RECOMMENDATIONS | CLASSICS BY AND ABOUT WOMEN

Penguin have recently released the Sisterhood collection - six beautiful editions of classic novels, all written by and about women. I was lucky enough to be gifted a copy of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and it's inspired me to put together a post honouring three of my favourite women writers of classic literature.

Each of these women gets a bit of a raw deal by the 'literary canon' and gets lumped into writing straight romance (by people who think romance is bad) when their work has so much more to offer. So I wanted to make the case for each of them, and hopefully inspire you to check them out if you haven't! 

BOOK REVIEW | THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS BY PAT BARKER

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker - Published August 2018 by Penguin - ⋆⋆⋆

BOOK REVIEW | GHOST WALL BY SARAH MOSS

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss - Published September 2018 by Granta - ⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆

DO YOUR BOOKS SPARK JOY?

Mari Kondo has been causing quite a stir among the book community. As I mentioned in my recent Instagram post this isn't because she explicitly said anything bad, but because the internet loves demonising, drama, and self-righteousness. If you've missed this, essentially the KonMari philosophy is all about really thinking about what you want and need in your life, and making a conscious decision to only buy and keep objects that are explicitly necessary, or spark a certain joyful feeling in you.

FEBRUARY GOALS | RAISING MY BLOGGING GAME

Oh my god the first month of 2019 is already over! January was a weird month because on the one hand I did a lot of really lovely things, but on the other some pretty horrible stuff happened. So it was a bit of a mixed bag. One of my personal goals was to stop being a crappy friend and always finding excuses not to see the people I love, and in January I made the effort to go see almost everyone I'd been flaking on, and was so proud of myself and delighted to catch up with some of my favourite people. 

I'm hoping to hold myself more accountable to my goals this year. I'm that person that will set huge elaborate idealised lists of things I want to do in a new year, only to flake on them by April, so I'm going to start tracking my goals on the blog, in order to hold myself accountable. So without further ado...

MY CURRENTLY READING PILE

As I mentioned in my 2019 Reading Resolutions, I'm taking the pressure off myself to read a certain amount this year, my only goal is to try and read every day. One side effect of this is hopefully buying fewer books and not spending so much money on things I just never get round to. As a way to track and control this I've split 2019 into quarters of three months each (very business-like I know), and will only buy a number of books I can reasonably expect to read within that time frame. If I get to the end of that stack with time to spare I can pick up something else, otherwise any more book-buying will have to wait until the next quarter.

So I thought I'd share my reading pile for 'Q1' (how corporate) and go through the bits that I'm hoping to finish by the end of March.