Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Happy Weekend, everyone - and, for those in the UK, it's a Bank Holiday Weekend. Which makes little odds to me (especially since I'm at work tomorrow) but will give you lots of time to read Barbara Comyns' The Vet's Daughter - for those who are joining in a group readalong, informally organised by me and Polly (aka Novel Insights) and Claire (Paperback Reader). I finished the book today, and thought it was brilliant - feel free to post a review anytime next week (pop a link in the comments, and I'll organise them together). If you don't have a blog but have read the book, I'd be more than happy to post your thoughts here.


1.) The link - is to 50 Iconic Book Covers, as chosen by abebooks... not perhaps all ones I'd have chosen, but it's nice to see them as actual books, rather than just pristine pictures of their covers, don't you think?

2.) The book - was mentioned by a few people on an email book discussion list I'm on; the new one by Bill Bryson called At Home : A Short History of Private Life. I've only read a couple of his books (Mother Tongue and Shakespeare) but I loved them both. Bryson is able to relay all manner of fascinating facts without ever sounding dry, and his sense of humour is a delight. To give you an idea about the sort of thing Bryson's doing, I'll quote the Author's section from Amazon:

Early in the course of my research for my new book I learned that houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house.

Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked in to the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes.

Houses aren't refuges from history, as I hope you are about to discover in At Home. They are where history ends up.

So there you are - irresistible to me, I think I might have to wait til the library gets it. Or perhaps it'll come in at no.11 in Project 24? Tempting...

3.) The blog post - is from Claire at kissacloud, and is here. It's about Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco, a Filipino author of whom I hadn't heard, but am now very eager to read. But it also opens up a wider question, specifically for those who have emigrated - do you try and stay in touch with your birth-nation (if such an expression exists!) through literature? As someone who was born and bred in England, I can't answer the question - but on a regionalist note, I do get excited if a book mentions Worcestershire, since nobody seems ever to do so...