Tag: Reading

  • Girls in books

    This week’s pondering, readers, was prompted by a post on Facebook. It was a video of a mother and daughter looking through the girl’s bookshelf and removing all the gender-imbalanced books to discover what a tiny selection they were left with. They started by removing all the books that had no female characters, then the…

  • M is for … Mostly overlooked.

    My “M” book is The Midnight Society by Rhonda Sermon. Now, this book has been wandering around at the edges of my awareness for yonks. At least a year, I swear. I remember it with another cover – it’s been that long. So in all that time, why on earth did no one take me…

  • E is for … Elementary, my dears!

    My “E” pick was the Elementals series by Michelle Madow. I was really pleased that I’d got a bit ahead of myself where my schedule’s concerned, so I had chance to read this series in one, glorious gulp (I got through them in a week; not that I’m boasting or anything. Ahem). It’s a cracking…

  • My Alphabet Challenge: A is for …

    …Among Wolves. And that turned out to be a fine start to my new reading year. It’s post-apocalyptic and with a reasonably familiar premise, but the narrator was excellent, and the finale was pulse-raisingly dramatic stuff. Please watch out for my full review of Among Wolves, which will be on the Paisley Piranha site shortly. So that’s…

  • My free reading challenge: straying outside my genre

    I read a lot of YA fiction. Reading is a high priority in my life. I work, I’m a mum, I write books myself (45.5k words through Nanowrimo – whoop!) and I still squash in reading 2 – 3 books a week. I’d be lost without them. But I can get a bit jaded. Just to…

  • My free reading challenge: temptation!

    My quest to read as much as I like without spending money on a book for myself until Christmas continues… Dear and lovely readers, this week was hard. Offspring found an unspent book token, so we headed off to Waterstones to spend it. A will of iron Now, that’s not the hard part. I’m –…

  • My free reading challenge: pay with a review

    My challenge to keep reading without paying for a book for myself until Christmas continues… This week I have been mostly fighting my TBR pile, which – even containing only free books – has reached teetering levels. I’ve spent this week reading, reading, reading in a vain attempt to slim down my teetering TBR pile (it’s…

  • My free reading challenge: a delightful glut

    Well, last week’s giveaway source of free books provided rich pickings. I’ve only started three so far, and I’ve already finished and loved two of them – the third I’m not so sure about, but we’ll see. To be fair (and to armour myself against future disappointment), I started with the ones that attracted me most.…

  • 3 reasons I love my library

    Libraries are a hot topic in the UK at the moment, with the government and councils seeming to view them as pointless moneypits which can easily be dispensed with without any derogation to life or culture. I’m not going to add anything dramatic to the debate, but I wanted to articulate why libraries full of…

  • Words are magic, that’s why it’s called spelling

    Wide-range reading I’ve been reading out of my genre this week – Longbourn caught my eye (and who wouldn’t want a chance to escape back into the Pride and Prejudice universe?) and I’ve absolutely loved it. As well as the story (it’s Pride and Prejudice seen from the servants’ point of view), I’ve loved the…