by Bonnie Garmus 'There's nothing more irritating than witnessing someone else's unfair share of happiness, and to some of their colleagues at Hastings Research Institute, Elizabeth and Calvin had an unfair share. He, because he was brilliant; she, because she was beautiful.' Elizabeth Zott is a chemist -a good chemist. Her problem is, she is …
Category: Humour
ITHACA
by Claire North 'Penelope, sixteen years old, left her father's court behind to marry a man she had known for three weeks. And, as she stood at the prow of the ship that carried her to Ithaca, she closed her eyes and repeated, I will love, I will love.' I used to read lots of …
Reynard the Fox
A Very Old Story, retold by Anne Louise Avery Stories of the cunning fox, his escapades and his victims, have their origin in ancient Greece. The chief source is the Fables of Aesop which contain several fox stories, and these have been added to and embellished throughout Europe in the centuries ever since. Anne Louise …
Old Babes in the Wood
by Margaret Atwood What more can be said of Margaret Atwood, more than has been said already by countless readers? Novelist, poet, essayist, children's writer, it seems she has been around for a very long time. She has; her first book was published in 1961. And can she go on churning out these wonderful, inspirational, …
Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons 'You told them you were mad. You had been mad since you saw something nasty in the woodshed.' Aunt Ada Doom is in her eighties. She hasn’t left the farm for twenty years. Indeed, she only comes out of her room once a year to do ‘the Counting’ – a kind of …
Saintly Con in Santa Cruz
Revisiting the favourite literature of our childhood and youth can often bring disappointment. There may be several reasons why this is so. For one thing, reading tastes change as we grow older. The world changes too; ideas about what is acceptable, amusing, moral, and so on, do not remain fixed. That is not to say …
In Other Worlds
(SF and the Human Imagination) by Margaret Atwood A review In this non-fiction work, dedicated to her fellow sci-fi and fantasy writer, the late Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood talks about the literary influences of her childhood. A series of essays and book reviews of works that have inspired her, In Other Worlds takes the …
Book Review: Measuring the World
by Daniel Kehlmann (Die Vermesserung der Welt) This novel is a double biography of two of the giants of science, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, fast-paced and told with irreverent humour. 'It was both odd and unjust, said Gauss .... that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether …
Something Nasty in the Woodshed
I was reminded just the other day on going through my 'Reader' of this piece, which I wrote some time ago. As this is one of my very favourite books, I thought I would re-post my review today! Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons 'You would expect, by all the laws of probability, to find …
Maddaddam
by Margaret Atwood '.... [A]nyone who liked smelling daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God's Holy Oil, which were one …
Bookheathen Scribblings 