Month: December 2025

The death of the mass market paperback, the people’s books

The mass market paperback is dying. Publishers Weekly makes it official, as distributors have pretty much ended those once-ubiquitous 4-by-7 inch-sized books sold around America and the world.

People who are buying books still are getting the larger ‘trade paperbacks’ or hardcovers but the budget-friendly wee paperback that used to sell by the millions is now, it seems, obsolete. 

They’ve been fading for a while, I guess – I honestly can’t recall the last new mass market paperback book I saw for sale here in New Zealand other than those cute little perennial Penguin classics, and the last few times I’ve been to the US those comforting little supermarket shelves of Stephen Kings and Lee Childs seem to have been shrinking to nothingness. 

Books themselves aren’t going anywhere, or so I keep telling myself and fervently hoping despite all the evidence humanity’s collective brains are dissolving into a stew of slop and influence. But I’ll miss those paperback stands at the supermarket or the drug store, just like I miss those spinning comic book racks I once lived for. 

Growing up, the plucky little mass market paperback was my gateway to the wider world of words, starting with the battered second-hand Peanuts and B.C. comic strip collections I’d pick up at the thrift shops. As a book-obsessed young geek with limited money, buying myself a book for a buck or 50 cents was heaven. 

I still recall my first time or two visiting a paperback exchange with my allowance burning a hole in my pocket – inhaling that rich odour of pleasant decay you get from sniffing a vintage paperback and its gradual breakdown of cellulose and lignin.

I’ve got nothing against trade paperbacks and hardbacks and the like. All books are great! But those mass market paperbacks felt more egalitarian, covering everything from literary bestsellers to glorious trash. Those small covers weren’t a very big canvas, but in its heyday the mass market paperback was America’s everyday art form, before we all started getting distracted by screens 24-7. Nothing beats a great paperback book cover.

Books that feel like they were made just for me like Paperbacks in Hell and the absolutely amazing pulp fiction histories like Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Cool Cats or Dangerous Visions And New Worlds celebrate all the weird little horror and sci-fi and crime paperbacks that filled up every spinner rack between Spokane and Miami for decades. Every chunky pocket-sized paperback was a passport to somewhere else. 

My first Stephen King reads were battered paperbacks handed down from my mom. I’ve still got Different Seasons, its cover barely hanging on, and can picture the thrilling little shocks and heartbreak his classic novellas “Apt Pupil,” “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” and “The Body” broke open in me. Somehow, reading those King books as a teenager, I knew I’d have to make a living with words, even if I’d never be a Stephen King. 

I was first introduced to the irascible, unforgettable Harlan Ellison through books like Deathbird Stories, and even though that stark gorgeous red spine on the paperback has faded a lot over the years, I’ll never get rid of it, or part with the memories of the beautifully apocalyptic title story, which felt like a cosmic symphony cracking open to Young Nik’s brain.

Or Tom Robbins’ delightful Jitterbug Perfume, which was passed around my high school pals like contraband – we were years too late for Robbins’ peak sexy surreal hippie lit-god era, but Perfume and his other books still felt like the counter-culture to me, with his loopy prose wrapping in everything under the sun in gloriously excessive comic romps. 

I still remember exactly where I got many of the paperbacks – the collection of Flannery O’Connor novels I picked up during a summer in New York City at one of those outdoor book stands, the hefty Stephen King The Tommyknockers I picked up to read during a long road trip around Oregon and California with my dad toward the end of high school. 

So many others – the extremely battered “1984 anniversary edition” of George Orwell’s 1984 I read when I was 13 which turned me into a lifelong fan; the very first Kurt Vonnegut book I read, Hocus Pocus; the massive pre-internet compendium Book Of Lists which filled me with a Wikipedia’s worth of trivia and knowledge; Robert Asprin’s charmingly hokey “Myth Adventures” series, Donna Tartt’s achingly gorgeous The Secret History which felt like the literary novelisation of my wild intellectual college hopes and dreams. The most recent one on the shelves, Quentin Tarantino’s doggedly nostalgic novelisation of his movie Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, was released in mass market paperback form just like all those hacked-out movie novels of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Before you could log on to stream or even pop in a VHS tape, the Star Wars novelisations gave us a way to get back into the story. I miss that truly interactive experience.

As the wife reminds me, I’ve got too many books, spread about the house in a variety of shelves that I’m constantly refining so I can fit the new books in without too many piles of loose books everywhere. But I’ve still got many of those mass market paperbacks that were building blocks to the book-brain, carried around the world the last 40 years or so. They won’t go anywhere while I’m around. 

Why Pierce Brosnan never quite worked as James Bond

In theory, he should’ve been the perfect James Bond. He looked great. He was groomed for the role and talked about it far longer than other actors, and yet, 30 years on after his 1995 debut in Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan feels like the 007 who never quite hit his target.

