The Haunted Bookshop

by Christopher Morley

[MurderByDeath]

Oh how I didn't like this book.  I should have DNF'd it, but it was called The Haunted Bookshop!  I'd have thought it impossible for any book with that title to be so disappointing.   Where to start...  the characters - the two main characters - are each in their own way incredibly irritating.  Roger Mifflin, the bookshop owner, constantly reminded me of Walter Mitty: living in his own dreamworld with grandiose ideas about the power of literature.  Just about every time he opens his mouth, it's to deliver a long ultimately irritating panegyric on the fantastical powers of books.  I love books and I believe the world would be a much better place if everybody read more, but Mifflin takes this idea too far and the result makes him look foolish.   Aubrey Gilbert, on the other hand, is actually foolish.  An idiot really.  He spends the book either spouting off sales rhetoric that sounds like an Amway pitch or flying off half-cocked chasing dust-devils and flinging about insane accusations.  Remember the Dick Van Dyke Show?  Gilbert is like Dick Van Dyke only without rational thought or a sense of humour.   The plot... sigh... the plot was good, what there was of it.  Sadly it only accounted for about 1/10th of the book itself.  The audiobook I listened to was 6 hours long and I swear if you edited out everything not directly related to the plot itself it would run less than 20 minutes.  Tops.     The narrator did a good job, although he sounded so much like Leonard Nimoy I kept picturing Spock reading to me, except I'm pretty sure even Spock would have lost patience with the book after a couple of hours.     The best part of this experience?  This was a library loan and it didn't cost me anything but the time I spent listening to it and the energy I spent yelling at my car's audio telling Mifflin to shut up already.   Ah well, moving on.