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Alan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Alan Gibbs’s Followers (4)
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405 books
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519 books
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832 books
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480 books
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63 friends
458 books
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1,099 books
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Alan Gibbs
Goodreads Author
Member Since
November 2014
More books by Alan Gibbs…
Alan’s Recent Updates
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"Peter Ackroyd, in his ground-breaking biography of Charles Dickens, says that Nicholas Nickleby is "perhaps the funniest novel in the English language". The complete title of the novel is perhaps a bit of a mouthful,
"The Life and Adventures of Nichol" Read more of this review » |
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"Please, when I die, just place a copy of this book on my grave. That’s all I ask—thank you.
The story is a brilliant meditation on how we treat history—how we glorify certain eras and idolize their people, obsessing over times we never lived through, " Read more of this review » |
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Maggie’s update
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The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.
Losing a child is every parents’ most visceral fear. I came across, again and again, in various biographies of Shakespeare, a lofty and dismissive attitude to Hamnet’s death. He got perhaps two or three entries in the index, and his death was usually wrapped up in statistics about child mortality in the 16th century, as if the implication was that his death was of no particular significance, that it was run-of-the-mill. It made me furious every time I read this! I just refuse to believe that at any point in history, any where in the world, the loss of a child is anything less than catastrophic
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The husband, standing straight as a reed now, arms folded, lips pressed together, shakes his head. “What did she say?” “That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.”
I wanted to give readers a new perspective on Shakespeare’s marriage, to suggest that William and Agnes loved each other, that theirs was a partnership. This idea expressed in this excerpt is drawn from my conjecture about how Shakespeare might have been seen in rural Warwickshire when he was young. I think he must have stuck out a mile. We know now what was inside him, what his imagination and intellect were capable of, but people then might have considered him a bit odd, a bit of a misfit. I liked the idea that maybe Agnes was the only person who saw his potential or recognized his
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