Nigella Lawson
At times this year I thought I'd never get beyond the instructions printed on the side of the Pampers packet. And when time to read is difficult to find, the effort has to be rewarded. Books have been required to be ungrudging givers of pleasure, and what's more, suitably segmented for brief, stolen snatches. This has meant diaries which in turn meant, predictably enough I suppose, Alan Bennett's Writing Home (Faber, £17.50), and short stories, in which catego- ry Jane Gardam's Going into a Dark House (Sinclair-Stevenson, £14.99) and Salman Rushdie's East, West (Cape, £9.99) insinu- ated their way into the imagination well after the actual books were closed. Of late I've become grateful for Penguin's new Syrens imprint — 'masterpieces of the waiting room and the corridor' — slight volumes by substantial authors, from Proust to Beckett (£2.99 each).
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