I keep reading this baseless crap about how boys won’t read stories about girls, so we should just stop writing and publishing them. It’s nonsense. Worse, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because how will boys read about girls if everyone’s been warned not to offer them those books? I recently wrote a round-up of 12 notable New […]
The latest booklovers’ chain-letter going around Facebook seems to be a challenge to list (without too much agonising) your ten most ‘influential’ books. Heavens. To stay in the spirit of the challenge I’ve tried to write this in one sitting, presumably missing a lot of worthy contenders, but hopefully capturing some kind of truth. And […]
Many of my mentors are fictional. Characters in novels whom I not only like but also want to be like. I really like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and I’d even enjoy being her for a bit, apart from the lack of modern plumbing, medicine and feminism. But I don’t find myself thinking ‘now, this […]