Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

  I’ll start by saying that A Promised Land is a looooong read. The hardback weighs in at 701 pages, not including Acknowledgements and Index and I have to say that the index is very comprehensive. I got it for Christmas 2020, which was a lovely surprise. It had been on my book wish list, which I handily keep very visible so the husband can see it, but I hadn’t actually expected to get the hardback because a book of this size ain’t cheap. I’ve been picking away at it through January and February, mainly reading a chapter or two every couple of days with a cup of tea in the afternoon – I would say it’s probably not a bedtime read because it’s a book that definitely requires concentration. I’m not American, but I did emigrate to Canada the year before Obama became US president and I do live right on the 49 th parallel so I read this book as a more than interested bystander to this period of US political and social history. Opinions differ on whether he was a good or effective presid...

 One of the joys of the Bargain Book Table is coming across something you might never normally have noticed, but that turns out to be joyous. As I’ve said elsewhere, books are all about risk and reward and oh boy, with Treasure Palaces edited by Maggie Fergusson it was all about the reward. Treasure Palaces is subtitled ‘Great Writers Visit Great Museums’ and the book does what it says on the tin (with bells on…) It’s a collection of 24 essays by eminent writers about their favourite museums and it started life as a series of pieces in Intelligent Life, the sister magazine to The Economist, with the premise that a writer (who isn’t an art critic) would return to a museum that had played a part in their life and write about any aspect of it – the building, the collection, the originator – while weaving in elements of personal memoir. The original magazine collection ran to 38 essays and I can honestly say that the only thing I’m disappointed about with this book is that they had to ...

  You can come to a new book in so many ways – a review, a recommendation from a friend, desperation at the airport or station where you will sometimes buy just about anything so you have something to while away a few hours when you can’t go anywhere. I’ve bought books on the basis of all three of these and I think most people would agree that the first two methods are usually, but not always the most reliable because it’s really embarrassing when a friend loves something you really hate! I came to Giovanni’s Room after reading an interesting interview with Sharmaine Lovegrove who has worked as a bookseller for over twenty years, but couldn’t get a job in publishing. She argues that there is a real disconnect between the publishing industry and readers. The interview is worth reading in its own right, but it also lead me to another article written two years earlier in which she takes about the lack of diversity in UK publishing, her own history as a book seller including openin...