Dave Eggers - The Circle

Wow, this was a hard review to write. So many things are contained in this book. There were times when I became so frustrated with the protagonist that I felt like hurling the book across the room, but in the end it is a novel of significance. There is more to say about it than I can properly summarise here, and if you are interested in a deeper analysis I will refer you to Margaret Atwood's fantastic review in The New York Review of Books.

This is Eggers' Orwellian tale, foretelling apocalypsis through technological subsumation. Eggers has received censure from some of the IT crowd, who dispute the accuracy of his portrayal of their world. But for me, and indeed for those members of our bookclub who work in IT, this had the ring of truth about it. Frighteningly, Eggers' warning feels timely and realistic.

Mae Holland is in her early 20s and in a dead-end career until she leans on her best friend Annie to get her a job at The Circle, which is basically what you would get if Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft joined forces: a monster tech company, a total monopoly, the offices of which constitute a massive 'campus', not dissimilar to the grounds of various tech companies that already exist (though much bigger). The Circle is run by the 'three wise men', each of whom resembles a tech figure we know in real life (Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, perhaps?), and the 'gang of forty', a group of the 40 highest ranking officers in the company.

Mae and Annie are very close, sharing a believable friendship and dialogue that frequently sparkles with comedic wit. For the first weeks after Mae joins The Circle she continues to leave campus for visits home to her family, to sleep at her own apartment, and to commune with nature through her solitary hobby of kayaking. Mae's father suffers from MS and needs increasing care, and Eggers writes a couple of scenes early on of father-daughter bonding which reveal that Mae is close to her parents. Her ex-boyfriend Mercer is also still friendly with Mae's parents and is often present when she visits home, an annoyance she has learned to live with. Mercer voices concern about Mae's new job from the beginning, raising the moral counterbalance to Mae's unquestioning enthusiasm for The Circle - a necessary warning because it's not long before Mae becomes totally absorbed in her work to the detriment of everything else in her life.

Indeed, she becomes so engulfed in the philosophy of her workplace that leaving the campus for any reason becomes actually uncomfortable - life outside is comparably so messy (both literally and figuratively). And the corollary to her voluntary submission to The Circle is her rise within it. In no time at all, it seems, Mae has moved into the upper echelons of The Circle, away from the customer service team in which she started into something that is far creepier.

In some ways it seems unrealistic that Mae, a person who initially derives genuine pleasure from solitary pursuits, from being surrounded by nature, from close relationships with family and friends, so quickly becomes absorbed into a world in which none of these things are considered to have value. One scene in particular, a seminal scene for Mae, shows her kayaking by herself in darkness to an island she knows she should not visit, and her excitement and enjoyment stem from the thrill of doing something illicit and unknown. Ironically it is this experience that lies at the centre of her eventual mutation into a Circle hero, the centrepiece of The Circle's increasingly pronounced ethos - "Secrets are Lies; Privacy is Theft".

As Mae eschews contact with Mercer, her parents and eventually Annie in favour of the all-knowing, all-seeing Circle, the tale becomes eerily familiar and worryingly prophetic.

Eggers writes with a fluid, clear style that immediately captured my attention and drew me in. He sets the scene perfectly. As a reader you can understand why Mae would be excited to work at The Circle. But as soon as I read that it was 'like Paradise' I knew it would be the very opposite. What is frustrating is that Mae never has this realization. Alarm bells started to ring for me during her first few days at work, when she was asked to transfer all of her personal information from her phone and her own laptop onto Circle devices. As Mae was informed that all of that information now existed in The Circle's cloud, accessible to anyone, I began to feel deeply uncomfortable - but she didn't blink. When Mae was told about the exciting work Francis was doing to ensure child safety, by installing chips into their BONES (!), neither she nor anyone else at The Circle paused to consider the consequences, or enunciate any concern - but as readers we are supremely aware that those children will grow to be adults whose every move can be monitored.

What is incredibly clever about Eggers' writing is that although we are able through our outsiders' lense to comprehend the problematic nature of The Circle's practices, each new privacy-killing scheme is introduced in the book by socratic conversation in which convincing, rational, utilitarian arguments are put forward in favour of The Circle's methods. It's unnerving, because we understand how multitudes of people might be persuaded by the same arguments.

