Last Saturday, the Guardian ran their Books of the Year feature, and it had a slightly different slant from the rest of these supplements. Instead of naming their favourite books of 2007, the contributors were asked for their favourite Christmas reads, past, present and future.
Nabokov had his butterflies, William Burroughs doted on his cats - I'm sure there's a book or two to be had on novelists and their animals. What kind of book I'm not too sure; though I bet there's one out there already, full of glossy pics of faithful hounds delivering manuscripts and slippers to their masters, or kittens adorably tangled in cradles of typewriter ribbon.
I realise that with this blog post following on from my last one (not to mention the one that was slightly about poker) I'm risking getting myself a reputation as the person who blogs about tacky lowbrow things at Picador. Hang in there though, because in the next couple of weeks I'm hoping to be saying something interesting about Philip Roth.
Last week Picador announced that, from next spring, it is going to change the way it publishes some of its books. A number of our titles will now be offered in both hardback and paperback simultaneously. It has been interesting to see how people have responded.
