Come and escape from the world in some great books!
For a novel so deeply deeply contemporary, there is a timelessness about Smith's writing and prose, accentuated by the interplay of ideas and characters between the four novels in the Quartet. These are luminous books that recognise and celebrate the presence of the past in the present.
Oh Lyra Belacqua, Lyra Silvertongue. I devoured the original trilogy of your journeys to the North. Bolvangar, Svalbad, Iorek Byrnison, The World of the Dead. I adored the Miltonic and Blakean echoes. Fell in love with the mercurial, quick witted, innocent girl. Loved the world created by Pullman, the familiarity of it, the uncanniness, the… Continue reading The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman
Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. So this week we are looking at character traits we love. Things… Continue reading Top Ten Tuesday: Character Traits I Love
This is a deliciously quirky trilogy of novels! Many many things in the books, Rotherweird and Wyntertyde should not work, and yet they somehow do. Gosh! Wyntertyde had left us on a cliffhanger: a second mixing point was discovered; Bolitho was revealed as Fortemain and then dispatched; the vile Calx Bole had succeeded in resurrecting… Continue reading Lost Acre, Andrew Caldecott
There are some books you want to love so much, but which - for some reason - you cannot. There's a barrier between you and what you think you should feel about the book. And this is one of those books. There is so much about it that chimed wonderfully with all the things I… Continue reading Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?The Sign of Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I often find - as I mentioned in my previous post - a post-Christmas lull in my reading. The cold dark days of January, which this year… Continue reading A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Of coracles and crosswords... You know what they say about judging books by their covers? Well, I did with these because they are lovely lovely covers! I was also aware of Caldecott, a respected QC in media law with a string of high profile cases to his name - and what appeared to be a… Continue reading Rotherweird and Wyntertyde, Andrew Caldecott
There are times when I love my job. Some. On rare occasions. One of those times came today when I spotted a copy of The Sleeper and the Spindle on the side in the library and I was asked to have a read of it over night and see whether I thought it was suitable.… Continue reading The Sleeper and the Spindle, Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell
Exciting news this week! New blog features have arrived! Well, been made. By me. I'm not sure they quite work right, but as I'm seeking access to ARCs and am signed up to NetGalley and other blogging lists, I learn that a Review Policy is required. It sounds terribly formal and... binding. But if these… Continue reading Weekly Round Up: 2nd July 2018
Sometimes you want to like a book just so damn much that it feels like you're the failure when you end up not liking it. So it was for me with this novel. Now there is no doubt that Horowitz can plot a cracking crime story: Midsomer Murders, Foyle's War, Magpie Murders are all testimony… Continue reading The Word Is Murder, Anthony Horowitz
Detective fiction is a funny thing. The moment of most conflict and drama generally takes place outside the narrative, often before detective has been called in. The narrative arc is pretty formulaic: scenes are inspected, witnesses interviewed, discrepancies explored. And the conclusion is pretty predicable: the culprit is identified and society made safe from him… Continue reading Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz
Some books need more of an exercise in imagination than others. A bigger suspension of disbelief. An unborn narrator, for example, is one such. And not just unborn in a metaphorical sense but literally foetal. The narrator of McEwan's most recent book - recently serialised on Radio 4 - is a third-trimester Hamlet, set in modern London, recounting… Continue reading Nutshell, Ian McEwan
This is an absolute gem of a read - or more likely a listen, as Pullman wrote it for Audible as a free giveaway at some point. That's how I collected it - see what I did there? - and it's been lurking in my library ever since and today I thought I may… Continue reading The Collectors, Phillip Pullman
The second Thursday Next book picks up immediately after the end of The Eyre Affair and is a fun and joyful thing! A bit of lovely fluff: light, quick and just fun. It does perhaps suffer from its role in the series: The Eyre Affair was pretty self-contained; it has spawned a series of - I… Continue reading Lost In A Good Book, Jasper Fforde
Oh I'm in two minds about this book. I so wanted to like it. A alternate history world in which the borders between reality and books is flexible and malleable. Who would love to pop to Wuthering Heights for a cup of tea with Nelly Dean? Or stroll through the 100 Acre Wood? Or play hide-and-seek… Continue reading The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
What's the bravest thing you ever did? He spat into the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said. Yup. That is how bleak the world of this book is. Tragically, lyrically and devastatingly bleak, but bleak nonetheless. Nothing grows. Nothing lives. The world contains nothing of beauty or of value and very… Continue reading The Road, Cormac McCarthy
When I was an impressionable teenager, which feels a long time ago now, I imbibed a lot of Arthurian legends. Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawaine, Bedivere, Ector, Cai, Pelias, The Fisher King, Tristran, Iseult, Mordred, Morgana La Fey. And from there, at University, a unit on Medieval Literature reunited me with Gawain in Sir Gawain and The… Continue reading The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro
Anthony Horowitz, for me as an English teacher is almost synonymous with his teenage spy Alex Rider. Although probably with fewer helicopters, assassins and explosions. And more writing. The series is a very boy friendly, speedily paced series of novels which are one out go-to series for reluctant boy-readers. So it was with some surprise… Continue reading The House Of Silk, Anthony Horowitz
I am a huge Patrick Ness fan! Let me put that out there at the start of this. I hugely admired his Chaos Walking Trilogy but was utterly blown away by the visceral emotion and mythic scope of A Monster Calls. There are few books that dig inside you as much as that one. This… Continue reading More Than This, Patrick Ness
Intertextuality is a strange idea. It's reasonable and intuitive that texts refer both backwards and forwards within themselves: how many stories and tales begin and end at the same place and setting? Detective fiction is built on the importance of small early details turning into clues to be resolved later. Anton Chekov went so far… Continue reading Intertextuality in the The Woman in Black
The Book Lovers' Sanctuary 
You must be logged in to post a comment.