For example: Don't you want your neighbourhood to be safe? Wouldn't you rather sacrifice some of your own privacy for the privilege of knowing without a doubt that your family and your home were always safe? 

Or: Oh, you're concerned about your information being made public? Why? What have you got to hide?

It is the same ploy that has been used over the past ten years to persuade us to give up all kinds of civil liberties. Isn't the sacrifice of a stranger viewing your nude body worthwhile if it means safety in the skies? Isn't the safety of our civilians worth the annoyance of the government listening in on our phone calls?

If we have already given up these freedoms, what's to say we might not be amenable to giving up more, as Eggers predicts?

About three quarters of the way through the book I became frustrated. Various metaphors are drawn that are awkward and condescending. A few major events felt unrealistic to me - or rather, Mae's unquestioning response to them felt unrealistic. I also found Mae as a character to be thoroughly unlikeable. The speed with which she turns her back on her family and her friends, her narcissism and selfishness were not endearing. And I found the ending of the book less satisfying than I had hoped (but this may be because I wanted to feel some optimism, and really - an apocalyptic book such as this should not end on an optimistic note or what's the point?).

But in the grand scheme of things, all of these are minor faults.

The truth is that since putting the book down I have been more aware of the way technology is infiltrating every part of our lives. It is difficult to keep the book from crossing my mind when I 'check in' on Facebook or see advertisements heralding new social media developments. I keep wanting to talk to people about it. Eggers' style is disarmingly breezy, so that it is not until one sets the book down that one suddenly realises how profound he has been. Some critics have suggested that Eggers is undeserving of praise because none of this is new - we all realise that we are fighting a losing battle against new technology. To those critics I say: Sure. But that doesn't mean it's something we should not be urged to consider, it doesn't mean it's unnecessary to shake the greater population out of its complacency or ask ourselves what we intend to do about it. As the great Ferris Bueller famously said, life moves pretty fast. If we don't do something about this now, it may soon be too late.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. This is a book that is worth more than the story within it. I am certain it will become a classic of our age. A real conversation-starter, you will be desperate for people around you to read it so you can discuss it - perfect for bookclubs.

Notes and noteable passages:

- Eggers is occasionally very funny. I had to clamp my lips shut to stop myself from waking everyone in the household with laughter when I first read the passage between Mae and Francis upon their first meeting:
'"This is my first day," Mae noted.
"No way."
And then Mae, who intended to say, "I shit you not," instead decided to innovate, but something got garbled during her verbal innovation, and she uttered the words "I fuck you not," knowing almost instantly that she would remember these words, and hate herself for them, for decades to come.'
- I like Annie, who expresses herself in surprisingly original ways - to Mae, for example: '"You're like part human, part rainbow."'
- This is a very accessible book, which I think is a good thing for a text which Eggers obviously wants as many people as possible to read. Nevertheless, his skill as a writer is clear. Some of his descriptions are delightfully original.
- I coudn't decide whether it was because Eggers was a man that he believed Mae would accept such unsatisfactory sex on a regular basis or whether it was just another indicator of the level to which she had descended - that it was preferable to her to be with a man she actually finds detestable and have company, than to be free of him but alone. Sadly I think many women make this kind of sacrifice even without the daily pressure of complete transparency.
- Mercer's outcries occasionally felt forced, but what he says is so crucial and so relevant even for today's society:

"Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication... No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food."

Ian McEwan - The Cement Garden

I have mentioned before that I'm a huge McEwan fan. At the start of this year I had three of his novels left to read, of which The Cement Garden was one. It's a funny thing, reading through a favourite author's entire works. On the one hand, the goal is obviously to finish - to read them all. On the other hand, there is a reluctance to finish because then there will be no more of something one loves. Luckily, McEwan has a new book out later this year, so reading one of his earlier novels and ticking it off my TBR (to be read) list seemed appropriate.

The Cement Garden was McEwan's first novel. The publication of this and his second novel, The Comfort of Strangers, caused him to be nicknamed 'Ian Macabre', and rightly so. Like many of his works, this is a seriously disturbing book. It is narrated by Jack, one of four children whose parents both die early in the novel. Various critics have suggested there is a strong Oedipal subtext running through the story, which is referenced in the first line ("I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way") and realised in the final scene, which I will not describe for fear of revealing spoilers. It is indeed plausible that McEwan drew on Freud to create the dark undercurrent that runs throughout, because the book is deeply unsettling in a way that is difficult to precisely define.

