At the end of my last Arts Update (August 2020), I was part way through reading Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and about to start David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue. I would highly recommend both of these novels, but especially Hamnet. Set in seventeenth-century Warwickshire (England), Hamnet is a beautifully written fictionalisation of the ups and downs of William Shakespeare’s family and particularly … Read More
Here I am in Lock-down again and who knows how long for…. I obviously can’t get out to schools, as I like to do, but it does give me plenty of time to read, read, read….. And I have taken advantage of this 🙂 Reading Around The World This time around, I have read – and continue to read – … Read More
It seems like a long time since I reported on books that I have read / movies and plays I have seen recently, so the following is a report on the reading and viewing that I did over Levels 4, 3 and 2. Viewing? Almost nothing – no plays (apart from some excellent productions on line, including an outstanding version … Read More
BOOKS READ I spent the holiday period (December and January) perusing everyone’s ‘best of 2019’ lists (especially in the Guardian, the New York Times and the NZ Listener) and reading the novels that ‘crossed over’ many of these lists. In all, I read 13 novels in this period. My favourites, by far, were all by American writers and two of … Read More
I spent most of October reading the six short-listed novels for the 2019 Man Booker Prize: ‘The Testaments’ (Margaret Atwood); ‘Ducks, Newburyport’ (Lucy Ellmann); ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ (Bernadine Evaristo); ‘An Orchestra of Minorities’ (Chigozie Obioma); ‘Quichotte’ ( Salman Rushdie); ‘10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World’ (Elif Shafak). I commented on some of these in my last book blog, … Read More
Based on a belief that effective teachers of reading and writing should be interested in the art of reading and writing, I want to share Comments on The Arts with teachers on the books that I read, the movies that I watch and the theatre I attend. I hope to maybe interest you in books, films and plays that have … Read More