The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr McKechnie’s bookshop, Gordon–Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth…| This Reading Life
‘Why a book about Orwell’s wife?’ a friend asked. ‘He would have been a great writer no matter who his wife was, right?’ That thought was expressed to me several times…| This Reading Life
14 posts published by This Reading Life during October 2024| This Reading Life
13 posts published by This Reading Life during June 2025| This Reading Life
10 posts published by This Reading Life during June 2024| This Reading Life
Posts about A Swim in a Pond in the Rain written by This Reading Life| This Reading Life
I do love August and Adam@Roof Beam Reader’s Austen in August meme. This year I reread Emma for the second time in my lifetime (so far!) Emma is now a classic study of friendship, truth and c…| This Reading Life
9 posts published by This Reading Life during September 2025| This Reading Life
The Australian Book Review short story prize has been awarded since 2010. In 2011 it was renamed the Elizabeth Jolley short story prize. Anyone from around the world can enter the prize. The story must be written in English and can be written in any style about any subject by one individual author. The story … Continue reading ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize| This Reading Life
Another year; another menopause book. Menopause is certainly having its moment. After decades of little to no research, study and funding, it is finally getting some much needed attention. Which is why we need yet another book. Almost as soon as one book is finished it is out of date. New studies, research and treatments … Continue reading The Menopause Moment | Kelly Casperson| This Reading Life
ABC Radio National is looking for the Top 100 Books of the 21st Century as voted by its listeners. On their website they explain that, All genres are in the running. Whether you want to vote for your favourite novel, politics or history book, sports book or poetry collection — all books across all genres … Continue reading Top 100 Books of the 21st Century| This Reading Life
I started reading Mrs Reinhardt and other stories by Edna O’Brien at the beginning of the year for Cathy and Kim’s yearlong Edna O’Brien project. I read five of the stories before setting the book aside for other projects. But then along came Lisa with her Short Story September and I decided it was a sign to finally finish … Continue reading Mrs Reinhardt and other stories | Edna O’Brien| This Reading Life
Note to Reader: One of Jane Austen’s earliest surviving letters is dated 23 August 1796 and was sent to her sister Cassandra from Cork street in London, where the twenty-year-old budding author overnighted with their sailor brother Frank on the way to relatives in Kent. That short visit places Jane within an easy ten-minute walk … Continue reading The Novel Life of Jane Austen | Janine Barchas & Isabel Greenberg| This Reading Life
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the worl…| This Reading Life
The night light in the blue-tinged glass on the mantleshelf burned behind a book, which cast a shadow across half the bedroom. The quiet glow spreading over the bedside table and the chaise lounge,…| This Reading Life
Gervaise had waited up for Lantier until two in the morning. Then, shivering all over from sitting half undressed in the cold air from the window, she’d slumped across the bed, feeling feveri…| This Reading Life
I promised I wouldn’t write a post for every single chapter in L’Assommoir but how does every second chapter sound :-D ? The famous wedding day between Gervaise and Coupeau in L’A…| This Reading Life
Reading Zola in April with Fanda @Classiclit has become a tradition and a treat; something I look forward to every year. Zola’s Paris novels in particular, fascinate me. Zola was the master o…| This Reading Life
The President of the Chamber remained standing until the faint stir caused by his entry subsided. Then he took his seat, saying rather nonchalantly, in a quiet voice: ‘The sitting is open.…| This Reading Life
Émile Zola: A Very Short Introduction is part of the very excellent Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series. There are over 700 titles in the series covering everything from author b…| This Reading Life
La Teuse came in and popped her broom and her feather duster against the alter. Confession one: this story ended up being a chore to read. After six engaging, enthralling Zola’s I have hit my…| This Reading Life
La Conquête de Plassans, or The Conquest of Plassans (1874) is the fourth novel in Émile Zola’s twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series that I have been reading with Fanda for #Zolad…| This Reading Life
Le Ventre de Paris (also known as The Belly of Paris – a direct translation, or The Fat and the Thin referring to one of the main ideas explored in the story) is not only an extremely visual …| This Reading Life
