Review - W. J. BURLEY - "Wycliffe and the Last Rites"

Publ: 1992
My own copy
ISBN: 0 75284 931 X
Genre: Crime
Pages: 220p
Found by Serendipity
Rating: ***** ***


What led you to pick up this book?
Found by Serendipity in charity shop - had read and enjoyed another Wycliffe novel.

Describe the plot without giving anything away.
A quiet Cornish village is shaken by a bizarre murder in the church. Chief Superintendent Wycliffe arrives to supervise the investigation but does not solve the crime in time to prevent further outrage from being committed. And what had a sixteen year old unsolved hit-and-run to do with the murder?

What did you think of the characters?
Wycliffe is a good old-fashioned policeman and the characters in the plots are usually fairly predictable. Nevertheless, that helps to make the books comfy reading.

What did you think about the style?
There is an old-fashioned feel to the style of Burley's crime fiction. Never gruesome and an olde-worlde feel to locations and characters. The intricacies of Burley's plots are not too great but skilful enough to make guessing the villain or villains difficult. Ideal cosy crime reading.

What did you like most about the book?
The steady, comfy feeling that escapist fiction like this gives you. Not too much effort is involved but enough to sustain the interest and make the reading enjoyable.

Was there anything you didn't like about the book?
No.

Thoughts on the book jacket / cover.
The cover, designed by Nick Castle, includes a rather good photo by Richard Jenkins.

Would I recommend it?
Yes.

Quotations:

Bt that was logic and she had never found much consolation in logic.

Perhaps books, even on shelves, have a civilising influence. What sort of deviant feels belligerent in a library? (By Jove, I could tell you lots of stories about belligerence in libraries, as could any librarian or ex-librarian.)

But this was a good place. Perhaps a place to die in. Death, he imagined, might come easily, unnoticed, stealing like a mist up the river.

W J Burley - see 'Wycliffe and Death in Stanley Street '

Review: Sebastian FAULKS - "The Girl at the Lion D'Or"

Publ: 1990
My own copy
ISBN: 0 09 977490 9
Genre: General Fiction
Pages: 250p
Found by Serendipity but also continuing reading the author's works
Rating: ***** *****


What led you to pick up this book?
I saw the title and cover in a charity shop and both instantly appealed. A moment later I realised the author was Sebastian Faulks whose Birdsong is one of my top 150 fiction books.

Describe the plot without giving anything away.
A girl with a mysterious background arrives to start work at a seedy provincial hotel in 1930s France. A Parisian lawyer moves to the countryside. Girl meets boy....

What did you think of the characters?
As well developed and as sympathetic as any to be found in the great classics of literature. They are as real as one's own family but with the difference that Faulks has helped us to understand them in a way that we never understand our own relations.

What did you think about the style?
Classic. One feels that Faulks could set his hand to any plot and make the whole landscape of it live. Emotions are explored in a way that only the very best of authors can do.

What did you like most about the book?
Probably the characterisation but the whole book is first class. It is the sort of book you want all your friends to have read.

Was there anything you didn't like about the book?
Simple answer - No.

Thoughts on the book jacket / cover.
An unattributed picture which I would happily have hanging on my wall.

Would I recommend it?
Absolutely.

Quotations:
In a moment Anne could see in his large hands and the strength of his movements all the other ages of his life, as if his body were a palimpsest on which had successively been subscribed the stories of his childhood, adolescence and youth, none of them entirely effacing its forerunner, so that suddenly the contradictions of his bigness and delicacy became understandable and she found herself seeing through his manly self-possession to the ghost of his vulnerable boyhood.

She was wearing her waitress's black dress and her waitress's smile through which, Hartmann thought as he watched, little bubbles of the private girl kept breaking.

When next you pass the memorial in the Place de la Victoire, stop and look at the list of names. Try to imagine that they're not just letters chipped into rock but that each one has a face, a laugh, a look. My life might just as well have ended with them, too. But yours is possible because of them.

It was a day in which everything around her seemed to be in harmony; it was impossible to imagine that he hedgerows and the fields and the woods and streams and isolated cottages were in any other than their appointed place. Only she, a human, with her illusion of free will, couldn't find her true position in it all.


