September 26, 2012 · 1:55 pm
According to Peter Stothard, this year’s chair of the Man Booker Prize judges, book bloggers are harming literature. Well thanks, Peter. Thanks a lot. I’m sure there are many people who have come across my blog who might have been indifferent or in strong disagreement with my reviews but I never expected the whole concept of my blog to be accused of being detrimental to literature. That seems quite extreme to me.
I am not a professional critic. I enjoy reading books and nobody pays me to write reviews. I did not study English Literature at university. I do not work in publishing or journalism. As a blogger, I don’t have an editor to check my posts and I know my writing isn’t perfect. However, I completely reject Stothard’s assertion that blogging is drowning out ‘serious criticism’. He appears to have lumped all bloggers into the category of what he calls ‘unargued opinion’. Sure, there is an awful lot of badly written stuff out there, but it isn’t universal. Continue reading →
September 23, 2012 · 12:24 pm
The downside of starting my postgraduate degree next week is that I will have a lot less time to read fiction and also a lot less time for blogging than I’ve had over the summer. The upside is that I now have access to different libraries and a 10% student discount at my favourite bookshop in the world, Foyles, so when I do have time to read for pleasure, I will be pretty spoilt for choice.
Last week, I visited the main university library for the first time and got hopelessly lost. Due to the absence of signs and being completely unfamiliar with the Library of Congress classification system, it took me nearly an hour to even find the sections relevant to my course. During my search, I happened to stumble across the Czech literature section and picked up a copy of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera as it was on my TBR list and isn’t available at my local library. I figured that even if I never found the books I had actually gone to look for, it wouldn’t have been a totally wasted trip. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Fiction, Literature, Milan Kundera, Novels, Philosophy, Reading, Reviews, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
September 19, 2012 · 3:07 pm
‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham interweaves the parallel stories of three women from different generations across one day in their lives through their connection with the novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’. The writer Virginia Woolf is in the process of writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’ in the early 1920s as she battles mental illness. Claustrophobic post-war housewife Laura Brown bakes a cake to celebrate her husband’s birthday but all she really wants to do is escape and read ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway, is a modern-day New Yorker planning a party for her friend and former lover, Richard. As well as the obvious connection with Woolf’s novel, the women are all connected in other ways. Notably they are affected by the same themes including madness and sexuality.
Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Fiction, Literature, Michael Cunningham, Mrs Dalloway, Novels, Pulitzer Prize, Reading, Reviews, The Hours, Virginia Woolf
September 16, 2012 · 11:44 am
Earlier this year, I watched the first season of the TV series ‘Borgen’, a political drama set in Denmark, and got completely hooked to the point where I began to convince myself that I could speak Danish. However, with the exception of reading the Millennium Trilogy a couple of years ago, I am definitely lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to jumping on the Scandinavian crime fiction bandwagon and this week, I tried to rectify that by reading ‘The Redbreast’ by Jo Nesbo. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Crime, Fiction, Harry Hole, Jo Nesbo, Norway, Novels, Reading, Reviews, The Redbreast, Thriller
September 13, 2012 · 5:09 pm
The Mercury Prize (sorry, Barclaycard Mercury Prize) nominations are out. Here is the shortlist for this year’s prize:
Richard Hawley: Standing At The Sky’s Edge
Plan B: Ill Manors
Alt-J: An Awesome Wave
Django Django: Django Django
The Maccabees: Given To The Wild
Jessie Ware: Devotion
Ben Howard: Every Kingdom
Michael Kiwanuka: Home Again
Lianne La Havas: Is Your Love Big Enough?
Field Music: Plumb
Roller Trio: Roller Trio
Sam Lee: Ground Of Its Own
Continue reading →
September 12, 2012 · 3:29 pm
After the madness of being Freshly Pressed two weeks ago, my post ‘The Rise of eBooks: evil or essential?‘ has now been featured in the Daily Post! It is quite funny reading an analysis of how I managed to make my post Freshly Press-able without me even realising it at the time. It’s also a nice confidence boost for me as I am far from being an expert at blogging. Continue reading →
September 11, 2012 · 6:20 pm
‘Cold Comfort Farm’ by Stella Gibbons tells the story of nineteen year old Flora Poste who decides to track down her long lost cousins out in the Sussex countryside on Cold Comfort Farm after the sudden death of her parents. As soon as she is confronted by her strange relatives, Flora immediately sets about trying to change things on the farm with each character having their own particular problem that needs resolving. However, her modern middle-class outlook frequently clashes with the rural way of life as she helps them to adapt to the twentieth century.
Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Cold Comfort Farm, Fiction, Humour, Novels, Reading, Reviews, Rural, Stella Gibbons
September 9, 2012 · 12:21 pm
I have been meaning to read ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ for absolutely ages – as I’ve mentioned, I find it easy to take classic literature for granted, knowing that it will always be easily available especially in electronic format, so it tends to get pushed down to the bottom of my TBR list. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ should have been bumped up to the top of my list sooner. The novel tells the story of a young man named Dorian Gray, who has a portrait painted of him by Basil Hallward. Dorian meets Basil’s friend, Lord Henry (Harry) Wotton, who believes that youth and beauty are the only things which really matter in the world and Dorian subsequently becomes heavily influenced by his ideas about aestheticism. However, the story takes a sinister turn when Dorian makes a wish that only his portrait should age and wither while he would look young forever, thus selling his soul for eternal youth. As you can imagine, the moral of the story is something along the lines of ‘be careful what you wish for’… Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Classic Literature, Literature, Novels, Oscar Wilde, Reading, Reviews, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Victorian
September 6, 2012 · 6:47 pm
I mentioned in a post recently that I wanted to re-read the Adrian Mole books (again) by Sue Townsend at some point as they must surely be amongst the funniest books ever written. I then realised that I hadn’t actually read the latest book in the series ‘Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years’. Set in 2007-2008 as the credit crunch looms over Britain, Adrian is approaching his 40th birthday and has settled down with his second wife, Daisy, and their daughter, Gracie. However, all is not well in Adrian’s life as both his health and his marriage are in a very fragile state. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Adrian Mole, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Diaries, Diary, Fiction, Humour, Reading, Reviews, Sue Townsend
September 3, 2012 · 4:36 pm
‘Lucky Jim’ by Kingsley Amis tells the story of James Dixon, (a character supposedly inspired by Philip Larkin, as Wikipedia reliably informs me) who has stumbled into a job as a medieval history lecturer at a redbrick university in the Midlands mostly by accident. Due to his northern, non-elitist background, he frequently finds himself out of place in academic circles and the story recounts the often farcical episodes of his early career. At the beginning of the story, Dixon is worried that he will not be reappointed at the end of his probationary year but ends up making a series of gaffes in his efforts to keep his job as well as trying to deal with his on-off girlfriend, Margaret. Continue reading →
August 30, 2012 · 7:39 am
After less than six months of blogging, I’VE BEEN FRESHLY PRESSED!!!
Thank you to WordPress for choosing my post and thank you to everyone who has had a look at my Little Blog especially my very dedicated followers for posting so many comments and generating quite a lot of debate on some of my posts! I start my Master’s degree very soon so I might not be posting quite so frequently over the next few months but I will still try and blog as regularly as I can!
Also, it is going to take me hours to reply to everyone’s comments on my Freshly Pressed post on eBooks which are still coming in thick and fast so please bear with me on that! Thanks again, you’re all lovely 🙂
August 28, 2012 · 6:53 pm
The eBook debate continues to rage incessantly and provoke some very important questions. Is the controversy less about the value of books and more about the development of modern technology? Who are the winners and the losers in this supposed eBook revolution? Does it really matter what format books are available in? For many people, it certainly does.
Although I don’t actually own an e-reader yet, I do plan to get a Kindle soon (hopefully for Christmas this year) after borrowing my sister’s one earlier this summer. I will be using it almost exclusively for when I’m commuting by train as it is the practical side of e-readers which appeals to me the most.
