Update

It’s been a funny old month at Bookist HQ. For starters, circumstances have meant that I’ve only read two books in the last five weeks (and nothing at all for the first two of those). I cannot remember another time of reading so little.

I did fit in a few days to slip back into my fantasy life/alternate reality in London, where I visited two excellently curated bookshops (Foyles on the South Bank and the London Review Bookshop near the British Museum). I bought a small (yes, really) selection of books and decided that this blog has been taking my reading in entirely the wrong direction. Since I started it, I’ve read one book in French and perhaps a couple in translation, instead spending far too much time on prize lists and the like. My only interest that hasn’t suffered is short stories (speaking of which, my review of Miranda Hill’s Sleeping Funny appeared in the National Post last month).

The entire TBR pile is now appealing, with just five books on the top shelf: NW (yes, still), Open City by Teju Cole, Lightning Rods by Helen De Witt, Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway and (rather belatedly) Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse. No more basing my reading on what the local library (which I love, despite being rather far from the average reader it’s buying for) decides to stock, or on prize longlists populated with too much dreary same-old, same-old.

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