Craze for shelf expression should be brought to book

How do you arrange the books on your shelves? By topic, I imagine, though some opt for alphabetisation and I’ve met a handful of trendy types who claim to arrange by mood.

Now here’s a new suggestion from the interiors magazine Ideal Home. The latest issue printed a picture of a shelf stacked with books, but they were all flipped the wrong way around, their spines facing inwards so all you can see is a line of featureless pages. The accompanying headline read: “Lauren keeps the look neutral by stacking books back to front.”

Seems a bit silly, doesn’t it, counter- intuitive. Social media thought so too. The picture quickly went viral and caused a quite an online stir. “Well Lauren’s a blithering idiot then, isn’t she?” tweeted the comedian Pete Otway.

Some of the comments moved into real cruelty and misogyny (one horrible Facebook troll even threatened to come to her house to kick her head in). Lauren ended up defending her decor decision against the online mob, who concluded that she must be a non-reader to want to display books in this way. “Too many books of different colours can make a shelf look cluttered,” she explained. “Some people may think it is pretentious but to make assumptions about my character based on one bookcase is unfair.”

The reaction to Lauren’s bookcase is extreme but it is true that other people’s bookshelves can give an intimate insight about taste and, yes, character. It’s always the first thing I look at when I visit someone else’s house. Not to condemn or criticise, of course, but how can one not be curious?

So why have some people been made so angry by poor Lauren (apart from the obvious answer that they are strangers on the internet and so inordinate, cruel rage is basically a requirement)? I suspect it is because she has been unfairly lumped into an emerging group: the book braggarts of Instagram.

It has become rather popular in recent years to show off book collections on the social media platform: photo after photo of neatly lined-up hardbacks, warmly-lit, well-framed and glossy-filtered in the same way others might snap a meal at a swanky restaurant or a poolside selfie. Selfie or “shelfie”, the tiresome purpose is the same: look at my beautiful life, are you envious yet? Oh, get over your shelf.

I’m getting in the popcorn for the next royal biopic

The American TV channel Lifetime has announced a film about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, apparently with the plan to air it before the couple’s wedding on May 19.

The film is a sequel, of sorts. The network’s first attempt at a royal romance, William & Kate: The Movie, about the couple meeting and falling in love at St Andrews, aired in the UK in 2011 just in time for the big day.

I have fond, blurred memories of the film. I met up with fellow university friends, St Andrews alumni, to have a few drinks and a laugh at the almost inconceivably naff disaster. Shots of LA pretending to be Fife, dodgy accents, risible script chock-full of clunky, expository howlers (“You’re the heir,” Prince Harry tells William. “I am just the spare.”), it had all you could want from so-bad-it’s-hilarious trash.

Can Harry and Meghan: The Royal Love Story surpass its predecessor? With less than four months left to write, cast, film and edit the thing, I’m optimistic.

A sneeze is always better out than in

An unlucky soul made the headlines yesterday after he tried to stifle a sneeze and ended up blasting a hole through the back of his throat. Shocking stuff, but it could have been even worse — apparently holding in a forceful sneeze could cause a lethal brain aneurysm.

I am a frequent and naturally loud sneezer (I have a mild allergy to sugar but refuse to stop eating it), yet for years I have been suppressing blasts under my wife’s instruction. Little did I know that all this time I’ve been dicing with death on a daily basis.

But my initial thoughts of horror were soon replaced by opportunism. Sorry, darling, I have to let out my sneezes at full blast now, doctor’s orders etc. Thanks, quacks.

The Saudis’ first movie is a bit *thumbs-down*

At the weekend Saudi Arabia lifted its cinema ban for the first theatrical screening in 35 years. But Saudi wannabe cinephiles shouldn’t celebrate just yet.

The first film given the thumbs-up by the conservative Islamic kingdom’s officials is The Emoji Movie, the children’s cartoon savaged by western critics last year: “rancid”, “oppressively bland”, “the most hideous example of product placement in cinematic history”.

No one could blame the Saudis if they choose to not watch a film again.