
Showing posts with label Book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book reviews. Show all posts
Thursday, 14 October 2021
Don't believe the hype

Wednesday, 13 October 2021
No ordinary woman

The democratisation of poetry

Last year I reviewed John Cooper Clarke's Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt. I supposed that working class poets from the North West would mine the gritty reality of their industrial environment for their work rather than the romantic foppery of daffodils. How wrong I was. In The Mersey Sound, a collection first published in 1967, Adrian Henri has a poem called The New, Fast Automatic Daffodils(1).
Saturday, 3 April 2021
The everyday as exceptional

And so, I was wary of expecting too much from Alan Bennett's "The Complete Talking Heads",
Thursday, 11 March 2021
Too many books, not enough time

Years later you find the time to do that thing you wanted to do aged sixteen and you discover David Lodge's book, The Art of Fiction
Monday, 23 November 2020
A Marxist and a monarchist

Thursday, 22 October 2020
A daft story with a philosophical theme

Friday, 16 October 2020
A Dark-Adapted Eye. What's the truth?

Over thirty-five years Vera's family has tried to forget about the incident, and in their own ways have distanced themselves from it. The long dormant memories are reawakened when a true-crime writer contacts Faith Severn, the murderer's niece.
Friday, 2 October 2020
Parson Peters - a life of dishonesty

The Parson of the title is Robert Peters, and the book follows his career as he repeatedly tries to take up positions at academic and religious institutions around the world, using forged documents and bogus qualifications.
Friday, 25 September 2020
A Long Petal of the Sea? Not my cup of tea.

She's a new author for me. Allende's Wikipedia page was encouraging, mentioning magical realism and saying her novels are often based on historical events and real-life individuals. As for A Long Petal of the Sea, it ticked quite a few of my boxes. The opening part is set during the Spanish Civil War, a conflict I know little about, during a period of time that I find fascinating - the 1930s, economic depression, competing ideologies of Marxism and Fascism, the run-up to World War II. With a couple of weeks to spare before book club I read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and then sat down to immerse myself in Allende's tome.
Thursday, 24 September 2020
Period Piece: charmingly fearful of the lower classes

There was me, Sian, Bernard, Marco, and Susan, white bread smeared with salted butter and topped with smoked salmon, and a glass of white wine, which always helps lubricate the discussion.
So what about the book?
Monday, 31 August 2020
Rats as big as cats

Thursday, 6 August 2020
Romantic fiction or psychological manipulation?

Friday, 31 July 2020
One reads for pleasure. It is not a public duty.

Monday, 27 July 2020
The culmination of a lifetime of struggle

Thursday, 16 July 2020
The problem of society's expectations

The book tells the stories of twelve interconnected characters: young daughters, middle-aged mothers, the childless, the celibate, monogamous and polyamory. From new born children to a woman in her 90s, all have experienced discrimination and abuse because of their skin colour and their gender.
Thursday, 9 July 2020
What's with the teeth?

First, there are the teeth: Mr Tench the dentist, cautious because "Any dentist who's worth the name has enemies", the mestizo with his two protruding yellow fangs, and the jefe (Chief of Police) with his incessant toothache. No-one in the story has a perfect set of choppers.
Monday, 29 June 2020
A dream-like love story

Much of the action takes place in the student accommodation where Sarah, Robert, Terry and Gregory meet. They lose contact after graduation, but a decade later a number of coincidences cause their paths to cross again. At its heart it is a love story.
Sunday, 21 June 2020
The decline of Bolton

Sunday, 14 June 2020
The obsession of a spy

It's primarily told from the point of view of Stephen, a man in his late 20s, recruited to the secret service at university. He works at the Institute with a team of friendly colleagues, but he doesn't like to socialise with them. During the week he lives in London where "it is a long time since he remembered to wash the sheets." At the weekends he retreats to his elderly mother in Didcot. It's a lonely life.
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