Where to start with this towering novel by Patrick White? The fact that I finished reading it yesterday evening. That when I started reading it, a couple of months ago, the handsome hardback I bought on our short trip to Lewes, I immediately felt rejuvenated. Here was a book, a writer, I really wanted to …
Category: reading
a quick (late) sketch from the rear stalls
To a seat in the rear stalls at the Royal Festival Hall last night, for the T S Eliot Prize readings. This was the hot ticket on a very cold Sunday night. Nearly 2,000 in the audience. Eight shortlisted poets reading for 10 minutes each (give or take a rambling digression or two). Compered by …
how to save eight hundred and ninety-five pounds
You find yourself, on a weekend away from London, in the rather randomly chosen town of Lewes (but what a good choice it turns out to be), on the Saturday morning, after a superb breakfast of eggs Florentine in the swishy hotel you've indulgently booked - you find yourself at a book fair in Lewes …
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notes from yesterday
A breezy, summer's-last-hurrah day. A rare lie in, cups of tea, Radio 3. Late breakfast: wilted spinach and poached eggs on toast, to set us up nicely for the day's cultural exertions. First stop, the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair at Exmouth Market, organised by the excellent CB editions. An inspiring, if slightly overwhelming, event …
worrying about my reading habits
Am I reading enough? Am I reading enough contemporary fiction? Have I read enough of the classics? Do I read enough literature in translation? Is it a problem that my reading choices are scattered, random, unstructured? Dare I confess that I have never been a voracious reader? That I never read under the bedclothes with …
literary connections
I've recently finished reading, in quick succession, The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (introduction by Ali Smith) and There But For The by Ali Smith herself. I found Carrington's novel charming and surprising, wonderfully anarchic, but with a dark subtext about humanity's exploitative and destructive relationship with mother earth. There are elements that reminded me of …
waking up to Chandler
A fairly unusual occurrence for me - a book finished within a week: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, which I read because it came endorsed by my sister, and because I felt I should have read Chandler. How many other authors are there I should have read? More than enough to induce panic, guilt, …
my brain hurts
In a parallel universe, I have been reading about spaghetti maps, swimlane diagrams, rich pictures, mind mapping, and an astonishing number of acronyms. CATWOE, anyone? PESTLE analysis, MoSCoW, MOST? Welcome to the world of business analysis, where your Boston box contains both a Wild Cat and a Cash Cow, your fishbone diagram could be labelled …
The True Deceiver
Recently finished reading Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver. A cool, mysterious, deceptive (appropriately) novel. The writing is beautiful in an unflashy way - an almost glacial surface (hard not to reach for those Nordic metaphors), troubling undercurrents, piquant details. I was captivated by the sense of place, the winter which never seems to end, the …
double dose
Two literary evenings on the trot. First up, on Tuesday, to the London Review Bookshop to hear Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts read from and discuss their new book Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness. In the spirit of their collaborative approach to writing the book, they took turns reading passages from the chapter …
Hilaire 