Omniwords – 2 January 2026

My uncle took a big risk on Christmas Day – as perilous as pouring a glass of wine for a sommelier or offering advice to a scaffolder – and presented a bookseller with a book. As it is, he nailed it. He gave me a book I wanted to read, had put on various lists and had not yet bought for myself: Look Closer by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.

This is a book about the joy of reading – really reading, with that kind of committed focus that you see particularly in children who tune out every noise and distraction, even the burning of Brussels sprouts or the calls that it really is time to go for a walk, in favour of the page in front of them.

Each chapter sends you, gently, down a rabbit hole, clutching at everything you pass on your way. Entirely appropriate given all the references the author makes to Alice and her adventures in Wonderland (on which he has written The Story of Alice). One chapter on dialogue alone ranges from Lewis Carroll to Marcel Proust to James Joyce, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sally Rooney and George Eliot, with a passing reference to Taylor Swift. The ideas are academic, the writing conversational and enticing. In the face of no little despair about reading for pleasure and whether even those who have chosen to study English actually read the books they are set, this is a remedy to press into everyone’s hands as well as being excellent fun.

Anne Enright’s essay collection, Attention is its perfect companion. She writes on Helen Garner, Toni Morrison, John McGahern and Maeve Brennan. She writes on Antigone and Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes, on abortion reform, on submission, consent and desire, on addictions from smoking to drinking to the smell of a baby and on the missed ardency of her younger self.

Both books invite the reader in and ask something of him or her: to take more time, revisit sentences, examine a page and reap the reward.

I mentioned Evensong by Stewart O’Nan a couple of weeks ago and this is exactly the sort of novel which stands up to such reading, offering more each time. It follows the members of the Humpty Dumpty club, a group of women who make sure that everyone in their ageing community receives their prescriptions on time and is taken to their medical appointments, that people have their shopping and their cats are fed and that those in hospital receive visitors and kindness. In between they play bridge and go to evensong and worry about their own failing health and fallible memories.

Evensong is very special indeed. It is quiet and observant and I aspire to show even half the care that these characters do for their friends but also for those they hardly like or understand.

Encouraging those of all ages to slow down and pay careful attention, Omnibird: An Avian Investigator’s Handbook by Giselle Clarkson is a guide to investigating birds from near and far, spotting even those accomplished at concealment such as the tawny frogmouth (unlikely in the UK but one likes to be prepared), eavesdropping on warbles, chuffs and screeches and identifying what a bird’s bill can tell us about their choice of food and table manners. It’s a playful book, fantastically illustrated; I learnt the word caruncle and met a fulvous whistling duck. Delightful.

And now, since Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes so beautifully of Wendy Cope, I intend to spend the day Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis. Here is Cope on the subject:

It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn’t be much of a poem
But I love the title.

May your weekend propel you gently into Wonderland with a keen eye and a good book,
Lizzie