Category: My Reading

  • 3 Short Books

    All of these were really impulse buys and 2 of the three were successful so that is pretty good I think. In Daunts beautiful bookshop in Marylebone High Street, where one could go simply to admire the gorgeous Edwardian architecture, they arrange their travel section in a very particular fashion. There is a bookshelf of […]

  • Bibliomaniac – Robin Ince

    I sometimes enjoy reading a book about books and book lovers. This is a wide church of course. There are very different members of this club. I came across this book through Daunts Bookshop inviting me to a talk Robin Ince was giving. I very nearly went but the trains had other ideas; it was […]

  • Rooftoppers – Katherine Rundell

    I first heard of this book, and indeed this writer, at a U3A session. Coincidentally the author was then a guest of Michael Berkeley on Radio 3s Private Passions and I realised that she had written the introduction to a Michael Morpurgo book I had read recently. I have not worked out quite why she […]

  • My Salinger Year – Joanna Rakoff

    It is always good to receive news from Slightly Foxed. The book that caught my eye this time was called ‘My Salinger Year’ written by Joanna Rakoff. It is a memoir of a year spent working in an esteemed literary agency in New York City in the 1990s. The author was an intern, an assistant […]

  • Rebecca / Frenchman’s Creek – Daphne du Maurier

    This is a minor Daphne du Maurier fest about 2 of her novels: Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek. I will leave Jamaica Inn and My Cousin Rachel for another time. (There are of course many others but those are the four famous stories.) Looking along my bookshelves I found I had all 4 stories in a […]

  • Treacle Walker – Alan Garner

    And now for something totally different. You may know the author Alan Garner from his children’s book ‘The Owl Service’ which was important to several generations and subsequently became a television series. However, there have been very many books since then and Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, written as Alan Garner […]

  • Saplings – Noel Streatfeild

    Along with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women books and the Heidi stories, Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild looms large in my childhood reading. Goodness knows how many times I read it. I still have the rather battered paperback; my original copy. Reading it again a few years ago, two thoughts came to mind. Firstly, what […]

  • The Tap Dancer – Andrew Barrow

    This was a strange read but one that I am still thinking about sometime after finishing it. If I hadn’t been told otherwise I could have believed that this was autobiographical but apparently not: fiction, all fiction. Although of course one can hardly avoid putting something of oneself into any piece of writing. A weird […]

  • The Woods in Winter – Stella Gibbons

    If you know anything about Stella Gibbons, then it is probably her first novel: Cold Comfort Farm. In this book Aunt Ada Doom famously saw ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ and this experience, never explained or clarified, scarred her for life. There was indeed something ‘nasty in the woodshed’ in the early life of the […]

  • The Wisdom of Sheep and Other Animals – Rosamund Young

    This book is apparently a follow up to a first publication venture called ‘The Secret Life of Cows’ which I have not read. I might though, because I did enjoy these gentle pages telling of life on a family farm, handed down through generations. The farm is in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds and has been run […]