I am in a book reviewing rut! With the exception of Piranesi (which will surely be my book of the year), I read it a couple of days ago and wrote a long review for Shiny immediately, I’m finding it hard to get to grips with my other pile of books read, but not yet Read More
Category: Authors B
Review Catch-Up
Not only have I been too busy and mentally wired the past couple of weeks to read much. I’m also way behind on reviewing, so a bit of a catch-up is in order, so two shorter reviews for you today! Firstly though, I watched Susanna Clarke in conversation with Madeline Miller on the Waterstones feed Read More
Six Degrees of Separation: Rodham
My favourite monthly tag, 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 our starting book is: Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld A book I’ve not read, Read More
20 Books of Summer #15 – Berners-Lee
There Is No Planet B by Mike Berners-Lee Back in 2010, I read Mike B-L’s first book, How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything reviewed here. Apart from being very informative, I found MB-L (yes, he is the brother of Sir Tim) to be an entertaining host as he talked us through his Read More
A Cracking Memoir – Mother by Nicholas Royle, and a DNF
Before I get into talking about specific books, an apology to all the lovely book publicists who have sent me review copies of titles out from mid-August onwards. THANK YOU! I will read and review all the books you’ve sent, but with the crowding of titles coming out on this year’s ‘Super Thursday’ – Sept Read More
#WITmonth is here!
August is #WIT – Women In Translation month, a long-term project hosted as always by Meytal at Bilibio. Meytal does a fab job at highlighting the widest possible range of women authors around the whole world, ensuring that we read beyond the Eurocentric publishing world of books in translation. As always I will join in, Read More
Stats Fun
Rebecca posted some data from her blog stats the other day here, and I took a look at mine too. I wasn’t going to post anything, but when I discovered that they are really linked by one particular post/author I couldn’t resist commenting here too. That post of mine is entitled ‘Return to Wigtown‘ and Read More
20 Books of Summer #1-2 Braithwaite and Saunders
My 20 books has got off to a slow start. The distractions of 800 pages of a SF classic for book group, an impulse re-read and the review pile for summer suddenly growing with moved dates – that’s my excuse. But I am 2 in, just 18 to go! My Sister, the Serial Killer by Read More
The Rathbones Folio Prize: Thoughts on the Shortlist
The Rathbones Folio Prize definitely has a USP: Books are nominated by members of its Academy rather than publishers. The Folio Academy members are mostly writers and critics, nominated by the Prize Foundation or their peers and now number around 250. This leads to a rather different set of books (published in the previous year) 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
Year End Review 6: It’s my BOOKS OF THE YEAR!
This year I’ve given up trying to shoehorn my selections into a set number, be it 10, 12 or a baker’s dozen. My list has as many categories as I felt I needed – which ended up as 18 this year. Without further ado, here they are: Best fictional biography: Murmur by Will Eaves – Read More
Year End Review 2: The Disappointments
The DNFs I still find it difficult, even after all my decades of reading, to stop reading a book. However, this year I was a little tougher on myself and I had more DNFs than previously.. Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien – (75/480 pages) – This was for book group, but Read More
Review of the Year 1: The Discoveries
I’m kicking off my review of my 2019 reading year by sharing a few of the authors I discovered for the first time and now want to read much more of – and poetry! Charlotte Bingham Bingham’s volume of memoir MI5 and Me (reviewed here) which covers her later teens in the late 1950s when Read More
Two Short Reviews: Rodriguez Fowler & Bourland
The Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodriguez Fowler I was lucky enough to be on the Shadow Panel in 2017 for this fabulous award that celebrates works by young authors (18-35), having followed it before then, and ever since, naturally. This year’s Shadow Panel also had an interesting set of books to choose from: poetry, a Read More
A Beckettian comedy about er… death?
