Category: 2020

  • February 2020

    I wonder how many of you received the book: ‘The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse’ for Christmas? It was Waterstones book of the year and is a very curious publication, picked up by an editor at the Ebury Press from various postings on Instagram. Interesting I think how various digital media actually […]

  • March 2020

    Do you know Olive? Olive Kitteridge I am talking about, a book written by the east coast American writer Elizabeth Strout. Olive is not immediately a wholly likeable character but she is very real and as I went through the book I became increasingly sympathetic with her and her plight. Her plight being simply dealing […]

  • April 2020

    In the few weeks before I set off on the church pilgrimage, I enjoyed wondering about my reading for those ten days. It is fun to match your books to the place you are visiting and I had been thinking about something by Adele Geras maybe or From the Four Winds by Haim Sabato. Simon […]

  • May 2020

    I love books and I love reading so I suppose it is no surprise that I am also very fond of books that are about reading. Maybe it shows me that I am not alone and that other people are as passionate and well, yes, maybe obsessive about this pastime as I am and really […]

  • June 2020

    I think I have read all of Tracy Chevalier’s novels and particularly enjoyed Falling Angels and Girl with a Pearl Earring. Thus I eagerly awaited my copy of her latest work: A Single Thread. It did not disappoint. Chevalier does not write to any formula and her stories are all different and various. It is […]

  • July/August 2020

    All these extra hours and days that many of us have had over the past few weeks and indeed months, should have been an absolute gift to anyone who loved reading. However, for many it seems, this has been a slightly bewildering time. I have read of serious readers who cannot for the life of […]

  • September 2020

    I have no idea what made me pull ‘I’m the king of the castle’ off the shelves of my college library in Cheltenham in the early 1970s but it was the beginning of a deep interest in the writing of Susan Hill. I remember reading the extremely scary book late into the night and going […]

  • October 2020

    I wonder if you are familiar with the term ‘slightly foxed’. It is frequently used by sellers of second hand books and refers to the gingery, freckle like marks that can appear on the pages of a book, usually near the spine. They are caused by deterioration in the quality of the paper, damp and […]

  • November 2020

    I wonder what makes someone write their autobiography? Money, obviously is a frequent motivation but you presumably must also feel that you have something of interest to share with others. Famous people are the ones that publishers and literary agents focus upon but actually I think ‘ordinary’ lives might be just as consuming to read. […]

  • December 2020 / January 2021

    So, fellow readers, in my literary Christmas stocking are three books, two new and one not so. Down in the toe of the stocking is a small hardback, quite heavy with beautiful endpapers of butterflies. It is The Lost Spells with words by Robert Macfarlane and illustrations by Jackie Morris. If this all sounds rather […]