Category: My Reading

When we were in Boston a couple of years ago, we went out of the city to Concord to see the house of Louisa May Alcott. In the little high street was a lovely bookshop and inevitably we browsed and bought. At the time of paying I must have given my email address because ever […]

My granddaughter and I worked our way through Narnia, Harry Potter and the Hobbit during lockdown times and then she swiftly moved onto Katherine Rundell and I felt I ought to follow. I loved ‘The Rooftoppers’ but ‘Impossible Creatures’ is really something else. I would never say that fantasy is my favourite genre but if […]

I wonder if you remember 84 Charing Cross Road? It was a delightful film with Anthony Hopkins in his London bookshop during the stringent times of the Second World War and Anne Bancroft as a jobbing writer sitting for the most part alone at her typewriter in her small New York City apartment. The book […]

I was enjoying my U3A literature session where we had been asked to bring prose on the theme of doors. I was as usual enjoying the variety and the obscure tangents that lead people to new discoveries. Interestingly, everyone had avoided going through the wardrobe door to Narnia but we did go down the rabbit […]

I have bought several paperbacks lately and I can’t quite remember where I picked up this one. I think it caught my eye because I had just written an article about ‘cosy crime.’ Was Anthony Horowitz jumping on the bandwagon I wondered. I associated this writer with children’s books, specifically aimed at boys, the most […]

I don’t always follow through when people recommend books to me. The older I get, the more I want to make my own choices. However, I’m very glad I picked this one up. I had recently read ‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham and loved it (and the film) so I had high expectations of this […]

I am a longtime fan of William Boyd, so I was pleased and intrigued to find this new paperback, not quite so hefty as most of his other volumes. There is a new hero, if that is the right word for him, Gabriel Dax and I found him both interesting and appealing. Chelsea, London, is […]

Smallish, hardback books are just too tempting for words, especially when they are written by an author that I truly revere. So, finding this book displayed face up on the front table of Waterstones, well, I just knew I was going to buy it. This is planets away from lengthy, family stories such as Brooklyn […]

There are times, not often I admit, when I put the stories, the fiction and the make believe down and pick up something real instead. It might be lyrical landscape writing by Horatio Clare or Robert MacFarland, something more practical and pragmatic by James Rebanks or maybe a  memoir or biography. This time it was […]

I nearly went to Turkey. Once in the late sixties I was on a schools’ cruise ship in the Med. Turkey was on the itinerary but there were tensions about Cyprus between Turkey and Greece, and the captain decided to play safe and refused to dock there. I still haven’t visited and have to admit […]