And when did you last read your father?

Last night I was invited to dinner with Xinran. I might also have taken up the offer to attend drinks to mark the launch of Juan Gabriel Vasquez's new book. Or I could have just watched the football.

But no, I was duty manager on the late shift. Another evening of refund fraudsters, computer glitches and discourse with customers with the wit and social graces of autistic camels.

I wonder if there are people out there with cherished dreams of working in shops? Possibly not beyond the age of seven, until which time playing shop is considered educational, rather than indicating stunted ambition.

Mind you, I did have a young lad come into the shop not so long ago asking about jobs. He said that he was looking for the sort of position which would allow him to sit behind the desk and read most of the day. No wonder we get treated with such disdain by customers if that's what they think we do in bookshops. Although, if we didn't have to spend quite so long tidying up after people for whom the effort of returning a book to the shelf seems a ludicrous imposition, we'd probably get through a few chapters.

I've found myself thinking along these lines as I'm reading The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, of which Heinemann were kind enough to send the most extravagantly packaged proof I've seen since HarperCollins did ones for William Dalrymple with incense sticks. They're hardbacks in boxes and they're numbered, after a fashion, with the names of each the 167 characters in the book. Mine's called Freddie after a character I have yet to encounter. I wonder if the allocation is anything other than random.

I'm particularly interested because I went to school with Nick. He was in the year above and we socialised occasionally. He was distinctly fey at the time, given to the wearing of fedoras and trench coats. Now I'm working in a bookshop, earning some pocket money on the side with some journalism, while he's sold his first novel for the usual 'significant' six-figure sum. Rather than an insignificant six-figure sum, I suppose.

He's also the son of John le Carré, which I should imagine is scarcely an impediment to finding oneself a publisher. But it would unfair to bear a grudge for that reason, not least because he will be dismissed as someone whose father's reputation and influence must have won him his publishng contract by every reviewer yet to write their own bestseller.

It would be pointless even to compare the two as writers, not least because Nick is on his first book while his father is nearly two dozen down the line. And because there's been forty years of fiction published since The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was written. But the book deserves to be judged on its own merits, no matter that there might be easy comparisons to make. To describe a book as an ersatz version of another or a hybrid of two is of value only in a marketing context, not in making a critical evaluation.

A hundred and fifty pages in, I'm enjoying myself, I think principally because the author so very clearly is. It's yarn of a story, whose direction I can't begin to predict. We have a main character - with no name that I've spotted yet - who is a student of radical thinking and some gorgeous pastiche of the martial arts, surrounded by impassioned scene-stealers. It's only frustrating because our 'hero' is a little too passive, too clinically perceptive, too much of a pivot for the book, rather than an engine.

In a way, it's a pop culture White Teeth. Like Zadie Smith, he's thrown so many ideas at it that not all of them can stick, but what remains is a novel of such bravado and brio that to fail to enjoy it would be the act of a spoilsport. (It's hundred pages shorter than his first draft too, apparently.) What remains is a glorious patchwork quilt with so many little scraps of narrative that needed a home like this, a novel which celebrates the wonder of storytelling and the sheer joy of harnessing the power of language.

Writing by numbers

I've been reading a proof copy of a wonderful debut novel, Addition by Toni Jordan, which Sceptre have produced to promote their mass-market paperback after doing poorly with the trade paperback, possibly owing in part to a fairly atrocious cover.

Our narrator is Grace, who has a variant of OCD which compels her to count everything in her life and restricts her to those things which she can easily monitor. She is not portrayed as weak, as any sort of victim or as being in any sort of denial. She resists categorisation, marginalisation and any sort of mollycoddling. She is forthright, independent and possessed of a irresistibly sharp wit.

But that doesn't mean she's not vulnerable. She just knows her weaknesses and doesn't need a knight in shining armour to save her from herself. She's a well drawn, rounded character, someone I felt I was getting to know, not just a figure to observe travelling through a particular story. She feels as if she should have life beyond the page.

Her own personal version of numerology means that the fact that her full name, Grace Lisa Vandenburg, has the same number of letters as Seamus Joseph O'Reilly - 19 - means he's definitely got boyfriend potential. So it was with some excitement I noticed that mine does too! Only then did I realise that I seem to have fallen in love with a fictional character. Still, at least she's from someone else's imagination rather than my own, which is encouraging.

Sobering statistic of the week - with the possible exception of the revelation by the Zoological Society of London that humanity has killed off between a quarter and a third of the world's animal life since 1970 - is the survey of Italians which found that 68% of them want all Roma Gypsies deported from the country.

Last month's national elections resulted in the return to power of the odious Silvio Berlusconi, heading a right-wing coalition voted in largely owing to their hardline proposals with regard to immigration. Italian police have been charged with protection the Roma from victimisation, but so far this seems to have little impact on the abuse and violence.

We can't be complacent in the UK. London now has Boris Johnson as its Mayor - even though voting for Boris was as about as sensible as voting for a bowl of fruit - which no doubt has at least something to do with Tory attitudes to immigration. The real concern is the fact that the Mayoral Assembly now has a BNP member, since 5% of voters were taken in by their paranoid xenophobia, although I am gratified to learn that, thus far, the ghastly Richard Barnbrook is being ignored by his fellow Assembly members.

He was the BNP member who offered his support to Prima Ballerina Simone Clarke when she attacked for using her Arts Council-funded prominence to speak in support of the BNP. At the time she was dating a dancer of Cuban-Chinese descent, which Barnbrook said he didn't have problem with, but added that he thought it best that the pair didn't have children.

The following statement made to the BBC during his campaign should leave you in no doubt about his commitment to tolerance:

"You can be gay behind closed doors, you can be heterosexual behind closed doors, but you don't bring it onto the streets, demanding more rights for it."

This worrying incompassion, which seems set only to increase alarmingly given the sentiments offered in response by readers of the Daily Mail on their website and on the BBC website's Have Your Say page, will no doubt become even more prevalent as the world's resources become stretched. This week Barcelona, with their reservoirs filled to only 18% of their capacity, became the first European city to import water. I wonder how long it will be before we have tales of immigrants scrounging water.

I've been reading an anthology of Peter Ustinov's weekly columns for the defunct European newspaper written in 1990-91 and his calm wisdom is something which seems no longer to have a place in political debate.

He speaks with the compassion one would expect of such an active ambassador for UNICEF and does not shy from uncomfortable truths. In a piece revealing the widespread victimisation of the Maori community in New Zealand, he notes:

"Prejudice is an indefinable weed which is at its most insidious in the greenest of lawns."

