Hi there

Do have a look at the photo below.  It's the famous Shakespeare & Co bookshop on the Left Bank in Paris.

It was started by Sylvia Beach, an American woman, in the 1920s and became a meeting place for writers in the twenties and thirties, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein were just some of the writers who made it their second home in Paris.  As you can see it is heaven for book lovers, crammed with English language as well as French books. There are new and second-hand books and you   can browse for hours, and end up with more books than you can carry home.  It is just another of the wonderful places I visited on a recent trip to France and England.

Since then I've had my nose to the grindstone because it's the end of the university semester.  I also had the pleasure of speaking in the University of Western Australia Spring School last month and met a lot of lovely people after the talk.

There seems to be a terrific selection of new books around at the moment.  I have just read and enjoyed Zoe Heller's new book The Believers, (Zoe Heller also wrote Notes on a Scandal which was made into a film with Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench).  And today I finished The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas - it's a fascinating and confronting book which I couldn't put down.  Next on my list is Brian Dibble's long-awaited biography of the late and much loved Elizabeth Jolley, it's called Doing Life, and the cover has a wonderful and very characteristic photograph of Elizabeth.  As I knew Elizabeth and have known Brian for more than 20 years I'm aware of the enormous amount of research that went into this book so I'm really looking forward to getting into it.

I hope you've enjoyed some good books recently -  if so do post your recommendations on the blog so we can all share them.

I'll be back soon.  Liz