Revisiting The Hobbit
The Hobbit is the first major book of which I have a conscious memory. Probably four or five years...
Podcast review – Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams
Listening time: 15 minutes. It’s about a quarter of a century since I first read this moving...
Making invisible friends
This is a book lover's book, and the protagonist is the son of a bookseller, whose bookshop he takes over...
A capacious book thief
Steinbeck and Robert Capa spent a month in the Soviet Union. It took some time for Steinbeck to cotton on...
The best part of books…
Obvious when you put it like that. But it’s got me trying to think of what’s actually happening in books...
The spirit of a book
I like that the spirit of the book lives as much in the readers as in the writers. When I...
The history of books
An idea so intrinsic to reading books, particularly those you love and remember, that I had never consciously thought of...
How to read a book in a language you don’t know (II)
I love children's books and their illustrations, and often buy second-hand at this or that flea-market. By now, we have...
Worse than cocaine
If you were traversing the Soviet Union it was better to be caught with a kilo of cocaine than a...
What is reading for?
A wonderful quotation about what reading can do for and to us. Not a question of clocking up facts or...
Why read literature?
‘Why read literature? Because it enriches life in ways that nothing else quite can. It makes us more human.’
I'm...
There is no method but yourself
Wisely or no, this has pretty much been my haphazard method of reading poetry since I left formal study. With...
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