Jack is the second eldest of four siblings who decide after their mother has died that they don't want to publicise what has happened and risk being put in care, which would almost certainly result in their separation from one another. The pact they make to ensure things stay as they are, and the way this pact is physically manifested, haunts the rest of the book and taints it with a clammy sense of unease.

McEwan is at his best here; no word is out of place. His writing is visceral, nuanced, the heat of the summer palpable, the sloth of the children in their humid, festering surrounds somehow gripping.

As a mother, I found many of the passages worrying. Is this how all children feel or are these very unusual children? Tom, the youngest of the four, reacts to his mother's death with obvious grief, but this is soon overwhelmed by his concerns about being bullied at school. He goes through a phase of wanting to be a girl, and another of wanting to be a baby, which Julie, the eldest child, gladly entertains. The other children do not appear to react to the death of their parents with any grief or sorrow - instead, for example, Jack describes feelings of elation and hysterical joy at his newfound freedom. But we glimpse through Jack's narrative lense various activities that might hint at deeper feelings underneath: Sue, the younger girl, keeps a diary in which she records imaginary conversations with her mum. Julie occasionally lets Tom into their dead mother's room, which she has preserved behind a locked door, where he lies in her bed and tries on her clothes.

Jack himself allows his personal hygiene to fall entirely by the wayside, and we are treated to lengthy passages about his multiplying spots, sweaty clothes, dirty bedlinen and his greasy hair. This is in direct contrast to his sister Julie, whose beauty grows throughout the book, alongside Jack's illicit but pronounced attraction to her. From early on the children are shown playing 'doctor', a game which as adults we tend to regard as learning stripped of sexuality. McEwan, of course, does not let us off so easily. Sexuality is rife in the childhood he describes, and this too is discomfiting.

Although this is not a scary book, I found it difficult to read after lights out. McEwan's genius lies in unnerving us at some profound, subconsious level so that we are left on edge without quite knowing why: there are no monsters here. Instead it is the monsters within all of us that he depicts so well. His use of language is perfection, the characters vibrantly alive and the plot winds inexorably towards the inevitable finale.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. I know I should probably give it 5, as this really is McEwan at the top of his game. But I find it difficult to award 5 stars to a book that leaves me feeling so disturbed, and where I find the characters so nasty. I also tend to prefer the work McEwan does when he is exploring philosophical questions of art versus science, belief versus rationality (see Saturday, Amsterdam, Enduring Love). But if you are looking for a short read that will have you biting your nails and squirming in your seat, there's no doubt this is it.

Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction - Shortlist

Earlier this month the shortlist for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction was announced. A. M. Homes was the winner of this prize in 2013. As you will know if you've been reading the blog for a while, she was one of my favourite discoveries last year. In fact she is attending the Sydney Writers' Festival next month and I am gutted I won't be there to see her. But I digress.

The point is, if A. M. Homes was awarded the Baileys Women's Prize for May We Be Forgiven, it makes me curious about the books that have been nominated this year - maybe among them lies another gem (or two)?

With no further ado, the nominees are:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Americanah

Hannah Kent – Burial Rites

Jhumpa Lahiri – The Lowland

Audrey Magee – The Undertaking

Eimear McBride – A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Donna Tartt – The Goldfinch

Such a great line-up. And I'm also impressed with the choice of judges this year, especially the fact that Caitlin Moran is among them (I love her!). When I read this quote, from Denise Mina, it made me think I would like to sit down and have a drink with these women:

“This list of six shortlisted books is a source of such pride to us judges, you might think we had done something more noble that just curling up, reading and loving them. This shortlist seemed to make itself known because we chose those books that we really, really loved. Not the ones we admired technically, or the cleverest ones, but those books that made us yelp with joy or sob on planes, the ones we’ve bought for friends and couldn’t wait to tell people about.

