Category: book shops
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Bookshop to bookshop railway
Or, what I did on my holidays We had booked a week in Settle. The aim was to ride up and down the Settle to Carlisle railway, finding great Yorkshire walks and interesting bookshops and above all, avoiding the internet and all things work and big-media related. We succeeded, and I came home feeling renewed.…
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A truly terrible book
I picked this book up because it’s subtitled Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction, and it got a further punch of urgency from the strapline by Eric Idle, ‘Put this at the head of your reading lists immediately’. I thought it might be about one of the emergencies the great and the…
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Complicated?
I still see people around social media saying ‘it’s complicated’. I still see them pointing out creases and chasms in the history of Palestine which they use to suggest firstly, it’s hard to see who Palestine ‘belongs to’ and secondly – and incredibly – that this difficulty means they can’t roundly oppose mass killing, displacement,…
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Fly a kite, tell a story, read a book…
In February last year, I went to a talk by Dr Zahira Jaser, which focused on what it’s like being a Palestinian woman in the UK lately. One of the issues mentioned was some people’s attitudes to people wearing the keffiyah. These days, people seem to think it means ‘terrorist’. Jaser spoke eloquently about the…
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A shameful day for the English
One of the ironies of any work in publishing and the book trade is that, because your work involves a lot of reading, you’re always at least a decade behind on what ‘everyone’ has read. That’s why, now the book-work is down to a minimum, I like doing my occasional series of ‘reviews of old…
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There’s a one-in-five chance you just don’t matter
What if someone convinced you that we have a government that has consciously abandoned around one fifth of our population to a miserable life and an early death? Doesn’t it make you angry? Doesn’t it make you want to leap over all the bullshit and fix this hellishly dysfunctional country? In the course of education…
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Viva FiLiA!
It’s three weeks now since I got my hands on a copy of Rahila Gupta’s ‘British Feminism Through a FiLiA Lens.’ I’ve been reading furiously ever since, and have only just emerged. 384 closely printed pages about all that FiLiA has instigated, inspired or been a part of over the last ten years. To say…
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Nobody here is innocent
I wrote elsewhere about the weekend I spent at Winchester Writers’ Conference, way back in – oh I don’t know, the early years of the 21st century. It was great – Terry Prachett was the guest speaker, and brought a jazz band along. Carol-Ann Duffy and Michael Morpurgo were there doing signings. I went to…
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Not a single firefighter, police officer or soldier had come
“Nearly 20 minutes had passed since Huda and her staff had come across the burning bus … she and the UN nurses gently carried burned children to waiting volunteer cars…” The drivers would take the burn victims to “the nearest accessible hospital. For most of them, that was Ramallah. The hospitals in Jerusalem were far…
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Sweet little UXB
Why am I tempted to say ‘this is a sweet little book’? It’s no such thing and anyway, I don’t say things like that but I’m trying to figure out how Xiaolu Guo has cunningly disguised an unusual and important piece of work as a sweet little book. The rare and quiet determination of someone…
Kay Green 