Bringing up Charlie: A carol for Christmas Eve...

RIP John Philip "Jake" Thackray (27 February 1938 – 24 December 2002)

My bookshelf

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

by Geoff Dyer

I like Dyer, like his fiction, like his travel writing, especially like his masterful book on the Great War. But I’m less impressed, in fact profoundly unimpressed, when he starts writing about jazz. Even when he’s not writing about jazz...

Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence

Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence

by Geoff Dyer

This is an odd book, an odd reading experience, a book about a book but a book about a book that doesn’t really - and never will - exist. It’s slow to start, too. After rather too many pages describing the author’s procrastination this b...

The Temporary Gentleman

by Sebastian Barry

You can’t read Sebastian Barry slowly. It’s like poetry. It IS poetry! How else to explain a sentence like this? ‘Such are the embers of things spoken when the great conflagration of life is nearly over...’ WHAT a sentence! And the book ...

Burning Bright

by Helen Dunmore

Dark, yes, and with moments of heart-thumping tension so great it makes you skip through prose you know demands attention just because you want to find out what is happening. And then there’s the ending. Without giving anything away, I t...

A Long Long Way

by Sebastian Barry

‘Unsurpassed in First World War fiction’ it says on the cover, and that’s quite a lofty canon. But this addition does indeed rank there with them, even among the highest. One of the most moving, thought-provoking and heart-rending books ...

Bringing up Charlie

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Monday, 24 December 2012

A carol for Christmas Eve...