Archive for 'Book Review' Category
Review: ‘Death of a Naturalist’ by Seamus Heaney
Despite my resolution to read more poetry this year I don’t seem to have achieved that aim terribly well. Probably because I can’t read poetry on the train as I find poems tend to be too short for me not to become distracted by what’s going on around me. I also find that poetry requires a different type [...]
Review: ‘The Circle Cast’ by Alex Epstein
Stories of King Arthur and the characters around him have been a large part of my reading diet for as long as I can remember. I’ve read classic retellings, obscure retellings and a desire to discover the early retellings is what led to me becoming an unemployable medieval English postgraduate. They’re stories that have become [...]
Review: ‘Dawn Chorus’ by Joan Wyndham
Reading Perfume from Provence reminded me that reading non-fiction is nowhere near as hard or as serious as I think it’s going to be when it comes in the form of an engaging memoir. I decided to carry on the theme by reading another thoroughly English memoir which I picked up, this time one of [...]
Review: ‘Perfume from Provence’ by Lady Winifred Fortescue
You might remember my mentioning by Lady Winifred Fortescue back in my March Review when I confessed to having broken my Lent book buying ban due to an unexpected train delay. Whilst I felt a little bit guilty at the time (not least because I also picked up the two companion books by the same [...]
Review: ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ by Charles Dickens
Think of Victorian novels and which one author leaps immediately to mind? For me, and I suspect for many others, it is Charles Dickens. When taking part in a reading challenge which relates to Victorian literature, it seems only right to read something by the great man of Victorian literature himself. However, I have a [...]
‘The Salzburg Tales’ by Christina Stead
Well, it’s finally happened: the honeymoon period is over. I suppose the day had to come when I encountered a Virago Modern Classic for which I didn’t particularly care, and it seems that that day is today. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I actively disliked The Salzburg Tales by Christina [...]
‘Alice Hartley’s Happiness’ by Philippa Gregory
There are a lot of authors whose books I can pick up without knowing any specifics but with a fair idea of how the book will go. Dickens? Deserving poor, a host of comedic supporting characters with amusing names, and a downtrodden central character who is elevated through their own goodness. Angela Carter? A twisted, chaotic storyline [...]
‘Up at the Villa’ by W. Somerset Maugham
Sometimes my reasons for choosing books are incredibly shallow; I bought the Vintage Somerset Maugham collection because of the rather attractive covers (not to mention they were incredibly good value from The Book People, of course), and I chose to read first because, at a mere 120 pages, it is by far the shortest one of the [...]
‘Miss Mapp’ by E. F. Benson
Although I only discovered E. F. Benson this year (and I still wonder why it took me so long) he’s fast become one of my go-to writers when I need a comfort read. When I was feeling ill and in need of some cheering recently I turned to the next book in Benson’s Mapp and [...]
‘The Nutmeg Tree’ by Margery Sharp
How do you arrange the books on your shelves? Do you organise alphabetically by author? By colour of the spine? Do you separate out your TBR pile from the main library? On my shelves, the unread books rub shoulders happily alongside those that I have read, and instead I organise them thematically by vague genre. [...]