nocto

Nevil Shute was a favourite of mine as a teenager when I found books like Requiem for a Wren & A Town Like Alice lurking on my parents bookshelves. I've been disappointed by reading other Shute books as as adult but had never read this one and it's reissue as a "Vintage Classic" was enough to make me try it.

The setting is post nuclear war Australia with the northern hemisphere wiped out and radiation sickness slowly creeping down to wipe out the southern hemisphere too. As is usual in Shute's books middle class naval types carry on with their everyday lives in strange circumstances.

I'm not sure whether it's really an enduring classic of literature, but it is a good yarn, rather dated but probably better for it. I found it a good read and it made me cry a lot.

Purchased on 1st November 2009.

I like Tim Harford's books much better than his Freakonomics colleagues/competitors. Though I can't remember either book in detail I found this a good in depth read with plenty of detail and explanation. Learnt a lot.

Borrowed.

I loved this. The writing is fabulous - full of sentences that make you sit back and marvel at their ingenuity and the images that they conjure up.

The chapters of the book flip between four different viewpoints. Each is set in a different place and time stays tightly with a single character and each is very individually written with no chance of a reader muddling up the writing - the headings announcing which character was in this chapter were totally superfluous. The distinctive voices were in first, third and even second person. Second person can be really tedious to read but here it was my favourite part of the book as it seemed to be rationed out just nicely. The settings varied from 1960s to the present day and included London, Italy and Cumbria. On the whole the book was well varied but early in the story I found the changes difficult to keep track of - though it wasn't long before I was hooked.

This is definitely a literary novel and not one driven by plot devices and I enjoyed the fact that the links between the four strands of the story weren't pointed out time and time again. I liked coming across small pieces of the jigsaw in the prose and I'm sure that there were plenty of details that I missed.

The book takes in, as you'd expect from the title, death, art and dying artists. Which might make it sound pretty bleak but it's a book full of light, full of interesting snippets of life and well worth a read.

Purchased on 4th October 2009.

Hmmm. Well I thought I'd enjoyed Carry Me Down when I read it a couple of years ago but it looks like my memory is playing tricks on me from the looks of what I wrote at the time. Interesting. I did however really like this book.

Sixteen year old Lou moves from her own family in Sydney to somewhere near Chicago to stay with the Harding family as an exchange student at a local high school. She makes her own family out to be, on the whole, a pretty appalling bunch living in near squalor and the American family who take her in are very much in the well off, large house, tanned with perfect teeth mould. Lou is obviously clever but is clearly going to have real trouble fitting in here.

The first person narration means that we see how everything falls apart from inside Lou's head. This makes it really compelling to read and you don't end up agreeing with what others think of Lou (or at least I didn't).

I was enjoying the book loads and preparing myself for being let down by the ending - mostly because I couldn't figure out where the author was leading to at all. But I wasn't let down - it was very well concluded.

Purchased on 4th October 2009.

I've enjoyed many of Ann Granger's books without finding them particularly exceptional - and this was pretty much the same as ever. I like the characters - a forthright Victorian woman and her Scotland Yard boyfriend - and I end up thinking the plot is pretty good too. But somewhere along the line nothing is really impressing me and making me want to pick up another one all the same. I like the Fran Varady series much better.

Purchased on 1st June 2009.

This book is all about putting a realistic twist on all the big risks everyone thinks the world holds - zillions of people terrified of terrorism and the like. The only problem for me is that I'm already a numerate sceptic who explains to others that the risk of, oh, their kids being abducted by paedophiles or similar, is vanishingly small and takes all use of statistics in news stories with a huge pinch of salt. So I wasn't sure how much I was going to get out of it.

The good news is that it's a good read and did tell me plenty of things I didn't know. Which just gives me more ammunition for playing the numerate sceptic role in future. Hah, fun.

The bad news? Well, the book covers the phenomenon of "confirmation bias" where you tend to take away from a story only the bits that backup what you already think and disregard the rest. So I think I've probably done that even with this book... how do you counter that? The author mainly wants to play down people's fears of what they consider to be big dangers but doesn't really get into what the biggest risks we face in our comfortable first world lives are. We obviously all make bad decisions about them preferring to fixate on removing some minor environmental hazard before taking exercise.

The point to take away is that we're fortunate to be about the healthiest, safest and longest lived humans who have ever walked the planet which is nice to have confirmed. (And don't believe any interpretation of statistics you hear in the news. Hmmm, the author's a journalist...)

Purchased on 1st September 2009.

One of Anita Shreve's pseudo thriller-ish books. When I first read Shreve I liked stories like The Pilot's Wife with a mystery background to them more than the perhaps more literary or historical ones. I changed my mind somewhere and didn't like this as much as I might have done a few years ago.

This is a series of accounts of events surrounding a sex scandal at a private school in New England. I found it difficult to get my head round what happened being such a huge scandal - partly because the blame in the story was obviously not with the characters it was being given to but some of it felt like a geographic divide - I'm not sure the scenario in the book would have been a big deal in the UK. I might be missing the point there. If you go along with the story it works and I like the device of telling the story through disjoint accounts, the sum of the parts being greater than the whole... kind of thing.

All in all a good read but not a fabulous one.

Purchased on 28th August 2009.

This looks to be the sixth of Patrick Gale's books that I've read in 15 months since discovering Notes From an Exhibition. As you can gather from that I've been enjoying them a lot. I've been spacing the back catalogue out rather than gorging on it.

This one isn't back catalogue - it's a new release - and I didn't like it as much as the older stuff. It's not as sweeping in it's scale as some of the books and I guess the author fancied something different as this book limits itself, as the title suggests, to taking place on a single day. This isn't as limiting as it could be as the characters do plenty of recollecting and reminiscing and if the day long constraint hadn't been prominently signposted both inside and outside the book's covers I could have missed it.

The central characters are Ben, a doctor treating HIV patients, and Laura, a freelance accountant, who first met at college and encounter each other again in their forties. I thought they were both well drawn and their relationships with their tangled families were believable. I did think the story was careering towards an obvious ending - and I won't spoil it as to whether it went where I thought it was heading - but I ended up thinking Gale did a good job of ending the tale.

Overall it's not at all bad and I'll certainly be reading more by the author.

Purchased on 15th July 2009.

The only thing wrong with this book is that when I got to the end of it - wondering how on earth the author was going to wrap it all up in what seemed to be a very small number of pages left to read - the last page said "to be continued" across it. So, I am very much looking forward to the next Mary Russell adventure which I guess will be closely linked to this one.

Purchased on 28th August 2009.

On the one hand I was expecting to mostly like this as I loved reading The Night Watch a couple of years back. On the other hand I was a bit dubious about it being a ghost story as supernatural elements in books typically annoy me. These about cancelled each other out - I didn't love it or hate it. I liked the setting and the characters and I thought the ghostly elements were mostly unnecessary and it would have been a much better book without them there, there was enough interest in the story without them.

Purchased on 1st August 2009.