Just no

More books I just cannot be doing with. Lucy Worsley, Agatha Christie This biography is written like a TV script, with way too much hand-holding and reiterating gobbets of information we have only just been told. The tone is both patronising and bit too chummy. Worsley cranks up the tension as we approach Christie’s famous … Continue reading Just no →

Ruth Pavey, Deeper into the Wood

Like many other people during lockdown we had the extravagant idea of buying a bit of woodland. Nothing came of it: we realised that we would feel awkward buying a piece of land as strangers, knowing nothing about it, or who used it and might resent us, so we didn't do any more about it. … Continue reading Ruth Pavey, Deeper into the Wood →

Books I Want To Keep

I have read so many duds and books recently that I gave up on because their meh factor was way too high. These are the pearls in a bit of a swamp, the ones I actually finished. Bea Howe, Lady With The Green Fingers. The Life of Jane Loudon I rather unfairly only think of … Continue reading Books I Want To Keep →

Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, which I found completely delightful, is the fourth of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer novels. The first novel in the group, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet (2014), initially funded by a Kickstarter campaign, was nominated for six literary prizes, including the Arthur C Clarke Award and the Women’s … Continue reading Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within →

More good books

Books that have shone out during my recent long run of duds as being really splendid reads, giving me faith that good books are out there if you keep at it long enough. Gossamer Years This is the revised translation by Edward Seidensticker from 1960 of a nameless 10th-century Japanese noblewoman’s complaints about her very … Continue reading More good books →

I Have Doubts

More sour remarks about books I tried and found wanting. Hugh Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair This 1925 novel pops up regularly in lists about the supernatural canon as a gem of twentieth-century Gothic horror. It is certainly horrifying, but it’s a novella stretched out painfully beyond the natural length of its … Continue reading I Have Doubts →

Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina

I lived outside the UK from 2001 to 2016, so I missed a lot of new books I would otherwise have gobbled up on their first publication. (There were good English bookshops where we lived, but I still missed things.) I only realised that this exceptional biography of Lydia Lopokova existed because I met a … Continue reading Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina →

Read With Pleasure

I did enjoy reading these, but I haven’t got a whole blogpost’s worth to say about each of them. Please accept these brief paras in the spirit of strong recommendation. Una McCormack, The Greatest Story Ever Told I bought this from NewCon Press, one of a trilogy of themed novels about a populated Mars, with … Continue reading Read With Pleasure →

New Year, new duds

It is downright depressing to find so many books from my TBR shelf turning out to be duds. The only upside is that I have contributed several to the charity shop, and I might have learned a bit more about how not to write. F Tennyson Jesse, The Lacquer Lady (1929) I’ve long had Jesse … Continue reading New Year, new duds →

The Good Books 2021

Here are the books that I enjoyed most in 2021. You can read about those I liked best in 2020 here. Biography/memoir/autobiography/history The Element of Lavishness, Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell was a Christmas present from 2020 that got shunted into the waiting room while I read her letters to and from … Continue reading The Good Books 2021 →