H is for Hawk – Helen Macdonald

H is for Hawk – Helen Macdonald
Jonathan Cape, 2014

I don’t know where to start with Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. I loved it and urge everyone to read it. It’s a book that moved me, it’s a book I admire for the absolutely wonderful writing, it’s a book that I believe is fully deserved of all its awards success (it won the Samuel Johnson prize, won Costa’s Biography award and later the Costa Book of the Year) and the hype it’s received on blogs and in the press.

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Reading Resolutions 2015

Happy New Year! Like last year, I thought I’d share my reading resolutions for the year ahead. If you’ve got any resolutions of your own, please feel free to share them in the comments below – I love hearing about other people’s goals.

A Year in Books: 2014

I feel like I’ve been putting this post together for some time because I’ve been finding it very difficult to decide on my favourite books I’ve read this year. 2014 has been a good reading year for me. Part of this, I think, is still the feeling of freedom I have being away from school/university reading lists. The other reason is that I started blogging, and I’ve never been exposed to as many brilliant books as I have now. I touched on this in my How I Choose Books post, but it is reading reviews on book blogs and getting recommendations from you in the comments that means I rarely read a book I don’t enjoy in some way anymore. Which makes putting a list like this together very difficult! But it’s certainly a good position to be in.

Reading Resolutions 2014: How Did I Do?

2014 has been a good reading year for me: I’ve read books I’ve loved and discovered new favourite authors, I’ve had free reign over what I’ve been reading, and I’ve read great books I might never have known of thanks to lots of different book blogs.

I started 2014 with 2 Reading Resolutions:

1. Read well.
2. Move out of my reading comfort zone.

You can read my original post for more detail about each resolution and why I chose it.

Blogging for One Year!

It’s a year ago today that I nervously pressed ‘publish’ on the book review that I’d been endlessly rereading and editing for the blog that I’d registered a few months previously.

I’d been making promises to myself that I’d start a blog for, literally, years. But there was always a reason why I didn’t: university was taking up all of my time, my studies were more important, I was already contributing to an online magazine with book reviews. While these were genuine reasons, looking back, I realise I was nervous. It’s a scary thing putting your thoughts and opinions out there for other people to read.

Rereading Books – Part 2

I’ve been a bit absent on the blog since my last post, but I spent a lovely week or so visiting family. It was great to spend time away from the internet and computers, and instead enjoy spending lots of time outdoors and catching up with family.

I didn’t even manage to get that much reading done. I started and finished Amy Sackville’s Orkney which is beautifully written, and I started Robert Galbraith’s The Cuckoo’s Calling which I just finished yesterday and I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series. I’ve got a couple of reviews of books I finished before I was away to publish, but you can expect my thoughts on Orkney and The Cuckoo’s Calling in the not too distant future I hope.

Anyway, here’s part 2 of my Rereading Books post I published earlier! If you missed part 1, you can read that here.

Rereading Books – Part 1

I rarely reread books. I often feel that there are so many classics I haven’t read, so many authors’ works that I haven’t explored yet, so many exciting books being published that I always have something new to read – and not enough time to read it all! So if I reread a book, it’s often got something special that makes me return to it.

With this in mind, I thought I’d go through my bookshelves, pick out the books that I’ve reread and tell you a bit about each one. I found that there were more books than I thought, so I’ve split them into two posts – part 2 will follow shortly!

How I Choose Books

Recently I’ve been thinking about how I choose books and why I choose them.

Since I discovered this part of the Internet where like-minded people talk about books and I started blogging myself, the majority of my TBR list has been filled with the books talked about by bloggers and Booktubers. After reading reviews or watching videos, I find myself adding to the Word document that is my TBR, and it’s continually increasing.

#thisbook | Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

I recently read about the Baileys Prize project called #thisbook on A Little Blog of Books. The idea is to nominate a book written by a woman that has had the most impact on you and vote for it by using the hashtag on Twitter. You can find out more about the project here and see the books chosen by celebrities such as Jennifer Saunders, Caitlin Moran, and Dawn O’Porter to name a few.

With this in mind, I thought I’d share with you the book that has had the most impact on me: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.