Buried Under Books

The one you wish you hadn’t read

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 […]

Revisioning Jane Austen – The Austen Project II

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 […]

Rewriting Jane Austen – The Austen Project I

‘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 […]

What Babies and Children Really Need

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’. […]

What Mothers Do

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 […]

Misconceptions of Motherhood

Someone once told me I would look forward to returning to work when I had finished enjoying my “love affair with motherhood”. At the time, this simply irritated me, though I wasn’t sure why. Time has allowed me to articulate the sources of my irritation. 1. Explicit in this statement is the certainty that I […]

A main serving of noir with a side dish of crime

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 […]

Why would suicide need a witness?

I’m always interested in the reasons writers choose to adopt pseudonyms. Crime novelist Agatha Christie published six “romance” novels as Mary Westmacott; adult sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov wrote a series of YA novels as Paul French; and, of course, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling was recently unmasked as Robert Galbraith, author of ‘The Cuckoo’s […]

a book collector’s dilemma

I have always maintained that it is impossible to own too many books. I still believe this. However, I have recently reached the stage where I can’t see all my books because they’re hidden by…another row of books, which is topped by…a further pile of books. Other books, despairing of ever reaching the precious shelves, […]

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