pocketbook

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...

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 ...

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...

'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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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

FALLOW    formal visceral viral philosophical comical botanical   A READER'S GUIDE There's a point where reading is no different fro...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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

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...

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...

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...

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

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,...

 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...

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

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...

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, ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Henry Green liked his present participles, the borrowed present of his writing is what he's constantly moving towards, pausing at, givin...