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Dec 1, 20211 min read
919. Håkan Nesser - The Lonely Ones
Best novel I have read for a while. Beautifully constructed and written. The plot covers a 35 year period from the mid 1970’s to the...
Aug 22, 20211 min read
887. Ted Lewis - GBH
Never heard of the author (he wrote ‘Get Carter’ apparently) and worked on the animation of 'Yellow Submarine'. This is basically London...
Jun 14, 20211 min read
868. Patrick Gale - Take Nothing With You
Embarrassingly, I have read this before but had (have) no memory of this until I said to P. ‘If I was still on speaking terms with [a...
Jun 14, 20191 min read
689. DJ Taylor - Rock And Roll Is Life
A library book of Paddy’s. She liked it, I didn’t much, although one would have expected the opposite, given that I am more into rock and...
May 7, 20191 min read
680. Ian McEwan - Machines Like Me
This was a good, big and difficult book. The basic plot premise is that a man buys a humanoid type machine, I believe for £85k. He and...
Oct 1, 20181 min read
629. Kate Atkinson - Case Histories
If she is so good, better read another. This is no.1 in the series; 628 is the 4th and last to date. This is very good as well; begins...
Jul 27, 20181 min read
612. Meg Wolitzer - The Interestings
A library book via P. I thought, for most of this book, which is quite a hard work read, that ‘the interestings’ (5 or 6 student-y...
Mar 17, 20181 min read
578. Jake Arnott - Johnny Come Home
Grabbed another Jake Arnott as I finished 577 late evening and needed an easy start. This I think is a better book than 577, set in...
Jul 7, 20171 min read
506. Joanna Cannon - The Trouble With Goats And Sheep
I didn’t enjoy this much, at least until very near the end when the subject became a little clearer. So, (as everyone says nowadays), it...
Feb 12, 20171 min read
467. G. F. Newman - The Corrupted Part 2
Not as good as part 1 (464), but he had set the scene then and doesn’t add much to it in Part 2, apart from dropping in various...
Sep 30, 20161 min read
434. Arnaldur Indridason - The Draining Lake
I quite like this guy; have read this before; it is the one about the Icelandic left wing students who go on a communist sponsored year...
Jun 28, 20161 min read
415. Tim Lott - The Last Summer Of The Water Strider
A library book from P. Set in the 1970’s, a mildly bored and disaffected teenager is sent off to live with his hippy uncle on a houseboat...
May 28, 20161 min read
404. Dan Kavanagh - Duffy
I gather Dan Kavanagh is really Julian Barnes, writing private eye thrillers under this pseudonym. Certainly a fairly salacious page...
Sep 15, 20151 min read
337. Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog
The last (I think) of the Brodie books. I found this the least enjoyable. It was somehow too dense and lacked the lightness of touch of...
Sep 20, 20141 min read
248. John Harvey - Darkness, Darkness
I think I have read one of the Resnick novels before, without really enjoying it. Jon Harvey is coming to speak at our local library in a...
Apr 10, 20131 min read
97. Heinrich Boll - The Lost Honour Of Katharina Blum
Very short, maybe a bit of a cheat. Had read it before, maybe 30+ years ago. Enigmatic, about a woman in Germany in the 1970's whose life...
Apr 5, 20131 min read
95. Graham Greene - The Honorary Consul
Despite my mixed response to Greene in this text, I found this one, bent and out of shape from having been read and it appears dropped in...
Jan 5, 20131 min read
70. Neil Young - Waging Heavy Peace
(Requested) Xmas present from my son D. I enjoyed it in the end; found it difficult at first as: I was expecting a linear narrative Some...
Oct 31, 20121 min read
52. William Boyd - Restless
This was brilliant. I had a weird and precise memory of having read the first chapter (only) before; maybe one of the publisher's bits of...