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11 februari 2005

Travels Around My Bookshelf 3

Jonathan Howells

NaaktBesjeuitsnede (54k image)

I don’t have time for science fiction anymore – it’s one of those things, like The Beano, chewy sweets and hating your parents, that one should put away once they’ve got past puberty. Reading some science fiction in one’s formative years isn’t a bad thing, but impressionable minds should find a balance between space operas and star battles and the more important areas of writing. Sadly this country is full of wasted youths who, having mastered the skill of reading, find themselves addicted to the modern equivalent of penny dreadfuls.

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4 februari 2005

Travels Around My Bookshelf 2

Jonathan Howells

naaktedans2-uitsnede (16k image)

One thing a book lover decides upon early on is whether they like hardbacks or paperbacks. For me, there’s no real choice here – it’s hardbacks all the way. I can’t imagine a reason why I’d buy a book in paperback in preference of a hardback. Paperbacks are ugly little items, the fag packets of publishing. No matter how handsome a volume is in its original hardback edition, once it gets shrunk down into paperback, it looks like trash.

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4 februari 2005

Mecca Cola

Richard Letterman

meccaad (13k image)

Being an international man of danger such as myself doesn’t necessarily mean cobra venom and monkey eyes at every meal. No, occasionally I get those rare forbidden fruits straight out of Arabian Nights that no average white man gets to experience, such as “prunes” and “yogurt”. Don’t be embarrassed if you find yourself baffled or unable to pronounce these delicacies, it’s not your fault you’re just an ignorant rube. Recently, while shopping for prunes and yogurt at the local Turkish market, I came across the infamous and mysterious Mecca Cola.

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4 februari 2005

Witness to the Devil

Peter Breedveld

blanketscover (64k image)

Craig Thompson (1975, US) is the author of the most raved about graphic novel of the past two years, Blankets, translated in Dutch as Een Deken van Sneeuw. Six hundred pages long, Blankets is touching, funny, exciting, melancholic, smart, slapsticky, shamelessly sentimentalistic at times and really, really beautifully drawn. Last summer I spoke to Thompson, who was touring Europe and had just returned from a trip to Morocco.

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27 januari 2005

Travels Around My Bookshelf

Jon Howells

I have a lot of books. Probably enough to justify calling this column ‘Books Do Furnish A Room’, but that would be too obvious, so we’ll stick with what is a pretty accurate description of what I’ll do here, which is to have a browse on my shelves and see what pops out. But first, we should set the scene…

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