For some reason I recall it as just being me and Bunce. No one else in the compartment at all. Just me, eight years old, and this inexpressibly small dab of misery who told me in one hot, husky breath that his name was Samuelanthonyfarlowebunce.

AND so begins Moab Is My Washpot, the first volume of Stephen Fry’s autobiography which takes us through his formative years in prep and public schools up to his entrance to Cambridge University… and a whole lot more.

Trying to reconcile Stephen Fry — British national institution and star of A Bit of Fry and […]

BORDERS has a wonderful thing called Borders Rewards. You sign up for it and they email you coupons saving you up to 40% off the cover price of any book. Armed with a couple of these coupons, Ev and me went to the Thousand Oaks store to see what we could find.

After having a shufti around I settled on Anthony Beevor’s D-Day and two I found in the buy one, get one free box — Street Gang: The Complete History Of Sesame Street and Forest Gate.

By some amazing maths that’s probably one day going to […]

I’M NOT entirely sure what to make of Victor Lodato’s novel Mathilda Savitch. On the one hand it’s presented as a mystery seen through the eyes of a teenage girl whose sister has been murdered. On the other hand it’s something very different.

“I want to be awful,” says Mathilda in the first line. “I want to do awful things and why not?” She even tries to get her best friend (and secret crush) Anna to call her Lufwa, awful backwards. Mathilda’s decided on this course of action in a desperate attempt to jolt her parents out of their year-long emotional distance […]

SIGN me up! I’ve known about the sale at the Brand Bookstore for a week but thanks to the current shitstorm of work I haven’t been able to get there til today. Even though my personal library stands at 669 (with about 240 of those unread) I’m always willing to add to it.

Whereas going to Borders or Barnes & Noble means you’ve got a 95% chance of finding what you want, the chances of actually getting hold of a copy of From Russia With Love or a biography of Stalin or anything by Philip Kerr, Iain Banks, Sandra Cisneros or Michael […]

SWEET zombie Jesus, Francis Spufford’s I May Be Some Time: Ice And The English Imagination is boring. Boooooor-ing. How you can take something as fascinating as Arctic/Antarctic exploration and make it so deadly dull is beyond me. “Hey,” Mr Spufford must have thought, “I’ll dedicate an entire chapter to Edmund Burke’s ruminations on the flooding of the River Liffey”. You do that, Francis; I’ll be over here reading a much more interesting book.

Ev, don the Raiments of Happiness and prepare to perform the Dance of Rejoicing, for I’m about to get rid of a […]

AFTER giving up on My L.A. I picked up Monica Dickens’s My Turn To Make The Tea, her semi-autobiographical account of working as a junior reporter on a provincial paper in the late 1940s/early 50s. The book is pretty lightweight (I got through it in a night) and very witty and engaging.

There’s no real plot but that doesn’t matter as the book’s entertaining enough. Dickens’ character Poppy describes the day-to-day life of being the only female reporter on the Downingham Post, the frustrations and chauvinism she experiences as she tries to add some sparkle to the deadly dull pages, and the […]

AFTER months of reading other books in my seemingly ever-growing collection, I finally got around to picking up Matt Weinstock’s My L.A. the other day. I discovered it in an OC “antiques” shop a couple of years ago and had to hide it because I was on one of my periodical book-buying bans, I’d been looking forward to reading this 1947 book about old school LA.

Weinstock was a columnist for the L.A. Daily News, and I was hoping My L.A. would be along the lines of HV Morton’s The Heart of London, a 1928 collection of essays about the city that […]