Category: Musings

  • Danielle Steele

    A Sunday Times article recently educated me about the author Danielle Steele, now in her mid seventies. She has sold over 800 million copies. I had to check that number, it is so enormous and she has written nearly 200 books, sometimes 3 or 4 a year. I have never read anything by her. Why, […]

  • Joy and Sadness – Conflicting Emotions

    The joy is that I came home to find a new book waiting for me: The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths. She is one of my favourite modern authors and she has her own shelf in one of my bookcases. The sadness is that I know this is the last book in the series about […]

  • Frank Muir

    If you are of a certain age then you might remember Frank Muir, he of a variety of Radio 4 quiz games and also Call My Bluff on BBC 2 with his fellow comedy writer Denis Norden. I bought a second hand copy of the Oxford book of Humorous Prose recently and found that it […]

  • Fake Books

    Is it OK to buy books simply because of the cover, or the colour, size or design? Bookstagram and Booktok  (and probably many other social media sites that I don’t know of) are proffering books as interior decoration. In a way this is nothing new as many people bought books by the yard in Georgian […]

  • Comparatives and Superlatives

    I wonder where you stand on this? I had been doing some proofreading and wanted the word ‘youngest’ changed to ‘younger.’ If you have 2 sons, then as far as I’m concerned, you have a younger son and an elder son. To use the word youngest or eldest you would need more than 2 sons!  […]

  • Bloom’s Day

    Happy Bloom’s Day, 16th June. It might be fun to be in Dublin today, drinking Guinness and eating oysters as that seems to be the tradition. So all this is about the novel Ulysses written by James Joyce. I have only ever read the first part of this tome, similarly with ‘A portrait of the […]

  • Magical Realism

    I went to a good U3A literature session recently but probably even better was the chat on my journey home. The driver talked about the books of Elif Shafak with great interest and he used the term magical realism. It took me a moment to realise that he hadn’t made this up but that it […]

  • Who decides which books get reviewed?

    Getting your book reviewed is the best sort of advertisement. Even if the reviewer is not greatly enamoured by your work there is always the case of all publicity is good publicity. Publishers are familiar with literary agents and with editors and reviewers of magazines and newspapers. They are well practised in getting their product […]

  • Writing to Authors

    Why would one write to an author I wonder. To ask questions maybe or to express strong opinions, positive or negative. Presumably some writers are overwhelmed with sackfuls of (probably) fan mail whilst others are longing for the postman to stop at their door. Maybe though they are happy to be left alone; not all […]

  • Memoirs and Autobiographies

    I am reading ‘Blood Knots’ by Luke Jennings and its appellation is ‘memoir.’ It made me think about how a memoir might differ from an autobiography. Looking into it, I find it much as I thought!  An autobiography is going to be factual and nearly always chronological whereas a memoir offers considerably more freedom. ‘Blood […]