Rewatching all four Brosnan James Bond adventures recently, the main fact I was struck by was how inessential they all seem – even the best regarded of them, Goldeneye. They feel like corporate IP placeholders between Timothy Dalton’s harder-edged Bond in his last hurrah in 1989’s Licence To Kill and Daniel Craig shoulder-charging onto the screen as Dalton’s spiritual successor in 2006’s Casino Royale. 

There was talk of Brosnan playing Bond for years going back to his Bond-adjacent turn on TV series Remington Steele. But when NBC wouldn’t release him from his contact, Dalton became the new Bond after Roger Moore retired, and Brosnan wouldn’t get his chance until 1995’s Goldeneye. He was anointed. It all felt so promising. Yet in the end, he was also disappointing. 

Sean Connery was the sexy and brutal Alpha Bond all others came from, while Roger Moore was the more genial killer, Dalton the cunning professional and Craig excelled at giving us a haunted, bruised Bond. But too often Brosnan was asked to imitate elements of his predecessors. He started to develop a kind of professional, cooly slick James Bond archetype which never quite came into full focus. 

The horny sexism and one-liners of Sean Connery and Roger Moore are products of their time, but when Brosnan tried them on in the 1990s, he always looked vaguely pained to be making awful jokes like “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.” His quips generally come off as lame or needlessly cruel. There’s a lot of performative posturing about Bond being an antiquated dinosaur (mostly coming from Judi Dench’s M, who’s the true MVP of the Brosnan era) but little true interrogation into what that would actually mean. 

Goldeneye, like most of the Brosnan Bonds, starts with a banger sequence including a still-classic motorcycle leap onto a moving plane, Sean Bean makes a solid villain and Famke Janssen’s feral thrill-seeker is one of my favourite sexy villains. It’s a very good Bond movie that doesn’t quite make it to great, and in his debut, Brosnan too often just seems like a pretty guy in a nice suit to me. 

An overpowering ‘90s excess hangs over most of the Brosnan era, with huge action set pieces but a general lack of any strong character moments to let the story breathe. In Tomorrow Never Dies, it all starts to feel strained. Jonathan Pryce’s scenery-chewing media mogul is a little too over the top, even seen today in the world of Elon Musk. And Brosnan, if anything, is more wooden than he was in Goldeneye, while Teri Hatcher is a dismal Bond girl. Michelle Yeoh, however, is a delight as a Chinese secret agent. It’s all decent enough mid-tier Bond antics, really. 

The third Brosnan picture, The World Is Not Enough gets a lot of slagging off for Denise Richards’ godawful performance as Lara Croft-cosplaying “nuclear scientist” Christmas Jones, but that aside, it’s actually a pretty good Bond romp – Sophie Marceau is terrific as one of Bond’s few female main adversaries and Brosnan finally begins to loosen up and give a little emotional depth to his Bond in his scenes with her. Embrace the camp value of Christmas Jones for what it is, and this underrated one is nearly as good as Goldeneye, I think.

Die Another Day, however, is a sloppy mess. Helmed by the late NZ director Lee Tamahori, it’s wildly all over the show in tone, a bloated and unsatisfying clunker that ranks with the worst in the series. It starts so promisingly – Bond is captured on a mission in North Korea and held prisoner for more than a year, and when freed his 007 status is revoked and he’s out in the cold. But the promising germ of that idea, and haunted Bond with his bushy hostage beard, gets lost – within minutes Bond’s shaved and back to his usual wisecracking self. I’m not a fan of Halle Berry’s co-starring role as shallow quip machine Jinx, and think Yeoh did the “allied secret agent” thing much better. Toss in a terrible cameo by Madonna (!), an invisible car, a rogue’s gallery of absurd race-swapped villains, combine it with some truly awful CGI sequences to all make the campy Moonraker feel like a Nobel Prize winner by comparison.

The Brosnan years also became when the Bond series caretakers started worrying too much about legacy, and legal battles and infighting that keep derailing the series started to come into play. Nobody ran a focus group on whether Roger Moore really should dress as a clown for the climax of Octopussy, but starting with the unceremonious dumping of Timothy Dalton the corporate hand began to weigh awfully heavy on Bond. It’s a big reason why Daniel Craig’s reign feels so choppy and obsessed with canon and continuing subplots.

Brosnan’s James Bond comes off as a cool, unruffled professional, with the potential to seem as unstoppable as Connery did, and he truly does try with the scripts he’s given – I’m thinking of the brief brutal climax where he confronts Sophie Marceau’s Elektra at the end of World, or the few moments Die Another Day gives him to portray a broken Bond after months of torture. 

