Category: My Reading

I picked up this book out of sheer curiosity. There are masses of these paperbacks and they are everywhere, from Daunts and Waterstones to Sainsburys. They nearly fill the best seller lists that appear every week in the Sunday Times. Do note these are the bestseller lists, not necessarily lists of the best books! I […]

Well, this slim book is well named. For the vast majority of us it is indeed a conundrum to feel so very strongly that you were born into the wrong body that you are prepared to undergo lengthy, risky and painful surgery to become a member of the opposite sex. Jan Morris was born James […]

I haven’t read any Rachel Joyce for a while. A few years ago I did enjoy The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (and the subsequent film) followed by Maureen Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. Quite a moving trilogy. In Homemade God we are faraway from Harold’s genteel suburbia, instead transported to […]

I have had a couple of months where I have been deeply immersed in detective fiction of one sort or another: Ian Rankin, Mick Herron, Robert Galbraith, just for starters. I needed an antidote … and then it was Valentines Day. My gift was a debut novel by Lucy Steeds; The Artist. A perfect present […]

How many pages can you read whilst a saucepan of peas cooks do you think? As it turns out, quite a few. I know as I have done it. Usually my current book stays beside my bed, except during lockdown times when there was a downstairs book and an upstairs book. However, I lived (I […]

Lots of writers, artists and composers are known by the general public for one work, think of Widor and his Toccata, Dukas and the Sorcerors Apprentice, Ravel and Bolero, Munch for his ghastly picture ‘The Scream,’ JD Salinger with ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and then there is Harper Lee. Harper Lee (1926-2016) is famous, hugely […]

Some non-fiction is good now and then, and when I dip into it, it tends to be art, history or landscape based. Here is some history that I just stumbled on half price in Waterstones. Alice Loxton is a young historian and writer and indeed this book could only have been written by someone who […]

At a recent U3A session that I go to about poetry, prose and plays, someone read a poem by Helen Dunmore. I hadn’t thought about this author for a long time but I knew I had  book of her poetry. I found it, enjoyed dipping into it and realised there was a poem at the […]

This is another in the series by Alexander McCall Smith and I went to this recently as an antidote to the many crime fiction books I had consumed in quick succession. You know that there will be no grisly deaths, accidental or intentional in this story. The author has even confessed that he doesn’t really […]

Like most people I met Kate Atkinson through her early books: Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet. These books were award winners and much lauded. Later, much later, I found the Jackson Brodie stories and devoured as many as I could find, loving them all. Recently I picked up a fairly old […]