Ramblings of a Bookworm
Posted in Booking through Thursday, Books on Mar 11th, 2010
How do you feel about illustrations in your books? Graphs? Photos? Sketches?
I think illustrations are essential in some books and not in others. Non-fiction cries out for them. They enhance biographies for example. Cookery books without photos are just not as explanatory, they demonstrate how the cooked dish should look. Imagine travel books without photos or drawings [...]
Posted in Biography, Book Reviews, Daphne Du Maurier, Non-fiction on Mar 10th, 2010
Why do writers write? How do they go about it? What inspires them? The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories gives a glimpse into the mind of Daphne Du Maurier.
Du Maurier began to write Rebecca in 1937 when she was thirty years old, living in Alexandria and feeling homesick for Cornwall. She jotted down chapter summaries [...]
Posted in Books, Crime Fiction Alphabet, Fiction on Mar 8th, 2010
This week’s letter in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet series is ‘U’.
I’ve chosen Umberto Eco, an Italian writer of post-modern fiction, full of allusions and references, using puzzles, playing with language, words and symbols.
I’ve read The Name of the Rose twice, some years ago now.It is a fantastic historical crime mystery novel set in a Franciscan monastery in 14th [...]
Posted in Books, Sunday Salon on Mar 7th, 2010
Could you give up reading for a week? That’s what Bibi van der Zee did. She wrote about it in yesterday’s Guardian. She was beginning to wonder if books were eating her up and whether they were some kind of drug.
I just can’t imagine not reading for that length of time. If I go for one [...]
Posted in Books, Cookery, Food, Non-fiction, Weekend Cooking on Mar 6th, 2010
Last week for my Weekend Cooking post I wrote about Italian cookbooks, so this week I thought I’d stay on the Continent and write about my French cookbooks. I only have four – two over 20 years old and two more recent. Three are by British food writers and one by a French woman writer.
The [...]
Posted in Books, Library Loot on Mar 5th, 2010
Here are some of the library books I currently have out on loan.
I haven’t started any of them, although I’ve dipped into each one. From top to bottom they are:
The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom. An interesting title I thought. It’s about a Jewish, vegetarian librarian who has just arrived to take up his [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Fiction, Historical Fiction on Mar 5th, 2010
Recently, I wanted to read something other than crime fiction, but chose The Warrior’s Princess by Barbara Erskine, which just happens to include a couple of rapes, kidnappings and a murder. However, it’s really a time-slip book, switching between the present day and the first century AD in Rome and Britannia, a mix of historical fiction, fantasy and [...]
Posted in Biography, Book Reviews, Early Reviewer, LibraryThing, Non-fiction, Poetry on Mar 4th, 2010
I didn’t know much about Shelley before I read Poetic Lives: Shelley by Daniel Hahn. This biography gives brief details of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s short but extraordinary life, from his birth in 1792 to his early death in 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday.
The opening paragraph caught my immediate attention in pointing out that Shelley was not that far away [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Crime Fiction, Crime Fiction Alphabet, Fiction on Mar 3rd, 2010
I’ve read two books by Jospehine Tey – The Daughter of Time and now The Franchise Affair. Josephine Tey was a pseudonym for Elizabeth Mackintosh(1896 – 1952). She was a Scottish author who wrote mainly mystery novels.
I read The Daughter of Time a few years ago and thought it was an excellent book, a mix of [...]
Posted in Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge, Books, Crime Fiction Alphabet, Sunday Salon on Feb 28th, 2010
It seems a good day to look back over my reading in the first two months of the year. I’ve read 15 books – 8 in January and 7 this month.
Titles marked * are crime fiction, underlined are non-fiction and in italics are library books. The rest are my own books acquired from various booksellers.
Drood by [...]
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Ramblings of a Bookworm
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