Showing posts with label Stuck in a Book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stuck in a Book. Show all posts

Tuesday, 9 June 2015

In Which I Discover A Podcast!


A short and sweet post for anyone who hasn’t already come across the wonderful Simon T at Stuck in a Book and the equally excellent Rachel at Book Snob (though I’m sure most of you have). The pair of them have just come up with a lovely new venture – a podcast! Oldies like me may throw their hands up in horror (I wondered if my technical skills were up to coping with this), but they’ve made it dead simple to play (or operate, or access, or whatever the right word is).

It’s called ‘Tea or Books’, and in each session they will be talking about two book-related topics. The first episode, which you’ll find here, tackles the issue of books in translation versus books written in English but set abroad, and the old argument on who is the better writer - Emily or Charlotte Bronte.

I listened whilst drinking a cup of tea – who says you can’t have tea and books! It was lovely to hear them, and their debate was as interesting and thought provoking as I expected. You can join in the discussion by leaving a comment, just as usual, but sadly my listening skills have dwindled since I finished work, and each time I thought of something I wanted to say Simon and Rachel had moved on to another point and I lost the thread! However, it’s easy to stop the podcast and replay a section, so it’s not really any different to re-reading text, although I need to be a little more organised gathering my thoughts.

Anyway, that’s quite enough of me wittering on – go take a look!

Friday, 1 November 2013

My Life in Books!

A selection of some my old childhood books -
can you guess which is my favourite?
I'm always fascinated by other people's reading habits (when I'm in someone else's house I always look at the bookshelves) and I've really enjoyed the occasional My Life in Books series Simon T runs over on his blog Stuck in a Book. So I was thrilled when he invited me to take part in in the latest installment,  and you can read it here. I knew two participants were being featured each day this week (14 of us in all) and I knew we had to try and guess something about our unknown partner, but I hadn't looked at my emails today (I went Oxfamming, then met up with some old friends), so it was a lovely surprise when I went online and found myself on Simon's blog - and it was even more of a surprise when I found my mysterious fellow book lover was Simon himself! 

I felt quite honoured to be sharing the limelight with him, because he's one of my blogging heroes and he's been responsible for many of my book buys over the last couple of years - I tend to find that I like many of the books he recommends (but I disagree with him over Orwell, and nothing, but nothing, will induce me to re-read Nineteen Eight-Four, or Animal Farm, or any of his other novels).

The link above takes you to today's My Life in Books, but the series began on Monday, and continues until Sunday, and you can access the previous three series and have a nose at people's favourite reads. You can find out about their best-loved childhood book, their first adult book, how their reading has changed - and their 'guilty' reading secret (if they have one!). It really is a lovely insight in to the way books can help shape lives, and how much they can mean to people. And it's interesting to see how popular certain authors and titles seem to be. So, if you haven't already visited Stuck in a Book, please hop over and take a look.
My first book - coloured in by me, when I was very young...