Come and escape from the world in some great books!
Top Five Saturday is a meme hosted by Devouring Books to discover and share books that all have a common theme. The list of themes currently runs at 1/4/20 — Funny Books1/11/20 — Books Over 5 years old1/18/20 — Unreliable Narrators1/25/10 — Books by Favorite Authors Ooooo I love me an unreliable narrator! The moment when we… Continue reading Top Five Saturday: Unreliable Narrators
"Angels could look like many things." So can monsters.
This is the sort of novel I feel the need to reach for metaphor to describe, tired and cliched metaphors at that: it is a roller coaster, a kaleidoscope, a hall of mirrors, shifting sands.... It is dazzling - but being dazzled is not always the most comfortable experience!
Top Five Saturday is a meme hosted by Devouring Books to discover and share books that all have a common theme. The list of themes currently runs at 1/4/20 — Funny Books1/11/20 — Books Over 5 years old1/18/20 — Unreliable Narrators1/25/10 — Books by Favorite Authors My top five books that have celebrated their fifth birthday... goodness,… Continue reading Top Five Saturday: Books over Five Years Old
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. Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Topics: January 7: Most Anticipated Book Releases… Continue reading Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Book Releases of 2020
Love the idea of this Survey, from Jamie’s End of Year Book Survey and having read a few, thought I'd (perhaps a little belatedly) upload my own. **2019 READING STATS** Number Of Books You Read: 40Number of Re-Reads: 0Genre You Read The Most From: Crime, Fantasy and Literary 1. Best Book You Read In 2019? The… Continue reading 2019 Book Survey
One problem I have - and it perhaps says more about me than anything else! - is that I tend to rely on familiar authors so in crime I have been reliant on Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series, Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler series, Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels and a few others: Anthony Horowitz,… Continue reading Blood Wedding, Pierre Lemaitre
Wow! This was deliciously dark and disturbing! An ideal creepy read for that strange, unsettling time between Christmas and the New Year, where no one quite knows what day of the week it is or how long they have left on holiday! I'd listened to The Loney by Hurley as an audiobook a little while… Continue reading Book Review: Starve Acre, Andrew Michael Hurley
It has been an age since I read The Night Circus - so long ago that this blog did not exist - but I remember it as ephemeral, atmospheric, beautiful and moving. So the news this year that Morgenstern was bringing out another novel was huge - huge! So it was downloaded on the day… Continue reading The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern
Top Five Saturday is a meme hosted by Devouring Books to discover and share books that all have a common theme. The list of themes currently runs at 11/9/19 — Books with a Survival Theme11/16/19 — Books by Unread Authors You Want to Read11/23/19 — Books with Fake Love Couples11/30/19 — Books to be read by the… Continue reading Top Five Saturday: Fake Love Couples
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
What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
I have sat on this book for a while since finishing reading it - partially as a result of workload; mainly because it, like The Heart's Invisible Furies and many others, is a book that deserved some time to settle and be absorbed before launching into a review. The novel revolves around a single character,… Continue reading 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World, Elif Shafak
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
Top Five Saturday is a meme hosted by Devouring Books to discover and share books that all have a common theme. Previously, the focus has included witches, werewolves, thrillers, faeries, fairy tale re-tellings, high fantasy and many more. This week's theme is books with maps in them and there is one obvious and iconic mapped… Continue reading Top Five Saturday: Books with Maps
The Teaser Nostalgia Nalan believed there were two kinds of families in this world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family. If your blood family happened to be nice and caring, you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not, there was still hope; things could… Continue reading Teaser Tuesday: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, Elif Shafak
Top Five Saturday is a meme hosted by Devouring Books to discover and share books that all have a common theme. Previously, the focus has included witches, werewolves, thrillers, faeries, fairy tale re-tellings, high fantasy and many more. This week, we are looking at book in excess of 500 pages. So many to choose from...… Continue reading Top Five Saturday: Books Over 500 Pages
Some authors deserve a fanfare when they are about to publish and Frances Hardinge is one of those! A new novel from Hardinge is a thing of joy! She is one of those authors who seem to have never put a foot wrong in their writing: plots, impeccable; characters, vivid and real; language, beautiful and… Continue reading Deeplight, Frances Hardinge
I'd been saving this one up for the summer holidays when I have time to indulge it, not sneaking a half-hour read in late at night when I should be sleeping. I also wanted to head back to the beginning of the series, having started with The Secret Place, and catch up chronologically. And I… Continue reading The Trespasser, Tana French
Disclaimer: Received from NetGalley and the publisher, Penguin, in exchange for an honest review. There are some novels which flow fluidly like a river. Others are curved and twisted. Others are very linear taking a route from inciting incident to resolution without a deviation. Others are shaped like a tree, branching and dividing but never… Continue reading The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy
Read with caution: Cleaning companies may never be the same again! I've come to Kate Atkinson late in her career: I can recall surprisingly vividly my mother's water damaged, crinkly paper copy of Behind the Scenes at the Museum teetering on the side of the bath - an avocado kitsch bath - from my childhood… Continue reading One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson
This was my first Paver read having heard some good things about her, and it thrust me straight into a solid Gothic historical yarn with some genuinely creepy moments! The novel is perhaps misnamed: it focuses on the house Wake's End set beside the local fen, some three miles from the village of Wakenhyrst; and,… Continue reading Wakenhyrst, Michelle Paver
Why is it that the words of female sexuality - and of female anatomy - are either rendered taboo or fetishised in our society ? Vagina. Clitoris. Vulva. Menstruation. Compared to "cock", there is a different quality in these words. A frisson of shock and challenge. And that is a frisson which Broder does not… Continue reading The Pisces, Melissa Broder
Lanny Greentree, you remind me of me.
Divine days fall like water from a cataract, and I had not learned yet the mortal trick of counting them.
The Book Lovers' Sanctuary 
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