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Continue reading →: Book Review: Verity by Colleen Hoover
“The novel is so badly written I found it almost offensive to read” I had this book recommended to me as something I might like. How wrong that person was (you think you know someone eh?). The fact that some people (including the aforementioned recommender) liked this novel is the…
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Continue reading →: Book Review: Claudius the God by Robert Graves
Having taken, quite literally, decades to get around to read my copy of I Claudius, I took a mere handful of days to read this sequel. That’s how much I was impressed (or more accurately, turned) by Robert Graves’ first book. This book takes up where the first left off…
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Continue reading →: Book Review: Abolish the Monarchy by Graham Smith
For the purposes of transparency, I’ll state that I’ve been anti-monarchist for my entire adult life. It is with the death of Elizabeth that I became ardently anti-monarchist. I wish Smith’s book had been around much earlier, I would not have wasted time waiting to take up the cause; I…
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Continue reading →: Book Review: How to Be Your Own Therapist by Owen O’Kane
I’m not a great fan of ‘self-help’ books when it comes to medical or mental health. Often they fit in the same category of new-age books by self-styled gurus who spout, at best, pseudo-science and, at worst, complete bullshit. But this book caught my eye. Firstly, it is written by…
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Continue reading →: Book Review: Never Good with Horses by Simon Armitage
Having just attended a reading by Simon Armitage in Grasmere, I immediately bought the main book from which he was reading – Never Good with Horses. I’ve liked his poetry for a long while and, as an English teacher, I’ve been grateful for his work many a time. His poems…
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Continue reading →: An Audience with Simon Armitage, Ambleside
22nd August, Daffodil Hotel The UK’s Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage has, apparently, been giving readings hosted by Wordsworth, Grasmere for at least two decades and the occasions are always a sell-out. As the man himself said to the audience, “I think some of you have been coming to my readings…
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Continue reading →: Book Review: I, Claudius by Robert Graves
I, Claudius is another of those classic books that appears on every ‘Must Read’ list. Regular readers of my reviews might guess this would immediately make me suspicious regarding the quality. ‘Classics’ are very much a hit and miss affair. Initially, I was not much impressed. Almost the entire book…
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Continue reading →: Book Review: Notes from the North by Suji Kwock Kim
This collection of poems, solely focusing on life, and the people ‘existing’, in North Korea is, to say the least, dark and depressing. The poet has not pulled any punches with this her second collection. We get the bleak picture of life in the communist dictatorship. It is hard to…
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Continue reading →: Book Review: Histories of Nations edited by Peter Furtado
I’ll come straight to it: this book is utterly pointless. It’s a pity because it need not have been. The idea – of presenting a brief history of twenty-eight of the major nations of the world – was a good one. There is, of course, an immediate issue with deciding…
Hello, I’m Ken.
Welcome to Write Out Loud, my blog dedicated to all sorts of things to do with writing.
This page will be updated constantly every week with book reviews and writing-related stuff.
The blog is the baby sister of my personal blog kenthinksaloud where I write ‘Monday Murmurings’—insights into life and philosophy. Get a clever take on politics with ‘Wednesday Banker,’ and ‘Future Friday’ for the latest in psychology, environment, and tech.
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Write Out Loud (Reviews and Writing) 