Authors Electric

                                                                                                                                   Why Women (and Some Men) Read Fiction Liz Dexter who is a prolific blogger about books, both fictional and otherwise, and who has occasionally commented on my own AE blogs, has recently published a review of a book that had been on her ‘to be read' pile for some little time. It was called  Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives by Helen Taylor. As this was a subject that had particularly intrigued me during my years spent as an adult education tutor I set out to read her review carefully. My WEA literature classes ...

The last time I’d been in town, only a few days after the EU referendum, there’d been a fractured, distressed, angry vibe in the air. A confusion in the fabric of the country that I’d never sensed there before. Now, only eight days later, it was a sunny day as I waited between buses in town and that disturbance in the air’s molecules seemed to have gone. The next bus took me nine miles out into the pollen-crazed countryside. From there, the day’s tasks required me to walk another eight miles, across rough land with three-feet-high grass, up and down several very steep hills, following tractor tracks with my boots. Some of the walking had to be done on the main road and the worst section was the bypass by the village. Vehicles came past at 70 miles-per-hour, only inches away. Huge rural vehicles that might as well be lorries, and now and then a real lorry hurtling past. I tried to stay on the road, no pavement around obviously, but then a smell of meat filled the air halfwa...