Two recommendations from people at work this month! The Centre - interesting but by the end I really disliked the main character, which is a bit of a shame since she's sort of touted in-book as a strong, diverse, open-minded lead and it gave me real concerns about the author. I can't...

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In November I was still not in the mood for reading and so made my way through Hail Mary AGAIN and Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

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Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's most well known plays. It's also largely a retelling of an Italian novella by Matteo Bandello, translated with a rather adroit spoiler in the title as "Of the sad end of two hapless lovers, one dying of poison, and the other of grief; together with sundry events".

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I started but did not finish a friend's copy of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791) which frankly made me far too angry. On a very different track, I did finish

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The Locked Room, by Paul Auster is the final book in The New York Trilogy and demonstrates that the trilogy really is a single book divided into three large sections. I thought this was substantially better than the other two, being able to build on the foundations they laid, and I had to take a two-week brea...

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A quiet month for reading, mostly of the first two books in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, who died recently. These are post-modern detective stories and really quite curious beast...

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The Dick And Jane Reader For Advanced Students. Class.

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The top twenty-one books have been announced in the BBC’s The Big Read Of that twenty-one, I’ve read twelve and have no particular desire to read the other nine. I must say though that it’s a pretty poor top twenty-one. I mean, “His Dark Materials” by Philip Pullman just isn’t that ...

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