dovegreyreader scribbles

Lesley Ann's Book List

Some more of our cut flowers to decorate today's post...

and thank you so much everyone, ninety four heartfelt comments and well over fifty suggestions...a book a week for a year or more. As you can see from her replies, Lesley Ann has been incredibly moved by your kind thoughts, and wise words and I know that for many who read here sometimes knowing you are not alone, even in a virtual way, can help

I wonder how many of us started reading a book off the list week. I certainly did and am really enjoying The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery and the suddenly very interesting life of Valancy Stirling. I had also been meaning to read Our Lady of the Lost and Found by Diana Schoemperlen for years so have had my nose in that all weekend too.

Here is the list of books that have all worked for you in times of need, and I have split off those which seem specifically grief-related as well as a list of authors and then poetry. I have also included the suggestions sent in e mails (thank you everyone for those) please let me know if I have missed any from comments (it won't have been intentional, every suggestion welcome)  and if you want to add to this list just leave details in comments at the end of this post and I will add them dreckly as we say. 

 

Our Lady of the Lost and Found ~ Diane Schoemperlen
The Blue Castle ~ L M Montgomery
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant, an autobiographical book by the American cartoonist Roz Chast.
A Month in the Country ~ J.L.Carr
The Light Years + Cazalet saga ~ Elizabeth Jane Howard. 
I Capture the Castle ~ Dodie Smith
Cold Comfort Farm ~ Stella Gibbons
The Village School ~ Miss Read
Mr Collier's Letter Racks ~ Dror Wahrman
The Lost Carving ~ David Easterly
My Family and Other Animals ~ Gerald Durrell
The Snow Geese ~ William Fiennes
Sightlines ~ Kathleen Jamie
Findings ~ Kathleen Jamie
The Wheel on the School  ~ Meindert de Jong
The Presence ~ Danni Abse
Are You Somebody - The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman ~ Nuala O'Faolain 
Miss Hargreaves ~ Frank Baker
Under the Greenwood Tree ~ Thomas Hardy
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society ~ Mary Shaffer
The Wind in the Willows ~ Kenneth Grahame
The Railway Children ~ E.Nesbit
China Court ~ Rumer Godden
Gift From the Sea ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Mrs. Fitten's Country Life  ~ Mavis Cheek
Last Night at the Lobster  ~ Stewart O'Nan
Cassandra at The Wedding ~ Dorothy Baker
The Heather Blazing ~ Colm Toibin
All Passion Spent ~ Vita Sackville  West
Brunetti Series  ~ Donna Leon
Bruno Chief of Police Series ~ Martin Walker
The Children of Green Knowe ~ Lucy M.Boston
The Summer House ~ Santa Montefiore 
Simon Fonthill series ~ John Wilcox
Coroner series ~ M.R.Hall
The Enchanted April ~ Elizabeth von Arnim
The Red Tent ~ Anita Diamant
The Distant Hours ~ Kate Morton
Tolstoy and the Purple Reading Chair ~ Nina Sankovitch
The Swan ~ Rilke
The Secret Garden ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
Flambards ~ K.S.Peyton
The Magic Apple Tree ~ Susan Hill
A Ram in the Well ~ June Knox-Mawer
Ammonites & Leaping Fish ~ Penelope Lively
The Summer Book / The Winter Book~ Tove Jansson
The Gate to Women's Country ~ Sherri Tepper
The Forsyte Saga ~ John Galsworthy
The Scent of Water ~ Elizabeth Goudge
The Frederica Quartet ~ A.S.Byatt
Kitchen Privileges ~ Mary Higgins Clarke

Grief-related books...

A Grief Observed ~ C.S.Lewis
Comfort: A Journey Through Grief ~ Ann Hood
The Music Room ~ William Fiennes
Hour of Gold/Hour of Lead ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
When Things Fall Apart ~ Pema Chodron
Only Remember Me: An Anthology of Grief and Love ~  compiled by Anthony Guest 
A Time to Grieve ~ Carol Staudacher
My Year of Magical Thinking ~ Joan Didion
The Widow ~ Lynn Caine
Don't Let Them Tell You How to Grieve ~ Gina Claye
Levels of Life ~ Julian Barnes

