Welcome to the annual blog monetisation recap – this is the sixth (!) time I’ve written such a post and I hope that it provides a bit of insight and information for anyone who’s interested in doing the same for themselves in 2019 and on whatever scale – small, medium or large. As always,…
Read / January 28th, 2019
Normal People by Sally Rooney was the second book I received for Christmas. It is the 2018 Man Booker Prize longlisted international sensation, so much so that British booksellers are keeping stashes behind their counters. I was curious (like many people!) to find out what the fuss was about, especially considering I haven’t read her other novel Conversations…
Part of me wonders at the use of writing this post midway through the first month of a new year (I have a little voice singing the line ‘The past is in the paaaaaast!’ from ‘Let it go’ as I type). But I’m going to ignore it because I believe in the merit and value…
Read / December 29th, 2018
Before I begin I would like to extend my belated good wishes for the holiday season. I hope it was spent in your favoured ways surrounded by your favourite people. As I have been a writer-in-residence at Montsalvat for a good chunk of this month, you might have noticed that my activity here on the…
Read / November 29th, 2018
I picked up Why Will No-One Publish My Novel? A Handbook For The Rejected Writer by Fay Weldon from the library because I love a writing ‘how to’/guidebook (I wrote one!) and this one is an adorable (almost) pocket-size. That was another reason why it stood out among the shelves. (Penguin has a range of Pocket…
Read / November 26th, 2018
I’ve extended this Christmas recommendations series to include cookbooks this year because there are always so many that come out that it can be hard to keep up to date with them all. Like most people, I am partial to a good cookbook but mostly for the inspiration because, honestly, I don’t like cooking very much. A…
Read / November 22nd, 2018
I didn’t need any more convincing to pick up Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami after hearing that this novel is his homage to his life-long love of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Look at this charming video of Bernard Caleo’s performance at the launch of Killing Commendatore at Readings bookstore. I will declare that my success rate…
Read / November 20th, 2018
Boys Will Be Boys by Clementine Ford is the follow up to her immensely successful and terrific Fight Like a Girl. Ford is an intelligent and courageous thinker who is also regularly subjected to a lot of the worst kind of online abuse I’ve seen. You’ll hear her read out some of those comments in the video below. ‘Boys…
Read / November 15th, 2018
It’s young-adult day in my Christmas recommendation series. If you missed them, you can find the picture books and middle-grade posts if you follow those links. I’ll say again that it can sometimes be hard to draw the line between what could/should make a particular list – especially as children hit the preteen or teenage…
