The living room is dark and low-ceilinged, with bookshelves all along the wall opposite the windows. These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly—despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public—to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.

- Christopher Isherwood (A Single Man)

I want to be able to listen to recordings of piano sonatas and know who's playing. I want to go to classical concerts and know when you're meant to clap. I want to be able to 'get' modern jazz without it all sounding like this terrible mistake, and I want to know who the Velvet Underground are exactly. I want to be fully engaged in the World of Ideas, I want to understand complex economics, and what people see in Bob Dylan. I want to possess radical but humane and well-informed political ideals, and I want to hold passionate but reasoned debates around wooden kitchen tables, saying things like 'define your terms!' and 'your premise is patently specious!' and then suddenly to discover that the sun's come up and we've been talking all night. I want to use words like 'eponymous' and 'solipsistic' and 'utilitarian' with confidence. I want to learn to appreciate fine wines, and exotic liqueurs, and fine single malts, and learn how to drink them without turning into a complete div, and to eat strange and exotic foods, plovers' eggs and lobster thermidor, things that sound barely edible, or that I can't pronounce. I want to make love to beautiful, sophisticated, intimidating women, during daylight or with the light on even, and sober, and without fear, and I want to be able to speak many languages fluently, and maybe even a dead language or two, and to carry a small leather-bound notebook in which I jot incisive thoughts and observations, and the occasional line of verse. Most of all I want to read books; books thick as brick, leather-bound books with incredibly thin paper and those purple ribbons to mark where you left off; cheap, dusty, second-hand books of collected verse, incredibly expensive, imported books of incomprehensible essays from foreign universities.

At some point, I'd like to have an original idea. And I'd like to be fancied, or maybe loved even, but I'll wait and see. And as for a job, I'm not sure exactly what I want yet, but something that I don't despise, and that doesn't make me ill, and that means I don't have to worry about money all the time. And all of these are the things that a university education's going to give me.

- David Nicholls (Starter for 10)

But, of course.

Bought two mangoes, one after another, which she peeled and cut up on the spot for us. Ate a slice that tasted slightly tangy, salty. I did not expect her to have washed her hands before manhandling our mangoes but could not help wondering what she had touched. Swallowed with faint grimace.

Street food for those looking for a more "authentic" experience in the touristy Old (or is it Central?) Market area. Perhaps a different stall would have changed my opinion of the food. The coconut shake was quite the thing though. My companion was quite keen to have an all-local culinary experience. Me, some pasta in one of the recommended low-key joints would have been nice. Towards the end, we started having separate meals. I sit with her while she eats, and vice versa. It was fun, but this trip did make me realise just how important food compatibility is.

I didn't like Phnom Penh. But it did have more amusing urban sightings like this for picture purposes.

The little hand belongs to a kid sandwiched between them, and that's a live chicken she's holding.

grains of cambodia

Now we all loved one another to death. Which is to say, until the end of the evening. There was no other place to be, it was unimaginable not to float on our backs in this ocean of luxury, an archipelago of personalities lobbing witticisms across one another's beaches.

- Jonathan Lethem (Chronic City)

"I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints... I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."

- Douglas Coupland

Lovelife 2010