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Oct 15, 20221 min read
1021. Richard Osman - The Bullet That Missed
Number three in the Thursday Murder Club series. I don’t like these at all, and this was certainly the worst; poorly and predictably...
Apr 9, 20221 min read
965. Richard Osman - The Man Who Died Twice
I didn’t enjoy the first of these, I think called ‘The Thursday Murder Club’. But that is because I didn’t understand the genre. This is...
Feb 16, 20221 min read
947. Adam O'Riordan - The Falling Thread
Pleased that the local library is open again post lockdown; I am probably borrowing too many books, and the choices there are quite...
May 17, 20211 min read
860. Deborah Orr - Motherwell
Very good. Quite a difficult book about her childhood in Motherwell, written by a successful and now I think sadly dead journalist in her...
Apr 17, 20211 min read
856. Maggie O'Farrell - Hamnet
I enjoyed this, particularly the last quarter after the boy’s death, but struggled with the early chapters where there were (for me) too...
Jan 21, 20211 min read
843. Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club
Good, and very different, despite feeling slightly negative about the author as a clever dick TV quiz show presenter. Set in a retirement...
Jul 11, 20201 min read
798. Delia Owens - Where The Crawdads Sing
A thank you present for Paddy from Cristina next door, whose novel Paddy ‘proof read’ to anglicise the prose. (Cristina is Italian but...
Feb 3, 20201 min read
747. George Orwell - Coming Up For Air
This was on the radio and bits of it were set quite locally in Binfield, so I thought I would give it a go. Bits I liked, for instance...
Jan 22, 20201 min read
745. Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
This is a wonderful, but still (at 3rd or 4th reading) difficult book. Is it (just) 4 symbolic characters at the end of the 2nd world war...
Feb 15, 20191 min read
659. Michael Ondaatje - Warlight
I struggled with the first half of this book which seemed almost Dickensian in its slow development. 2 kids are abandoned by their...
Jan 18, 20181 min read
567. Edna O'Brien - The Country Girls
Not sure that I have ever read any Edna O’Brien before, if so a long time ago. Although set in rural, agricultural Ireland in (I am...
Nov 16, 20171 min read
551. Tim O'Brien - In The Lake Of The Woods
Bought this years ago, for obvious reasons and have never managed to read it. It is actually very good, about a couple who both disappear...
Apr 23, 20161 min read
394. Keith Oatley - The Case Of Emily V
Another one from the attic; I have no memory of having read this before. It is quite a clever novel, written by an academic psychologist,...
Mar 31, 20161 min read
388. P. J. O'Rourke - Holidays In Hell
Didn’t enjoy this at all; very dated and the humour seemed to me to be 2nd rate Clive James. Not entirely sure why I read it; except that...
Dec 5, 20151 min read
359. Karl Ove Knausgaard - A Death In The Family
I hated this at first; to say that Zola is prolix is unjust in the context of Knausgaard. The first 200 pages seemed to be a tedious...
Oct 5, 20131 min read
151. Cynthia Ozick - Foreign Bodies
A quick pre-holiday read from the library. Not particularly good — a Jewish post WW2 variant on Henry James themes. I think you could say...
Sep 30, 20131 min read
149. George Orwell - Homage To Catalonia
Thought I would read this in view of our impending trip to Barcelona. It is very flat and factual; you get no real idea why he went there...
Nov 22, 20121 min read
59. Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
Not sure if I have read this before. It is very good, quite difficult but at the same time oddly easy to read (and quiet short). It is...
May 12, 20121 min read
10. James Oswald - Natural Causes
Got this as a Kindle book for nothing (needed a break from no.11 below). A detective story with a very poorly characterised cop, which...