La Curée is the second book in Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series of books set during the Second Empire in France. I read it this month in honour of Fanda’s #Zoladdiction2018. I have m…| This Reading Life
April is #Zoladdiction month and this year Fanda is encouraging us to find the art in Zola’s writing. This year I’m reading La Curee (The Kill) which is set in Paris during the mid 1860…| This Reading Life
I cannot thank Fanda @Classiclit enough for once again hosting #Zoladdiction2017 – one of my favourite readalongs each year! I used this year’s readalong to go back to the ver…| This Reading Life
I cannot thank Fanda @Classiclit and O @Behold the Stars enough for introducing me to the wonderful world of Zola. Last year I read Nana for Fanda’s Zoladdiction month with great enjoy…| This Reading Life
I’m still reeling from my Nana experience. Zola has created such a vivid world that it’s impossible to come away from it untouched or unscathed. Nana, herself, is larger than life even …| This Reading Life
Jura, April 1947. It was his third day back on the island but the first he had managed to get out of bed. He knew what he had to do: transfer to paper the ceaseless, grinding monologue that had bee…| This Reading Life
“That braw lanky laddie,” the woman in the upper-deck first-class saloon said, squinting and hitching herself forward in her chaise lounge for a better view. Her white summer dress tick…| This Reading Life
Epigraphs (3): (1) I very rarely think either of my past or my future, but the moment that one contemplates writing an autobiography…one is forced to regard oneself as an entity carried along…| This Reading Life
It was hard not to feel that Paris was the place. My response to The Paris Bookseller has been complicated. I was keen to read it thanks to the blurb which told me it had a Paris setting, a booksho…| This Reading Life
His mother waited upstairs while the servants took coats and scarves and hats from the guests. Some books are not easy to review. If you had asked me a couple of month ago, I would have said, unres…| This Reading Life
Kathy O’Shaughnessy has written an utterly delightful and immersive story about the extraordinary Marian Lewes, otherwise known as George Eliot. The book follows Marian from the early days of…| This Reading Life
A couple of months ago I was fortunate enough to receive a reading copy of Jane Caro’s Accidental Feminists from Melbourne University Publishing. I immediately tucked it into my weekend bag t…| This Reading Life
I knew next to nothing about the mother/daughter Mary Wollstonecraft/Shelley pair until reading Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. I had started read…| This Reading Life
It was the man from Records who began it, him all unknowing in his prim, grim way, his above-it-all, oldthink way. He was the one Syme called ‘Old Misery’. Julia by Sandra Newman has be…| This Reading Life
It was an undecided and hazy spring, the spring that MAS370 disappeared, and I didn’t know what I was doing in London. Everyone kept asking me what had happened to the plane. I had become an …| This Reading Life
7 December 1962, Devon 7 REASONS NOT TO DIE: 1. Skin. To never again feel the skin of one’s beloved child. Not another fictionalised biography I hear you cry! One day I will work out why I am…| This Reading Life
I had planned on writing extended reviews for some of these books, but Covid. Assembly especially, which packed a punch much weightier than its mere 100 pages would suggest, deserves to be more wid…| This Reading Life
Lisa @ANZ LitLovers is hosting the inaugural Short Story September where we are encouraged to ‘discover short story collections that are good to read.’ In more recent times I have been reading short story collections very, very slowly as I try to savour each individual story, but the focus of this month is on the collection … Continue reading Short Story September| This Reading Life
What’s On My Mind: 20 Books of Summer Winter A BIG tick and pat on the back to me! I finished reading my twentieth book at 11pm on the 31st August. Now I just have to complete two reviews so that I can say that I have read AND reviewed 20 books over the Antipodean … Continue reading Stories & Shout Outs #82| This Reading Life
August is usually the windy month; this year it has been the wet month. Perfect for reading but not so good for walking every day or getting out into the garden for a pre-spring tidy up. But I have managed to get in a few Snapshot Saturday posts on my photographic blog, Four Seasons, if … Continue reading Book Diary | August 2025| This Reading Life
7 December 1962 He was lying on a varnished wooden board, the top of a boxed-in radiator. The board was exactly as wide as his shoulders and he knew, from painful experience, he must sit up like a man emerging from his own coffin. Roll over and he would be on the floor. You never … Continue reading The Land in Winter | Andrew Miller| This Reading Life
Last month, when Marcie, Bill and I read Gooseberries for our George Saunders Swim in a Pond in the Rain project, we discovered that the Anton Chekhov story was actually part of a trilogy of storie…| This Reading Life
