nocto

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.

A fascinating book about the genetic history of the British Isles as seen through our mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes. The author spends a long time talking about our history as seen through fable, story and oral history, the kind of thing you might think was just pie in the sky made up by our ancestors to sound good (or bad as desired). I found these history lessons a little longwinded but it was enthralling when they were linked up with the evidence from our genes.

Purchased on 25th July 2009.

Probably the most famous of the "lets explain the world using economics!" books which there may be a lot of around at the moment, or it may just be that I've noticed them in the last few years and they were moving below my radar before that. Not my favourite of the genre. Too many American examples (which is fair enough as the authors are Americans, just didn't suit me this time) and too many things that seemed to concentrate on the sensational aspects. Didn't find it well rounded I guess.

I'll still probably take time to read the recently released follow up sometime though as it was interesting and well written and made me think even when I was disagreeing with it.

Purchased on 25th July 2009.

Penelope Lively is definitely one of my must read authors of the moment. I loved this rambling tale of family life.

Borrowed.