Donna-Jo Napoli, linguistics professor and award-winning author of children’s fiction Tell me which authors, or what reading, you can see now were influential in your life and career? As a child, I read voraciously. My family had all kinds of financial and other problems, so we moved a lot, and I never had friends for very … Continue reading Tell Me What You Read: Donna-Jo Napoli
Hop on over to Vulpes Libris where I've just posted a long review of David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. I liked it very much.
When the hoo-hah about Go Set A Watchman erupted a few weeks ago, I was diffident, since I haven’t read To Kill A Mockingbird in about thirty years (and I don't think I've seen the film), and though my memory of Mockingbird was very positive, I had no particular desire to read it again. Instead, I was … Continue reading Read the novel before you judge it: Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman
In Tell Me What You Read I interview well-kenned folk in public life about how their reading has shaped their lives, in the past and now. David McKay, literary translator of Stefan Hertmans’ War and Turpentine, and Everything to Nothing by Geert Buelens. Tell me which authors, or what reading, you can see now were influential … Continue reading Tell Me What You Read: David McKay and literary translation
Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book podcast series A-Z is I, and I have moved out of fiction, and to the intriguing biography by Molly Izzard, of the Middle Eastern traveller and woman of letters, Freya Stark. Stark made her name in the 1930s as the first western woman to travel in some very remote … Continue reading Unpicking a life of glamour: Molly Izzard’s Freya Stark
In my teenage years I collected Elfquest, and Grendel, and suffered with all my friends when issue 121 of the X-Men mysteriously failed to arrive in Britain in that dark, dark month just before my O-Grades. When I was a student I worked on Saturdays at Aberdeen’s science fiction bookshop, and read the week’s new comics when … Continue reading British magic: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London: Body Work
In Tell Me What You Read I interview well-kenned folk in public life about how their reading has shaped their lives, in the past and now. Susan Vollenweider, half of the women's history podcasting dynamo The History Chicks, columnist for the Kansas City Star, mother, aspiring novelist, and school sports cheerleader Tell me which authors, … Continue reading Tell Me What You Read: Susan Vollenweider
The title is the second-best thing about The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. How can you resist the suggestion that Phileas Fogg kept an alternative log of his trip Around the World in Eighty Days? What else could have happened that the world didn’t know? The first best thing about the novel is the answer: … Continue reading Jules Verne meets Conan Doyle with aliens: Philip José Farmer’s The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
Today’s letter in the first Really Like This Book's podcast A-Z series is H, and today’s author is Helene Hanff (1916-97), oh blessed be her name. She spent her life trying to become a Broadway playwright, and ended up writing a best-selling novel about her relationship with a London antiquarian bookshop from the 1940s to … Continue reading A life in books: Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road
In Tell Me What You Read, a new feature on this blog, I interview well-kenned folk in public life about how their reading has shaped their lives, in the past and now. This week, Martin Fowler, software developer, incessant traveller and author. Tell me which authors, or what reading, you can see now were influential … Continue reading Tell Me What You Read: Martin Fowler
Kate Macdonald 