Unintentional lunchtime purchase

I've been trying not to buy books and to go to the library instead, but I couldn't help myself. I love Margaret Atwood! Review to follow in a few days I guess...
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Should I laugh, or cry?

I'm laughing at myself, but it's sad really.

I'm meant to be an intelligent, enlightened, no-nonsense woman, who sees beyond the myths of femininity constructed by society, but today, I bought two books:

1. A low-fat, low-calorie, low-GI, low-protein, low-sugar cook book
2. Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth.

What a perfect encapsulation of the dilemma of 'womanhood'....

I buy one book to help me lose weight because I feel insecure and that I need to be thin to to be worthy, which also puts me in the kitchen and firmly in the traditional female domain. this book will leave me ultimately disappointed, because it will not make me emaciated in all the right places, but abnormally voluptuous in others, more confident & secure, younger, taller, immortal...

But I also buy a second - perhaps to comfort me when the first one doesn't achieve what I was promised it would - a neat slice of accessible feminist theory that tells me that I don't have to be beautiful & that beauty is a conspiracy against women, but ultimately won't make me feel any better about the fact that my face and body don't fit with the accepted ideal of 'beauty', that won't stop me wanting to buy new clothes and make up and half-believing that they will be the end of my insecurity, yet simultaneously hating myself for even half-believing such a pack of bullshit...

Is it laughable, or lamentable? Again, I'm stuck in the middle between laughing at the situation, and being sad, because it's my own life and attitudes that I'm mocking - I can see how ridiculous it is, but I don't know how to do anything about it...

Book binge

I binge-bought a load of books today...taking advantage of the buy one get one half price offer that's on in Books Etc round the corner from by office. I do it every now and again - I never feel guilty for spending money on books like I do when I buy clothes or anything else, because I feel in some way like I'm doing something that's good for me.

I bought:

• The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
• The Age of Shiva, Manil Suri
• The Story of Forgetting, Stefan Merrill Block
• We Think: Mass innovation, not mass production, Charles Leadbeater
• The Map of Love, Adhaf Soueif

Now I've just got to find time to read them...

My favourite bookshops.

Like just about everyone these days I buy most of my books online - the internet is amazing resource, I've stumbled across books that I might never have found otherwise and tracked down stuff from thousands of miles away, but there's something to be said for actually going to a bookshop and thumbing through the volumes - especially secondhand bookshops, where you get that musty smell of old paper that I've always found a little intoxicating. Sad, but true.

I started thinking about my favourite bookshops after reading about Shakespeare and Company, the legendary bookshop in Paris. The owner, George Whitman, has played host to 50,000 writers since he opened the shop in the 1950s, and the bookshop, which has 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise' as its motto, is more famed for its hospitality perhaps than it's choice of books.

At home (which is Brighton by the way) my favourite has to be the Amnesty bookshop on Sydney Street - I'm always amazed by the things I find in there. The layout and the way the shelves are organised makes browsing a pleasure - plus there's the added bonus of knowing the money you spend goes to a good cause.

Away, it has to be Idiom Books in Cochin in India. I had been in India for a while and had run out of things to read when I found this fantastic little shop - lovely service, a great choice of books from both within India and outside - book heaven as far as I was concerned.