Visitation Street
‘On her way home, Val goes over all the details of Jonathan’s apartment, the smell of old smoke and stale laundry, the sound of honky-tonk trickling in from the bar . . . In bed, she continues to replay the entire afternoon at the music teacher’s apartment, examining it until the sheen comes off, until she can […]
Wonder Boys: A Twist on the Campus Novel
‘For the one thousandth time I resorted to the nine-page plot outline, single-spaced, tattered and coffee-stained, that I’d fired off on a vainglorious April morning five years before . . . An accidental poisoning, a car crash, a house on fire; the birth of three children and a miraculous trotter named Faithless; a theft, an […]
The Unstrung Harp by Edward Gorey
To give it its full title: The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel (1953). There is no-one quite like Edward Gorey whose illustrations conjure up a rather sinister, vaguely Edwardian world. I can’t really give the full flavour of the book without breaching copyright as the pictures are half of it. The cover will have […]
The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate
It is the 1930s and eighteen year old Fanny has been invited to a daunting house-party at Hampton Park. Her terrifying hostess Lady Montdore and the fashionable Mrs Chaddesley Corbett call her over and ask her, ‘Are you in love?’ ‘I felt myself becoming scarlet in the face. How could they have guessed my secret? […]
Books I wouldn’t buy for myself …
. . . but am very happy to receive as presents. I’ll begin by saying that I do buy a lot of books. But there are certain categories I tend to avoid. I already pay a hefty subscription to the London Library, so I try not to buy books that I can borrow: biographies, non-fiction […]
What to read when you are still not very well
by which I mean still coughing, sneezing and streaming. I know I am not alone: others have been suffering from this exceptionally long-lived virus. Luckily I am not short of reading material. And one book I’ve particularly enjoyed is Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop. ‘November, a dark, rainy Tuesday, late afternoon. This is my ideal […]
What to read when you are not very well
I have got one of those annoying colds that just goes on and on with days when I think I am getting better followed by relapses when I don’t want to do anything but loll around and read something undemanding. So what did I read? This Xmas my brother gave me one of his own books that I have long coveted: […]
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination
The British Library are on a roll. They’ve followed up an excellent exhibition on book illustration with an equally good one on the Gothic. I absolutely loved it. The range is wide, taking in its origins in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Strawberrry Hill and going right up to the Whitby Goth Weekend, photographed […]
Mat Coward is a guest on my blog
I first came across Mat Coward in a CWA anthology. He is a first-rate short story writer, but he also writes across a wide range of other genre: sci-fi, crime, children’s books (including Dr Who adventures), as well as being a gardening columnist for the Morning Star and a researcher on QI. I began by asking […]
The Assassination of the Archduke
This book by Greg King and Susan Woolmans is subtitled: ‘Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder that Changed the World.’ It was recommended by Elaine at http://randomjottings.typepad.com. I decided that it was something I didn’t know enough about. It did after all set in train a sequence of events that led to the deaths of millions, including my […]