This is the latest post in a series I started last November, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially ( Read more... )

As previously noted, 2006 started with a full house of visitors and much fun, though B's behaviour was becoing more and more difficult. I got very excited about the Lib Dem leadership, with Charles Kennedy's dramatic fall and the nearly successful wonkish challenge by Chris Huhne to veterans Menȝies Campbell and Simon Hughes. (There was a time when ( Read more... )

In 2006 I read over 200 books - lost count but I think the final tally was 207 - up considerably from last year's 137. This was partly because I read quite a lot of shorter books, but also I think I did more travelling where it was easy to keep reading. In addition, I had a few attempts at sertting up small reading programmes for myself, such as ( Read more... )

20) Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, by Marina Warner


( Read more... )

19) Unfinished Tales, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

Another piece of Tolkieniana, one that I'd been putting off reading for years, fearing that it would be as big a disappointment as The Silmarillion. But in fact, taken on its own merits, there are some excellent bits here. The first half of the book, which is basically three ( Read more... )

18) An Intimate History of Humanity, by Theodore Zeldin

I got this ages ago, as it promised to be an interesting investigation of the history of how humans relate to each other. Unfortunately it isn't; it is a series of conversations with French women, one by one, with an attempt by the author to draw universal conclusions from each one individually ( Read more... )

17) Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

I'm very grateful to angeyja for sending me this - I had read a heavily abridged version years ago (back when my mother was involved in adult literacy schemes, I found it on her desk one day) but there is no substitute for the real thing. And this, not the film, is the real thing. No silly Caribbean escapades to fill in ( Read more... )

16) Notes from a Small Island, by Bill Bryson ( Read more... )

15) Ockham's Razor: A Search for Wonder In An Age of Doubt, by Wade Rowland

This is the last of the three books that had been staring at me from my shelves for some time, urging me to read them and return them to their rightful owners (the other two being Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee and The Elusive Quest). Ockham's Razor was lent me by the author' ( Read more... )

14) Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad

This took me a while; it is very dense prose, and you can't skim it. A fascinating tale of disgraced and redemption; the eponymous Jim is complicit, more or less by accident, in marooning eight hundred pilgrims in a sinking ship in the Arabian Sea; fleeing his past, he ends up in the interior of Celebes (or as we now ( Read more... )