With the West's lawns starting to brown, I fear that our feeble attempts to protect the world's poor and weak will be replaced by the frantic raising of drawbridges.

We're only here for the beard

This week I was privileged enough, courtesy of Atlantic Books, to meet that doyen of alt.history and postcyberpunk and paradigm of pognophilia*, Neal Stephenson, in anticipation of the September publication of his new book, Anathem. The venue was a dim, slightly stuffy underground bar near Holborn, serving a range of tapas, including a sweaty cheeseboard featuring a cheese so odd I'm not unconvinced I may not have been confusing it with the bread.

(* I am aware that this is a gratuitous piece of sesquipedalianism, but anyone who wishes to accuse me of bombast and magniloquence at the slightest provocation would be right on the money.)

His editor remains the maverick's maverick Ravi Mirchandani, with whom I did work experience when he was at William Heinemann about nine years ago, when I still entertained furtive dreams of editing a Booker winner or two as an editor at Picador. I saw little of him while employed as an ersatz editorial assistant, since he tended to leave for lunch a little after eleven, leaving a trail of unreturned messages in his wake, and return about three days later.

He did, however, give me a proof copy of The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, which remains one of my favourite novels. I also did a little work on Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, published at the end of my three weeks there; I seem to remember typing out long passages from the manuscript, although to what end I really couldn't say.

The author gave the obligatory sales pitch, an unenviable task even in front of a small audience naturally inclined toward him. Of course, being an author in today's market is almost as much about image and media skills as it is about being able to write; on publication, the usual cavalcade is de rigueur for all but the most established and stubborn writers. I'm told that the Richard & Judy team do bear in mind how an author will come across on the studio sofa when making their selections for the Book Club.

Anyway, after the usual toasts, I took the chance to speak with him. This is one of the perks of the book industry, compared to other media. I doubt I should get the chance to speak, at least without a PR's close supervision, to many stars if I worked in film or music. He seemed a little diffident, but, looking back, I do wonder if assailing him with questions about postapocalyptic dystopias in contemporary British literature - Jim Crace's The Pesthouse, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away-World - was a little unfair on him. I'm not as familiar with his work as I like to be when meeting an author, so perhaps I was trying too hard to assert my own credentials, for fear of looking ignorant.

Later, when I was saying my goodbyes to the Atlantic staff, he was deep in conversation with a couple of the Waterstone's buying team. I'm not very good interposing in conversations and tend to hand around awkwardly on the periphery for a few minutes until finally plunging in, usually at an utterly unwelcome juncture, so I decided to leave. As I started up the stairs, he came bounding after me, to thank me for coming.

This is a symptom of something I don't really like about the industry. When meeting head office buyers and the gentlemen of the press, an author is presumably given clear instructions to be as amenable and patient, since the impression given will probably end up having some bearing on the enthusiasm with which the book will be promoted. It's not so much the fact that one feels more inclined to support those one finds likeable, but the fact that the whole thing is a symptomatic of the author's being part of the package, part of the product.

We forget sometimes that a book is a commitment of considerable intensity on the part of the author - I know this is a generalisation and a romanticisation of the life of a writer - and that they are the one essential component, the spindle on which the whole wheel turns. Not even Mark Booth at Century - the man who publishes Katie Price and then recently had the gall to announce 'the death of the novel' - has yet devised a way to take that human element from the process, although I wouldn't be surprised if he spends his time these days coding algorithms to generate novels spontaneously.

The author is not a nuisance - certain persistent offenders demanding ongoing front-of-house presence against all sensible retail practice notwithstanding - but a cultural definer, standard bearer and baton passer. My nerves at meeting a senior member of the marketing team at a publisher whose lists I like owes themselves to the wish that I might make a good impression for professional reasons; nerves at meeting a favourite author are more profound and personal because I am responding in whatever small way I can to someone who has shaped my thoughts and has made me contemplate life afresh.

So, when Anathem is published this autumn, I hope the launch will be a celebration of the man, his ideas and his artistic vision.

Bookselling: the early years

Going off on one of those irresistible Internet tangents which it is impossible to ignore when a deadline looms, I encountered an fascinating and unrepealed piece of legislation, The Copyright Act (1709). It states that a customer, should he consider the price charged by a bookshop for any particular title to be too high, is entitled to write to the Archbishop of Canterbury and request that he rule on whether or not the price is indeed excessive. Should he deem it to be so, he can fix a lower price and the bookshop shall be fined £5 for every copy henceforth sold at the higher price.

I await my first customer to take advantage of this. I see, however, that www.archbishopofcanterbury.com remains unregistered: perhaps I should set up a bargain bookselling site and claim that prices are set by a higher power.

My star customer of the first Saturday I've worked since Christmas was the gentleman who came in with the details of a book on obtaining one's pilot's licence. He provided all manner of useful bibliographic data to aid in tracking down the correct book, including the fact that it was apparently published in 1900.

It made me think of Wings Over Dagenham, the wonderful Goon Show where Neddy gets carried away building a mangle and accidentally invents the aeroplane - Moriarty laments the passing of the horse-drawn zeppelin - and is immediately contacted by the Air Ministry.

Prose on the underground

(Originally posted on 8th October 2007)

I travel to work by Underground. My point of origin is sufficiently suburban that I get a good half an hour’s reading in to ease me into the day and I find a cosy mental cocoon is the best way to endure commuting.

Short stories seem to be the obvious choice for a short journey, suitably brief and self-contained. But they’re never the right length, of course. It’s, say, two and half stories or just the two and then a twiddling of the thumbs for the last few stops. Besides, short stories aren’t really my thing: oblique, smug little things, far too many of them.

The great writers, the ones whose every sentence cries out to be given its own module on the National Curriculum, are too rich to be digested when queasy from abrupt braking and other people’s sweat. And I can’t, for example, be swept away on an elegiac tide by John Banville in twice-daily fragments over a fortnight. Conversely, something with a bit of pace has its flair rather dampened by the need to nip up an escalator every other chapter.

Non-fiction has to be chosen carefully. It’s no use having one’s elucidation on the matter of quantum physics bisected by eight hours of emails and meetings. My fragile thread of understanding would perish in the meantime. Biographies don’t really suit brief episodes, unless one is prepared to draw up a crib sheet to recall a labyrinth of unfamiliar – as appropriate – aunties or astronauts or Albanian ambassadors.

Of course, there’s also the risk of being sat adjacent to someone with a particularly intrusive personal stereo. I’ve never quite summoned up the cojones to start singing along, but I also find it difficult to concentrate on a book when being buzzed by the treble end of Snow Patrol.

