If you read one thing this week -Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life is something of a misnomer; like his best-selling A Short History of Nearly Everything, this is a whopper, and, at 550-odd pages, could well be used as a doorstop.

But the going is light and breezy, and At Home is a work of considerable discovery.

Like a batty old uncle in corduroy trousers, Bryson shuffles around his home in Norfolk, a rectory built in 1851, and, moving from room to room with his trademark goofiness, picks his way through the mundane humdrum of everyday life with such intense curiosity that the everyday objects of our domestic lives emerge as fascinating and genuinely strange.

THE BOOK ISSUE

THERE'S a Facebook group called "Christians praying for Christopher Hitchens" and, at the time of writing, it had 228 members who joined the battle for the cancer-stricken polemicist, writer and atheist's soul.

The author of the astounding God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and, more recently, Hitch-22: A Memoir (both Atlantic) has responded with good grace.

The London Evening Standard, has reported that news of Hitchens's condition has sparked a debate across the US: should Christians pray for the recovery of the world's most famous atheist (sorry, Richard Dawkins), one who pities them as victims of medieval superstition?

The anti-monarchist Johann Hari has tweeted: "I forbid everyone from praying for him. He would hate that. And rightly so."

Christians have, nevertheless, declared September 20 a prayer day for Hitchens.

BIBLIOTHERAPY

POOR Paris Hilton. The silly spoilt goose has apparently been caught with drugs again, this time while out cruising the Las Vegas Strip on Friday night with her nightclub mogul boyfriend, Cy Waits.

A motorcycle police officer got a whiff of suspicious smoke coming from Waits' Cadillac, and followed "the vapour trail and the odour of marijuana", as one law enforcement spokesman put it, pulled them over and, with other officers, began to search the car.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Hilton then pulled out a tube of lip balm from her purse and out came a plastic bag of cocaine at the same time. Dear, oh dear.

But why do drugs, when others have done them for you? Try these:

• Cannabis: A History, by Martin Booth (Bantam Books) - a sober account of the baffling process through which marijuana became outlawed throughout the Western world, and the terrible effect proscription has had on the world's economy;

• Mr Nice: An Autobiography, Howard Marks (Vintage) - of all the dope smuggling memoirs, this one remains the best; and

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S Thompson (Harper Perennial) - worth revisiting until Simon & Schuster publish Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S Thompson by the editors of Rolling Stone in January.

ONE-LINE REVIEW

"THE night they were hijacked, Roxy Palmer and her husband, Joe, ate dinner with an African cannibal and his Ukranian whore." - Opening sentence of Capetonian Roger Smith's new thriller, Wake Up Dead (Serpent's Tail). And it doesn't let up after that. Hard-boiled and very noirish.

• email: andrewmdonaldson@mac.com