Books: delicious hot, disgusting cold

The Kilburn Bookshop closed forever on Sunday. I popped in and out almost every day last week, checking its pulse and scavenging for books. The atmosphere was funereal, the shelves got thinner and thinner, people dashed in saying 'Darling! Is this really the end?' and the guys at the till got weary of saying the same old things. Yes, we're closing. Yes, it's true. Yes, Amazon, the book trade, the rent hike...

To counter the despair, I thought I'd post a list of some of the books I came away with in the vulture-mobile/jalopy. These are books which will illuminate my life in years to come. There was a separate pile for Mr Q and for Pie, and some that I won't mention because they're presents; these are the ones I chose for me, myself and I.

• Burnt Diaries - Emma Tennant
• Selected Poems - Wallace Stevens
• The Complete Poems - Emily Jane Bronte
• Singing in the Dark - Alison Brackenbury
• Drives - Leontia Flynn
• The Broken Word - Adam Foulds
• The Forward Book of Poetry 2007
• Time Bites - Doris Lessing
• The Unknown Matisse; Matisse the Master - Hilary Spurling
• The Artist's Way - Julia Cameron
• Sign Language Companion - Cath Smith
• More About Boy - Roald Dahl
• The Jolly Postman - Janet & Allen Ahlberg
• Wizard of the Crow; A Grain of Wheat - Ngugi wa Thiong'o
• Catholicism - Gerald O'Collins
• The Child that Books Built - Frances Spufford
• Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell
• A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift
• The Discovery of France - Graham Robb
• A Book of Silence - Sarah Maitland
• Speak, Memory; Glory - Vladimir Nabokov
• Revelations of Divine Love - Julian of Norwich
• The first person and other stories - Ali Smith
• On Beauty (audiobook) - Zadie Smith

The last is poignant. I'm listening to it at the moment and it mentions Kilburn, Zadie Smith's childhood stomping ground, giving me a warm glow on the inside when I hear mudane details of the houses round here and how far it is to the nearest tube stop. But it also reminds me of the article posted up in the window of the bookshop (from the Telegraph, Apoca-lit Now) in which I read that Zadie used to get books from the Kilburn Bookshop as a kid. Where would a young bookaholic go now?