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.
I’m not a big fan of book groups. Or rather, like a lot of things, they look good on paper but don’t work that well in real life. Reading and talking about a book are two different skills. Book group members are often good at the former but not so good at the latter, so … More Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
Liz Jensen is an author I admire, so when in a recent piece for creative writing journal Mslexia she urged subscribers to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band, I determined to do exactly that. As you might guess it‘s a Sherlock Holmes adventure, the first I’ve ever read, though I’d … More The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley, a Manx smuggler. The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, a country parson. Jack Harp, an escaped convict. Peevay, a mixed-race aborigine. Dr Thomas Potter, a race-supremacy theorist. Timothy Renshaw, a reluctant botanist. These are just some of the colourful characters that narrate this extraordinary book. Spanning a period of fifty years, from … More English Passengers by Matthew Kneale
When I was 16 I told my mum I liked Lion Bars. I mentioned it once, you understand, as a throw away remark in a casual conversation. My mum, though, treated my ephemeral preference as if Moses had descended from the Mount of Olives bearing a stone tablet inscribed ‘Though Shalt Bestow on Thy … More The Greeks Have A Word For It by Barry Unsworth
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 attempt 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)
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