Category: 2024
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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 […]
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November 2024
Are you a Janeite I wonder? By this I mean do you love and reread the small cache of six novels by Jane Austen. Janeite is rather an ugly word I think, that doesn’t sit well with the beautiful writing of the author but it is a term that is all over the internet. There […]
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October 2024
A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles Two people at church talked glowingly about this book, so obviously it was a ‘must read.’ The first paragraph, to my surprise, transported me back over 50 years to when I was standing in Red Square in Moscow. This was Cold War, iron curtain time but although this […]
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September 2024
It is quite rare to read the first couple of pages of a novel and just know that you will love the book. It is a delicious feeling and it happened to me with this story. I have only read one other novel by Ann Patchett: The Dutch House. I liked it but for me […]
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August 2024
‘The Signora had no business to do it, no business at all.’ Many of you will recognise this as Charlotte Bartlett’s words at the beginning of EM Forster’s ‘A Room with a View.’ Well, when we recently stayed in Florence, our room nearly had a view of the River Arno … almost. However, we had […]
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July 2024
Little Clarendon Street in Oxford. If you are of a certain age this address might immediately bring to mind Laura Ashley! In the 1980s I would regularly walk along St Giles, out of the main shopping centre, to visit my favourite shop. It was a time of crowded communal changing rooms where you made sure […]
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June 2024
In 1984 bookmakers refused to take further bets on the winner of the Booker Prize. It was a forgone conclusion. The Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard would win … but it didn’t. The winner was a slim book of 140 pages: Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. Accepting the prize, Anita Brookner said […]
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May 2024
There was a time, many years ago now, when I was quite an authority on children’s books. I read widely and voraciously, led reading groups to extend the stamina, experience and variety of children’s reading and mentored those who were ready to move onto adult literature. Writers that I used included Penelope Lively, John Rowe […]
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April 2024
So this book was a bestseller in 2009. It is back in the windows of bookshops now because of a new Netflix series, closely based on this story. Every newspaper, journal and magazine I have read of late has had excited reviewers waxing lyrical about everything David Nicholls. I understand the buzz and the enthusiasm. […]
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March 2024
On my hall windowsill is a group of old Pan paperbacks by Nevil Shute. There are nine of them. Many years ago I went through a phase of collecting these mid-20th century stories and became a little obsessive about finding editions of each book that had matching artwork on the front. I trailed charity shops […]