Source: The Guardian
Continue reading →
August 27, 2012 · 5:23 pm
The premise of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is the stuff of nightmares for bibliophiles everywhere. Ray Bradbury’s portrayal of a dystopian society in which books are outlawed would be like hell for all book-lovers: as we are told on the first page, Fahrenheit 451 is “the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns”. The book tells the story of a fireman called Guy Montag, except he is not the sort of fireman we would normally imagine – instead of putting fires out, firemen in Bradbury’s not too distant future deliberately start fires in places where books are found. From the moment when his seventeen year old neighbour Clarisse McClellan asks him if he is happy, Montag starts to question everything around him especially when Clarisse disappears and his wife, Mildred, attempts suicide. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, Fiction, Literature, Ray Bradbury, Reading, Reviews, Science Fiction
August 25, 2012 · 3:03 pm
Although lots of people may say that you should never judge a book by its cover, in the case of ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern, I think it’s acceptable to do so. I love this book cover not just because it is very pretty but because I think it matches the story so well too. Lots of adjectives like ‘dazzling’, ‘enchanting’, ‘spellbinding’, ‘imaginative’, ‘captivating’ and ‘magical’ have already been used in the critics reviews on the cover to describe this book. I would like to add that it is also highly original especially for a fantasy story. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Erin Morgenstern, Fiction, Literature, Novels, Reading, Reviews, The Night Circus, Victorian
August 23, 2012 · 6:01 pm
Set in England in the 1950s, ‘The Outcast’ by Sadie Jones tells the story of nineteen year old Lewis Aldridge and his return to his childhood home in a small village in Surrey after spending two years in prison. Tensions both at home and in the community soon become darker as it becomes clear that Lewis will never really be able to make a fresh start in Waterford and let go of his troubled past. Never has the British stiff upper lip seemed so resistant to change. Continue reading →
August 22, 2012 · 12:37 pm
‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov tells the story of Humbert Humbert and his obsession with twelve year old Dolores Haze also known as Lolita. Humbert marries her mother, Charlotte, to be closer to Lolita and after her sudden death, Humbert becomes sexually involved with Lolita and they travel around the United States. The themes of obsession and loss of innocence are dark and so is the humour in this densely written classic which is still as controversial today as it was when it was first published in the 1950s. Continue reading →
August 20, 2012 · 12:12 pm
I will admit that I had never heard of ‘The History of Love’ by Nicole Krauss until relatively recently in spite of the huge number of endorsements it seems to have had from critics over the last few years. The novel only came to my attention after reading some blog reviews recently which gave it extremely high praise so I decided to hunt it down at the library this week. In a nutshell, ‘The History of Love’ tells the parallel stories of Leo Gorsky, an elderly man living in New York City who is unaware that a novel he wrote in his youth entitled ‘The History of Love’ was published under a different name, and Alma Singer, a fourteen year old girl who tries to track down her namesake from the same book who also happens to be the woman that Leo based his novel on. However, this brief summary only scratches the surface of the intricately-drawn mystery at the heart of the story. Continue reading →
August 18, 2012 · 4:47 pm
I very rarely give up on a book. Even when I dislike a book, I will usually finish it out of obligation (like ‘The Immoralist’ by André Gide, for a French literature course) or sheer bloody-mindedness just to say I read it (like ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen) or simply to get people to stop hassling me about it (like ‘The Hobbit’ by J. R. R. Tolkien). But occasionally, life is just too short. Here is a list of the books I have given up on in the last couple of years.
Everything is Illuminated: Jonathan Safran Foer
This was the last book I couldn’t finish a few months ago. To compare the linguistic experimentalism of this book with ‘A Clockwork Orange’ by Anthony Burgess is a sin of the highest order. To try and stretch out an unfunny joke about Ukrainian attempts at the English language over an entire book is completely unforgivable. Sorry, I just didn’t get it.
Continue reading →
August 17, 2012 · 12:20 pm
‘The Crossroads’ by Niccolò Ammaniti is a dark-humoured thriller which won the Premio Strega – the Italian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize – in 2007. Unsatisfied with their lives, Rino Zena, and his low-life friends Danilo Aprea and Quattro Formaggi (yes, it’s a nickname) plan to carry out a bank raid and come up with the supposedly perfect crime. However, events soon take them in unexpected directions. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Fiction, Italy, Niccolo Ammaniti, Novels, Reading, Reviews, The Crossroads, Thriller
August 15, 2012 · 12:08 pm
I found a copy of ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini on top of a hand dryer in the ladies toilets somewhere a couple of years ago with a note inside which read ‘If you enjoy this book, please pass it on!’. I feel quite bad for hanging on to it for so long as so many other people could have read it in the time that it has sat on my book shelf collecting dust. But I also wish I had got round to reading it sooner simply because it is a very worthwhile (if imperfect) read. ‘The Kite Runner’ tells the story of Amir and his friend Hassan growing up in Afghanistan in the 1970s and the tragic consequences following a kite-fighting competition they take part in. Although the Russian invasion forces Amir to leave Afghanistan to start a new life in the United States, the events of his childhood never really go away and years later, he returns to his home country following the rise of the Taliban in the hope of finding redemption. Continue reading →
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