TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Essay: Mau-Mauing the Flesh Eaters Jonathan Safran Foer is just the latest in a long line of distinguished literary vegetarians. feeds.nytimes.com |
Ringing the changes: phone box becomes mini-library Village that was set to lose its traditional red phone box and library service comes up with plan to save bothWhen the mobile library stopped visiting, it was a blow for the villagers of Westbury-sub-Mendip. And when they found out they could lose their beloved red phone box, there was something of an outcry.Happily a bright spark in the Somerset village (population 800) hatched a clever plan to tackle both difficulties. Why not buy the phone box and use it to set up a mini-library?Today, the small but perfectly formed Westbury book box was doing a brisk trade. Adults were bringing in thrillers, romances and true-crime books, leaving them on the four wooden shelves and choosing another to take home. Young book fans were hunting around in the children's section – a big red box on the floor – for Roald Dahl and Horrid Henry favourites.Parish councillor Bob Dolby, who cleans and polishes the phone box/library with his wife, Lyn, beamed with pride. "It has really taken off," he said. "Turnover is rapid and there's a good range of books, everything from reference books to biographies and blockbusters."The scheme was the brainchild of resident Janet Fisher, who lives opposite the phone box. She floated the idea at a village tea party in August and the concept was accepted on the spot.So the parish council bought the box, a Giles Gilbert Scott K6 design, for £1, and Dolby screwed the four shelves into place. A local business donated a sign and a wag added a "Silence please" notice. Residents donated books to get the project going and it became an instant hit, all for an outlay of just £30.Fisher popped across the road today to swap an Ian Rankin novel. She was hoping to pick up a Michael Connelly book – "Some of the girls said there was one here" – but it had gone. She rejected the book on the life of Fred West and plumped for another American detective novel.Fisher's neighbour, Angela Buchanan, strolled over to see what was new. She picked up a Penelope Lively the other day. Nobody has yet been tempted by the audio book she left of Laurence Olivier reading Charles Dickens. "It's such a brilliant idea. Our nearest library is Wells, four miles away, so if you don't want to go into the town but have run out of something to read, it's great you can use this. All sorts of interesting books turn up – manuals, picture books, good literary novels."And unlike the library in Wells, the phone box library is open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day – and is lit at night. There is a regular check on it to see if some titles are not moving. These are then shipped on to a charity shop to keep the phone box collection fresh.BT has received 770 applications for communities to "adopt a kiosk". So far 350 boxes have been handed to parish councils. Ideas for their afterlife have included a shower, art installations, even a toilet. Dolby said he was just pleased that a piece of street architecture in Westbury had been put to good use. "It's very pleasing that the phone box has been saved but is also being used to provide a service for the village."LibrariesSteven Morrisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
This year's Costa judges: all razzle, no dazzle? Actors and models outnumber authors and editors on this year's Costa judging panel. Have the awards gone too far in their search for stardust?What do Caroline Quentin, Dervla Kirwan, ITV's dashing man at Westminster Tom Bradby, Neil Pearson, Sandra Howard and Marie Helvin have in common? Well, despite the presence of three actors it's nothing to do with acting. Or modelling, despite Howard's time as a star catwalk turn and Helvin's ascent to the ranks of the "top 30 supermodels of all time" as voted by Channel Five viewers. And it's not the lineup for a new reality TV show - so far, anyway. Got it yet?Well, in truth I'm sitting on some of the cards: what they have in common is also shared by novelist Josephine Hart, children's author William Nicholson, biographer Robert Lacey and the Literary Review's deputy editor, Tom Fleming. Penny dropped?I confess that I was a little taken aback when I discovered that what unites this disparate band is that they're all judges for the final round of the Costa prize, due to be announced next month.Is it unforgivably snooty of me to wonder exactly why these people have been chosen as arbiters of a year in literature? Just because someone is good at wearing clothes, or appearing in indifferent TV, or writing gruesome power ballads, doesn't automatically mean they don't know books. (Back in the time of the BBC's grisly Big Read exercise, I remember interviewing Lorraine Kelly because she was the telly "champion" of Jane Eyre. That was a bad business, but away from the sofa our Lorraine turned out to be an eloquent and well-informed reader.)Of course, there's a perfectly reasonable argument that "ordinary" members of the book-buying public, as opposed to establishment writers and critics, are capable of judging a good book, even if they've never written one. But the Costa judges aren't there to represent "ordinary" readers: they've been chosen, if appearance is anything to go by, in the hope they can scatter a little stardust over proceedings.And of course the majority of them have written books. The Costa site points out that Marie Helvin has written three (though as far as I know Bodypure: Your Complete Detox Health and Beauty Programme and Catwalk: The Art of Model Style didn't win that many awards themselves). Sandra Howard is on to her third romantic novel, informed by the Westminster-insiderishness she's acquired as Tory ghoul Michael's wife. Tom Bradby turns out a successful line of thrillers; Gary Kemp has recently published his memoirs ("Great bloke, great band, great book" was Bob Geldof's verdict).To be fair, this is not the first time the prize has deployed celebrities – Hugh Grant, Alex James, Liza Tarbuck and Ralph Fiennes are just some of the people with whom the Costas have snazzed up their judging panels in years gone by. And it doesn't actually seem to have warped their verdicts too conspicuously in the past. It is perhaps a little hard to imagine Geoffrey Hill, who won the first Whitbread poetry award in 1971 when Margaret Drabble was judging with JB Priestley and Anthony Thwaite, coming away with a gong these days, but recent winners have all been hard-to-fault mainstream books. But the ratio of star power to literary expertise does seem more heavily weighted towards the former this year. I suppose it boils down to a question of priorities. If priority number one is to get maximum exposure, then star judges make perfect sense. If it is to pick out and promote books of the highest quality, then sue me, but I'm not convinced Gary Kemp and Marie Helvin are the best people for the job.Costa book awardsLindesay Irvineguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Waste Land | Theatre review Wilton's Music Hall, LondonTS Eliot apparently penned The Waste Land in a seaside shelter in Margate while recovering from a nervous breakdown. He wrote staring out over Margate Sands where "I can connect/ Nothing with nothing," ransacking the literary voices of the past to conjure ruined civilisations and crumbled cities. But it is London, a broken place full of ghosts, bones and ashes, that haunts the poem, and no more so than in Deborah Warner's staging in Wilton's Music Hall, still one of the capital's hidden gems.First seen here in 1997 on the stage where Champagne Charlie toasted the girls, Fiona Shaw's 37-minute recitation of the poem is a perfect meeting of performance and architecture. There are moments when Shaw's turn as the charlatan clairvoyant Madame Sosostris or the drinkers in an East End pub has a sly music hall jollity, but mostly this is a quiet cry of spiritual despair, an eternal search for meaning in a jumbled world without meaning. I was intensely reminded of some of Sarah Kane's work in the dramatic use of a single, multi-voiced consciousness.Twelve years ago Shaw was the first person to give a live performance here since 1880, and the place smelled of damp and rot. It has since been tidied up a bit – the candy cane pillars no longer look as if they are about to crumble away. Fortunately, nobody has tidied away the ghosts, which still lurk in every corner and in the stark shadows raised by Jean Kalman's lighting. The 37 minutes are more like a sighting than a performance, a collective hallucination in which past, present and future mingle and the living and dead walk hand in hand.Rating: 4/5TheatreTS EliotPoetryLyn Gardnerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Row Paperback books of particular interest. feeds.nytimes.com |