Tonight, over a bottle of wine, I finished up Literacy and Longing in L.A., a compact novel cowritten by two Californian women, that focuses, funnily enough, on another Californian woman, Dora. Told from her perspective, Dora (named after Eudora Welty), is a woman who instead of finding her emotional outlet in shoe shopping, immerses herself in books to escape her real life, which includes an estranged husband, dwindling financial resources, a new love interest, and a pathological fear of driving on LA’s freeways. I found the idea of, as one review put it, ‘book lust meets chick lit’ a novel idea (pardon the pun), and it was a quick, mostly satisfying read, if a bit rushed and too ‘happily ever after’ at the end – a good book for bibliophiles to bring along on holiday for the proverbial beach read.

I think we can all relate to the idea of escaping into books, to varying degrees. One of the pure pleasures of reading is to be able to enter someone else’s life and momentarily forget our own worries.

Of course, like any book that deals with other books, it mentions quite a few authors and titles, and I was turned on to one particular book, which has since been added to my wishlist: An Instance at the Fingerpost.