Reading Review of the Year 2022

2022 was an odd year. Things have gone back to normal in many ways, but there’s also an air of nothing will ever be the same again about it. There’s a sense of before and after which I don’t think will ever go away. I’ve read a lot of books and also bought a lot…

What a difference a narrator makes

l’ve been listening to audio books for a few years now, and lately I’ve been disappointed by the fact I haven’t been able to listen as much as I used to, now my daily commute is a thing thing of the past. It was while driving that I absorbed book after book, rattling through titles…

This is absolutely a blog post

Over Christmas I read an article about writers who blog. It said that writers should absolutely be blogging in order to build their audience, and ideally have a mailing list for potential readers to sign up to. I thought, Great! I already have a well established blog, and though 2021 was a bit of a…

Reading Review of the Year 2021

As we near the end of 2021, the year we all began with high hopes (‘Well it can’t possibly be worse than 2020…’), I’m attempting to bring a bit of light relief to my covid riddled household by going over my year in books. My challenge this year was to read 50 books, and again…

Recommended Reads: Where the Crawdads Sing

“Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.” I had heard the title of this book mentioned quite a lot on bookstagram since its publication in 2018, namely due to the fact it featured in Reese Witherspoon’s book club, and she subsequently announced her…

Recommended Reads: Piranesi

Anyone who has read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke’s first novel, will remember a mammoth of a book, rich in characters and world building. Her second, Piranesi, is the complete opposite in terms of page count, coming in at less than 250, but in terms of world building it is every bit as…

Self help books

According to Wikipedia, a self help book is defined as a book that is written with the intention to instruct its readers on solving personal problems. The books take their name from Self-Help, an 1859 best-seller by Samuel Smiles. Until recently I had never read anything that could be classed as self help. The idea…

Observations on my A-Z Reading Challenge

I first designed an A-Z Reading Challenge in 2017 – finding a book title for every letter of the alphabet and working through them across the year. Every year since I have thought that I wouldn’t do another one, but somehow I always manage to find enough books on my TBR to make it work….

My Twitter Fiction

Last week I had a really interesting conversation with a Senior Lecturer in Publishing, who featured a short story I wrote on Twitter in her thesis, and who will also be featuring it in a book she is writing on her thesis topic, all about social media as a place for authors. I don’t know…

Reading Review of the Year 2020

I set myself a slightly lower reading goal for 2020, 45 books as opposed to 52 in 2019. Little did I know that the whole world would change soon after setting the goal, and with it, my reading habits. I actually completed 54 books this year, helped along by the fact that for most of…