The Unofficial & Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who Road Signs [This is an actual book]

I’m not a massive Doctor Who fan, but I’m more than aware of the show and its history. I’m also familiar with fandoms surrounding TV shows and the sheer amounts of merchandise which becomes available for them.

A website I follow excitedly released the news that a new book would be available from the end of March. Turn Left: The Unofficial & Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who Road Signs by Andy X. Cable is ostensibly about the author’s visits to road signs around the country which are tenuously related to Doctor Who. Already it’s catering to a niche market but it was classified under ‘Humour’ so I thought I’d look into it further.

Here’s an extract from the entry for Martha Road:

When I fell down the stairs once and hurt my head and my arm and my legs I went to hospital and I saw lots of doctors. One of them tried to move my arm and it really hurt which made me cry out like the Sixth Doctor Colin Baker being sucked into the sand during the finale of the penultimate episode of the epic fourteen-part story The Trial of a Time Lord. Mum told me I was overreacting but then she told off the doctor for being too rough. I was in hospital for three days because I kept getting dizzy and there was ringing in my ears. While I was in there I saw lots of other people who were sick or had things wrong with them like Leslie who was 83 years old and had to have her arm cut off because it stopped working. They used to come round and feed us and offer me tea or coffee or water but they wouldn’t let me have soft drinks because they only had squash. Once a boy called Jeremy offered to push me around in a wheelchair which sounded like fun. He took me all the way to the top floor of the hospital and we looked out the window and Jeremy got into trouble for spitting on people down below and he ran off leaving me there and I got blamed for it but how could I have done it?

The story continues in a similar vein for another half a page. As far as I can tell from the preview, currently available here, the whole book is written in a similar vein; i.e. badly formatted, stream of conciousness, childlike text.

I understand that a book doesn’t have to have mass-market appeal, and doesn’t have to cater to my specific taste in humour, but am I missing something?

A little bit of googling reveals that the author used to run a website showcasing his collection of sets of underwear worn by actresses who’ve appeared on Doctor Who. Real or not, this isn’t doing anyone any favours. Obviously this is some kind of character the author is writing in, but why? It doesn’t make the book readable and it really doesn’t reflect at all well on the hardcore fans, already perceived as a group of mentally ill manchildren.

Top 5 Books, 2011 Edition

I don’t remember the first time I went into the loft at my parent’s house, but I do remember the method of entry. You’d start with one foot on the back of the chair which leant against the radiator while the other foot rested on the door handle to my parent’s bedroom. From there you’d lift the wooden panel and slide the loft open. Both hands then went on opposing sides of the hole and you’d haul yourself in, using the transom over the bedroom door to brace yourself. Then you’d realise you’d forgotten the torch and have to yell for another family member to throw it up to you or be forced to jump down and repeat the process. I think the fact that it was such a physical challenge made the whole endeavour seem more exciting.

Once you were in you were completely overwhelmed. Until my father installed some rudimentary shelving there were thigh-high stacks of books everywhere you looked. Carefully stepping across the beams, each pile was something to be looked through. When I’d exhausted the local library’s reserves of Just William collections, Famous Five books and Star Trek tie-in novels it was to my Dad’s stockpile of 1970s sci-fi I turned.

I was a voracious reader. Until my early teens I was permitted to read in bed until around 9pm. To get around this draconian rule I would get out of bed, cover myself with a duvet and read by the tiny amount of illumination offered by the hall light shining under my bedroom door until the early hours of the morning. I’ve a feeling this has heavily contributed to my myopia, but it meant I was a very well-read, albeit heavily exhausted, child.

In recent years this has waned somewhat. I still read a lot, but nowhere near the six or seven books a week I was devouring. This is at least partly due to my offloading the vast majority of my books and DVDs, which can be attributed to either my continuing spiritual development where I’ve renounced attachment to physical possessions, or merely a simple desire to make the packing/unpacking housemoving cycle easier to bear. Enter the Kindle.

I like books. I like the feel of them, the weight of them, the look of a haphazardly stacked pile of them and I like the smell of them (apparently grass, with a tang of acidity and a hint of vanilla). You don’t get that with an eBook reader but you do get the portability factor. There are some books I will never get rid of - those with sentimental value and those rarer ones with actual value - but the vast majority of my reading (as well as the vast majority of my books) is now on the Kindle I purchased at the beginning of 2011.

This tied in neatly with a New Year’s Goodreads Challenge to read 52 books in 52 weeks. It seemed an ideal opportunity to read more as well as make the most of my Kindle investment. I read just under 14,000 pages of 52 books, the longest being Stephen King’s collection Everything’s Eventual clocking in at 608 pages. Here are my top 5 of 2011:

  1. When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
  2. Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories, Mike Birbiglia
  3. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
  4. The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson
  5. Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), Carol Tavris

If I think back, each period of my life has a book genre heavily associated with it; mid-teens I identify with Biographies, in my early twenties I read an awful lot of Travel Writing.. so I guess my early thirties is going to be defined as Books That Have Been Featured At One Time Or Another On This American Life.