I’ve decided to sort my books. I have four bookcases in my room, giving 21 shelves, and another two cases in the attic. Lots of books, most of which are where they are simply because that’s the only place there was room for them.
So now they’re not on the shelves, but rather on the floor. [...]
Don’t get me wrong: Marcel Proust was a genius. His works are terribly important in the context of literary history. But what the Dickens is he on about here..?
But, when nothing of an old past endures, after the death of the people, after the destruction of the things, alone, more frail but more [...]
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Heh – in America, [...]
Penguin (or, at least, Colin Brush, a Penguin copy editor) delivers an almighty smackdown to Nicholas Lezard, a Guardian book critic who has been bemoaning the death of literary fiction:
Lezard is too busy doom-mongering to explain himself properly. For starters, what is literary fiction? Last time I checked no one could agree on [...]
In the summer of 1997, when we were shopping in Dillon’s in Nottingham, my mum pointed out a book she had heard reviewed on Radio 4 and thought I might enjoy. We bought it. That book was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I started at Nottingham High School two weeks later, and got round to [...]
BBC News is reporting that the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality is “calling on high street book[stores] to pull a Tintin adventure from its shelves over claims it is racist.”
Yes, it contains “bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period – an interpretation some readers may find offensive” (in the words of the Tintin’s UK publisher, Egmont). [...]
So, there are just over twelve days (or just under, depending on where you are in the world) to go before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released worldwide.
I reserved my copy yesterday at Chapters in Montreal. While UK booksellers are battling it out over who can make the biggest loss selling Potter (Amazon [...]
Waterstone’s is 25 years old this year. Some might say the true Waterstone’s died some years ago, but that’s neither here nor there.
What’s interesting is that, in association with the Daily Telegraph, Waterstone’s is carrying out the Great British Literary Census to investigate what and how Brits read. It’s been done before, but hey.
One of [...]
Yesterday I toddled off on a jaunty saunter down to London (well, it would have been even jollier if Midland Mainline were able to display even the slightest hint of competence).
As always (just ‘cos it’s something I always do), I headed off to Waterstone’s Picadilly. And who should follow me through the front doors? None [...]
Apparently, Teletext (for some reason) ran a survey recently about books that people don’t finish. Top of the fiction list cam DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Joyce’s Ulysses.
Ulysses I can well understand. I’ve never, ever met anyone who has actually read the whole thing thorugh (certainly no [...]