Comfort Authors

Jane Austen
Agatha Christie
Richmal Crompton
George Eliot
Mrs Gaskell
Georgette Heyer
G.M.Malliet
Ursula le Guin
Barbara Pym
Dorothy Whipple
Monica Dickens
Margaret Mahy
Victoria Thompson
Louise Penny
Mazo de la Roche
Dorothy L. Sayers
Anthony Trollope
P.G.Wodehouse
Alexander McCall Smith
E.F.Benson
Ngaio Marsh
Elizabeth Taylor
William Maxwell
Maurice le Blanc 
E.Nesbit

Poetry

Being Alive
Staying Alive
Being Human
Robert Frost
George Mackay Brown
Yeats
D.H.Lawrence
Mary Oliver
Denise Levertov
Volumes of edited poetry by Roger Housden. 
John O'Donahue
Robert Pack

 

 

 

Bookish Delights of 2011 No 5 ~ Random Spectacular from St Jude's & The New Artisans by Olivier Dupon

If you recall that chair I was coveting from Angie Lewin's design company St Jude's a while back, then it was a fortuitous wander around their website that also alerted me to the forthcoming limited edition of Volume One of the St Jude's design journal to be known as Random Spectacular. I had already spent ages coveting the fabrics on the site before very naughtily cutting off a virtual yard of Mark Hearld's 'Doveflight' fabric in grey as the obvious and only suitable background for my Twitter page, and I am grateful to Mark for designing it especially for me. (I'm sure)

But I can rarely resist a design-based journal, though finances dictate that I really should. I adore Selvedge and buy a copy whenever I see it and have the £10 lurking and unspoken for and it all segues perfectly into a book from Thames & Hudson that I have been enjoying for a while now.

'Looking' books are on an equal footing with those 'journey' books we were talking about on Monday I think, and in terms of value just keep on giving, and The New Artisans by Olivier Dupon is a treasure trove for anyone who warms to the notion of restoring noble status to the very word 'artisan'.

'Highly talented crafters around the world have been working laboriously and passionately, experimenting with techniques and materials, to produce high quality, modern, desirable, one-off objects of creation...History, vision and feeling are incorporated into each and every piece, and that clearly distinguished these products from mass-produced goods.'

Sounds (and is) poles apart from my selection of home-made Christmas gifts this year (can't reveal for obvious reasons) but there was nothing I was going to dislike about a book whose production values are stellar and which shares page after page of inspiration with me. I plan to share much more of this book and the designers, their goods and their websites on here through next year... in the meantime, it's obvious I would love Andrea Williamson who had stopped me in my tracks by page ten.

 So I could see no harm in at least enjoying the first edition of Random Spectacular and giving something back to assuage my guilt for making off with that yard of virtual fabric, whilst getting some inspiration and wonderful colours and designs for the back of my eye in these dark and chilly winter months. I instinctively knew I wouldn't be disappointed; Angie Lewin's designs have really come to my attention on book jackets this year and they sit very comfortably with my gaze....

and talking of artisans, my thanks to Fran H-B for those hand-crafted snowflakes in with the card...yes indeed, move over Kirsty Allsop:-)

Published in a limited edition of 750 copies and with profits being donated to Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres, I signed up for the St Jude's notification e mail and then kept a track on Twitter for news of publication, because I had a feeling these would sell very quickly indeed. Up came the tweet last week, my order was placed within minutes and as I had thought Random Spectacular No 1 had sold out by the next day. News spread quickly that this was indeed spectacular and disappointed buyers gnashed their teeth, whilst I held my breath hoping mine would arrive...which it did last Saturday.

It's a journal that engages at every level, what I would call a 'looking' journal with writing which, measuring 14" x 9.5" and with 104 big pages, offers sufficient space on each to achieve something true to its name. The contributors have donated their time to the project and include...sorry in the end I thought I'd better name them all.... Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Richard Ardagh, Simon Beckmann, Graham Bignell, Paul Bommer, Adam Bridgland, William Brown, Chloe Cheese, Ellie Curtis, The Gentle Author, Jonathan Gibbs, Peter Green, Hand & Eye, Jonny Hannah, Mark Hearld, Ed Kluz, Justin Knopp, Angie Lewin, Ceri Levy, Maggie Li, Markus Lloyd, Jon McNaught, Alex Malcolmson, Simon Martin, Emma Mason, Joanna Moore, Justin Partyka, Tim Rich, Rob Ryan, Neil Sentance, Emily Sutton, Jake Tilson.

