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Monthly Archives: September 2011
I’m on Scene of the Blog!
September 28, 2011 – 7:30 am
Simple pleasures, elegantly phrased
September 27, 2011 – 9:01 am
Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid
by Virginia Woolf
This collection of essays in the Penguin Great Ideas series were originally published between 1925 and 1942 (a few being from a posthumous collection). I think I am growing to prefer Woolf’s essays to her fiction, which is probably some kind of heresy in a literature graduate, but these are truly beautiful pieces of writing…
Make do and bake
September 26, 2011 – 3:31 pm
I went for a walk this afternoon to a favourite cafe for chai tea and cake, only to find that it’s closed on Mondays. So I just had to come home and make it for myself…
A peek inside
September 24, 2011 – 3:02 pm
Censoring an Iranian Love Story
by Shahriar Mandanipour
translated from Farsi by Sara Khalili
This is a complicated book to explain, and indeed to read and form a reaction to. But it’s also an illuminating look into a world we in the West don’t get to see in detail: modern-day Iran…
Back to the classics
September 20, 2011 – 8:16 pm
The Time Machine
by H G Wells
This is one of those greatly revered classics that made people look on with admiration while I was reading it, but actually isn’t a particularly hard read. It’s also not the most engaging, but it is full of Big Ideas…
Comics are for grown-ups
September 17, 2011 – 2:38 pm
Skellington
Scary Go Round book 3
by John Allison
As the title intimates, this is the third collection of Allison’s Scary Go Round web comic strips in print, in this case from May 2004 to March 2005. All of those comics are still available, for free, on the Scary Go Round website so why would I (well, okay, Tim) buy this in book form…
Book Blogger Appreciation Week
September 16, 2011 – 7:44 pm
This week has been (and just about still is) Book Blogger Appreciation Week, which is a fab event for, you know, book bloggers. I sadly have been far too busy to take part properly but I wanted to say a quick hello and thank you to the book-blogging community. You’re ace…
Future terrors
September 14, 2011 – 5:27 pm
The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood
My immediate reaction on finishing this book was “Oh wow” (in fact, I think I tweeted exactly that). I am so grateful to my book club for getting me to read it and suspect it will be a book to come back to, time and again…
Give it up
September 12, 2011 – 6:11 pm
When you are first diagnosed with a chronic illness it seems as though you are constantly having to give things up. Good things. Fun things. Chronic illnesses don’t tend to be a death sentence but they often appear to be a boredom sentence…
What larks, eh?
September 8, 2011 – 6:36 pm
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
by P G Wodehouse
It’s perhaps surprising that I had never picked up a Wodehouse before, and I’m glad I’ve finally indulged. This is one of the later titles in the canon but I already knew the characters and storylines from the TV series so I figured it made no difference. Maybe one day I’ll read them all in order…