If you follow Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book), you’ll know that another of their hugely enjoyable ‘Club’ weeks is about to begin. Starting on Monday 12th October, the…

a blog primarily about books

I hope you’re all as excited as I am about our upcoming week of club reading which this time is from 1949! When I first started looking for titles I soon realised it was a bumper year and the…

It’s always a good day when a new title in the British Library Crime Classics range pops through the door, and a recent arrival looked to be an enticing read. It’s another one of their …

I was still feeling in the mood for something substantial after finishing “A Happy Death”, and the stacks of Instagram-inspired titles I’d put together included a number of books …

Later this month, Karen and Simon will be hosting another of their hugely enjoyable ‘Club’ weeks, focusing this time on 1949. Starting on Monday 12th October, the #1949Club is a week-long celebrati…

The topic of posthumous releases of author’s works has been on my mind a little lately, no doubt because of the Kafka rabbit hole I disappeared down! However, as I mentioned in my end of Sept…

Burn. The sight of beauty sets me on fire. I once read of the burning tremor of fear which the lover will suffer when the eye perceives a likeness of eternal beauty. Burn. To read Daniela Cascella …

I don’t quite know what it is about September, but it always seems to whizz past; maybe because I’m always back to work after the summer break and so things are frantic, with a lot of c…

Back in January I shared my thoughts about a wonderful book which I’d received as a Christmas gift from lovely Jacqui – “Souvenir” by Michael Bracewell. The book was basical…

I’ve been a keen reader of the British Library Crime Classics series since they first started reissuing Golden Age Crime back in 2012, and it’s been fascinating to watch the development…

I’ve been a keen reader of the British Library Crime Classics series since they first started reissuing Golden Age Crime back in 2012, and it’s been fascinating to watch the development…

Despite having overflowing bookshelves and a mountainous TBR, I still always seem to amass multiple copies of individual titles, and today’s book is a good example of that. Back in the 1990s …

MY VERDICT: A gripping, fast-paced dive into Erle Stanley Gardner’s science-fiction short stories!

Sophie Anderson’s ‘Scheherazade’ (ca 1870), The New Art Gallery Walsall. ‘The Kiss’ (1977), ‘Our Lady of the Massacre’ (1979) and ‘The Kitchen Child&…

Prior to 2014 I didn’t keep any kind of record of when I bought books, where they came from or anything like that; and the list I’ve kept since then has been very useful! However, one t…

Raw, unflinching and razor-sharp are just some of the descriptions that come to mind when I think of Penelope Mortimer’s fiction. Mortimer has an innate ability to portray how easy it is for an int…

Orava Castle, Slovakia, engraving by G A Troitzsch after Ferdinand Laufberger. The Castle by Franz Kafka. Das Schloß (1926) translated by Anthea Bell, introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson. O…

If there’s ever a book which had me wanting to rush off to northern climes, it’s “An Island Rooing” by Joan Grigsby! The latest release from Michael Walmer in his Northus Sh…

My second read for Short Story September is a book I picked up fairly recently after seeing it pop up on a number of blogs I follow; it’s by an author I’ve read before and was a recent …

Sometimes a book crosses your path at exactly the right time, and that happened to me recently when I was browsing in a British Heart Foundation charity shop. As I mentioned in my August round up, …

Books continue to lead to other books (my recent Kafka reading being a good example), but I’m also continually being influenced by online mentions and commenters here on the Ramblings. A case…

One of the books I picked up last month when we were having our little shop to celebrate mum was by an author I’ve read before – Seishi Yokomizo. Back in 2020 I reviewed his “The …

It’s been a little while since I picked up a book from my my various casual and ongoing reading projects; however, I recently felt the need for something familiar and which I knew I could pro…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the mythology of vampires began with Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” published in 1897. However, as “Vampire Tales”, a fantastic new …

August has obviously been quite a difficult month for me, so inevitably I spent as much time as I could with my regular coping mechanism, books. Drowning myself in words has always been very therap…

While I was reading Kafka’s “The Castle” recently, I checked out the bibliography in the back and saw mention of an interesting sounding title – “Kafka’s Other T…