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By Tanya, on January 27th 2012 
This is a wonderful book. It’s a sad thing, though inevitable, I suppose, amidst the scrutinised bodies of Posh and Kate and Cheryl, that, even in the arts pages, the most interesting thing about Candia McWilliam is supposed to be that she used to be beautiful and isn’t any more. That’s almost certainly the most boring thing about this most unboring of women. Slightly more interesting are the factors which brought this transformation about (other than the obvious ones of time, common sense and not being terrified by Vogue editors); alcoholism and a rare condition called blepharospasm, which led [...]
Continue reading Review: What to Look for in Winter by Candia McWilliam
By Tanya, on November 1st 2011 
It’s taken me eight months to finish reading this book. Not because it’s at all dull: the subject matter is utterly fascinating and Naomi Klein’s writing invariably lucid, concise and civilised. So why has it lingered at the bottom of the currently-being-read stack for so long?
The conscious reason is because I wanted to pay the book the respect which it deserves; to read it carefully, thoughtfully, taking notes and pondering its revelations. But there’s more to it than that. What The Shock Doctrine did for me (to me?) was, once and for all, to demolish those ideas [...]
Continue reading Review: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
By Tanya, on October 10th 2011 
This is a quietly extraordinary little book. One of the most extraordinary things about it, for me, is the quite unexpected pride it inspires in me at being both English and a lawyer (albeit of the dormant variety). And, most of all, it makes me proud of having the signature of the late Sir Thomas Bingham, Tom Bingham as he is here, at the foot of my practising certificate.
It begins conventionally enough, with a theoretical and historical survey of the concept of the rule of law, fluent and fascinating, but nothing likely to frighten the horses. But then [...]
Continue reading Review: The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham
By Tanya, on August 23rd 2011 
For as long as I’ve been listening to music by myself, I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan. As a teenager, when you need a label or two to cover up the dodgy bits, I was ‘the girl who likes Bob Dylan’. Sharply parkaed mods (1980, second time mods) would come up to me at parties and ask, ‘How can you listen to that shite?’. The question was, I gathered, rhetorical. Others, older boys with ringletted manes and afghan coats, would tell me earnestly about bootleg tapes they’d scored from a guy in the business, nodding a lot, in the [...]
Continue reading Review: The Ballad of Bob Dylan
By Tanya, on August 22nd 2011 
This has been on one of my many waiting-to-be-read shelves for a few months, but a remark in the Guardian that the forthcoming film trailer gives away the ending encouraged me to promote it to this week’s Saturday night waiting for the teenagers/Sunday afternoon with a couple of glasses vacancy.
The cover, as you can probably tell, is plastered with extravagant praise with two fly leaves similarly doused. “A wonderful, wonderful book”, “Totally brilliant”, “Destined to be a modern classic”. A modern classic? Really? Along with Midnight’s Children , East of Eden and The Road? To [...]
Continue reading Review: One Day by David Nicholls
By Tanya, on August 19th 2011 
I’ve got a lot of time for Marcus Brigstocke. On a CDD (comedian-donation-duration) scale, where Mark Steel merits a long weekend and Jim Davidson the minimum number of milliseconds required to activate an off switch, Marcus gets at least a leisurely Sunday lunch, probably followed by an afternoon’s croquet and winding-up with the leftovers enjoyed as a midnight feast. Not only was Giles Wemmbley-Hogg tea-down-the-nostrils funny, but on his TV show a couple of years ago he sacrificed the opportunity of flirting with some airheady celebrity in favour of interviewing Harriet Lamb of the Fairtrade Foundation. So, on the [...]
Continue reading Review: God Collar by Marcus Brigstocke
By Tanya, on June 9th 2011
 Last weekend I ventured across the border to the Flat Lake Festival, a slightly anarchic literary and arts shindig held at Hilton Park near Clones in County Monaghan. The headlining act, if that’s the right phrase, was John Banville, so in preparation I read The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable in quick succession beforehand. Slightly too quick, in retrospect, as I now have the two protagonists, and in particular their Irish families and ancestral homes, slightly amalgamated in my mind. Oh well. I suppose it’s only an accelerated version of what inevitably happens [...] Continue reading Not really flat at all…
By Tanya, on May 18th 2011 
I haven’t done this for a long time, so here are some pretty pictures and random observations about books I’ve read since the last post.
newish novels
Four of these I really enjoyed: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, much hyped, and perhaps not that good but certainly better than some of the snobbish broadsheet Christmas round-ups suggested. I read the withdrawn uncorrected edition (the only glaring error being ‘Cypress’ for ‘Cyprus’) so will read the other sometime and see whether it leaves me with any significantly different impressions. [...]
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By Tanya, on March 12th 2011 
My latest novel, Summer 17, is now available from Amazon on Kindle format. I originally started writing it around thirteen years ago, after finishing Trotter’s Bottom, the third in the Ophelia O. trilogy. Then I went back to work as a solicitor, went to Italy, taught English, wrote Survival Guide for Chess Parents and Girotondo, came to Ireland, set up Crystal Bard Books and generally forgot about it until a couple of months ago when M discovered the draft on an old computer. So, it’s been revised, rewritten and brought to [...]
Continue reading Tanya’s new book
By Tanya, on February 25th 2011 
This week I have been reading Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s a great book, a novel set in Nigeria, and more specifically Biafra, across the decade of the 1960s, before, during and briefly after the civil war. It’s wide in scope and wise in detail, beautifully written, finely observed, humane and invigorating; the kind of book that changes the way you view great chunks of reality. The only really perplexing question is to do with where it came from. I bought it for ten pence or so last year in one [...]
Continue reading Real Books
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