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What I’ve Been Reading
Australia Under Surveillance by Frank Moorhouse was an interesting collection of essays about ASIO (Australia’s version of MI5 and the FBI) and the conflict between national security and individual...
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‘T. H. White: A Biography’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner
It took me a while to read this excellent biography of the author of The Once and Future King – not because it was lengthy or written in ‘difficult’ prose (quite the contrary), but because it often...
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Nancy Pearl Discusses ‘A Brief History of Montmaray’
Nancy Pearl talked about A Brief History of Montmaray this week in her regular book spot on KUOW-FM, a Seattle radio station. I am very chuffed about this – not only to hear someone on the other side...
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What I’ve Been Reading
I’ve mostly been reading British fiction written during or about the 1960s, but as I tend to blog only about books I like, I won’t be writing about them.1 However, I did enjoy the third volume of Noel...
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Adventures in Research: Schoolgirls in the 1950s and 1960s, Part Two
My copy of Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing up in the Fifties was finally delivered and proved to be interesting, although not terribly useful for my research purposes and possibly not worth the...
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The Years of Grace : Your Home
In my previous discussion of the opening section of The Years of Grace, I neglected the fabulous illustrations, so I’ll make sure to include some here. Each section of this book has an introduction by...
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The Years of Grace : Leisure
I meant to post this earlier, but have been experiencing major technological difficulties1. Sorry about that. Anyway, according to The Years of Grace, Fifties Girl had many different options when it...
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The Years of Grace : Sport
Each section of The Years of Grace begins with some verse, and the introduction to ‘Sport’ is the worst by far: Every girl ought To love sport But if she wants to be wise and adorable and completely...
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The Years of Grace : Careers
The fifth and final section of The Years of Grace provides advice for girls about careers, although Noel Streatfeild emphasises in her introduction that “the best career for every woman is, of course,...
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‘A Spool of Blue Thread’ by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler is excellent at writing family sagas and A Spool of Blue Thread is a wonderful example of her craft, even if many of the themes and plot lines will be familiar to her fans. Her twentieth...
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‘The Meaning of Treason’ by Rebecca West
The Meaning of Treason is a fascinating, if somewhat biased, discussion of what ‘treason’ means in the modern world and although it was first published in 1949, I found it highly relevant to current...
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‘On Writing’ by Stephen King
I loved On Writing, a very entertaining and informative book about being a writer. It’s part memoir, part conventional fiction-writing guide, written in an amusing, self-deprecating style. For...
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Miscellaneous Memoranda
Or, A Collection of Book-Related Links That Caught My Attention But That I Never Got Around To Writing Blog Posts About. – And yes, I know I ended that sentence with a preposition and started this...
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‘Rivers of London’ by Ben Aaronovitch
I absolutely loved Rivers of London, the first in a series of novels about Constable Peter Grant of the London Metropolitan Police, who unexpectedly finds himself apprenticed to a wizard and solving...
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This Looks Strangely Familiar …
‘The Scent of Secrets’ by Jane Thynne (Published in September 2015 by Ballantine Books) The Scent of Secrets, by Jane Thynne, is historical fiction set in 1938 and published last month in the US and...
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‘Goodbye Stranger’ by Rebecca Stead
This is a gentle, thoughtful novel about friendship, love and change by Rebecca Stead, who won the Newbery Medal for When You Reach Me. I liked this book very much, but also wondered how many...
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What I’ve Been Reading : The Peter Grant Series
I’ve just started a new day job, plus I’ve returned to college to update my qualifications, so when I’m not working or studying or despairing at the current state of the world, I’m looking for reading...
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Mrs Hawkins Provides Some Advice for Writers
“So I passed him some very good advice, that if you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the...
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What I’ve Been Reading
Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment in Love was an interesting, if depressing, novel about young English women studying at university in the 1960s. Carmel, the narrator, has been brought up in a grim,...
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My Favourite Books of 2015
It’s not quite the end of the year, but here are the books I read in 2015 (so far) that I loved the most. But first, some statistics. I finished reading 81 books this year, which doesn’t include the...
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