The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1978

In 1959, Florence Green, a widow living in the seaside village of Hardborough, East Suffolk, decides to open a new (and the only) bookshop in town to fulfill her duty “to make it clear to herself, and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right.”
Calling upon her youthful experience as a bookstore [...]

Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, edited by Anne Fadiman, 2005

I’ve just finished this moving selection of essays from the literary quarterly The American Scholar, in each of which an author picks a piece of writing that had a significant impact on them on their first reading and then re-reads it to see what they now think and feel.
The writings selected are a [...]

Another blog is born!

Having happily idled away many hours of ‘07 by reading book blogs, I’ve decided to start one of my very own.
Here’s the end-of-year reading I’m treating myself to:

I’ll review the first-time reads- The Bookshop and Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love- and recommend the old favourites- Pride and Prejudice and A Study in Scarlet.
And [...]