Riding the spine of a book
The book as a kind of flying broomstick or galloping horse taking the boy into story land.
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
The whole intricate plot of Ruiz Zafón's Shadow of the Wind begins with his father taking him to this labyrinthine...
An accent thick enough to…
Bernarda is a wonderful housekeeper to the protagonists and when they employ a tramp to work in their bookshop, he...
Culling of books …
I sometimes feel like this when we go to the flea market in Geneva and survey a lifetime's worth of...
The pitfalls of childhood
What a sad commentary on the wounds we inflict on children before they are equipped to comprehend what has happened...
A place to get lost in
My idea of a bookshop or library to get lost in ... though not exclusively. I also love some of...
Moth-ridden masterpieces
The Shadow of the Wind assembles a posse of 'bibliophile knights' who hang out in cafés to save the moribund...
The spirit of a book
I like that the spirit of the book lives as much in the readers as in the writers. When I...
On keeping secrets
An intriguing definition of what makes a secret worth keeping - not the secret itself, but those from whom it...
As weighty as …
A refreshing change from references to lead and other heavy materials, I liked this silence as weighty as the Swiss...
Making invisible friends
This is a book lover's book, and the protagonist is the son of a bookseller, whose bookshop he takes over...
Book as mirror I
A great riposte, of course, and true to a large extent. Having dismissed a book, it sometimes happens that I...
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