“WE CHOSE BOOKS THAT WE REALLY, REALLY LOVED”

I think I can speak for all of the judges when I say that we’re so proud of the shortlist of six books, we’ve begun to talk as if we had some hand in producing them. That’s wrong. We didn’t. We feel that sense of ownership because great books are beguiling and make readers feel proprietorial. It’s not just that the books are individually fantastic, but the span of the shortlist, in subject matter, style and tone, is so textured and the standard so high, choosing just one as the winner will be like choosing between your children. If you decide to do the Full Marathon and read all six before we announce the winner on the 4th June, I’ll bet you feel the way we do. If you don’t have time for six, and pick three for the Half Marathon, let us know how you get on, keep us updated and tell us who you think should win, if you can!”

- Denise Mina, WriterBaileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014 Judge 

Isn't that brilliant? "We chose books that we really, really loved" - shouldn't that be exactly how book prizes are judged?

So the winner is to be announced on the 4th of June. Given that The Goldfinch alone is 771 pages of book (I just went and checked in the lovely hardcover I was given for Christmas), it will certainly be a challenge to read all of these books by that date. But Burial Rites, The Lowland and The Goldfinch were already on my list for 2014. I'm going to add the rest and try to read all of the shortlisted nominees this year, if not by June 4. 

Who will join me for this delightful challenge? Who's in?

Jess Walter - Beautiful Ruins

This is the first book I 'read' on Audible. It had been sitting on my bedside table in hard copy for an awfully long time, unread. In fact, worse than that, it traveled with me from Australia, throughout Malaysia and Europe, to arrive with us in Toronto, without me having read more than the first chapter. What a waste! It is truly such a fun book I'm surprised I didn't get into it during our travels. I think the reason I didn't, though, is that it's one of those books in which the narrator changes from chapter to chapter. As a result, the story jumps around considerably. In this case the shifting nature of the narration works, but initially I resisted it. I like settling into a story. If the narrator, the setting, and the time period change too frequently, the flow of reading is seriously interrupted. Each chapter is like starting again.

When I downloaded Audible, this was my first purchase. And it was a perfect book to listen to. The narrative flow didn't matter as much out loud - it became more like a movie. Interestingly, we are accustomed to switching quickly between disjointed scenes in performative art forms. It doesn't feel as uncomfortable as it sometimes does on the page.

As I mentioned in my previous post on audio books, listening to a book rather than reading it adds a new dimension. The interpretation of the book by the person who records it is vital to one's enjoyment as a 'reader'. In this case, the narration was done by Eduardo Ballerini, who was unknown to me. He had a serious challenge on his hands. The story of Beautiful Ruins moves fluidly across continents and time periods. The many nationalities and corollary accents include Italian, American, Irish, English, and Russian. And Ballerini handled all of this very well. So well, in fact, that I giggled to myself frequently while listening - the narrative often succeeded in absorbing me to the extent that I forgot I was in public.

In spite of the rather garish looking cover, Beautiful Ruins is not a chick lit offering. It is a sweeping tale, covering a period from the 1960s until present-day, in places as diverse as Hollywood and remote coastal Italy, and featuring a wide range of protagonists including the charismatic Richard Burton.

The story starts in 1962, when beautiful American movie starlet Dee Moray arrives by boat in the remote (and fictional) coastal village of Porto Vergogna. Local hotelier Pasquale watches as the glamorous blonde steps onto shore. Nothing so exciting has ever happened before in his life.

Many years later, a now elderly Pasquale arrives at a studio in Los Angeles, looking for the woman he fell in love with so many years before. He encounters a man he has met before, the gruff movie producer Michael Deane, who Walter paints as a deliberate caricature of Hollywood absurdity. His face has had so much cosmetic work done he looks "like a 9-year-old Filipino girl". This kind of descriptive vigour is one of the strengths of the book - it's funny. Like really funny, laugh out-loud funny. Funnier than you think it will be, and at the most unexpected times - although it's difficult for me to say whether I would have found it quite so entertaining had I not had the benefit of Ballerini's take on Walter's script. And I use the word 'script' deliberately - in some ways, this does read like a script. I can see this as a movie and I guess I'm not alone, because I believe it has already been made into one, to be released later in 2014. 

So much happens in this book that it is quite impossible to compress into a succint review. Walter takes us through the travails of filming the epic Cleopatra in Rome, to the tempestuous relationship between Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, to a washed-up former drug addict's attempts to reinvigorate his music career through comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. We meet a writer pitching his script, an assistant producer on the day she might quit her dream job, a novelist whose single story idea takes him back again and again to the last days of 'his' World War II. At its heart, yes, this is a love story. But it is so much more than that. 

