Blair's Profile

368 ratings (3.46 avg)
348 reviews
Goodreads librarian
more photos (2)

#21 best reviewers
#26 most followed
#82 top reviewers

http://learnthisphrase.blogspot.com

http://www.goodreads.com/obviously

add as a friend follow reviews send message | recommend book | compare books

Blair's Bookshelves

read ‎(372)
currently-reading ‎(1)
to-read ‎(6)
abandoned ‎(48)
to-read-one-day ‎(11)
wishlist ‎(9)
read-on-kindle ‎(91)

historical ‎(77)
contemporary ‎(73)
ghostly-and-magical ‎(63)
mystery-thriller-etc ‎(57)
favourites ‎(51)
classics-of-some-sort ‎(39)
non-fiction ‎(37)

past-and-present ‎(37)
booker-prize ‎(31)
childhood-favourites ‎(26)
kids-and-young-adult ‎(25)
fantasy ‎(23)
read-on-holiday ‎(21)
biography-or-memoir ‎(18)

bad-or-overrated ‎(18)
guilty-pleasures ‎(16)
secret-history-esque ‎(16)
short-stories ‎(15)
poetry-and-plays ‎(6)
to-buy-physical-copy ‎(6)
pictures-or-photos ‎(6)

Cloud Shelves | Stats | More…

Blair is Currently Reading

Blair is currently reading:

The Light Between Oceans

by M.L. Stedman

bookshelves: currently-reading

My rating:

May 19, 2012 09:55am

rss
Blair's Recent Updates

Blair is currently reading: The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman	My rating:
May 19, 2012 09:55am
Blair gave to: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn read in May, 2012	My rating:
Review to follow.
May 19, 2012 09:54am · see review
Blair gave to: Empress of Rome by Kate Quinn (Goodreads Author) read in May, 2012	My rating:
So, I'm a little disappointed that I didn't enjoy this book more, and I feel a bit guilty about this low rating. But that's just the way it goes sometimes, I suppose, especially if you have high expectations. I found the previous two books in this se...more
May 16, 2012 03:32pm · see review
Blair gave to: Signs of Life by Anna Raverat read in May, 2012	My rating:
Beginning this book, there is something you should know. This is not a confession. This is something I am writing; something I am making out of something that happened. Ten years ago I had an affair that ended badly... With these irresistible lines b...more
May 14, 2012 08:57am · see review
Blair gave to: The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan (Goodreads Author) read in May, 2012	My rating:
This is a fairly short, ostensibly simple story about a group of survivors, most of them female, who are cast adrift in a lifeboat after their ship, the Empress Alexandra, sinks. It's narrated by Grace Winter, a young, newly-wed woman. The book opens...more
May 04, 2012 08:07am · see review
Blair gave to: Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Elanor Dymott read in April, 2012	My rating:
I've mentioned before - on numerous occasions, I think - that I'm not keen on love stories. This doesn't mean I'm a killjoy about romance: I like reading about love, but it has to be realistically portrayed. To enjoy a fictional romance, I have to be...more
May 02, 2012 03:23am · see review
Blair gave to: American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar (Goodreads Author) read in April, 2012	My rating:
Told mostly in flashbacks to the early 1980s, this coming-of-age novel focuses on Hayat Shah, a young Pakistani boy growing up in the American suburbs. Much of the plot revolves around his first crush on his 'auntie' Mina, his mother's best friend, w...more
Apr 23, 2012 05:14am · see review
Blair gave to: A Common Loss by Kirsten Tranter read in April, 2012	My rating:
At the beginning of chapter two of A Common Loss, Kirsten Tranter writes: This isn't going to be one of those stories about a suburban boy seduced into a picturesque world of wealth and charm by a group of high-class eccentrics. And I think, 'damn, w...more
Apr 23, 2012 02:15am · see review
Blair gave to: Summer by Tom Darling read in April, 2012	My rating:
Following the deaths of their parents in a freak accident, Grace and Billy Hooper - thirteen and nine years old respectively - go to live with their grandfather on his farm. It's a remote and lonely place: no shops for fifteen miles, no other childre...more
Apr 18, 2012 06:22am · see review
Blair gave to: The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams read in April, 2012	My rating:
In 19th-century London, Catherine Sorgeiul is living an isolated life in Spitalfields, where she is confined to her uncle's home. An insular and slightly disturbed young woman, she has a troubled history which always seems to be threatening to rise t...more
Apr 15, 2012 03:49pm · see review

More of Blair's books…

“Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

42 people liked it

“An anxiety with no object or purpose in the present, and in the future nothing but endless sacrifice, by means of which he would attain nothing - that was what his days on earth held in store for him... What good was life to him? What prospects did he have? What did he have to strive for? Was he to live merely in order to exist? But a thousand times before he had been ready to give up his existence for an idea, for a hope, even for an imagining. Existence on its own had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more than that. Perhaps it was merely the strength of his own desires that made him believe he was a person to whom more was allowed than others.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

6 people liked it

“I performed the part of an odd, quiet woman, and performed it to everyone's satisfaction. When others slept, I was awake; when they woke, they found me quietly occupied. I took walks by myself. I read and sewed or sat in the garden with my own self for company. I was not missed. I have never been missed. I had all the manners and necessities of other women of my society, yet I was without society.

... I simply surrendered to that brute unhappiness which had always been close at hand. I no longer made the effort to appear civil, for by then I loathed civilisation from the bottom of my heart. Solitude, after a while, becomes the worst kind of savagery.”
― Margaret Cezair-Thompson, The True History of Paradise

3 people liked it

“He was someone who had to live alone, someone who found it difficult to be with others for any length of time, because he only had one mode - that discreet art of withdrawal which had, no doubt, taken him years to perfect. He had no other strategies for getting along with people and, though his colleagues probably saw this as the mark of a gentle, erudite, considerate soul, I was suddenly able to see right through it. Not because I was so very perceptive, but because I was so like him. He had been living in that one mode for so long, he had almost forgotten about it, but I was a near-beginner, and for me it was painfully obvious.”
― John Burnside, A Summer of Drowning

1 person liked it

“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal

74 people liked it

More quotes Blair likes…

Blair's Writing

Ultimate favourites list (Nonfiction)

1 chapters — updated May 15, 2012 01:30am

Description: My favourite books of all time.

The best and worst books of 2011 (Nonfiction)

1 chapters — updated May 14, 2012 07:17am

Description: My favourites from 2011's reading - and what I hated.

The Deadline (Literature & Fiction)

1 chapters — updated Oct 30, 2011 02:09pm

Description: This is a submission I made to a writing competition which (obviously, ha) didn't win. The first paragraph, in bold, was already written, and the challenge was to finish off the first chapter within 1000 words. Disclaimer: by no means do I think this is great - in fact it makes me cringe a little bit, and I don't like that first paragraph to begin with. But since I spent time writing it, it seems a shame to let it just moulder away in my outbox for the rest of time.