What I Cooked Last Night

This is probably the best Christmas shopping-for-kids idea I've ever heard. Local bookshop Pictures & Pages is having a grown-ups-only night, during which you get to enjoy champagne and nibbles while you walk around the shop pulling books off the shelf and throwing them in a box. You don't even need your wallet; they give you until December 3 to pay, and after that they will keep your book purchases hidden away out the back until you sneak them home on Christmas eve. That will have the kids scratching their heads after they've searched the house for their presents while you're at work. Interfering little brats. * Pictures & Pages 400 Sydney Rd, Coburg Grown-ups only night 19 November 7pm-9pm .

She says chain bookshops often failed because they were overlit, treated customers like cash cows and sold populist books that ironically catered to a small, occasional reader market. They neglected the 'real readers' who read voraciously but wanted intelligent staff and a wide choice. Paradoxical? Condescending? No. The owner seems to have a very good instinctive grasp of the business. The fact is, buying books is difficult when you have to reach your purchase across a counter stacked high with ephemera designed for the impulse purchaser. Into this category, I place books with one ‘wisdom’ quote on each spread opposite a picture of a sunset; books filled with pictures of cats; books filled with pictures of flat white buildings in Greece; books filled with pictures of cats sitting on flat white buildings in Greece; books that spin off from television shows; and books with ‘Little’ in their titles (e.g., The Little Book of Calm ). This last has sold two million copies, accord...

Ex- The Australian reporter and now independent bookseller Corrie Perkin gets free publicity on Page 3 of last Saturday's Weekend Australian : "A true booklover loves having a conversation about books ... That may be the conversation they have with the bookseller or with other booklovers in the bookshop. ... You can't have those conversations with Amazon, you can't have those conversations most of the time in a shop like Borders because they don't have the staff." True, but only up to a point. It's also patronising to customers as well as to the hundreds of book-loving staff who work in the book chains. They don't all do it for the dollar. Moreover, it ignores the information available at Amazon such as reader comments and reviews, forums, rankings, reader purchases, recommendations, recently viewed lists and on it goes. I have found Amazon's service to be faultless, and I do enjoy that parcel arriving in the mail. No face-to-face? That's lik...

Nicholson Street is a twentieth century shipwreck of architecture. It is a magnificent mess. It is a proud dowager wearing a faded dress and cobwebs. It is a jumble of Victorian shopfronts and Edwardian houses and 1950s grease monkey workshops and accountants’ offices and suburban law firms and Thai cafes and factories making God knows what. Nicholson Street is tattoo parlours and ugly video stores and bicycle shops and newspaper publishers and pasta manufacturers and student houses with Tibetan flags across their front doors, bikes on their front porches and naked bulbs glowing in uncovered windows. And trams run through it. * I was on foot, heading south on the west side, the North Carlton side. It was dusk, almost six o’clock, and bleak. A tram trailing phosphorescent dust flew north, loaded to the gunwales with scarved and wired commuters bound for the home fires of East Brunswick, and red wine, and Mozart. I walked past Bande a Part, a pizza place for Franco-cinephiles where...

Saturday sporting pursuits were out of the way early in the afternoon and that left the rest of the day free for idle recreation, such as reading the newspaper on a chair under a tree in the back garden. But how did idle recreation square with two small boys bursting with energy that came from having devoured large bowls of spaghetti and meatballs for lunch followed by an energising nap? It didn’t, was the short answer, and there was no long answer. So I took them to the city by train. Boys love trains. And I could read the newspaper while they looked out the window. We blinked out of the darkness of Flinders Street station mid-afternoon, into hot sunshine, and against a tide of humanity surging up the steps. The city is busy all the time now, and the tide stretched along Swanston Street. We dodged down Collins Street and into an arcade and rode an escalator to a basement bookstore that has a toy corner. The boys played with small trains on a wooden track while I read the dust jack...

So that was Islands in the Stream , about which an anecdote: I was standing by the counter at the bookstore and the attendant said Can I help you by raising one eyebrow at me and not speaking. So I saved some words as well and said " Islands in the Stream ?" with a questioning upward inflection at the end. He disappeared for a little while and came back and held out a CD with a lopsided smile. "Track four." "Ah yes," I said, "I liked Kenny Rogers but I did find Dolly Parton's ..." Now he was raising his other eyebrow. "I found Dolly Parton’s voice a little unexpected," I went on, "Kind of like Neil Sedaka's voice coming out of Pavarotti." That left him flat-footed. So I bored on. "Actually, it wasn’t the CD I was looking for. It was the book. You can’t get it anywhere. Hemingway. Dymock’s didn’t have a single Hemingway title on the shelves. They had about a million Gordon Ramsay cookbooks and a whole ...