February 2012
45 posts
3 tags
Day 8: Book that scares you
When I first started reading his poetry, I started with the stereotypical - The Raven. I was around thirteen I believe, and despite how gorgeously it is written, I was so disturbed. I never get frightened, no scary film has ever affected me, but The Raven really did. The rest of Poe’s poetry equally shifted me, which makes him yes one of my favourite poets and one who is undervalued in my...
3 tags
Book Review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Well, technically this isn’t the correct name for the novel. It’s official title is ‘These Foolish Things’ but I didn’t know that when I saw it on the bookshelf at Watestones. I for one am not a fan of books with movie covers, so I approached the sales assistant to ask if they had another copy and they said no. I thought that was rather odd, but I really wanted to...
4 tags
Day 7: Book you can quote/recite
I can’t believe that even to this day there is a book I read, as a child, which I can still recite off by heart: The Story of Tracy Beaker.
I read this book over, and over and over, and then I bought the cassette which I listened to every night before going to sleep, and it continued whilst I slept, hence why I’m pretty certain this novel is engrained in my head nine years later. ...
3 tags
4 tags
Day 6: Favourite Young Adult Book
Believe it or not, I really didn’t like reading when I was a teenager. I was so obsessed with drawing and painting that I never had time for reading, I went to sleep with paper and paints on my bed and would wake up with paint all over my duvet. It’s easy to be obsessed with art when your mother is an artist, but since I moved out a few years ago I stopped painting and reading became...
4 tags
Day 5: Book you wish you could live in
Oh this is quite hard. Because the cliche answer, which also happens to be the answer which my childhood/teenage self would give, is the Harry Potter series. But if a magic fairy came down and asked me, truthfully, which one today I would love to live in, the fist one that pops into my head is this:
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster. Forster is one of my favourite authors, and being a young...
5 tags
Day 4: Book that makes you cry
Ok, so two books equally enter this category and I can’t decide which one made me cry more so I shall enter two. The first is a short story which I remember really badly effected me when I was a very young child, and that is The Little Match Girl, a short story by Hans Christian Anderson. This tale was utterly heartbreaking. My mother read it to me as a bedtime story the first time and I...
3 tags
Day 3: Book that makes you laugh out loud
I was, perchance, a little underage when I read this book. I was just thirteen years old and I had started watching the BBC drama on it, for it was based in the school my cousin attended at the time, a local school to me, so I wanted to watch it. Half way through one of the episodes mother informed me it was a book, bought it for me. Simultaneously, my English teacher had set us homework to read a...
13 tags
3 tags
Day 2: Worst Book Ever Read
Oh gosh, I feel awful writing badly about a book, because obviously I’m ultimately attacking something which people out there love but I honestly couldn’t stand. If you do love this book, my review is not a critique accusing you of having ‘poor taste’ or ‘bad judgement’, it is merely that I personally did not enjoy this book for my own reasons. So, here we go....
4 tags
Day 1: Favourite book
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh I strongly believe that this novel will be my lifetime partner and shall remain by my beside for all eternity. It is 1943 and Charles Ryder, a single, homeless and loveless army officer finds himself unexpectedly billeted at Brideshead, a grand estate house which is now being utilised by the military during the war. But Brideshead isn’t unfamiliar to...
2 tags
laurajet asked: i love this blog, you have a beautiful and clear view of peoples work :)
3 tags
The Paris Wife
Earnest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers, married four times, but his first wife, Hadley, was whom he moved to Paris with. It was she who witnessed the beginning of his creativity, it was she who watched him casually chat to the newly published and unknown F. Scott Fitzgerald, it was she who cradled their child in her arms whilst he wrote, and it is she who lay in bed beside him,...
4 tags
The Surgeon of Crowthorne
So, the Oxford English Dictionary. A masterpiece in itself. But did you know they couldn’t have done it without a murderer? An insane, Yale graduate surgeon who butchered a man and spent his life in a mental asylum devouring books, through which he developed the skill of compiling quotations which were used to illustrate ways particular words were used, making him one of the biggest...
4 tags
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
So, there’s a rumour going around that there’s a mole in the Circus, but who is it? Only one way to find out…send in Smiley. Smiley wasn’t ready for retirement anyway, but this is a tricky task. He’s spying on the spies. “Commander”, the old head of Circus is dead, and now the suspect could be anyone, from the new head of Circus, Alleline, to any one of...
4 tags
The Descendants
Matt King, a descendant to one of Hawaii’s biggest land owners, finds himself taking care of his two daughters alone after his wife, Joanie, falls into a coma after a boating accident. As if he wasn’t going through enough with that, his daughter’s obscure personalities make the situation more difficult for him to grasp. Scottie, aged ten, idolises a girl in her class who acts and...
“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are...”
– E. M. Forster. 