Read 19/02/2022-15/03/2022 Rating 3 stars The Book of Disquiet is Fernando Pessoa’s factless autobiography written under one of his ‘heteronyms’, Bernardo Soares. Constructed from…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Read 28/02/2021 Rating 5 stars Written in 2005 and first published in English translation in 2014, Marie NDiaye’s hypnotic fictional memoir Self Portrait in Green follows an unnamed narrator,…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
I picked up Natural Enemies of Books from the excellent independent book and magazine shop Rare Mags. I’m interested in the history of printing and typography and wanted to know more about women’s roles in a male-dominated industry. Natural Enemies of Books is a response to the 1937 publication Bookmaking on the Distaff Side, which […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
This is the first book I’ve read by Hanne Ørstavik. Stay With Me is her sixteenth novel. She has won multiple awards in her native Norway and her novel Love, translated into English by Martin Aitken, was a finalist in the 2018 National Book Awards for Translated Literature in the US. Aitken is the translator […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
In When Women Kill, translated by Sophie Hughes, Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán examines four true crime cases, each one a murder committed by a woman, to reveal the backgrounds of those women and the reasons they chose violence. Zerán trained as a lawyer, and this book draws on that training to dissect why some […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Looking for Luddites grew out of author and illustrator John Hewitt’s student interest in the Pennine landscape in the 1970s. It gathers together fourteen sites associated with the Luddite uprisings in 1812, drawn by John in their 21st century contexts and presented with a brief history of their significance. Out of his daily stuff, posted […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Nina Bouraoui’s novel Satisfaction is told in the form of journal entries. The journals, seven of them, belong to Mme Akli and cover the period 1977-1978. Mme Akli is a French woman married t…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
8 posts published by Jan Hicks during May 2025| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
1 post published by Jan Hicks during August 2025| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Frankie Miren’s novel The Service follows three women involved in the sex industry in different ways. Lori is an illegal sex worker trying to forge a better life for herself and her daughter.…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
4 posts published by Jan Hicks during July 2025| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
An academic walks into a room. He is faced by eight other people. He’s a late arrival, the meeting is almost over. A government official introduces him badly, getting his name wrong, misrepresenting his work and generally not having done his research properly. It’s an inauspicious start to his involvement in a government commission into […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Keeping the House is the 2021 debut novel of North Londoner Tice Cin (pronounced Teejah Djin, for anyone like me whose English tongue wanders towards what it looks like to us). Set amongst the Turk…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
7 posts published by Jan Hicks during February 2021| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
8 posts published by Jan Hicks during March 2021| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
In Manya Wilkinson’s tragicomedy Lublin, three teenage boys walk from Medritsch (Międzyrzec Podlaski) to Lublin along a road none of them have traversed before, in more ways than one. It is August 1907. Elya, Kiva and Ziv are taking brushes manufactured by Kiva’s uncle to market. Elya has made himself leader of the expedition. He […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Since I posted my thoughts on the collapse of Unbound, author, journalist and drinks historian Henry Jeffreys has written about his experiences as an Unbound author in The Critic. His article, Balancing the books, provides some evidence of things I speculated about in my post, in particular the way Unbound co-founder John Mitchinson seems to […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
This is an opinion. I’ve provided links to information available online, most of which is open to interpretation due to a lack of transparency on the part of the main actors. I’m not ac…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Yuri Herrera is a new author to me. Season of the Swamp is his imagining of an 18 month period between December 1853 and June 1855 when Benito Juárez was in exile in New Orleans. The novel is descr…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
7 posts published by Jan Hicks during March 2025| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Posts about Adam Scovell written by Jan Hicks| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
On the flight home from our trip to Japan last autumn, I watched the two Denis Villeneuve-directed film adaptations of Frank Herbert’s Dune back to back. I knew little about the book, other t…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Piranesi is Susanna Clarke’s second novel. It is the story of a man of uncertain sanity, lost inside a labyrinthine house, who knows only the bones of the dead and a man he calls the Other. I…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War arrived earlier this year as part of my And Other Stories subscription. It is categorised by the publisher as poetry, but it is more than a down the line collection …| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
We’ve had a hot couple of weeks in Manchester. It has felt like summer and the cover of Adam S Leslie’s Lost in the Garden called to me from Book Mountain. I wanted an adventure that wo…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ novel The Visitors follows a former textile artist turned art supply seller, known only as C, as she navigates keeping her business afloat, repaying her medical debt, …| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
