Archives by Tag 'Fiction'
‘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. [...]
‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ by Michel Faber
I hate to seem prejudiced, but there are certain literary devices which I tend to find very off-putting in a book. The first is present tense narration: logically the action of the book can have taken place in the past or it could be going to take place in the future, but I’m always very aware [...]
‘Far to Go’ by Alison Pick
Historical novels are usually a staple part of my reading diet, but one that has been rather neglected so far this year in favour of trying new things and branching out into different, unexplored areas of literature. This certainly hasn’t been a deliberate decision and in fact I hadn’t realised that I was reading fewer [...]
‘Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister’ by Gregory Maguire
Gregory Maguire is an author probably best known for his adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, . I’ve read the entire trilogy, with somewhat mixed results: Wicked itself I enjoyed and thought it was quite clever (although I imagine that musical is a bit less political and less bizarre than the novel, given how successful [...]
‘American Ghosts and Old World Wonders’ by Angela Carter
Sometimes reading books can be a bit like following the clues to a treasure hunt, one book leading you on to find the next, and that’s exactly what happened to me with this book. Reading Bill Willingham’s Fables: Legends in Exile made me think about other fairy tale adaptations that I’ve enjoyed, which instantly put [...]
‘Fables: Legends in Exile’ by Bill Willingham
With the exception of the Asterix books which I’ve loved since I first borrowed them from the library as a child, my experience with graphic novels has been rather limited. By limited, I mean nil. Partly I think this is because I’ve always been a bit unsure of the concept: pictures are nice enough, but [...]
Review: ‘The Warden’ by Anthony Trollope
In a world where there are too many wonderful books to be read and too little time in which to do so, I always welcome recommendations of books that I might enjoy. One such book was The Warden by Anthony Trollope which was recommended to me by a friend who told me to read and [...]
Penguin Mini Modern Classics: Saki
Although I may have no resolve at all when faced with a second hand bookshop, usually I have a will of iron in the face of one selling new books which are far beyond my comfortable price range at the rate at which I consume them. However, all the reviews which popped up recently of [...]