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Shirley Hazzard Mary Wesley Tracy Chevalier Anne Tyler Irene Nemirovsky

Although a lot of my favourite books are written in the first person, I find it incredibly hard to use in my writing. I wrote the first draft of my third novel in the first person, to see if I could (what was the phrase - stretching my writing muscles) but it didn't really work. I'm now about...

I loved that book as a child and I haven't thought about it in years. I can still remember sitting in class at school (third year primary) reading it and being just totally absorbed. Thank you for reminding me, but I had no idea what it was called or who wrote it.

Ernest Hemingway - the greatest!

That's exactly what it means - my mum uses it all the time. One of my favourite words is 'transient.' And I love the way Americans say 'squirrel,' which kind of sounds like squirrrrrl but is impossible to say unless you've been brought up to it.

I wish. I went to university almost 20 years ago, and the dissertation is now in a box gathering dust and mould in my mother's loft. I doubt he'd be that interested in it :)

I agree with you on both counts - The Aussies really respect their old soldiers, and there has been a revival in interest in their experiences recently amongst young people which is brilliant. The British have a bit of a tradition of ignoring old soldiers - like you say, Remembrance Day is more...

Good suggestion - A Soldier's Pay is quite accessible too.

I've had a quick skim through this right from the beginning - am I really the only person out there whose favourite author is Ernest Hemingway? Any writer who can interest me in bull-fighting and lion hunting has got to be a genius. And then there's the war stories - A Farewell to Arms, For...

No one's mentioned the book 'Shame', which I loved (though I lent it to someone years ago and haven't seen it since - but that's a story for another thread). I wrote my university dissertation on Midnights Children and Shame, and while I think Midnight's Children stands in a class completely...

I can't write with music, but I don't mind background noise of other people doing stuff. Ideally though, I'd be on a mountainside in absolute solitude, with a wonderful view to inspire me!

I buy most of my books second hand, so I'm not too fussy about the way they look. But I do get sentimentally attached to them. I lent a couple of books to a (sort of) friend a few years back (a new copy of God of Small Things, which was a present, and an ancient and much loved copy of Frost in...

That's about the same for me! Every now and then I think about organising them, then get distracted by a book I might not have picked up for a while, and that's about as far as it ever gets!

Me too. I've tried it twice now. I keep thinking if it won the Booker there must be something I'm missing, but somehow it just failed to keep me interested beyond the first 20 pages or so. I don't think I'll bother with it again though. Life's too short and there are too many other books that...

Hi, I just joined today, having recently discovered that I like online forums and the chance to spend (waste?) time swapping ideas about books. I read all sorts of stuff, though I tend to steer clear of "genre" books. I'm not really into crime or horror or fantasy, although I have read...