Have you ever bought a book that left you screaming "I want my money back!"  It's happened to me twice in recent memory. First, with Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud and then, yes, I was among the millions who bought Shades of Grey -- paid for the whole damn trilogy and got bored midway through the first book. There's me, once again, screaming "I want my money back!"

Literary activism is the antidote as well as the antonym. It's using our energy -- or in this case our book buying budget -- to support a good cause. That's how I discovered Gregory Norminton. This lovely young author edited Beacons: Stories for our not so distant future, and he contributes the royalties to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition,  "the UK’s largest group of people dedicated to action on climate change and limiting its impact on the world’s poorest people." I bought one kindle story on Amazon for 99 cents and it was so good that I cheerfully blew $10 on the whole collection. Norminton calls climate change "a failure of the imagination," and these stories will stoke yours with visions of life after the tipping point. Buy this book! It'll do your soul a heap of good.

And if you get hooked check out Norminton's fiction here: http://www.gregorynorminton.co.uk/

Oh,  I almost forgot, The Lost Art of Losing (rants), Norminton's vaguely aubiographical collection of aphorisms, is a great read. It had me groaning and laughing in gusts on the flight from Auckland to San Francisco. The guy next to me wondered what was up but didn't dare ask. . .