We’ve all suffered from Amazon’s relentless ‘confusion marketing’, but this is a step too far…

This is what I found on first searching for the new book Tolkien’s Modern Reading on Amazon UK. It’s on the list results too. It’s not a result of an infected Web browser, as it’s the same when seen on a clean browser. Anyway, just one more reason why keyword and title search on Amazon is crap. Their advance/recent listings are even more abysmal.

I had thought the book Tolkien’s Modern Reading wasn’t out yet, but a search reveals Amazon UK has had it in Kindle since the end of January 2021. £13.50, which is reasonable for a 580-page book by an academic. It could have gone to an academic libraries publisher and been pushed out at £80. The well-researched book surveys all the various non-medieval authors Tolkien is known to have read or perused at one time or another. He even dipped into James Joyce, fascinated by the complex language-play and allusions, though tended toward interesting genre books. So far as I’m aware he did not read popular magazine fiction. As such the new book also seems to offer a sort of reading guide to pre-1960s books.