Jeff Lemire’s Essex County (Collected) Top Shelf Productions, 2010 Here’s what I scribbled in my notebook when I finished reading Tales From the Farm in 2008: The first in Jeff Lemire’s Essex County trilogy feels in some ways like the antithesis to [Craig Thompson’s] Blankets – a very slim volume, with
Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick (1971) Julie Andrews Edwards' The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (1974) Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) If I'd looked back to my childhood reading, I would have described myself as being much more comfortable with witches and dragons, enchantments and whangdoodles, than
Arguably the best novel of the trilogy, for having been nominated for Orange Prize in 1996 and having won the Booker that year, there was no question in my mind as to whether I would read on following Regeneration and The Eye in the Door. Despite my habit of resisting war
Penguin, 1993 So you know, from my thoughts on Regeneration, how much of a talking-to I had to give myself to keep reading Pat Barker's brilliant war novels. But as much as I might be a cowardly reader, I'm also a stubborn reader, so I made sure that
Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991) Come on, admit it: you've avoided reading this because it's a war novel. It's okay: you're not alone. And how can a book about the horrors of war compete, when reading time is limited and it would be so much more fun to re-read Miss Pettigrew
