Ethel Wilson's Love and Salt Water (1956) McClelland & Stewart, NCL 1990. The advantages of reading an author's works through are many; I love the sense of truly-getting-acquainted that comes with this reading immersion, the intense satisfaction of recognizing interconnections (and divergences) between stories and longer works, the sense of
I admit it: the first feeling that I had when I saw Laila Lalami's novel was relief, relief that it was obviously shorter than so many of the novels I wanted to read so quickly as part of the Orange Prize longlist reading I wanted to do. Not very propitious,
Sadie Jones' Small Wars Knopf, 2009 All three of 2010's Orange Prize nominees discussed here already (Lorrie Moore's At the Gate of the Stairs, M.J. Hyland's This is How, Rebecca Gowers' The Twisted Heart) were relatively quick reads for me. Sadie Jones' Small Wars? It took me a full week
What struck me about this challenge is connected with a question that an acquaintance asked me the other day: where do I find the books that I read. It's the kind of question that reminds me just how innate reading feels to me, whilst it's unfamiliar territory for a lot
If you read Rebecca Gowers' first novel, When to Walk, you've been introduced to Ramble: she's not easy to know but she's at the heart of Gowers' debut so you'll have made her acquaintance. Those readers who want to make friends with the characters they're reading about, likely didn't even
