Holiday reading?

We are away for a little while so nothing new till I get back - in the meantime here are some book reviews from the archives. I never intended to do book reviews on here...in fact I have no idea what I intended...but now and again I have found myself in a book-reviewing state of mind (or something). All these have come about for a whole range of different reasons and whilst some have been reviews of new books some have been anything but! There will be another (new) book review when I get back (the John Baker 'Winged with Death' review I mentioned not long back).


I picked Ben Okri's novel 'The Famished Road' up in the library one day because I'd seen that it had won a prize some time back (Booker Prize 1991...whole lifetimes ago!) and wondered what it was like. This post is from June 06.


Jim Murdoch was one of my first blog experiences (that sounds a bit weird) and here I am spending a lot of typing time on his novel 'Living with the Truth'. It was a two-way thing – he reviewed my book slightly earlier on – but this piece is from June 08.


I don't review many poetry books. Why is that? I do read them...and I do write about poems and poets...I just don't often feel the need or desire to write reviews of whole individual poetry collections (it's not one of my interests as far as poetry is concerned I suppose...I tend to be more interested in individual poems...I think). I could go into this now but I haven't the energy or the time! Probably the closest I have got to reviewing a poet's book is Hugh McMillan's excellent 'Postcards from the hedge' so here is what I managed in August 08.


Remember the reading list for life project we got into on here last year? It started with a comment by Fiendish at Dave King's and it ended up with heaps of books we would all recommend to a young adult reader. One book that was mentioned by several of you was Aldous Huxley's novel 'Brave New World' and I had somehow never read it. So last year I did...and then wrote this in September 08.


Another one that had escaped me was Evelyn Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited'. So I read that too and wrote this in September 08. That was quite a lively comments box if I remember rightly.


When I wrote a post about my family's Quaker links Colin Will mentioned the historical novel about Quakers by Margaret Elphinstone called 'Voyageurs'. I got it out of the library and wrote this in October 08.


This book sounded so daring that I bought it brand new - Bernardine Evaristo's 'Blonde Roots'. I wrote about it here in November 08.


A little more poetry...I wrote about the anthology '101 Poems by 101 Women' (ed. Germaine Greer) here in December 08. It's not exactly a review (are mine ever?) but you might like it anyway.


I like a little light reading at Xmas so I read comedian/actor Steve Martin's autobiography 'Born Standing Up' and wrote about it here in January 09.


Another book swap with a blogger...I wrote about Fiona Robyn's hot-off-the-press novel 'The Letters' here in March 09. What did she think of my book? I have no idea...


And that, my readers, is all there is for now. After last post's brush with royalty I would have liked a good Spitting Image does the royals clip to finish off but couldn't see one I wanted so instead you could go and see another famous family that starts with r instead (here).