Category: Reviews

#TopTenTuesday Bookish Discoveries In 2019

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Top Ten Tuesday newTop Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post. Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists. Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is Bookish Discoveries In 2019. My list is a combination of changes in my reading and some new authors I discovered last year. Links from the book titles will take you to my review.

Restraint – Whether that’s not over-committing to blog tours, turning down new review requests or not requesting more titles from NetGalley than I can handle, 2019 was the year I tried to bring balance to my blogging and reading life. Let’s be honest, it’s a work in progress.

Memoirs – Some of my favourite reads last year were personal memoirs such as Where The Hornbeam Grows by Beth Lynch, In My Life by Alan Johnson and The Outrun by Amy Liptrot.

New Genres – Thanks to Pushkin Press, I discovered American noir through the work of Margaret Millar and her novel The Listening Walls.

Audiobooks – I listened to more audiobooks than in any previous year but that still amounted to only a handful. I’m not one of those people who can multitask and listen to a book while doing other things; I need to give them my full attention. However, I found it useful for consuming books I might have found challenging in a standard format, such as The Long Take by Robin Robertson, winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2019.

Reading Challenges – I was forced to come to the conclusion that I’m pretty bad at reading challenges. I documented some of the reasons in this blog post. I’m attempting to follow my own advice and sign up for less this year or set more realistic targets.

Blogging is hard work – Although I’m not driven by stats and I blog for fun, I was disappointed to see my blog received less views in 2019 than the previous year. However, I’m still massively grateful for every visit, comment or like. It proved to me that making your blog stand out from the crowd – if that’s important to you – requires perseverance and constant promotion and sharing of blog posts. And as for Instagram…Well, that’s even more work.

Finally, Four New To Me Authors:
Fiona Kidman, author of This Mortal Boy
Meg Keneally, author of Fled
Heather Cooper, author of Stealing Roses
James MacManus, author of Ike and Kay and The Woman With Wings

What bookish discoveries did you make last year?

#BookReview Artefacts And Other Stories by Rebecca Burns

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ArtefactsAbout the Book

That dandelion. A flash of stubborn yellow in a dark box of space. It had promised sunshine but had tasted sour.

Artefacts. A dandelion. A mayfly. A family, bereft. Items and mementos of a life, lived hard and with love, or long, empty, bitter.

In these sharply drawn and unflinching short stories, Rebecca Burns unpicks the connection between the lives we live and what we leave behind.

Format: ebook (154 pages)                         Publisher: Odyssey Books
Publication date: 30th September 2017 Genre: Short stories, literary fiction

Find Artefacts and Other Stories on Goodreads

Purchase links*

Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

My Review

All the stories in the book are well-crafted but, as is often the case with short story collections, some engaged me more than others.

For example, ‘On This Day’ is the unsettling story of a man’s response to the anniversary of past events. In the title story, ‘Artefacts’, a woman senses the emotions of others, even complete strangers. And in ‘The Bread Princess’, bonnets worn over the years by young women taking part in a local custom give insights into social changes.

I also really enjoyed ‘The Last Game – August 1914’ in which a match by the local cricket team, depleted by these who have already joined up, is full of allusions to war. So the cricket pitch becomes the ‘arena of conflict’, the captain swings his bat like a weapon, each man in the team knows his place and his role and, assessing the opposition, the father of one of the players remarks, “This should be over quickly.”

However, the standout story for me was ‘The Greatcoat’ in which a young man returning from the war has conflicting feelings about having to hand back the coat he was issued with. For him, it evokes memories of suffering and loss but also of comradeship and duty. In an example of one of the striking images scattered throughout the collection, he sees the coat lying across a chair in his bedroom. ‘One arm was thrown to the side and it dangled, empty, like a ghost. A dying coat.’

Artefacts and Other Stories is an intriguing collection exploring the feelings, memories and emotions associated with everyday objects. I received a review copy courtesy of the author and Odyssey Books.

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bekki-150x150About the Author

Rebecca Burns is a novelist and short story writer. Her two story collections, Catching the Barramundi (2012) and The Settling Earth (2014), were both longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the UK’s only award for short story collections. Her debut novel, The Bishop’s Girl, was published in 2016. She lives in the Midlands, UK, with her husband and young family. (Photo credit: author website)

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