Category: My Reading

  • Seth Rhyming with Plate

    As I walked into the kitchen, Petroc Trelawney, my favourite Radio 3 presenter was talking about a book called An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth. However, he didn’t say Seth as I had been pronouncing it i.e. the Biblical Hebrew way. Instead he said Sate, as I said, rhyming with plate. In India this is […]

  • The Farmer’s Wife – Helen Rebanks

    I have read 2 books by James Rebanks, the husband of the above author. ‘The Shepherd’s Life’ and ‘English Pastoral’ are both excellent reads, written in a cogent and pleasing style and mainly autobiographical. Both books though do have an agenda that the author wants to communicate and that is concerning sustainable farming and our […]

  • The Last Remains – Elly Griffiths

    When you are selling many copies of your books, they are applauded by literary columnists and your readers wait avidly for the next instalment, it seems very brave to say: this is the last one. ‘The Last Remains’ is the 15th Dr. Ruth Galloway book and the last one in the series. I find that […]

  • Life of Pi – Yann Martel

    This 2002 Booker prize winner is one of the strangest books I have read. The sobriquet Booker prize winner does not always mean it will be a book that I enjoy. Some I haven’t even attempted to complete but this was quite an easy read. A zookeeper’s son, Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat […]

  • Landlines – Raynor Winn

    I think most readers will have heard of this author. This is her third book, following on from The Salt Path and The Wild Silence. The Salt Path was a publishing sensation chronicling as it did the walking of the South West Coast Path by Raynor and her husband Moth. Impressive enough to walk the […]

  • The Muses – Kiran Millwood Hargrove

    When I really engage with a book I always want to find out about the writer (she lives in Oxford) and I want to see what else she has written; in this case not very much, one other novel and 2 books for young people. So, having read The Dance Tree, the ‘other’ book is […]

  • The Dance Tree – Kiran Millwood Hargrove

    The Dance Tree is one of the best books I have read in a long time and I would love you to read it too. The story is firmly grounded in history which I really like. In this case the setting is sixteenth century Germany; Alsace, sometimes German, sometimes French; in and around Strasbourg. The […]

  • Midnight Blue – Simone Van Der Vlugt

    A lovely story and a great read. I had never heard of this author and was interested to find out that she is a best selling writer in the Netherlands and that this is the first of her books to be translated into English. It is late in the seventeenth century in Northern Holland and […]

  • Louise Penney: Still Life and Fatal Grace

    I have been living a ‘small town life’ of late but very definitely that of a town in the US or Canada. There are of course plenty of small towns in England but they are never as remote as those on the other side of the Atlantic and that makes a difference; there is less […]

  • Bloodknots by Luke Jennings

    It is sometimes simple to say why a book works for you but at other times it is very difficult. This memoir is focused on fishing. I know nothing about fishing and really have very little interest in it and yet I liked this book a great deal. A blood knot is the simplest way […]