Here’s an excerpt from David McKie’s column about an “obsession with spines” in the Guardian UK:

Take a photograph in the Guardian last month, in a feature showing politicians on public transport, of David Cameron on a tube train. The only other passenger in the vicinity is a bored-looking woman who apparently does not know, or perhaps does not care, that only three seats away is the man who might be our next but one prime minister. And what book is he reading so diligently - held up at an angle which makes its title just visible? Well, what book would spin doctors have told him he ought to be reading if he wants to show how tuned in he is to the tastes and preoccupations of literate, sentient Britain? And yes, sure enough, it’s the new Ian McEwan.

You can do the same—with a trip to the Upper East Side, not London—by attending his reading next month at the Y on the day On Chesil Beach hits American bookstores. The New Yorker previewed a chapter in December.

[Ian McEwan: 6/5/07]