It’s been a busy month or two of reading the six wonderfully varied books shortlisted for this year’s Wellcome Book Prize. The judges will announce their result on Monday, but today our informal shadow panel is posting its winner, and our winner is: TO BE A MACHINE by MARK O’CONNELL Here’s what the shadow panel Read More
Author: AnnaBookBel
Wellcome Book Prize Blog Tour
Today, it’s mine and Paul’s (Halfman, Halfbook) turn on the Wellcome Book Prize Blog Tour. Each day two bloggers are covering one of the books on the shortlist for this prize which will be announced on Monday. One will review, the other will host an extract, so head over to Paul’s blog (Halfman, Halfbook) to read a Read More
Wellcome Book Prize #5 – Rausing
My penultimate review of the six books shortlisted for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize. The final one for The Vaccine Race will be my stop on the official blog tour, for the prize which starts tomorrow (details above). Mayhem: A Memoir by Sigrid Rausing You may remember much news coverage of the Rausing family, heirs Read More
1977 week – ‘Here’s Johnny!’
Twice a year, Simon and Karen host a club where we all read from a particular year. This time it was 1977. This turned out to be not the best year for me – the book I would have chosen, had I not read it before would have been Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym Read More
Wellcome Book Prize #3 & #4: Adébáyọ̀ & Mannix
Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ Adébáyọ̀’s novel is the one fiction selection on this year’s Wellcome Prize shortlist. Although it has much to say about the patriarchal society of Nigeria in the 1980s, it surprised me with how much it does meet the prize criteria of a book that celebrates, ” the many ways Read More
Wellcome Book Prize #2 – The Butchering Art
The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris This is the second of my reviews of books shortlisted for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, read as part of the shadow panel. Lindsey Fitzharris is an American with a doctorate from Oxford in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, and a post-doc Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust Read More
Before it gets recycled…
Sometimes, a book is just falling apart so much, and you have no need to keep it despite it having some sentimental value, that the best thing is to recycle it. This is the case with my Puffin Songbook. First published in 1956, mine is the second reprint from 1963. The cover is by Ronald Read More
‘An Ark, a flood and a man called Noah’
This post was edited and republished from my lost posts archive on my old blog The Flood by David Maine When I originally wrote the two posts I’ve combined into one here back in early April 2014 – the film Noah was just about to hit the big screens. I wrote a post about why Read More
Book Group Report: ‘Red’
The Red House Mystery by A A Milne It’s thanks to my friend Simon that I’m aware that A A Milne was a author and playwright of wide reknown before he wrote Winnie the Pooh; I’m not sure if the rest of our book group knew this before I introduced this book as a possible for our Read More
Wellcome shortlist #1
To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell The second book in my shadow reading from the Wellcome Book Prize shortlist, (the first was The Vaccine Race which I’ll be reviewing for the official blog tour in a couple of week’s time). I loved this book from the front cover to the back, starting with its Read More
Six Degrees of Separation: Geisha
Hosted each month by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest, Six Degrees of Separation picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six more steps. Click on the titles to go to my reviews where they exist. Our starting book this month is the bestselling: Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden I read Read More
The Baltic Books Blog Tour #2
This year the Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – are celebrating 100 years of independence with new translations of Baltic Books coming to the UK for the first time and a series of cultural events happening across the UK. The Baltics are also being honoured as the Market Focus at London Book Fair Read More
The Baltic Books Blog Tour #1
This year the Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – are celebrating 100 years of independence with new translations of Baltic Books coming to the UK for the first time and a series of cultural events happening across the UK. The Baltics are also being honoured as the Market Focus at London Book Fair Read More
A Trip to the Ashmolean…
The other day, daughter and I went to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to catch the last day of the Michelangelo drawings, and the first week of the new “America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper” exhibitions, using our new Art Fund cards to get half price entry. Michelangelo Drawings A single room full of drawings, Read More
Shiny Linkiness…
It may be the Easter hols, but I’m still very busy on the termly school magazine for a day or two. So I have a link to my latest Shiny review for you to fill the gap. Almost Love by Louise O’Neill I was a big fan of O’Neill’s first two novels which were hard-hitting Read More
The Power of Fairy Tales: Marina Warner & Sally Gardner
Once Upon a Time by Marina Warner Subtitled ‘A short history of fairy tale’, Warner’s compact volume belies its small size. It’s a tiny hardback, but within its 200 or so pages, the author recounts the rich history behind the beloved fairy tales we all know from their most common (often arguably via Disney film Read More
Reading Ireland month
March is Reading Ireland Month, as always hosted by Cathy at 746 books and Niall at The Fluff is Raging. I forgot that Tana French in my previous post is Irish, so I’ve actually read two books by Irish authors this month (plus another coming up for Shiny next week). Here’s the second… From a Low Read More
What ‘Elle Thinks’ is Right … Tana French is Fab!
