Recommendations of books old and new
Laurent Letellier is a bookseller. He runs a bookshop called Le Cahier Rouge, which could be loosely translated as, The Red Notebook. He has a daughter, an ex-wife, a girlfriend, a best friend that he isn’t quite sure deserves that status anymore, and a life that, while not humdrum, is routine and somewhat boring. He …
This is an unassuming, but charming book. It’s about a middle-aged man, Tim Gandy, with grown children who’s just retired and is finding life rather flat. He and his wife have grown apart over the years. He finds that he has somehow, become a spectator in his own life, and now that he no longer …
This is the story of a couple, a Mr and Mrs Ransome, who find their rather sedate and predictable lives disrupted by a completely unexpected event. They go to the opera one evening, and they come back home to find that they have been robbed, or so Mrs Ransome says. "Burgled," Mr Ransome says, because …
Continue reading "The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett"
This is a delightful book. It is a collection of newspaper columns written for the Guardian. The subject of these columns, very broadly, is food, and Rayner is an enthusiast. He writes about a variety of subjects, from the joys of cooking with what he likes to call piggy products, to his inability to ever …
The full title of this book is The Way home: Tales from a Life Without Technology, and that is essentially what it is, the record of a year of the writer's life that he lived without any of the conveniences of modern life; no electricity, no running water, no plumbing, no computer, internet, smart phone …
Helene Hanff wrote several books, both for adults and for children, but the one book that everyone knows her for, is 84 Charing Cross Road. It is a gem of a book that become a stage play which had a phenomenal run in the UK and was then made into a movie that some have …
Continue reading "Writers in Profile: Helene Hanff and the Book that Changed her Life"
This is an account of the Apollo missions, all the way from the disaster of Apollo 1 to Apollo 17, when the last man to walk on the moon, Gene Cernan, got back in the lunar module with Harrison Schmitt, his lunar module pilot and the first scientist ever to be a member of an …
This is a collection of letters that spans a period of twenty years, exchanged by two intelligent, thoughtful, and sensitive women who never met. Their correspondence began in 1957, when Katherine Moore wrote to Joyce Grenfell to comment on something that she (Joyce) had said on a radio show. Joyce wrote back and Katherine responded, …
Continue reading "An Invisible Friendship by Joyce Grenfell and Katherine Moore"
This is an unexpected, good book. I picked it up on a whim, not knowing much about it, other than that it is an account of a walk along the River Thames. I like books about walking, so I expected to like this book. I’m a bit surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Tom …
This is the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. The process of creating the dictionary, a word and a quotation at a time, makes for absorbing reading. Simon Winchester does a delightful job of bringing it all alive. The people who were involved in the making of this dictionary have fascinating stories of …
Continue reading "The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester"
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