Category: My Reading

  • 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 […]

  • Went to London, Took the Dog – Nina Stibbe

    This is essentially a diary written by the author whilst living in London for a year, on what she calls a sabbatical from her marriage, left behind in Cornwall. Will she return the reader wonders as the days and months pass by. When she wrote this, was she already intending it for publication I wonder. […]

  • The Small Miracle – Paul Gallico

    This is a small review for a small book, that is worth reading nevertheless. I came upon this little hard back whilst doing some clearing out and reorganising. I knew I had read it before but I thought it deserved a second look. It took me less than an hour to read but I am […]

  • All around the year – Michael Morpurgo

    I enjoy reading books about the natural world, the countryside, the landscape etc and I very much enjoyed this one. It is however different in several ways. This is a diary written by Michael Morpurgo of the year 1976 and was never intended for publication. During that year, I actually remember it well: drought and […]

  • George Barker and Much More

    I had never heard of the poet George Barker but I was sent on a Barker odyssey recently by my favourite Sunday Times columnist India Knight. ‘Read Notes from the Henhouse, she said, ‘by Elspeth Barker. She was the wife of George Barker, who was the subject of By Grand Central Station I sat down […]

  • The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway

    During the long siege of Sarajevo between 1992 to 1996, a cellist stood at his apartment window. He looked down at the bakery on the opposite side of the road and noticed that a queue was forming. This meant that people had learnt there might be loaves available. The cellist saw friends and neighbours and […]