Category: Bookends
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September 2025
On a Saturday morning there is a decision to be made. There will be an email from Daunts Bookshop wanting to share with me their five book choices for the week. Will I open the email or just leave it? If I open it then the chances are I will buy one of those books. […]
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August 2025
Joanne Harris is an interesting writer. She is half French, lives near Barnsley in Yorkshire, has played in a rock band for decades and was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She is the chair of the SOA, the Society of Authors, and has had many quite public, strong disagreements with JK Rowling, mainly […]
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July 2025
The advert on the wall of Marylebone tube station was indeed large and it pleased me immensely. It was advertising Tracy Chevalier’s latest novel ‘The Glassmaker’ and I understood it immediately. I knew the book had come out last year but now they were telling me it was available in paperback. I had been restrained, […]
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June 2025
I can’t imagine there are many people reading this who aren’t familiar with the name Alexander McCall Smith. The jovial, super brainy professor of medical ethics at Edinburgh University who gave up the day job to become a full-time writer in the late 1990s. The confidence to take this very large step came from the […]
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April 2025
I have recently been down a long and convoluted Virginia Woolf shaped rabbit hole and what a fascinating journey it has been. It began with ‘The Memory Library’ by Kate Storey, (visit: beyondtheairing cupboard.co.uk to read my thoughts on that book and a musing about ‘Mrs Dalloway,’) and led me to have another go at […]
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May 2025
When I set up my blog about books and reading a couple of years ago, I did of course need a name for it. Over a cup of coffee I played about with some rather obvious titles: cover to cover, turning the page etc etc. They had of course all been taken by existing blogs […]
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March 2025
Near the top of one of the floor to ceiling bookshelves in my bedroom is the Penelope Lively section. These shelves will always remind me of lockdown times when I was compulsively buying books and then manically reading them. The piles on my bedside table…and on the floor…became impossibly vertiginous and soon two tall bookcases […]
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February 2025
Looking for something different to read, I walked along my bookshelves and came across these two. They took me back to my teaching days. For several years I ran a lunch time reading group for able readers in year 6, so 10 and 11 year olds. We read a chapter of a book and discussed […]
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January 2025
The Booker Prize has been in existence since 1969. The hope was that newly published work would become as central to the English speaking world as the winners of the Prix Goncourt are to that of France. Publishers Graham C Greene and Tom Maschler came up with the original idea and then of course needed […]
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December 2024
Daunts Bookshop sends me an email each week with their top book choices. Usually, I can refrain but occasionally I press the buttons, as happened this time. This year anything with Florence in the title was going to attract me as I was fortunate enough to visit the ‘Flowering City’ in June. The beautifully designed […]