Skip to main content

reading: five books that are going on my 'to read' list.

I have spoken before about how my list of books to read is huge, and ever growing. This week for Friday's Fabulous Five, I thought I'd share five books which have recently gone on the list. Perhaps I can make your list grow too?!

1. First up is Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther, as recommeded on A Good Read back in March 2015. This is a really old book, but I've not read it yet, even though there was a Virago version and I used to read EVERYTHING from Virago! Have you read it yet?

2 Next up, and I don't know how it got on the list, but it looks good is The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Blanch. This is pretty old too, but fascinating, telling tales from Lesley's life. It's reviewed in the Telegraph here. Lesley died in 2007, aged 103, and having packed a lot in. Literally.

3. Also from A Good Read (I should stop listening to that programme) is The Village Against the World by Dan Hancox (they talk about it at about 10 minutes in). This is about Marinaleda in Spain, a village with a charismatic mayor and communist ideals. 

4. I am madly in love with Amanda Palmer, and want to give her money, so I'm planning on buying her book, The Art of Asking. I love this TED talk she did on the topic, and also suffer from the fear of asking, so I reckon I've got a lot to learn.


5. This last one is pesky I'm afraid, because it's not actually finished yet (and it's not George RR Martin, The Winds of Winter will bypass the list). The Alchemist by MK Robinson has been highlighted as 'one to watch' on the Authonomy blog from Harper Collins, and it tells the story of Minnow, for whom things look pretty dreadful. You can read the first four chapters here.

What's gone on your book list lately?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

February update!

  Hello! Please see above for a screenshot (not sure who the photo is by) from the lovely Fragmented Voices website which has my poem, Escaping Pheasants, as their featured poem today. This poem is inspired by the pheasants which are brought in to our local country house for people who are that way inclined to shoot. Sometimes I see them flapping down from the estate wall and on to the busy road, making a break for it toward the moors. Good luck pheasants. Escaping Pheasants also features in my book, Little Gods, published by the marvellous Roswell Publishing and available from booksellers and Amazon, or get in touch to get a signed copy from me. Other recent successes include two poems in Obsessed with Pipework #105, a Haiku in Coin Operated Press ' Haiku Zine, The Libraries  came out in Culture Matters' Bread & Roses Anthology, and, as I mentioned last time, When you slow a bit you can see the way , another poem from Little Gods, came out in Butcher's Dog #19. I have ...

Happy New Year!

I can still wish you happy new year before January's out, right? Having spending a while doing research and convincing myself I can't write, I'm back in the room in 2019, sending my little baby poems out into the world. I have broken up the chapbook I was trying to get published, I've rewritten lots of stuff, and I'm happily sending them out to places where I hope they might find a happy home, while supporting some of the fantastic poetry magazines out there. One of those fantastic poetry magazines - Picaroon Poetry  - run by the marvellous Kate Garrett - has already accepted one of my babies. It was one of the ones that I'd started to feel bored by, so I tore it to bits, rewrote it, and sent it off to Kate, who will be sending it out into the world in Picaroon Poetry #16 in May (which is terribly organised if you ask me, I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow!). Thanks Kate!  Hopefully I'll be letting you all know about more successes soo...

discovering Iain Crichton Smith

I think I don't like poetry. In fact I'm pretty sure. What I like is a brick of a book with well rounded characters, who can take me on a journey with them. I find that for me poetry can be navel gazing, twee nonsense, so caught up in its clever cleverness that it drives me to distraction. But then again, I like lots of songs for their lyrics, and sometimes, just sometimes, I come across some poetry which just blows me away. I came across Iain Crichton Smith recently at my writing group. I live in Scotland, and the other members of the group were all saying that Smith is so much covered in Scottish English (and Gaelic) classes that people don't tend to notice the beauty of his poetry. I didn't go to school in Scotland. The poets I studied at school were people like Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley. I don't recall ever coming across anything like this. That said, I'm not sure that as a teenager I would have noticed it. Perhaps you have to have some i...