Y’all know that I love the library, but one of the aspects I love most is being able to sample, to see if there’s a match for my reading taste before I purchase. It’s an hour’s walk—there and back, in total—but I can plan to avoid the rain. (I
I grew up reading Enid Blyton, wondering what was ginger beer and desperately wanting some for my own “secret island” and other adventures. So it’s unsurprising that I understood the value Proust placed on the taste of a madeleine, decades before I tasted one myself, decades before I read
Seeing that some of my reading habits had shifted unexpectedly at the end of last year, I scribbled a note to peek mid-way this year, just to see how my ideas about my reading compared to my actual reading. The short version of my plans included reading from my
Years ago, working in a bookshop and reading reviews for the first time in my life, I learned of a new volume of non-fiction by V.S. Naipaul and decided that I would never read his books. I don’t remember why exactly, but he has been criticized over the years
Almost straight away after Simon and Kaggsy chose 1961 for the current club year, I started to come across references. As in Stacey D’Erasmo’s memoir, The Long Run (2024) which draws a clear connection between one writer’s life and work and the values of the era: “We believed in