The Faculty of Indifference by Guy Ware I don’t often include a publisher’s blurb in my reviews, but felt the need with this novel – The following comes from the back of the paperback: Robert Exley works for the Faculty: he spends his life making sure that nothing ever happens. In counter-terrorism, that s your Read More
Six Degrees of Separation: Sanditon
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: Sanditon by Jane Austen I’ve not read Austen’s last, unfinished novel, nor Read More
German Literature Month: A Black Forest Investigation III
The Dance of Death by Oliver Bottini Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch I’m late to German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline and Lizzy, but have just made it with the third crime novel in Oliver Bottini’s ‘Black Forest Investigation’ series. Louise Boni is a Chief Inspector with the Freiburg ‘Kripo’. She’s in her Read More
Non-Fiction Novellas in November
Combining two reading tags into one, today I have a couple of contrasting non-fiction short reads for you… Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay Destined to be in thousands of Christmas stockings, this is a bijou helping of more stories in diary form from the author of This is Going to Hurt (reviewed Read More
Novellas in November: Two French ones
Novellas in November is hosted by Laura at Reading in Bed. I really enjoyed taking part last year, here is the first of what I hope will be several posts this month, this time on two French novellas in translation. Lie With Me by Philippe Besson Translated by Molly Ringwald Before I tell you about the book, yes, it is translated by Read More
Six Degrees of Separation: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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. This month – the starting book is: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll A childhood favourite that I re-read so many Read More
My Most Reviewed Authors & A Reading Week Proposal
I’ve been on half term for the past fortnight, and my major project has been to create a new master index of books read and reviewed since I started my blog, and you can see it on the tab above – the one called ‘Review Index’. Easier said than done to get in a format Read More
Literary Genre Fiction – let’s discuss
Earlier this week, Rebecca took part in a tag on the subject of literary fiction (see here), and after defining what literary fiction is for you and picking some examples, the tag asks, “Name a brilliant literary-hybrid genre novel.” Rebecca chose The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell – which I read many years ago, and Read More
A perplexing thriller and a new trope: ‘Nuclear Noir’
The Carrier by Mattias Berg Translated from the Swedish by George Goulding This thriller has a premise and a half to keep you reading. Imagine you’re on a state visit and the agent who is never more than a few feet from POTUS, the agent called Erasmus Levine carrying the briefcase with the nuclear launch Read More
Return to Wigtown
Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell Bythell owns Scotland’s largest secondhand bookshop in the self-proclaimed Book Town of Wigtown in Galloway, south-west Scotland. His book Diary of a Bookseller (reviewed here) was a big hit in 2017, and for anyone returning for this second volume, it is comfortingly more of the same. The first Read More
Brookmyre and Broomfield
Given their adjacency in my A-Z list of authors reviewed, and the similar blue tones in their book covers, it seems a good idea to review these two books in one post, despite them being very different to each other! Fallen Angel by Chris Brookmyre It’s been far too long since I read one of Read More
3 shorter reviews – Bissell, Hunter, Ross
Barnhill by Norman Bissell After the end of WWII, George Orwell left London to live in a remote farmhouse on Jura in the Hebrides. It was there at ‘Barnhill’ that he brought together all the ideas that had been fermenting in his brain into the book that became 1984. Bissell’s novel tells the story of Read More
Some good reads from pre-blog days, and what I thought about them then… #6
It’s the spreadsheet that keeps on giving. Here are five more capsule reviews that I wrote pre-blog. All these ones are from 2006 or earlier – and the authors all happen to begin with ‘B’… The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke (1987) In the creation of Dave Robicheaux, Burke has created a one of Read More
20 Books of Summer: #7 & #8 – a Barnes duo
When I picked my 20 books, I managed to include two by Julian Barnes, for I forgot that Julian Barnes wrote a series of crime novels in the 1980s under a pseudonym – Dan Kavanagh, (Kavanagh being the maiden name of his wife). So I read the two back to back – which worked very Read More
Six Degrees of Separation: Wild card for the hols
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 titles will take you to my reviews where they exist. This month – the starting book is a wild card – the book you ended your last chain with, which for me was: Sharp Read More
