I’m off for a couple of weeks to the US, to read from ‘Juliet, Naked’.
Please, PLEASE come and say hello:

September 29th in New York
Barnes & Noble ­ Union Square, 7:00 PM

September 30th in Boston
Brookline Booksmith, 6:00 PM
Location: Coolidge Theater

October 1st in Washington, DC
Politics & Prose, 7:00 PM

October 6th in Los Angeles
Book Soup, 7:30 PM
Location: Skirball Cultural Center

October 7th in El Cerrito, CA
Barnes & Noble ­ El Cerrito, 7:00 PM

October 8th in San Francisco
City Arts & Lectures, 8:00 PM
Location: Herbst Theater

October 9th in Seattle
Elliott Bay Book Company, 7:00 PM
Location: Seattle Public Library

That gap between the 1st and the 5th . . . I’m not skiving. ‘An Education’ premieres then – and opens in New York and LA on October 9th.

Last night, at the ‘Juliet, Naked’ signing in Selfridges, a nice woman told me that we’d met before, a few years ago, at another event.
“You gave me some advice when I was applying to college.”
“What did I say?”
“I had two choices, and you told me to go for the less prestigious one because I’d enjoy the work more.”
“What did you do?”
“I ignored you, and went to the more prestigious one.”
“And?”
“I hated every moment of it.”
We both laughed uproariously, but inside, I was seething. Really, what is the point of dispensing rabbinical wisdom if you people are just going to take no notice? If you’re coming to an event over the next few weeks, in the UK and the US, with the express purpose of asking me for my guidance in professional or matrimonial matters, I really must insist that you do what I say, otherwise the whole thing is a waste of my time and yours. (There may be a simple but legally binding document for you to sign.) And if you wish to talk about relationship matters, please bring your partner with you. I can’t be expected to decide whether you should marry somebody without all the necessary facts at my disposal.

In Sundance, it was Uma Therman; at Toronto last weekend, where ‘An Education’ was showing as part of the Film Festival, it was Penelope Cruz who asked me for a light. This is all very difficult. Like most smokers, I don’t intend to smoke forever, but where’s the incentive to give up here? If I quit, none of the world’s most beautiful women would approach me randomly at parties or press conferences.

“Oh, stop with the false modesty,” I hear you say, and I can see where you’re coming from. But a handy lighter at least gives people like Penelope the pretext for conversation – an opportunity that, admittedly, she did not exploit on this occasion, probably because I looked (and indeed was) very busy. If I am to stub it out for the final time, somebody is going to have to arrange for the world’s most beautiful non-smoking women to come up to me, punch me on the shoulder, and tell me how well I’m doing. Does anyone who reads this blog know Angelina? Is she a non-smoker? Because she could help, I think.

Juliet, Naked signing on Wednesday 16th September at 5.30-6.30pm at W H Smiths, Selfridges, 400 Oxford Street, London, W1A 1AB.

There are two readings next week. One is in London on Tuesday, 7.30pm, at the Bloomsbury St Hotel (tickets £5.00, available for Waterstone’s in Gower St); the other is on Sunday at 1.30pm at the Enwave theatre in Toronto, Canada. No offence to the people of Toronto, nor indeed to the people of London, but I wish the two events were on the same continent at least. Oh, well.

In every interview I give – and there’s a lot of it about at the moment – I am asked to list recent favourite books and albums. ‘Recent favourites’ is a hard category, because we all have to read and listen to a lot before we find the things we love; I find myself giving the same answers over and over again, simply because I don’t have so much to choose from. And in these days of Google alerts, I worry that the people who produced these recent favourites might think I’m some kind of stalker. “He’s just recommended my book/album for the fifteenth time in the last ten days! Let it go already!” So apologies in advance to: Elvis Perkins (‘Elvis Perkins In Dearland’),  Speech Debelle (‘Speech Therapy’) Jess Walter (‘The Financial Lives Of The Poets’) Curtis Sittenfeld (‘American Wife’) and Laura Cumming (‘A Face To The World’). You are all recent favourites, and I will therefore be yoking your work to mine, over and over again, in an attempt to make me seem more interesting than I really am.

So ‘Juliet, Naked’ is published today (I think); promotion for the novel and for ‘An Education’, in the US, UK and Europe, means that I won’t be doing any writing for three months or so. That’s a big chunk of a working year gone, especially if you throw in the month-long summer holiday I’ve just taken.

I don’t read reviews – editors and other interested parties know that they have to provide a summary in one word or less, and, if the one word is a word I don’t want to hear, the name of the bastard responsible. So far, the reviews seem to have been good or OK, with one notable exception: the review in the Times was, apparently, hostile. It’s not often that a bad review provokes amusement in its victim, but this one did, because the Times paid quite a lot of money to run extracts of the book, over three days; the bad review ran bang in the middle of the run. Times readers must have been very confused – why were they being asked to plough on with a novel that had just been rubbished by one of their book critics? If you’re going to get a thumping, then it might as well happen in a way that leaves the paper looking silly.