Saturday 30 July 2011

Reach – Boris; OBO

Reach being a term used by the Arts Council – something to do with getting the books out there, finding new readers. Boris being Boris. OBO – oh come now, even Virginia Woolf would have known this one: ‘But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never help reading about cricket’ (Peter Walsh in Mrs Dalloway). Over By Over: the continuous online live commentary on the Test match on the Guardian website, consistently the most-viewed item on the site during the daytime when the cricket’s on.

Boris: as noted in previous post, the Mayor of London spent his Tube journey between Shepherd’s Bush and Chancery Lane on Thursday engrossed in the CBe edition of David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel. (Will he have to declare it as a gift on some public register? Hope so.)

OBO: Jennie Walker’s 24 for 3 is no longer a CBe book, it’s now published by Bloomsbury, but still, it takes place over the five days of a home Test between England and India that starts on a Friday, so I sent a copy to the OBO team and it got some chat (‘seems to be a bodice-ripper set at a Test match . . . essential summer reading for all OBO fans’) and Nick Lezard popped by during over 17 with a link to his original review and business was done on Amazon.

Next: Lichtenberg & The Little Flower Girl to Interflora. Only Joking to the British Association of Accordion-players.

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