This year, Fiction Uncovered have been inviting various people to act as Guest Editor of the site, each posting four opinion pieces over the course of a month. So far, the Guest Editors have been my fellow book blogger Simon Savidge; my fellow Desmond Elliott shadow juror Kaite Welsh; and the journalist Anita Sethi. I’m excited to announce that this month, it’s my turn.
My brief for the four columns was fairly open, apart from that they should have a British focus (which I’ve mostly stuck to, with a tiny bit of fudging). I won’t reveal exactly what my pieces are about just yet, but I will say that I’ve aimed to cover my main reading interests in them. I’ve also created a page on the blog where I will linking to the columns as they appear.
The first column is up now. It’s called ‘Uncovering the Reader‘, and is about how we change as readers – how, sometimes, you don’t appreciate a book unless you read it at the right time. I use my own experience as an example, talking about some of the ‘milestone’ books where I think I changed as a reader.
Further reading
If you’re interested, here are some links to where I’ve written more about the books mentioned in the column:
- The Prestige by Christopher Priest (and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Clute and John Grant)
- Gold by Dan Rhodes [link via the Internet Archive]
- Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway
- Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
- Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
10th August 2014 at 8:58 am
Congratulations David. I shall head off and read forthwith.
10th August 2014 at 3:58 pm
I tried to leave a comment there – but it didn’t work! We have had a very similar reading journey – I came into literary fiction from the SF&F world too, and I have similar thoughts about The Prestige and Gold too, Gold being one of the first books I mentioned on my blog. I wasn’t so entranced with Hawthorn & Child, although I recognised the writing as good.