Walter is a good enough writer to pull all of this off with aplomb. It is not high literature, as such, but each character is skilfully portrayed and the many threads of the story are tied together in a satisfying finale. Beautiful Ruins left me thinking I would eagerly read whatever Walter wrote next. Having said that, I am not so keen that I will run out to find his previous five novels and devour them.

Overall assessment: A great read, well written, imaginative. 4 out of 5. 

Notes on reading with Audible: As I said above, this book was really funny. Unfortunately, because I listened to it in audio form, I don't have highlighted passages to take me back through this dense novel and pick out favourite (or problematic) bits. Sometimes days would go by where I couldn't find time to listen to my book, and I would read something else instead. Sometimes I would pick up the hard copy version of this novel in order to re-read a passage, or to remind myself of something that happened. It was an unusual reading experience for me, and it took me much longer to get through this book than had I just persisted with the paper version. Having said that, I'm glad I listened to it - the voices will stay with me, and I do believe that Ballerini's performance added something to my enjoyment of the book. But having the hard copy handy as a companion to the audio book was key.

Vale Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico City on March 29, 2004. © The Richard Avedon Foundation. From The New Yorker.

How sad I was to learn this week that Gabriel Garcia Marquez had died. He was truly one of my favourite writers. I started reading his work in high school, when our curriculum included the book of stories, Leaf Storm. I loved it so much I graduated to One Hundred Years of Solitude and then Love in the Time of Cholera, which remains one of my favourite books of all time. Since then I have tried to read as much of his work as possible. Most recently (several years ago) I read his novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. 

I loved Marquez's writing, but he also introduced me more generally to the world of Latin American fiction, and to magic realism. Marquez was my jumping off point into Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, Laura Esquival, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda. And my mother, a great reader and a great influence on me, also loved Marquez. It was her copy of  One Hundred Years of Solitude that I read, complete with her pencilled-in, ease-of-reference family tree covering the title pages of the book. That book contains one of the great opening lines in all of literature: 

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

It's right up there with the opening lines of Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Perfection. 

Hearing of Marquez's death was a shock, for some reason, even though he was 87 years old. In honour of his writing and his life, I am going to turn back to his work in the next few months. I would love to re-read Love in the Time of Cholera, but I would also like to read some of his work I never got around to - like The Autumn of the Patriarch. 

Who is with me? Let's have a Marquez love-fest. I will post details when I have decided which book of his to read first.

Christina Baker Kline - Orphan Train



Between 1853 and 1929, 250,000 orphaned, abandoned or homeless children were transported on trains from urban centres in the U.S. to foster homes in rural areas of the midwest as part of a questionable welfare initiative. The founders of the orphan train program aimed to eradicate the existing system of institutional care which they believed stunted, rather than supported, children, and instead place them with families. It was what led to today's system of organised foster care. Unfortunately, the orphan train movement was insufficiently regulated and deeply flawed, and the families who sought to adopt children from the trains were often seeking free child labour, or worse, rather than a child to love and call their own.

This is the extraordinary history Christina Baker Kline draws on for her novel. Sadly it is a mediocre book, one that might have been better suited for a young adult audience, and Baker Kline fails to depict the fascinating phenomenon of the trains in sufficient depth to educate or enlighten a reader.

This was the first book chosen for the 2014 reading year of my Canadian bookclub. We sat down over dinner one night in February and mapped out our books for the year, a feat involving creative organisation, entertaining debate and numerous voting rounds. Most of the women enjoyed the novel well enough, and I admit that I was its harshest critic.  But my pet reading peeve is poor writing, and Baker Kline's writing is weak. By 'poor' or 'weak' writing I mean that the obvious is frequently stated, metaphors are drawn that don't really work, and events that should rightfully be shown are told, even glossed over.

