Danish blogger Emme has a category of books she calls “matadormix” - “mixed candy”. These books do not ask much of you as a reader: they’re easy to zip through, leave you feeling slightly bloated if you overindulge and there’s a bit of everything in them. “Mixed candy”, indeed.
These past few days I’ve made [...]
If I’m going to have to rip out another effing row on the neckline on my effing sweater, I swear I’m going to toss the effing thing on the bonfire I’m going to build in our backyard. What do you mean “Well, it’s your first attempt at an actual garment and you did abandon the [...]
If you can read Danish, it might amuse you to know that the editor of Bogrummet (The Book Room) is my cousin. I sorta-kinda-almost knew what she had been doing with her time, but it had sorta-kinda-almost slipped my mind.
It’s still very cool and utterly amusing in a absolutely-definitely way.
This week I rummaged around on the net and almost accidentally joined a book club based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Thankfully the members correspond with each other online. The idea is that you set yourself up for reading 20 books within a set time (which is very achievable) and some of these books have to be [...]
Tuesday I went to see my GP again for a non-seizure/keeling over matter and I was met with the immortal words: “Yup, we need to take a closer look at that. Which hospital would you prefer?” I did not know whether to laugh or cry. I still don’t.
So, life is filled with little ups-and-downs at [...]
Last night I went into the kitchen and announced: “I really like Tanzania.” My poor, deluded brain had been locked into dream-space whilst I had been battling it out on Puzzle Quest. While my fingers had been busy pairing up gems and fighting wyverns, another part of me had been in Tanzania on a veranda, [...]
Having just finished Scarlett Thomas’ “PopCo”, I find myself longing for non-contemporary novels. I have been reading many books recently but all have all been written within the last thirty years. I long for a different sort of prose, a different perspective. And so I have been looking at my book shelves, thought about the [...]
Heard sung outside on the street at around 9am: I do, I do, I do believe in faeries…
I finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s excellent The Road yesterday. Its sparse, exquisite prose reminded me of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead as did the preoccupation with love and tenderness. However, while Gilead is about a place and staying there, [...]
I am currently reading Sophie Gee’s “The Scandal of the Season” and it is a bewildering read.
The plot outline: 18th century Britain. Catholics and Protestants live side by side uneasily. The young poet Alexander Pope is heading to London to make his name. He encounters a situation he’ll later immortalise in the wonderful mock [...]
If you look at the “Now Reading” bit in the sidebar, you can see that I’m tearing through the novels at the moment. Five novels thus far this month and that is not even counting Douglas Coupland’s jPod which I finished just around the 2007-2008 shift. I’ll be honest with you: I do not have [...]
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