I've been interested in the Folio Society since back in the day when I subscribed to the now long dead Punch magazine and it carried adverts for the society, which was then a book club. Book clubs seem to have gone out of fashion now but they were
I've recently finished Emma Wood's book "The Hydro Boys: Pioneers of Renewable Energy". It's her examination of the Scottish hydro-electric power schemes and reading it provided an interesting contrast to Jim Miller's "The Dam Builders: Power from the Glens&
I've just finished reading Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan. In it she details her life in books from the earliest days of being read to, then learning to read, and her progress through many of the classic children's stories that we'
Let’s start with some religion: which is how do you keep track of where you are in a book? If your answer is that you fold down the corner of the page you are wrong and you will burn in hell. The correct answer, of course, is that you
[I'll start this post with a trigger warning, both for death, and also for horse lovers, plus a spoiler alert for readers of Ann Cleeves' Shetland novels.] In my reading recently I've come across some deaths which have affected me. The first was from “The
One of the things I like about reading is the part serendipity plays and my discovery of Persephone Books came about that way. I was listening to a podcast completely unrelated to books and someone mentioned in passing that they had been bought a subscription to Persephone Books as a
My mother taught me to read and by the time I arrived at infant school I was already a voracious reader. In those days books were expensive so the library was my friend. When I first visited it in the sixties Fleet Library was still in what had clearly once
I want to tell you a story about a book ... or three. In December I bought a copy of “The Folio Book of Days” by Roger Hudson. It’s extracts from diaries, letters, and other dated sources written by individuals over the centuries arranged by day of year. My plan