This is clearly a wonderful collaboration showcasing a wealth of design, artistic and writing talent that creates a truly spectacular and very harmonious whole. But one to single out... to my pleasant surprise Ed Kluz, the artist whose illustrations first drew me into A History of England in 100 Places.

So here are just a few sneak pics from my copy to share with you, a feast for your winter (or summer for those in Oz) eyes too and on or around the Winter Solstice.

 

Bookish Delights of 2011 No 3 :: Thin Paths - Journeys in and Around a Mountain Village ~ Julia Blackburn

'Before we begin to eat, Herman pours out glasses of prosecco and I give a little speech. I say that I hope everyone will like the book if it is eventually translated into Italian and that being here in the valley has made me think that time past and time present and time future is like a vast landscape and we are walking through it on a tracery of thin paths. To my surprise everyone says, yes, it's true, and they burst out clapping.'

Having met Penelope Lively on that memoir writing course it was my delight to discover that the other tutor was Julia Blackburn, there with husband Herman Makkink, and Thin Paths the book, in its infancy, that Julia described during her tutorials in France in that September of 2008. I loved The Three of Us , and Julia had also sat in the dovegreyreader asks...armchair so I had been really looking forward to this one.

It is now the summer of 2010, the book is complete and the guests are gathered on the terrace of Julia and Herman's home high in the mountains of Liguria . Armando and Ida, Adriana and her daughter Eliana and the baby along with the ghosts of Arturo and Old Tunin and La Muta and me too ...well it felt like it, in spirit at least, having travelled those thin paths of memory alongside them. All the people that I have come to know during the six months I have been reading Thin Paths - Journeys in and Around an Italian Village.

I have been watching too much Strictly (Come Dancing) of late, where the 'journey' word has become the cliche that makes even Claudia Winkleman groan, and so I heaved out the enormous Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary just to see if I could find another word... peregrination (1548)... fizgig (1594) ... scoterlope (1583)... scamander (1864) perhaps. I wanted something to describe my own travels with this book because now I have turned the final page I do feel as if I am at the end of...a.... a..... well it will have to stay as a journey. You might remember that wonderful literary 'journey' we took to Italy on here back in June, so many wonderful reading suggestions from you all and I have travelled little further than this single book, but it has been a complete and very fulfilling trip in itself.

Journey books are just the best value, those books that you pick up whenever you feel like it and wander through a few more pages of landscape and people who become so familiar. With no rush to finish, a book like this becomes a treasure, and in fact time and space seems to be written into these pages to linger and ponder, to walk slowly.

Thin Paths is a collection of personal and community memories about life in the Italian mountains, each piece just a few pages long, the text  interspersed with black and white photos (and my thanks to Julia for these colour ones, this the view from the terrace of their mountain home)

Thin Paths travels to the heart of a remote community. A supportive community and not only with regard to present-day troubles but also the tribulations of the past, because this is about recollections of the life of the partisans fighting the Germans and Mussolini in these mountains during the Second World War. How a community copes with conflict, treachery, betrayal, illness, death, starvation (you will never ignore a chestnut again)  and poverty... but don't be alarmed because this isn't misery. Julia has a calm and measured inflection to her narrative voice which can convey such details with huge respect and sensitivity for the people, the landscape, their traditions and ultimately huge respect for what they choose not to say, so no over-dramatising; it's unnecessary, the impact is sufficiently profound in its simplicity blending with the whole seamlessly to create a really beautiful and moving book.

Celebration and mourning reflect life and sit side by side, along with humour and a real love of the landscape and the people, whilst giving a real insight into life under occupation. Lives and homes infiltrated by soldiers with all the indignity and concealed resentment as they take your best rooms, your food, your warmth plundering the lives, the minds and the pride of those you love. Yet there is that sense of an indomitable spirit of survival despite the often futile attempts at retaliation, the merciless punishments and the overwhelming sense of helplessness... and as Julia gains their confidence and learns their language (from scratch) her neighbours confide their deepest memories, the pain long-buried in the way that those who have suffered during war so often do for their own sanity.

I often liken it to a suitcase full of crumpled washing, one that can become a heavier burden the more years you carry it around. To open the lid and look inside becomes even more frightening, because what if you couldn't get it all back in again...then what. But I sense a relief amongst those Julia has talked to, a lightening of that burden shared with someone who will listen, and who in turn will share it with many many more who will do likewise. And for Armando who writes his stories each night only to burn them the next morning, there is still that sense of a powerful release.

