Matthew Selwyn's Blog, page 3
January 9, 2017
Reads testing
What will I be reading in 2017? A bloody good question, thanks for asking. Over the year, whenever someone recommends a book to me that I think I'd enjoy or when I come across something I'd like to read, I'll add it to the page here. This will help me keep track of my teetering TBR pile and who doesn't like a good list? No bibliofreak I know. As I review books, I'll add links to the review on here too. I'd love to have your recommendations - comment below or hit me up on Twitter (@thebibliofr...
January 5, 2017
Testing blog
What will I be reading in 2017? A bloody good question, thanks for asking. Over the year, whenever someone recommends a book to me that I think I'd enjoy or when I come across something I'd like to read, I'll add it to the page here. This will help me keep track of my teetering TBR pile and who doesn't like a good list? No bibliofreak I know. As I review books, I'll add links to the review on here too. I'd love to have your recommendations - comment below or hit me up on Twitter (@thebibliofr...
January 4, 2017
2017 Reads
What will I be reading in 2017? A bloody good question, thanks for asking. Over the year, whenever someone recommends a book to me that I think I'd enjoy or when I come across something I'd like to read, I'll add it to the page here. This will help me keep track of my teetering TBR pile and who doesn't like a good list? No bibliofreak I know. As I review books, I'll add links to the review on here too. I'd love to have your recommendations - comment below or hit me up on Twitter (@thebibliofr...
December 30, 2016
Reading Plan: January 2017
Like Hillary Clinton’s political career, 2016 is now a dim and distant memory; all hail 2017, destined to be marginally less shit than its predecessor. We hope. Aside from having escaped a year that seemed, at times, determined to off all our most treasured icons, I’m pretty excited for 2017 for its own sake. Even if everything else goes to hell, at least I will be able to say that I am making my vlogging debut. Doubtless this will be a great comfort to the people of Aleppo, god knows they ne...
December 23, 2016
Covers #007: UK Bestsellers 2016
Below are some of the biggest selling books of 2016 (based on UK sales), but can you work out which they are from the small snippet of cover? Not all of these books were released this year but all of them have been flying off the shelves.
Click on the images to reveal each answer and let me know how many you get right in the comments below - good luck!
December 21, 2016
Review: The Sellout by Paul Beatty
“Being black ain't what it used to be.”
Winning the Booker Prize isn’t always a sign of a book’s quality but it always ensures a dramatic spike in sales. Paul Beatty’s brilliant satire of Blackness in a small Los Angeles suburb would probably have passed most British readers by had it not been given the prestigious award recently. And what a pity that would have been because The Sellout is one of the funniest books, one of the most sophisticated and satisfying comedies I have read in a very l...
December 6, 2016
Review: A History of Britain in 21 Women by Jenni Murray
“The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” claimed Thomas Carlyle. Jenni Murray would care to disagree. The stalwart broadcaster and journalist who has headed up BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour since 1987 has written a personal refutation of Carlyle’s claim in A History of Britain in 21 Women (2016), a bright and breezy series of vignettes which paint brief biographies of some of the women who have helped shape Britain.
Murray makes it clear as she introduces the book that the 2...
November 29, 2016
Reading Plan: December 2016
“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveller back to his own fireside and quiet home!” So says Mr. Charlie J. Huffam Dickens, who is most certainly for Christmas. So dust off ye olde copies of A Christmas Carol , light up a crackling fire beneath the mantle, and look yonder, for Christmas is coming, just 24 sleeps from now.
That is just 24 days left in which to purchase up all...
October 30, 2016
Reading Plan: November 2016
Happy All Hallows’ Eve, fellow ghouls and goblins of the darkest reaches of the web. May your pumpkins be perky and your frights frightful. I wish I could say my reading had been fitted to this most horrid of holidays but sadly the only monsters in my recent reads have been squashed spiders who have inadvertently found their way into the leaves of my book collection.
While I may not be able to offer a trick to supplement the season, I hope I can offer up a minor treat in the form of my redesig...
October 29, 2016
Review: The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So runs the epigraph, probably more famous than the book itself, of L. P. Hartley’s wonderful novel of 1953, The Go-Between . I was fortunate enough to study the book at school but others may have come across the story via the film adaptation, written by Harold Pinter. For those who haven’t encountered this delicate story yet, let me lay out its happenings.
In the 1950s, Leo Colston, a dried up man in his sixties, comes across a...
