Book dedications of the year
Every year I like to honour the art of the book dedication by posting some dedications which have caught my fancy through the months, a tradition harking back to my very first blog post. Just as there is no one recipe for a good book, there is no one recipe for a good book dedication. It's a bit like stone soup. Cryptic or poignant, cabbage or peas -- put in what you've got; the one essential ingredient is the magic stone, which in the case of dedications is personality, as so often in life. 1. Daniel Nester in How to be inappropriate For our daughter, Miriam Lee Nester. I’ll try to behave myself from now on. I like the honesty of that "try", from someone who is so attuned to the inappropriate as to be able to offer an absorbing variety of examples, including "an Australian opposition leader caught sniffing a woman's chair; two more Australians, cadets this time, of Chinese descent, singled out by superiors to play-act Koreans in knife com...