It was Silvia – she had discovered him before I did – who told me: ‘Look at his hands while he talks.’ He was standing there, legs slightly apart (with hiking boots, we were in the mountains); he w…| This Reading Life
I’m loving Japanese literature more and more. The modern stuff in particular, appears deceptively simple, but as you read, and for weeks afterwards, you become aware of layers of meaning. The…| This Reading Life
11 posts published by This Reading Life during May 2025| This Reading Life
Books first published: 1996 | 2000 | 2008 | 2001 | 2016 There are beings who are overwhelmd by the reality of others, their way of speaking, of crossing their legs, of lighting a cigarette. They be…| This Reading Life
6 posts published by This Reading Life during August 2025| This Reading Life
Alyosha was the younger brother. He was called the Pot, because his mother had once sent him with a pot of milk to the deacon’s wife, and he had stumbled against something and broken it. His mother…| This Reading Life
#368: What had I imagined? Time as a merry-go-round one could jump on and off? The year as a stream running underneath my eighteenth of November? As it turns out, both Tara Selter and I got a littl…| This Reading Life
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted m…| This Reading Life
The facts of the case, though meticulously reconstructed, proved precisely nothing – except that the discovery made by two carters from Dizy made, frankly, no sense at all. It’s the 4th…| This Reading Life
What’s On My Mind: Stats. Volatile Rune recently wrote a post about her thoughts on The Salt Path controversy which garnered many interesting comments, especially about the increased traffic …| This Reading Life
12 posts published by This Reading Life during April 2025| This Reading Life
It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York. That city had become disorientating to me, after my father’s death and my mother’s sudden r…| This Reading Life
Margot is shuffling in a balletic first position along the strip of carpet between the legs of the already-seated people in the theatre and the chair backs of the row in front. The performance at t…| This Reading Life
A gold bar is deceptively heavy. Four hundred troy ounces, about 12.5 kilograms, of ultra-high-purity gold formed into an ingot – a sort of slender brick crossed with a pyramid. The gold bar …| This Reading Life
The whole sky had been overcast with rain-clouds from early morning; it was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the country for a l…| This Reading Life
Posts about Haruki Murakami written by This Reading Life| This Reading Life
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Posts about Reading Austen written by This Reading Life| This Reading Life
A long long time ago, when I was a little chick, not even a chick but a pink and naked thing, a scar a scrap a scrape fallen on roots and wriggling, when I was catching my death and all I knew of s…| This Reading Life
Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hid…| This Reading Life
I know the pleasure of rereading Jane Austen intimately. I know that to reread Austen is to delve deeper into the intricacies of her characters, to appreciate her sparkling dialogue, her wit, her c…| This Reading Life
6 posts published by This Reading Life during July 2025| This Reading Life
The day it happened, Arlie wasn’t paying attention. An owl had visited, that was the problem, but Arlie had forgotten. It is going to be very difficult to top the three insightful and engagin…| This Reading Life
Henry Thomas Austen (8th June 1771 – 12th March 1850) wrote two memoirs, or biographical notices, about his sister Jane. The first one was written in 1818 just after her death and was included…| This Reading Life
Friday, 7 November. Concarneau is empty. The lighted clock in the Old Town glows above the ramparts; it is five minutes to eleven. The tide is in, and the south-westerly gale is slamming the boats …| This Reading Life
The practical test for my CAPES examination took place at a lycée in Lyon, in the Croix-Rousse area. A new lycée, with potted plants in the buildings for the teaching and administrative staff, and …| This Reading Life
What’s On My Mind: Anniversaries. Today is the 16th blogoversary of This Reading Life, formerly known as Brona’s Books. A lot has happened since the 6th July 2009. Mr Books and I got ma…| This Reading Life
No one noticed what was happening. No one suspected that something serious was taking place in the small station’s waiting room, where only six passengers sat dejectedly among odours of coffee, bee…| This Reading Life
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lur…| This Reading Life
© Brona’s Books 2025 | The Three Sisters, Katoomba June has been grey, windy and cold with some huge overnight frosts. The crisp, blue-sky days of winter have been rare so far, so I was deligh…| This Reading Life
