Maigret in Vichy
I’m making it a rule now always to have something French on my ereader. Earlier in the year it was Simenon’s Maigret’s Little Joke, which I blogged about in June, and I have just finished Maigret in Vichy. I loved them both. Simonen wrote over eighty Maigret stories – that is quite some going for […]
More Treasure
In my previous blog I wondered if ebooks would herald a resurgence in the publication of short stories and novellas. What I hadn’t fully realised was the extent to which it is already far easier to get hold of collections of short stories that in the past have been very hard to find or prohibitively […]
Gone Girl
I was somewhat late coming to the party with this acclaimed crime novel by Gillian Flynn. You know how it is. Sometimes all the hype puts you off, especially if, like me, you are a bit of a contrarian. However I finally succumbed and I am glad I did. It’s a really gripping read, particularly […]
Plotting for Grown-Ups
Sue Hepworth’s new book, PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS is being launched next Tuesday. I thought I’d interview her and this is what she had to say: How far do you draw on your own experiences in your books? In other words, are you Sally Howe? ‘I always draw on my own life in my books, but […]
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
This book by pyschoanalyst, Stephen Grosz, has been widely reviewed and deservedly so. When it arrived from the London Library, I opened it to flick through it and read the odd page, and that was it, I was hooked. I read it more or less in one sitting, drawn on by the enticing titles: ‘How […]
Why I Love Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
It arrives through my letter box every month or so in its neat transparent wrapper. It’s the perfect size and weight – better even than a Kindle – to slip in my handbag for emergency reading. I encounter old friends in its pages and read work by writers new to me. I like the old-fashioned […]
Life and Fate
In my previous post I wrote about a book I was reading when I was nineteen. It was a wonderful time in my reading life, when I read voraciously: WAR AND PEACE, ANNA KARENINA, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, quite apart from the books that I was required to read for my English degree.I used to be […]
Books and Places
The time: a late June afternoon in the nineteen seventies. The place: Sheffield railway station. I was changing trains there on my way home to the North-east from Leicester university. I was nineteen. I didn’t have much luggage as my trunk had gone on by road (does anyone take a trunk to university these days?). […]
Childhood reading
One of the advantages of my e-reader is that I can download a lot of out of copyright material and that’s what I’ve done with some of the books I used to love as a child but had somehow mislaid over the years. I have done that with Susan Coolidge’s Katy novels. WHAT KATY DID […]