Literary Pics: On the trail of Tam O’Shanter

The sun was shining on Easter Monday and so I took the opportunity to drive south to Alloway – to celebrate national poetry month by visiting the birth place of Robert Burns and the recently opened Robert Burns birthplace museum. We’ll start this tour at the beginning, in the cottage where Robert Burns was born. [...]

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An Uncertain Place – Fred Vargas

Translated from French by Sian Reynolds I have three rules for reading Vargas.  1)  Ignore my antipathy to her detective Adamsberg.  2) Suspend my disbelief .  3)  Enjoy the ride. Let me deal with Adamsberg. I do not like his cavalier attitude to life and relationships - after all these years, he’s still playing the carefree, cool,  detached bachelor.  He’s insufferable and [...]

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Irretrievable – Theodor Fontane

Fontane’s Irretrievable (1891) is surprisingly modern - a marriage of long-standing breaks down when the couple stop listening to one another and their paths diverge.   The fun-loving man lays his bad behaviour at the door of his wife’s unaccommodating piety. (Well, she was brought up by the Herrnhuter – a strict Protestant sect, roughly equivalent to the Plymouth Brethren). When [...]

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Possessed (by German literature)

I’m doing an Elif Batuman on you.  She made me remember my student days and all those lovely German books that  I read during them and still contine to read – in the most literary of places.   Reading Goethe  in Frankfurt am Main ….. or Fontane in Berlin …. I dream of future reading adventures: reading Koeppen in Munich, [...]

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The Possessed – Elif Batuman

I picked up Elif Batuman’s The Possessed in need of some light relief after one of this year’s Oranges, brilliant though it was, touched a raw nerve and left me feeling a tad emotional.  I needed an antidote, something to induce tears of laughter and judging from a multitude of tweets, I could expect Batuman’s highly personal Adventures [...]

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Let’s make it 7 shortlists and a book binge …..

Following on from yesterday, I discover there are two more shortlists to consider … 1)  Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize (for comic fiction) 6 titles: 50 % available at my library.  2 in the TBR (Catherine O’Flynn + Sam Leith) 2) Arthur C Clarke Award (for science fiction) 6 titles: 50 % availability at my library.  0 [...]

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5 Shortlists – What’s in the TBR or even on the Library Shelves?

As a result of today’s announcements, I am now juggling 5 shortlists and as I shall not complete reading any of them before the winners are announced, I shall end up a Jill of all lists, mistress of none.  Ah well, perhaps I should learn to specialise. Let’s start with the most disappointing shortlist of them all. [...]

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Book Group: Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

Winner – 2009 Man Booker Prize Winner – 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction Winner – 2010 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction Winner – 2010 Tournament of Books OK – so I’m the last book blogger in the world to have read this – winner of everything going (apart from last year’s controversial [...]

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Great House – Nicole Krauss

Longlisted for the Orange Prize 2011 First and foremost, this is the most ambitious Orange longlistee of the 3 that I have read.  It is also the most challenging to read.  I always thought a strong contender to win this year’s prize.  Now that I’ve read it,  I’m officially rooting for it.  Krauss uses two increasingly popular techniques to structure the book.  [...]

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From Austria

Grüß Gott, Österreich ! Stand up and take a bow.  For once we are letting the Austrian penmanship take precedence over the German language in which these stories are written.  Austria, home of the beautiful Tyrol, scrumdidiliumptious Sachertorte (cue gratuitous photo of a young (skinny) Lizzy eating piece in the Hotel Sacher a good many moons ago) [...]

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