Category: Uncategorized
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Cities of honey and bone
In troubled times, absorbing books are a blessing: a gateway to a different world, from which we can return with a subtly altered perspective on the problems of our own. I remember loving The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, a 2011 novel about a richly imagined circus that sets the stage for an age-old struggle…
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Aiming for 2020 vision
Yep, it’s a terrible pun. (Not least because my eyesight is actually appalling.) And yep, it’s a vision board. (I too find them almost unbearably cheesy.) And yes, I’m a bit late to the whole ‘goals for 2020’ thing, given it’s February already. BUT. In doing this, I found there is something about finding images…
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An art critic’s memoir
This week I read Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands. It has SUCH an amazing premise: it’s a memoir by an art critic whose mother went missing for three days from a Lincolnshire beach. It happened in 1929 when her mum, Betty, was three – Betty has no memories of this event, and wasn’t even told…
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What it’s like being a reporter on assignment
Going on assignment has always been, in my fairly limited experience, an odd mixture of exciting, terrifying, infuriating and boring. But mainly, quite honestly, exhausting. For a woman who spends most of her time sitting at a desk working on a computer (or – whisper it in case my physio hears – slumped on the…
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In 2017 I read 112 books
This is my actual bookshelf, unedited. In 2017 I read 112 books. I know this because I track the books I read in Evernote. I have an Evernote for each year from 2014, inspired by reading about an author who wrote down every single book he EVER read. This is infuriating to me. Why did…
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London War Notes 1939-1945, by Mollie Panter-Downes
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: school life must have been hell for Mollie Panter-Downes. The name is quite extraordinary and yet somehow perfectly of its time – catch anyone saddling a defenceless babe with such a hyphenate now. Born in London in 1906, Panter-Downes (no, I can’t do it; she’s P-D…
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Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders
Acclaimed short-story author George Saunders’s first novel is extraordinary – I mean that quite literally. In a long and varied reading life, I haven’t read anything quite like it. The novel is based on the true, and almost unbearably sad, story that when President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie died, Lincoln went several times at…
Hannah James 
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