Learning how to be independent and how to recycle

Stig of the Dump takes me back to when it was read out in my junior school class. I was probably the same age as Barney, the boy who was told, "If you went too near the edge of the chalk pit the ground would give way". Barney wanted to see if what the adults said was true, and of course, "the ground gave way." He "felt his head going down and his feet going up" as he fell into the world of Stig, a stone-age character who speaks no English, and who uses discarded rubbish to make useful implements. Barney returns to the pit to see Stig whenever he stays with his Grandmother in Kent.

Figure out where you're going before you go there

I decided to read Rabbit, Run after seeing it included in a couple of listings of great literature of the 20th century. It's about Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, the most selfish, self-centred, tin-eared, immature character that I've ever encountered.

Just how lucky we'd been

I picked up Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go because it was described as a dystopian story. The events take place in 1990s England, but it's not quite the place and time that I remember. Kathy narrates the tale. She tells us about her relationship with Tommy and Ruth, her friends at a school called Hailsham.

Uptight women, Chanel suits, fluffy little handbag dogs?

I went to the Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair in April 2024, looking for options for self-publishing. Meandering through the stalls, I spotted a book with a jacket that looked like the flag of Monaco; red strip at the top, white strip at the bottom. On closer inspection, I discovered it was a novella titled Monaco, by Juliet Jacques. Well, I know a bit about the Principality, so of course I bought the book.

Change is inevitable

Isabel Colegate's The Shooting Party gives away the end of the story on the first page: "It caused a mild scandal at the time, ... an error of judgment which resulted in a death." The book then describes events leading up to the incident, which takes place a few months before the outbreak of WW1, when Sir Randolph invites a group of privileged people to take part in a shoot at Nettleby Park. The old-fashioned peer has "all but bankrupted the estate" to entertain the late King.

Much, much too rich for his own good

Before picking up The Hare With Amber Eyes, I was under the impression it was fiction. My heart sank on discovering it's a family memoir. I'm not a fan of this sort of non-fiction unless it's warts-and-all, or humorous and self-deprecating. But it was a Book Club choice, so I swiped to the first page and began reading.

The book's set in late 19th century Europe, WW1, and the inter-war years of the 20th century. French art and literature loom large, both of which are interests of mine. So far so good. As for the family, it takes in three generations of the Ephrussi bankers, from whom de Waal is descended. He says, "I know that my family were Jewish, of course, and I know they were staggeringly rich". He traces these ancestors using a collection of 264 netsuke as a device, moving through generations and locations according to who owns the small Japanese carvings, one of which is the titular amber-eyed hare.

Not for the faint-hearted reader

José Saramago's The Cave isn't for the faint-hearted reader. It was a book club choice, and such was the density of words that I was 40 pages short of finishing before the meeting. One of our members thought it was terrible, the main complaint being a lack of punctuation.

At first, I too wasn't sure I was going to enjoy it, however the more I read, the more I was struck by its style of writing. I began to imagine Saramago sitting before me, reading the book out loud, like the actors on the old UK children's TV series Jackanory.

Briefly, the elderly potter, Cipriano Algor has a predictable, productive and happy life. His daughter Marta helps him make pots for The Centre, where his security guard son-in-law Marçal works. Marçal is hoping for a promotion which will allow the three of them to move from their rural community to a rental apartment in The Centre. The plot isn't intricate, the characters are nicely drawn, and we even get to listen to the thoughts of the dog, Found, whose relationship with Cipriano Algor is charming.

It's been described as dystopian and Orwellian, and raises questions about what to do with your life when you no longer work. This may not be the intentional theme of The Cave, but that's what I was thinking when I finished it. You might want to read Plato's allegory of the cave before starting, or you can just enjoy it for what it is; a story with a happy ending.

I was relieved to finally put down this 'unputdownable' book

Claire Douglas isn't writing books for people like me, but nevertheless I do have some positive things to say about The Couple at No. 9, so I'll start with those.

First, the premise is great. A young couple called Tom and Saffy Cutler move into a cottage in a village somewhere near Chippenham, Wiltshire. It's owned by Saffy's grandmother, Rose. They want to make some changes and begin with the garden. While digging the builders discover two bodies, buried 40 years earlier, when Rose was living there with her infant daughter, Lorna. Unfortunately the elderly woman has dementia and can't remember what happened.

They fuck you up...

Lengthy family sagas don't appeal to me and I'd never normally have opened the covers of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. However, during a chat with an English-teacher friend I mentioned that I knew nothing about Shakespeare's King Lear. "Here", she said with a smirk, "this is a modern adaptation." So I took it, left it on the shelf for a couple of years where it kept staring down at me, and eventually thought I might as well read it so I could report back.

