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 ...

                                    How I Became a Reader                    How I became a reader was all down to my school, the alma mater of Beatles, George Harrison and Paul McCartney, and often much maligned in my blogs. Deservedly so, I think, because if you weren't an Oxbridge candidate it didn't have a great deal to recommend itself, especially to the also-rans, with whom I must confess I belonged from the very first day when, black and green peaked cap in hand, I had stood abashed before its austere and forbidding iron gates. There were, however, some good teachers: among them Mr Toobe, whose head and neck poked between the lapels of his dusty black gown, and who was appropriately nicknamed ‘turtle’ as he stepped slowly along the school corridors, holding those lapels apart as if they were the opening curtains to some play. And this was a p...