Miserable winter weather always leads me to crank up the heating, feel guilty about it and read a book about sustainable living. Recently I re-read ‘Enough’, which could be described as a critique of our cluttered lifestyles from an evolutionary psychologist perspective. What’s it about? John Naish, lifestyle writer for The Times, argues that over human […]
It would be easy to dismiss this book as largely fearmongering, given the attention-seeking title. However, it’s much better than that. What’s it about? A few years ago, Sue Palmer, literacy expert, stepped aside from her day-to-day professional activities and began to examine a range of cultural factors that were having a growing impact on […]
Recently, I read ‘The Family’, a story which the blurb claims will ‘hook you in from the very first page, and keep you there til the very last’. Unfortunately, I found the opposite to be true: during the month I had this book, I found myself reading almost anything else, and it was a real […]
My teetering TBR pile and haphazard reading choices mean I always seem to reach the ‘must-read-book-of-the-year’ just after everyone else has finished reading and talking about it. Gillian Flynn’s third novel, ‘Gone Girl’, is a case in point: hyped as THE thriller of 2013, I found myself reading it as we slipped into 2014. So […]
I was pleased to receive this during my pregnancy as, at a mere 144 pages, it made the whole idea of having a child seem a lot more manageable. I’ve seen longer instruction manuals for putting furniture together. What’s it about? The basics of babycare. Jay starts from a position of absolute ignorance, similar to […]
It seems it may no longer be possible to be “well-read”, although much depends on how you define the term. Once, a reader who had read Shakespeare, Milton and works by a few of their contemporaries could claim to be well-read. Now, there are so many new books published each month that it sometimes feels […]
Like most people, I love a freebie. Free ebooks always seem like a great way to fill up my kindle, which I only tend to use when a bulkier book would be inconvenient to pack. Unfortunately, in my experience, these books are often free because no-one would buy them otherwise and very little money has […]
Although watching my son explore our local SureStart Centre can be fun, there is definitely a finite amount of time I can bear to spend watching him play with cars. Recently, that time having long since expired, I found myself browsing the centre’s bookshelves and spotted Sally Goddard Blythe’s ‘What Babies and Children Rally Need’. […]
After spending a day at home with my eleven month old son, it’s very easy to look around me and wonder what I’ve achieved. So I’ve tidied away the toys that made the living room look like a branch of the Early Learning Centre, cleaned on, around and under the high chair for the third […]
I like narratives with a distinctive voice. That said, I find narrators with a truly distinctive voice can take a bit of getting used to. My first perusal of the opening pages of Ken Bruen’s ‘Purgatory’ didn’t inspire me to read further and I let most of the month slip by, reading other things, until […]