Saturday... wait

I knew nothing of Ian McEwan's Saturday before picking it up. It was just another one of his books, another that I wanted to read before settling down to Atonement (I've still got a few to go).

A few pages in and I thought it was going to be a struggle.

All the nice people were poor

If your reading preference is for door-stop sized sagas featuring families or fantasies, Muriel Sparks's 134-page The Girls of Slender Means may not appeal. The girls in question are aged under thirty, living away from home at the May of Teck Club, and starting out on their working lives. It reminded me of all-female halls of residence at university.

Don't call me Fanny

I have no idea how Anita Brookner's 1983 book Look At Me came into my possession. It's an old paperback copy with yellowed pages and the back cover missing. I'd been told that the author's output was melancholy, which suits me fine, so when I spotted it on the shelf I thought I'd give it a go. And I'm glad I did.

The story's narrated by Frances Hinton a medical librarian and aspiring writer who yearns to be noticed. She fears that she will "grow into the most awful old battle-axe" and says she writes in order to become visible, to be heard, "to make people laugh". In other words, she says she wants people to "look at me".

Theirs not to reason what the fuck, Theirs but to shoot and duck.

I might have been half listening to one of those BBC Sounds programs whilst preparing lunch, or reading an end of year best books list in The Guardian. Whatever, someone recommended Paul Beatty's The Sellout and said it was about a black man who re-introduces slavery and segregation to the USA. What?!

Rose-tinted memories, mis-remembered by some, forgotten by others

A few years ago a university friend attempted to reunite our old gang. The response was somewhat unenthusiastic. Rose-tinted memories resurfaced, mis-remembered by some, forgotten by others. Thank goodness it didn't go ahead, unlike the reunion of The Old Devils in Kingsley Amis's novel.

How to enrich your life

I love libraries. Unlike the online world, they don't limit your horizons to something an algorithm suggests because you've taken an interest in it before. You can be looking for books about travelling in Europe, and before you get to the shelf, you see something far more interesting that you didn't even realise you wanted. Which is what happens to me today.

Cheating at cards... it's about the only crime that can still finish you

Last year the screen persona of James Bond turned 60. He made his debut in 1962 with Dr. No. I must have seen all the movies. I groaned at the awful punned names of heroines like Pussy Galore and cringed when Sean Connery forcibly kissed her. I rolled my eyes at Roger Moore's cheesy humour and cheered when Piers Brosnan met his match with Onatop. But in all this time I've never, up to now, read a single one of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels.

Virginity: the sum of a girl's worth

In the early 1970s Mum's American pen friend and family paid us a visit on their way home from Iran; the husband was something in US diplomacy. We wore our best clothes and had to be on our best behaviour. Our visitors had straight teeth and spoke with movie-star accents. They brought with them a small souvenir for each of us from the faraway, fairytale country about which I knew nothing. I still have my gift, a little mirror mounted behind small doors in a hand-made, hand-painted frame. I'd never owned anything so exotic, and for many years this was my only image of Iran. So when I picked up Jasmin Darznik's Song Of A Captive Bird I thought it might give me some insight into the country.

Now, I realize that accounts differ... My account you can trust

Did you know that Macbeth was a real Scottish king who died nine years before William the Conqueror fought the battle of Hastings? Shakespeare put his own spin on the real man to big-up the ancestry of James Sixth of Scotland (and First of England). The playwright relied on an English chronicle, but there are at least four alternative Scottish histories. And have you seen Braveheart, Mel Gibson's kilt-clad, woad-faced portrayal of the 13th century struggle for Scottish independence? One historian said of the movie that it was "one of the most historically inaccurate films I have ever seen. It bears almost no relation to historical fact". Now I'm not suggesting that everything we think we know about Scotland might be made-up for some nefarious purpose, but maybe we should take a step back and reconsider what we've been told, especially if it's based on the work of a couple of blokes in the entertainment industry, both of whom had businesses to run.

Pussy Riot. - That's just middle age. It'll sort itself ou'.

I started to read Roddy Doyle's Two Pints a few years ago, when an Irish friend gave me a copy and told me it was "feckin' brilliant". Well, I didn't get far with it. I couldn't get to grips with the dialogue, written to try and capture the Dublin accent. So the book lurked at the back of the shelf, forgotten.

It wouldn't be long before people lost interest.

I was intrigued by the premise of Yun Ko-eun's The Disaster Tourist. It's about a South Korean woman named Yona, who works for a travel company called Jungle that organizes holidays based around disaster zones. After being assaulted by her boss, and knowing that if she makes a fuss she'll lose her job, Yona accepts the offer of a business trip to assess one of Jungle's destinations: the fictional island of Mui.