There is a gentleness and enchantment to Julia's writing. I find it magical to read, poetic and meaningful, carefully chosen words to create something very exact. Julia observes nature like no other, the only person I have ever met who can willingly pick up a slug, stroke it and love it,

and so her observations about the natural world that surrounds her mountain home are pitch perfect ... as is the tent, because Julia and Herman walk the terrain and camp out frequently.

Nature weaves a wonderfully timeless thread throughout Thin Paths, somehow grounding everything that has happened in people's lives with an unchanging permanence.

And then there are moments that made me want to stop and think about the implications of something that may have been told at a slant.

There is a moment with a cake, cooked for Adriana by the wife of a German man who lives locally. Whilst Julia looks on Adriana protests that she doesn't like it,

'and she makes a sweeping gesture with her hand over the cake as if she hopes it might disappear...'

As the conversation draws to a close and Julia tries some of the cake...

'Adriana watches me eating it to see if it tastes as good as it looks.'

And the chapter ends...and I know so much from what has not been said, and from what hasn't happened, about whether Adriana will ever be able to forgive the German atrocities she witnessed as a child in these occupied mountains.

Adriana will be unfailingly polite and accept their cake, but she doesn't have to eat it.

The far-reaching impact of Adriana's childhood fear is plain to see, and the fact that Julia has dedicated the book to her surely a testament to one woman's courage and tenacity.

Within Thin Paths, but not overtly so, Julia and Herman also walk the narrow path of illness following Herman's diagnosis with throat cancer, but this is lightly done with a fortitude and humour that surely belies the fear and anxiety, and as you can see Herman is in fine form, (read more about Herman Makkink here)

But like every aspect of this book there is perspective and containment in the words of illness, all of which makes the reading even more powerful...the 'what is not said' echoed and reverberated again and again as I read.

On reflection neither am I surprised that Edmund de Waal chose Thin Paths as his Book of 2011 because its trail through 'the present moment of the long ago past' chimes wonderfully with The Hare With Amber Eyes, the book I read in a similar journeying way for the first six months of this year.

What a grace-filled year of reading I have had from these two books alone.

 

 

Bookish Delights of 2011 No 2 ~ Candlestick Press & poetry

So after I had read that piece in Slightly Foxed about Sebald's Austerlitz, the piece that followed was about Candlestick Press and Jenny Swann's really innovative poetry series set up with a small inheritance left by her mother, so I thought I might as well read that again as well.

Each immaculate twelve-page poetry collection is themed (dogs, cats, tea, birds, bicycles, puddings, lovely unusual things that will mean and convey something to both givers and recipients) and at £4.95 as reasonable as any gift card, and far better perhaps for being the card that keeps on giving rather than the one that goes in the bin.

Jenny (or someone, thank you whoever anyway) sent me some of these back in 2008 when they first came out and I still have them here in the Poetry Dresser having always meant to send them onto people, because these are meant for sharing. And even more exciting to read about the Candlestick Press collaboration with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who has undertaken to contribute a selection The Twelve Poems of Christmas every Christmas for the years of her tenure.

Poetry has featured very large in my daily reading this year. Several collections that have captured my heart and my imagination and several poets who have secured their comfy armchair in my personal pantheon of Greats.

It was a revisit of The World's Wife for the A Good Read performance that brought Carol Ann Duffy right back into perspective for me, as well as The Bees of course. I have been reading Selected Poems throughout the year too and doubt I go many days now without reading something by Carol Ann because I keep this volume, with its distinctive Angie Lewin cover design, on my desk and at my right hand.

Alice Oswald is now part of my furniture too, and huge admiration to her for holding to her principles and the stance she has taken over the funding of the T.S.Eliot prize by withdrawing from the short list. I think it takes a particular sort of courage these days to look £15,000 in the eye, that you were in with a chance of winning, and turn your back on it.  Dart remains a treasure and I have become much more familiar with Woods etc through this year too.

I have Alice Oswald's latest collection Memorial, with the CD of Alice reading it, set aside for Christmas listening.

And talking of T.S.Eliot I have focused on getting to know Four Quartets this year. Shame on me for not reading it properly and sooner, and to my surprise how many lines from that have found their way into popular parlance. I have the CD of Ralph Fiennes reading it and so Ralph accompanies me on my walks occasionally.

