Lego, marketing tricks and a nibble of a lunchtime read

After enjoying a very rare day off work taking my children to Lego Land – great but expensive – we pitched up at my in-laws and my niece, who is an avid reader showed me her latest pile of books she aims to get through. One of them caught my eye not so much for the cover and content but the marketing ploy that it is using. A book by a German author Cornelia Funke advises the sceptical reader to turn to a particular page to get a feel for how good the book is.

I know there has always been the mythical page 69, or thereabouts, test of a novel but this seems to be going one step further and actually highlighting a page that contains in the author and publishers opinion a good taster, in this case page 89. It is a ploy that I have not seen used before but it certainly seems to work with my niece and myself both turning straight away to the recommended page.

On the lunchtime read front as you might imagine the lunch break was spent running round Duplo world trying to get a couple of bites of a £3 hotdog. I did manage to get a couple of the sub chapters of chapter three in book two of Scoop done and the brief highlights follow:

* Boot decides to quit the hotel after another hoard of journalists arrive and ends up moving into accommodation that has been used by the German wife of a missing engineer and Boot and her strike up a friendship pretty quickly

* Corker breaks up the mood to tell Boot that they have all been scooped by a rival hack who claims to have discovered the hideout of the revolutionary headquarters – a place that William has been told contains nothing by his contact at the consulate

* Despite pointing out to his colleague Corker that the rebels cannot have a base there because there is nothing there he is told that regardless the scoop has gone round the world and everyone now has to find the place and follow-up the story

There just hasn't been a chance to read any Life and Fate but there might hopefully be more of an opportunity tomorrow…