I love Bob Mortimer. I always have. In the Reeves and Mortimer partnership, he’s the unassumingly funny shy bloke to Vic’s bombastically funny shy bloke. Bob’s sound. I’m prepared to watch anything that Bob’s on, because he’s silly like Terry Jones was silly, and wriggles with the giggles of it all in the same way. The man’s a delight.
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Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca at Bookish Beck are hosting Novellas in November again this year. This is a reading challenge that I’ve dipped in and out of in the past couple of years, when my reading has accidentally coincided with it. This year, though, I’m going to try to set myself some goals to try to bring my To Read pile down a little more.
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Read 29/04/2022-30/04/2022
Rating 5 stars
My friend Dipika has a story in this anthology, which gathers together poems and stories of maps and mapping from UK writers of global majority communities.
These are tales of place, covering diaspora, exile, identity, childhood and family. The writers are all based in the UK and are from a wide range of communities. After finishing The Good Immigrant, I wanted to sink my teeth into more writing from communities that are underrepresented in the literary world, and this offering from Arachne Press gave me the opportunity to do just that. Continue reading
Read 19/02/2022-15/03/2022
Rating 3 stars
The Book of Disquiet is Fernando Pessoa’s factless autobiography written under one of his ‘heteronyms’, Bernardo Soares. Constructed from fragments of writing on scraps of paper, it is a diary of sorts in which Soares attempts to understand who he is. Continue reading
September already and time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
This year’s Booker Prize shortlist is announced in a couple of weeks. Kate’s choice of starting book, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, is on the longlist. I wonder if it will go the distance.
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Is it July so soon?
I knew instantly what direction my Six Degrees chain would take this month when I saw that Eats, Shoots & Leaves was the starting book chosen by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
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April’s starting book for Six Degrees of Separation is Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. Kate, who hosts the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best, chose this recent Booker winner to set us off with a chain of six more books that are somehow linked together.
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Read 15/03/2021-21/03/2021
Rating 5 stars
In Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris explores a place that had deep personal meaning to her. I picked it from my local library as my second book in this year’s Dewithon, hosted by Paula at the Bookjotter blog. It is my first experience of Morris’s writing. I thought it would be a travel book. It is, but it’s also a number of other things. Continue reading
I’m still struggling to get my reading head together, so I thought I’d put together some ponderings on a series of books I haven’t read that are the basis for two tv adaptations that I’ve watched and loved. Just a bit of randomness to while away a moment. I’m also going full ‘blocks’ with this post, rather than relying on the safety of the ‘classic block’. Hopefully it will look okay when I post it.
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February is six days old, and here’s the first Saturday of the month and Six Degrees of Separation. Check out the meme hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best if you want to join in. This month, in a return to normal things, we’re starting with a book I haven’t read, Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the Side of the Road.
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What I Think About When I Think About Reading 