Last Christmas Books

Published Monday, December 11, 2006 by Kevin Breathnach | E-mail this post

In his contribution to the Christmas Books project, Fergal Crehan reveals the blogosphere's literary weakness:

I also have included books that are not quite recent, but merely recent-ish. Partly from a fondness for paperbacks and partly from parsimoniousness, I am not a big reader of hardbacks, and consequently am rarely fully up to date with what’s going on in the world of books. My apologies then if my books of the year are not, in fact, of the year at all.

It's comforting to know that in this project, I will not alone be found wanting in my reading of contemporary literature. Fergal calls it a fondness for paperbacks, but for me, it's more: it's a disdain for hardbacks. You can't break or break their spines; they're far too tall; sitting among paperbacks, they look awful on shelves; their covers are perpetually slipping, until one is forced to actually remove it, following which it is inevitable lost, or worse, destroyed. It's not even a subconscious disdain: knowing, I await the paperback arrivals of, amongst many others, Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights, Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis and Richard Aldous' The Lion and the Unicorn.

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Last Christmas Books

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