Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Maeve Binchy - Circle of Friends

Another feelgood - but she certainly makes her characters live in my head, and her plots are well constructed. A picture of the changing society in Ireland, conflicts of old and new, a worldy-wise nun, two very different gold-diggers who come to grief or at least to reality, a decaying aristocratic family with a disowned wayward daughter, and the central friendship between two girls who grow up together in a small town and then Dublin.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Bill Bryson - Made in America

Another re-read. As always with Bryson, very entertaining, even when packed full o' facts. The book takes us through the development of American English from the early colonists to the present day. Well, 1994, when he wrote the book.
Along the way he debunks some of the popular myths of American history. Even Independence Day is celebrated on the 'wrong' day.
Excellent.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Carrington (1995)

The story of (Dora) Carrington, Lytton Strachey and other artists and writers of the early 20th century. Beautiful colours, lots of bed-hopping, and many people making themselves thoroughly miserable for the best of all possible motives. ('I don't believe in jealousy.')
An absorbing and well-told story.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

WritersDock Poetry Competition Winners

1st - Sabita Banerji More Gardened Against Than Gardening
2nd - Grace Galton Awakening
3rd - Geoff Lowe Death Comes in Two Parts

You can read the winning entries here.I act as a moderator for WD, but as someone who didn't enter or judge the competition, I'd like to congratulate the winners, and the judging team, and say how much I enjoyed all three poems.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

I, Claudius

We finished watching the series on DVD last night - what a lovely lot, those old Roman rulers were! It tends to put our modern sleaze and corruption stories into perspective a little.

Violence? We don't know the half of it.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Books I read at school

Someone on Writers' Dock has started a topic about reading in school, and whether it put us off particular books. Now, ok this is half a century ago, so...

I have very little memory of the books I read at primary school - I was devouring Enid Blyton adventures and the like at that stage, although my father didn't approve. I think we may have been encouraged on an individual basis rather than reading as a class.

At High School, we did read books as a class - I remember Moonfleet, by John Faulkner, which I loved. An adventure yarn with smuggling, treachery, mystery and so on. Mysterious noises in the church vaults during morning service. A cracking yarn.

I could never resist reading on ahead, rather than following whoever was reading in class. I was always two pages or more ahead, with one finger keeping my official page..

We read Hard Times, by Charles Dickens. I wasn't so struck by that at the time.

We read at least one Shakespeare play per year - Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth all stick in my mind. We used to take the parts and read them out.

I don't think we read Jane Austen or the Brontes in school, though I certainly read them at home.

It would have taken more than school to stop me reading as a child. Even the hour at the end of Friday afternoon didn't achieve that. That was when our revered headmistress 'taught' us Religious Studies by reading chunks of the Bible, evidently unaware that some of us eleven-year-olds were wriggling around trying not to wet ourselves.

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Just re-read Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris. I think this is my favourite of hers. I love the stories where her darker side emerges.

I am reading Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, by Alexander McCall Smith. I like this better than his Mma Ramotswe books about Botswana. He is pretty good at getting inside the head of a modern, intelligent woman.