New Moon Contest!

UPDATE: NOVEMBER 16, 2009: Thanks for your entries! This contest is now CLOSED!

The movie adaptation of New Moon, the second book in the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, hits theatres November 20th 2009.

In honour of the occasion, I'm running a contest to win a New Moon prize pack consisting of the following:

• A complete set of the books in the Twilight Saga (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn)
• A copy of the Twilight 2-Disc Special Edition DVD
• A copy of the Deluxe edition Twilight Original Movie Soundtrack
• A copy of the Twilight Director's Notebook
• A copy of The New Moon Official Illustrated Movie Companion
• A copy of the New Moon Original Movie Soundtrack (which just debuted at #2 on the Billboard charts)
• AND... A set of 4 Twilight Journals in a collectible tin!

Sound like something you or your library would like to win??

To enter, please send an e-mail to rosalyn.steele@hbfenn.com with 'New Moon Contest' in the subject line. This contest is open to teachers and librarians in Canada only. Please provide your school or library's full mailing address with your entry. The contest close date is MONDAY NOVEMBER 16th.

There will also be 3 runner-up prizes of the New Moon Original Movie Soundtrack.

Visit this website to download countdown clocks to the movie release, wallpapers, posters, watch the latest trailers for the movie and find out what is going on with the third film, Eclipse.

And for fans in the Toronto area- some of the cast of the New Moon movie (Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz and Bronson Pelletier) will be visiting Much Music for a live interview on MUCHONDEMAND, Friday, Nov. 13 at 5 p.m. ET. Last year, Twilight movie actors Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Nikki Reed and Rachelle Lefevre visited MUCHONDEMAND and created total mayhem- some fans waited up to 12 hours in the rain! I would suggest anyone wanting to be front of the line this time around to head downtown VERY early! I think I'll just set the old VCR (very old school, I know!)

NYRB Challenge Book #7: A Classic Graphic Novel. . .

Whew, it's been a busy week with a lot of work reading, so I've only had time for a quickie. But NYRB can thankfully oblige; they have plenty of short little gems and this month, they've published their first graphic novel, (could any genre be more trendy right now?) which I read this morning on the bus to work. And trust NYRB to find not only a classic graphic novel (first published in 1969), but one in translation as well.

Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati, translated from the Italian by Marina Harss, is a modern retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Orfi, who is a successful pop singer sees his girlfriend Eura disappear into a tiny door set into a wall, and taking his guitar, he sets off to follow her. He is quickly stopped by the Guardian, a brown sports jacket minus a body, who tells Orfi that while people in the underground may seem happy because there's no more sickness or death or sexual longing, they are also bored. Before letting Orfi in to search for Eura, he will have to sing, to remind the inhabitants of all they have lost. Buzzati then illustrates several of the songs before embarking on the final sequence when Orfi finally finds his beloved. And well, you all know how that's likely to end. . .

I'm not really a huge graphic novel fan, but I found this entertaining enough. It definitely is a beautiful package - full colour, glossy paper. The artwork is Edward Gorey meets Federico Fellini. And the author includes artists as diverse as Salvador Dali and Caspar David Friedrich in his acknowledgements. It is a bit dated though. Did I mention that whenever any women enter the underworld, they immediately lose all their clothes and get huge breast implants? Here is a sampling of spreads that are not x-rated, to give you an idea of the look.

Buzzati has also illustrated and written a children's book, The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily, that is published by NYRB's Children's Collection.

Paris 1919: The Documentary. . .

If you are a fan of Margaret Macmillan's bestselling book Paris 1919, or a history buff fascinated by the historical details surrounding the end of the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, then you'll want to check out the NFB's documentary based on the book. Starting next week it will be screening in a number of Canadian cities (in many cases at the libraries). You can find the full schedule here. Some of the Deweys will be in Ottawa next week - we're looking forward to catching it there.

The Museum of Innocence. . .

I've just finished reading Orhan Pamuk's ambitious new novel The Museum of Innocence, translated by Maureen Freely. This is his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, and as the protagonist's endless recountings of lovelorn regrets intensifies alongside the meticulous descriptions of the common objects he is collecting, the narrative too insinuates itself layer by layer, chapter by chapter, into the reader's consciousness.

