Listening to an interview with one of my favourite authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, recently, I heard him say something fantastic:
What I want to emphasise is that for novelists … I think that your peak is likely to be somewhere in your mid 30s to your mid 40s. A few years after footballers!
But then the pressure came on …
You have to really go for it when you’re in your 30s, and you have to ignore older people who patronise you as though you’re some kind of little chick that’s about to hatch. …

To Facebook, or not to Facebook, that is the question that many people around the world have asked themselves recently. Personally, I love using Facebook to keep in touch with the large number of people I know in many different parts of the world, but that’s mostly because I’ve travelled a lot, lived overseas, and now teach people who return to their home countries, so it makes sense; someone who has most of their friends living within reach could quite easily convince me they didn’t see any use in it …

As I promised – a lot more for my benefit than for yours – I’m going to check in at the end of each month to see how my progress is going on my New Year’s resolutions. You know how it is, especially for me, a bit of external pressure knowing that someone out there might be wondering if I’m keeping up my promises or not really helps me to do it.
The great news is that so far, the progress I’m making on my resolutions is pretty excellent! Considering we’re …

It’s the end of January so it’s time to look back on the reading I’ve done this month – this year I’ve decided to pick out a book of the month each time. That’s partly to remind you all of the ongoing reading list I’m keeping, and partly to remind me about the great books I’ve read, since I have a bad habit of not remembering books too well unless I actively think back on them.
So, to sum up quickly, these are the 13 books that I read during January:

Spielby David …

You know I love travelling, but one continent I suspect I may never get to is Antarctica. It fascinates me, of course, but those cold temperatures are not as high on my list as many other places, and since I just finished a great novel set in Antarctica, I am doing a fairly good job of imagining it for myself anyway. That’s thanks to Robyn Mundy who wrote The Nature of Ice, and reminded me of another great novel about a modern Antarctic experience from one of all-time favourite writers, …