It is 1982 and Swanna Swain is 14 years old. Her parents, both academics in their forties, both having a midlife crisis, have separated. They send Swanna and her younger brother Madding to summer c…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Revolution in the Head is touted as an indispensable Beatles book, a masterpiece and an astonishing achievement of pop criticism and scholarship. The edition that I read is the 1998 update that inc…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Read 21/02/2021-26/02/2021 Rating 5 stars Permafrost is the first novel by Catalan poet Eva Baltasar. It’s a thing of beauty, visceral and uncompromising. It’s about depression, and bei…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
This isn’t really a review. It’s more an overview. How Grey Was My Valley is a photo essay using images taken by Peter Halliday that explores various examples of post-war modernist arch…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Adam Scovell’s third novel is loosely based on his own memories of growing up on the Wirral, Merseyside, and, through his usual mix of prose and photographic fragments, examines how a place a…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Four years ago I bought a book from Manchester’s Modernist Society shop about Wales’s modernist architecture (sort-of review here – I still haven’t completed my attempt at t…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Lucie McKnight Hardy’s debut novel weaves together a smattering of personal experience with folk horror tropes to create a quiet novel about revenge, belonging and control. It’s an unse…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Henry and Astrid: a psychiatrist and a singer, drawn together at one of her gigs into an unequal relationship. Told in alternating chapters, Henry’s relayed in the first person, Astrid’…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Read 07/11/2016-13/11/2016 Rating: 4 stars So many books these days have endless quotes from reviews that prepare you for what you’re about to read. Especially books that are classed as diffe…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a retelling of the story of Catholic priests Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf and their mission to New Mexico. Set in the period shortly after New…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Book 4 in Iain Martin’s Winterhill series opens with a statement from the President of the Twelve Galaxies, announcing that his term of office is due to end in one solar year’s time and…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Split Tooth follows the fortunes of an unnamed Inuk girl from Nunavut, Canada. Her story is a first person narration, combining prose chapters with poetry and art. The novel begins in 1975, with a …| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Nick Bradley’s novel Four Seasons in Japan is his second book set in Japan, and follows part time translator Flo through a moment of crisis. Flo is from Portland, Oregon, but is living in Tok…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
The Flame Alphabet is the second novel by Ben Marcus. Published in 2012, it depicts the impact of an epidemic that turns first children’s and then everyone’s speech toxic. At the start …| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Read 01/11/2019-09/11/2019 Rating 5 stars Ring the Hill is a walking book, a history book, a nature book, a folklore book and a book about contemporary Britain viewed through a lens that seems to h…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Read 28/12/2017-02/01/2018 Rating: 4 stars I’ve been reading Tom Cox’s nature writing for a while now, first through his columns in The Guardian and more recently via his website. He…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Read 14/12/2019-04/01/2020 Rating 4 stars I found Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women a difficult read. It’s essential in its content and the topics Perez shines a light on, but I f…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Read 31/10/2018-14/11/2018 Rating: 5 stars Last year, Tom Cox published his wonderful book of nature writing, 21st Century Yokel, through Unbound. Having loved that book, the writing, the design, t…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
1983. The year of breakfast telly, the afternoon kids’ tv slot being rebranded Children’s ITV, Thatcher’s Tories winning a second general election by a landslide, the Little Miss …| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Mister N is about a novelist who has lost his sanity. He has left his apartment, he says, because he could no longer live in the shadow of a high rise being built alongside it. He has checked into …| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Read 08/05/2022-12/05/2022 Rating 5 stars Villager is Tom Cox’s first novel. I’m not going to call it a debut, because the author has a wealth of writing already in his back catalogue. …| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Leave the Capital is wonderful. Informative, chatty and funny, it traces a path from the 1960s to the 1990s and argues that a handful of Mancunian bands who were also-rans in the Beatles era paved …| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
In its flap copy and its cover blurbs, Feminist City is framed as a treatise on how urban spaces have ended up so gendered and how a different way of thinking about cities and the people who live a…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
From one forgotten author to another. I’m still reluctant to return to the second book I picked up for 10 Books of Summer and instead have chosen Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal’s account…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Read 06/01/2014-20/01/2014 Rating: 4 stars LibraryThing review Laurence Sterne’s convoluted stream of consciousness un-novel and I have history. It’s a book that I kept seeing reference…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
I started my 10 Books of Summer badly with a book I’m finding quite dry. I was delighted, therefore, when my library reservation for Caliban Shrieks came available and I could put my chosen r…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
“What on earth shall I do when I get home? Read? All books are the same – about beautiful girls who get married or married women who fall in love with their husbands. In books things al…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
