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 […]
My initial response to The Austen Project was the mental equivalent of a head-shake and an eye roll. WHY spend time rewriting the classics? Surely the whole point of a classic is that they are, in some ways at least, still relevant in contemporary society and culture? If a book is no longer relevant to […]
‘Sense and Sensibility’ – by Joanna Trollope? Doesn’t sound right, does it? How about ‘Northanger Abbey’ – by Val McDermid? Meet The Austen Project: six well-known authors are ‘reworking’ Jane Austen’s six completed novels. Why? Erm…because they can? This isn’t a new phenomenon by any means, and there are still fewer rewrites of Austen than […]
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’. […]