Set mostly in the 1970s, The Museum of Innocence is the story of Kemal, a wealthy young man, happily dating the spirited Sibel, who belongs to his social circle. However one day he meets Füsan, a shopgirl from a poor family, and falls madly in love. They have a passionate affair that lasts forty-four days, but when Kemal officially announces his engagement to Sibel and celebrates with a large party to which all of Istanbul's society is invited (including a young writer named Orhan Pamuk who will re-emerge later for a more important role), Füsan ends their relationship and disappears from his life. When Kemal finally finds her again, she has married someone else. Undaunted, he spends the next eight years platonically insinuating himself into her daily life just to be near her. And during every visit he pockets some object that not only reminds him of her, but that will help to physically recreate the space she has inhabited - a stubbed out cigarette, a china dog that sits on the television, even something as mundane as a salt shaker that she once touched. This obsessional longing for Füsan completely takes over Kemal's life; he is physically ill, his business suffers and he loses the respect of his friends and family.

As Pamuk said during his interview at the recent International Festival of Authors in Toronto, his novel is about love, but it, "doesn't put it on a pedestal. It doesn't treat love as a sweet pop song but as a more human tragic drama. I was trying to humanely understand what happens when one is deeply and seriously in love."

The novel is also a portrait of everyday Istanbul life and its mostly wealthy population caught between tradition and wanting to embrace more Western and modern values. In particular, those caught between a double standard both cultural and gender-based, are the women of the novel - beautiful, intelligent and passionate, but living in a society very much focused on marriage and one that still frowns on pre-marital sex - for females. While the novel focuses mostly on Kemal's experiences, the frustration of all the women in his life is expressed, even his mother who is angry at her son, not for his indiscretions but how badly and publicly he has handled them. Füsan's rage at her situation also becomes increasingly apparent; despite her seemingly demure outer appearance it's clear that to be adored means nothing to her if it is accompanied by a narcissistic, selfish unawareness. Readers will certainly question the ambiguities surrounding the end of this multi-year romance.

While I did find the first half of the novel fairly repetitive (while acknowledging this structural necessity to re-enforce Kemal's all-consuming passion), the pacing does pick up in the second half. Particularly interesting are the passages describing Kemal's travels to real and quirky museums around the world in search of curatorial inspiration for his own museum dedicated to Füsan. It's a fascinating meditation on obsessive collectors and the power of objects to evoke memories, resurrect the dead, and console the grieving. This is a long and thoughtful novel - fans of Pamuk's other work will appreciate his unique style and enjoy this one too. I also think you can recommend this to readers who like Kazuo Ishiguro (I'm thinking of his novel The Unconsoled) or even A.S. Byatt. It's definitely for Proust fans as well.

At his IFOA reading, Pamuk was interviewed by well-known journalist Carol Off who actually got heckled at one point by the audience for asking the author political questions instead of just sticking to the novel. I was very surprised by the audience reaction as she certainly did not ignore the novel which she had clearly read. And her questions about Pamuk's politics were completely valid in his case given his recent experiences being charged under the Turkish penal code for uttering comments deemed insulting to the country (about the thousands of deaths of Armenians and Kurds that had taken place in Turkey). The charges were later dropped after an international outpouring of support. Pamuk interestingly doesn't consider himself a political writer. "The novelist's job is to understand others," he said. "Who is not like me, who is not living in my situation? Trying to see the world in another's eyes is deeply political engagement. It's also about compassion."

He also talked about the very real museum he is planning to open in Istanbul in 2010 to showcase the ordinary and cultural life of the city. He bought the building ten years ago and has been working with artists to produce images of artifacts to be displayed along with the several hundreds - mentioned in the novel - that he has already collected. You can read more about this project here and see some of the artifacts here.

Remembrance of Authors Past. . .

Have you always been meaning to read Proust and just need that extra push of encouragement? Hey, I'd give you a whacking thump on the back; spending a summer reading In Search of Lost Time remains one of the reading experiences of my life. Yes, it really is that good. Publishing Perspectives has just launched a new blog called The Cork-Lined Room in which you can read the novel and hook up with other readers online. They'll be starting the discussion on November 2nd. But first they offer ten good reasons for reading this mammoth, but oh-so-satisfying classic. If you need more guidance, you can also turn to this new guide: Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past by Patrick Alexander. Isn't the cover terrific?


