In My Mailbox, No. 1

As promised in my previous post, I am now doing In My Mailbox, a Story Siren meme where I list all the books in my immediate vicinity, so even if I don't blog about them you know they're there. And they don't feel ignored and rise up against me, which would be as frightening to you as it is to me if you could see Just. How. Many. There. Are. 

Seriously, shelves, bookcases, lampshades, fridge. Everywhere. All of them simultaneously giving me the evil eye and the come on until I don't know which way to look. Essh.

Barry Unsworth's 'The Quality of Mercy': ARC from Hutchison, review to come in next week or so;

Wilkie Collin's 'The Woman in White': an ex-Book Club choice. However, seeing as I am no longer doing the book club (I'll tell you that story sometime) I have put it down for now. I will pick up it soon though, as it's really rather good.

Tea Obreht's 'The Tiger's Wife': I have read this actually, but it's hanging around waiting for a Book Quote Friday post or a review.

Javier Marias' 'Written Lives': bought after reading this post on 'Wuthering Expectations'. Sounds a little crazy, but that makes it all the more tempting to pick up.

George R. R. Martin's 'A Feast for Crows': although, to be honest, I am not reading this and have all but no intention to. My husband is reading his way through the entire series however, so they are all over the house. And 'Game of Thrones' was, until the series ended, all over my TV. So it deserves a mention I think.







Back to School Again...

....although, that was always kind of a bad thing for most (unless you were sad like me and secretly loved school), and my return to blogging after a few weeks off is definitely a good thing all round. Time to get the grey matter working again and to talk about what I've been reading whilst I've been away! I've got some real humdingers coming up for Book Quote Fridays and for review.

Taking a break was definitely the right thing to do though. Work has been crazy lately (I've just got a new job) and much of that is writing, which meant at the end of the day, come blog post time, my brain had already been wrung dry of any drops of creativity normally therein. There was also a bit of a crossover with the job before, which meant for a few weeks, I was working in the region of 7 days a week. Good for career progression? Yes. Good for having the time and mindset to write? Not so much.







#100 Blog Fest

       Hey there! I'm back from my long break and ready and raring to go, with a new layout and look and my first ever guest post from Martin King's #100blogfest challenge, where he aims to publish 100 blogposts on 100 different blogs during the month of August. Phew!

 

So, without further ado, take it away Martin!







Ta Ta for Now

     Well, the summer is well and truly upon us, as seeing as everyone is taking a holiday I thought I might too. It's been a truly hectic couple of months and at the moment when I say 'brain, come on', it says 'what? why? Ssh' and goes back to drinking a drink with an umbrella, magazine in hand. 








An Obvious Truth

   

 

Not that we aren't trying to mimic that, of course...

 







Confessions of an Elle fan

     Now, as fans of good writing in all its forms, you'll forgive me for wandering off books for this one particular blog post and straying into the not-so-oft mentioned world of magazines (Elle, to be specific) to talk about some particular writing to be found there.

     Or not, as the case may be. 

      Let me explain.







Book Quote Friday: The Happy Ending

      Sometimes, at the end of a rough day, all you want is food, bath and the miraculous good fortune of a happy ending in your bedtime read. 

     I know there’s been a bit of a Rose Tremain love in on this blog lately (I most recently talked abut her short story, Moth), but after seeing her speak at the Vintage events I’ve worked my way back through a fair part of her back catalogue. As a general conclusion, it rocks. If you haven’t read much of hers, you should probably stop reading now as seeing the name of the book will tell you the ending of said book (tis tricky to write a post about a happy ending without revealing the ending, of course) and these books are so good that I wouldn’t want to do anything that would discourage you from reading any of them.