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
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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Read 28/03/2021-30/03/2021
Rating 5 stars
Angharad Price’s novel The Life of Rebecca Jones is a fictionalised memoir born of family documents and photographs, some of which appear in the text. It’s a clever and affecting book that paints a picture of farming life in the Maesglasau valley in Merioneth across the 20th century. Written in Welsh, the original novel has the title O! Tyn y Gorchudd, which can be translated as O! Pull Aside the Veil. I read Lloyd Jones’s excellent translation into English. Continue reading
Yesterday was the first Saturday of March and I really couldn’t think of how to get my Six Degrees of Separation chain started. This month, meme host Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best has chosen Phosphorescence by Julia Baird as our starting book.
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Read 15/11/2020-23/11/2020
Rating 5 stars
Stasiland has the subtitle Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. In it, Anna Funder shares the experiences of a number of East Germans to build a picture of life under an oppressive regime. Her interviewees range from people who tried to escape, people separated arbitrarily from family overnight, and people who worked for the Stasi. There are amazing people between these pages who survived unimaginable horrors, and there are also the people who supported the use of those horrors. I found it a very moving book. Continue reading
Read 15/10/2020-28/10/2020
Rating 5 stars
From start to finish, The Patient Assassin is a gripping read, bringing to life a complex man and the Indian history he is part of.
Hello September. You’ve come around quickly, and almost a week old already. That means it’s time for Six Degrees of Separation, in which Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best chooses a book and we all add six more in a chain. The concept is explained here.
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I did alright, as it happens. I managed ten books, seven of them from my original list. Continue reading
What I Think About When I Think About Reading 