http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,709070,00.html



Snide and condenscending piece on book clubs: probably true but still... What's interesting is that one of the items mentioned for "people who really, actually read" is an honest-to-Eisner comic book but not IDed as such.



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http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s



Lost in the mysteries of genetics or the American educational process is the origin of my unrestrainable list-o-philia. Give me a list, Best Eastern European Poetry for instance or Best Movies Unreleased in the US (both real ones), and I'll start checking off items, sometimes even trying to add more. So the Guardian's collection of Top 10s is irresistable if only to expose the gaps in my reading (the intellectual's equivalent of a memento mori?). Almost every list has at least one book I've read but the highest are eight from Richard Grant's "My favourite comic SF novels" (the two of his own are the exceptions), seven from Kate Atkinson's Top 10, and six each off Jenny Colgan's "My favourite comic novels," Mike Phillips' "My favourite crime novels" and Norman Spinrad's "My favourite novels." Now isn't this much better than describing what I see in inkblobs?



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Classification of the Week: From the library catalog listing for Ali Smith's Hotel World - "Hotel cleaning personnel--Fiction."