August Reading Roundup
When I first started this blog (over ten years ago now!), I intended to review every book I read. Even by September 2008, I was already talking about that intention in the past tense, and by now I have to…
Innovative Small Publishers Around the World
I just wrote a quick post for OZY Books highlighting 10 innovative small publishers from Australia to Brooklyn that are worth watching.
Completism
Can you recommend a good book by an author whose surname begins with Q, U, X or Y? It’s a strange question, I know. The thing is, I’ve been documenting all the books I’ve reviewed on this site since it…
Why I still love bookshops
I’ve written about bookshops a lot on this blog over this years. There’s a good reason for this. For me, good bookshops have always been inseparable from the joy of reading. When I was in my early twenties and working…
What we did before Google
Whatever did we do before the internet? How did we manage before Google? I’m hearing these questions more often these days, usually after someone’s discovered some snippet of astonishing information in just a few seconds. The questions are rhetorical of course,…
Book fairs are dangerous
Do you ever get carried away in bookshops or at bookfairs, and buy far more than you’d planned? Is it consumerism, or bibliophilia? I like to think that, because books are objects of learning, my book-buying binges are a positive…
Austin Clarke at Bim Literary Festival
After my unintended gatecrashing of a class with Derek Walcott earlier in the day, this was an event I was actually allowed to attend. It was an interview with two major Caribbean writers, Austin Clarke and Earl Lovelace, followed by…
New short story
Just found out that I’ve had a short story accepted for the forthcoming Stations collection to be published by Arachne Press. It’s a collection of stories set around a particular train line in London, with one story for each station.…
Books vs. nuclear submarines
I paid a visit to the excellent Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green recently. The owners put out an appeal to everyone to buy an extra book from the shop to help them survive and pay off their bank loan.…