Category: Blog

Sunday Salon: A whole new year

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The Sunday SalonIt’s the time of year for reflecting on things done or not done and planning how to do the next year…better, somehow. I haven’t quite started my Christmas holiday yet but work is very much wound down and really it’s all about this Friday. (Which I am not at all ready for. I haven’t got the last few presents, let alone wrapped and labelled them all. Gonna be a busy Christmas Eve!) But I love Christmas – all that tinsel and the sparkling lights and the hearty foods – even if the weird broken weather is making it feel more like May outside.

I’ll save my end-of-year reading stats for the actual end of the year but this is as good a time as any to reflect on my top books read in 2015, which were:

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Death stats in Shakespeare and other bookish fun

I saw this chart in a few places today and just had to blog about it. As Improbable Research explains, this was put together as research for a new play, The Complete Deaths, produced by Spymonkey, in which all 74 deaths in Shakespeare are re-enacted. I’m envisioning something like the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who are always hilarious, so I’m pretty sure I want to see this play. But I’m also thoroughly enjoying the above chart and trying to remember which plays which deaths belong to! Who doesn’t love the stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” from The Winter’s Tale?

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Sunday Salon: New books versus old

The Sunday SalonI have been trying fairly hard not to acquire new books as my TBR persists in being more than 130 books. But the fact that its size persists goes to show that I’m not succeeding very well in my aim! It possibly doesn’t help that I subscribe to two publishers and I still borrow books from family and friends.

This week I gained three new books. Martin John by Anakana Schofield is the first book in my 2016 subscription to And Other Stories. 100 Poems by Jen Campbell was a reward for supporting Jen in a charity fundraiser. The Man I Became by Peter Verhelst is the first book in my 2016 subscription to Peirene Press. They all look awesome and I can’t wait to read them.

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November reading round-up

Girl Reading by Emil Brack (1860-1905)
Girl Reading by Emil Brack (1860-1905)

So here we are, one month left of 2015. One last chance to assess how I’m doing against my reading goals for the year so I can give it one last push. Better than I am on my November goals. Once again, NaNoWriMo was a wash. I started well, but stuff came up and I think my total word count ended up around 18,000. Which is better than 0, I guess.

My annual goals are looking better. Nine books in translation so far. I think if I read one more and make that a round 10, I’ll be happy with that. For Classics Club I’ve read eight, which puts me slightly behind, but I have four more years to play catch-up there!

November wasn’t the greatest month. Roll on December. Although that said, I am so far from ready for Christmas. I tried preparing by reading a collection of Christmas stories by David Sedaris but it didn’t put me in the mood. Guess I’ll have to try the good old covering-the-house-in-Christmas-decorations method. That usually works. I really like fairy lights.

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Sunday Salon: Autumn turns to winter

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The Sunday SalonI was planning to write a post about how much I love November. Which I do. Growing up, Halloween was never much of a thing for me and my family but Bonfire Night was. It marked the start of winter in celebratory style. I remember the crisp cold and woolly hats that accompanied firework displays with great affection. And even though this year it hasn’t got that cold just yet, it’s definitely coming. The trees are bare, the rain is freezing, the big winter coats are out and I love it all.

Untitled

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Sanctum

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Lewis Creaven and Patrick Farrell

Sanctum is a project created by installation artist Theaster Gates. He has built a wooden structure inside the bombed out shell of Temple Church in Bristol, and in this shelter from the miserable November weather, for 24 days there is a constant 24-hour-a-day stream of live performances, largely music and poetry. It’s free to drop in at any time.

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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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