A friend of mine says she uses one herself to blot out whatever anyone else might be listening to, but I can’t see that working for me. I’m as precious about what I listen to as what I read, so I don’t want to employ my music as some sort of noise-cancelling device. My favourite albums would be reduced to the consistency of muzak.

So all I can do is undertake the aural equivalent of holding my breath. Besides, as Gandhi so nearly put it, an iPod for iPod and the whole world goes deaf.

The most recent significant impact on the reading habits of Londoners has been proliferation of free newspapers, flocks of which billow around the carriages with Hitchcockian menace only to settle beguilingly onto the laps of weary commuters with their come hither headlines and double-page spreads of photos sourced from Heat magazine’s dustbins. Before them, most people reading on trains read books. Admittedly though, we had got to the stage where everyone who wasn’t reading Dan Brown was poring over Sudoku puzzles like a student in the Union bar hoping to appear irresistibly intellectual.

I think free newspapers are a great idea. If everyone gets to vote, I’d like think that we should all have at least a basic awareness of the issues of the day. But alarm bells rang when one of them announced its arrival with the claim that it would feature all that one might find in a conventional newspaper but wouldn’t feature too much news as it was felt that young people tend to find that a bit hard going.

Frankly, I wouldn’t wrap my chips in them. Any publication which derives the majority of its correspondence from text messages is unlikely to encourage particularly trenchant debate on any topic.

It’s a great pity that this is what has replaced book reading for a huge number of commuters. Whatever my own dilemmas about suitable book choices for the tube, the capacity in books to show us what critic Samuel Hayakawa called “as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish” is their principle wonder. I never go anywhere without a book – who knows when I’ll be stuck in a queue? – and so I’m more sanguine than most when faced with a monopoly on trains to Edgware at the expense of anything remotely imminent to High Barnet. It’s not the destination that matters, you see, it’s the journey.

On stalking and other social interactions

(Originally posted on 5th October 2007)

I've been poring lasciviously over a feature in the latest issue of Record Collector magazine on the 60 "most interesting" David Bowie rarities (I have two!), which reminded me of a rather endearing authorial encounter a few weeks ago.

We'd been promised a visit from Sebastian Horsley, the artist best known for having himself crucified and, in true Libertine spirit, spending tens of thousands of pounds on prostitutes; he recently published an autobiography, Dandy in the Underworld.

I'd first seen him at Sceptre's party back in February, when he'd swept in wearing a floor-length mink coat, teetering on outrageous stack-heeled boots and dripping in make-up, accompanied by his amanuensis, Rachel, resplendent in very little at all.

My participation in the evening's glamour was restricted to sharing an ashtray with Tracey Emin and reluctantly dancing with colleagues so drunk that the next day they had no memory of, in one case, her own dancing, let alone (mercifully) mine, and in the other, of how he had come by the bruised knuckles (enthusiastically punching a pillar, I was able to reveal).

We had a couple of dozen copies for him sign: a few minutes' work with another few for pleasantries was all I expected. Twenty-five minutes after his arrival, he'd managed six, owing to his racounteuring (sorry, I know verbing weirds language) like an amoral and quite filthy Peter Ustinov and an insistence on adding a message, different in each case, to his signature.

Struggling a little for aphorisms, he decided that one book should be inscribed with his home address and the next with his telephone number. He regularly finds death threats on his answerphone, he explained, but he feels that people who give advance warning of murderous intentions rarely carry them out. Indeed, he likes to phone them back, which I should imagine would deter all but the most psychopathic of stalkers.

By this time, his publicist was slumped in the seat next to him, clearly resigned to the fact that fulfilling their next appointment on time had been a plan born of unjustified optimism.

Now, David Bowie's extraordinary 1995 album, 1.Outside, came about in part because of Bowie's ongoing interest with those who inflict violence upon themselves in the name of art. Wondering if Sebastian Horsley's self-crucifixion might just have ushered him into Bowie's circle and hoping that maybe this was the man to help me fulfill my quest to meet him, I probed as subtlely as I could about a link.

"Why do you ask?" said Sebastian. "Is he a friend of yours?"

Will Self describes Horsley as "simultaneously enthralling, charming and fantastically annoying". I couldn't have put it more perspicaciously myself.

Zuckerman's dying swansong

(Originally posted on 15th September 2007)

Given my almost lycanthropic relationship with sunshine, last week's release from summer's clammy embrace has been quite blissful. Thursday morning saw me quite joyous as I beheld the mist hanging over the railway cutting and I struck out with crisp strides to the tube station.

Befitting such an autumnal turn, I decided to read Exit Ghost, Philip Roth's forthcoming final chronicle of Nathan Zuckerman. I'd given a quote to The Bookseller, admittedly somewhat mischievously, that it was "the Deathly Hallows of serious literature" and anticipated a masterpiece comparable to Updike or Bellow.

I read it with burgeoning disbelief. It's the worst book I've read all year.

The pivotal relationship of the book is that between Zuckerman and Jamie, the wife of the couple with whom Zuckerman has arranged to swap houses. He remembers her from some lecture he gave when she was a student, although her recollections of the encounter are not noted. He too had the privilege of meeting a literary idol when young, the now forgotten E I Lonoff, whose biography Jamie's sometime lover - and is he still? - is intent on writing.

Zuckerman's attitude to the biographer Kliman is aloof, condescending and obnoxious to the point that his valid concerns about the motives for reintroducing Lonoff to the canon are undermined. Kliman and Zuckerman are diametric: young and old, extroverted and introverted, full of vim and full of bile. Kliman represents how tawdry the relationship between the artist and his audience has become.

Now I'm all for a bit of misanthropy from time to time, especially if it's done with the sort of élan which demarcates its author as occupying the sort of high ground which validates it. Roth, as a great twentieth century writer, has that, but Zuckerman does not. I think Roth has here allowed Zuckerman to become a mouthpiece for his views on the sanctity of literature. I'm sure there are students of Philip Roth who might say that I've completely misjudged where Roth ends and Zuckerman begins. But both Zuckerman and Roth, who are similarly reclusive, evidently feel that the man and the writer are entities to be considered separately and, in that fundamental kinship, Roth, to my mind at least, undermines that very idea.

I'm not going any further down that route. It'll only end in tears and discussion of Wagner. Every reader reads his own book, and I'll gladly leave it at that.

The oddest thing about Exit Ghost, though, is the passages where Zuckerman, each time he has spoken with Jamie, writes these imagined conversations between the two of them in the form of a playscript. I'm not sure if these passages are also meant to indicate some of extrapolated subtext to their conversations. It's more than likely I've missed the point altogether, but to make proper sense of it all, I'd have to read it again, and I'm not sure I've done anything to deserve that.

