Category: Musings

  • Stories of their time

    Amongst all the heaviness of the Ukraine war, the cost of living crisis and the earthquake tragedy in Turkey and Syria, the prime minister took a couple of minutes to give his thoughts about Roald Dahl and his books. He said ‘the books should be preserved and not airbrushed.’ This is referring to the publisher’s […]

  • Love According to Will and Paul

    As it is February and of course St Valentine’s Day, I thought I would share my favourite Shakespearean sonnet with you: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! It is an ever-fixed […]

  • Lockdown finds

    Obviously in crazy lockdown times, particularly the first one (how many were there?) I had swathes of empty time, much of which was filled with extra reading and also following up writers on my iPad. Here are a few of the writers I encountered in that dark time. Somebody somewhere, maybe in a journal or […]

  • Lived Experience

    I read a newspaper article recently which was talking about the lived experience of writers. I wasn’t totally sure that I understood what they meant, so I read on. In essence it was saying that some publishers had been telling authors that unless they had lived through the subject matter of their novel, they should […]

  • Both sides of the bed

    There are piles of books on both sides of the bed. Mine is almost totally fiction with a little biography maybe. My husband’s is made up of science and computer journals, some mainly musical biography and a few art books. It is rare for a book to move from one side of the bed to […]

  • The very best place to read

    If there was a poll of such a thing, I think reading in bed, or a favourite armchair by a fire, or in the garden (with appropriate weather) would probably be the top choices. All of those are good but my personal favourite is reading on a train, preferably in a quiet zone and preferably […]

  • How do you read in bed?

    How do you read in bed? Sitting up properly with the pillow plumped behind you in a fairly civilised fashion or on your side with your elbow getting crinkled and a little numb before you turn to your other side? Or, do you lay on your back with your arms fairly straight and the book […]

  • Reading the classics …

    … well, being forced to actually. Wandering around my local Waterstones recently, I noticed a whole section on exam notes of various kinds: 11+ practice, SATs revision and various parts of the GCSE and A level English syllabi…syllabuses sounds more natural doesn’t it? Anyway, I had a look and found that all the literature was […]

  • Why do we read fiction?

    I have on more than one occasion talked to friends about this question, some of whom are committed fiction readers and others not. It has been an important part of my life for decades but I have never really thought about why I want to spend hours reading stories. There are many websites that wish […]

  • Chick Lit

    What does this term mean to you I wonder? To me it has a slightly derogatory nuance to it. When I researched a little, it became clear that it was applied to novels that were aimed at young women and mostly written by women, particularly during the 1990s and 2000s. Since then the term has […]