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This is a funny little book and I’m not sure what it’s about. In The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (translated from French by Alison Anderson) a concierge, Renee, looks after an apartment building in Paris inhabited by very rich people. Most of the people who live in the building don’t notice Renee unless they want…
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The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks is the first of his science fiction novels that I read. At the end of last year I read two of his more recent ones that I was blown away by and wished I could nominate them for my book club. I couldn’t because we have a…
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Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach is one of those books I should have read a long time ago, but didn’t get around to. It’s an experience akin to reading The Lord of the Rings, in that I’ve read lots of things derived from it so it seems quite familiar. The central premise…
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Apparently books have trailers now. I’ve been aware of this for some time but never actually watched one, because it just seems like the wrong medium. Then I read that Joe Abercrombie’s forthcoming A Red Country has a trailer. I’m such a fangirl that, naturally, I went off to watch it. It still seems like an…
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As read by Hugh Dennis on Radio 4! I caught the last episode over Christmas and it was funny, and available for 99p for my new kindle, so I bought The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth. Who also blogs over at The Inky Fool. It is a series of brief chapters on the origin of words in English, where…
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Finally, the last part of the Millenium trilogy! In Steig Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, Lisbeth Salander is arrested for the attempted murder of her father and her friends work hard to save her. Lisbeth has a bullet lodged in her brain and is taken to hospital where her life is saved…
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I bought this book about ten years ago at a time when I was very depressed. It seemed like The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon might be relevant but actually I found it too upsetting to read. The sub-title of the book is An Atlas of Depression. It starts with the author’s own experience and an overview of…
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The book for Book Club in March is Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth, who also wrote Call The Midwife, now a BBC series. I know something about workhouses and the conditions that inmates experienced, the values that inspired them and some of the reasons why they didn’t work. I was interested in reading…
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I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while. It turns out that The Steel Remains was the first in a trilogy after all. Richard Morgan’s The Cold Commands is the second in the series. Ringil is busy exacting revenge on the slave traders who took his cousin. He slaughters a whole caravan and heads…
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Boudica Marginalia 