Another great writer was Vladimir Nabokov and next month sees the somewhat controversial publication of his unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. He had originally instructed his wife to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that make up the "manuscript" of this book but they were locked away instead. Now his son has authorized the publication of this first draft. I'm excited to read this if only because the published format will be quite experimental and interesting - the book will consist of detachable facsimiles of the handwritten index cards (so not particularly practical for public libraries - sorry). Robert McCrum has a great article in The Guardian on the history of the manuscript and the controversy. It makes me want to stop everything and just read nothing but Nabokov for days on end. Check it out here.

Some highlights from the International Festival of Authors. . .

I've been spending the last couple of days taking in some exciting events at the International Festival of Authors and now want to take a month off to read a whole bunch of books. First on the pile has to be John Irving's new novel Last Night in Twisted River, which has been getting some stellar reviews. The Literary Saloon has a round-up of them here. Irving talked about how this novel has been brewing at the back of his mind for the last twenty years but he never can start the actual writing process until he knows the last sentence, and that only came to him about seven years ago. This sentence has already been widely quoted (it incorporates the book's title) and doesn't contain any spoilers so here it is:

He felt that the great adventure of his life was just beginning - as his father must have felt, in the throes and dire circumstances of his last night in Twisted River.

The first sentence is equally enticing:

The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long.

While I've certainly enjoyed some Irving novels like A Prayer For Owen Meany, or The Cider-House Rules more than others, he is one author that I will always make a point of reading. I admire the time he takes with each book, how he maps out his narrative meticulously paying close attention to details. During his IFOA interview, he spoke about wanting his books to be as plot and character driven as the novels by those writers he loved to read as a teenager - Dickens, Hardy, and Melville. That's fiine company to be in.

Another thrill at the festival was to meet British writer Adam Thorpe who was visiting Toronto for the first time. Several of his novels have been Dewey picks for me: The Standing Pool, Between Each Breath and The Rules of Perspective. I love the fact that he never even remotely tackles the same book twice and his writing is intelligent, edgy, and frequently creepy in a delicious, slow building way, (The Standing Pool scared the heck out of me, but I couldn't stop reading). He excels at making the smug reader feel uneasy both morally and emotionally. His latest novel Hodd sounds fascinating. It's a re-imagining of the Robin Hood story, but in his version there is no Maid Marian, no band of merry men and no stealing from the rich to give to the poor. This is Robin Hood or Robert Hodd, as if he were the equivalent of a medieval gangster and Thorpe went back to the origins of the legend, long before the movies and television created the character we think we know. A good book for dark November nights, I think.

The IFOA's country focus this year is Scotland and my favourite Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy absolutely rocked the house with her clever, witty and inspiring one hour stand-up show Words, which explored how she became a writer, the pitfalls of being one, the frequently ridiculous and surreal things that happen on book tours and while talking to the media, and how the crazy profession is nevertheless worth it because she gets to create whole worlds with words and words are power. She is just awesome. Do yourself a favour and read Everything You Need , which definitely has a permanent spot in my top ten favourite contemporary novels list. When I read it several years ago, this story about a group of writers living on a remote island completely overpowered me with its bleak setting and its emotionally fraught relationships. It's a novel that goes right to your guts.

Something completely different, but also tackling the writer's life is Nicholson Baker's new novel The Anthologist. Paul Chowder is a poet trying to write the introduction to a new anthology, and using all the negative things in his life as an excuse to procrastinate. Baker is not only a terrific writer but a superb and very funny reader as well - definitely don't miss the chance to hear him speak if he comes to your neighbourhood. I think this new novel will have much of the same humour as my favourite Baker work - U and I. It's definitely on my to-read list.

I also went and saw Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk being interviewed about his latest novel The Museum of Innocence, but I'll blog about that later - I've almost finished the book.

TD NATIONAL READING SUMMIT

On November 12th and 13th, Toronto will be hosting The TD National Reading Summit. For two days, people will come from all over the world and Canada, to help create a national reading program. This will be the first in a series of summits over three years. Many countries already have such policies in place...so why not Canada? I am really looking forward to attending AND participating. TPL is a sponsor and I expect to see many librarians there. If you want to get involved, check out the link and I hope to see you there!
I will blog about what takes place so stay tuned...

NYRB Challenge: A Ménage à trois of letters. . .

