0192 | August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien
Context: Read this while I waited for Barry to come and cut the church hedge with me. Incidentally, this is where I married Mrs Arukiyomi nearly 15 years ago. REVIEW…
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0191 | Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology | Shigeko Okamoto & Janet Shibamoto Smith (eds.)
Context: Was reading this when we moved into the flat here at 77 Field View, Bar Hill. REVIEW This was a review copy I was sent for free. I’d chosen…
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0189 | The Voice of the Tambaran – Donald Tuzin
Context: Read this throughout the first week of Wimbledon and finished it just as Serena Williams won her quarterfinal match. REVIEW Tambaran is more than a sum of ideas and…
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0182 | Road Belong Cargo – Peter Lawrence
Context: The first book I read in a new pile of hard to find anthropology and linguistics books from Cambridge University Library which my resourceful helper found for me. REVIEW…
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0181 | Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas
Context: One of the books on the bookshelf in our bedroom at our new place in Bar Hill. REVIEW This only takes about thirty minutes to read from cover to…
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0176 | Decision Making and the Will of God – Garry Friesen
Context: Discovered this at a key time in my walk with God at Wycliffe. REVIEW Boy I needed to read this book. It’s amazing how God brings things into your…
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0173 | Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction – Don Kulick
REVIEW This is an excellent book. It is at once thought-provoking, revealing, informative and very well written. Kulick spends months and months in the village of Gapun where no one…
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0171 | Multilingualism – John Edwards
REVIEW This is an excellent overview of the immensely detailed and frustrating world of multilingualism. Edwards’ style is very very readable, often ironic and he uses a lot of very…
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0163 | Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
Context: Listened to this courtesy of librivox.org while walking to and from work through the bluebells in Dell’s Wood. REVIEW Long ago, when my mother-in-law and her sister asked me…
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0159 | Decline & Fall – Evelyn Waugh
Context: Listened to this in a day while chopping copious amounts of veg in the Wycliffe kitchens. REVIEW Having read Vile Bodies, I was expecting something a bit more banal…
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0153 | The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
Context: Listened to this in a day or two while working in the Wycliffe kitchen. REVIEW The film is an absolute classic. In fact the book made me want to…
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0144 | Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Context: Moving house again, this time to a room in a lovely house in Piddington. REVIEW Never read any du Maurier so wasn’t sure what to expect from this. I…
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0132 | Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Context: Finished this off just after we celebrated Mrs Arukiyomi’s parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. REVIEW An amazing book, made all the more poignant by the fact that it was her…
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0128 | The Cider House Rules – John Irving
Context: Finished this (first edition) off the day we made a massive £7 at a car boot sale. REVIEW I really liked this but had a really hard time trying…
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0127 | Suite Française – Irène Némirovsky
Context: Read this as we celebrated 14 years married and got some flowers from the in-laws. REVIEW A moving and powerful account made all the more poignant by the background…
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0124 | The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Context: Finished off this on my bed at the Wycliffe centre. REVIEW An amazing book that, for a first novel, is a great feat of literature. There’s so much going…
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0115 | The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Context: Finished this in the taxi from my mum’s in Portugal to the railway station. REVIEW It’s quite something to write a novel in a language foreign to your own….
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0114 | The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
Context: Finished this off in my mum’s jacuzzi. REVIEW Now that Middlesex has been removed from the 2008 edition of the 1001 list, Eugenides’ work is represented by this one…