Category: Literature

One of the benefits of supping with the devil and buying The Daily Mail for the past week or so, aside from building a nice cheap Ealing Comedy DVD collection, has been to read the extracts of the new Andrew Jennings book. As sure as night turns to day, a new international tournament – in…

First off, I must admit that I don’t think I’d ever before noticed the apostraphe in Waterstone’s name. I certainly don’t believe I used it before. My mistake. Anyhow, Tim Waterstone has launched a bid to buy back the book chain from parent company HMV. HMV, of course, had been thinking about a buyout of…

Great piece from Kieren McCarthy on the Jonathan Freedland/Sam Bourne fiasco. Be sure to follow all the links.

The Competition Commission has provisionally cleared (PDF) the sale of Ottaker’s to HMV (owners of Waterstones), and I for one am pretty disappointed. I used to love Waterstones – it was a great bookshop to browse at – but bookselling’s changed and it’s lost the sparkle now in places like Waterstones. I’m very lucky to…

The Times seems to love giving away free books at the moment. They’ve been running a promotion with their sister company HarperCollins whereby you can pick up a different book each week for 99p when you buy The Times in WH Smith. This is nothing new, as they’ve run this promotion a couple of times…

As many people know, there’s an ongoing court case between Dan Brown, writer of The Da Vinci Code, and a couple of the authors of a piece of cod-history called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail which was published quite a few years ago. At first glance, it seems as though it’s a battle…

No, I’m not talking about Bookcrossing. I mean those books you find when you stay in, say, a holiday cottage, or perhaps a guest house somewhere. There’ll be a shelf of select titles kicking around, and depending on what you’ve brought with you, and the offering available, you might read one or two of them.…

Just after Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason won the Golden Dagger from the British Crimewriters’ Association, they ban foreign language titles. The rumour, according to The Guardian’s Bookseller diary, it’s down to the award’s sponsor next year not wanting to promote obscure Scandinavian authors when there are lots of British and American authors to plug. The…

At the weekend I went to a great new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum about Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence was a great Arabist, and I must admit that one of the books I’ve not read, but really wish I had, is Seven Pillars of Wisdom – don’t worry, I intend to put this right.…

Last night I joined many others to see Lenny Henry in conversation with Neil Gaiman. A very entertaining evening it was too even if I didn’t stay around to join an enormous queue and get a book signed. Here’s what Gaiman himself says about the evening (with links on from there).

I popped along to this after work, and was reminded once again that I don’t read enough SF. The discussion was getting very interesting before I had to leave for my next busy Monday night engagement.

I know I must be thinking like a complete snob, but I can’t be the only one who’s disappointed by the number of adults they’re seeing reading the new Harry Potter on the tube. Last night I saw a couple sitting together each reading their own copy. I think the worst thing is that some…

One of the most remarkable things I noticed on my recent visit to America (about which, I really really will write something soon. Not that there are any readers here on tenterhooks or anything), was the fact that The Da Vinci Code is not out in paperback in America. This is a book that became…