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.
In July, Hubby and I spent a week in the city of Cork, Ireland’s second-city (though with a population of only 300,000 it feels more like a large town). I love exploring new places. Aside from the joy to be had from the main sights, there’s the thrill of simply wandering around a strange city, … More Fools of Fortune by William Trevor
If you follow my blog you’ll probably realise that I mostly read prize-winning books. That’s not because I think prize winners are the only books worth reading (sometimes I don’t even rate them all that highly). No, I read the prize winners because I get to read books that I wouldn’t otherwise pick up – … More Heart Lamp Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq translated by Deepa Bashti
Earlier this year I was on a walk with my friend Hal when he brought up my blog post on Orlando. If you read my post, you might remember I confessed to not liking Woolf’s major novels, Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). (I did acknowledge I might have been … More To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
If you’ve read my blog post about Bart Van Es’s biography The Cut Out Girl, you’ll know that during World War Two, The Netherlands (Nazi-occupied at the time) was so efficient at rounding up its Jewish population, that the death rate was the highest in Europe, higher even than in Germany. I highly recommend Van … More The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
A couple of months ago (at the time of writing) Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer made a speech about how Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together” due to uncontrolled immigration. He later said he deeply regretted his choice of words, but it got me thinking about the … More American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The ancient Greeks had a theory about soul-mates. It was said the first humans were spherical and twice the size of present-day humans, and were cut in half by Zeus as a punishment for misbehaviour – literally cut down to size – splitting their souls between two bodies. A variation of the same myth said … More Normal People by Sally Rooney
A couple of months ago I was in Madrid with my friend, Cath. It was a joy to visit Spain with her not least because she’s a fluent Spanish-speaker and knows a lot about the culture. In the Prado we lingered over the museum’s most famous artwork Las Meninas (the Ladies-in Waiting) by Velazquez, which … More Orbital by Samantha Harvey
During the COVID lockdown, with all swimming pools shut like many others I took to the sea. I didn’t have to go far: only a few miles along the coast from my home there is a lovely, sheltered bay. Immersion was gloriously cold and exhilarating, and I loved it…but having a healthy respect for tides, … More Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain by Roger Deakin
“False information can be just as useful, influential, as telling, transforming or as damaging as true information…how could you tell what was genuine and what was the product of a clever, devious and determined mind?” Barely a day goes by, it seems, without talk of fake news and disinformation, and services such BBC Verify exist … More Restless by William Boyd
About five years ago while sorting through a stack of old, official paperwork, I found a piece of paper on which my dad had written his mother’s maiden name: Agnes Hughes. That doesn’t sound so strange, until you realise that Dad was an orphan. He’d been raised in various Barnardo’s homes from the age of … More Regarding Agnes….I did it!
whatcathyread 