It seemed an unlikely choice, this large establishment in the financial district, so that I stood outside and checked the address, the name of the restaurant, I wondered if I had made a mistake. Bu…| This Reading Life
My Dearest Ruby, – We got back from Loch Sween last night. It was still raining there when we left, and we reached home in a downpour. To-day it rains steadily. A wet Glasgow Sunday! The Brit…| This Reading Life
When in 1926 Robert Chapman published his edition of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s biography of his aunt Jane Austen the Times Literary Supplement chiefly welcomed its reissue not for the life …| This Reading Life
I meet my parents at a fish shop in an inner-city mall. By the time I get there, they are waiting in their windbreakers and matching hiking shoes. I greet their outdoor energy with a wave hello. &#…| This Reading Life
Artwork by Julia Soboleva On the 25th March 18–, a very strange occurrence took place in St Petersburg. On the Ascension Avenue there lived a barber of the name Ivan Jakovlevitch. He had lost…| This Reading Life
At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch’s Ponds. The first of them – aged about forty, dressed in a greyish summer suit – was short, dark-ha…| This Reading Life
Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest. It had blue velvet curtains full of dust, and fire surrounds painted like marble to fool the …| This Reading Life
It’s time for another Classics Club spin. This is the Classics Club’s 41st CC Spin…and mine. Yes you read that correctly. I have participated in EVERY single Classics Club spin. What is…| This Reading Life
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be…| This Reading Life
Helen realised that she had walked too far just as daylight was beginning to fade. As she looked around her, she was struck by the desolation of the country. During her long walk she had met no one…| This Reading Life
At first he barely notices the children. They’re waiting for the bus, a small boy, and a girl of about ten with braided hair. He’s twenty-three, too close to childhood and too far from …| This Reading Life
Penguin Classics UK covers designed by Alceu Chiesorin Nunes I have been saving this post for closer to July and all things Paris, but I’ve come down with a nasty lurgy after my recent FNQ ho…| This Reading Life
I have been asked some very odd questions during my seventeen years working in independent bookshops – where did that time go? It is now almost as long as my teaching career lasted for! But r…| This Reading Life
What’s On My Mind: Far North Queensland. By the time you are reading this I will be ensconced in our happy place. Mr Books and I both love to travel to new and interesting places, but we also…| This Reading Life
According to The Orwell Foundation website which manages The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction, ‘Each shortlist celebrates work that aspires to Orwell’s ambition to “m…| This Reading Life
Original title of Master and Man: Хозяин и работник (Khozyain i rabotnik) Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (1899) Project Gutenberg 24 February 2020 ebook #986 Date Read: 10th May 2025 M…| This Reading Life
“Aren’t we kind of the opposite of Adam and Eve?” a boyfriend once asked me, long ago. I was twenty years old and had taken this boyfriend home at a time when I knew nobody would …| This Reading Life
After a decade hosting the worldwide blogging event, 20 Books of Summer, Cathy @746 books has decided it is time to pass the baton. I have been with Cathy and the 20 Books Of community since 2…| This Reading Life
In the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, a hold-up in the traffic stopped the cab which was bringing Octave and his three trunks from the Gare de Lyon. The young man lowered one of the windows, although it…| This Reading Life
A biting wind swept through an open window at the end of the hall where Mary kept vigil outside her mother’s bedroom. The month of May had been mean thus far to the rural market town of Bever…| This Reading Life
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single lady in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a husband. ‘Nonsense,’ Miss Caroline Bingley muttered into her empty teacup…| This Reading Life
Photo by Kaye Hanson on Unsplash April, where did you go? In a blur of autumn leaves, crisp mornings, chocolate eggs and extra shifts at work another month has hurried by. It looks l…| This Reading Life
I have hated my mother for most of my life but it is her face I see as I drown. But Rowan doesn’t drown and the face she sees upon wakening is the ‘rough and wind-bitten and scratchy…| This Reading Life
At any point over the past fifty years or so a small band of dissidents have made it their business to inform the reading public that the Orwell game is up. In most cases this process involves the …| This Reading Life
The 1952 Club is hosted by Karen @Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon @Stuck in a Book. After checking the lists to see which books were first published in 1952, I realised that I had three o…| This Reading Life