The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
In a recent blog, Martin Edwards referred to the rather old-fashioned habit of putting a list of characters at the beginning of crime novels. I could have done with one recently when I read THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST, the last of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy. These novels, in particular the last two, are […]
Snow
After I wrote about SICK HEART RIVER in last week’s blog, I got to thinking about other works of fiction that deal with the intense cold, not least because we’ve had a bit of that ourselves and have been snowed in. I realised that some of the most memorable books I’ve read have dealt with […]
John Buchan and others
A friend who reads my blog asked me, ‘How do you manage to read so much?’ I don’t read nearly as much as I have done at some periods of my life, but still . . . ten minutes sometimes over an early morning cup of tea, half an hour over lunch, always at bed-time, […]
The Pattern in the Carpet
Margaret Drabble’s book is subtitled A PERSONAL HISTORY WITH JIGSAWS. It is partly a history of jigsaws (a little too much of this for me) and partly a memoir, focusing on her Aunt Phyl with whom she shared a love of jigsaws. Aunt Phyl was a key person in Drabble’s childhood. Drabble remarks that it […]
A Woman at Home II
Going to the post office to buy stamps and post cards to friends abroad, writing cards, writing letters to the people that I write Christmas letters to, cooking meals, going back to the post office to send the one foreign card I forgot, buying Christmas presents, wrapping Christmas presents, doing the washing, going back to […]
A Woman at Home
I am still mulling over the biography of Elizabeth Taylor that I wrote about a few weeks ago. One of Nicola Beauman’s arguments is that Taylor might have been an even greater novelist if she hadn’t been tied to her sweet-manufacturer husband and the domestic round. I wonder . . . There is virtually always […]
Stranger than Fiction . . .
I recently finished writing a short story which centred around a murder committed by a surgeon who wants to get rid of a woman who is threatening to spill the beans about their affair. I asked myself if this is a plausible motive for murder in this day and age, and decided that given the […]
Home
Marilynne Robinson’s fine novel explores a question that I’ve sometimes pondered. After all the excitement of the return of the Prodigal Son, what happened next? Once they’d eaten the fatted calf and ordinary life resumed, what then? How did the good brother, the dutiful one who had stayed at home, come to terms with the […]
The Mandarins
I was about 200 pages into this 700 page novel by Simone de Beauvoir, when I paused and considered: was I going to finish it or not? It was the choice of my reading group. But was I prepared to devote that much time to it? I decided to push on. I’m glad I did. […]
Coming of Age novels
I’ve recently read two novels which fit into this category. Giorgio Bassani’s THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS and Olive Anne Burns’ COLD SASSY TREE. In other ways they could hardly be more different. Bassani’s novel, published in 1962, is elegaic. lyrical,and poignant. It is set in Ferrara in the 1930s and we know from the […]