Books are my thing.

I got lost in them when I was a kid, I studied them when I was a student, and I live by them still. Some of my best friends are books.

The lure of literature fascinates me, and this blog is an attempt to fathom books and their depths, to tear back the covers and let the ideas flow.

Here you’ll find posts on miscellaneous reads as well as books from my literary canon, which really is a thing.

Fiction
The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne (Safer Waters: Evading the Shark of Life)
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford (Frank’s Lament: ‘The Sportswriter’ and the American Dream)
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (Where There’s a Will: Escaping (or Embracing) the Facts of Your Birth)
Our Jack by John Hooker (Safer Waters: Evading the Shark of Life)
The Biggles Books by W.E. Johns (Taking Flight: How Biggles Saved My Bacon)
A Man of Parts by David Lodge (Conflicting Interests: What Happens When You Want What You Don’t Want)
Here’s Luck by Lennie Lower (Sweetly Sour: Lennie Lower, Antipodean ‘Plum’)
Bruny by Heather Rose (Crossing That Bridge: Heather Rose’s ‘Bruny’ Blunder)

Non-fiction
Les Guêpes (The Wasps) by Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr (Going Native: How to Change Without Changing)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (Going Native: How to Change Without Changing)
A Book of Their Own by Thomas Mallon (Talk and Self-Talk: People, Their Diaries and Me)
The Dynamics of Creation by Anthony Storr (Finding Your Type: On Being Read by a Writer)

Books pop up elsewhere, of course, and you can track their traces on the guest list.

And because stories come in various forms, I also write about films and plays.

Dunkirk (Radical Dehumanisation: Dunkirk‘s Retreat from Reality)
Ladies in Black (Goode’s, Better, Best: Ladies in Black and the Growth of a Nation)
King Lear (Seeing Things Feelingly: Books, Climate Change and Me)