I knew I loved the Scots for a reason...

I did so enjoy all your thoughts on the Booker prize, both for and against. It does inspire very strong opinions to both sides, and so it's nice to see some moderate ones expressed here.

This article has been doing the rounds of blogs - I saw it first on Kirsty's Other Stories. Well, to be completely honest I saw it on her Facebook wall, but that sounds worse. This woman is my new heroine. (Though it doesn't mention that she's actually read any of 'em...)

In unrelated news, the most perspicacious amongst you will notice that I changed my world map provider last week. This one keeps the data for more than a few days - indefinitely, I think - and I can see that in the last week people visited Stuck-in-a-Book from 51 different countries. That's quite humbling, since I'd probably be hard pushed to name 51 countries off the top of my head. I'm sure that quite a few came by accident, but nevertheless it's quite a bizarre statistic to contemplate from my little room in Oxford. So, welcome denizens of Guam, Mauritius, Romania. Hello to Cyprus, Ukraine and Vietnam. And special greetings to those two readers who came all the way from that little known country 'Europe'.