This extract from East Coker is being quoted frequently this week in support of Alice Oswald's stance...

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.

I've ventured into more Philip Larkin with fiction and letters alongside the poetry and then of course deeply into the life and poetry of Edward Thomas.

Don Paterson's collection Rain is always in my sights (and not just outside the window this week) and of course Don offered me a new perspective on Shakespeare's Sonnets this year with his new commentary.

I have now progressed from Christopher Reid's A Scattering to his Complete Poems. The title poem of A Scattering continues to amble around in my head and I read it often and with Christopher Reid's own thoughts in my mind too... 'What appealed to me...as the mixture of clumsiness and grace in the elephant's behaviour. My grief was clumsy, but I hoped that grace would come of it.'

        I expect you've seen the footage: elephants
finding the bones of one of their own kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
        decide to do something about it.

        But what exactly? They can't of course
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can't even make a tidier heap...

...elephants at their abstracted lamentations -
may their spirit guide me as I place
        my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.

So now I'm looking for some new poetic directions for 2012... whither next dovegreyreaders??

I await your usual brilliant suggestions, meanwhile back to Candlestick Press.... 

If any of you feel you could give a home to Ten Poems About Bicycles, or Ten Poems about Puddings, or Six Poems by Christina Rosetti, please tell me which and why in comments, we will choose three people to receive, and I will do what I should have done when they first arrived and post them on ...I get there eventually.

 

Bookish Delights of 2011 No 1 ~ Slightly Foxed - The Real Reader's Quarterly

Slightly Foxed - The Real Reader's Quarterly has crept up on me again, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y i-n-d-e-e-d but something funny happened yesterday...I just had to go out and buy the latest edition.

I'm a bit hand to mouth with Slightly Foxed.  Sometimes they send me a free copy for which I am always grateful, sometimes they don't, probably because I haven't written about my complimentary copies when everyone else has. But I have been biding my time in order to see exactly how Slightly Foxed might make an impression on me and inform my reading over the year, rather than waxing lyrical just because I have had a free copy.

I've been happily and willingly reeled in by the wily fox before but the thorny problem is that in these cash-strapped times £36 feels like quite a large layout for the annual subscription to what on first appearances seems like a modestly-sized quarterly magazine. I was in like a shot when it first set up, subbed for a year and then went peicemeal, and though ninety-six pages and 'modestly-sized' is to unfairly belie the contents of this vibrant and stimulating literary diamond I wanted to see whether it still had real staying power with me.

I blame two people for yesterday's dash.

Firstly Carol who sent me such a wonderfully enthusiastic account of the Slightly Foxed Literary Day held at the Art Worker's Guild in Queen's Square a few weeks ago. Penelope Lively talking to Sue Gee about their  writing lives, Daisy Hay on her book Young Romantics, Maggie Fergusson on Orkney writer George Mackay Brown, Juliet Gardiner on the Blitz, Ysenda Maxtone Graham on her grandmother Jan Struther of Mrs Miniver fame and more, plus this session which sounded wonderful...

Frances Donnelly (who made the cakes) and Jeremy Lewis on Graham Greene. JL was a real raconteur who told lots of funny little stories about the various famous and not so famous Greenes, and probably got the biggest round of applause of the day for his sort of  elderly-schoolboy enthusiasm.

In Carol's words 'terrific value at £45 for the day plus tea and cakes' so it's in my diary to look out for the next one too. Not to be missed, and I have had the Slightly Foxed book shop on my list of places to visit when in London for ever too, so that will be next time.

So with Slightly Foxed bleeping away quietly on my radar screen, a determined little glow, I happened to fly across to Will Rycroft's blog yesterday morning where there was a discussion in progress about Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald.

I love Sebald's writing and there's always a danger that I get overly effusive about it all and wrongly come across as 'trying to be an expert' when in fact I am nothing of the sort. But I had read about Sebald and Austerlitz recently and I was sure it was Diana Athill writing in Slightly Foxed  and much more of an expert.

