Just bought two books whose main pull quotes on the cover are from the Daily Mail… Is this the beginning of the end? Is my reading credibility down the drain forever?*

*Did I mention they both have embossed gold writing for the title?

I had a meeting with E (she just won this btw!) at the V&A on Friday and used it as an excuse to mooch about the gallery for a few hours. I saw my fave embroidered map, some beautiful tiles, this book exhibition and of course, had to check out the Supremes’ dresses at the same time! There were also some books published by Coracle on display – and this butter book leapt into my hands… A joint project between Coracle and the Cork Butter Museum (of course!) the book is made up of prints made with the original butter-wrapper printing blocks and collection of folklore, song lyrics, butter inspection notes and quotes. This appealed to the Goldtop side of me, and somehow reminded me of my favourite books – Sendak’s collection The Nutshell Library…

Me and books always get on well, and this month has seen a blossoming of our relationship

• Read it, Swap it has seen me finally get rid of a bunch of unsuccessful reads in favour of some new novels for 0 pence! (well ok, stamp pence)
• Brixton library has been nominated for this years’s Love Libraries Award, so get voting! I went in there the other day and they have a great exhibition of weird collections in jam-jars – fab
• A belated b-day present from dear I; Chronicle Book’s Smart Women Read Between the Lines. It has cute bookmarks, bookplate stickers and a list of 100 best books by female authors.

That, along with the autumnal weather is making me want to curl up under a duvet and get reading…

More people live in a 2 car household than have 2 novels in their house? 3% of Britons can’t read and 40% *choose* not to read books? This is sad news….

I ♥ my books.

week 4: no reading

Well, hell you may as well say no breathing…! This is the typical reaction apparently, and not surprising as it knocks on the head not only *nice* reading like novels, magazines, blogs etc, but email, schoolbooks, work papers etc… Plus TV & radio! umm… After reading the chapter and thinking about how I would cope some surprising things happened last night:

- on the radio there was a book review programme that talked about Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. In it, the character is an academic who watches telelvision continuously as a distraction and a way of delaying starting to write. Eventually he trys to avoid tv altogether (and finds it almost impossible!)

- also on the radio was Something Understood – about ‘The theft of Time’, readings, poems and music about just taking the time to just be, and exist in the present making of it what you will..

To hammer it home, this morning I got sent a free magazine to read. (I’ll look at it next week!)

Dec 15: Books for Christmas (always good!)

Tonight was the U75 Bookgroup’s Christmas Dinner at the Bonnington. Weirdly enough there was a Brixton Bookgroup’s Christmas dinner booked at the same place, only the night before… Anyhow wine was drunk, secret santa books were swapped and we all managed to agree on a book for next month too!

and even for something on friday at 3am!