How you help at the bookshop

I still do a shift from time to time, and both donate books and buy them. Back in the early days I did a tour of community bookshops around the country to see how it was done and that helped form our plans.

Favourite Author (and why!)

Impossible question! Let’s say Patrick O’Brian. Questionable human being: not Irish, not much of a sailor, bit of snob, bit of a fantasist; great books. The Aubrey-Maturin novels might as well be science fiction, Napoleonic War sailing and spying are as remote from my life as would be spacefaring, but have a warmth that’s often missing from SF. In amongst the daring do (mostly adapted from the adventures of real naval officers) and swashing of buckles, the domestic homages to Austen, the spying and romancing, the clever humour and ghastly punning, in amongst all that is an extended study of true, deep friendship. A glass of wine with you!

Favourite Book (and why!)

Another impossible question! How to chose one? Let’s say “Lolita”. Widely reviled as disgusting, obscene, degrading, pornographic trash by people who haven’t read it, Nabokov’s multi-layered multifaceted multilingual magic lends itself superbly well to depicting the machinations of the most misleading of unreliable narrators. It’s by turns ghastly and beautiful, appalling and intriguing, shocking and soothing, all by very careful design and expressed with the greatest precision and care in the some of the best English ever written. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Something you've been reading recently that you'd recommend

Paula Fredriksen’s “Paul” is a weighty but approachable and very thorough reassessment of the life and teaching of Paul of Tarsus. There’s a growing community of Jewish scholars of the New Testament (Fredriksen is a convert to Judaism) who take very seriously the historical fact, lost in most treatments of the material, that the first generation of followers of Jesus were Jewish, and the very likely inference that Paul in particular was born, lived all his life, and died still a faithful Jew. That he did not convert to Christianity as there was not a Christianity to convert to. Without doubt Christianity did not begin as an enemy, or even and opponent of Judaism, but as one more kind of Judaism amongst many in the late Second Temple period. A close (vey close!) reading of Paul’s sophisticated Greek in the context of Jewish thought in the early Roman Empire leads to some conclusions which seem very surprising in the context of Christian thought. Surprising but compelling. Fredriksen knows the material, she discovered or created much of it, and presents it with full academic rigour but in clear and readable language.

Your pick of a book that's currently in store or online

It says in Wikipedia that “Possession”, by A. S. Byatt, is an example of “historiographic metafiction”, or maybe a post-modern satire of historiographic metafiction? I think that means the kind of almost-but-not-quite-real world building, combined with knowing irony about it, that genre writers have been doing for a century, but, y’know, this one is respectable literature so no one needs to feel embarrassed about enjoying it. Whatever. The book is perfectly constructed. Really perfect. it’s fabulously clever, yes, but also hugely enjoyable. A thought-provoking romp. An intellectual romance about romantic intellectuals studying the romances of some post-Romantics. And you never know what you’ll turn up in an old book. Buy lots of them.