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 […]
Better Not to Know Too Much?
These days famous writers are celebrities and details of their marriages, divorces, tax problems, even dentist’s bills are regularly splashed over the media. It seems tough to me that they should be regarded as public property, when writing is such a private and solitary activity. And how much does it really add to our enjoyment […]
A Far Cry From Kensington
A few weeks ago in my post ‘Nothing New under the Sun’ I wrote about diets in fiction, and the other day it occurred to me that I had missed out a novel I much admire, Muriel Spark’s A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON. I have it next to me as I write and it is […]
Maigret’s Little Joke
Or in the original French, Maigret s’amuse, and, yes, I am reading it in the original French – on my Kindle with the aid of an electronic French dictionary. It’s wonderful: all I have to do is touch a word for a definition to appear. Mind you, it’s not perfect. It sometimes doesn’t have a […]
The London Eye Mystery
A month or two ago I blogged about MURDER IN THE LIBRARY and mentioned a novel on display there, THE LONDON EYE MYSTERY, that sounded intriguing. I’ve read it now and thoroughly enjoyed it. When twelve-year old Ted and and his older sister, Kat, watch their cousin Salim get on board the London Eye, he […]
Little Women
I must have pretty little myself when I last read LITTLE WOMEN, because I don’t think I’ve read it as an adult, at least not all the way through. I decided to return to it after reading Jane Smiley’s THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE NOVEL, which contains some fascinating commentaries on a hundred books, […]
Nothing new under the sun
I’ve been reading about the Fast Diet, which has had so much publicity recently. It involves two days of fasting per week (on 500 calories a day for women, 600 for men) and five of feasting, ie eating what you like. The health benefits, quite apart from losing weight, seem to be considerable and people […]
The scent of a cigar
A while ago I blogged about how much I enjoyed John Mullan’s book about Jane Austen. I followed that up by reading HOW NOVELS WORK by the same author. This too is hugely enjoyable and I found a lot of food for thought both as a reader and a writer. I knew I was in […]