify with the multicultural Asian chick lit genre” and that the most successful of them “was made into a Lifetime Original Movie starring Denise Richards and Dean Cain.”

Which really begs the question of why I’m even flicking through her various publications.

I have no opinion whatsoever of Lifetime Original Movies—never having seen one—but I have little interest in chick-lit; I read and enjoyed both Bridget Jones books and Helen Fielding’s first novel, but generally find that I can’t sympathise with chick-lit heroines any more than I can sympathise with the characters from Sex and the City. We just don’t speak the same language.

But those aren’t the books I’m looking at.

No, the problem is that I ran across The Bard Academy series.

Perhaps if I give you the titles it will explain why I’m putting these on a mental “think I sort of want them” list: Wuthering High, The Scarlet Letterman, and Moby Clique.

Oooh.

According to the Wikipedia page, these novels “update” the author’s favourite classics.

That’s something that always worries me. It seem to tie in with the models of literary criticism that I, at least, was taught at high school, centring on my favourite fallacy: “universal themes.” I don’t believe in universal themes.

Oh, sure: issues such as love and hate, ambition and jealousy, pride and despair have been explored in literature for as long as we’ve had literature. (Note to Hollywood: that doesn’t mean that Grendel’s mother is supposed to look like Angelina Jolie.) But their manifestation, their presentation, their significance—these change radically depending on a number of variables, of which the period of composition is only one.

But I’m hoping . . . a little . . . that Wikipedia is being slightly ingenious in presenting the novels this way.

Because according to Amazon, it’s not that simple.

The protagonist is sent to a strict boarding school, because she wrecks her father’s car and runs up enormous bills on her stepmother’s credit cards?

Not interested.

The school is staffed by the ghosts of writers who died before their time, including Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Charlotte Bronte?

Oooh.

Of course, they might not be my kind of thing at all.

But speaking as someone who also wants Simon Hawke’s out-of-print Time Wars series—purely because they have such titles as The Ivanhoe Gambit (1984) and The Dracula Caper (1988)—and who reads anything that Jasper Fforde publishes, I think probably need to take the risk.