My Name is Why

by Lemn Sissay (2/52) Proper wanted to like this book too. It is a brave book but I could not warm to it on first reading. The poems on first reading left me cold too. But I guess you have to realise that I have “skin in the game” and that might have coloured my…

Dear Reader, Hello 2021!

Hello 2021! We made it, not with a bang but a whimper but we made it none the less 🙂 How are you? This first book recommendation for 2021 was a gentle start to the New Year and carried me through Christmas secure in the knowledge that tucked away amongst the big ticket items was…

Hold Still: A Memoir in Photographs

On a break from work and still hurting from the arguments, I wandered lost into a used bookshop behind the Grove.  Running my fingers along the brightly coloured spines of each book, I let my finger tips guide me to my next purchase.  They caught on the cover of a beautiful, fat paperback – airport…

Mapping the Way Home

Mapping the Way Home: the Sufis and the Three Stages of Spiritual Awakening Food, body image and self-acceptance have run like a royal road right through my life.  Food is and was my safety, my comfort and my security, my north star through a difficult childhood adoption spent in fear of abandonment and fear of…

The Mid Summer Fire

June contains a great turning pointing in the year as the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, pauses there for a moment on June 21st and then begins the descent back towards Autumn and Winter. The date was marked by our farming ancestors as a date to remember that all would turn again…

Reading Matters: You, A Bike and A Road by Eleanor Davis

    Looking out from my desk at work through the long gallery of windows that line my side office –  I  find myself watching the wind catch the tops of the tree branches and how they exalt in the wind’s embrace.  And it stirs my soul: deep and powerful.  It’s the call of the…

Reading Matters: Just Kids Patti Smith

Just Kids – Patti Smith “When you hit a wall, just kick it in” O Patti  – you are the opposite of me and the sum total of who I could have been had I but dared to venture.  Watching you live your life with passion and intent,  tracking the path it takes you  –…

A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin

“Life changes in the instant.  The ordinary instant” Joan Didion This book  “A Life of My Own” is a class act written by a very classy lady who has lead an extraordinary life built on the very ordinariness of life and I loved it. Slightly dull in the beginning with some early scene setting, the…

5 Books to Read in September

Book Stack time and yes, I did jump the gun a little by reading 99 Stories of God in August but I couldn’t wait and as I wrote last week, it proved to be the perfect holiday read  – it just tickles me,  see below. Ha!  And its all like that  – short , pithy,…

One for the Summer Sun

99 Stories of God This book is a collection of exquisite, tiny masterpieces and is perfect for holiday reading.  I loved it. Hard to define, the book is a collection of vignettes- every day life moments – at times darkly ironic at times deeply familiar – exploring our pre-occupation with and relationship to God but in the most…

Adoption and the Fish Ladder

My sometime favourite piece of advice  in life reads something like: “This Life is a journey – you will take two steps forward and one step back – what ever you do , don’t give up or rather –  I have handled everything that has come my way so far and I will handle this…

Reading Matters: The Fish Ladder and Ynys Las

June and a review of the Fish Ladder by Katharine Norbury (Bloomsbury Publishing) And I’m remembering a time with my first husband out on the Llyn Peninsula – this book (the Fish Ladder)  has made me think of that. We were young together – we met at school on the stage in a  school play,…