Tag Archives: Book Review
October 11, 2012 · 7:40 pm
I hardly ever read two books or more at the same time but with ‘The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama’ by David Remnick I had to make an exception. It is a beast of a book and I would never have finished it if I hadn’t been reading some fiction alongside it over the last few weeks. As I mentioned in my post about political biographies, almost all books about political figures are extremely weighty tomes which are crammed with more detail than you will ever need to know. ‘The Bridge’ is no different but even though it definitely isn’t aimed at the casual reader, it is still a highly readable account of Barack Obama’s truly extraordinary life and path to the White House. Continue reading →
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Tagged as American Politics, Barack Obama, Biography, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, David Remnick, Elections, Non fiction, Political Biography, Politics, President, Reading, Reviews
October 7, 2012 · 5:48 pm
I’m a little bit slow when it comes to reading the Man Booker Prize winners and nominees. I haven’t read any of the books on this year’s shortlist yet and ‘Snowdrops’ by A. D. Miller is only the second book on last year’s shortlist that I have read so far. It tells the story of Nick Platt, a British lawyer in his thirties living in Moscow. After meeting Masha who soon becomes his girlfriend, Nick gets involved in a property deal. This being Russia, let’s just say it doesn’t go quite as planned…
Continue reading →
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Tagged as A D Miller, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Booker Prize, Crime, Fiction, Literature, Novels, Reading, Reviews, Russia, Snowdrops
October 4, 2012 · 7:09 pm
‘The Reader’ by Bernhard Schlink tells the story of fifteen year old Michael Berg who has an intense affair with a much older woman, Hanna Schmitz. Years later, Michael discovers that Hanna, who was an SS guard at Auschwitz, is being prosecuted for war crimes after World War II. Michael, now a law student, watches her trial and tries to come to terms with the collective guilt surrounding Germany’s past. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Bernhard Schlink, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Fiction, Germany, Holocaust, Literature, Novels, Reading, Reviews, The Reader, World War Two
September 29, 2012 · 2:17 pm
‘The Virgin Suicides’ by Jeffrey Eugenides tells the story of the five adolescent Lisbon sisters who all commit suicide. The youngest sister, thirteen year old Cecilia kills herself first and her death impacts the whole community, especially her other four sisters: fourteen year old Lux, fifteen year old Bonnie, sixteen year old Mary and seventeen year old Therese. The local neighbourhood develops an obsessive fascination with the mysterious Lisbon sisters with tragic consequences for all involved. Continue reading →
September 23, 2012 · 12:24 pm
The downside of starting my postgraduate degree next week is that I will have a lot less time to read fiction and also a lot less time for blogging than I’ve had over the summer. The upside is that I now have access to different libraries and a 10% student discount at my favourite bookshop in the world, Foyles, so when I do have time to read for pleasure, I will be pretty spoilt for choice.
Last week, I visited the main university library for the first time and got hopelessly lost. Due to the absence of signs and being completely unfamiliar with the Library of Congress classification system, it took me nearly an hour to even find the sections relevant to my course. During my search, I happened to stumble across the Czech literature section and picked up a copy of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera as it was on my TBR list and isn’t available at my local library. I figured that even if I never found the books I had actually gone to look for, it wouldn’t have been a totally wasted trip. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Fiction, Literature, Milan Kundera, Novels, Philosophy, Reading, Reviews, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
September 19, 2012 · 3:07 pm
‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham interweaves the parallel stories of three women from different generations across one day in their lives through their connection with the novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’. The writer Virginia Woolf is in the process of writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’ in the early 1920s as she battles mental illness. Claustrophobic post-war housewife Laura Brown bakes a cake to celebrate her husband’s birthday but all she really wants to do is escape and read ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway, is a modern-day New Yorker planning a party for her friend and former lover, Richard. As well as the obvious connection with Woolf’s novel, the women are all connected in other ways. Notably they are affected by the same themes including madness and sexuality.
Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Fiction, Literature, Michael Cunningham, Mrs Dalloway, Novels, Pulitzer Prize, Reading, Reviews, The Hours, Virginia Woolf
September 16, 2012 · 11:44 am
Earlier this year, I watched the first season of the TV series ‘Borgen’, a political drama set in Denmark, and got completely hooked to the point where I began to convince myself that I could speak Danish. However, with the exception of reading the Millennium Trilogy a couple of years ago, I am definitely lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to jumping on the Scandinavian crime fiction bandwagon and this week, I tried to rectify that by reading ‘The Redbreast’ by Jo Nesbo. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Crime, Fiction, Harry Hole, Jo Nesbo, Norway, Novels, Reading, Reviews, The Redbreast, Thriller
September 11, 2012 · 6:20 pm
‘Cold Comfort Farm’ by Stella Gibbons tells the story of nineteen year old Flora Poste who decides to track down her long lost cousins out in the Sussex countryside on Cold Comfort Farm after the sudden death of her parents. As soon as she is confronted by her strange relatives, Flora immediately sets about trying to change things on the farm with each character having their own particular problem that needs resolving. However, her modern middle-class outlook frequently clashes with the rural way of life as she helps them to adapt to the twentieth century.
Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Cold Comfort Farm, Fiction, Humour, Novels, Reading, Reviews, Rural, Stella Gibbons
September 9, 2012 · 12:21 pm
I have been meaning to read ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ for absolutely ages – as I’ve mentioned, I find it easy to take classic literature for granted, knowing that it will always be easily available especially in electronic format, so it tends to get pushed down to the bottom of my TBR list. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ should have been bumped up to the top of my list sooner. The novel tells the story of a young man named Dorian Gray, who has a portrait painted of him by Basil Hallward. Dorian meets Basil’s friend, Lord Henry (Harry) Wotton, who believes that youth and beauty are the only things which really matter in the world and Dorian subsequently becomes heavily influenced by his ideas about aestheticism. However, the story takes a sinister turn when Dorian makes a wish that only his portrait should age and wither while he would look young forever, thus selling his soul for eternal youth. As you can imagine, the moral of the story is something along the lines of ‘be careful what you wish for’… Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Classic Literature, Literature, Novels, Oscar Wilde, Reading, Reviews, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Victorian
September 6, 2012 · 6:47 pm
I mentioned in a post recently that I wanted to re-read the Adrian Mole books (again) by Sue Townsend at some point as they must surely be amongst the funniest books ever written. I then realised that I hadn’t actually read the latest book in the series ‘Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years’. Set in 2007-2008 as the credit crunch looms over Britain, Adrian is approaching his 40th birthday and has settled down with his second wife, Daisy, and their daughter, Gracie. However, all is not well in Adrian’s life as both his health and his marriage are in a very fragile state. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Adrian Mole, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Diaries, Diary, Fiction, Humour, Reading, Reviews, Sue Townsend
September 3, 2012 · 4:36 pm
‘Lucky Jim’ by Kingsley Amis tells the story of James Dixon, (a character supposedly inspired by Philip Larkin, as Wikipedia reliably informs me) who has stumbled into a job as a medieval history lecturer at a redbrick university in the Midlands mostly by accident. Due to his northern, non-elitist background, he frequently finds himself out of place in academic circles and the story recounts the often farcical episodes of his early career. At the beginning of the story, Dixon is worried that he will not be reappointed at the end of his probationary year but ends up making a series of gaffes in his efforts to keep his job as well as trying to deal with his on-off girlfriend, Margaret. Continue reading →
August 27, 2012 · 5:23 pm
The premise of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is the stuff of nightmares for bibliophiles everywhere. Ray Bradbury’s portrayal of a dystopian society in which books are outlawed would be like hell for all book-lovers: as we are told on the first page, Fahrenheit 451 is “the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns”. The book tells the story of a fireman called Guy Montag, except he is not the sort of fireman we would normally imagine – instead of putting fires out, firemen in Bradbury’s not too distant future deliberately start fires in places where books are found. From the moment when his seventeen year old neighbour Clarisse McClellan asks him if he is happy, Montag starts to question everything around him especially when Clarisse disappears and his wife, Mildred, attempts suicide. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, Fiction, Literature, Ray Bradbury, Reading, Reviews, Science Fiction
August 25, 2012 · 3:03 pm
Although lots of people may say that you should never judge a book by its cover, in the case of ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern, I think it’s acceptable to do so. I love this book cover not just because it is very pretty but because I think it matches the story so well too. Lots of adjectives like ‘dazzling’, ‘enchanting’, ‘spellbinding’, ‘imaginative’, ‘captivating’ and ‘magical’ have already been used in the critics reviews on the cover to describe this book. I would like to add that it is also highly original especially for a fantasy story. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Erin Morgenstern, Fiction, Literature, Novels, Reading, Reviews, The Night Circus, Victorian
