Tag Archives: reading
Review: The Versions of Us, Laura Barnett
What if you had said yes . . . ? Eva and Jim are nineteen, and students at Cambridge, when their paths first cross in 1958. Jim is walking along a lane when a woman approaching him on a bicycle swerves to avoid a dog. What happens next will determine the rest of their lives. […]
Review: Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
It’s 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby – and she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to […]
Review: The Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss
There’s really nothing like dipping into a book feeling returning to an old friend. Comfortable, comforting, like it’s an old story you know and love. Reading The Wise Man’s Fear was like continuing on a long journey with people and places I was already very intimate with. It took a very long time (nearly 1000 pages), we got a […]
Review: On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
On a weekend trip to London when I had lent my Kindle to my brother and needed something to read, I picked up On Chesil Beach for sheer superficial reasons: it was thin and would fit into my already over-brimming backpack. Plus, you know, it’s so pretty. I had read it previously during my post-Atonement Ian McEwan phase, but […]
The Truth About the Kindle
If you would like to see my previous long rant about the Kindle, please click here. Otherwise, please just accept that I am a hypocrite and that things have changed, ok? A year or two ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of ever getting a Kindle. To me there was nothing better than the sight of […]
Review: the Miniaturist, Jessie Burton
On an autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman knocks at the door of a grand house in the wealthiest quarter of Amsterdam. She has come from the country to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt, but instead she is met by his sharp-tongued sister, Marin. Only later […]
My Post-Graduation Reading List
As I struggle through volumes of John Donne and pages of the Medieval Welsh magical realism of The Mabinogion (?!), the light at the end of the tunnel is that glorious post-university beacon, when I know I will be able to read ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING I WANT. Now I say this as a student who […]
Bethany Wren 