Undeliverable Male

'The Lost Letters of William Woolf' by Helen Cullen

There's a growing trend in publishing for charming and uplifting tales of ordinary people experiencing extraordinary things.  These stories are becoming bestsellers, so it's not surprising that publishers are on the lookout for the next 'Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry' or 'Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine'.  One such hopeful is the debut novel of Helen Cullen, 'The Lost Letters of William Woolf'.

William Woolf is one of 30 'letter detectives' at the Royal Mail 'Dead Letters' depot in East London.  Every day, sackfuls of lost letters find their way to the depot thanks to smudged ink, missing labels and illegible handwriting.  The detectives try to solve their mysteries and get them back on their way, but too often the search proves fruitless and the only place the letters can go is the industrial shredder.  As William worries about his failing marriage and stalled writing ambitions, he becomes obsessed with a series of letters sent to 'My Great Love'.  Written by a young woman to the soulmate she has yet to meet, William is struck by the hope and yearning of her words and dares to wonder if they were meant for him all along...

Check (Work) Mate

I mentioned a few posts ago that I felt fortunate because I'd only found a handful of books so awful that I'd had to give up on them.  Although I didn't actually give up on 'Office Politics' by Oliver James, Lady Luck had turned against me and I really wish I'd gone for the paperback rather than the audiobook version.

'Office Politics' should be a must-read for the modern employee.  Although we all feel like we're so busy trying to get the job done there's no time to think about anything else, we can't ignore the fact that good or bad relationships with colleagues can make or break us and our careers.  Oliver James' book aims to equip readers with enough understanding to recognise and protect themselves from the political games that other people play at work and perhaps use some tactics to help them progress.

My feelings about 'Office Politics' are a bit chequered.  The big issue with the audiobook was the narrator.  Any fan of the BBC's 'Horrible Histories' will know what I mean when I say "I'm a shouty man!".  For everyone else, imagine one of those annoying blokes who pop up in cheap adverts yelling at you to buy windows or call a personal injury hotline, like hyped up bingo callers.  My ears rang after listening to this recording for any length of time and it began to try my patience very quickly.

It didn't help that the makers somehow didn't notice the number of words that were pronounced incorrectly either, even relatively normal ones like 'persona'.  For a bookish type like me, it was rather distracting, just as typos and bad grammar are in any printed book.  I found myself hissing at the CD player like the audience at a panto.  I'm baffled at how the makers of this recording didn't notice anything wrong.

These two pretty big irritations mean I don't feel fully qualified to judge the content of the book itself.  I know that Oliver James has a bit of a monopoly on popular psychology books, so assume he must be successful for a reason.  I did find the content rather hard to get my head around at times, but this may be because when listening to something you have to keep pace with the speaker, whereas readers can both go at their preferred speed and re-read anything they're unsure of.

Overall, I think this audiobook was rubbish, but I would like to give 'Office Politics' another chance in written form.  For the moment, though, I think it's time to roll the dice and move on to something else.