Category: My Reading

  • 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 […]

  • The Stranger Diaries and The Postscript Murders

    I have written before about Doctor Ruth Galloway, the most delightful and beautifully written character in the detective novels by Elly Griffiths, all set on the Norfolk coast. I have talked to several others who have read all the books and love them as I do. (I think there is a carefully defined difference between […]

  • The Pilot’s Wife by Anita Shreve

    The bookcase on the landing has many books upon it that I would have bought and read back in the 80s and 90s. Susan Sallis, Erica James, Katie Fforde and Anita Shreve. All female writers I notice. At that time my reading habits were very different. I was teaching full time and had 4 young […]