I KNOW, six books in four days is pathetic for me. I wouldn’t have bought any if I hadn’t discovered the amazing three-storey Waterstone’s in Cheltenham and spent a happy hour wandering around with £40 burning a hole in my pocket. I picked up When The Lights Went Out and No Such Thing As Society and was heading to the till when I saw Strange Days Indeed. All three are social histories of the 70s and 80s, a topic I got into after reading Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent Never Had It So Good a couple of years ago. After paying for those I […]
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NOW that Borders has winged its way to the great bankruptcy court in the sky, I’m left with Barnes and Noble as my primary source for buying books. It may come as a surprise that I don’t really like going to a big store that’s crammed with my favourite things, but B&N is really starting to get on my nerves for several reasons… The rewards card: It costs $25 for a year and entitles you to 10% off the price of whatever you’re buying. Sounds good until you realise you have to spend $250 just to get your $25 back. Apart from […] Fiction Three Stations The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents Room The Wee Free Men The Graveyard Book A Hat Full Of Sky Lost Echoes Coraline Wintersmith Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Soul Hunter Savage Season Faithful Place Case Histories I Shall Wear Midnight Non Fiction Mockingbird: A Portrait Of Harper Lee The Diary of Anne Frank The Fry Chronicles Letter To A Christian Nation 1959: The Year Everything Changed The Authorised Biography of Ronnie Barker Color: A Natural History of the Palette Hitler’s Empire: How The Nazis Ruled Europe Family Britain, 1951 – 1957 Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America State of Emergency: The Way We Were — Britain 1970 – 1974 At Home: A Short History of […] BOOK blog The Broke And The Bookish does a weekly meme of top 10 lists based around different themes. With it being Thanksgiving this week (or “Let’s Be Grateful The Indians Didn’t Have Gunpowder Day”) the topic is the 10 authors you’d invite to your Thanksgiving feast. So without further ado, and in no particular order, here they are… George Orwell He fought in the Spanish Civil War, spent a year down and out in Paris and London, went down coalmines in Wigan, worked as a colonial policeman in Burma, produced numerous reviews, essays, columns and articles about anything he wanted and then […] IT MIGHT seem a bit odd to take a 330-mile round trip to visit the grave of someone I never knew, but yesterday I did just that. I headed to Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire to see the resting place of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, an Antarctic explorer who I admire. Finding his grave proved a problem as I’d only seen photos of what I thought was a gravestone, which is actually a plinth bearing a memorial cross. When I realised I’d walked past it about seven times I couldn’t believe it. “Found you,” I said for some reason. It just seemed apt. Cherry’s father, mother and sister […] SEPTEMBER 24 — OCTOBER 1 is Banned Books Week in America, a week when bookstores and libraries report on which books have been challenged and banned across the nation. Glendale, where I work, has been pulled into a controversy over whether Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood should be added to the school board’ s English curriculum. Members of the PTA and some school board officials have voiced objections to the book, a nonfiction novel about the slaying of a Kansas family in 1956, because of its graphic violence. The English department wants it in because it’s a classic of American literature. Why such a week […] FIVE new bookcases and I’ve filled ‘em all already. Amazing. I was hoping they’d hold all my books plus room for more, but no. There is still some space on the bottom left cabinet, but that’s about it. I can get more shelves to split some of the areas up, but that’s going to have to wait, and I can see us having to buy another slim bookcase to go on the right. Ev came up with a plan — “get rid of some books”. I’m not sure what that means as I’ve only got 740 (about 250 of which are unread) so I […] WE’VE finally got around to buying the bookcases I’ve wanted since we moved in. As my book collection is pushing 800 volumes I wanted something that would hold them all with spare capacity as, contrary to what Ev thinks, I’m not suddenly going to go off reading (I’d have more luck going off breathing). I found what I needed at the IKEA in Cost a Mesa — a Billy corner combination consisting of six bookcases held together with brackets. I picked the white one to match the red and white colour scheme of my office. Billy bookcases have been around for 30 years, and […] THE inevitable has finally happened. Borders has filed for bankruptcy and will be closing 200 stores across America — including the ones I usually go to in Glendale, Cerritos and Long Beach. Bugger. Some $1.3 billion in debt, Borders is blaming the usual suspects for its failure such as Amazon, Wal-Mart, rival bookstore Barnes & Noble and maybe the fact that it couldn’t get its act together online, only launching its own web-based store in 2008, and not getting on the e-book reader bandwagon fast enough. Oh, and let’s not forget that you can sometimes buy three books for less than the price […] I RECENTLY read The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. It’s both a profoundly uplifting and profoundly depressing book; uplifting for the way Harris rips huge holes in religious belief and those who practice it, and depressing because of the horrors he cites as reasons why religion should be banned. And as he points out over and over again, with plenty of examples, it shouldn’t just be banned for its irrationality, its holding back of scientific thought, its poisonous influence on society as a whole, it should be outlawed because of what it could lead […] |
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