Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

I don't have any particularly deep thoughts to share about How to Stop Time (and some might say I haven't had any deep thoughts about any of the books I've read and reviewed so far for this blog, but that is another thing altogether…), but the one thing I do have to say is that I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wanted a light, quick, easy, well written and engaging read. Our hero is Tom Hazard, a 41-year-old Englishman who is just about to start a new job as a history teacher at a London secondary school. The only trouble is that Tom Hazard isn’t his real name – well, not his full name, anyway –   he’s not 41 and he’s not really English. Because Tom is over 400 years old, comes from French aristocratic stock and suffers from a rare disease called anageria, which radically slows down the aging process. The idea of the disease is a lovely conceit because it allows Matt Haig to have Tom participate in the momentous events as well as the smal...

 One of the attractions of the Bargain Book Table is that it sometimes entices me to read authors I’ve never got around to reading, but who I feel I should have read. Edna O’Brien is one of those authors. When I saw one of her later novels, The Little Red Chairs on the bargain table sometime last year  I automatically picked it up, and after reading the blurb on the back, I was intrigued enough to decide it might be time to rectify my omission. Having finally got around to reading it, I’ve been struggling to get to the bottom of what I felt about this book until I remembered a conversation I had with my older brother many, many years ago (as in the 1980s years ago). We had rented One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on VHS from the local video store (ah remember VHS!). I’d seen the film before and read the book, but my brother hadn’t. At the end (oh god, that ending…) I remember asking my brother what he thought of it. After a pause he said that he thought it was a brilliant film, ...

I felt a little bad on Christmas Day 2019 when the husband opened his presents, which were inevitably mostly books, and he didn’t get one of the books he was expecting. The book was Me, the newly minted autobiography of Elton John. The trouble was, I didn’t know he wanted it, or I would have bought it. Note to husband, contrary to popular belief I am not psychic, not even after 30+ years together. The main reason I didn’t know he wanted it (apart from him not telling me…) is that he reads mostly science-based non-fiction so, much as he is an Elton John fan, it never occurred to me that he might want to read this autobiography. One upside was that come Christmas 2020 I had one sure fire hit for a present when the paperback came out, especially as it was updated with a new chapter to account for the weirdness of a COVID-centric year. Needless to say, he was delighted to receive the book, especially as he’d forgotten about it in the intervening year. Even more of a bonus was that he reall...