SEBASTIAN FAULKS (b1953) worked as a journalist for 14 years before taking up writing books full time in 1991. He is the author of A Trick of Light, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, A Fool's Alphabet, the celebrated Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He lives with his wife and two children in London.

Review - Devon Federation of Women's Institutes - "The Devon Village Book"

Publ: 1990
Helen & Ian's
ISBN: 1 85306 078 X
Genre: Non-fiction - geography
Pages: 256p
Found by Serendipity
Rating: ***** **

What led you to pick up this book?
Saw it in a charity shop and thought it would make a suitable gift for Helen and Ian. Especially as this would give me the opportunity to read it first!

Describe the book.
An account of the history and things to see in the Devon villages. Each village is succinctly covered and ignoring the recurring theme of how many local facilities and shops have disappeared in the recent past it is a most useful guide.

What did you think about the style?
Demonstrably put together from different local sources so that the style varies throughout but it is always readable.

What did you like most about the book?
The way in which each of the 200 or so villages is shown as having its unique identity.

Was there anything you didn't like about the book?
Yes - and it lost it two stars in my rating - the absence of a map. It was a real pain having to refer to Google Maps every couple of pages to see where a village was located. A good map would have got the book 9 stars.

Thoughts on the book jacket / cover.
An attractive photo.

Would I recommend it?
Yes - good background material for anyone visiting Devon. The sort ofr book to keep in the car and glance a each time you see a village name sign.

Review - Jem POSTER - "Rifling Paradise"

Publ: 2006
My Own copy
ISBN: 0 340 82295 3
Genre: general fiction
Pages: 325p
Found by Serendipity
Rating: ***** ****


What led you to pick up this book?
The brilliant cover with its lithograph of parrots by Edward Lear.

Describe the plot without giving anything away.
A minor landowner in Victorian England flees some minor indiscretions and follows a long-standing wish to make his mark as a naturalist. Once abroad he encounters a number of people who affect his quest for new scientific specimens.

What did you think of the characters?
Wonderfully delineated. The Mail on Sunday described it as a 'terrifying journey into the dark recesses of the human soul'. I wouldn't go that far by any means but it is a fascinating look at the emotional and psychological workings of the 'hero's' mind.

What did you think about the style?
Poster has a great ability to paint pictures with words. His imagery encompasses not just the natural surroundings in which the action takes place but also the action itself and the thoughts of the main character.

What did you like most about the book?
Everything from the cover to the plot, characters to the setting; all were good.

Was there anything you didn't like about the book?
No.

Thoughts on the book jacket / cover.
One of the best. I would have this on my wall as a piece of artwork.

Would I recommend it?
Yes.

Quotations:
My tears were for myself too, for the chastened dreamer hunkered down among the splinters of his own unsustainable illusions...

I don't think... that meekness means letting other people have their way at your expense, or being silent when you've a right or duty to speak. I think it means being humble in the face of a universe we can hardly begin to understand.

Mr Bullen seems to imagine... that our culture will have fulfilled its destiny once it has taken everything else - the wilderness, other cultures, life itself - by the scruff of the neck and shaken it into submission.

I remember wondering, not entirely playfully, whether Adam's fall might have begun not with the eating of a fruit but earlier, with the arising of the desire to catalogue the plants an animals in his teeming paradise.


JEM POSTER (born 1949) holds the Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has worked variously as an archaeologist for English Heritage, an administrator for Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education, and as Lecturer in English Literature with Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. He is a former fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. Rifling Paradise, his second novel won an Arts Council Writer's Award fo work in progress.


I came across this alternative cover picture on the web. I like it but not as much as the one I have.

Review - Karl PILKINGTON - "Karlology"

Publ: 2008
Gift from Helen and Ian
ISBN: 978-1-40533-335-1
Genre: Non-fiction - Humour / Philosophy
Pages: 219p
Saw Karl on TV and was inspired to get his book
Rating: ***** ****


Summary:
Pearls of 'logic' and 'wisdom' from comedian Karl Pilkington whose way of looking at the world can best be described as eccentric in the extreme. His unique thought-process provides a hilarious look at 'What I've learnt so far'. The chapters are based on his various rips to museums and places around London like the Science Museum and Tower of London.

What did you like most about the book?
Karl's zany approach to life.

Was there anything you didn't like about the book?
At the end of each chapter is a handwritten page of facts - the writing is small and difficult to read.

