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Looking back at July, it’s interesting to see some of the well known writers we lost over the years – many at the beginning of the month. By no means an exhaustive list:

1817 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

1826 Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible

1896 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1930 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

1932 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

1946 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

1961 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man & The Sea

1962 William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

1977 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

2022 Susie Steiner, Home Coming

2023 Milan Kundera, The Unbelievable Likeness of Being

2024 Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls

How many have you read? I’m not saying!

Some weeks back I highlighted a series of books (Quick Reads) from the Reading Agency for World Book Night 2025. Now, it’s not taken me all this time to read these last two, but they are certainly worth a look. Try your library first – they should have both of them.

First is Cathy Rentzenbrink’s Write It All Down or How to put you life on the page. If the thought is daunting, horrifying or seemingly impossible, this is a useful checklist. So before you rush ahead and run out of ideas by the age of 6, it’s certainly worth reading it cover to cover first. It will certainly clarify whether you really want to go down this road!

The second useful tome is Dr Alex George’s The Mind Manual. As he says this is a complete mental fitness toolkit and, therefore, you need to exam what each part is designed to do before you find your anxiety levels rising. So again, read through and see what it entails. Then, if you need to boost your mental fitness, work though the manual. George doesn’t paint a very rosey picture of himself at the start, so clearly there’s a lot of hope in here.