Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Bookselling in stop-motion


This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

I really enjoyed this promotional video for 4th Estate, especially viewing it in Vimeo’s luxurious full-screen HD. The producers used 1,000 4th Estate books and spent 3 weeks holed up in a flat during the summer to produce the movie, which cleverly plays on the themes of the books on display and re-enacts key moments within them (I particularly liked Albert falling off a boat papered with Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections – 1min 02 secs). Only a serious bookworm could spot all the ‘bits’ first time round, but you can read more on Times Emit, the Fifth Estate blog or on the new 25thestate.com website.

Good books, poor Hilary

I read 2 really exceptional books over Christmas:

  1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy – Buy it, read it, it’s incredible.
  2. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan – Similarly brilliant.

And I started 1 book:

  1. Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

I never finished it. From my prior knowledge, Mantel is no shabby writer, but oh dear. She just couldn’t even vaguely compete with the big boys.