I'm off to the London Book Fair today (meetings). I'm actually rather looking forward to it. Having retired from bookselling for the moment, I am not there to frantically work so will simply have the pleasure of moseying around looking at what is on offer from the various publishers. Much more fun.

So, just a few items to keep you amused:

The Orange Prize shortlist for 2007 has been announced:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun (yay!)
Rachel Cusk - Arlington Park
Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss
Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Jane Harris - The Observations
Anne Tyler - Digging to America - Chatto & Windus

Alexander McCall Smith talks about his first house in Botswana.

Oh, for more booksellers like these! Matthew Crockatt and Adam Powell of the lovely independent bookshop Crockatt & Powell discuss the UK booktrade:

For us the idea of a bookshop is that your hardcore customers, the ones who keep you alive, who buy 50-100 books a year, they want to come in, chat to us about books, see books they haven't seen before - they want to feel like their passion about books is being reciprocated. (Copyright David Teather, THE GUARDIAN)

And lastly, Pascal Wyse in the Guardian Weekend magazine has a little piece called "Wyse Words" which always reminds me somewhat of THE MEANING OF LIFF by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. On Saturday his definition was:

Refleshment The reserve spurt of energy that joggers deploy when passing someone sexy, even though they're so exhausted they could throw up their own heart. Body language is transformed from flailing sweatbox to "I'm fit - and so are you, baby. Let's work out." Once safely out of sight, they fall over.

Excellent. I've just recently rejoined my local gym. Oh so familiar.

You've still got until Friday to put your names in the hat for a free copy of Fadiman's EX LIBRIS.

Yes, well, I'm usually a week late for everything only this time I have an excuse because the books hadn't arrived yet (and they still haven't, but I've changed supplier!). It is (was) BAFAB week, otherwise known as "Buy a Friend a Book Week" as envisioned by Debra Hamel. The idea being to give a friend a book "for no good reason." A nifty idea, I think. Although I never need much of an excuse to add to my own burgeoning shelves, it is always a good thing to pass on a book or two to others. So, I have chosen Anne Fadiman's EX LIBRIS: Confessions of a Common Reader to give to a friend, and I have an extra copy to give away to one of you lucky blog readers out there too. Dovegreyreader has a novel way of selecting her BAFAB winner by making her cats walk across post-it notes! My selection process will undoubtedly be more mundane (names in a hat?!), but equally fair. So if you'd like a copy of EX LIBRIS, do say so in the comments or send me an email and I'll add you to the pot (where you are in the world does not matter, I will post anywhere).

Here's a taster; Fadiman has just tried out a list of words she doesn't recognize on family and friends in the hopes that they too will not recognize them, so she won't feel so bad. A few correctly identify the occasional word (she refers to them as Wallys after Wally the Wordworm from her childhood - you'll have to read the book to discover the delicious details of this story):

All the Wallys could remember exactly where they had encountered the words they knew. The English professor said, "Mephitic! That must mean foul-smelling. I've seen it in Paradise Lost, describing the smell of hell." My brother, a mountain guide and natural history teacher who lives in Wyoming, said, "Mephitic, hmm, yes. The scientific name for the striped skunk is Mephitis mephitis, which means Stinky stinky." The lawyer, who, incredibly, had bumped into mephitic just the previous week in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, possessed particularly vigorous powers of memory. When I asked him to define monophysite, he said, "That's a heretic, of course, who believes there is a single nature in the person of Christ. I first encountered it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of which I read an abridged version in a green Dell Laurel edition with a picture of Roman ruins on the cover that I bought with my allowance for seventy-five cents when I was in grade school, at the bookstore at the corner of Mill Road and Peninsula Boulevard in Valley Stream, New York. I read it while walking home. It was springtime, and all the trees on Mill Road were in bud." No man ever remembered the face, dress and perfume of an old lover with fonder precision than Jon remembered that glorious day when he and monophysite first met. (p.15)

Surely you must want to read it after that?! Do you recognize yourself, or someone you know? To add to sauciness around this read, it has recently been linked to plagiarism charges against Ben Schott; you can have a read here.