August 23, 2012 · 6:01 pm
Set in England in the 1950s, ‘The Outcast’ by Sadie Jones tells the story of nineteen year old Lewis Aldridge and his return to his childhood home in a small village in Surrey after spending two years in prison. Tensions both at home and in the community soon become darker as it becomes clear that Lewis will never really be able to make a fresh start in Waterford and let go of his troubled past. Never has the British stiff upper lip seemed so resistant to change. Continue reading →
August 22, 2012 · 12:37 pm
‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov tells the story of Humbert Humbert and his obsession with twelve year old Dolores Haze also known as Lolita. Humbert marries her mother, Charlotte, to be closer to Lolita and after her sudden death, Humbert becomes sexually involved with Lolita and they travel around the United States. The themes of obsession and loss of innocence are dark and so is the humour in this densely written classic which is still as controversial today as it was when it was first published in the 1950s. Continue reading →
August 20, 2012 · 12:12 pm
I will admit that I had never heard of ‘The History of Love’ by Nicole Krauss until relatively recently in spite of the huge number of endorsements it seems to have had from critics over the last few years. The novel only came to my attention after reading some blog reviews recently which gave it extremely high praise so I decided to hunt it down at the library this week. In a nutshell, ‘The History of Love’ tells the parallel stories of Leo Gorsky, an elderly man living in New York City who is unaware that a novel he wrote in his youth entitled ‘The History of Love’ was published under a different name, and Alma Singer, a fourteen year old girl who tries to track down her namesake from the same book who also happens to be the woman that Leo based his novel on. However, this brief summary only scratches the surface of the intricately-drawn mystery at the heart of the story. Continue reading →
August 17, 2012 · 12:20 pm
‘The Crossroads’ by Niccolò Ammaniti is a dark-humoured thriller which won the Premio Strega – the Italian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize – in 2007. Unsatisfied with their lives, Rino Zena, and his low-life friends Danilo Aprea and Quattro Formaggi (yes, it’s a nickname) plan to carry out a bank raid and come up with the supposedly perfect crime. However, events soon take them in unexpected directions. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Fiction, Italy, Niccolo Ammaniti, Novels, Reading, Reviews, The Crossroads, Thriller
August 15, 2012 · 12:08 pm
I found a copy of ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini on top of a hand dryer in the ladies toilets somewhere a couple of years ago with a note inside which read ‘If you enjoy this book, please pass it on!’. I feel quite bad for hanging on to it for so long as so many other people could have read it in the time that it has sat on my book shelf collecting dust. But I also wish I had got round to reading it sooner simply because it is a very worthwhile (if imperfect) read. ‘The Kite Runner’ tells the story of Amir and his friend Hassan growing up in Afghanistan in the 1970s and the tragic consequences following a kite-fighting competition they take part in. Although the Russian invasion forces Amir to leave Afghanistan to start a new life in the United States, the events of his childhood never really go away and years later, he returns to his home country following the rise of the Taliban in the hope of finding redemption. Continue reading →
August 10, 2012 · 9:30 pm
I was born somewhere between the Berlin Wall coming down and the Soviet Union completely disintegrating so I have no memory of the Cold War divide that dominated the world for nearly half of the twentieth century, but even I realise that the publication of ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1962 in both the Soviet Union itself and Western countries was pretty significant to say the least. Based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experience of the gulag system, this short novella tells the story of a Soviet prisoner or zek, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, who is in his eighth year of a ten year sentence for espionage for the Germans (a false accusation). This shattering depiction of life in the Stalinist-era labour camps won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 – and got Solzhenitsyn permanently expelled from the Soviet Union a few years later. Continue reading →
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Tagged as Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Fiction, Literature, Nobel Prize, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Reading, Reviews, Russia, Soviet Union
August 8, 2012 · 5:22 pm
The subtitle of ‘At Home’ by Bill Bryson is ‘A Short History of Private Life’ – in other words, a history of all aspects of domestic life including eating, cleaning and sleeping and so on. As well as exploring how the modern idea of the home has developed over history both in its architecture and our daily habits, each chapter covers a different room in the house – the kitchen, the dining room, the cellar (even the fusebox) and the stories behind how we live. ‘At Home’ covers an ambitious amount of history without ever being overwhelming or tedious and Bryson’s characteristically dry humour makes it a thoroughly entertaining read. Continue reading →
The downside of starting my postgraduate degree next week is that I will have a lot less time to read fiction and also a lot less time for blogging than I’ve had over the summer. The upside is that I now have access to different libraries and a 10% student discount at my favourite bookshop in the world, Foyles, so when I do have time to read for pleasure, I will be pretty spoilt for choice.
