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May 5, 20231 min read
1063. R J Ellory - The Darkest Season
I like Ellory, but he seems to be obsessed with the murder of teenage girls (see no.1054). This approaches the same issue from a...
Mar 30, 20231 min read
1054. RJ Ellory - A Quiet Belief In Angel
I love this book, although the plot has its incoherences. A very lyrical bildungsroman, but peppered with a series of very gruesome...
Mar 8, 20231 min read
1050. R. J. Ellory - A Simple Act Of Violence
Have read this before and it is brilliant. Starts with a murder, and then looks for the next 100 or so pages like a police-procedural,...
Dec 11, 20221 min read
1035. Bernadine Evaristo - Girl, Women, Other
Have read this before, but tried to read it more seriously/critically, in view of the book group meeting later this week. Not really sure...
Oct 26, 20221 min read
1024. Samantha Ellis - Take Courage
Subtitled ‘Anne Brontë and the Art of Life’, this is very good. Effectively an impressionistic biography of the Brontë family (who all...
Jun 20, 20221 min read
991. R. J. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta
Last read this 10 years ago and it remains brilliant. A Cuban ex-Mafia killer tricks the FBI or CIA into listening to his whole life...
Feb 28, 20221 min read
951. RJ Ellory - The Darkest Season
I like Ricky Ellory, but this disappointed me. Felt very repetitive and structurally very similar to others; gruesome murder of women, a...
Jan 22, 20221 min read
937. Jim Eldridge - Murder At The Savoy
Never heard of the author; one of a series set in London during the blitz. Unclear why the central detective has to be an aristocrat...
Jan 9, 20221 min read
932. Martin Edwards - Mortmain Hall
Never heard of this guy, or read anything of his before. 1930’s upper class decadence and sexual depravity meets 1930’s intellectualised...
Mar 30, 20211 min read
853. George Eliot - Middlemarch
Remains, probably, my favourite book, but it is seriously long! (although lots of distractions over the last few weeks – cricket,...
Mar 5, 20211 min read
850. George Eliot - Silas Marner
Wanted a short book by George Eliot and there aren’t many, so went for this one. It is hard work – Marner is an opaque and rather...
Feb 26, 20211 min read
849. R. J. Ellory - City Of Lies
This could have been called 'Gangs of New York', but I think someone else got there first. A long and at times hard work book. The...
Dec 8, 20201 min read
832. R. J. Ellory - Three Bullets
I think he is quite patchy and this is not one of his best (which are very good). A fictionalisation of the Kennedy assassination in (I...
May 14, 20201 min read
776. George Eliot - The Mill On The Floss
I think George Eliot is my favourite 19th century novelist. This is brilliant. I first read it as an A level set text probably nearly 50...
Jan 6, 20201 min read
741. Bernadine Evaristo - Girl, Woman, Other
A library book of Paddy's – we think this may have shared the Booker Prize with the new Margret Atwood. Predominantly, it initially...
Dec 1, 20191 min read
732. Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
Never read this before and I thought it was really good. She writes clean, strong, prose and there were lots of bits of plot that are...
Sep 27, 20191 min read
716. George Eliot - Middlemarch
I think reading 714 in Malaga exercised my reading muscle and perhaps that was why I couldn’t be bothered with 715. I think, on the 3rd...
Jun 28, 20181 min read
608. R. J. Ellory - The Devil And The River
Ellory is possibly my 2nd favourite thriller writer, unlike Herron which has bits of the best of Dickens and Le Carre, Ellory is an...
Apr 27, 20181 min read
588. R. J. Ellory - A Quiet Belief In Angels
Have read this before and am not entirely sure what to make of it. A bildungsroman (is that what they are called?), about a boy brought...
Mar 25, 20181 min read
581. R. J. Ellory - A Simple Act Of Violence
I have read this before with little memory of it, but would say it is the best of 2018 so far. Really clever plotting, looks like a...