Would I recommend it?
Yes.

Totally irrelevant side note:
The whole book is totally irrelevant.

Quotations:
I read about the sivathere, which was around years and ago but died out. They say it was a cross between a giraffe and a moose. I don't think that mix was ever needed on the world, and that's why they died out. (Labradoodle will go for similar reasons.)

Another thing that's important about art is where it's placed... That big Angel of the North statue in Gateshead is an example of what I mean. It's in a field off a motorway. Motorways are the most boring things to drive on, so stick something there for people to look at and they'll like it. I think that's why cavemen built Stonehenge where it is - it made the road next to it less boring to travel on.

But the best has got to be the chicken. They give us so much: chicken breast, chicken legs, wings (the fact chickens have wings that hey don't even use but that we can eat is evidence that these animals were designed o be eaten), and that's if a chicken gets past being eaten by us when it's an egg.

...people worry about testing drugs on animals, whereas I think it all depends on the situation: if the drug's aspirin and the chimp has a headache, is it still wrong?

They always do these scientific tests on the wrong creatures. It's like how when it came to cloning, they went and did a sheep. Why? All sheep look the same so it was hard to see how the good the cloning was.

Her lipstick was a luminous pink and went over the edges of he thin lips. I say of you're no good at colouring in, don't wear lipstick.

London Zoo ... three sausages, beans and chips and a coke came to £10.80p! I don't know why they bother putting up signs asking people not to feed the animals - at them prices there's no chance of that happening.

Peumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoniosis is a type of lung diease.
If someone can't breathe that well, why give the illness a name hat they'll struggle to say in one breath?

A million new books are published each year, a fifth of them in the UK, which produces more books than any other country. An estimated 175 million books have been published. If you read one an hour it would take 19,000 years to read them all.

Every hair on your body comes equipped with a tiny muscle that can make it stand upright.

The most interesting place was an art shop.... In prime position was a fossil fish with a sign saying it was 56 million years old. It's been around that long and still no one's bought it, it's clear to me that no one wants it. The shop was like a museum with price tags.

This seems to be everyone's dream before they die, to swim with dolphins and whales, yet people are panicking when the news says global warming means that Britain is gonna be underwater by the year 2025. Do they want to swim with dolphins or not?

Woke up to the news that people were happier in the 1960s than they are now. This isn't news, it's obvious, it's probably cos they were younger back then.

I think that's why nature put a pearl inside oysters, it was a way to encourage people to buy them - they are like mother nature's scratchcards.


KARL PILKINGTON (born 23 September 1972) is an award-winning English radio producer, philosopher, podcaster and author, best known for producing and co-presenting The Ricky Gervais Show on London radio station Xfm from 2001 to 2005 and later in the form of podcasts. Karlology is his third book.

Review – Bernard CORNWELL – “Sharpe’s Waterloo“

Publ: 1990
My Own
ISBN: 0 00 223643 5
Genre: Historical Fiction
Pages: 375p
Continuing reading the series
Rating: ***** *****

What led you to pick up this book?
Continuing reading the series

Describe the plot without giving anything away.
Richard Sharpe and the Waterloo Campaign, 15th June to 18th June 1815. Richard Sharpe is involved in the Battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo - this is what the series and the career of Richard Sharpe have been leading up to. Cornwell's finest book in the Sharpe series.

Would I recommend it?
Yes, an absolute essential for Sharpe fans or anyone interested in the Napoleonic wars.

Quotation
"He was ever anxious about the weather and, when he could think of nothing else to be anxious about, he became worried that he must have forgotten something important that should have been causing him worry."

BERNARD CORNWELL – see ‘Sharpe’s Havoc’

Review – Bernard CORNWELL – “Sharpe’s Revenge“

Publ: 1989
My Own
ISBN: 0 00 221432 6
Genre: Historical Fiction
Pages: 350p
Continuing reading the series
Rating: ***** **

What led you to pick up this book?
Continuing reading the series

Describe the plot without giving anything away.
Richard Sharpe and the Peace of 1814. Sharpe’s latest enemy, Pierre Ducos, is involved again. Not one of the best Sharpe stories.

What did you think of the characters / style?
As in all my previous Sharpe reviews....

BERNARD CORNWELL – see ‘Sharpe’s Havoc’