Category: Bookends
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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 […]
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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 […]