My thoughts about books, writing, life and so many other things….Judy Leigh/ Elena Collins.
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.
I'm still on my quest to read books by authors I wouldn't usually choose, looking at genres which are new to me, discovering what I can learn as a writer from them. I recently heard a keynote speech by Meg Rosoff at a writers' conference and I decided she clearly knows and can explain fluently …
I'm on a quest to read popular novels that aren't the type of thing I'd usually read. Novels which might make one of my most respected literary friends wrinkle her nose and push it aside if I offered to lend it to her. The sort of writing I'm not steeped in. I'm doing this because, as a writer, …
Continue reading Review: ‘The Shock of the Fall’ and ‘Thursdays in the Park’
Uzodinma Iweala's novel Beasts of no Nation is a brutal story about a boy who is forced to become a soldier. I read it in an hour and it has real impact. It's written in the present continuous tense, which gives it a sense of immediacy and the voice of the character is omnipresent, youthful and naive,. His language …
Continue reading Beasts of no Nation: a novel about a boy and a gun
I have just finished reading 'Shakespeare's Wife' by Germaine Greer. It is the most superb read. I love the way Greer becomes a voice in your head when you're reading this book: you can hear her firmness, the way she is sure of her facts and how she isn't afraid to proffer an opinion. And this …
Continue reading Laddish literature? Not in Germaine Greer’s book.
A few days ago, I began reading a book which didn't immediately grab my attention. Like all readers, I encounter novels which work for me and some which don't. Even among novelists whose work I love, there are books which don't do it for me. Donna Tartt is a great example- I loved The Goldfinch and The …
Continue reading When to stop and when to read on until the bitter end?
David Mitchell's novel, The Bone Clocks, passed me by last year although several of my writer friends raved about it. But I am on a writer's quest to read even more widely than I used to. Everything is inspiration: popular novels, YA, book club novels, clever writing, predictable writing, and - above all - successful …
'The Dressmaker,' a novel by Rosalie Ham, was recommended to me by a writer who knows what she's about. It is out on film at the moment starring Kate Winslet and it really doesn't look like my thing. Set in Australia, the novel's strapline reads 'an unforgettable tale of love and hate and haute couture.' …
Continue reading Review: The Dressmaker – mischief and mayhem
This is a blog post I may return to again and again: there are lots of books I wish I had written and today I will discuss three of them. By 'books I wish I had written,' I don't mean simply that I enjoyed the book or even that I admire the narrative style and the …
That quintessence of dust 