My next pick in my ongoing 50 book NYRB Classics Challenge was inspired by a recent conversation with a friend. We were discussing - ironically by electronic means - the demise of personal correspondence, concluding shamefully that it had been several years since either of us had actually written a long letter by hand. E-mail or instant messaging can be a wonderful, instantaneous, cheap mode of communication, but I have to wonder - are we missing out on something possibly more precious and fun, that is not only more permanent, but also intellectually challenging, forcing one as it does, to thoughtfully take the time to choose words and subject matter? Is letter writing truly a lost art form and one I'd like to re-engage with?

I wanted to find out so I spent two hours flexing my lazy hand muscles and I wrote my friend a letter. And then I went to my shelves and started reading NYRB Book #6 - Letters: Summer 1926, the correspondence between the poets Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke. The collection is edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak and Konstantin M. Azadovsky and translated from the Russian, German and French by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt and Jamey Gambrell. Susan Sontag provides the preface.

The collection covers four months in which the three poets wrote to and about each other. Rilke was battling leukemia in a sanatorium in Switzerland; he would die later that year. Pasternak was living in Moscow (where he couldn't receive letters with Swiss stamps - Rilke had to reroute them through France or Germany) and carrying on both an artistic and romantic correspondence with Tsvetayeva who was living in poverty in Paris. Reading this collection of very powerful and beautifully written letters, I was struck by several glaring contrasts to our modern styles of communication, no doubt influenced by the historical period and the personal temperaments of the poets. Considering that Rilke had never met either the adult Pasternak or Tsvetayeva, the emotional and familial outpouring of words is impressive from all three of them. Any author today would blush to get the type of adulation that gushes from this fanmail. This is especially true of Tsvetayeva's letters which were my favourite of the group. As noted in the introduction, she treated her letters as art, as if she were creating a new genre - "epistolary lyric poetry." Here she is on the subject of writing them:

A letter is like an otherworldly communication, less perfect than a dream but subject to the same rules. . . Neither the one nor the other can be produced on command; you neither write a letter nor dream a dream when you want to but when it wants to: the letter- to be written; the dream - to be dreamed.

Secondly, it was fascinating to note the extreme importance placed on the written word. These letters were not only read and re-read, but multiple copies were made, extracts written down in notebooks and forwarded on in other letters to friends and families. And indeed it is because of this meticulous preservation that this correspondence has been able to be reconstructed, as in some cases the original letter was lost. These letters were treasured and savoured. Pasternak kept a copy of a short letter from Rilke in an envelope marked "Most Precious" which he carried in his jacket pocket for the rest of his life. Would we ever do this with an e-mail, even one printed out? Would it have the same sentimental and emotional impact as a blue-tinged, crinkly piece of paper, the ink faded somewhat, but still showing signs of its writer's distinctive handwriting? Would we ever assign that much importance to any device that needed electrical charging?
And the correspondence even continued posthumously. Both Pasternak and Tsvetayeva wrote letters to Rilke after hearing of his death, as if this was the only medium they felt could best express their grief.

This collection contains an excellent and extensive introduction that provides all the biographical and artistic context one needs to successfully navigate through the correspondence and it will make you want to engage with the poetry as well. Rilke's poetry can be found easily and in many editions, for example here. Samples of Tsvetayeva and Pasternak's poetry, can be found in NYRB's edition of The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt. In particular, this collection contains Tsvetayeva's long poem "The Poem of the End" about a couple ending their affair as they walk across a city. It's haunting, beautiful and stylistically interesting, and when she sent it to Pasternak, it made an enormous impact on him (he mentions it numerous times in his letters, both to her and other correspondents). The collection also includes poems by acclaimed poets Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Alexander Blok.

The day after I finished the book, a handwritten letter arrived from my friend (Canada Post is considerably slower now than 1926 postal systems that crossed many borders). I shall treasure it. I think we both enjoyed the exercise enormously and I hope we'll continue to make the time to write.

The Importance of Buying Ernest

Ernest is a moose, a very big moose, and one who is VERY determined! You see, there is this book, a nice new orange picture book, and Ernest REALLY, REALLY wants to fit into it. But alas! No matter how Ernest struggles to shunt, shimmy, shuffle in one way or squidge, squodge, or squeeze in another, he is JUST TOO BIG! But fortunately for Ernest, he has a VERY resourceful friend- a little chipmunk. Together, with some sticky tape and odd bits of paper, they build an extension to the book so that Ernest fits in perfectly!

