pocketbook

A loose occasional reflection on what I'm reading, how I inhabit books and they inhabit me.

Sunday, 17 May 2026

native denizens

›
Who are the fellows who cut the hay, nowadays. George Ewart Evans, writing about a Suffolk village more than a hundred years ago, knew who c...
Sunday, 10 May 2026

running in the family

›
The other night I plucked a book from the shelves in the dark: Michael Ondaatje's running in the family  was in my hand. A childhood in ...
Friday, 1 May 2026

Inside Jacob's Room

›
Afternoon up at the pond with Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room  after a conversation with D by the bonfire the other day about Fahrenhe...
Wednesday, 22 April 2026

strange things

›
'But really Mattis', she said with a toss of her head, 'you think up so many strange things these days that I hardly recognise y...
Monday, 13 April 2026

Erasmus in Inniscarra

›
I noticed this fragment on the front terrace for a day or two before bringing it indoors. Placed on a square of paper it became a drop-down ...
Wednesday, 8 April 2026

WASTE OF LANGUAGE

›
In Arthur's book emporium P spotted It walks by night and was immediately drawn. Arthur gave it to him, for the title, one of the dark ...
Monday, 30 March 2026

SAPPHO PAGES

›
Sappho pages are mostly empty, which means you can read them in any order.  but I to you of a white goat and I will pour wine over  That...
Friday, 20 March 2026

Natalia Ginzburg & Beryl Bainbridge, Lynne Tillman

›
Two of the early essays in  Little Virtues by   Natalia Ginzburg are about London in the early 1960s, the melancholy, desolation, lack of im...
Sunday, 8 March 2026

FALLOW

›
FALLOW    formal visceral viral philosophical comical botanical   A READER'S GUIDE There's a point where reading is no different fro...
Monday, 2 March 2026

For Esmé With Love And Squalor

›
When I was about thirteen this title on my parents' bookshelves, with a lurid Pan cover — completely off the mark — For Esmé with Love a...
Thursday, 26 February 2026

idle reading

›
Much of current reading is infill: I read before I write; I read when I can't sleep; I read in the bath. The rest of the time I am weedi...
Tuesday, 17 February 2026

JD Salinger and Anne Carson, at dusk

›
I like to have a bath early evening, to divide the day from the night. I read, for preference, the New Yorker. Today Jill Lepore remembered ...
Monday, 9 February 2026

Corgi Height: twelve inches above the ground

›
An ageing civil servant out for a walk with his Corgi in Kent, 1950s or earlier. He strolls his Kentish lanes, his Corgi coursing around, he...
Saturday, 31 January 2026

THE WHATSAPP DIARY

›
I read an article by Sam Knight in the New Yorker about whatsapp. I read it in several goes, unable to pursue it start to finish. Each time ...
Tuesday, 27 January 2026

Russian influence

›
The last story in Elephant , a selection of Raymond Carver stories, is an imagining of Tchekov's death, over a glass of champagne, which...
Thursday, 22 January 2026

RAYMOND CARVER

›
Deep in my re-reads of Patrick White, Thomas Wolfe and John Cowper Powys, I remembered Raymond Carver, the brevity of his writing, aided and...
Friday, 16 January 2026

Wolf Solent — an excruciating read

›
With the best will in the world — from my first reading I remembered only a rural girl who could whistle like a blackbird — I re-read Wolf S...
Tuesday, 6 January 2026

SELF-ABSORPTION

›
Eugene Gant, Thomas Wolfe's narrator in Look Homeward, Angel  enters the theatre of human events in 1900, a new start at the foot of a p...
Wednesday, 31 December 2025

ACTS OF THE BODY

›
In the nineteen seventies a number of long novels written about twenty years before were reissued, including the works of Patrick White in A...
Friday, 26 December 2025

BOOKSHELVES

›
I dreamed I went to stay for a few days in a hotel and installed in my room the bricks and planks that for many years I used as bookshelves,...
Tuesday, 16 December 2025

Reading in tune with 'flu

›
 During 'flu part one I did not read at all, I coughed. My head ached. All the bodily weaknesses I've ever known came through and ma...
Tuesday, 2 December 2025

THE LURE OF THE SENTENCE

›
 From Virginia Woolf losing hairpins along Piccadilly, to Gerald Murnane of Inner, Outer and Other Australia, The Plains, the sentence has t...
Tuesday, 25 November 2025

READING THE ORDNANCE SURVEY

›
After I came back from my home turf on the essex coast, I got out a 1980s ordnance survey map and read it like the book of my past, for some...
Thursday, 20 November 2025

LAST LETTER TO A READER

›
I began Gerald Murnane's Last Letter to a Reader with a sense of relief, as one coming into the home passage, not walking nor sinking, ...
Thursday, 13 November 2025

Re-reading Pavese straightaway

›
The House on the Hill sounds so homey/inappropriate you forget the title until you start reading the book again. Re-reading is for pause ti...
Saturday, 8 November 2025

The long and the short: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn & The House on the Hill

›
The long and the short of it, in 1940s novels from Brooklyn and Piedmont, Italy. The long was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, whic...
Monday, 3 November 2025

The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

›
I stubbed my toe on the wood box in the night and so was laid up for the day, which was all wind and sugar as they used to say. I read The E...
Friday, 31 October 2025

BATS IN OCTOBER

›
A bat flew by outside, through the gingko and the service tree. I was thinking about Barbara Pym and then Betty Smith, who wrote A Tree Grow...
Tuesday, 14 October 2025

poetry this summer

›
Since soundeye in July I have read poetry as the start of the working day, that is, five o'clock in the afternoon onwards listening to D...
Monday, 13 October 2025

PARTY GOING

›
Henry Green liked his present participles, the borrowed present of his writing is what he's constantly moving towards, pausing at, givin...
‹
›
Home
View web version
Powered by Blogger.