Category: Books

We begin this month with What are you Going Through? (2020) by Sigrid Nunez and with thanks as usual to Kate at booksaremyfavouriteandbest who does all the organising for this monthly feature.  The background can be found here. 

Continue reading “Six Degrees of Separation: from What are You Going Through? to …”

I finished reading this more than a month ago, well ahead of the review-along date.  Plenty of time.  Then I went away for a week – all planned – and totally forgot that the review was due to be posted the very day I got home.  Not a word written. Ah well.  A little preamble then, to explain that this has been written in haste and may turn out to be a very short review of a very long book.  (Or a rather long review which doesn’t say much.)

Such a long book, in fact, that I doubt I would ever have read it without the review-along, so thank you, fellow reviewers.  I can at least cross this doorstopper off the list.  What I can’t do is say whether I enjoyed it.  I didn’t dislike it certainly, but neither did I soak it up.  It’s easy to read and made me laugh occasionally but there was nothing in all its 800+ pages which really made me feel it was worth the how-ever-many hours it took to read.  That said, I’m glad to have read it.

Continue reading “Vanity Fair (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray”

Time again for Six Degrees, the only thing keeping this blog alive for the moment. Grateful thanks to Kate at booksaremyfavouriteandbest who does all the organising for this monthly feature.  The background can be found here.

I have not read The Lottery (1948), the starter book this month.  Had I been asked a few weeks ago I would have said with confidence that I’m unlikely to pick up anything by Shirley Jackson despite her work appearing regularly on my bookish radar.  A sweeping and unfair dismissal I accept, but what I hear of her work has never appealed. 

Continue reading “Six Degrees of Separation: from The Lottery to …”

Six degrees again and again I am late.  I didn’t quite get the post written before we headed off on a road trip around the country, catching up with family.  But better late than never.  Thanks as usual to Kate at booksaremyfavouriteandbest who does all the organising for this monthly feature.  The background can be found here.

We are beginning this month with Second Place (2021) by Rachel Cusk.   It is one of thirteen titles on this year’s longlist for the Booker Prize.  Unusually for me, I would happily read the majority of them this year but prior to the longlist announcement, I had read just one and that’s where I’m starting.

Continue reading “Six Degrees of Separation: from Second Place to …”

(Thanks as usual to Kate, at booksaremyfavouriteand best, who does all the organising for this monthly feature.  The background can be found here.)

We begin this month with Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher.  Variously described as a ‘cult classic’ and ‘a wickedly black-humour riff on the horrors of rehab and the hollows of Hollywood life…’, I don’t anticipate reading it in this lifetime despite it being a well-reviewed debut.  And I’m not a Star Wars fan, so there’s no link lurking there. Instead, I’m going for a chain more suited to the season.

Continue reading “Six Degrees of Separation: from Postcards from the Edge to…”

Will July be the second consecutive month in which I have my chain listed and partly written and then the end of the month arrives before it gets any further?  I hope not.  I did manage an alternative post in June so it wasn’t an entirely barren month on the blogging front.  And there’s plenty of July left.  Let’s see what happens.

Thanks as usual to Kate, at booksaremyfavouriteand best, who does all the organising.  The background can be found here.  I’m always astonished that no matter how varied the chains and with the vast numbers of books to choose from, there is invariably at least one book from mine which appears in someone else’s. This month I share a title with Kate herself, albeit one that we arrived at by very different routes.

Continue reading “Six Degrees of Separation: from Eats, Shoots and Leaves to …”

As I’ve been such a sporadic member of the blogging community this past year, it was by happy accident that I learned of the review-a-long organised by FictionFan and friends for The Silver Darlings by Neil Gunn.  An even more fortunate accident from my perspective meant that Rose’s copy of the book was lost at sea for a while which delayed the original date for posting reviews and enabled me to have almost finished reading when the new date was announced.  That date was Monday last, and here – better late than never – is my contribution.

Continue reading “The Silver Darlings by Neil Gunn (1941)”

Whilst I wait for opportunity and blogging muse to coincide I’m pleased that at least I’m keeping up with Six Degrees.  Kate does all the organising for this and the background can be found here.  Thanks, Kate!

Continue reading “Six Degrees of Separation: from Beezus and Ramona to …”

Six Degrees of Separation is organised by Kate and the background can be found here.  Our starter book this month is Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart.

Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker prize.  I’m sure it was a worthy winner but the back cover quotes mean I won’t be reading it.  “… as intense and excruciating to read as any novel I have ever held in my hand..”  Not for me right now.  Probably never would have been.

Continue reading “Six Degrees of Separation: from Shuggie Bain to …”

Wanting to read at least one book for this year’s Dewithon, hosted by Paula on Book Jotter, I cast around for something that might work at this time when my normal reading patterns remain fragile. I settled on The Seasoning by Manon Steffan Ros.  Blasu, to use its original title, was written in Welsh and published in 2013 when it won the fiction prize of the Wales Book of the Year awards.  Ros’s English translation was published in 2015 as The Seasoning.

Continue reading “The Seasoning by Manon Steffan Ros”