It’s the end of January, and time to look back on the first month’s blogging of 2011. This is what was on my blog:
Book of the Month
Sometimes a book takes you by surprise, and that’s what happened this month. The best book I read in January was one about which I knew nothing and read purely on impulse: Linda Grant’s novel of the baby boomers, We Had It So Good.
Reviews
This month, I published full-length reviews of:
- The launch stories from Shortfire Press, by Nadifa Mohamed, Laura Dockrill, and Elizabeth Jenner
- Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor
- We Had It So Good by Linda Grant
- Volume 3 of the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology
- Caribou Island by David Vann
- and a film: 127 Hours.
I also blogged shorter write-ups of William Coles’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Simon Lelic’s The Facility, and Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost…
…and began an ongoing project to blog Volume I of The Oxford Library of Classic English Short Stories.
Features
- My best of 2010, on Strange Horizons.
- Thoughts on the category winners of the Costa Book Awards.
- My list of notable books for January.
- How I found my way into reading literary fiction.
- How to find out the bestselling books in the week you were born.
- The return of The TV Book Club.
- January’s Firestation Book Swap.
- The book I hated at school.
- Assessing the sample chapters of the Waterstone’s 11.
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