The Cake Tree in the Ruins by Akiyuki Nosaka Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori It’s the 13th year of the Japanese Literature Challenge, hosted by Meredith of Dolce Belezza – it runs from January through to the end of March – find out more here. I hope to read more than one book for it, Read More
Month: January 2020
The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
I discovered this memoir through Rebecca’s post here and it was one of her ‘backlist best of’ choices too last year. You need to be of strong stuff right from the start, as Yuknavitch begins her account of her life so far with a truly emotional and painful episode, the stillbirth of her daughter, a Read More
Blog Tour – Cara Hunter – All the Rage
I discovered Oxford author Cara Hunter last year when she visited my local indie bookshop for a Crime Panel Event. It was fascinating to hear her talk about the genesis of her detective, DI Adam Fawley, and about the way she includes social media and transcripts in her texts. I went on to read the Read More
The World of Ephemera: Learning Your Scales
You know I love ephemera, (see here for lots of posts on the subject). It’s amazing, the bits of paper you find, when rooting around for things. Today I found this: I bet you thought slide-rules were just used for maths! Actually most of you will never have come across a maths slide-rule. By the Read More
A review assortment – Johnston – McGlasson – Dawson
I didn’t mean to leave a week between posts, but I’ve got some very welcome overtime at the moment, which means that everything else moves into blogging time and so on. So here are three medium length reviews of recent reads for you. A Sixpenny Song by Jennifer Johnston It was Kim’s post here, celebrating Read More
A review assortment – Lahiri, MacKenzie, Maugham
The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri Translated from the Italian by Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush An London-born American author of Bengali descent, Lahiri moved to Italy where she now writes in Italian – and her husband translated this essay into English, which she then reworked in both Italian and English for its English publication! Complicated, huh? Read More
“Home is so sad”
How It Was by Janet Ellis After reading and loving the late Clive James’ last book, an anthology of his writing on Philip Larkin (reviewed here), I was planning to read more Larkin already. Then, up he pops in my last read of 2019, in the title and epigraph of Janet Ellis’s second novel, for Read More
Belatedly, my reading plans for 2020
I don’t intend to make formal New Year’s reading resolutions, but I do have plans! 1. State of the TBR It always has been out of control. I used to take part in the TBR Dare annually, in which participants tried to only read from their TBR from 1st Jan to 31st March. That was Read More
Six Degrees of Separation: Daisy Jones & The Six
Hosted by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest, Six Degrees of Separation picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six more steps. Links in the titles will take you to my reviews where they exist. This month – the starting book is: Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid How I loved Read More
Red Lockdown!
Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton Anyone who works in a school will be familiar with ‘lockdown’ procedures, with code reds being the ones you hope you’ll only ever have to practice; the make yourselves as invisible as you can to an intruder ones. Lupton’s latest novel takes such an awful situation, placing it into an Read More
The World of Ephemera: A Classic Crochet Pattern
Something away from books today as a palate cleanser from all those best of lists! Plug the word ‘Ephemera’ into the search bar or click here, and you’ll bring up a rich variety of bits of vintage paper, most of which hail from my late mum, who was an inveterate newspaper clipper. I found this Read More
Review of the Decade
Happy New Year & Happy New Decade! But, before I dive headlong into the 2020s, here’s just one more backwards-looking post to pick out my highlights for each year of the 2010s, well 2010-2018 – I’m considering 2019 done! 2018 Book of the Year: To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine. Something about this memoir Read More
