Cain Classifications to guide you

11:50am Friday 2nd May 2008

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Since Christmas I've been working my way through the large number of books I gratefully received as presents. When I noticed recently that the leaning tower of Pisa beside the bed was down to its final volume, I decided that a restocking trip was necessary, but where to begin?

I don't know about you, but the trouble with bookshops these days is the sheer number of publications on offer.

It used to be so easy. In the good old days you really could tell the contents of a book by its cover. As a general rule of thumb, anything with lurid purple foil lettering or the name Danielle Steele was bound to be schmaltzy trash with a smattering of toe-curling rumpy pumpy thrown in whenever the plot structure went awol.

The only time you might consider buying a book like this was at an airport en route to a holiday in Malaga, secure in the knowledge that: n Everyone else round the pool would be reading something equally embarrassing.

n Anaesthetised by sun and sangria, your brain would be incapable of tackling anything more challenging.

(I once went on a girly holiday with a friend who thought that two weeks in Majorca would be provide the perfect opportunity to scale the heights of War and Peace.

By mid-morning of day two she was scouring the local shops for three-day-old copies of the Sun.) The equivalent publications for men also featured lurid foil lettering, this time in gold, and possibly a picture of something manly like a scarab beetle, a revolver or a blood-stained scimitar.

I'm assured by male friends that these novels replaced the schmaltzy trash with lots of high-octane, testosterone-fuelled action, but equally resorted to scenes of toe-curling rumpy pumpy whenever the plotting went awol.

While I'm sure you can still find examples of these fine literary oeuvres at your local branch of Waterstones, it seems to me that the great divide between chick-lit and bloke-lit is more blurred these days - although there's still a lot of foil on those covers.

After scouring the shelves of my nearest bookshop last weekend, I reckon I can now offer you some handy Cain Classifications to guide you through the labyrinth of literature in 2008.

If you've ever found yourself idly browsing the shelves in a dark, far-flung corner of a bookstore and become suddenly aware of an odour that is two parts BO to one part old trainer, you have probably strayed perilously close to the sci-fi section.

Beloved by teenage boys and older men with a keen interest in computing, you'll find that the literary offerings here generally feature space travel, future worlds and big-breasted aliens.

There's also a sub-section that embraces parallel dimensions, dwarves, wizards, arcane lore and big-breasted elves - indeed, all that is generally regarded as Lord of the Rings lite.

As a general rule, if you pick up a book to read the blurb on the back and encounter anything like: "Thule, cursed ruler of the seven orbs, dark lord of the Jumanji faces his greatest adversary yet, lovely but deadly Voluptua, ancient sorceress of the void and keeper of the." my key advice is to put it down sharpish and move slowly away from the table before anyone notices that you are not a 14-year-old male emo with an amusing haircut.

But these days sci is not the only fi lurking on the shelves of Borders, and this is my own, totally subjective, cut-out-and-keep guide to help you find the one that's right for you.

Lets begin with hi-fi.

This is the new breed of historical fiction that mostly centres on some aspect of the Tudor era.

Generally told from a minor female character's perspective, this sort of book will almost certainly feature quite a lot of gold loopy writing on the quite tasteful cover.

Don't worry if you can't work up the energy to actually read one of these, as they stand a very high chance of being made into a big budget, badly costumed Hollywood film starring Scarlett Johannsen wearing a lot of (anachronistic) lip gloss.

Next there's my-fi. The daddy of all my-fi novels is The Da Vinci Code, which took an ancient, pseudo-historical mystery and built a great big quasi-scholarly blockbusting adventure around it.

My-fi will almost always feature some sort of earth-shattering religious secret guarded for centuries by members of a shady and sinister society, or the Vatican, or both.

Words in the title to look out for, again written in gold embossed loopy writing or possibly something resembling ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, include Messiah', Apostle', Secret' Atlantis', Scroll' and, of course, Code'.

In fact, such is the power of the latter that after the success of The Da Vinci Code, several books that had not previously featured this key word anywhere in their title were subsequently re-issued with a new title in which the c-word played a prominent role.

In my book, lo-fi pretty much covers anything designed to generally lower the human spirit.

This genre covers misery memoirs featuring alcohol addiction, abusive parents and exceptionally cruel nuns.

Look out, if you really must, for books with a mainly white covers often with a small black and white photo of a child cowering in the bottom right hand corner.

The title, usually printed in jagged type in an eye-catching red will probably be a single word like Animal', Misery' or Howl'.

An interesting subsection to lo-fi is actually lie-fi, where a bit of journalistic research has revealed that the appalling experiences presented as fact by some autobiographers is actually a pack of porkies.

Which brings me neatly to my last classification, pie-fi.

These are memoirs written by people for whom food has played such a key and comforting role throughout their lives that recipes themselves become a central feature of a book.

Often written by people whose exotic lineage brings the scents, tastes and customs of the Far East or the Mediterranean to the page, for my money the best of these is actually Nigel Slater's Toast - The Story of A Boy's Hunger, a touching account of the author's rather lonely northern childhood, punctuated by reassuringly prosaic things like butterscotch Angel Delight and Dairylea triangles.