BOOKWORM

I am a bookworm - I will read anything that comes my way, in French or in English. Classics, novels, biographies, children's books, airport books and even the rubbish my mother reads (which is just a little step up from Barbara Cartland and Mills and Boon - neither of which I have read as far as I know).

And now a grump about where I live - there isn't a bookshop! The local newsagent sells books and when desperate I grudgingly buy a paperback, but it's not the same thing as going into a bookshop and browsing and spending far too much money! When I lived in Toulouse I was in readers paradise - Toulouse has the most bookshops in France per head although that can be a minus at times - which store to choose? One of my favourites was 'Les Ombres Blanches' which also had a splendid children's section. My children are also readers, even my 15 year-old son, but now we live in Switzerland his reading has declined ... I order him books on the internet, but it isn't the same as going into the bookshop, handling a book, reading the blurb, flicking through the pages and getting the general idea of the book, and the smell ... I love the smell of new books!

Of course there are some splendid book shops in Switzerland, and I've already spied a few in Lausanne, but we don't go there that often. So I am now reduced to ordering from the most unfriendly web sites such as Amazon and the Fnac and it has become a soul-less task - almost like ordering groceries on the net. I have a continually running mental list of books I want to read, but ordering for adolescents over the net is no easy task - yes, he should order his own books and not read what his Mum decides, but with a twelve-hour school day and a couple of hours of homework, would you want to order books from one of these sites?

As much as I love books, I was delighted to read a review a few months back on Sony's eBook - now, that is the thing for me! The reviews on the eBook were pretty mixed when talking about the object itself, and so far I don't think that there is an enormous choice of reading material; one of the problems of course being the copyright - so far the books published no longer have copyright, and eventually for the system to take off new laws regarding the downloading of copyrighted books will have to be changed. The advantages for me living in a barren area for books, is that I could just download a book in a flash onto this neat little machine as opposed to re-reading a book, which I can only do after a couple of years! Apart from the choice of books available (rather a large amount of airport reading matter) is its price - $350! But an interesting gadget especially for those of us who tend to nod off reading and awake to find a rather scrunched up book! If you don't know about the eBook, have a look at it on the web at www.sonystyle.com.

I started this posting with the intention of writing a sort of book review - but 'review' is rather pretentious - something more along the lines of 'A book I have read and enjoyed' and I had the firm intention of trying to add a photo which is necessary in the case of the book I'll tell you about later - it is "Let us now praise famous men" by James Agee and with photos by Walker Evans. Perhaps I will manage to write something later today - it all depends on the weather which is definitely looking snowy!