While I should be writing

Rossiter Books 2: “You’re the Neil Gaiman-tweet?”

I’m new on Twitter, and to be honest, I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet. I keep struggling with the word limitations. I need 400 pages to tell a simple story, so the chances of me every managing to keep it short are very slim. But one of the things I do like about it is follow others, so one of the first things I did when I signed up was to start follow Neil Gaiman.

By this point in my journey I’ve asked some twenty or thirty booksellers to recommend just one book, and they’ve all considered it quite a challenge. Probably as challenging as it has been for me to stick to the one book. Until the Neil Gaiman-fan at Rossiter Books. So I tweeted about the easy choice and added Neil Gaiman himself, who retweeted it. Perhaps not surpicingly, quite a few of his followers agreed with the easy choice.

  So when I visited the second Rossiter Books the day after, on 5 Church Street, Monmouth, and explained what I was doing, I was greeted with: “Ah, yes, you’re the Neil Gaiman-tweet, aren’t you?”

His recommendation was another illustration of the power of booksellers: “I have this favourite, but I keep recommending it so it’s often out of stock. Yes, it is unfortunately. The Art of Fielding.”
Oh, I’ve read that one. It’s amazing.
“Well, this one is almost as good: It’s like a movie by the Coen Brothers, but with more humour.”

And then I couldn’t resist Welsch author Jonathan Edwards – My Family and Other Superheroes.”