NearHull
Well-known member
Just thought I would mention that if you are a member of your local library you can download ebooks for free loans. (but perhaps it may not be nationwide)
Was struggling with To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf until yesterday when I googled 'is Virginia Woolf difficult' and found that To the Lighthouse is in some bibliophile website's Top 10 difficult reads...It advises readers to not try and work out who the heck is thinking what about whom (it seems to be mostly the thoughts of the characters about themselves and each other, and not a lot of dialogue) and just read it...so I can now read it accepting that I'm not going to have much of a clue, but just enjoy the words and wait and see what happens.
When I was a kid I used to go the library to keep warm and read back issues of punch. Always enjoyed 'fathers day', which he wrote for many years.Happy Old Me by Hunter Davies. Have enjoyed his writing for more years than I care to think about and this is a good as any. I just picked it up in a big pile of books I managed to book out very shortly before our County Council closed the libraries. When I started it, I couldn't believe that he was writing in a very entertaining way about exactly my personal situation - living alone in your 80s.
When I was a kid I used to go the library to keep warm and read back issues of punch. Always enjoyed 'fathers day', which he wrote for many years.
With Australia in mind and given the current crisis, I am rather avoiding re-reading Nevil Shute's On the Beach - hopefully our ending is betterJust finished Scrublands by Chris Hammer. Great crime/thriller book set in a small town in Australia. I see it's only 99p now on kindle so if you have one and have a bit of spare time I'd really recommend it. You need to pay a bit of attention to the plot but that's not a bad thing. In a similar vein The Dry by Jane Harper (also set in Australia in the middle of a heat wave) is very good, as are her others Lost Man and Force of Nature.
I assume it's no longer published. I subscribe to private eye, which (at least in the back half) has supplanted it.I, too, was always an avid reader of Punch.
Been reading mostly on Kindle in recent times, but Mrs B has instructed that I should clear (ie read) some of the backlog of hardback books bought over the last year - so currently going through Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies, with biographies of Stalin, Napoleon and Alan Turing to follow. Then a history of the Palestinian "problem". After that just another 20 or so to get through.
I assume it's no longer published. I subscribe to private eye, which (at least in the back half) has supplanted it.
Also used to enjoy Alan Coren's pieces. An English teacher used to read from a selection of his pieces called (iirc) Golfing for Cats. Pretty certain it wasn't about golf or cats though...
Without commuting, do people read more or less?
I usually read on the train and during lunch break, I haven’t touched a book in about 3 weeks now. I was struggling to find them next thing’ anyway, hopefully there will something once the world starts to turn again.