One of the more popular pieces of self-referential naval-gazing that many bloggers go in for on occasion is to muse on whether anything has changed as a result of their taking up blogging; not in the sense of ‘changing the world’ - although you do encounter the occasional blogger who you strongly suspect habours such delusions of grandeur - but on a more personal level. Questions such as ‘have you learned anything new since you started blogging?’ or ‘have you changed your views on any issues because of something you’ve written/read?’ crop up pretty frequently, even if they rarely lead to more than a few idle speculations on the nature of blogging; such things being something of semi-obligatory antidote to blogger’s block and a means of keeping you hand in until you can think of something worthwhile to write.

Personally the only appreciable change in behaviour I’ve noticed since starting to blog is that I’ve got back into the habit of reading books about politics; facilitated as much by the presence, just around the corner from my workplace, of a bookshop called ‘The Works’.

If you live in or have visiting any fair-sized town in the last few years you’ll have come across just such a bookshop; one which specialises in ‘discount’ books. Perhaps the best way to think of The Works is to take the view that if Amazon is the Hollywood of book trade, bright brash and oh-so-very-modern, and Waterstones its Oxford Street then The Works is its Eastbourne, the elephant’s graveyard of literary pretensions: a departure lounge where books go to die.

However, the beauty of such a bookshop lies not in the sheer acreage of dross which adorns its selves, the once proud hardbacks whose cover stickers prodly proclaim a recommended retail price of £14.95 before forlornly noting ‘reduced to £2.99′ but in the occasional nugget of gold to be found within its walls. Visiting such a bookshop is very much akin to panning for gold, you have to sift through a lot of uninteresting gravel but every so often, just often enough to keep you interested, you turn up something of genuine interest. This is particularly true of political books, or indeed any books which operate within a niche market and which therefore lend themselves well to a future of being remaindered down to the bargain bins in such shops.

So, in the last few months, my occasional search has turned up such gems as Ron Suskind’s ‘The Price of Loyalty‘; Mark Steel’s passionate, spirited [and very funny] account of the French Revolution, ‘Vive Le Revolution‘; Paul Kingsnorth’s wonderful ‘One No, Many Yesses‘ and John Grey’s ‘Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern‘, one of the most lucid critiques of our own presumptions of modernity that I’ve ever read: more often than not in hardback editions and without ever damaging the bank balance to the tune of more than £3.99.

Of course, as you might expect, visiting such a bookshop places you eternally at the whims and vagaries of whatever stock the company happens to have picked up at the time of your visit. Not every visit is necessarily a good one; today’s most certainly was and yielded the hardback edition ‘The Point of Departure’, Robin Cook’s personal account of his two years as Leader of House of Commons from Labour’s election victory in 2001 to his resignation over the Iraq War - which includes the full text of his resignation speech - and all for the princely sum of £3.99.

Better still, a little mooching around Google revealed that The Works even has its own website the terms of which are not at all bad (£2.95 standard delivery charge regardless of the size of package and free delivery on orders over £250 and that The Point of Departure can be ordered online. With Amazon listing the paperback edition at £6.39, the canny political shopper can avail themselves of the hardback edition and still save themselves 40p, which is a good deal in anyone’s book (no pun intended).

In fact now would seem a good time to check of The Works regardless of your preferred political leanings as alongside Cook’s memoir you’ll also find an intriguing looking biography of Che Guevara, which appears to be a new hardback edition of a book previously published by Hamlyn while if your inclinations are rather more to the right of either Che or Robin Cook you’ll also find Roy Jenkins’s weighty biography of Churchill (paperback unfortunately but still a couple of quid off the Amazon price if you get in quick).

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Note: The full-on shill for Tim Worstall’s ‘2005 Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere’ in which yours truly has one of his ID card diatribes included will start in earnest closer to the publication date of 18th November. Just of the basis of the small number of bloggers who I either know Tim contacted or who’s work will self-evidently feature - what would a review of the year be without Nosemonkey’s liveblog of the 7th July at Europhobia and Scott Burgess’s exposé of Dilpazier Aslam, this will be a damn good read - all the fun of an RSS feed and you can read it in the bath.

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Now you will excuse me but I have to get back to the next chapter in Robin Cook’s memoir…

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