The world is swimming in books, huge shoals of good quality fiction, thrilling mystery stories, exciting tales of adventure, wondrous sagas of other worlds and other times and places and people that are similar to or outrageously different from what we know, but can I find something that I fancy reading right now, can I bobbins!

At the risk of stretching this metaphor a little bit further than is wise, I know I probably need find some new places to go fishing, and to rely a bit less blatantly on the Amazon or Goodreads reviews that routinely find their way into inbox, and actually get into the habit of visiting new pools or riverbanks where the conditions are different and the silvery creatures that inhabit the depths are also a little less familiar.

In reality, I’m also a bit picky. I like the language in the books I read to be at least a little eloquent, the descriptions of places and people and things to be enough to spark my imagination, but not so much I feel like a police sketch artist. I like quirky and curious and interesting, but I dislike overly grisly or gore laden scenes, and as for erotica . . . I struggle to imagine anything less stimulating.

Fortunately, while there is clearly an abundance of exactly the type of fiction that I don’t like, increasingly in the age of the ebook and the small indie publisher there is also an abundance of almost every other variety of book . . . if you can find them.

And here’s the rub, I occasionally stumble across gems that I treasure and enjoy and which enrich and enliven my imagination beyond comparison. But right now I’m definitely between gems.

At present I’ve got a William Gibson book, The Peripheral, on the go, which I love the idea of, like the setting and world descriptions, and even like some of the characters.

But which I feel I’ve been slogging my way through rather than enjoying it.

In an attempt to find more stimulating fayre I took the plunge to grab a tasty morsel that I rather liked the sound of, in the form of a series by a Spanish writer called Fernando Gamboa, and for a chapter or two it had such promise, but the translation is a bit clumsy in places, and after being jarred out of the story by it a few times, I’ve had to put it down for a bit as well.

This is not good news, maybe I need to go for a stroll around Waterstones, or better still find a nice antiquarian bookshop to have a mosey around.