I was doing my daily Yoga with Adriene today (daily is relative) and as we sat massaging our feet, Adriene asked me – through the screen, she spoke to me – what’s your favourite book? Leave a comment, she said, and tell me what your favourite book is. And as...
Soul Tourists by Bernardine Evaristo is not at all what I was expecting from the cover or the blurb. It is a fairly linear story, but told partly in prose, partly in verse and partly in a sort of condensed dialogue format which swings from internal to external. It doesn’t...
It’s not easy being a book lover on the road. My parents (bless them) have several hundred of my books in storage in their garage, and yet I still shipped over two boxes of printed matter! One box of those were my diaries and notebooks and various works in progress....
Review: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss Look, I persevered. It is no doubt an interesting book concept. And I came away from it with a clear and unsettling feeling that I had just spent a week in overgrown and hostile jungles, amongst the sticky, sharp, cloying, impenetrable vegetation of Aldiss’s future...
Adding a book to the ‘did not finish’ pile always feels like a failure. On whose part, I don’t know – the reader and the writer are sometimes equally to blame. There are plenty of (probably) truly excellent books that I just haven’t been able to finish, and loads of...
Like a lot of people around the world, I was saddened today to hear about the death of Terry Pratchett – AT LAST, SIR TERRY, said Death, and they walked out the door together. C and I were talking about literature the other day, about answering questions like “what are...
“The Lost Dog”, Michelle de Kretser. (Chatto & Windus, London: 2008) Review – Beautiful & tedious & gorgeous & dull. Yes, all of those things. I had to re-borrow this book from the library to try to remember what it was about and if I’d liked it. In general, I’d...
“Life After Life” Doubleday, 2013 (Kindle) Could also be called “Fifty Ways to Kill a Woman”. Ursula Todd, doomed to live her life over and over again, tries so hard every time to get it right. But perhaps you never can get it right. We don’t really get second chances....
In the spirit of data collection, I’ve taken to using Bitly to see which of my links people actually clink on. And the results are, I have to say, despairing. I shared a few stories this week. One was about a woman who draws penises using her Nike running app....
Man, I used to love the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Was it the superb cover design? Or was it the excellent writing? I guess it was the (false) feeling of having some control over where the story would go. The first one I remember reading was “Who Killed Harlowe...
