Category: Blog

Five-year book giveaway: the winners

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As my blog turned five last month, I held a giveaway of five of my favourite books from the last five years. The books I chose were:

5-years-covers

An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell by Deborah Levy

The Jump Artist by Austin Ratner

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martel

I have now put the entrants’ names into a metaphorical hat and can announce that the winners are…

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March reading round-up

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sleeper and spindleIt’s been another genuinely good reading month. Oddly enough, my favourite title was one I didn’t review at the time – The Sleeper and the Spindle by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell – so I thought I would write a little about it now. It’s a beautifully told and even more beautifully illustrated retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story, with some other fairy tales mixed in for good measure and some major deviations from what you might remember/expect. It stars a kickass queen who sets out sword in hand to save the neighbouring land. I really loved Gaiman’s language and the ways he mixes the familiar with brand new ideas but what really made this special was the artwork. It’s all drawn in black and gold, elaborate and, well, gorgeous. I highly recommend you seek it out.

This month my blog turned five years old. Five years already! To celebrate I held a giveaway of five of my favourite books of the last five years. If you’re reading this before midnight on 31 March you can still enter, but do it quickly!

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Bloggiesta: nearly done

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Bloggiesta-S15Thank goodness for Bloggiesta! After a year of thinking about it I have finally installed a new theme that’s mobile-friendly and supports some plug-ins my old one didn’t. It took a few tweaks to get it working but I think it’s there now. Please do let me know if you spot anything strange!

I’ve also tidied up my pages, read lots of great blogging advice and finished reading one of the three books I was in the middle of. (Which is progress of a kind, though perhaps not as much as I’d hoped for. I keep having non-blog chores to do. Damn that real life.)

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Bloggiesta: best blogging advice ever

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Bloggiesta-S15Today’s Bloggiesta challenge is to post the best blogging advice you have ever been given. I’ve been blogging about books for five years now and I’ve definitely been grateful for some nuggets of wisdom along the way.

Lesson number one for every blogger should be back up your blog regularly. If you’re self-hosted or have made any tweaks to personalise your blog theme, then this means more than just exporting your posts and comments. Make a full copy of all the files on your blog’s FTP server once a year or so. Believe me: it can be a lifesaver. (You never know when you might need an emergency reinstall. It happened to me a year in and it was super scary, but thank goodness I had the files on hand.)

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Bloggiesta starting post: the spring clean begins

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Bloggiesta-S15For those of who already know what Bloggiesta is, yes I am indeed a day late posting this. Oops! (In my defence I was working on my blog last night, I just forgot to write this post first. I was confused by all the WordPress theme choices!) For those who don’t know, suffice to say you’re gonna see some changes around here this week, including a whole new design. (If you’re a book blogger and don’t know about Bloggiesta, do look it up, as it’s a useful prompt to take care of your blog.)

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Sunday Salon: Eclipse and other fun times

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The Sunday SalonWe seem to have packed in a fair bit of the fun stuff over the last few days, which means I’ve done almost no reading. I should probably feel worse about that, but frankly I woke up far too early today to feel bad!

On Friday Tim and I watched the solar eclipse from Castle Park in central Bristol. A fairly large crowd had gathered, with people from Bristol Astronomical Society and @Bristol bringing along lots of fun telescopes and pinhole cameras to view the Sun through and BBC Sky at Night had brought a bunch of eclipse-viewing glasses. It was pretty cloudy but we could see the eclipse really well and it was great to share the experience with a big crowd. I’d made a homemade pinhole for my own camera and got some half-decent photos.

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Sunday Salon: International Women’s Day

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The Sunday SalonHappy International Women’s Day, folks! While I can only remember hearing about it for the past couple of years, this day was created in 1909 as a national day in the US and went international in 1911. There’s all sorts of fun facts about this day on the official website, but my favourite one is that International Women’s Day is now an official holiday in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China (for women only), Cuba, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Madagascar (for women only), Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal (for women only), Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zambia.

I am mostly celebrating by listening to 6 Music, which seems to have dedicated its whole day of programming to International Women’s Day, but when I do find some time to read I’ll be continuing my way through Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her birthday was 6 March and to celebrate I wrote a piece for the Redhead Reads micro newsletter. Aurora Leigh is an appropriate read for today not only because it was written by a woman but also because it’s about a woman trying to break free of the social constraints placed on her by her sex. And it’s really good.

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February reading round-up

(George Goodwin Kilburne)
(George Goodwin Kilburne)

I finally feel that I’m in the swing of reading this year. February was a good month. I discovered Bidisha thanks to an English PEN event on refugees, I had a very lovely Valentine’s weekend with Tim in London and I finally got to see Kate Tempest live. I also found plenty of time for reading.

I also started contributing to Redhead Reads, a micro newsletter published daily by Beulah Devaney, a fab feminist writer I first discovered through For Books’ Sake. So that’s pretty exciting.

However, while I went to lots of fun events and read lots of books, I didn’t read any great books. I miss that feeling, the feeling of a great read that pulls you in and won’t let you go. There must be plenty of them on my TBR, I just keep picking out the wrong ones!

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Ted Hughes: a Tribute

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Ted Hughes March 1993
(CC-BY-SA Breakingthings)

Bath Literature Festival
The Forum, Bath, 28 February

I confess that I mostly chose this event to go to because it included Kate Tempest and I keep missing her Bristol shows. But I also like Ted Hughes’ poetry and was interested in what a tribute to him would be like. The answer? A bit uneven and yet also staid. But Kate was really good.

The audience had been expecting Melvyn Bragg and Jonathan Dimbleby, which perhaps explains the make-up of the crowd (largely older than me, and very white upper middle class, but then it was Bath) – they actually groaned when the panel change was announced. Personally I bought my ticket after this change was made. It might have been enough to put me off even the chance to see Kate Tempest. I know Bragg and Dimbleby are supposed to be beloved national icons but I find them very dull.

The event was hosted by Bel Mooney, a writer who co-founded the festival 20 years ago, which was when she first met Ted Hughes, who opened that year’s festival in the Forum, the same venue hosting his tribute. She spoke warmly of him as a man and as a writer, hitting all the right notes of celebration and admiration.

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