I must confess at this point that this is only the second Roth I've ever read and the first was a much earlier work I read about fifteen years ago. I really ought to try American Pastoral or The Human Stain or indeed just about anything else he's written, going by his exalted reputation.

I do seem to have a knack for homing in on the dodgy ones when I make a foray into the backlist of big name authors I've hitherto managed to avoid. William Boyd? I read Armadillo. Absolute rubbish. Matthew Kneale? Small Crimes In An Age Of Abundance. One first-class short story and eleven wearisome ones. Margaret Atwood? Oryx and Crake. Bloody tedious and certainly amongst the odder choices by a Booker panel to make the shortlist; it's a weak dystopian short story dragged out to novel length, like one of those dreadful 80s 12-inch extended remixes.

I'm quite sure in all three cases that their reputations do not rely on the books I happened to try and that I'd be as smitten as anyone else by Any Human Heart or English Passengers or The Handmaid's Tale. They're on to the 'to read' pile, the only downside of that being that if it were just the one pile, it'd be a hazard to aircraft, so I can't guarantee a second chance to any of them before the Tories get back into power.

Or, by way of a more recognisable time scale for any Americans who've stumbled across this, before the Rapture.

Incidentally*, I was reading in Have A Nice Doomsday, Nicholas Guyatt's despatches from America's Bible Belt, that there are hundreds of thousands of Christians who are so convinced that Jesus will whisk them up to heaven at a moment's notice that they won't take jobs like piloting aircraft or driving buses because they don't want to condemn their passengers to the rather messy fate that awaits people when the person in charge of their vehicle they're in suddenly vanishes in a puff of sanctimony.

Well, that's the evangelical for you: a couple of disciples short of a Last Supper but considerate with it.

I've been listening to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John while writing this. I'll steadfastly defend Elton John up to a point, but that point is 1976. Floreat 1972-76 and there's not been a song worth growing ears for since. But his early stuff is extraordinarily beautiful, even if the remastered versions out now still don't hide the fact that the drumming sounds like a frankfurter on an upturned bucket.

*Oh, all right, I confess: it was just a very contrived link. Still, Eddie Izzard would be proud of me.

The second self-help book you've ever bought

(Originally posted on 28th August 2007)

I've been suffering from Booker overload. Writing a leaflet on the longlist and concocting ready-made quotes for the newspapers for shortlist day has prompted me to attempt to make some headway on the disparate heaps of non-fiction I've been stockpiling.

I've finally made a start on Waterlog by Roger Deakin, a proof copy of which has been slowly yellowing on my shelves for eight years. Synopsis: environmentalist and documentary maker living in a Suffolk cottage with a moat - please bear with me - conceives of swimming anywhere and everywhere in Britain where there's room for the breaststroke.

Deakin's profound knowledge of and love for nature makes him a fantastic guide to Britain's inevitably vanishing wilder locations. Essentially, it's a millennial restaging of William Cobbett's Victorian paean to a lost age, Rural Rides, minus the incipient racism.

I've always felt a claustrophobic discomfort in the water, but I do envy Deakin's ability to feel part of the shifting waterscapes of coasts and rivers, ancient and immovable yet restlessly kinetic. It's hard not to feel a twinge of loss when he tracks down a Fenland sinkhole in which for many years Baptists anointed their flock but is warned off further investigation by dire warnings from the Department of the Environment of leptospirosis and all manner of delinquent bacteria.

At a time when sparrows and hedgehogs have recently been designated endangered, it seems ever more urgent that we try to understand how human moulding of the landscape fundamentally skews ecosystems. Deakin laments that the banks of chalk streams are bought up by wealthy trout anglers when in France all land within twenty metres of a riverbank is public property. He stands vigil over a river diverted past a factory via a concrete channel.

But he's no misanthrope. The book is written literally from a frog's eye view but informed by a mind steeped in folklore and nature. As he drifts through the duckweed, exchanging curious glances with the newts, he is comforted by the amniotic quality of the water and it is a pleasure to imagine accompanying him on these eccentric field trips, listening to him point out the linnets and the blackcaps in grandfatherly tones.

Deakin died only last year - a great loss - but fortunately not before completing a second book, Wildwood, a comparable elegy to woodland and all manner of arboreal magnificence. My mother instilled in me a fascination with nature from a young age and I still remember racing through all her Gerald Durrells and leafing for hours through the twenty-part encyclopedia of animal life we kept on shelves in the hall. It is the wide-eyed wonder of passionate people like Deakin which is ever more vital at a time when schoolchildren are taken to city farms to encounter such exotic fauna as the cow and the pig, creatures which they are then horrified to learn are present in their packed lunches.

Anyway, I've inveigled both of Deakin's books to Front of House in the shop, Wildwood enjoying an Indian summer in New Titles and Waterlog crowbarred into the 'Other' section of Popular Biography alongside other unclassifiables such as Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and Pimp by Iceberg Slim.

There's been another upsurge in people asking for The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. For anyone fortunate enough to have had this pitiful excuse for an ISBN as yet pass them by, it's another of these manuals of positive thinking dressed up in pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo and shot through with moronic references to 'energy' and 'centredness'.

"Our job as humans is to hold on to the thoughts of what we want, make it absolutely clear in our minds what we want, and from that we start to invoke one of the greatest laws in the Universe, and that's the law of attraction. You become what you think about most, but you also attract what you think about most."

Thus writes John Assaraf, yet another Californian peddling a blend of basic common sense and scientific travesty. The whole book goes on like this, repeating the idea that visualising what you want to the exclusion of all negative thoughts will inevitably make those dreams come true. Want a flash car? Visualise it long enough and, so long as an image of some decrepit jalopy doesn't interpose, it's yours. Honestly, it's like cosmic ordering for dummies. Richard Dawkins may be an arrogant tosspot - and, boy, wasn't he just when I had what I had expected to be the privilege of meeting him last year - but frankly he sits on the fence too much for my taste. I'm not sure a full-on assault of pinpoint ratiocination is sufficient deterrent to these charlatans.

This week's Private Eye sends Dawkins up quite deliciously, having him harangue a woman for making a birthday wish:

"But how could blowing out candles on a cake have any influence over a future event? Isn't that just the most crude, primitive, infantile, unscientific superstition?"

Anyway, all this codswallop gives me another idea for a Christmas novelty title. It'll be called The Second Self-Help Book You've Ever Bought and every page will be blank, save one with the words 'You Mug' in an uncompromisingly bold typeface.

