My thoughts about books, writing, life and so many other things….Judy Leigh/ Elena Collins.
I've never been a real crime novel fan although I did enjoy Into the Fire by Manda Scott, mainly because of the sustained tension and the gripping and likeable characters. I heard about The Widow from Madeleine Milburn at a writers' conference and she lauded the book because of its immediately interesting and arresting voice. The …
It's something I hear quite often and I don't mind at all when people say it. 'It must be really hard being a vegan' 'You have to give up so much.' 'I could live without meat but exist without cheese? Never.' I can understand why people make these comments. I'm less anarchic than I used …
'The One in a Million Boy' is a novel by Monica Wood, telling the story of unlikely protagonists, misfits who become close to each other, finding out about themselves as they explore new relationships. Ona Vitkus is 104 years old and her friendship with the eponymous unnamed boy is the central focus: he is interviewing her about …
So many crises have been screamed from newspaper headlines this summer. We’ve read about the post-Brexit panic and the disharmony in both major political parties as new leaders put themselves forward. Politicians have been maligned and rejected and new leaders have emerged. We’ve read about the queues at Calais, the dreadful attacks in Nice and …
Continue reading Happy September! Let’s bottle summer and keep it alive through the cold months
A writer never stops learning. I always feel that I have so much more to learn about the skill, the art, the craft of writing, and reading widely is always a good way to prompt thinking, learning and improving. I've just read three books, each good in its own right, each very different. Ian McEwan's …
Continue reading McEwan, Cannon, Kent: it’s all in the writing.
Mary and Max is a 2010 stop motion animated film by Adam Elliot. It is narrated by Barry Humphries: Mary is voiced by Toni Collette and Max is voiced by Philip Seymour-Hoffman. Mary is a young Australian girl with a distant, overworked father and a kleptomaniac, alcoholic mother. Mary is bullied at school and lonely. …
Continue reading ‘Mary and Max’ – ‘All humans are imperfect’
Have you ever seen a trailer for a film and thought 'This looks brilliant. I must watch it.' Then you watch it and all the best bits were in the trailer and the rest of the film is just not for you? That's Francis Ford Coppola's black and white film, 'Tetro'. It's quite an old film now …
Love the poem, love the man, love the film. 'Howl' is a 2015 film about the landmark obscenity trial in 1957, concerning 'Howl', Allen Ginsberg's signature poem. It features excerpts from the poem as we see beat poet Ginsberg reading his work to an adoring audience of famous writers such as Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac. …
I read Game Girls by Judy Waite in two hours, trying to imagine myself as a fourteen year-old reader. I was lying in a hammock in the sunshine and there was nothing to disturb me but a few tweeting birds, yet I still managed to slip from my idyllic setting into the whirling world of …
Continue reading ‘Game Girls’: a tough tale for today’s young readers.
In the blurb on the back cover of The Fishermen, New York Times suggests that 'Chigozie Obioma truly is the heir to Chinua Achebe.' I read Things Fall Apart years ago and loved it: it was the archetypal 'modern' African novel and the title comes from a wonderful W. B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming. …
Continue reading ‘The Fishermen’: everything about Obioma’s novel is superb.
That quintessence of dust 