A Piece of the Quiet
by Paul Wilson

Release Date: 18th Jan 2008
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 978 0 2300 1607 1
RRP: £7.99

Average Customer Rating:

(0.0 based on 0 ratings)

An instance where size doesn’t matter and certainly doesn’t reflect the level of enjoyment one can expect.

A Piece of the Quiet is another offering from Paul Wilson aimed at the time and patience-short, promising fast returns on minimum efforts to gain a moments calm in a noisy world. As my mother always used to tell me, ‘Words, if juicy excrement looks too big to be anything other than a worm-trapping bird, it’s probably a bird’. Could this book live up to its promises?

Books of this nature tend to be personal, for example, what may be a throwaway sentence for one reader may be the spark of realisation and personal growth for another. This is what makes such books difficult to simply discard no matter how much we sense we are retreading the same path over and over... for the same reason that The Handbook of Exceptional People can’t be ignored, we have to acknowledge that where there is potential to imbibe serenity into people’s lives, you have to drink it up. And if you are one of the less sceptical ones, this could prove to be of immeasurable value to you personally.

At this point, one could question the value of reviewing titles of this genre... and I quite agree that it is a difficult task at times. I like to tackle the style of the author, the manner in which a book is written... the words that are used, if you like... do they rise up harmoniously? Do they reach me on a personal level? Am I drawn into the reading of it? Does the language inspire and arouse emotion within me that have lain dormant for some time?

Well, yes and no. What I like about this book is that once the rather monotonous and dull introduction is out of the way, we are free to roam the book as we see fit. Indeed, we are positively encouraged to randomly seek out and select pages and have a stab at that particularly quick, easy and pain-free method of inducing peace and quiet. Granted, some methods are better than others, again the personal nature of the genre comes into this; I particularly liked ‘Do nothing and go deeper’, partly because it sounds deliciously salacious and partly because it actually worked for me. It doesn’t take a genius though to conclude that all the methods work on the simple basis of taking time out. It’s amazing what five solitary minutes can do to ease the mind. And I do have a warning: don’t expect these to work if you are surrounded by screaming children all under the age of 5, if the phone is ringing incessantly, if you’re expecting a delivery any second, you have an urgent report to be submitted in less than 24 hours, or if anything remotely immediate and stressful is taking place. Nor will they work if your partner or spouse is making goo-goo eyes at you... the distraction is most fierce!

Overall, a good book. Better than most of its contemporaries, I can see why Paul Wilson’s other titles have done so well.

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