I should state at this point that I claim copyright on the concept and text, before Michael O'Mara Books add it to their illustrious roster of humour titles. (I came across the highlight of their September list today: Nosepicking For Pleasure.)

I really shouldn't write these posts while a police helicopter circles endlessly overhead like some sort of enormous luminescing mosquito. It has left me with an imbalance of the humours. I'm going to listen to Arcade Fire at mildly antisocial volume now and play 'air organ' on Intervention and My Body Is A Cage.

Afternoon of the living dead

(Originally posted on 19th August 2007)

It's after lunch on a Saturday that shopwork really starts to grate. The ill-tempered and witless seem to move onto the high street en masse: another afternoon of the living dead. By about half three, most of us on the servile side of the counter become convinced that surely anything would be less soul-crushing: working in an abattoir for kittens perhaps.

And being Duty Manager for the day just makes it that little bit more... well, even Roget can't help me here, but it's bloody relentless, whatever it is.

Competing for the day's star customer accolade were the Russian woman who accused a member of staff of stealing the bag she'd actually left on a different floor, and the student who kept trying to get a refund to which he certainly wasn't entitled and who only gave in when he realised that it would me who'd be called upon to adjudicate at whichever desk he went to and that I was quite prepared to play the game of saying 'no' in as many different ways as possible without hesitation, deviation, repetition or just telling him to sod off.

This week's cavalcade of the clueless seems to have made me a soulmate in misanthropy of Michael Bywater, the recent paperback publication of whose Big Babies, Or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?, has been my Tube reading for the last few days.

Essentially, his argument is that we live in a culture whose sole aim is entertainment, passive and puerile, baby food for the brain. (He doesn't like marketing's fancy for alliteration so perhaps I'd better modify my rhetoric here.) From the vacuity of musicals and reality television to the patronising pictograms of warning signs which proliferate in every public space, we are discouraged at every turn from taking any responsibility about the way we live.

I came across a perfect example of such a sign at London Bridge station this week. A poster drawing attention to the hazards of unattended baggage juxtaposed a picture of a bench with a lone suitcase beside it with one identical but for the presence of a man sitting next to the bag: the first had a big red cross beside it, the second a tick.

Being a slightly fusty alumnus cambrigiensis, he does occasionally misfire when laying into certain pop-culture phenomena: his tirade against The Spice Girls, while of course nobly motivated, did rather need a copy editor to point out that he was taking a step too far outside his realm of expertise. And his assertion that "good sex shouldn't be fun" does rather fly in the face of the field research of millions.

I've been listening to Talk Talk's Laughing Stock while writing this, a speculative purchase of a band whom I had hitherto only encountered when marginally misshelved in the Talking Heads section of record shops. I can't remember now what provoked my investigating them, but they certainly have their passionate adherents on Amazon. (Mind you, so does everyone on Amazon, but Talk Talk's reviewers seemed mostly to have at least a familiarity with polysyllabism and the concept of punctuation).

I'm at a loss as to how to describe the album: woozy blues, classical mithering, a vaguely ambient jazziness at the abstract end of the Eno scale and the sort of wilful atonality which Scott Walker has spent the last couple of decades honing. Anyway, I'm enjoying being confounded by it.

I've not had any particularly memorable contributions to Photos of Dinosaurs in the last few days. But I did unearth one of my own that I'd forgotten about.

Where do you have books on music and rock stars from the sixties?
- Up in the music department on third floor.
Then why does it say 'Books and Music' over there?
- Because that's Borders over the road. It's a different shop.

That's what Saturday's like. All bloody day.

Chance is the name we put on our ignorance

(Originally posted on 11th August 2007)

This post's epigrammatic title is quoted from The Painter of Battles, the forthcoming English translation of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Spanish bestseller. I finished it today in the early evening sunlight, reading for an hour or so with my legs slung across the arm of the chair, askew as if they were prosthetic limbs put aside (one's own physical comfort can be such a distraction when trying to become immersed), and the cat nestled beside me on a folder of gas bills.

It took me the majority of its 220-odd pages to develop much of an appreciation for it. Faulques lives hermit-like in a former lighthouse; he is working on a painting, wrapped around the interior of the building's dome like a Moebius strip, capturing every horror he saw through his viewfinder as a war photographer. One day a Croatian soldier, an image of whose nationalistic defiance won awards for Faulques and cemented his fame, appears and announces that he has spent the last ten years hunting him down. He intends, he declares, to kill him, his reason being that wide distribution of the image meant that his Serbian wife and child were brutally slaughtered.

The Croatian's desire for vengeance is brought about not through blind hatred but from a slow realisation of the complicity of the photographer in what he chooses to record and how - like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, I suppose - his presence might affect it.

The reason it took me time to warm to it was that my first point of reference was Schopenhauer's Telescope, a superbly Kafkaesque novel by Gerard Donovan which made the Booker longlist in 2003 (the year of Vernon God Little's absurd victory). The jacket blurb for this reads:

One afternoon - in a certain European village, in the middle of a civil war - one man digs while another watches over him. Gradually, they begin to talk.

Aside from being the most beguilingly phrased blurb I've ever read, I think the thematic similarity with The Painter of Battles is fairly obvious.

So, at first, this book suffered by comparison. The present-day narrative is constantly interrupted - or so I thought - by Faulques' reminiscences about Olvido, another photographer who teamed up with him and whose bloodied body constituted the last war photo he took. They became, of course, lovers and she is strikingly beautiful, piercingly intelligent and ineluctably drawn to Faulques, whose tactiturn machismo is softened by his intuitive artistic sensibility... and so on, just as middle-aged male novelists have acted out their fantasies so many times before.

But putting Olvido's stereotypical nature aside (and also the fact that I couldn't help thinking that her name sounds like a type of low-fat spread), the device gradually revealed its purpose. The Croatian has spent ten years in pursuit of Faulques, but he does not wish simply to assassinate him; indeed, he comes and goes from the lighthouse for several days. It is his intention that Faulques should come to understand why the chain of events which began with Faulques' taking of the photo must end with his death. As the two discuss the mural, and the paintings which seem to have inspired it, Faulques begins to understand that the painting is his own attempted expiation, his synthesis in paint what the Croatian's words also indicate.

Pérez-Reverte does flirt with the quantum implications of the book's philosophy. The Croatian refers to the 'butterfly effect', that illustration of chaos theory which demonstrates the manifold, seemingly unimaginable consequences of every action. But his lesson to Faulques is not that. It is, succintly, what I have headed this piece with, a notion which Faulques haltingly derives from the situation, the idea that no consequence is so unimaginable that we cannnot conceive of it and therefore that we cannot take responsibility for it.