I LOVE this new picture book from Catherine Rayner, author of Harris Finds His Feet, which recently was awarded the 2009 Kate Greenaway Medal. It is perfect for reading aloud in front of a group of kids for storytime at your library (or to your thirty-something-year-old sister who is still a child at heart)! The simple text and descriptive words lend themselves to dramatic storytelling, and the lovely illustrations are nice and big so kids will be able to see them from across the room. The large gatefold ‘extension’ that the friends build to help Ernest fit into the book makes this book better suited for the storytime shelf than for general circulation, but nonetheless, this appealing story and characters are bound to become a favourite with children and storytellers alike.

Besides, how could you not love Ernest? Just look at that mug- Ernest is adorable!

A fearfully good follow-up. . .

Audrey Niffenegger is quickly establishing herself as a skillful narrator of unconventional love stories. Her Fearful Symmetry, her new follow-up novel to the best-selling The Time Traveler's Wife is just as quirky (albeit without any naked librarians), and ethereal, and I enjoyed it even more than the first book.
Julia and Valentina are two American mirror twins who have come to London after their recently deceased aunt Elspeth bequeaths them her flat. The only conditions - they must live in the flat for a year and their parents (particularly Elspeth's twin sister) are not allowed to set foot in it during that time.
The twins, suddenly independent, tentatively start exploring the city and the neighbourhood around their building, which is adjacent to Highgate cemetery (home to the graves of George Eliot and Karl Marx among others - there are a few ghostly photographs scattered throughout the book). Formerly inseparable, they also venture into new experiences of their own, especially when they become involved in the lives of their lonely neighbours: Robert, Elspeth's grieving lover who works as a guide in the cemetery, and Martin, a crossword puzzle creator with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, whose wife has just left him. Complicating all of their lives is the ghost of Elspeth, who just doesn't want to leave her former flat, and mischievously observes the living with ulterior motives of her own.
Her Fearful Symmetry is a lot of fun to read veering as it does from the suddenly spooky and supernatural, to passages full of sparkling, spectral wit. Think Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit meets Hitchcock's Vertigo with a little bit of Fingersmith thrown in for good measure. If you are a Sarah Waters fan, you will particularly enjoy this. It's a ghost story, a love story (equal parts romantic and suffocating) and the perfect adult read for Hallowe'en or a cozy evening by the fire as the dark autumn night howls outside the windows.

In Search of Lost Personalities. . .

So here's something fun for the lunch break. Just published is Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness and the Meaning of Life - a collection of favourite celebrity results from the Proust questionaire that's at the back of the magazine. Everyone from Salman Rushdie to Aretha Franklin to Catherine Deneuve is included. You can read more about the origins of the questionnaire here. Or, you can take it yourself online here and find out which celebrity your answers had the most in common with. For me - it turned out to be Jane Goodall. And I didn't mention chimps once, honestly!
Certainly a more thoughtful quiz than the ones that usually turn up in Cosmo.

Fall 2009 Dewey picks. . .

If you're looking for something to read this weekend, or want to get a head start on some holds at your library - I've now posted some of the Dewey Divas' fall picks. You can always access them on the right hand side of this blog, and as the reps update their websites, I'll link to those pages. For now, you can see fall picks from Lahring, Saffron, Susan and yours truly. Have a great Thanksgiving weekend. Stuff yourself silly with books!

Herta Müller wins Nobel Prize. . .

Another writer to add to my growing pile of international writers to read. Librarians will be familiar with her as she won the 1998 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Land of Green Plums, available in English translation from Northwestern University Press as is Traveling on One Leg.

The best information on this author and her books is to be found at the Literary Saloon - which by watching the betting odds and doing some good sleuthing, actually predicted the winner yesterday. See also this post.

NYRB Challenge #5: Cesare Pavese. . .

