This review in the Guardian has really made me want to read Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artist and the Imagination From Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris.From the review, written by Kathryn Hughes:
They loved country churches, tea in china cups wreathed with roses, old manor houses, abandoned fishing smacks, Gypsy caravans and, just as important, the soft English rain that smudged the outlines of all these precious things. Above all, their sensibility was local. While the other modernism saw national boundaries as just one more example of pernicious Ruritanian debris, romantic moderns celebrated the way England's crinkled coast enclosed the rooted and particular. Trees, stones, bodies, walls: these were no longer the flotsam that needed to be excluded from art. They were what art was all about.
I love this inter-war period of art and literature in all of its many beautiful and varied forms. I'll definitely be getting my hands on a copy of this.
The Toronto Film Festival starts tomorrow and I'm enormously excited and prepared to exist on very little sleep for the next ten days. I have tickets to 20 films, with a four day, two time zone business trip sandwiched in the middle of it - I'm literally leaving one film to go straight to the airport. However, I love the rushing around and this year I really lucked out and got almost all of my top choices. I'll be avoiding most of the big Hollywood films that will show up later in theatres, but I had to make an exception for Colin Firth's new movie, The King's Speech. He plays George VI, forced to become king after his brother's abdication and terrified of public speaking because of his stammer. Geoffrey Rush plays his speech therapist and Helena Bonham Carter plays the Queen Mum. It's already getting some early Oscar buzz.
, translated by Alison Anderson. was a no-brainer. This sounds like a wonderful read about a Paris bookstore that only offers literary masterpieces as chosen by a top-secret committee, who subsequently are mysteriously targeted and threatened. This is published by the wonderful Europa Editions, one of a handful of presses whose publishing choices I trust implicitly. So I also picked up 
The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leïla Marouane. It doesn't take much for me to pick up a book with Paris in the title, but this story of an Algerian man looking for an apartment and sexual encounters, narrated by an unsympathetic female, really intrigued me.
man trying to write a novel about a love affair. I'm normally quite skeptical about the review blurbs that get plastered onto the first pages of paperbacks, but this one from the Village Voice sold me: "The palettte of Davis's novel reminded me of green tea, bone, quartz light, and dried apricots, and its French room tone buzzes with the obsessiveness of Michel Leiris, the saltwater air of Jane Bowles and the grouchy who-cares-a-damn silence of Jean Rhys."
his latest C. When I read a review that suggested C was inspired by McCarthy's interest in Tintin, well mine was also piqued. Since these cartoons first appeared in 1929, they are clearly a part of the cultural history of the time and I'm curious to read all about them. 