In the Woods by Tana French Every time Eleanor of Elle Thinks mentions Tana French (the latest being here), I say ‘I must read one of her books’. Tana French is one of Eleanor’s go-to comfort reads, and she is always recommending her. Well, now I have read French’s first novel, and I can see Read More
An amoral anti-hero for Italian Lit Month
The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotto Translated by Lawrence Venuti There’s dark, and then there’s dark! You know what I mean, we’re talking the super-noir of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me or Simenon’s Dirty Snow here… Lean and mean novels with an amoral anti-hero at their hearts. This is the case for the protagonist Read More
Aristotle and young Alexander
The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon I bought this novel when it was published back in 2009, and it’s been in my bedside bookcase for some time. I’d moved it there because one of the boxes on my BookBingo of the time was read a book with an author that shares your name and Read More
My life in Comics and Magazines
Back in 2011, I published a post back on my old blog about this subject. Now my habits have changed again, so I thought it was a good time to edit and republish an updated version… I’ve always loved comics and magazines. As a child in the 1960s, I remember looking forward to getting rolls Read More
Book Group Report – ‘Green’
At the moment, our book group chooses books by picking a key word for members to make pitches based on – we’re currently working our way through some colours. For ‘green’ we had a varied group of suggestions: Plot 29 by Allan Jenkins – a memoir about two brothers rescued from care in the Read More
Shows how hard it is to pull off a literary thriller…
Lullaby by Leïla Slimani Translated by Sam Taylor The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds. This French bestseller has such a killer first line – they put it on the front cover. You’re left with no doubt that ‘The Perfect Nanny‘ (as this book has been titled in the Read More
Six Degrees of Separation: The Beauty Myth
Hosted each month by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest, the Six Degrees of Separation meme picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six more steps. Click on the titles to go to my reviews. Our starting book this month is the feminist classic: The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf Wolf’s bestselling Read More
A return to Joe Thomas’s Sao Paulo
Gringa by Joe Thomas At around this time last year, I read the first in a new crime series set in Sao Paulo (reviewed here for Shiny). Joe Thomas lived and taught in São Paulo, the most populous city in the Americas and Southern Hemisphere, for ten years. His observations and experience of living in this Read More
Get ‘Educated’ in Abingdon
Coming soon – an evening with Tara Westover The next book I’ll be reading will be Educated by Tara Westover (right). Published this week, Tara’s memoir is of growing up off-grid in the hills of Idaho sounds fascinating. Her father spent his time preparing for the end of the world, her mother worked as an unqualified Read More
Bookselling highs and lows…
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell A couple of years ago, my fantasy of buying a bookshop could have come true – one of my local indie bookshops was up for sale. I just about had the money and the shop was ticking along nicely (thanks to the hard work put in by Read More
The Wellcome Book Prize 2018
One of my favourite prizes of the year, the Wellcome Book Prize longlist for 2018 has just been announced. The Wellcome Book Prize celebrates ” the many ways in which literature can illuminate the breadth and depth of our relationship with health, medicine and illness.” The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday, March 20th, and the Read More
The Second Outing for the Anti-Miss Marple in Sicily…
Auntie Poldi and the Fruits of the Lord by Mario Giordano Translated from the German by John Brownjohn I was delighted to encounter the first Auntie Poldi book last year. The adventures of an irrepressible sixty-year-old German lady who retires to her late ex-husband’s ancestral home in Sicily, hoping to “fulfil one of her dearest Read More
Reading Muriel 2018 – an early novel
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark (1959) This is one of the Spark novels I’ve been meaning to read for years – so it’s great to be able to join in on Phase 1 of Heavenali’s #ReadingMuriel2018 year. An added bonus is being able to read from my late mum’s Penguin first edition paperback, yellowed Read More