So anyway I turned the house upsidedown looking for the right edition with the Diana Athill piece in it (Winter 2010, p61 Uncomfortable Truths) found a really great quote from Diana to assist those in comments at Just William's Luck who were procrastinating over whether to read Sebald or not, or had perhaps retired defeated from their own personal battle of Austerlitz. I wanted to be encouraging because I think perhaps once you 'get' Max Sebald you keep him close to your heart, and so I brought in Diana Athill who I think cracks it gently and enticingly with this..

'It is necessary to make an act of trust - to put yourself in his hands; and this may be a problem for anyone who has not yet learned to trust him by reading his wonderful The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. I doubt whether I would have persisted beyond the first thirty-odd pages of Austerlitz if I hadn't already learned that wherever Sebald led, I must follow him.'

So I left what I hoped was an encouraging rather than a 'who does she think she is' type of comment before settling back to read the rest of the article, and this is for at least the third time, may be even the fourth. By now I'm supposed to have started work (from home) and I'm still idling away the day reading an edition of Slightly Foxed I almost know by heart, when it dawned on me that I absolutely had to have the latest edition yesterday. I was suddenly overcome by the urge to see and hold the thing, browse through it, read a few articles and spot what else was in it to look forward to  and what it might prompt me to read. Worse, I couldn't bear the thought that it was out there and not here with me. Pitiful I know, covetousness in its worst manifestation.

The little pulsating thought of this purchase kept me going through a morning of everyone's saddest losses, bereavements, serious illnesses et al until eventually, online work hours (four) done and remembering to change out of my slippers, I hopped in the car, drove into town, parked in the nearest available spot and strode purposefully into the local indie bookshop,

 'Have you got the newest edition of Slightly Foxed?' I asked.

The shop owner pointed, I fell upon it, paid, walked back to my car and drove home.

Simples, only twelve miles, but I mean it all smacks of desperation and addiction doesn't it.

Does this happen to anyone else, perhaps about a book and the craving that can't be resisted??

In my defence I am using up all available willpower to lose weight at the moment (18lbs gone, 3lbs to go) and a book coming from Penguin in February Willpower - Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength, which I have been reading, suggests that you may only have sufficient willpower to focus on one project of deprivation at a time. I have now added to that evidence-base.

Anyway I dashed in the door with the spoils, threw a log on the fire, avoided tea and cake and settled down to read Slightly Foxed Winter 2011.

I knew it. I knew I was meant to go and buy this edition...

Louisa M. Alcott, J.L.Carr (A Month in the Country) , Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Sveck) Winifred Holtby, Dorothy L.Sayers, Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, Dodie Smith, Thackeray, Laura Ingalls Wilder and more, all the choices of authors and contributors various to this quarter's selection of books that deserve to be read and better known. Best so far a wonderful piece about the poet Charles Causley, born and lived all his life in nearby Launceston and to my shame a poet I know so little about and just waiting to be discovered by me.

And finally, the beautifully comic piece by Sarah Crowden on Bizarre Books, and Sarah's alter ego Dame Smut, and how she keeps that shop window we all love to stare at stocked with titles like Scouting for Boys and Indoor Games for Awkward Moments. For anyone who may not know it this is Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers in Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum.

Meanwhile, though I am now firmly reeled in again, I can't decide whether a subscription is the answer or not. It probably is in terms of supporting the publishers financially with what, over the last eight years, has become an invaluable fix addition and resource for booklovers like me and thee, and one it would be a tragedy to lose. But then there's the complete pleasure (I don't get out much) to be gained from that impulse must-have-must-buy-now moment, or happening upon the latest edition unexpectedly in a bookshop. Mind you, I doubt any booklover would turn their nose up at the gift of a Slightly Foxed subscription and you could drop hints with your nearest and dearest accordingly.

And even better, there's a really must-have Slightly Foxed tea/coffee mug...and a bag...and special limited run numbered book editions...and slip cases to keep the quarterlies safely homed... and postcards and things. I'm sorry but if I have been tempted (and I have, one back issue, one bag this time round) it is imperative I share.

My only quibble would be this from the Editors...

So, Christmas is nearly here and we do hope you'll enjoy this winter issue, which comes to you with our very best wishes. Slipped into it you'll find another of our literary crosswords, designed for those inevitable moments during the festive season when you really can't think what else to do, and if you can, you're too exhausted to get up and do it.'

Entries in the hat by January 14th, free subscription to the first one drawn out. Oh brilliant. I love a good crossword me.

Turned every page... shook the thing by the spine ... looked again... no flippin' crossword.