Best books of January 2019

January Reading Roundup

Better late than never! Here’s my reading roundup for January. It was a month in which I did a lot of travelling, driving from Greece to Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and now Croatia (via Romania again and a brief stop in…

Bottled Air by Caleb Klaces

I read this book twice in quick succession. It’s only a short collection, 70 pages of generously-spaced poems and a few pages of notes, so it didn’t take long. Interestingly, the two readings were very different. The first time, I…

“Crow” by Ted Hughes

I rarely read poetry, but I enjoyed this strange little book by Ted Hughes. It’s full of dark imagery, violence and unexpected humour. The poems read like myths of the origins of the world, except that at the middle of…

“T.S. Eliot” by Peter Ackroyd

I hardly ever read poetry, but for some reason T.S. Eliot’s poetry speaks to me. Perhaps it’s because, like Eliot, I used to work at a bank in the City of London, and the feeling of his poems is the…

Wislawa Szymborska

Just discovered the work of Wislawa Szymborska through a poem reprinted in an old edition of New Internationalist from last year. It was called Psalm and I thought it was a beautiful and humorous poem, perfectly illustrating the absurdity of…