What a year of reading! I’ve read some truly excellent, immersive, strange fiction. Some sexy, witchy, chant-worthy poetry. Some challenging and confronting non-fiction. Some unexpected and beautiful graphic novels. It’s been a great year of reading, and I can’t wait to see what fantastical worlds and delicious prose 2020 brings! In total I read 237 books in 2019. Compared to last year, I read about the same amount of short story collections (31), poetry collections/pamphlets (12), graphic novels (23) and…
Blog
October/November 2019 Reads
This Autumn has been a real mish-mash of reading, with plenty of surprising and excellent books. I’ve fallen in love with glorious-prosed children’s books, sceptical non-fiction, queer graphic novels, tarot-inspired poetry and some very, very dark novels. Read on for the 11 best books I’ve read recently: Fire, Bed and Bone, Henrietta Branford –This is one of the most beautifully-written books I’ve ever read. As it’s aimed at children it’s brief in terms of page count, but the depth of…
July/August/September 2019 Reads
It’s a bumper post of best books – not just the past two months, but the past three. And I tell you, I’ve read a LOT these past few months, and it wasn’t easy to pick the best. But I’ve tried to narrow it down, and by total coincidence we have another all-female line-up! (To be fair, two of the books are by male/female writing teams.) Read on for the 16 best books I’ve read recently: Take It Back, Kia…
May/June 2019 Reads
Hello, summer! We’ve had some lovely sunny weather in Scotland (that’s it over now, winter is back, get your coats out) so I’ve been spending many a happy afternoon immersed in a book. I read 32 books in May and June, and it was a real mix: fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, kids’ books; debuts, classics and collections of an author’s best. Here is my lucky 13 of the best books I read: The Night Visitors, Jenn Ashworth & Richard V….
March/April 2019 Reads
Hello, Spring! There’s been a heatwave in Scotland, and sunny days mean sitting out in Mama Logan’s garden with a flat white or a G&T (depending on whether it’s before or after 5pm) and getting lost in a book. I read 35 books in March and April, and it was a great though unplanned mix of non-fiction, novellas and crime fiction. Here are the top ten: Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah – WOW. Just wow. This book is a punch…
January/February 2019 Reads
Hello, 2019! I hit the ground running with books, books books (and how’s my own book going? The novel I’m meant to be writing? Uh… let’s not talk about that). I hit the ground running with my reading this year, and have finished 48 books so far. Although, to be fair, this includes 7 Point Horror books I read for the teen horror podcast I co-host, Teenage Scream. So far this year I’ve mostly been reading fiction, though I did…