Browsing the archives for the review category
Browsing the archives for the review category
Jill Tweedie was a feminist writer and broadcaster who is best remembered for her Guardian column on feminist issues, which ran from from 1969 to 1988. One particular series of columns was Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist, which was later collected into a book of the same name, and later again, More from Martha. I [...]
Hello, good evening, and welcome to the third meeting of the Not the TV Book Group! Following the impeccable example of Lynne and Simon before me, I have been baking, tidying, and brewing more tea than you can possibly imagine in preparation for my virgin voyage into the world of the internet book group.
We’ve already [...]
Can there be any bigger ‘discomfort zone’ than growing up?
I picked this book up on a whim a few days ago. I hadn’t managed to get into the book I was reading at the time and was looking for something completely different. That day I had also rearranged a couple of bookshelves in a fit [...]
Like Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report, I would never have chosen this book were it not for the Not the TV Book Group. Unlike the Claudel, though, I wasn’t bowled over by The Girl with the Glass Feet by Ali Shaw.
That’s not to say that I thought it was a bad book. On the contrary, Shaw’s [...]
See? This is why I’m delighted to be part of a book group. If Dovegrey Reader hadn’t suggested Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report for the Not the TV Book Group, then it would have passed me by completely. I had barely heard of it, let alone actually considered reading it, and if I’m perfectly frank I [...]
Another book, another set of odd links that pop up at you when you least expect it. Yesterday I was talking about my discomfort at the repeated use of the word ‘mongol’ to describe a child with Down’s Syndrome in The Fifth Child, but in Push by Sapphire the use of ‘mongo’ to describe a [...]
Doris Lessing is another one of those authors who I have been meaning to read a lot more by but haven’t quite got around to it. However, a couple of weeks ago I was recommended The Fifth Child by Academic Friend, who generally has impeccable taste. One second-hand copy later, I can confirm that Academic [...]
I mentioned the other day that it was a coincidence that just when I’d started reading Muriel Spark’s 1961 classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I saw an article about inspirational teachers. Well, doesn’t that just go to show that I had no idea what the novel was really about, and no, I’ve never [...]
Sometimes it is the simplest things that have the biggest impact. Sometimes, and I say this without meaning to sound cloyingly sentimental about the innocence of children, it is a child’s eye view of the adult world that brings home how complicated life can get without you meaning it to.
Gwenni Morgan, the heroine of The Earth [...]