Country of the Blind
by Christopher Brookmyre
This book is just right if you have a day free to do nothing but read – whether it’s a restful holiday or a rainy Sunday. The plot is thick and fast and the language fun but also sharp-edged. Brookmyre always picks a clear target in his novels, a dartboard to throw poison arrows at, and in this case it’s the Tory Party, so I was happy…
In a shameless copy of a brilliant idea by Novel Insights, I have painstakingly listed all of the books that I own but have not yet read – my TBR list. There’s quite a lot of them because I am very naughty about buying more books than I read, but it’s a useful exercise to have undertaken so thank you Novel Insights for the idea…
These are books that I own but have not yet read (it’s a very long list)…
Ripening Seed
by Colette
translated by Roger Senhouse
Colette is one of those highly rated authors whose works I continue to read but fail to be bowled over by. I think I understand the attraction but I am not personally attracted…
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
by David Mitchell
I bought this book the day it came out. I never do that, but I have loved all of Mitchell’s previous books so I went to Waterstones and walked home with it, lovingly stroking the exquisitely designed cover. I started reading it that night. And yet here we are months later and I’ve only just finished. So what happened?
This week we went to a music quiz at our local pub and what it reminded me – besides the fact that I have pretty poor music knowledge despite rating it as one of my better subject areas – was how soul-joltingly amazing music can be…
84 Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff
I hadn’t heard of this book until The Girl mentioned it on her old blog, but it turns out to be a bit of a modern classic. It’s quite simply the publication of actual letters exchanged between New York writer Helene Hanff and London bookshop Marks & Co. The correspondence lasted 20 years, from 1949 until the bookshop closed…
Time Out of Joint
by Philip K Dick
Although this is part of the SF Masterworks series, the SF content of this novel is fairly slim and if anything the big reveal is a little disappointingly convoluted. For the most part the novel is about sanity and our acceptance of the reality around us. And in that respect it is brilliant…