Two new crime novels
A few post ago I wrote about reducing my TBR pile by culling those novels that I decided not to read. Well, here are a couple that made the cut. I read both on my e-reader, where unread books were also accumulating: fatally easy to buy them and just as easy to forget you’ve got them. I’m […]
Spectre
One thing about having children later in life: no danger of settling into a comfortable middle-age (or even old age, come to that). I find myself doing things I otherwise wouldn’t dream of doing. Thus it was last Saturday that I found myself settling into my seat at the Odeon Sheffield next to my teenage daughter […]
I am buying books in my sleep
Regular readers of my blog will know that I have decided to abstain from buying books for three months. I began on the 24th September and I have been more or less faithful to my vow (I’ve bought a book at a book launch and a friend’s newly published poetry collection – I wanted to support her […]
Reykjavik Nights
In my last blog I wrote about discarding crime novels. Here is one that survived the cull. In fact Arnaldur Indridason is one of my favourite writers and I had been saving his latest. I won’t be recycling it via the charity shop either. Reykjavik Nights (2015) takes us back to the very beginning of Erlendur’s […]
How to reduce a TBR pile
Now that I am not buying books, I’m taking a good look at the books I’ve got and deciding which ones I really do want to read and which ones I’m going to get rid of. There are two categories that deserve special scrutiny: books from goody bags at conferences and books from charity shops. […]
Thriller-writer James Grady is my guest
Every day the young James Grady, apprentice journalist and college senior on a fellowship in Washington, walked past a white stucco townhouse, the headquarters of the American Historical Association. He never saw anyone go in or out. One day the thought struck him, ‘what if that building were a CIA front and one day someone went out […]
More on my moratorium
I did buy a book this week, but let me explain. I’ve decided that there has to be one exception to my non-book-buying rule and it’s this: I really can’t go to a book launch and not buy a book. It just wouldn’t feel right. And to turn down an invitation to a book launch because I’m […]
The Adventures of Moriarty
I always enjoy writing a story to a brief and ‘The Mystery of the Missing Child’ was no exception. I’d been thinking for a while that I’d like to try my hand at a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. So when Maxim Jakubowski put out a call for stories featuring Holmes’s arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty, ‘the Napoleon of […]
How I bought a book by accident
I’ll come on to how I did that in a minute. It’s two weeks now since I decided to have a three month moratorium on book-buying. It hasn’t been easy and yesterday I would have probably succumbed if it hadn’t been for the thought of having to own up to the lapse on this blog. I […]
A book on punctuation makes me laugh out loud
‘A couple I’ll call Penny and Jeter come out to my bungalow in Rockaway and proceed to devour the cheries I’ve put out in a bowl on the table. Jeter says, “Don’t put a bowl of cherries in front of Penny and I.” I am not about to snatch the cherries away unless Jeter learns […]