Category: Books
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
0552997048
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The Full Cupboard of Life
Book 5 in the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is more of the same really. There’s not a great deal of “detection” going on here – a lady who’s trying to choose between four suitors. And we only meet two of them! Then there’s a sponsored parachute jump, and maybe a wedding. Nothing much ever…
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Generation X
A bit late to the party with this one. The flyleaf of this books says it was written in 1991, so that’s a short while ago. And I’m someone who reads pretty much everything Coupland writes. But somehow his debut novel had passed me by. Of course I’ve owned a copy of it for quite…
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The Outsider
0141182504
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Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded
Krakatoa is one of those volcanoes that everyone knows about, and in 1883 it exploded in the largest recorded manner killing thousands. This brilliant book sets the explosion in its full historical context, filling the reader in on both the scientific and social situation. Well worth a read.
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The Small Boat of Great Sorrows
0552150231
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Around the World in Eighty Days
014062032X
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A Question of Blood
0752858963
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The Secret History
0140167773
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Notes on a Scandal
I’m not entirely sure why I picked up this book. But it may have had something to do with being cheap, me not having anything to read at the precise moment, and being near the hated Tesco. Zoe Heller is one of those newspaper columnists that on the whole I can’t abide. So why then…
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The Kalahari Typing School for Men
Can you tell that I’ve been away with very little to do? The Kalahari Typing School for Men is the fourth in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. You either like these books or you don’t – they’re slight, and inoffensive, but they take you away to another world. And although AIDS doesn’t really…
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Firewall
Regular readers will know that I’m something of a Mankell fan. Firewall is the latest to appear here in translation, and apparantly the penultimate Kurt Wallander novel. Firewall starts with someone dropping dead at a cashpoint and a seemingly senseless murder of a taxi driver by two teenage girls, before the plot thickens and a…
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The Dante Club
Now this is more like it. After the disappoitnment of The Da Vinci Code, it was good to read a literary thriller that held up to all that it was trying to be. Set amongst the literary elite of New England in the late 19th century as they battle to help Henry Longfellow put together…