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
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
‘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)
‘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
Some years ago I spent two terms teaching English at a girls’ grammar school and during that time I tried as best I could to encourage my students to read for pleasure. At the start of one lesson with a group of Year 7s (that’s 1st year seniors in old money, so 11 and 12 … More His Dark Materials Trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman
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