Reviews

‘A marvellous entry in this excellent series, one of those books that  you have to keep reading but hate to finish. Highly recommended.’ [Stage Fright]

- MYSTERY WOMEN

New Year’s Resolution

Posted on Jan 9, 2007 in Uncategorized | No Comments

It’s to use this blog as a reading journal and record everything I read for a year. One of my first reads of the year and a fine start was an absolutely cracking ghost story, STRANGERS, by a Japanese writer, Taichi Tamada. The narrator, a middle-aged scriptwriter, divorced, disillusioned, takes a sentimental journey to the […]

Comfort reading

Posted on Dec 23, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments

Yesterday morning I was in Scarborough. I’d struggled over in the fog for a pre-Christmas visit to my mother and was sitting in the waiting room of one of those places where they fix your car while you wait. I had a flat tyre and a flat battery and that was just the car. I […]

Birthday blog

Posted on Dec 18, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments

It’s almost traditional. Today’s my birthday and my present from my husband is a book I’ve already got. Own goals in previous years have included THE BRIDGE OF THE SAN LUIS REY and THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME. This year it is THE VIRAGO BOOK OF GHOST STORIES. I know exactly […]

Sentimental Journey

Posted on Dec 13, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments

A couple of weeks ago I was at a study week-end in Birmingham and drove over to Moseley, a suburb where I used to live between the ages of 22 and 30, an important time in anyone’s life. First I was a postgraduate student and then I worked at the Museum and Art Gallery as […]

The power of art to console

Posted on Dec 2, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments

Last Monday I was in London doing research for an academic article and was travelling from the British Library to the London Library on the underground. I was feeling low, a November day, and not very happy. I was coming up the first of the escalators at Piccadilly Circus when I heard someone singing. As […]

Warning: Reading Can Damage Your Health

Posted on Nov 28, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments

‘A whole family, brought to destitution, has lately had all its misfortunes clearly traced . . . to an ungovernable passion for novel -reading entertained by the wife and mother. The husband was sober and industrious, but his wife was indolent, addicted to reading everything procurable in the shape of a romance. This led her […]

The pig and the sausage

Posted on Nov 20, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments

It’s a strange experience reading a novel by someone you know well, especially when it definitely has autobiographical elements. Sue Hepworth’s lovely comic novel, PLOTTING FOR BEGINNERS, came out earlier this year and features a woman of a certain age living in the Peak District, married to a somewhat eccentric husband, with three children. She […]

namedropping

Posted on Nov 15, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments

Who would have expected a book about the Bayeux tapestry would read like a thriller? It was almost looted by the Nazis. Himmler regarded it as an Aryan masterpiece and was desperate to get it out of France. The Allies reached Paris only just in time. THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY: THE LIFE STORY OF A MASTERPIECE […]

. . . ‘I prefer reading’

Posted on Nov 10, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments

‘People say that life’s the thing, but I prefer reading.’ I’ve always liked that quotation from Logan Pearsall Smith, and there have been times when that was true for me. My decision to make this a blog about books and reading has made me think about the part reading has played in my life. What […]

A Failed Southern lady

Posted on Nov 2, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments

A book that made me laugh out loud recently was Florence King’s CONFESSIONS OF A FAILED SOUTHERN LADY. I missed it when it came out in the 1980s and only caught up with it now because it was chosen by my reading group. It’s supposed to be autobiographical (I imagine some of the tales have […]