of the LRB, and its bookshop

I think perhaps the LRB is the next subscription I'll treat myself to, although since they are so generous with their online version it seems almost unnecessary to have the print copy. In London last month, after the march for Lebanon, R and I ended up wandering around Bloomsbury, and for the first time I set foot into the LRB Bookshop, quite possibly one of the most dangerous bookstores I've ever encountered. As one of us said to the other, 'it's like a bookshop for people exactly like us!' And it is--I don't think I saw a book in there I wouldn't want to buy, save for those that I already own. I was also delighted to see one of the books I worked on as an editor, Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture--first time I've seen it in a bookstore, and it's always an exciting feeling.

I also want to mention this lovely piece by Amit Chaudhuri on Bombay (it's actually a very belated review of Suketu Mehta's Maximum City), The View from Malabar Hill:

Mehta’s book has the silent intrusiveness, the busyness and ubiquity, the voraciousness of a book of pictures, as well as the largesse that prose gives. But he doesn’t stand at the crossroads at which Singh found himself when confronted with Bombay. The shift has already occurred, and we are in a new world with Maximum City: the book is a giant embrace not only of a city but of hope – and its more complex, earthly incarnation, desire – in the age of the free market. It performs this embrace brilliantly and passionately. It is not, really, a nostalgic book, in spite of all it says about loss, displacement and the act of returning; its elegiac notes are its most strained. It has the hard-headed exuberance of a 19th-century novel, a fascination with the spirit of compromise and with survival skills, a complete understanding of the importance of the mercantile and the pecuniary.

(via half the internets, who all linked to it two weeks ago when I wasn't paying attention...)

more LRB lovin' here.