Browse: Love Letters to Bookshops Around the World edited by Henry Hitchings (2016)

 This is a collection of essays around the idea of the importance of bookshops in the lives of writers. Some of them have taken this to mean their part in their childhood and development, others their part in their lives as writers later on. While none of them are dull, I can't say I was wildly inspired, either. This is one of those books that has 'also-ran' written all over it, part of the 'books on books' efflorescence of recent times. I'm not sure what the problem is: the feeling is somehow the same as when someone tells you in great detail about a dream they've had. The content of dreams is fascinating, so why is it dull to hear them? This has the same quality of "ooooh, this shop was significant for me, and this book bought in it changed everything" but the reader has that sinking sense of searedness, trying to care and not quite succeeding. What occasionally changes this prescription is originality of viewpoint. So, Saša Stanišić playing with drug concepts, with books as matter for dealers, is more fun than most. Writing style also does it, so Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor speaking about a very plain but significant Nairobi shop in stark terms somehow lifts its head above the parapet. And the pyrotechnics of Iain Sinclair's prose make his piece about a St Leonards bookshop slightly beyond standard, though the matter isn't. This book as a whole is something for the 'just OK' basket.

Commonplace Book

 '"Efficiency is the gravest menace that the war holds over us," said O'Rane reflectively. "Whenever I've met it, it means being unkind一with Government sanction一to someone weaker than yourself; Jesus Christ would not have been tolerated by the Charity Organization Society, all the bourgeois press would have said that He was pampering the incompetent and maintaining the survival of the unfit. Efficiency frightens me."'

from Sonia Married by Stephen McKenna (Chapter Two, Part II)