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Little Lindford Library

For my birthday last year, my husband Andy gifted me a 'little library.' Along with my 14 year old son Benji, they spent time working on it from repurposed materials and although it arrived just a little late, last week we had our official…
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Friendship, Reading & WhatsApp

This blog post is dedicated to wonderful friend & reader Réne Petersen Back in 2019, I wrote on this blog about a good friend who had just finished reading me a book in chapter instalments on WhatsApp. Fast forward five years, and…

Books & Teenagers

I recently came across a picture that my eldest daughter drew when she was about 7 (she's now 17) that I found on an old blog. She drew it unprompted, just because she felt like it and somehow inherently understood at that tender age the importance…
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Favourite Five Books of 2023

I have barely managed to make a dent to my TBR pile this year. I keep getting waylaid by one book or another. Which, to be fair, is absolutely fine. So here's my top five reads of the year, in no particular order. How about you? I'd love to…
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Top Five Books of 2022

In no particular oder, here are my top five reads from this past year, books that have stayed with me and I know will do for some time. I have three fiction here, one non-fiction and a travelogue. I'm not normally into anything vaguely…
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How to Grow a Library

A couple of years after moving with my family to Nairobi (where we lived between 2013 and 2017), I started thinking about the fact that the school my children attended didn't have a library and I felt unhappy about this. A reading culture in…
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A Year Of Reading Outside My Ethnicity - Results + Reflections

Towards the end of 2020, I decided to spend the following year reading outside my ethnic group. If you'd like to see my original blog post and the intention I set, click here. The vast majority of books published globally are written by authors…
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An Icelandic Flood of Books

It was only a couple of years ago that I first heard about Iceland's Christmas tradition of Jólabókaflóð, roughly translated to 'Christmas Book Flood.' On Christmas Eve each year, Icelanders cosy up in front of the fire, drink…

Books & Memories: How a book is not just about the story but where it's read

I started thinking about the title of this blog recently when I was looking through my bookshelf and pulling books out and I realised something: as I held the book in my hand, not only was I reading the title of the book and the author but…
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The Healing Power of Story

I am nocturnally challenged. Many years ago, upon sharing this information with someone I met, he looked me in the eye and said 'Get your beloved to read to you.' I wasn't sure what my beloved would think of that, but I asked him, and he did.…