Tag Archives: The Guardian

Anita Brookner 1928 – 2016

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I hadn’t heard anything about it on the news so it was only when I turned to the Guardian’s obituary page that I realised that Anita Brookner had died on the 10th of March. You can read it here.

Apparently she wasn’t too keen on writing fiction, it was just something she was more or less addicted to, writing one book a year on average.

I must admit that I only read Hotel du Lac when everyone was reading it way back in 1984 after it had won the Booker prize. I recall it was quite enjoyable but nothing astonishing as far as I was concerned.

Apparently Brookner’s favourite novel was Oblomov by Goncharov which happens to be the book I got in the Classics Club spin. I’m now really looking forward to reading that one.

Guardian Review links

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This week’s Guardian Review section has a few articles that you might find interesting.

The books interview features Liz Lochhead, she’s a Scottish poet, just in case you didn’t know. She says: ‘You’re stuck writing something until the point where you go. To hell with it, I’ll tell the truth’ You can read the article here.

If you’re interested in Oscar Wilde you might enjoy this article about a new book on Wilde’s Women: How Oscar Wilde Was Shaped by the Women He Knew.

If you’re into gardens and art you might like to read The green rooms.

And last but definitely not least from the Review The man who read the world is an article about David Bowie, the now late great, but I still can’t quite get my head around that. You can read the article here.

Obviously there has been a lot of stuff about Bowie in the Guardian this week, you can read some of it here.

Guardian bookish links

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Hatchards is the oldest bookshop in London and I was very agreeably surprised to read the outcome of a Hatchards poll of their customers as to their favourite book of the last 200 years.
You can read the Guardian article here.

I was also interested to read an article about the distinctive smell of old books, you can read it here if you’re interested.

I love the smell of books, old and new. I used to have a quick look around to see if anyone was looking in my direction when I was in bookshops, before burying my nose in whichever book I was looking at, but nowadays I don’t care if people think it’s a bit weird.

In the Guardian review some authors have chosen their favourite books of 2015. It seems like no time since they were doing that for 2014. It’ll come as no surprise to you that I haven’t read any of the books mentioned by any of them. I intend to read the Kate Atkinson and Ali Smith books at some point though.

Has anyone got any others from this list which they would recommend?

Avocado = food of the devil?

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I’m old enough to remember when avocados were called avocado pears and were considered to be exotic. I remember a cousin told his father that eating avocados would be very good for his health. His father had serious heart problems so he manfully acquired a taste for avocados and proudly told his heart specialist of this feat. His heart specialist just about had a fit with his legs up! Nothing could have been worse for his heart.

So I’ve always been annoyed when people parrot how good avocados are for your health because they’re really not. When I’ve pointed out to people in the past that avocados aren’t all they’ve been cracked up to be I’ve had people looking at me like I must be mad. Apart from anything else they’re very calorific not to mention full of fat. Almost 200 calories in an average avocado. Coupled with the wine which often seems to be consumed at the same time (to make them palatable?) as anything containing avocados – it’s a bad day for the waistline, 200 calories also being in the average small glass of wine. They might have contributed hugely to the obesity epidemic which is engulfing the population.

While I’m in pontification mode, don’t overdo the banana eating either, unless you’re a long distance runner. Full of energy giving goodness they may be, but if you don’t use up that energy it will convert to fat fast. The UK apparently gets through more bananas than any other country in Europe, possibly the world, and those statistics have shadowed the obesity rates too.

I’ve always eaten loads of fruit and veg, long before ‘five a day’ became a mantra. My father did have a fruit shop when I was a youngster so I ate all sorts of fruit, well you can’t let it go to waste you know. But really nutrition and health wise you can’t do much better than eating apples, in fact to be on the safe side two a day would be even better at keeping that doctor away! It’s keeping the digestion moving that makes the difference.

This modern fashion for taking sips of water from water bottles is also not as good for you as drinking a good glass of water before and after a meal.

If you’ve ever made compost in a compost bin you’ll have noticed that if it is too dry then it doesn’t compost at all just sits there and I’m pretty sure that the same is true of the human digestive system. Those wee sips of water don’t do the trick and everything just lies in the stomach for ages, with plenty of time to convert to fat.

Well that got that off my chest, no matter how boring and uninteresting it might have been. I feel better for it.

If you want to read one of many avocado articles around at the moment have a look at this Guardian article

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Lolly Willowes cover

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner is one of a bunch of Virago books which have been languishing unread on a shelf for years, so when I saw that quite a few bloggers seemed to have read it recently I thought I should get around to it too.

