Ginge Reads

Photo by John Michael Thomson on Unsplash Bookshops, charity shops and kindle stores. There are so many different places to buy your books nowadays that it can get a little overwhelming. And with the increase in sellers, there ultimately always comes an increase in competition and huge variation in prices * . But lately, the simple task of buying a book has been called into ethical questioning, and it seems more important than ever that we are purchasing from the right people.  In a recent poll on Instagram's Bookstagram , over half of the participants said that their current go-to book seller is Amazon, the American multinational technology company. On average, their book prices are far below that of the standard RRP even with delivery costs taken into account. And each week, Amazon also drops the prices of a number of its books for a day or two, meaning the final price you pay as a consumer is normally very little. It is no surprise then, that so many choose them as their prefer...

Have you ever been reading a book and had that strange feeling of déjâ vu wash over you? Where you could almost exactly predict the ending and recognise some of the characters, having never read it before? That may be because there are a specific number of plot types that, supposedly, every book follows.  According to Christopher Booker's 2004 book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories , story-telling can be roughly summarised and categorised into seven specific structures. Each also follows common narrative patterns (such as the rule of 3 ) with a meta-plot to match. Of course, as with any rule there will always be exceptions, but w hile this theory has been criticised for being a little reductive, surely there is truth in the words that Booker took 34 years to craft and publish? The Seven Basic Plots - Explained Overcoming the Monster The protagonist * aims to defeat an evil force which threatens them or their homeland - James Bond          ...