If you buy books, 'tis the season to be jolly worried

It is mid-December and that can only mean one thing: time to buy myself some Christmas prezzies.

So off I go to Exclusive Books and buy a trolley-load of non-fiction books to keep my few remaining brain cells entertained over the holidays.

In keeping with recent exhortations to my billions of readers to buy local, I only buy books by South African writers and publishers.

I'm a bit dismayed, though, by what the things cost these days; books that previously set one back R140 are now selling for R200 and the R200 hard-covers are now demanding R300 and upwards.

This is depressing, but still our government insists on taxing knowledge. Shame on them.

Having recently re-read Cicero, Chaucer and Wittgenstein (as one does) I am tempted to purchase the collected wisdom of Pierre Spies or Victor Matfield but decide that, whatever its meaning might be, life is just too short for bad rugby books (because of some or other character defect, I collect cricket books).

I have a whole shelf of the things. When cricket books are written by masters of the art (people like Cardus, Arlott, Johnston and Martin-Jenkins) they are things of rare, even priceless beauty.

I once paid R500 or so for a second edition of Prince Ranjitsinjhi's 1897 Jubilee Book of Cricket.

But, apart from these rare exceptions, cricket and sporting books in general are execrable.

The only cricket book that gets added to my collection this Christmas is my ex-colleague Colin Bryden's book on Robin Jackman.

I get home giddy with as much excitement as Imelda Marcos must have felt after a shoe-buying spree, and survey my spoils.

I lovingly run my hands over them, flick through their pages and smell them. Much as I love the kindle application on my iPad, I love nothing more than a flesh-and-blood book. But then I realise, with some dismay, that at least half of my local books are to do with ne'er-do-wells, skullduggery and general malfeasance.

The books are meant for the beach but, like the padkos that has been wolfed down before you're out of the driveway, I have already devoured the first serving of Mandy Wiener's Killing Kebble.

I resent Ms Wiener intensely. For no other reason than sheer envy: this bloody book has sold a great many more copies than anything I have or ever will write.

I read Killing Kebble hoping to be bored out of my mind, but end up klapping the thing in three days.

While I'm reading this, a former police chief is going to jail (or going to hospital or something).

His successor has been suspended. Cabinet ministers have recently been kicked out of office.

Limpopo and a few other rats-and-mice provincial governments have been brought to their knees by rampant cronyism and corruption.

Even the boss of Cricket South Africa is in the dwang because he pretends he didn't know what a remuneration committee does.

All of this is not very good.

Brett Kebble was a pathetic figure of undoubted genius but had few if any scruples; an entrepreneur who collected well-connected politicians the way I collect books. For too long he and his cronies were able to get away with their nefarious behaviour because we have a political leadership that refuses to practise or enforce any boundaries. Limpopo is emphatically in the dwang because there were no boundaries between impartial civil servants and their political masters.

Kebble is dead and Jackie Selebi is going to jail (when he feels well enough to make the effort) because we just don't respect boundaries.

Our beloved constitution is now 15 years old but its letter and spirit are flouted on a daily basis by our political leadership and their friends.

South Africa is becoming a harder and harder place for honest entrepreneurs to do business.

Most of the books I have just spent a small fortune on belong in the Crime section but, instead, they're displayed on the Current Affairs or Politics shelves.

Several of them - including ones on Selebi and Andrew Feinstein's new arms trade tome - might as well be stored in the Business section. It must be confusing for booksellers to know what the boundaries are. For the rest of us, it's just plain distressing.

'Tis the season to be jolly worried.