pocketbook

I read three Elizabeth Bowen novels in a row: The House in Paris , The Death of the Heart and Eva Trout or Changing Scenes . Children all a...

An American couple are paying guests in a château in the Touraine after the war; their french is poor, they bring nylon stockings to give to...

An article in The New Yorker about Mark Twain sent me to the bedroom bookshelves to see what I had. Tom Sawyer was too big a volume for out...

Her side of the story by Alba de Céspedes, mid 20th century Italy, the anti-fascist sector. I became impatient with her side of the story, ...

I finished Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane, read the first few pages again, then watched the dancing flies above the pond, buffeted now and ...

In this week's twilight I read The Seamstress and the Wind , which I have had for some years, but didn't register the first time, th...

Reading César Aira to discover I have been in dire need of something like this: a hundred pages of rare and rich uncertainty: what next and ...

It would be good to think that reading a book, reading book after book, honed more general reading skills, like reading your mind, your own ...

Dug over two or three beds in the veg plot; ground very dry and hard; hitting thick sods may be of a piece with reading the stories of Flann...

I started reading Fanny Burney's diary — a 1940 Everyman edition I haven't looked at in decades. Perhaps after my week in France, a ...

I thought before I came to Paris that I would not haunt my old haunts, I would start again, but here I am, haunting, in an average café, wit...

 Philip K Dick, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland , my choice this week. Going into abeyance. I always liked that word. I have been reading my Americ...

Architect Louis Kahn said a building is only good if its ruins will be good, I read in Lara Pawson's Spent Ligh t. Louis Kahn believed t...

In three consecutive baths I read an article by Lawrence Wright  in the New Yorker about a group of women on death row in Texas. I hadn'...

Whenever people ask what I read I start by exclusion: I don't read books in the headlines, except long afterwards. Disgrace by J. M. Co...

You have to read books twice in February. The mist is down. The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese you'd have to read twice at any ...

When I was sixteen there were two new English teachers at school: Mr Harrison was genial and engaging from day one, a cricketer on an open w...

She stood among the circles and colours of Richard Gorman paintings, her flared patched jeans down to the floor, a brick-orange beanie, ligh...

The Library at Castlemartyr may be my home from home: there are six sprinklers and one smoke alarm in the ceiling, the sofa fabric is fiftie...

Daniel Defoe was plain Foe by birth. Coetzee was and is Coetzee. He has only one look for the camera.  There's a new mighty volume on De...

In the novels of James Purdy, the beautiful boy always dies. In The Nephew , his second novel, Cliff is missing in action in Korea, and then...

What am I doing with the pit of the year? Guys and Dolls set up several wet/windy/cold afternoons; a present from Gertie to my parents in 19...

 'A masterpiece of philosophical fiction' says one of the puffs on the back of Pornografia  by Witold Gombrowicz. Philosophical fict...

The Possessed  is a potboiler, an unwilling gothic novel written by a European avant-garde writer; Witold Gombrowicz went to Argentina from ...

The last paragraph of We think the world of you is as poignant as a story gets. Evie the Alsatian dog holds the centre of the novel; she is...

In Third Reich Germany, Charlotte Beradt began to notice how her own dreams expressed what, in a totalitarian state, she was unable to say. ...

Jhumpa Lahiri avoids names, of people, places, as if naming were owning or presuming more than she means to, more than she can. I read Where...

I read  The Blue Flower  every few years and different things show through. This time I noticed the Bernhard, age six, also known as the ang...

Three novels about drifting, 1920s to 1950s, by Joseph Roth, Jack Kerouac and Alexander Trocchi.  In Flight Without End , Franz Tunda, First...

Bone into Stone , Jhumpa Lahiri's essay on translating Ovid, made me suddenly aware again of the enchanted zone of the text — Ovid's...