Here I am with Mariella Frostrup, on whom I have the most enormous girl crush and have done now for about ten years. She is just SOOOO cool- talking a bit about chick lit. The book is nearly out! Very exciting. Haven’t been blogging much about reading because I am FINALLY reading Anna Karenenina. It is brill (apart from the bits about farming) and is taking a while. Also thoroughly enjoyed Sophie Hannah’s Lasting Damage, although even though it made perfect sense at the time, I couldn’t explain the end now, and Dan Rhodes’ fantastic new one, This is Life which I think is his funniest one ever.

Hope you’re enjoying some sunshine wherever you are! Spring is here in the South of France, which means the children are constantly covered in mud and bounce about a lot I approve of both of those things.

The Book Show

Awful thing, I haven’t been here for ages because when they changed the site layout I hated the photo and couldn’t bear typing whilst being looked down on by my big horse face. I know being vain about that kind of stuff is completely ridiculous. However having met lots of writers in the flesh after perusing their jacket photos, it is, let us be clear here, in NO WAY RARE :)

OOh, what’s been good? The great thing about kindle is that you can always see what you’ve been reading. My editor told me to read The Good Soldier which was really puzzling and upsetting and incredibly powerful. I never read introductions first, I hate spoilers, so it wasn’t till I got till the end and read the introduction that I realised it was actually meant to be puzzling and upsetting. Phew. I thought I just hadn’t got it. This is why I wasn’t a very good English Lit student.

Millions of people have also been telling me to read The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs and I was going to wait till I got back to London and nick my friend’s copy, but I cracked in the end and downloaded it for a trip to Barcelona, and yes, it really is that good. Hilariously funny, a very touching love story and very very very sharp on the vagaries of modern middle-class living. I couldn’t put it down and kept putting my head on my husband’s shouder and giving deep sighs of relief until he told me I wasn’t allowed to do that anymore whilst he was driving the car in case we had an accident.

It’s nearly time for the Costa awards, which are a brilliant competition, dedicated to books you would insist on pressing on someone else rather than some hi-faluting idea of boring art (my views on the Booker are here). I am utterly delighted that Maggie O’Farrell is finally being noticed for the wonderful novelist she is- The Hand That First Held Mine has won its fiction category. It’s a marvellous book, about childhood, though my favourite remains The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, which is startlingly brilliant.

There’s More! Click to read on…

… is a ridiculously late entry, actually. I thought  Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which is totally terrifying and quite amazing, would swing it- then last week I started Andre Agassi ‘s  Open.

There’s More! Click to read on…