On a distinctly lighter note... Photos of Dinosaurs goes international! I have my first overseas contribution, so I bring you, courtesy of my uneasy grasp of the French language, the following from a bookshop in Paris:

Do you have Stendahl's The Red and the Black?
- Yes.
Is it cheaper if I buy just The Red?

Life and death after Douglas Adams

(Originally published on 3rd August 2007)

I went to my first book launch in a few weeks last Thursday, for a magical first novel called Gods Behaving Badly, in which the gods of ancient Greece are living in undignified squalor in a shabby terraced house in Islington. Some of the gods try to apply their deific skills top the modern world: Artemis is a professional dog walker and her brother Apollo a TV psychic. But their modern lives are mundane and largely impotent; it takes the appearance of the doughty Alice, their cleaner, to bring some excitement and purpose back to their eternal existences.

The author, Marie Phillips is, wonderfully, gloriously, a former bookseller; she proffered the opening chapters of her manuscript to a sales rep, Peter Fry, who took it straight to Dan Franklin, grand fromage at Jonathan Cape. He read it, immediately phoned her to ask for the rest and made her an offer the next day.

It's the first genuinely funny new novel I've read for longer than I can remember: it made me laugh out loud on the tube, which undoubtedly had me fixed in the withering yet oddly stoic glare of my carriage-mates. What makes it stand out is the dialogue, a trick which evades most authors, who either end up with characters sounding like they've spent their entire lives under the direction of Noel Coward or else spouting some sort of ersatz street-talk which has been researched by means of sitting on the top deck of a bus at the end of the school day.

Essentially, she has Douglas Adams' ear for comic dialogue. (I mentioned this to her at the launch and she delightedly pointed out that the appearance of one of the lead characters in a dressing gown was in homage to dearly departed Douglas.) The opening scene, where Artemis comforts a tree which had been an Australian accountant called Kate until she rashly declined a particularly blunt proposition from Apollo, is the spirit of the book in microcosm. When Artemis describes Kate's new appearance to her, she takes comfort in her foliage.

"Are you sure I haven't gone mad?"

"I'm sure," said Artemis. "You're a tree. A eucalytpus. Subgenus of mallee. Variegated leaves."

"Oh," said the tree.

"Sorry," said Artemis.

"But with variegated leaves?"

"Yes," said Artemis. "Green and yellow."

The tree seemed pleased. "Oh well, at least there's that to be grateful for," it said.

"That's the spirit," Artemis reassured it.

In an appearance on Radio4's Bookclub (or something similar) some years ago, Douglas Adams asserted that the biggest influence of his writing style had been A A Milne. It instantly made sense. He used the same, blunt verbless sentences, with rambling pomposities thrown in as the plot and characters demanded. He cast sentences so that the eye is drawn to the absurd. He even capitalised for emphasis. All in all, there's a certain flow to it, one that works well when spoken out loud but also has the internal poetic rhythm that is the gift of the most stylish of prose writers, the staccato combined with the mellifluous. And I think Marie Phillips has that too.

Athena's wisdom is now lost in the hubbub of accountants' jargon and marketing gibberish; Dionysus spends time concocting and field-testing his revoltingly potent home-brew; Hephaestus is the epitome of the amateur DIY enthusiast. The book is appreciative enough of the mythos from which its immortal cast comes to make it a knowingly satisfying book for the lay classicist. But it also updates the stories delightfully: who could fail to be tickled by the notion that the Angel tube station is the gateway to the Underworld? Certainly not me, having arrived for the launch via that station in heat in more conducive to cake baking and then travelled up those escalators so long that they look as if they've been filched from the set of A Matter of Life and Death, accompanied by the less than celestial strains of a busker murdering Baker Street on an oboe (although eight out of ten for effort there).

Anyway, Gods Behaving Badly is out now and will be a book I shall suggest at every vaguely appropriate opportunity to our customers. So when you get a copy for Christmas from that distant and eccentric relative who has heretofore alternated between getting you bilious and grossly oversized knitwear and gift sets of rather manky cosmetics from Superdrug then you may well have me to thank for the hours of entertainment and the excuse to absent yourself from the post-prandial charades and ceremonial watching of the Harry Potter film.

Speaking of Douglas Adams, in the news today was the sorrowful conclusion that the baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin, is now believed to be extinct. The connection with Adams is that the baiji was one of the animals he sought out with naturalist Mark Cawardine in their book on endangered species of the world, Last Chance To See, published in 1990. At the time of his visit, the Chinese government had set up an ambitious project to preserve the dolphins' habitat, but the demands of industry have been, it would seem inevitably in a rapidly expanding economy, impossible to ignore. Having advanced all the usual arguments in favour of promoting biodiversity, Adams concluded that there was one more reason to preserve curious evolutionary culs-de-sac such as the kakapo and the Komodo dragon: "the world would be a colder, darker, lonelier place without them". Today, of course, we know he's right.

To compound this note of loss and regret, I'll conclude with a rather sad little quote from the editor of The Dandy, Craig Graham, announcing a relaunch of the 70 year-old comic as Dandy Xtreme.

"Following extensive research, we discovered The Dandy readers were struggling to schedule a weekly comic into their hectic lives. They just didn't have enough time. They're too busy gaming, surfing the net or watching TV, movies and DVDs."

Hero worship

(Originally posted on 25th July 2007)

I'd been saving up Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land for a time when I'd be able to give it the unswerving attention his books deserve, but this week concluded that such an opportunity was unlikely to manifest itself any time soon and so cracked the spine on the Piccadilly Line in defiance of the unbroken ranks of Potteroos.

I've heard nothing but reverent praise about his third novel featuring Frank Bascombe, and, 200 pages in, I concur wholeheartedly. The density of cultural references makes it necessarily slow going for someone unacquainted with suburbia in the grand American style, but such a close reading gives me the chance to savour every perfectly cast sentence, to delight in what Stephen Fry calls "the chewiness of language".

In a bar, Bascombe sees a silent TV image of George Dubya on the campaign trail in 2000: "Bush's grinning, smirking, depthless face is visible, talking soundlessly, arms held away from his sides as if he was hiding tennis balls in his armpits."

The wit is coruscating; the image is indelible. And there's even something about the passage as a whole which suggests that Ford wants us consider the possibility that the tennis balls, for some maleficent purpose, might actually be there.

