Be afraid . . . be very afraid
Books that have really scared you do tend to stick in the mind. When I was nine or ten I got hold of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ gave me pause for thought, but ‘The Speckled Band’ frightened me so much that I couldn’t finish the book. I have read them many […]
The book that made me cry in the library
I’m I’m in Birmingham again at the wonderful Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre. It’s the time of year that makes me think of new terms and new beginnings and I remembered arriving in Birmingham as a postgrad all those years ago. I had a couple of hours to spare so this afternoon I decided to hop on […]
Ten books that have stayed with me
A couple of weeks ago, my friend, Daniella, tagged me on Facebook. “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. It is not about the ‘right’ book or great work of literature, just ones that have affected you in some […]
What people are reading on the train
Or. at least, what they were reading on the 17.34 from Victoria to Peckham yesterday. The young man sitting next to me was reading Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. The one opposite was reading Murakawi’s 1Q84. The young woman who got off the train in front of me was reading a Virago Modern Classic, […]
Sally Spedding is my guest
I first met Sally a number of years ago when we did an event together at Heffers in Cambridge. She writes stories that are very, very creepy. Her most recent novel, Malediction, is a noir thriller set in France. Her new book, How to Write a Chiller Thriller, explains some of the secrets of writing supernatural […]
A wonderful writer
The summer holidays are nearly over and it’s time to plan a visit to the London Library. Looking at my pile of library books, I realised that I hadn’t got very far into Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them. I’d got distracted and had forgotten about it. I decided it was worth trying […]
It’s a luxurious feeling . . .
. . . when you discover a new writer – and find that they have written a whole series of books. This is what’s happened to me with Laurie R. King and her novels featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. I read The Beekeeper’s Apprentice while I was on holiday, and I’ve read the second, […]
A moving moment . . .
For me the most moving moment in Middlemarch is not the climax of the novel, when Dorothea and Will are united. To tell the truth, I am not terribly interested in this romance, and find Will rather tiresome – all that shaking his ringlets and what about that flirting with Rosamund Vincy? I am far […]
More on Middlemarch
Mr Casaubon’s Key to all Mythologies must be the most famous unpublished (indeed, unfinished) book in all of literature. In previous rereadings of Middlemarch, I’ve tended to skip over details of this work, but this time I was determined to read the novel from cover to cover. I was fascinated to discover that there is a […]