The Book Lover’s Bucket List: A Tour of Great British Literature by Caroline Taggart (Review)

The Book Lover’s Bucket List: A Tour of Great British Literature by Caroline Taggart

Blurb

Exploring the gardens, monuments, museums, and churches with walks both urban and rural, from the Brontë parsonage in Haworth to Zadie Smith’s North London and Shakespeare’s Stratford, The Book Lover’s Bucket List takes you through some 100 wonderfully described literary sites and landscapes, complete with colour destination photographs and illustrations from the British Library collections.

Start with Chaucer, Dickens, and Larkin in Westminster Abbey. Spend an afternoon at Colliers Wood Nature Reserve in Nottinghamshire and take in the lake D. H. Lawrence described as “all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow.” Venture south to Cornwall and work your way up to the Scottish Highlands, taking detours to Northern Ireland in the west and Norfolk in the east.

There are gardens, monuments, museums, churches, and a surprising quantity of stained glass. There are walks both urban and rural, where you can explore real landscapes or imaginary haberdasher’s shops. There‘s the club where Buck’s Fizz was invented and a pub where you can eat Sherlock’s Steak & Ale Pie. And there’s a railway station where you can stroke the muzzle of one of the world’s most famous and endearing bears.

Wherever you are in the United Kingdom, you’re never far from something associated with a good book.

Review

My best friend bought this book for me and I have been dipping in and reading a few pages a day ever since. I have also been making a big list of the places I want to visit as well which has been worrying my husband.

This book is divided up into sections for the different parts of Great Britain and each section has places of importance to different authors. The book tells you about the place and its history and what it is like now and whether you can visit it or not. There are also very handy websites listed for the places so you can investigate for yourself about a property.

There are so many authors from Great Britain mentioned in this book and the places that meant something to them, whether it be where they wrote their great works or places mentioned in their works, or like Lyme Park where a famous adaptation of the book was filmed. Yes, the wet shirt of Mr Darcy was even mentioned in this book.

Taggart’s writing is informative and funny and regularly made me laugh. There were also extra bits and pieces added about the authors and the books which were added to the different sections that gave extra information and extra places to visit.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I am really looking forward to visiting some of the places. I give this book 4 out of 5 Dragons.

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About the author

Caroline Taggart worked in publishing as an editor of popular non-fiction for 30 years before being asked by Michael O’Mara Books to write I USED TO KNOW THAT, which became a Sunday Times bestseller. Following that she co-wrote MY GRAMMAR AND I (OR SHOULD THAT BE ‘ME’?) As a result of these books and HER LADYSHIP’S GUIDE TO THE QUEEN’S ENGLISH, published by Batsford, she has appeared frequently on BBC Breakfast and on national and regional radio, talking about language, grammar and Pythagoras’s theorem. Her record is 16 radio interviews in one day on the subject of exclamation marks.