I live in Hoylake, on the north-western tip of the Wirral peninsula. I used to spend an hour or more on trains each week travelling to work and if possible would read for the entire journey, which is how this blog came into being. I changed jobs a few years ago and don't travel to work by train anymore but I'm sticking with reading and blogging. Old habits die hard.
This is an ambitious distillation of social history using the rooms of a Victorian vicarage, Bryson’s home, as the ‘hook’, crammed to the rafters with interesting facts. Who knew that the youngest chimney sweep apprentice was aged only three and a half? Or that the boating accident on the Thames with the highest number of … More At Home by Bill Bryson
I bought Tenderness of Wolves because it won the Costa Book of the Year in 2006 but somewhere in my brain the title had become muddled with In the Company of Wolves, so when it arrived I was more than a little thrown to read the blurb and find that the central character was a … More The Tenderness of Wolves by Steff Penney
2013: the story so far… OK, I’ll admit, I’ve let things slide lately but, hey, life can get in the way sometimes. So this and the next four posts are to get up to speed with What Cathy Read since – ooh – November 2012. I have a confession: I like cemeteries. The church I … More Pure by Andrew Miller
Did you know that: International company Shell took that name because it originally sold shells before it diversified into oil; Wikipedia, etymologically speaking, means fast child; In golf, Bogey means a score for the hole of one over par whereas it originally meant par; Cappuccino evolved from Capuchin monks and pants from St Pantaleon; Torpedo … More The Etymologicon – A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth (The Inky Fool)
‘Too short for us’ ‘Too short’ ‘Not a novel’ ‘46,000 words is a novella’ Those are direct quotes from rejection letters about my first (go at writing a) novel. I mention this simply because The Sense of an Ending, at 150 pages, is about 46,000 words long, I reckon, give or take, which means by … More The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
My granddad liked a drink and a sing-song, and most of family stories about him have him indulging in one or the other or (more usually) both. Once, after a day on the ale during the Second World War – he’d fought in the First and was too old to be called up for the … More Small Island by Andrea Levy (what Cathy read when she broke her shoulder – part 2)
I’ll hold my hands up: with Day it was a case of third time lucky. I tried to read it twice and gave up twice before finally making it all the way through from the beginning to the end. Admittedly both the failed attempts were made in the small hours of the morning through the … More Day by A L Kennedy (what Cathy read when she broke her shoulder – part 1)
When someone we love dies we experience grief in four distinct stages. So it’s probably no coincidence that Reid’s poetry collection A Scattering, inspired by his wife’s illness and death, is in four parts. The first part, The Flowers of Crete, is concerned with a holiday during her final illness. However it is his wife’s … More A Scattering by Christopher Reid
‘I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.’ So writes Roseanne McNulty, a centenarian patient in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, as she secretly puts pen to … More The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Paradise Lost? Are you kidding? How can you tackle Paradise Lost in a blog? Where do you even begin to start? That’s the voice of reason banging on inside my head. And that’s why it’s taken me so long to get my bum on the seat to write the ruddy thing. So, why Paradise Lost? … More Paradise Lost by John Milton
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