Category: Blog

October reading round-up

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reading

Happy November, folks! Suddenly life is full of Christmas plans and all the people we promised to catch up with before the end of the year. And yet through summer I always think October and November will be quiet. One day I’ll learn!

We started the month on holiday in Yorkshire, which was lovely and relaxing and already feels like a thousand years ago. I went to see The Crucible at Bristol Old Vic, a “theatrical experience” called The Stick House in the Bristol Temple Meads tunnels (a creepy gothic fairy-tale-type story that wouldn’t be out of place in an Angela Carter novel), Salman Rushdie talking about his new book and Bill Bailey on his latest comedy tour. The large collection of tickets for stuff on the fridge is finally all gone now and I’m itching to book something in!

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Gilmore Girls returns!

gilmore-girlsThe news that Netflix is going to revive Gilmore Girls with a series of four feature-length episodes written by original creator and producer Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino has got me pretty excited to say the least. While, like everyone else I am curious to see who will be back and what developments will have happened in their lives in the last 8/9 years (and whether they map what I imagined for the characters), I am also looking forward to a general revival of interest in the original TV show, so that my fandom doesn’t seem quite so out of date!

I am unapologetically a Gilmore Girls fan. I don’t own any merchandise but I recorded every episode off the telly and have watched them all…well, a lot. Now this may seem a decidedly unbookish topic for a book blog (though it’s my blog and I’ll write about whatever I want to) but Gilmore Girls might be the most bookish fictional TV there ever was. In fact, it’s so bookish that there are countless reading lists out there based on it, including my own version of the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge in which I have attempted to list every book read in the show by Lorelei or Rory. And let’s not forget that the show’s star Lauren Graham is a bona fide author (of a book that has been languishing on my wishlist since it was announced).

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Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

(CC-BY Ed Lederman/PEN American Center)
(CC-BY Ed Lederman/PEN American Center)

Salman Rushdie, Festival of Ideas
St George’s Hall, Bristol, 11 October

On Sunday afternoon I saw Salman Rushdie in the flesh! Rushdie was visiting Bristol to promote his new novel Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights (a title his publishers apparently thought cumbersome). St George’s Hall was packed to the rafters with fans keen to hear, well, pretty much anything the great man had to say, though he stayed mostly on topic.

The new novel was written in part as a reaction against the act of writing memoir (Rushdie’s previous book, Joseph Anton, documented his 10 years in hiding following the 1988 fatwa against him) – he felt an emotional desire to be at the opposite end of the spectrum, to make stuff up again. Rushdie was inspired by the Arabian Nights and here, as always, he feels he is part of the grand old tradition of non-naturalistic fiction – possibly the oldest form of world literature, encompassing fairy tales, heroic epics and other forms that seek to spread the collective wisdom of the human race.

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World Mental Health Day

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Today, 10 October, is World Mental Health Day. I write about this both because it’s an important cause that affects many many people, and because books and reading have a major part to play in helping improve mental health.

This year World Mental Health Day has the theme “dignity in mental health” – dealing with stigma and discrimination, changing social attitudes and spreading public awareness of the nature of mental illness. These are all major aims of Bristol Mind, among others, and many people are holding coffee mornings and other events around the city – and the world – today.

As author Matt Haig discussed in his excellent article for the Telegraph yesterday, books can genuinely help those with depression and other mental-health issues. The Reading Agency works with GPs to prescribe books to alleviate mental-health problems through its Reading Well scheme. And this actually works. Reading reduces stress; it also improves empathy, memory and cognition – perhaps we should all be prescribed books!

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September reading round-up

Arches

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog because we’ve been off holidaying again. This time we’re in Yorkshire, where we’ve enjoyed a sheep fair, a brewery, some old ruins and some fancy gardens, among other things.

It’s been a really lovely week and I have even found time for reading, but I don’t plan on reviewing any of it here properly. Partly that’s because it’s all starting to blend into one. I bought the recent Neil Gaiman Humble Bundle, a digital collection of rarities either wholly or partly written by Gaiman. Among the comics and short story compilations there are some more unusual works, such as Ghastly Beyond Belief, a co-production with Kim Newman collecting notably terrible quotes from science fiction and fantasy novels. Which is hilarious.

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Sunday Salon: How I learned to love comics

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The Sunday SalonGrowing up, my Dad bought us the Beano every week and I loved to read about the Bash Street Kids and all those other characters. But then I got too old for the Beano and I never replaced it with other comics, turning instead to novels.

When I met Tim he wasn’t a big reader of comics either, but he owned a few and had read a few more, and over the years he’s increasingly become a big fan, to the point where the staff at our local comic shop know him by name and we’ve started to invest in comic book storage boxes. I’ve always liked Tim’s taste in books, so I figured I should see what this comic thing was all about, in case I was missing out on something.

I didn’t feel interest in classic superhero stuff at first, because they all have these huge decades-old universes that call back to all that background, and even outside of superheroes I was tentative of where to dip my toe, so I opted mostly for one-off graphic novels.

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Genre limitations

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The general/literary section.
One of my general/literary fiction shelves.

As anyone who reads this blog/scans my reviews archive can tell, my reading leans heavily towards literary fiction. Sure, there’s a pinch of sci-fi and a touch of comics (an increasingly large touch) and a sprinkling of literary essays, but overall my reading has a clear leaning. I don’t necessarily want to change that – I enjoy most of what I read – but I would like to widen the boundaries a bit more.

A recent trip to my Dad’s house had me scouring the familiar old bookshelves and remembering how I used to read a lot of autobiographies (my Mum’s influence, I suspect) but also had phases of horror/thrillers, comic fantasy and historical romance, none of which I read a whole lot of these days. It could just be that my tastes have changed (I’m certainly more squeamish about graphic violence) but it could be that I have discounted whole sections of the bookshop through a combination of poor memory/one bad experience tainting the genre/snobbery.

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Here ends the summer book bingo

Today is officially the last day of the Nights on the Bookstand Summer Book Bingo and I have failed to complete any more rows or columns. I tried!

For “Revolves around a holiday” I read Us by David Nicholls. For “With a happy ending” I read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin, which, as I mentioned yesterday, might not strictly count anyway. For “By any Booktopia author” I’ve started but not finished Quiet by Susan Cain. And I hadn’t even chosen a book for the last square I was aiming to fill, “A presidential biography”. I was thinking of reading one of Barack Obama’s books, but Tim suggested I look outside the USA and I got completely stuck. Also I ran out of time.

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August reading round-up

Happy Bank Holiday Monday to those of you having one!

I’m cheerful having spent most of the weekend celebrating 13 years with Tim. Tim gave me a night in a fancy hotel, I gave him a behind-the-scenes tour of Temple Meads train station and the SS Great Britain. I clearly got the better end of that deal (though the tour was a lot of fun too).

Secret underground

I’ve also read some great books this month, my favourite being The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. What was your favourite recent read?

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