Breathing Just a Little

Having just finished, and so enjoyed, the audiobook of The Sea, The Sea, I seem to have stumbled into a half-baked plan to try to cover all the Booker prizewinners from the first decade of my life (1973-1983) as audiobooks if I can find audio versions. I don't know why, my lists make little sense even to me sometimes :-) The list is: J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (1974* tie) Stanley Middleton, Holiday (1974* tie) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (1975) David Storey, Saville (1976) Paul Scott, Staying On (1977) ✅Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (1978) Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore (1979) William Golding, Rites of Passage (1980) ✅Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981) ✅Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark (1982) J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (1983) I have already read Midnight's Children and Schindler's Ark, and of course have just read The Sea, The Sea, so they are ticked off. All three of these wer...

Every year in my January Month of Poetry exercise, the group is set a challenge one day of the week to write to a prompt. One of this year's challenges was to take lines from a favourite poem and build a new poem from them. I used the closing lines of Mary Oliver's On Travelling to Beautiful Places to create this one. On Being Alive as the Apocalypse Begins  and in truth the only ship there is is the ship we are all on burning the world as we go this ship that we can't get off, now maybe once we could have we could have dived off the deck, slick with salt and hard dreams cutting through the white horses of the glimmering sea to take our chances with the seals and the sharks turning our faces to the distant shore maybe once we could have turned this ship around or, if not that, we could have put the matches back in the box chosen sunsets and fruit and song and touch over the savage pleasures of power over watching the world on fire and delighting in our spite or even just ou...

  This book, which won the 1978 Booker Prize, is widely considered a modern classic, and has been on my long TBR list for many years. I lucked upon the audiobook version in my local library's collection, and it was read by the incomparable Richard E. Grant, so I have finally filled the gap over the course of the last fortnight, while driving, cooking, exercising, cleaning, walking, etc. And ... I Have Thoughts! Let's start with some scenario-setting. The Sea, The Sea is the story of  the protagonist / narrator, Charles Arrowby, retired playwright / director, who has left behind his London life and removed to a remote coastal location and a run-down old house (Shruff End) he has bought with the intention of writing his memoirs and living as more or less a hermit. This is where the book opens, and for a short stretch, it's all lush literary descriptions of scenery and (quite enjoyably to me, a confirmed Hobbit) delicious food, which Arrowby is both dedicated to and hilariousl...

Among more serious books, I have been churning through mystery reads in my summer break, because they are generally fun for me (although the less-great ones are not as much so!) Here are three that I did enjoy, all very different in type, but all, I think, good exemplars of their kind. This is a reverse thriller, which is an interesting way to construct the story. Beginning at the end (or close to the end), it goes backwards in time to the events in the past that led up to final moment. In a nutshell, it is the life story of literature academic, Thom, and his poet and arts administrator wife, Wendy. It takes the reader from the end of their life together all the way back to when they first met, aged 14, through all the things that happened along the way (exactly none of which I am going to name, as every single one is a spoiler!) There's no doubt about its cleverness, and Swanson always writes very well, but something about the reverse structure took a lot of the sting out of the r...

I had every good intention of doing this post in the void week between Christmas and New Year, or, at a pinch, in that void-adjacent first week of January, but I was engaged in an apparently aggressively intractable campaign of doing absolutely nothing except reading, eating, swimming and napping (all amazing things, I think we can agree) and it didn't happen. Still, I do like having these posts to reflect on, so I thought I'd catch up now, especially as I will be back to work next week and am doing set-up tasks for that now (which has me at the computer more than I have been in the lovely langorous early summer weeks). Quarter 4 (let's call it 1 November til today, as this year really only functionally begins on 27 Jan when work and school are back) was a busy and momentous time, with very high highs, and unfortunately one very low low. We were all basically well, barring a mild summer cold just before Christmas, but my perimenopause symptoms are gaining prominence, which ...

I haven't posted about my Agatha re-read project since last August, but that doesn't mean I have abandoned it! I did get very busy later last year and was also distracted by a lot of great new books, but I have been making my way through some Christie revisits, just not writing them up. Having just finished my Evil Under the Sun re-read a couple of days ago, I was prompted to do a catch up post. So here are the seven Christies I have re-read between late August and now - briefer notes than previously, but at least something! I also have been lazy and haven't bothered adding cover art, sorry :-) I haven't been attempting to keep to order in any way, just picking off the ones I felt like, but I have now exited the 1920s with the Poirot books, which is good news as (with the exception always of the amazing Roger Ackroyd), I feel the Poirot work really hits its straps in from the 1930s onwards. 1. The Big Four (Poirot, 1927) This is one of Christie's spy-thriller effort...

in the early mornings when the light is pale the day as fresh as a new-laid egg the pigeons on the garden wall cooing steadily the cat snuggled up under my ribs you curl against my back, and sigh the warmth of you easing all my soreness this posture as ancient as our days or as any days - here are two and also, one here is a helix wrapped in on itself here is a story that does not end here is a fist slammed against the night.

This is such a hard one for me to review, because it was almost like reading two different books in one - one that I loved and would have given 8.5-9/10 easily, and one that I found dreary and pointless and would've struggled to rise to 4/10. Probably the best way to do it is to go through which elements I thought worked (in some cases, brilliantly) and then which elements I thought let it down. The Good: Premise, Wittiness, Parodic Analogies, (Some) Philosophical Referencing As an idea, this book is an absolute cracker - two graduate students in magick follow their dead professor to Hell to ... (well, ostensibly to rescue his soul, but it's not quite that). The set-up for Hell, which also draws on many philosophy and theory insertions, is based on several cultures' representations of hell over time and incorporates the "nine courts" model, where souls have to free themselves from whichever sins they have been prone to (each sin represented by a court) before bein...

Every year, I participate in a month of poetry challenge where the goal is (you guessed it) to write one poem every day. A solid 70% of them are not worth reposting, but occasionally there is one that I don't mind airing a little further. The origins of this poem are a bit of a twisty story, but all the inspiration is from art, not my own life (art has proved a richer vein, given how peaceful and uneventful my life has been, excepting the death of my dog, for the last little while).  I am currently doing a re-read project with my Agatha Christie collection, and just finished reading the Poirot novel Five Little Pigs, which I have always thought is a top-tier Christie. While reading it, I was listening to Taylor Swift's Folklore album (I am not a Swiftie, but that specific album I do really like and have listened to many times over the years). Just as I reached the denouement of the novel, the album hit the song Mad Woman, and the two things fused irrevocably in my head ... and ...

Kicking off my 2026 reading year in style, I have just finished the second Ann Patchett novel I have read (after so enjoying Tom Lake last year) - The Dutch House.  This is, in effect, a masterclass in the true potential of a generational soap opera when written by an outstanding writer. For me, it was made even better by being narrated by an outstanding actor (Tom Hanks), who was the perfect voice for this story. It is the story of Danny (the narrator) and his sister Maeve, whose mother abandons them when Maeve is 11 and Danny 4. It is the story of their distant father, real estate developer Cyril, and his premature death; their scheming evil stepmother, Andrea, and her great crime against them; their stepsisters, Norma and Bright; their household staff and lifelong devoted friends, Jocelyn, Sandy and Fluffy (Fiona). It is the story of Danny's wife, Celeste, and his children, May and Kevin. Above all, though, it is the story of the Dutch House - the strange, luxurious and exceedin...