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Dec 29, 20191 min read
739. Siobhan Dowd - A Swift Pure Cry
Bought another one, as I finished 738 before being ready to sleep. This one is actually even better – about a 15 year old girl in Cork...
Dec 26, 20191 min read
738. Siobhan Dowd - Bog Child
Heard this on Radio 4 a few weeks ago and enjoyed it enough to read. It is very good; a coming of age novel about an 18 year old boy who...
Nov 7, 20191 min read
727. Patti Davis - Bondage
The author is apparently the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. It is actually quite a good exploration of a fairly taboo sexual topic...
Apr 30, 20191 min read
679. Emily Dean - Everybody Died, So I Got A Dog
A library book of Paddy’s; I can’t say I enjoyed this, although maybe unfairly. I found Emily Dean insufferably girly, trendy within a...
Mar 26, 20191 min read
670. Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
This was an S&P purchase from Lymington market back in May 1979 and neither of us had ever read it. So that is 40 years of life on...
Feb 22, 20191 min read
661. Daphne Du Maurier - Rebecca
This was very good; neither Paddy nor I had read it before, but it is a rattlingly good plot with bits of Jane Eyre influence. A gauche...
Jan 5, 20191 min read
647. Fydor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
This is a huge and very challenging book. The basic plot is relatively simple – three brothers with an unpleasant and dissolute father,...
Nov 24, 20181 min read
641. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime And Punishment
I have never read this before, although our old paperback edition was bought 41 years ago. So better late than never. I didn’t enjoy The...
Feb 4, 20181 min read
570. Charles Dickens - A Child's History Of England
I thought I would read some Dickens, partly because Susan Hill (568) likes him, and chose this as I don’t like the novels. Dickens does...
Nov 11, 20171 min read
549. Helen Dunmore - Zennor In Darkness
I loved this; she said she likes to write about people on the periphery of major events so here we have a WW1 novel set in Zennor, just...
Nov 4, 20171 min read
547. Helen Dunmore - Burning Bright
I thought this was very good. A thriller, gay female love story/ romance. A young girl Nadine is moved into a Bristol flat by her...
May 8, 20171 min read
486. Monty Don - Nigel: My Family & Other Dogs
One of Paddy’s – didn’t do a lot for me, although he did make points about pets and their deaths (pets generally don’t live as long as...
Apr 15, 20171 min read
480. Sabine Durrant - Lie With Me
Rivals 470 for book of the year. An unreliable, pompous and unpleasant narrator believes he has conned a group of friends into funding a...
Jun 7, 20161 min read
408. Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
I always try to take one big, difficult book on holiday, and am not a fan of Dickens, but persevere. Fairly typical of what I dislike...
Nov 12, 20151 min read
354. Lawrence Durrell - Clea
There is less plot really in this one: Darley returns to Alexandria, gives the girl to her father Nessim and becomes Clea’s lover....
Nov 9, 20151 min read
353. Lawrence Durrell - Mountolive
Meant to read a Zola next, but got a bit hooked by no.352. This is much more of a stand- alone novel, centering mainly on Mountolive, a...
Nov 7, 20151 min read
352. Lawrence Durrell - Balthazar
Book 2 of the Alexandria quartet, which I am beginning to really enjoy. Balthazar overwrites Justine, correcting a lot of misassumptions...
Oct 30, 20151 min read
349. Lawrence Durrell - Justine
My Dad had the whole quartet, so another purloined book. The is the first, and although they are beautifully written, the plot is spare...
May 25, 20151 min read
305. Lionel Davidson - Kolymsky Heights
Despite the endorsement by Philip Pullman (who I thought may have written the first chapters), this was complete rubbish. Not much more...
May 3, 20151 min read
300. Sarah Dunant - Blood And Beauty
This is a fictionalised account of the Borgias. The writing is poor; the characters very stereotyped and lacking in character. Reads...