Category: My Reading

  • The Muses – Kiran Millwood Hargrove

    When I really engage with a book I always want to find out about the writer (she lives in Oxford) and I want to see what else she has written; in this case not very much, one other novel and 2 books for young people. So, having read The Dance Tree, the ‘other’ book is […]

  • The Dance Tree – Kiran Millwood Hargrove

    The Dance Tree is one of the best books I have read in a long time and I would love you to read it too. The story is firmly grounded in history which I really like. In this case the setting is sixteenth century Germany; Alsace, sometimes German, sometimes French; in and around Strasbourg. The […]

  • Midnight Blue – Simone Van Der Vlugt

    A lovely story and a great read. I had never heard of this author and was interested to find out that she is a best selling writer in the Netherlands and that this is the first of her books to be translated into English. It is late in the seventeenth century in Northern Holland and […]

  • Louise Penney: Still Life and Fatal Grace

    I have been living a ‘small town life’ of late but very definitely that of a town in the US or Canada. There are of course plenty of small towns in England but they are never as remote as those on the other side of the Atlantic and that makes a difference; there is less […]

  • Bloodknots by Luke Jennings

    It is sometimes simple to say why a book works for you but at other times it is very difficult. This memoir is focused on fishing. I know nothing about fishing and really have very little interest in it and yet I liked this book a great deal. A blood knot is the simplest way […]

  • The Handmaids Tale – Margaret Atwood

    Why would one read a truly dystopian novel? I have read several books by Margaret Atwood and have enjoyed the work of a skilled writer but I have avoided reading The Handmaids Tale for many years, having seen several articles about the content as well as  trailers of the television series. (It was published in […]

  • The Love Story of Queenie Hennessy / Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North – both by Rachel Joyce

    These are the second and third parts of ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ trilogy,  a story that is about to leap into life on a cinema screen near you anytime now. The stars are Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton and I’m looking forward to seeing it at some point. Harold’s pilgrimage, unlikely, physical and […]

  • The 3,000 Mile Garden

    This book has kept its place on my shelves for 3 decades and has never come close to being culled. I must have read it four or five times and it never disappoints. What more could you ask of a book? The 3,000 miles in question takes us from Eccleston Square in London to Cushing […]

  • Not my usual reading

    A friend at church gave me ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot. She said that she had ended up with 2 copies and thought I would find it interesting reading. Glancing at the cover I thought it was a novel but it is definitely not. This is real life in all its […]

  • The Wife of Bath

    I studied this story, one part of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for A level and I remember we were all surprised and more than a little uncomfortable with how bawdy the Wife of Bath was. We didn’t quite know how to deal with it! I have just been to an event in the Oxford Literary Festival […]