Last year I bought an awful lot of secondhand books via Abebooks and, as a consequence, I signed up to their email newsletter, which arrives in my in-box once or twice a week. Today's newsletter featured a short item about Colm Tóibín, one of my favourite authors, pointing me to all his collectable work. I'm so glad my credit card is in the other room, because it would just be too easy to have a little splurge, acquiring all his lovely books that I haven't read yet!
Last night I went to a book signing... that wasn't really a book signing... in North London. Film critic Mark Kermode was promoting his new autobiography, It's Only a Movie, at the Phoenix Cinema, the oldest continuously-running cinema in the UK. Basically he stood in front of a packed audience and waxed lyrical about his love of film and some of the funny things that have happened to him as a film critic, and all the while he barely stopped for breath. It was an hour of complete ad-lib entertainment, followed by 30 minutes of questions from the audience. Good stuff.
Today a little parcel arrived from The Book Depository and out tumbled Natasha Walters' Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. I began reading it immediately and then found I couldn't put it down... She writes well and raises some very interesting issues about the hypersexualisation of British culture. Stay tuned for a review coming soon...
