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…
-
-
0119 | Villette – Charlotte Bronte
Context: Finished off in the garden while housesitting for some friends. REVIEW Forget Jane Eyre. Yes, I said forget her. There is such a huge chasm of difference between these…
-
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….
-
0111 | Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
Context: Finished off in the garden of my mum’s house in Portugal. REVIEW I’d read a bit of Ackroyd’s non-fiction as well before this and know that while he can…
-
0108 | Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte
Context: Finished this off in bed at my in-laws’ place near Cambridge, UK. REVIEW Nothing much to report here. This was an entirely predictable Bronte piece which, unlike her sisters,…
-
0107 | Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
Context: Read this on and off on the bench in my in-laws’ garden. REVIEW What a strange book this was. It was nothing like I expected at all and, despite…
-
0104 | To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Context: Finished this under a holly tree, by a pond at a friend’s house in Hertford, UK. REVIEW This novel is scarcely 200 pages long. Yet Woolf manages to load…
-
0100 | The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Context: Picked this up at a charity shop in Stockton high street and read it as I walked to and from car showrooms buying a second hand car. REVIEW This…
-
0097 | White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Context: Me and Mrs Arkiyomi read this together a chapter at a time while we toured Europe inlcuding tea on this Aegean ferry. REVIEW My first Zadie Smith and it…
-
0096 | CT Studd: Cricketer & Pioneer – Norman Grubb
Context: Picked this up in an apartment with a view of the Bernese Alps where we stayed in Switzerland. REVIEW Norman Grubb is a bit of a legend. He spent…
-
0095 | Small Island – Andrea Levy
Context: friend in Albania lent me this and I read it while we hitched from Greece to Liechtenstein via this service station in Rosenheim, Germany. REVIEW Reading this at the…
-
0091 | Dracula – Bram Stoker
Context: Started this in the Romanian town of Sighisoara (in background), birthplace of Vlad Tepes who some claim to be the model Stoker used for the character of Count Dracula….
-
0066 | Trainspotting ~ Irvine Welsh
REVIEW This was an amazing read. It’s violent, offensive, stomach-churning, tragic and yet somehow, under all this, deeply poignant.
-
0055 | Cider With Rosie ~ Laurie Lee
REVIEW Beautifully evocative, this is a classic memoir of the English idyll, where even winter is ‘summery’ and death has a romantic sheen.
-
0051 | High Fidelity ~ Nick Hornby
REVIEW Ironically, this book could have been entitled About a Boy because it is in fact about a boy. In fact, it’s about all boys and what makes them tick.
-
0049 | England Made Me ~ Graham Greene
REVIEW Not one of Greene’s best but certainly a novel that plots his development as a novelist on his way to his later greats.
-
0047 | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ~ John Le Carre
REVIEW Not read an overt spy novel before. Never read any Carre either. Not sure I’ll read either anytime soon…
-
0037 | Pride & Prejudice – Jane Austen
If you enjoyed this book, you’re going to love the map. REVIEW Been meaning to read this for years and years. I could hardly claim to be a book lover…