Category: My Reading

  • Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

    I didn’t mean to buy this book. I needed one as a gift. I chose the right book from the buy one get one half price table in Waterstones and obviously I then needed to buy the second book. Nothing in particular caught my eye until I saw the name Julian Barnes. Anything written by […]

  • Paul Gallico, Cats And More

    So there I was on a transatlantic flight last autumn, scrolling through the list of films from which I could choose. Nothing particularly grabbed my attention until I came to ‘Mrs Harris goes to Paris’. That will do I thought and so I settled down to watch it. The film sticks closely to the book, […]

  • Campus Novels

    I have always been fascinated by closed societies: monasteries and convents, boarding schools and to some extent universities, although one gets the feeling that most of the latter are more open now than in times past. I think the interest stems from the idea that these places can and do create their own rules, traditions […]

  • 84 Charing Cross Road – Helene Hanff

    This is a real life story in the form of a book of letters. It has a quiet charm and illustrates the world and particularly London in the 1930s and then wartime. Helene Hanff was a writer with a particular interest in classical literature, who lived and worked in her small New York apartment. Finding […]

  • The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O’ Farrell

    I did not immediately fall in love with this book, as I did with Hamnet, but it grew on me after a chapter or so. It is a great story and a rich read. It is indeed a portrait of a marriage but it is also a clearly painted picture of misogyny, control and female […]

  • Still Life by Sarah Winman

    I stayed in bed this morning beyond what anyone would consider a respectable time on an ordinary Thursday in February, because I just had to finish the book I was reading. What a book! I urge you to buy, borrow or steal a copy. Well, ignore the last option but you get my drift. This […]

  • Cyrano de Bergerac – Geraldine McCaughrean

    A suitable story for Valentine’s Day maybe. I do understand that Geraldine McCaughrean did not originally pen this story. It was written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand completely in rhyming couplets. Since that time it has been reworked and rewritten countless times. It has been staged and filmed and pulled around for years. This edition […]

  • Letters to Alice – Fay Weldon

    The author Fay Weldon died recently and I decided to revisit some of her work. I thought about what I remembered of her. ‘Go to work on an egg,’ the catch phrase of the Egg Marketing Board in the 1950s and 60s, was written by Fay Weldon during the years she worked in advertising before […]

  • Knots and Crosses and Hide and Seek … Ian Rankin

    Rebus means enigmatic puzzle. Whether Ian Rankin gave his main character this name for this reason I don’t know but it definitely works. I have a list of authors that I want to explore further or visit for the first time and Ian Rankin has been there for a long time. Weirdly I read the […]

  • Small Things Like These

    When a friend pressed this book into my hand, urging me to read it, I had never heard of Claire Keegan. The book was a one night read, 114 pages. I noticed it had been on the 2022 Booker shortlist but I find this is not always a good recommendation for me. I have before […]