Paula

There's nothing quite like a bit of #bookmail to brighten up the day when you've been sick for the past two weeks!Crying in H Mart has come highly recommended by so many of you, and now it's also @dualipa and @service95 book club pick for April, so I seized my chance to read it at last. Dua's bac...

The Easter holidays have just flown by, and so has the first quarter of the year! How are we in April already? I've been a very slow reader - just nine books finished in these first three months - but it has actually been really nice to step back and let each story, setting, mood and character li...

I've been feeling extremely scatterbrained lately and haven't read a single page for more than a week, but I'm hoping that one of these books might get me back into that reading groove. I've got books that will take me to Ireland and Italy, my favourite literary countries; and, for the first time...

I've been awfully quiet again, but the Book Prize Season is about to begin in earnest, and that is always going to bring me out of my hidey-hole. Today at 6pm UK time we'll have a new longlist of 16 books for the @womensprize - exciting! As usual, I've loved seeing everyone's predictions and coul...

The ones that got away.I had been excitedly collecting these books for my Fall/Winter reading but then the world events happened and now they're just gathering dust on the shelf. Will I be able to read them all this year? The very honest answer is probably no, because there's way too many other b...

Something a little bit different for today - raise your hand if you're a fellow fan of Irish fiction! I know there's many of you out there; @laura_reads_ read a whopping 15 Irish books last year and @bernie.lombardi and @christophermetts seem to be planning a whole trip to Ireland because of all ...

So here they are, my most memorable reads of 2023!I hadn't planned it that way, but the year was bookended by Ali Smith's Seasonal books - Autumn was a reread and Winter turned out to be the only novel I could focus on when the world had become a nightmare. Smith knows how absurd and bizarre our...

The heart has been heavy. 2023 began with a few absolutely lovely weeks in Tenerife but then - an illness in the family that went on for most of the year and slowly drained me of all energy. Just when things were starting to look up, the genocide on Palestine began, and I got sucked back inside t...

Another birthday has come and gone but the books are here to stay. Already devoured the Keegan the other day during a short and sweet coffee break, and can't wait to dive into the rest. All these covers make me think of Autumn storms and falling leaves, and make me want to snuggle up as cosy as ...

It's official - just four weeks left and we will have the Booker 2023 longlist! Prediction videos are popping up on YouTube and @inkdrinkerreads has started his excellent Reading Booker candidates series. Exciting!And I'm still here with my Booker backlist Tuesdays. We're on to 2020 now but this ...

The weeks are just flying by - how is it another Booker Tuesday already?This time we're on to 2019 - the controversial year of the two winners. This is also the year when my interest in the prize waned; even before the winner announcement, I had the feeling that some of the judges had their own a...

If you asked me, her building was scarier than any sharks. Like being trapped in a Duke Nukem doom castle. A thousand other families living there, every front door opening into one hallway. Stairs going down past other hallways. Outside the main front door, a street full of cars and cars, people ...