Category: Musings

  • Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries

    I don’t have a section for book talks, so this will have to be a musing. I spent the evening a few days ago listening to the author Kate Mosse talking on stage. She was entirely alone. This was not an interview but I’m not quite sure what it was: part performance, part illustrated lecture […]

  • Book Clubs

    So, what do we think about book clubs? They must basically be a ‘good thing’ I feel but going further into it maybe becomes a little complicated. The first and indeed only book club that I have ever belonged to, contained myself and a couple of friends, all aged about 7, and I think we […]

  • 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 […]