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’ve read some wonderful books this year. My favourites were: The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie; Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; and (best of all) the fantastically bonkers The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. One of the great things about reading is there are always more books to read. Some of the … More Goodbye 2024, Welcome 2025!
“Fear not: for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” Age 6, I … More The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder
In September, Hubby and I spent a fortnight back-packing in Europe to celebrate my early retirement. Our whistle-stop tour took in Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Saltzberg, Munich, Frankfurt and Cologne and provided many memorable moments, some planned (Oktoberfest – or Blackpool on acid as I now call it) and some unplanned (floods in Central Europe). And … More Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)
A few years ago, finding a scrap of paper on which my father had written his mother’s maiden name, I resolved to find out what had happened to my father’s parents. Evenings would now be spent on genealogy sites searching online records. I requested copies of birth, marriage and death certificates from the GRO, military … More Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
If you mainlined the Paris Olympics, as I did, you would have seen the controversy around two women boxers, Imane Khalif from Algeria and Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan. Both had been banned from competing in the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) but were cleared to compete in the 2024 … More Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
So, he who is known only as “Hubby” is making a rare guest contribution to the What Cathy Read blog, but as ever, worry not, Cathy will be back next month. I went to an all-boys secondary school in the late 70’s and early 80’s. It was a time when corporal punishment was routinely used … More The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe
June 2016. Hubby and I dutifully cast our votes in a once-in-a-lifetime referendum offering a simple, binary choice: Leave or Remain. We knew we were going to vote different ways and our votes would cancel out. In effect, we might as well not have bothered – but we both agree that voting is important. I … More Middle England by Jonathan Coe
Wind the clock back twenty years or so, and you’d find me trying to bash out a novel. It was a dystopian number called Embryo Song that owed more than a little to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I managed 50,000 words (about 200 pages) before I ran out of ideas and energy and now, … More Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
When I was a small child we lived next door to an old woman. Her name was Mrs Billington, and some nights she’d roam the street like a ghost, in slippers and a long, white nightgown, her white hair loose around her shoulders, looking for her mother. Mrs B gets ‘confused’, my mother told me. … More Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
Have you ever dreamed you’re running away from something, though you’re not quite sure from what or whom? Or that you’re lost in a forest? Or where you see yourself and in the dream you look totally different, but you know it’s you? This is pretty much where the protagonist of The Seven Deaths of … More The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
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