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Sep 19, 20181 min read
625. Kate Atkinson - Transcription
3rd purchase from Smith’s at Gatwick, her new book which Paddy devoured before I did! Not as good as many of her books, a bit...
Jul 30, 20181 min read
614. Graham Greene - The Tenth Man
A very slight novelette, written as a film script when Greene was contracted to Hollywood post war as he couldn’t fund life from writing....
Jul 28, 20181 min read
613. Craig Brown - Ma'am Darling
A pretty atrocious book about a pretty atrocious person (Princess Margaret). Subtitled ’99 Glimpses of’ her, not one of these was...
Apr 13, 20181 min read
586. Josephine Tey - The Daughter Of Time
This was clever and perhaps one of the first (? I have no idea) books to debunk conventional historical knowledge; no that is not right...
Mar 15, 20181 min read
577. Jake Arnott - The Fatal Tree
A virtuoso feat of writing, but maybe not much else? Set in 18th century London, written in an (I assume) genuine working class London...
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...
Jan 6, 20181 min read
565. William Boyd - Any Human Heart
Still not certain whether I have read this before. The central figure, Logan Mountstewart, sounds very familiar, but I had no memory of...
Sep 26, 20171 min read
531. Helen Dunmore - Birdcage Walk
Obviously the author’s last book, as she died not long after completing it. She says, in an afterword, that she likes writing about the...
Sep 4, 20171 min read
519. Benjamin Black - Prague Nights
Benjamin Black is the non de plume of John Banville, not that I have heard of him either. This is a slightly picaresque quasi-historical...
Jun 9, 20171 min read
495. Juliet Nicolson - A House Full Of Daughters
Juliet Nicolson is the 4th generation of the Nicolson daughters; granddaughter of Vita Sackville West. Her great great grandmother was a...
May 16, 20171 min read
487. Kate Atkinson - Behind The Scenes At The Museum
Possibly her first (famous or actual first?) book. Good, but difficult and hard work. The main narrative is a Tristram Shandy like...
Apr 17, 20171 min read
481. Lynne Truss - Tennyson's Gift
I gave up on this before even discovering what Tennyson’s Gift was. A tedious reconstruction of a (possible or actual, I never got that...
Jan 15, 20171 min read
461. Ian Rankin - Even Dogs In The Wild
Read this, untypically, in parallel with 460 above. I have enjoyed Rankin recently but found this a little low grade and predictable,...
Dec 30, 20161 min read
457. Louise Penny - Bury Your Dead
I have read this before (no 372), but it is far better on a 2nd reading. There are three plot lines: The murder of the archaeologist...
Sep 19, 20161 min read
430. Paul Scott - Staying On
The sequel to 'The Raj Quartet', and very different in lots of ways. I suppose essentially a tragi-comedy, about Tusker and Lucy Smalley,...
Aug 25, 20161 min read
426. Paul Scott - The Jewel In The Crown
Book of the year so fay, and by a long stretch. I have read this before, and we have watched and enjoyed the Granada DVD many times, but...
Jul 29, 20161 min read
421. Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave Is Forgiven
Another library book via P. I am not reading at all fluently at the moment; this was quite a good book but I didn’t really enjoy it at...
Mar 27, 20161 min read
387. Henry James - The Ambassadors
Bought in February 1977 from the 2nd hand book store in the town where we then lived, but never as far as I can tell, read until now. One...
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...