In the terrific oral history of the Bond franchise, Nobody Does It Better, Brosnan frequently mentions trying to find Bond in what were often still-in-progress scripts. “As I was playing the role, I always said to them, ‘Just what is the character about? Where’s the character? What’s the interaction between them?’” Brosnan is a good actor, but the movies rarely let him lean into his own distinctive qualities. Brosnan’s handsome face isn’t as expressive as Moore’s or Connery’s, to be honest, and perhaps leaning into his sometimes stoic presentation more could’ve given us a scarier, more mysterious Bond. 

In the end, I’d rank Goldeneye and The World Is Not Enough as flawed fairly good Bonds, Tomorrow Never Dies as mediocre, and Die Another Day as a true misfire. Other than one-and-done Bond actor George Lazenby, no other James Bond actor’s run feels quite like such a missed opportunity.

Maybe it is about more than just looking the part, in the end. 

I never really got over my Beatles phase

My Beatles phase has never really ended.

Like all of us, I go through phases. One week I’ll be super-into the films of Billy Wilder, or I’ll be reading all of Percival Everett’s novels I can find or all of the Daniel Warren Johnson comics I can hoover up, and the next week I’ll be all about exploring the discography of Hüsker Dü. 

But one phase that never really ends for me? That Beatles phase. Sure, it waxes and wanes, I might go a few weeks without listening to or thinking about the Beatles, but in the end, as the man said, I get back, get back to where I once belonged and dive back into figuring out the Beatles. 

There’s been a flood of Beatles content lately, so I’ve been heavy in a Beatles phase the last week or two again – rewatching the terrific 1995 Anthology documentary for the first time in ages now that it’s made its way to streaming, and listening to the latest grab bag of odds ’n’ ends, Anthology 4, all while reading a very enjoyable new deep dive into the great Lennon-McCartney partnership, John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs by Ian Leslie. 

The thing about the Beatles is, like anything that starts to pass into the realms of mythology, you never really get to the bottom of it all. I consider myself a 7 out of 10 on the scale of Beatlemania – I’m not one of those guys who can tell you who Stuart Sutcliffe’s grandparents were or what John Lennon had for breakfast the day they recorded “Penny Lane.” 

There’s 213 or so “official Beatles songs” plus all the infinite demos, jams and alternate takes that have been pouring out the last few years in super fancy special editions. Recently I came back to the mildly obscure track “Hey Bulldog,” and really listened to it – the thumping piano intro, McCartney’s sturdy bass line, the giddy sneer Lennon gives the lines “What makes you think you’re something special when you smile?” It felt like a whole new song suddenly bloomed to me even thought I’m sure I heard it dozens of times before. How did this happen? 

My parents weren’t big music listeners – about all I can recall in the way of “rock” music in the small vinyl collection was some Peter, Paul and Mary – so I didn’t really start hearing the Beatles in childhood, but I was the perfect age to discover them when their albums first started coming out on CD during high school and Generation X got Beatlemania. The Past Masters collections in particular cracked my head open navigating the band’s stunning evolution from poppy singalongs to psychedelic freak-outs. I still can’t quite fathom how they went from singing “Love Me Do” in the Cavern to recording “Tomorrow Never Knows” in less than four years. 

There’s a spark of joy that ignites in me whenever I truly listen to the Beatles, and I think the central mystery at the heart of it all is how these people, these scruffy rough kids from Liverpool, exploded to change pop culture in their decade or so of existence. We want to get inside these songs, to find how creativity itself works. The magic of creation remains the greatest magical mystery tour of all, and in an age where we’re increasingly served up algorithmic bait, fluff and trivia, the rough-hewn analog invention of Paul, John, George and Ringo still feels bottomlessly appealing to me. 

This is why I never really end my Beatles education, because even a bit of a cash grab like the fourth Anthology collection, with its surplus of pretty rote instrumental tracks, can grab me by digging up the gloriously unhinged take 17 on “Helter Skelter.” I sucked up the unabashed nostalgia of “Now And Then” and I dug the rhythmic hypnotic excess of Peter Jackson’s sprawling Get Back miniseries.

I’ve listened to Abbey Road or Revolver a hundred times a hundred times over the years and yet I can still find tiny new scraps of newness in those well-worn grooves. Yep, like everything else, the Beatles have become a content-churning factory in 2025, and, that new “final” ninth episode of Beatles Anthology probably wasn’t truly necessary, yet the little fragments we get of 50-something Paul, George and Ringo (30 years ago!) jamming and messing about with John’s sketchy demos on “Free As A Bird” still feel true despite the glossy sheen of Disney’s content farming. 

And so it’s gone, over the years – I keep coming back to the Beatles, and discovering how much I still haven’t really paid attention to before. 

The very last words Ringo sweetly says as the nine-hour journey of Anthology winds down are, “I like hanging out with you guys.” Me too, mates.