When he came in to the shop to sign stock last autumn, I felt a sense of awe. He has a grand presence and a measured stride. His huge hand embraces yours, his voice has an authoritative rumble, what he says is succinct and definitive.

And for perhaps the only time in my life when meeting someone with an iconic status in my eyes, I wasn't reduced to sweaty gaucheness. We spoke about the great writers of post-war America and when he'd signed his books, I managed to say what I really meant: "It's always a pleasure to meet authors, but sometimes it's just an absolute honour."

Trite and grovelling, no doubt you think, but it was utterly sincere. So, David Gilmour, if, by some bizarre happenstance, you're reading this, I can only apologise. It was a thrill to meet you, but excruciating for you, I'm sure. Still, you should have told me you were duetting with David Bowie a week later. I'd have mortgaged the cat for a ticket.

The obligatory Harry Potter post

(Originally published on 22nd July 2007)

So, Harry Potter. It's all over. The boy has become a man. Marvellous.

This isn't going to be a rant about Harry Potter. I'm not a fan - I have the read the first of them, as I felt it my duty as bookmonger, and was reminded of the pleasure I got from Roald Dahl as a child - but I'm happy enough for people, young and old, to enjoy them. In a way, I wish I were a fan, getting caught up in the all the anticipation, excitement and attendant persiflage.

But the Harry Potter phenomenon does concern me. And I think it's because it's become so much more than a way to show people what wonder can be found in the humblest of bookshops. Now anyone can, and apparently does, flog Harry Potter, even shops that don't normally stock books. Last Friday night certain clothes shops adjacent to bookshops dressed their staff up in all manner of thaumaturgical regalia to tap into the craze.

So I think what worries me is that people drawn to reading Harry Potter are going to expect this sort of glamour to attend the book trade generally. Hollywood tries to turn all its products into a relentless cavalcade of stars and CGI, all sound and fury signifying nothing, while the independent film industry continues its lonely decline, so it'll all be about making each release into an event. A film's success is determined in its first weekend's ticket sales.

The book industry is trying to ape that sort of business model, making authors, especially the media-savvy and photogenic, into stars, with the result that the general public's critical abilities are those which will suffice for 'watercooler' autopsies. But Harry Potter is a one-off. Anyone waiting for this kind of hullabaloo to show them what to read next isn't going to buying books again any time soon.

Back in January, when Stef Penney won the Costa Book of the Year (next year awarded alongside the Monster Munch Award for Contemporary Architecture), books made one of their occasional forays beyond the review supplements and into the news pages. But most journalists just wrote about Penney's agoraphobia and the supposed incongruity of this condition with her writing about the wilds of Canada, it not apparently occurring to any of them that having an imagination tends to be very much part of the job spec when it comes to writing fiction.

Reviews, sometimes even in the Sunday broadsheets, are often no more than a description of the plot. (I’d like to make an honourable mention here of Claire Allfree, who reviews for Metro, a publication not normally associated with intellect and insight; but both are abundant in the two and a half inches the newspaper is prepared to give her in lieu of more mobile phone ads and text messages from idiots.) It’s no wonder John Banville’s masterly Booker winner, The Sea, has sold so poorly in comparison with more prosaic winners, when nothing happens until 20 pages from the end, but after 80,000 words pieced together with such rare beauty. There are distressingly few of us who feel aggrieved that Jim Crace, England’s most stylish novelist, is not paraded through the streets of his home city of Birmingham in a streamer-festooned, open-top bus every time he publishes a new book.

Last week I was interviewed by a journalist from The Los Angeles Times about the then imminent Potter: she said she knew the films but not the books! They had no book readers up to the task? Books seem to have become a niche interest, a novelty, a hobby for the socially retiring. (The same day I also appeared on Al-Jazeera, in a piece on Alastair Campbell's diaries; my mother is now convinced I'm a prime terrorist target.)

There will always be word-of-mouth titles which skew the market - A Year in Provence, A Brief History of Time, Captain Corelli's Lousy Rotten Stinking Mandolin - and names, even at the literary end of the spectrum, who shift books no matter the quality of their latest (yes, I do mean you, Ian McEwan and Sebastian Faulks). And then of course there's The Da Vinci Code.

Now, anyone who's ever read a line of Nabokov or Conrad or Walcott will be able to tell from reading a single sentence from The Da Vinci Code that the publishers have made flesh the philosophical exercise involving an infinite number of monkeys and a similar number of typewriters (and no copy editors). The language in that book is so excruciatingly poor that the manuscript ought to have been so scored with blue pencil by its editor that one might have wondered if a young Picasso had been doodling on it. I'm sure the story is gripping, but one man's page-turner is this man's stomach-turner.

This total lack of analytical skills is why The Lord of the Rings gets voted the best book of all time, why students quote from Wikipedia in their essays, why the media's coverage of any political issue or scientific development is reported such starkly black and white terms that any debate is reduced to mindless sloganeering.

So, I hope all those waiting for Harry savoured every last word, but I hope that that you’ll pick up something that needs a bit of engagement some time soon. It doesn't matter that people read trash or watch trash or eat trash; it does matter when our minds, our palates, our expectations become so dulled that we don't want anything more, that we can’t even recognise something with real value, something worth treasuring.

I address that last adjuration to all those fans of G P Taylor, Jennifer Donnelly, Meg Rosoff, Philip Pullman and all the other children’s authors whom publishers are pushing on readers scared to pick up anything not first vetted by Richard & Judy. And that includes all of you out there who made The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time into a word-of-mouth bestseller and even voted it as a 'Vintage Future Classic'. Let's not be coy here: it may shed light on a previously relatively unreported condition, but it's a children's book. If you found the plot satisfying, then you have a reading age of nine and almost certainly read the book with a supply of Cheesestrings and Sunny D within easy reach.

Photos of dinosaurs

(Originally published 18th July 2007)

Well, it's finally happened: the 'Photos of Dinosaurs' email is bouncing round cyberspace and should be lurking in all sorts of people's inboxes tomorrow morning.

Should there be anyone reading this who doesn't know me, Photos of Dinosaurs is my bid to become the Christmas bestseller of 2008. A bookshop is just about the only place where a customer can, and frequently does, come in and legitimately ask you about any topic whatsoever, aardvarks to zymurgy. And amongst all the sensible questions are a fair number of bizarre ones, which can come about from confusion, ignorance, wilful stupidity or too much exposure to reality television, and I've been hoarding such treasures for a while now.

The title of this putative bestseller - Photos of Dinosaurs - comes from one of my favourite enquiries: "you've only got books with pictures of dinosaurs; haven't you got any with photographs?". (I have an erstwhile colleague who's had the exact same too! And indeed just a couple of weeks ago someone I currently work with had the same question only about dragons!)