I have to say that I didn’t love this book as much as I had expected to. It’s a book of two halves really. When her father dies Lolly Willowes has to move in with her brother and his wife and their family. She has been left money of her own but nobody expects her to strike out on her own and have an independent life. She’s one of those maiden aunts, handy for when the children need to be looked after, but otherwise unwanted.

After years of living her life to suit other people she eventually decides to move out to Great Mop, a rural village, where she’s able to learn more about nature and the plants and potions that have always attracted her. The book changes completely, just as Lolly did, and it seemed apt that I got to this point in the book on Halloween, as the village turns out to be full of witches.

You might be interested in reading this Guardian article about Sylvia Townsend Warner: the neglected writer.

Links from the Guardian Review

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It’s a wee while since I shared some links from the Guardian review section with you, but I think you might be quite interested in some from this week’s edition.

Firstly there’s an article titled Charlotte’s web by Claire Harman which you can read here. It’s about Charlotte Bronte and her crush on Paul Heger which inspired her to write Villette.

There’s an article here by Bill Bryson. Can you believe that it’s 20 years since he wrote Notes from a Small Island?

You can read Mark Lawson’s review of Ruth Rendell’s last book Dark Corners here.

Read Melanie McGrath’s review of Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus novel Even Dogs in the Wild here if you’re a fan.

Christobel Kent has reviewed Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith aka J.K. Rowling here.

Last but not least there’s an article by David Mitchell about Ursula K Le Guin and her Earthsea books which you can read here. I didn’t read the Earthsea books until I was an adult and I really got into the series, which is more than I can say for Tolkien’s books, so I was glad to read that Mitchell is a fan of Le Guin.

It was a rich seam of bookish stuff in the Review section this week as far as I’m concerned anyway, the above is just a selection which interested me most. I hope you enjoy some of it too.

The Guardian – Snooping around

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The Guardian Weekend magazine has a bit called Snooping around every Saturday and this week it was about homes in need of renovation. They weren’t kidding about that! Have a look at the photo below which is one of the featured homes.

As you can see it’s basically a shell, but it does have a great view, on a sunny day anyway. It’s the price which is the real shocker though as this shell of a house is on the market at £80,000 which translates to 123,104 US dollars. The shell is eight miles away from the nearest village shop too, so obviously it’s in a very remote area and I suspect that that means there is no mains water so no loo, definitely no electricity, in fact it was what is known as a but and ben in Scotland, which is a two roomed rural house with one room for the family and the other one for the animals.

I don’t think there are many such buildings still standing today, but I always had a hankering for one, In fact when we weren’t able to move back to my beloved west of Scotland (Argyll for preference) after Jack retired recently, due to there being no suitable houses for sale when we got our place sold, I did hope that I might stumble across a teeny wee cottage somewhere in Argyll which we could buy to use as a holiday place. I’m really not in favour of people owning two homes when there are so many people who don’t even have one, but a very basic place which couldn’t be used as a family home wouldn’t make me feel guilty about it.

Anyway as you can see, it’s not a problem I’m ever going to have if wrecks like the one above cost so much! Another dream bites the dust!

Margery Allingham by AS Byatt

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I thought you might be interested in reading this article by AS Byatt which was published in yesterday’s Guardian review. Although I’ve read quite a lot of Allingham’s books, I haven’t read Traitor’s Purse. Byatt is obviously a big fan of Allingham, as was John Le Carre apparently.

This week’s Review seems to be reminding me of how many books and authors I haven’t read. You might be interested in this article by Erika Johansen in which she celebrated life’s fighters. Ten uncompromising female protagonists – I haven’t read any of the books in which these females appear.

I’m always going to avoid reading Gone with the Wind and Stephen King, but I wonder if I’m missing something in not having read the others. Although I read children’s classics, I can’t see myself reading Harry Potter somehow.

Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

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I’ve been swithering about reading Go Set a Watchman but at last I’ve definitely decided not to read it as I don’t want to sully my experience of reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

If you haven’t already done so you can read the first chapter of Go Set a Watchman here. It’s accompanied by items by Oprah Winfrey, Shami Chakrabarti, Mary Badham (Scout in the film) and Harper Lee’s sister, Alice.

As it happens, Jack had never got around to reading To Kill a Mockingbird, it seems it wasn’t a set book when he was at school, although I must admit that I read it years before it was given to me at school to read.

You can read Jack’s review here.