Tag: Books

  • The curatorial twitch

    My dad was book mad. He owned a couple of thousand books, mostly non-fiction. He was an old-school, working class, self-taught polymath, a bus conductor-know-all (I’ve written about his dictionaries…

    Read more

  • “My wife wants a Kindle. She’s dead to me now…”

    I’m feeling a bit guilty about yesterday’s Kindle post, which was sarcastic. But since then I’ve been tracking ‘Kindle’ on twitter and I’ve seen no more than two or three…

    Read more

  • Kindle. Segway for books?

    Some people are calling Amazon’s Kindle ‘iTunes for books’. I’m calling it ‘Segway for books’. Not because it’s got two wheels and a giro-stabiliser but because it’s got Jeff Bezos…

    Read more

  • Xmas presents we liked 1: Carl Hiaasen’s Flush

    Flush, by Carl Hiaasen Easing myself back into blogging in ’07 with some reviews of the best Xmas toys and books and stuff (maybe some of the total rubbish too…

    Read more

  • Things I love…

    The Dover Press free samples. Always something useful, always something bonkers. Next time you’re in the West End go into the Dover shop in Earlham Street – a proper goldmine…

    Read more

  • A new book from Adam Wishart

    My friend Adam has written a book. It’s about cancer and he weaves together the story of his own father’s death from cancer with a history of the disease. The…

    Read more

  • Books and bombs

    Will books be replaced (or even substantially substituted) by ebooks and hand-held readers? Robert McCrumb in The Observer thinks so. Maybe he’s right. A better question – do they need…

    Read more

  • Sophisticated kids’ fiction

    Elmore Leonard, A Coyote’s in the HouseCarl Hiaasen, Hoot Under the seedy glamour and wise-cracking cynicism of your classic American crime novel there’s usually a pretty basic story with all…

    Read more

  • Will Self in The Wood Between The Worlds

    I’m reading the kids the first three books from The Chronicles of Narnia at the moment and very very brilliant and engrossing they are too (never read them before). From…

    Read more

  • Things were different in the 1950s

    My mother-in-law gave us a little bundle of gorgeous 1950s I-Spy books so I looked them up and found this nice memory of their production back in the Sixties and…

    Read more