We cruise into town on a sunny Saturday morning and the first place we notice is Our Book Shop & Café Berry. It’s got a shady courtyard and a family atmosphere. Grandmothers, prams, couples, kids and dogs create a laid-back ambience, surprisingly peaceful. We’re just passing through and needing a pit stop. I’ve got five
I’ve just had a new wooden floor laid (okay, I confess, it’s laminate) in the loft space where I write. I’ve also just been given (with a friend’s cheeky nod and wink) a book called Care of Wooden Floors: A Novel. How could I not read it? Written by Will Wiles, the book is about
This is bliss! There’s a library across the courtyard, there are shelves of good books behind me and above … & … & … & … I have a coffee to sip on that’s mellow and smooth. A quote from Anthony Trollope is painted on the silvery-grey wall of the stairwell. “What on earth could
Cate Kennedy says stories are living, breathing entities that refuse to be corralled by aphorisms. There are 15 short stories in her latest book, Like a House on Fire, and all live and breathe deeply. I’d read a couple of the stories before in other contexts but was pleased to read them again and to
Start the presses! The e-book is losing ground and printed books (especially hardbacks) are proving their resilience according to the Wall Street Journal. This news vindicates my late-adopter-Luddite tendencies (it’s true I have no Kindle or other e-reader) and makes me feel smugly hopeful that all those little bookshops that have hung in there in
Not an exhaustive list but a pretty good summary. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Bloomsbury) What a smashing first sentence. “I was born twice: First as a baby girl on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again as a teenage boy in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan in August of
Books of the year vary, of course, depending on where you reside. This can be seen in Stephen Romei’s summary for the Australian. Highlighted are Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (Text), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate), Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Random
Robert Colvile notes reports that the number of bookshops in Britain has halved in seven years and says something radical is required if main street outlets are to resist the digital revolution. With reference to the “unmatchable advantage of serendipity” and the age-old joy of being able to lose yourself in a good bookshop, he
“The attachment of writers to the old, tangible media is not just about money. The physical book seems like a fitting reward for the labour of writing a book.” Andrew Martin, in the Financial Times, reviews Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times by Andrew Piper, Paper: An Elegy by Ian Sansom and The Missing
There’s a longstanding tradition in our office that if a staff member goes on leave they must pen the other staff a postcard (or ten!) so we can vicariously share their adventures. Much more than receiving their emails, the handwriting of these colleagues moves me as it conjures each individual and their enthusiasms, quirks and
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