Category: My Reading

  • The Handmaids Tale – Margaret Atwood

    Why would one read a truly dystopian novel? I have read several books by Margaret Atwood and have enjoyed the work of a skilled writer but I have avoided reading The Handmaids Tale for many years, having seen several articles about the content as well as  trailers of the television series. (It was published in […]

  • The Love Story of Queenie Hennessy / Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North – both by Rachel Joyce

    These are the second and third parts of ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ trilogy,  a story that is about to leap into life on a cinema screen near you anytime now. The stars are Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton and I’m looking forward to seeing it at some point. Harold’s pilgrimage, unlikely, physical and […]

  • The 3,000 Mile Garden

    This book has kept its place on my shelves for 3 decades and has never come close to being culled. I must have read it four or five times and it never disappoints. What more could you ask of a book? The 3,000 miles in question takes us from Eccleston Square in London to Cushing […]

  • Not my usual reading

    A friend at church gave me ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot. She said that she had ended up with 2 copies and thought I would find it interesting reading. Glancing at the cover I thought it was a novel but it is definitely not. This is real life in all its […]

  • The Wife of Bath

    I studied this story, one part of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for A level and I remember we were all surprised and more than a little uncomfortable with how bawdy the Wife of Bath was. We didn’t quite know how to deal with it! I have just been to an event in the Oxford Literary Festival […]

  • Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

    I didn’t mean to buy this book. I needed one as a gift. I chose the right book from the buy one get one half price table in Waterstones and obviously I then needed to buy the second book. Nothing in particular caught my eye until I saw the name Julian Barnes. Anything written by […]

  • Paul Gallico, Cats And More

    So there I was on a transatlantic flight last autumn, scrolling through the list of films from which I could choose. Nothing particularly grabbed my attention until I came to ‘Mrs Harris goes to Paris’. That will do I thought and so I settled down to watch it. The film sticks closely to the book, […]

  • 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 […]