Over to Italy now. My next author choice came about because I've been slowly working my way through the films of the great Italian director Michangelo Antonioni. I was watching a DVD of 1955's Le Amiche (The Girlfriends) and the credits announced it was based on a novel by Cesare Pavese. I hit the pause button and immediately went to my shelves as I knew NYRB published him. Sure enough, the short novel that was the inspiration for the film is part of The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese, under the title Among Women Only. I love the cover of this collection - it could almost have been a still from the movie. Both versions of the story are great. It follows a woman who comes to Turin from Rome to oversee the setting up of a new fashion boutique shop and gets caught up in the lives of a group of rich but bored and shallow women. In the novel, the main character has more bite and worldly cynicism than her movie counterpart, but the ending of the film is terrific and all Antonioni. But unfortunately this NYRB edition does not have Canadian rights (although you can read Among Women Only in other editions). So it didn't count for this challenge.

So my NYRB Challenge Book #5 is another Pavese work that is available in Canada - his novel The Moon and the Bonfires, translated by R.W. Flint. It was published in 1950, just before the author committed suicide. The narrator, known only by his nickname "Eel", has returned to the small Italian town he grew up in. He has been away in America for many years - including those of the Second World War - making his fortune and trying to put his past behind him. (Incidentally, Pavese worked as a translator on many American classics by Melville, Gertrude Stein and Faulkner). Eel grew up in poverty, never knowing his parents and reliant on a family who takes him in for the few lire that the orphanage pays each month. He feels the stigma of his illegitimacy all his life. Later he goes to work on the Mora estate, a nearby vineyard, where he spies on the three daughters of his master as, desperate to leave their farm, they chase the attentions of any available bachelor - with tragic results (unhappiness and hopelessness seem positively glued to Pavese's female characters despite their defiant posturing). While wandering the familiar landscape of his past, and reconnecting with an old friend, Eel becomes interested in the family now eeking out a living on the poor parcel of land where he grew up, and also in finding out how the youngest Mora daughter died during the war.

This is a heartbreaking novel very much about wanting the unattainable yet never truly being able to escape from your past. Eel may have made money in America, but he's restlessly wandered that country for years, never content. The repetitive human cycles of inevitable despair mirror, and are very much embued with, the changing seasons - the promise of sown crops and the disappointment when harvests are poor. The title refers to the folk superstitions practised in hopes of cultivating the land, now sneeringly dismissed by the older, wealthy Eel. His wise friend quietly corrects him:

[he] told me that superstition is only what does harm, and if someone should use the moon and the bonfires to rob the peasants and keep them in the dark, then that man would be an ignoramus and ought to be shot in the piazza. But before I spoke I should become a peasant again. An old man like Valino might know nothing else, but he did know the land.

One small quibble that I have with the NYRB edition is the introduction by Mark Rudman which has plenty of interesting background information on the author but contains far too many plot spoilers. This novel is filled with a lot of shocking and emotional revelations. If you want to be surprised, skip the introduction until after you've finished the book. It really should have been an afterword.

Hilary Mantel wins the Booker. . .

. . . and once again, I fail to predict the winner and my own personal favourite doesn't win. Darn. Still - it was a great shortlist this year and I'm looking forward to reading Wolf Hall. The reviews, both from the critics and the librarians I know who have read it, have been stellar.

The BIG news of the day. . .

Yes, I know the Giller shortlist was announced this morning. If you haven't yet heard, you can read the names of the finalists here.

And the Booker Prize will be annouced in a few hours and I fully expect A.S. Byatt or J.M. Coetzee to walk away with the prize.

And we can look forward to the Nobel Prize being announced on Thursday.

BUT today I learned that there's a new Jonathan Coe novel coming out in 2010!!!! And that my friends, trumps them all! Thanks to the Literary Saloon for the news. The title is The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim and that's all I know for now.

I'm doing my happy dance. For those who wonder what all the fuss is about, just read him okay? The Rain Before it Falls, The Rotters' Club, The Closed Circle, The House of Sleep or The Winshaw Legacy.

Comfort audio. . .

Have you had a hard day? Or has it been cold and miserable out? Relax. Have a bubble bath and a glass of wine, then get into your jammies, put one of these CDs on and revert back to those idyllic childhood days when the most stressful decision in life was choosing which book your parents would read to you that night. Listening Library has just released these charming unabridged audios of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House on Pooh Corner with Stephen Fry as Pooh and Judi Dench as both the narrator and Kanga. And if you are a fan of As Time Goes By, you'll also enjoy Geoffrey Palmer as Eeyore. Jane Horrocks is Piglet.

Not recommended for children only.