Reading in blinkers
That was one of my first reactions to reading on my Kindle Paperwhite which my husband gave me for my birthday in December. Given that I am thinking of making two of my Cassandra novels available as ebooks, it seemed time to try out the technology for myself. It has made me more conscious of […]
The Making of a Marchioness
I hadn’t actually read anything by Frances Hodgson Burnett until I read this, though not long ago I saw an excellent film of The Secret Garden. It was Elaine’s corruscating review of the recent TV adaptation of The Making of a Marchioness on her wonderful Random Jottings blog and her enthusiasm for the original novel […]
The Pledge
About ten years ago I saw an impressive, if sombre, film, The Pledge, which starred Jack Nicholson and was directed by Sean Penn. It’s a dark tale in which a policeman is called to one last case on the day before he retires. It is the murder of a child and Nicholson’s character, moved by […]
Sheer Bliss
I’ve just read John Mullan’s WHAT MATTERS IN JANE AUSTEN: TWENTY CRUCIAL PUZZLES SOLVED and haven’t enjoyed a book as much for ages. However the title is misleading: he doesn’t solve puzzles as much as explore fascinating questions, such as ‘Why is the Weather Important?,’ ‘Do We Ever See the Lower Classes?,’ ‘Is There Any […]
Souvenirs
Soem time ago (December 2008 and February 2009) I wrote about trying to decide which of my mother’s books to keep after she had died. It wasn’t until this summer that I finally took the last ones to the charity shop. I have kept a fair number, integrating them into my own collection, but accepted […]
I’m glad I didn’t read . . .
. . . THE QUARRY by Friedrich Durrenmatt before I wrote my own short story, ‘Vanishing Act'(published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine last year). I got THE QUARRY out of the London Library after Mark Lawson talked about Durrenmatt recently in one of series of programmes about European crime fiction on Radio 4. And as […]
The Fear Index
My sadness at seeing that Blackwell’s in Broomhill was about to close didn’t stop me from going in and buying a few books at half price. One of them was The Fear Index by Robert Harris, and what a gripping read this turned out to be. Alex Hoffmann has become fabulously wealthy through his invention […]
Another book shop bites the dust
Well, a branch of Blackwell’s, rather than the company itself. Last week I went into Broomhill in Sheffield as I do every six weeks or so to have my hair cut and signs were up in the windows of Blackwell’s announcing that everything was half-price because the shop was about to close. I don’t know […]
Present Tense
Yesterday I was browsing in Smith’s on Sheffield station and my eye was caught by a promising book title: Autumn Killing by Mons Kallentoft. I hadn’t read anything by the author before, but when I’d scanned the blurb, I felt inclined to buy it. I love Nordic crime and this was set in Sweden, one […]
The tale, not the teller
I’m returning to a lot of old favourites at the moment – I might explore the reasons for that in another blog – and as I planned another raid on the shelves of the London Library for Maigret novels I reflected not for the first time on the discrepancy between the man and the books. […]