In the usual annual lists of best books, several reviewers have mentioned the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. This 60-volume set is a snip at just �6,500.00. One critic in “The Spectator” claims it’s so good that it’s worth flogging your daughter’s pony to afford it. Such is The Spectator’s readership.At least it’s eligible for free delivery for Amazon customers–but only if you live in the UK. The extra tariff for postage to Ireland is starting to put me off using Amazon. For example, for an order of say, �73, the charge for postage is close to �13–pretty much the price of a hardback book. However, I will probably bite my lip and continue to use the service occasionally because the range in Dublin bookshops continues to narrow by the year. This hit home a while ago when I was trying to find a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Island–in retrospect, not particularly worth the hardship of trying to locate*. A few stocked Brave New World but that was about it. Yet, next to the emaciated Huxley selection, almost the complete works of John Irving always seemed to be there, taunting me. And doubtless you’ll never have any trouble picking up in Dublin the full fictional output of Tom Wolfe.*Actually, Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza is far better. Island is really a series of lectures on how to meld mystical Oriental thinking with Western science presented by thinly fictionalised mouthpieces. EIG is more novelistic (at least by Huxley’s standards) and uses an interesting achronological time scheme in which characters are shown at different stages in their development. It also includes one of the weirdest scenes in all fiction: while the protagonist and his girlfriend are sunbathing on the roof of a French villa, an aircraft passes overhead. An object falls out of the plane and hurtles towards the roof. As it nears, they see that it’s a small dog which then splats onto the roof, covering the two onlookers in blood and guts. What’s intriguing is that Huxley (if I recall rightly) never explains the “backstory” behind this grisly incident. Apparently random, the dog’s death represents, I think, the horror each of the characters is trying to keep at bay in the uneasy atmosphere between the world wars. Anthony Burgess said that Huxley equipped the novel with a brain–this novel proves his contention.