Category: My Reading

  • You Are Here – David Nicholls

    This is quite a quick and easy read but I don’t mean that in any critical way. It is a lovely book: charming, funny, witty and demonstrating the author’s ability to observe the everyday in minute detail. The novel is written in alternating perspectives from 2 middle-aged, divorced and lonely characters: Marnie and Michael. Extrovert […]

  • The Years – Annie Ernaux

    I don’t think I have read too many works by Nobel prize winners in literature but here is one example. It took me a little time to get into this book maybe because in the beginning I thought I was going to be reading fiction. This is not a story in that sense but it […]

  • Time To Keep Silence – Patrick Lee Fermor

    Some people are so much larger than life that they seem to be fictional. TE Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, comes to mind, and, in the same mould, Patrick Lee Fermor. One reviewer of his work described him as a cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond. As a baby he was left with a random […]

  • The Woman in the Fifth – Douglas Kennedy

    My Douglas Kennedy shelf is in the bookcase in my hall. That row of books is quite full of itself. There are many hardback books and even the paperbacks are large. Somehow this seems quite suitable as these are big stories with a capital B. It also seems apt that they are written by an […]

  • A Paris Novel – Ruth Reichl

    My granddaughter and I were enjoying a wander around Barnes and Noble. I was telling her how much I had liked being in Florence the previous year and reading fiction based in that city. I was about to spend a few days in Paris and was wondering what I should read there. We wandered some […]

  • Bookish – Lucy Mangan

    If you have ever used books as an escape or if you have ever put reading above other commitments, then you will find it easy to commune with this author who is writing about how reading shapes our lives. This is a follow up book to ‘Bookworm.’ The idea is the same and it’s fun. […]

  • Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

    This book had been at the edges of my reading mind for a long time. Eventually I have read it. Gilead is a real place, a mountainous area in Palestine and it is an imagined small town in Iowa, USA. Iowa is in the mid-west. It is a flyover state i.e. tourists fly from the […]

  • The Wager and the Bear – John Ironmonger

    I didn’t mean to go book shopping. Writing that reminds me of the Arthur Ransome title: ‘We didn’t mean to go to sea.’ But, anyway, there I was in Blackwells in Oxford and I knew I wouldn’t leave without some new reading. I bargained with myself…well, if you’re going to buy, then make it something […]

  • My Fathers House – Joseph O’Connor

    The Sunday Times offered a review on a new book by Joseph O’Connor: The Ghosts of Rome and then Daunt’s bookshop advertised a talk with the author. I couldn’t go to that but I was interested enough to look it all up. My holiday to Florence and Rome last summer still gives me a heightened […]

  • Rivers in the Sky – Elif Shafak

    I finished reading this book a few weeks ago but I have hesitated about writing about it. It’s difficult to say why, maybe because the distance the novel covers is so huge that I don’t really know where to start. It is three stories in one and these are joined together by water. This book […]