Orphan Train tells the story of Molly, a 17 year old foster-child in modern-day Maine, who is sentenced to community service for stealing a library book, and Vivian, the woman to whose service Molly commits. It soon turns out that Molly and Vivian have much in common, Vivian having been orphaned at a young age. Vivian, of course, was one of the children shipped away from New York on an orphan train, and her tale of being tossed from foster home to foster home in rural Minnesota is appropriately bleak. The narration moves from Vivian's story to Molly's and back again, gradually revealing the secrets of Vivian's past as Molly's future becomes clear. Unfortunately Molly's story is less nuanced and far less interesting than Vivian's and it is hard to know why Baker Kline felt the need to tell the more interesting story of Vivian's life through this contemporary lense. Again, it feels as though she is using Molly to appeal to a younger generation of readers. If the book had been marketed as YA, I might have approached it differently, but for an adult novel it comes across as sappy and sentimental and a little condesending.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I read this and I'm glad to have learnt a little about the orphan trains, even if most of what I actually learnt came in researching around the novel rather than from the novel itself. For those of you looking for a light diversion, this may well be it - it has the feel of chick lit at times, especially in the latter half of Vivian's story, which is happier than her orphan train beginnings, and Baker Kline does succeed in getting her readers to keep turning the pages. All of the women in my book club were agreed that the novel became rather addictive in the second half, in the same way that a romance does when one is wondering who the heroine will end up marrying.

Overall assessment: 2.5 out of 5.

The Gift of Rare Books

I started writing this post months ago. It pertains to something that happened on my birthday, back in November 2013. So, you know, take that into account. I decided to publish this rather than scrap it because what I am really saying is this: I have become the kind of book-loving nerd who attends antiquarian book fairs and collects signed first editions. There is a passage in The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry where A.J. says that in the end, acquisitions don't matter - even the first edition E. A. Poe manuscript he treasured didn't matter. Only the people you love matter. And I really do agree with this. But I also believe that there is some joy to be derived, during life, from collecting things that give you pleasure.

So, for my birthday, months ago now, Bibliohubby went to significant trouble to track down bookstores in Toronto that carry rare books. He did the initial research without telling me, and then stumbled across an event that was happening on my birthday weekend, which he knew I would enjoy. And so it was that the four of us set out one Saturday in November to attend the Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Bibliohubby took Iggy downstairs to the learning centre whilst Lulu and I browsed (with Lulu on my chest in the Babybjorn, that most wonderful of inventions, leaving my hands free).

I have never before been to such an event but after this experience, I know I will be going again. Bookstores from all over the world were represented by small stalls, in which the rarest of books were displayed. Books from Hemingway's private library, inscribed to other writers. Original illustrations by E. H. Shepard from Winnie-the-Pooh books. First editions of classic novels. All manner of precious manuscripts. Textual history writ large. Amongst the stalls I honed in on two in particular, which held books by some of my favourite writers. That day we purchased a signed first edition of Alice Munro's Still Life and another signed first edition by Paul Auster - Yippee! I went home and placed the books carefully upon my new bookshelves.

A few weeks later, Bibliohubby arranged another surprise, taking me to one of the bookshops I had been introduced to at the fair. When we walked through the door, this is what we saw hung upon the wall in the vestibule:

 

"To care about words, to have a stake in what's written, to believe in the power of books, this overwhelms the rest and beside it, one's life becomes very small."

- Paul Auster

 

Those of you who know me well will know that Auster is my favourite writer. One of the quality assessment tests I give to new bookstores is whether they stock Auster's books and, if so, how many. To walk into this particular shop and find his words on the wall made it clear immediately that it was a place I would love.

Contact Editions is one of those bookstores you might want to live in. It is cosy and eclectic, hung with literary posters and prints and decorated with all manner of interesting bits and bobs, with a Chesterfield to sit and read in, green banker's lamps and, of course, walls lined with books. It is run by the most delightful couple, with the poetic names of Wesley and Lucia. I feel like a cat should live in the store too, a fat orange cat curled up on the sofa, with a bushy tail that slowly wags its disapproval when the door is left open to drafts.

Again we walked out with books, a signed Salman Rushdie, another signed Auster and Wesley threw in an additional first edition Auster at no extra cost.

I know that acquisitions are not what makes the world turn. I know that the words within a book are what matter, rather than the frame that holds those words and ideas. But the lovely books we bought in November adorn my shelves now, and I can't help it - they make me happy.

I am a book nerd, yes I am, and I make no apology for it.