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Jan 28, 20171 min read
463. Mick Herron - Slow Horses
I have never heard of the author and can’t make my mind up about the book. The ‘Slow Horses’ are rejects from MI5 (or equivalent) who...
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...
May 27, 20161 min read
403. Helen Stevenson - Love Like Salt
P’s book of the year so far, but not mine. The memoir of a woman who has a daughter with cystic fibrosis, who goes to live in France with...
Mar 19, 20161 min read
385. Elizabeth Gaskell - North And South
Another one from Bristol. I had read this years ago. Found it quite hard going; she doesn’t write very fluently about people so the...
Dec 13, 20151 min read
361. Justin Cartwright - Lion Heart
I think this guy is good. Hard to summarise this thematically, as there a multiple strands – Richard I’s attempt to recover the Cross...
Mar 4, 20151 min read
286. Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
This is extremely good, but long and hard work and I am not doing it justice. I am going to break the habit of this record and return to...
Feb 6, 20151 min read
281. Elizabeth Jane Howard - Confusion
Book 3 which takes us from 1942 to the end of the war. Lots of events as the girls grow up and Louise gets married to a dreadful man,...
Aug 24, 20141 min read
237. D. H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover
Haven’t read any Lawrence for ages; I think that no.223 inclined me to read another novel of thwarted love across the classes. The sex is...
Jun 12, 20141 min read
218. Peter Robinson - Innocent Graves
Need a quick detective novel after the marathon of no.217... Have read this before but forgotten the middle section where the wrong guy...
Aug 31, 20131 min read
140. George Eliot - Silas Marner
Bought this in 1976 and don’t think I have ever read it. It is bloody good. Quite simple, short, and beautifully compressed tale of...
Nov 28, 20121 min read
61. Eliza Graham - The History Room
One of P's. Very good part-thriller about sinister goings on at an English boarding school, which all have their origins in the past. Not...
Oct 12, 20121 min read
48. J.K. Rowling - The Casual Vacancy
Never read any Harry Potter, this is her first adult book. I thought it was very good: complex, multilayered and multi-class plot about...