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 ...

"A Grief Ago" * It’s the thing with feathers, as Max Porter puts it in his book about grief, although Emily Dickinson also used the phrase to talk about hope. Recently I was attending a book group to discuss The Master by Colm To ibin. As it happened, I had just read his article  A Grief Observed where he refers to the stories of Mary Levin. In those stories he says, a newly widowed woman has to re-invent some new rules of life for herself after her husband's death. Toibin then recalls how after the death of his father there was a silence around grief and that reading Mary Lavin's stories gave him something to relate to. This rang a bell with me  and as I read the rest of his article the titles of two books came into my mind which had helped me to deal with grief at two significant points in my life. The books were The   Coral Island  by R.M. Ballantyne and  Victory  by Joseph Conrad.   As many of us do, I had difficulty dealing with th...

Last year I joined a delightfully old-fashioned debating society. New members are voted in by the black ball/white ball system, where the appropriate ball is put in a box, and the results counted (origin of the term to blackball someone). Speeches are strictly limited in time, and no one is allowed to speak more than once other than the proposer and opposer, and no one is allowed to interrupt. In these days of unbridled rudeness on programmes such as Question Time, when the whole panel may be clamouring to get their point across, this is refreshingly civilised. This term we have a topic that may be of interest to those reading this – This House believes that the best children’s books have been written in the last fifty years. I would be very interested to have some replies here, to see what other people think. Of course, in true debating style, first we have to establish what is meant by best , by child , by written and then, in these electronic times, what is meant by book . ...