Ravening

Dammnit! How am I supposed to relax when books I already own in perfectly good condition get rereleased with far superior covers that cry out 'Buy me! Buy me, even though you already own me, and could just look at the new covers online if only you were a normal person, or even not worry about the fact that there are new covers, which maybe you would be able to do if you just liked sport and had social skills!', or words to that effect.

The books in this case are the 10-novel Alms for Oblivion sequence by Simon Raven, collected in three chunky volumes by Vintage UK. I've read half of them so far, and thoroughly enjoyed them: they're the madder, nastier, more body-fluid-soaked warped mirror to Anthony Powell's great A Dance to the Music of Time sequence*. The versions I have are the serviceable, staid covers shown at the top of the post. But in May, they're being rereleased as Vintage Classics with marvellous, luridly coloured, half-sexy, half-horrible covers by Andrew Archer.

So that's more money down the drain buying books I already own.

* This was adapted into an unsatisfactory BBC series in 1997, which attempted the hopeless task of compressing twelve complicated novels into 4 episodes. However, it did open with a full frontal nude Claire Skinner, so I enjoyed it more than it may have deserved.