Saturday, April 10, 2004



It seems hard sometimes to say to someone don't make that mistake because I'm speaking now from pain, I'm speaking now from tears, I'm speaking from suffering, from joy, from love. Before I could only speak of what the future could be.
The only way to come up from low is to think high. That's what life is really about: up and down, in and out, over and under, night and day, dark and light, all right.
Solomon Burke

The original Greek meaning of PASSION is suffering
Which is your favourite ? An older book can become a new book again...
Only about 10 per cent of the commercial titles published each year are fiction, and fiction accounts for only about a quarter of retail sales. We talk about fiction incessantly -- the Man Booker Prize, for example, continues to bear far more prestige, and attract far more excitement, than its non-fiction equivalent, the Samuel Johnson -- but it is non-fiction, as a nation, that we are actually reading. There's a message too powerful to ignore Publishers love a sure-fire trend, but there is so much more to picking a bestseller:
Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it.

· The Real Read: a Recurring Sweet revenge part of the game of life [Link Poached from The Telegraph and Ottakar's launch The Real Read, a poll to find the country's best-loved work of non-fiction ]
· See Also Colm Toibin's a travelling Irishman, his subject is a dilettante American. Together they create a riveting portrait of obsession

Praise be to one Giant Confessional: it's like a one-on-one thing, and that's deeply intriguing
There is a voyeur in all of us. At some level, we are fascinated by other people's secrets, out of either prurience or a more fundamental need to affirm that we are not alone, that other people, too, have thought or done things of which they are not proud. Over the past decade, confessions have become a staple of culture... We have had bare-all books about everything from abusive childhoods to addiction, crime, obsession, failure and, of course, sex in all its myriad forms.
I think we've got this compulsive drive to feel that we belong, or that we're normal. The fascination with other people's messy lives is really about a sense of How do they deal with these things? And also, How do you place yourself on a spectrum of normality?
If Millet's book sold because it was so racy, perhaps Moody's is selling because it is so ordinary .....
· See Full Text Story For your eyes only: with innovations including reality television and web cameras, combined with a general loosening of social and moral taboos, we now have unprecedented access into other people's worlds