Some blogs - the big, first division guys with things like regularly updated content and actual posts about things and, oh I don’t know, audiences - are today doing a mixture of chest-puffing and preening at the arrival on their doorsteps of advance copies of the new Iain M Banks novel Matter.
I’m not.
Not because I’ve got too much class to rub my readers nose in the fact that I’m more important than you and own things plebs like you could never possess. I don’t have that much class. If I could rub your noses in anything, dear reader, I would.
I’m not boasting or showing off because no one at Orbit considers me important enough to send juicy freebies.
I realise highlighting this fact risks revealing to my few (my happy few) readers that this blog is strictly Blue Square Conference North territory - but hey, let’s face it no one out there was deluding themselves any different, right?
I have to buy my own books.
But don’t think this is one of those posts where the nobody outsider attacks reviewers for taking free stuff and “selling out to the man, man”. It’s not. I’d love to have people send me free things
So no, I don’t have bloody copy of the new Iain M Banks novel.
Yes, I am jealous.
And maybe a little bit angry.
But I still have my dignity. (It’s not like I considered offering to both review the book and to pose naked in publicity stills with the book to promote the review.)
It’s not even that I really, really want to read the book (though I do).
It’s that I want to be sent it free. In advance. Before everyone else. So I can boast too.
Is that really too much to ask? Really?