Can it be really two years since Gleebooks made the move to Dulwich Hill? Perhaps I’ll conquer my inner inner west agoraphobia and hop a 428 to Marrickville road on the 6th and raise a glass or two to an outpost of empire.

Meanwhile I’ve begun a ‘project’ read with A New Literary History of America—a literally weighty tome (at a surprising $34.95)—over 1000 pages with more than 200 essays by a cornucopia of literary luminaries encompassing a broad definition of literature: ‘poems, novels, plays, and essays, but also maps, histories, and travel diaries, sermons and religious tracts, public speeches and private letters, political polemics, addresses and debates, Supreme Court decisions, literary histories and criticism, folk songs, magazines, dramatic performances, the blues, philosophy, paintings and monuments, jazz, war memorials, museums, book clubs, photographs, comic strips and comic books, country music, films, radio, rock and roll, cartoons, musicals, and hip-hop’.

A feast which should complement my Text Australian Classics project. Meanwhile, on the crime pages I’ll be reading the new Indridason—with Detective Erlendur still AWOL (hopefully not dead) Sigurdur Óli is front and centre to give a new perspective on Icelandic gloom. I’m also tempted by Harry Lipkin, PI: The Oldest Detective in the World by Barry Fantoni­—I’m predicting a new TV series.

I’m currently reading California P.I. by Rachel Sommerville—a highly readable and matter of fact account of Australian Sommerville’s work digging up background information for the trials of disadvantaged and disenfranchised death row inmates in the US gulag system of ‘supermaxes’. I haven’t reviewed the new Mantel, as Bring up the Bodies is as good as its predecessor—however it is a book that is best read as a hardcover, and while stocks last we have signed bookplates courtesy of the Writers’ Festival—there are authors whose signatures look like a child has scribbled on the title page—Mantel is, of course, not among them. Viki