Boring Postcards by Martin Parr This was a book I rescued from a local charity shop for just £1 and fell in love with instantly. Presented in their original size, beautifully printed onto heavyweight paper with plenty of white space surrounding them, these postcards make a brilliant topic for an art book from Phaidon, masters Read More
Category: Title begins with B
Opposites attract
Benny and Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti Translated by Sarah Death I’m doing well with my resolution to read more translated fiction – eight out of twenty books read so far this year. Benny and Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti is yet another brilliant Nordic novel from Sweden to be translated for us to read. Both heartwarming Read More
Like Mother Like Daughter?
I’ve just read another two books about mothers and daughters. These short novels are rather different to the mother and daughter story in my last post though … Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante … is the first novel by one of Italy’s most acclaimed contemporary authors, a Neapolitan, who shuns publicity and is rather an Read More
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa 1997 Nobel laureate Saramago was born in 1922 and is considered to be Portugal’s top living writer. He wrote this novel in 1995 and what a book it is! This was our book group choice for December, and we all found it an intense and compelling read. When an epidemic Read More
Desert Island Books #2
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable Some may consider choosing an encyclopaedic dictionary a bit of a cheat, but I maintain that if you were on a desert island with no internet – there is no better book than Brewer’s for frequent dipping into for little nuggets of information. It is simply the original and Read More
Short Takes
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark The 100th book I read this year. It was a delightful short novel about a young man who arrives in a slightly posh bit of South London, stirs things up rather devilishly bringing this staid bit of town to life, and then he disappears. Is Dougal Douglas Read More
Boy in the striped pyjamas by John Boyne.
A lot has been written about this book, especially since it was filmed, so I came to it having realised the ending, but I hadn’t worked out how it happens. Told from the point of view of nine year old Bruno, the son of a high ranking soldier who gets promoted to become the Commandant Read More