I reckon it might just take off. Buyers for bookshops would all identify with it and literary editors would have endless fun quoting from it. Douglas Adams and John Lloyd certainly recognised the latter possibility in The Meaning of Liff - their inspired little anthology of place names employed more usefully as words which should exist - which included:

Ripon (vb.)
(Of literary critics.) To include all the best jokes from the book in the review to make it look as if the critic thought of them.

I've registered the domain name photosofdinosaurs.com, as well as the obvious variations, and I've sent out an email to every bookish contact I have, encouraging them to send their own favourites to jonathan@photosofdinosaurs.com.

I've already had a few contributions from my shop, my favourite of which went as follows:

"Do you have books on London seasides?"
"Do you mean English seasides?"
"No, London coasts."
"London riversides?"
"No, London seasides."
"But London isn't on the coast."
"Don't worry about it mate, I'll go somewhere else where they know what they're talking about."

So, calling all booksellers....

Not a daily Mail reader

(Originally posted on 13th July 2007)

Today I finished The Road Home by Rose Tremain and I do think it's possible that I've just read this year's Man Booker Prize winner. It's the story of Lev, an eastern European immigrant to Britain: his wife has died and he has come to Britain to try to make enough money to improve the life of his daughter, who now lives with his mother. I'd not read a Rose Tremain before, but until now she's been best known as an historical... no, I don't care what Fowleresque edict I'm contravening, a historical novelist, and I'm rarely tempted by those. But she has an elegant, unfussy style which works its magic quite discreetly.

I've no doubt that Lev's story is not typical of the immigrant experience in Britain. He has the benefit of good fortune a little too often and his suffering at the hands of British prejudice is infrequent and relatively benign. But I'm not sure that's a valid objection. Rose Tremain is telling Lev's story and it is asking a little too much to ask him to represent everyone with a similar backstory. If Lev and the supporting cast were nothing more than stereotypes, it would be an issue. But Lev, his family and friends at home and his new acquaintances are well-rounded, the sort of characters one has no difficulty imagining outside the confines of this narrative.

Reading it reminded me of Ripley Bogle by Robert McLiam Wilson, a novel I loved when I read it about ten years ago. Ripley Bogle is homeless, but quite the street poet, with dandyish artistic sensibilities. But he is such a vibrant, vital creation that one soon sees how irrelevant any accusation that the author has romanticised life on the streets would be. And I met a man not unlike him at Crisis one Christmas: Brian was as well-read, knowledgeable and erudite as any Islington dinner party guest.

Earlier in the week, when I was only a short way into The Road Home, The Daily Mail took advantage of the conviction of the 21st July would-be bombers to emblazon their front page with a characteristically nasty headline: 'Bombers on benefits: How four refugees taking sanctuary in Britain betrayed us'. No doubt further stories about the dangers of the amoral foreigner invasion will follow and it will become even harder for anyone with the slightest tint to their skin - creosote-hued celebs not included - to step outside without being subjected to stares of hatred and suspicion.

Whenever I come across these examples of The Daily Mail's revolting agenda, I always think about an interview in The Guardian a few years ago with the Jennifer Griffin, daughter of Nick Griffin, the abominable leader of the abominable British National Party. She'd decided that she wanted to set up a BNP equivalent of the Young Conservatives (or Conservative Future as they rebranded themselves at a time when it seemed like the Tories had none, before Tony Blair contrived his legacy of making them look electable again). Challenged to defend her views on 'white flight' and Britain's being 'full-up' - clearly just a parroting of those of her father, who presumably spouted racist propaganda at her in lieu of bedtime stories - she said, "'The Daily Mail seems sure that illegal immigration is causing terrible problems across the country." You can read the article at http://politics.guardian.co.uk/elections2004/story/0,,1217914,00.html - it's bloody scary.

Having spent most of this post damning the Mail mentality, I must confess to, erm, buying The Mail on Sunday today: I couldn't resist the giveaway of Prince's new album. I was very curious to see what the lascivious composer of Sexy MF, Dirty Mind, Gett Off, etc. might possibly have to say to middle England.

Not, it would seem, a lot. He rocks out competently, warbles along to some jazzy lounge stuff and generally provides an excellent soundtrack to a cheesy evening of clumsy seduction. Meh, which I believe is the expression of indifference de nos jours.

The Mail on Sunday lived up to expectations though: every page made me shudder.

Cheese, wine and John Keats

(Originally posted on 7th July 2007)

I came across something rather splendid in our cookery department today: a self-published book called The Cheesemonger's Tale by Arthur Cunynghame. The author was once a Royal Warrant Holder as cheesemonger to the Queen and the Prince of Wales. I'm not sure what treachery one has to commit to lose such a warrant, but it doesn't seem to have dented the man's enthusiasm for his subjects, those of cheese, wine and the elegant marriage of the two.

It's the sort of book that the big publishers don't really do any more, a gorgeous gallimaufry with no more of central thread than the search for great cheese, a book that could only come from the mind of someone so immersed in the subject that the wider world is probably much of a mystery to him. Anyone who speaks of brie as 'temperamental' clearly communes with the stuff in a way a dabbling amateur like me can scarcely appreciate. Dull adjectives like 'steely' and 'floral' are reinvigorated here and he certainly has my mouth watering at the prospect of some proper Wensleydale, especially after foolishly buying a bland lump of the stuff from Sainsburys last week.

There are earnest little asides too, on the evils of supermarkets and a remarkably unlikely, given the author's undoubted Englishness, defence of EU policy of protected foodstuffs. And I particularly liked his definitive statement on the eating, or not, of rinds: if you like the taste, eat it.

Today's award for outstandingly ignorant pomposity goes to the customer who first was disgusted that we no longer stock a book he had bought from us in 1976 and, after a brief hiatus during which he ferreted fruitlessly for Keats in children's poetry before being directed to the adult section, declared himself baffled why we did not have that author's 'The rime of the ancient mariner'. I imagine that you will take rather less time to spot the fatal flaw in his reasoning that it took me to convince him of it.

He just shades the accolade from the ill-advisedly mustachioed gentleman who raged about Philip Pullman's being kept in teenage fiction when 'he clearly writes for adults'. Let not the fact that he been published only by Puffin and Scholastic, two of our finest children's publishers, deter you, sir.

I suspect there is going to be a prominent vein of literary snobbery running throughout this blog. Still, I'll brook no objections and all who take offence should go off and reread their 'adult cover' versions of Harry Potter.