The Great and the Good (Books) by Pauline Chandler
In last month’s blog, I said I was spring cleaning my office and, specifically, tidying my book shelves, which meant I had to throw some books away to make room for new ones. As other bookworms will know, what this really means is to make enough room to stand all my books upright with spines to attention, instead of slotting them in higgledy-piggledly, to lounge languidly about, horizontally, on top of the others. Ha! I’ve tried this before and I know exactly what happens. I pick up a lounging book and it infects and entrances me, so that a while later I come to and find myself lounging about too, in my armchair, half way through its pages.. You know it’s true. To be fair, you have to give a book on death row a chance. In order to find those I can safely discard, I’ve decided that a book worth keeping has to have taught me something, ie it’s one of the ‘great’, or it has entertained me, in which case it’s one of the ‘good’. All keepers have to be some...