I have been meaning to read ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ for absolutely ages – as I’ve mentioned, I find it easy to take classic literature for granted, knowing that it will always be easily available especially in electronic format, so it tends to get pushed down to the bottom of my TBR list. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ should have been bumped up to the top of my list sooner. The novel tells the story of a young man named Dorian Gray, who has a portrait painted of him by Basil Hallward. Dorian meets Basil’s friend, Lord Henry (Harry) Wotton, who believes that youth and beauty are the only things which really matter in the world and Dorian subsequently becomes heavily influenced by his ideas about aestheticism. However, the story takes a sinister turn when Dorian makes a wish that only his portrait should age and wither while he would look young forever, thus selling his soul for eternal youth. As you can imagine, the moral of the story is something along the lines of ‘be careful what you wish for’… Continue reading 
The premise of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is the stuff of nightmares for bibliophiles everywhere. Ray Bradbury’s portrayal of a dystopian society in which books are outlawed would be like hell for all book-lovers: as we are told on the first page, Fahrenheit 451 is “the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns”. The book tells the story of a fireman called Guy Montag, except he is not the sort of fireman we would normally imagine – instead of putting fires out, firemen in Bradbury’s not too distant future deliberately start fires in places where books are found. From the moment when his seventeen year old neighbour Clarisse McClellan asks him if he is happy, Montag starts to question everything around him especially when Clarisse disappears and his wife, Mildred, attempts suicide. Continue reading 
Set in England in the 1950s, ‘The Outcast’ by Sadie Jones tells the story of nineteen year old Lewis Aldridge and his return to his childhood home in a small village in Surrey after spending two years in prison. Tensions both at home and in the community soon become darker as it becomes clear that Lewis will never really be able to make a fresh start in Waterford and let go of his troubled past. Never has the British stiff upper lip seemed so resistant to change. Continue reading 
I found a copy of ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini on top of a hand dryer in the ladies toilets somewhere a couple of years ago with a note inside which read ‘If you enjoy this book, please pass it on!’. I feel quite bad for hanging on to it for so long as so many other people could have read it in the time that it has sat on my book shelf collecting dust. But I also wish I had got round to reading it sooner simply because it is a very worthwhile (if imperfect) read. ‘The Kite Runner’ tells the story of Amir and his friend Hassan growing up in Afghanistan in the 1970s and the tragic consequences following a kite-fighting competition they take part in. Although the Russian invasion forces Amir to leave Afghanistan to start a new life in the United States, the events of his childhood never really go away and years later, he returns to his home country following the rise of the Taliban in the hope of finding redemption. Continue reading 
The subtitle of ‘At Home’ by Bill Bryson is ‘A Short History of Private Life’ – in other words, a history of all aspects of domestic life including eating, cleaning and sleeping and so on. As well as exploring how the modern idea of the home has developed over history both in its architecture and our daily habits, each chapter covers a different room in the house – the kitchen, the dining room, the cellar (even the fusebox) and the stories behind how we live. ‘At Home’ covers an ambitious amount of history without ever being overwhelming or tedious and Bryson’s characteristically dry humour makes it a thoroughly entertaining read. Continue reading 
A Little Blog of Books 
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