Why do we say a gaggle of geese, a flock of sheep, a pride of lions or a swarm of bees? Well it harks back to medieval times when sportsmen grouped together collectives of beasties to refer to them in movement or attributing a quality to them - presumably while the poor creatures ran away…
Continue reading ➞ Thirty great medieval epithets for people and beasts
For all of the bookworms, here are some of the most exquisitely rendered miniature books in the world. As a warm up, here's a picture of the bombed-out Holland House library in London during WW2. The message was loud and clear. Readers won't be perturbed from doing what they love, no matter what else is…
Continue reading ➞ The Most Exquisite Tiny Books in the World
^ Contains no spoilers Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez is more known for his stunning works for fiction. However this short novella his first published peice of work is non-fiction. Garcia wrote this essay in a series of newspaper articles in Bogota over 30 years ago. He tells the dramatised story of a sailor Luis…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The narrator of this novel is an elderly Eileen who looks back on her mis-spent youth in 1964. This book is the blackest kind of noir, but does away with the usual noir narrative tropes. It tells the story of Eileen's entanglement with the enigmatic and beautiful Rebecca who is more a mythological figure than…
“If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.” – Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou has been one of the most influential literary voices of our time. Born in 1928 she has been in turns a poet, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, historian, film-maker and civil rights activist. She worked for Malcolm X…
Continue reading ➞ Ten Life Lessons We Can Learn From Maya Angelou
This memoir and first book by American author Margaux Fragoso was veritable literary dynamite when it came out in 2011. Or you could call it literary vegemite, in that you will either love the book or hate it. Tiger Tiger charts the complex sexual relationship of the author Margaux with Peter Curran, which began when…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: Tiger Tiger by Margaux Fragoso
Stuck on what to read next? Hate judging books by their covers? Then the Recommend me a book app will delight you. The app takes you headlong into reading the first few pages of a book without knowing anything about the author, title or context of the book itself. This allows you to gain some traction and…
His Bloody Project by author Graeme Macrae Burnet recounts the story of the triple murder and subsequent trial of accused 17 year old crofter Roderick McRae, who brutally slays three people in his remote village in 1896. Roderick lives with his family in a tiny croft on a property and land owned by the laird. His…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: His Bloody Project by Graeme MacRae Burnet
You know how you sometimes have those days, or even weeks or months when you feel un-moored to the shoreline and adrift in a lost world, floating aimlessly, feeling sad or morose? This is the kind of book every woman needs to feel found again. It's that miraculous book that brings you right back to…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: Today, Tomorrow and Everyday by M.H. Clark
Eowyn Ivey is a master craftswoman and her sentences are smooth and flowing like treacle. Her debut the Snow Child was one of my favourite novels. It told the magical tale of a child that emerges out of the icy Alaskan tundra and provides an ageing couple yearning for a baby, with the promise of…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey
Scottish writer Alan Warner's novel Their Lips Talk of Mischief is a boisterous, vigorous and energetic novel about two literary wannabes (Lou and Douglas) living in a glum 80's Thatcherite slumland in Britain. The pair share an interest in Lou's enigmatic and sexy girlfriend Aoife. Thus develops a complex menage a trois that follows. The year…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: Their Lips Talk of Mischief by Alan Warner
Peter and Beatrice Leigh are a childless 30-something British couple who are devoutly evangelical Christians and are living in a Britain of an imagined near future. In this imaginary Britain things look largely similar to how they are right now, except that there's a colony of humans living on a faraway planet called Oasis. These…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
OZ magazine was published in Australia and London between 1963 and 1973 and under the stewardship of Richard Neville and later also Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis. This magazine left the door wide open for everything wild, illegal, outrageous, radical and until then largely unimaginable. OZ magazine is reproduced by permission of Richard Neville in…
Continue reading ➞ The Iconic & Subversive Oz Magazine – In all its Psychadelic Glory
Poland in the summer is filled with enveloping sunlight, as bright and life affirming as a hug. Vibrant life, bees and flies take a circuitous route through fields of barley, poppies and wheat in the countryside. The air filled with drifting dandelion and pollen. A cacophany of bird song fills the countryside accompanied by a…
Continue reading ➞ Celestial ceilings and soaring skies in Poland
David Foster Wallace combined his phenomenal intelligence and gift for writing with a high level of self-awareness, and a deep awareness of the brutality and enormity of the world. He had an almost omnipotent ability to understand and communicate about what it means to be human in his iconic books. Like most highly sensitive people…
Continue reading ➞ The Soul of the World: David Foster Wallace
A bit of background: I came very late to the party when it comes to fantasy fiction. A devoted fan of Game of Thrones on TV, I nonetheless found this far too violent, ruthless and bloody to become fully enveloped into the fandom and to read George R.R Martin. So it was a massive surprise…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: Fools Assassin (Part 1 of the Fitz & the Fool Trilogy) by Robin Hobb
At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed the mountain. Going out alone with my staff of holly-wood. A thousand crags, a thousand valleys - In my dream journey none were unexplored And all the while my feet never grew tired And my step was as strong as in my younger days. Can it be…
This is a novel concept that could only be conceived by the Japanese. A bed and book hostel. This captures the very essence of snuggling comfort- falling asleep while reading a good book! The Book and Bed Hostel is a bookshop that's also a hostel and allows bibliophiles to hire out a nest-like bunk bed…
Continue reading ➞ The Ultimate Soothing Tokyo Lullaby: Book and Bed
This is a book to devour in enormous gulps. When you do come up for air, fill yourself with black tea and then settle back into your armchair, to be borne aloft once more. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent is a bittersweet and melancholy tale of a woman named Agnes Magnusdottir. Set in Iceland in…
I found this tiny old leatherbound book in the home of a woman I was looking after in Wales about six years ago. I liked looking after the woman and living in her ancient thatch-roofed house in the middle of nowhere. The serenity was perfect. And yet precisely because it was so serene, I got…
Continue reading ➞ Objects With A Story. Object 1: The Tiny Book
