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Ian's reading log 2016


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Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

 

It is a cold January morning and Shetland lies buried beneath a deep layer of snow. Trudging home, Fran Hunters eye is drawn to a vivid splash of colour on the white ground, ravens circling above. It is the strangled body of her teenage neighbour Catherine Ross. As Fran opens her mouth to scream, the ravens continue their deadly dance. The locals on the quiet island stubbornly focus their gaze on one man: loner and simpleton Magnus Tait. But when police insist on opening the investigation a veil of suspicion and fear is thrown over the entire community. For the first time in years, Catherine's neighbours nervously lock their doors, whilst a killer lives on in their midst. Raven Black is a haunting, beautifully crafted crime story, and establishes Ann Cleeves as a rising talent in psychological crime writing.

 

My Thoughts

 

I was familiar  with this series only through the TV series "Shetland" on which these are based.  I actually remembered this one as an episode, but fortunately I couldn't remember who the murderer was. I really enjoyed this. It's quite slow moving, and although there are a couple of murders, no real violence. It would almost come under the category of "cosy crime" if it wasn't for the brooding presence of the Shetland isles themselves. They seem to permeate ever paragraph of the book and lend a sinister air and other worldliness to the book. It had me hooked. My only negative point would be that some of the minor characters seems very underdeveloped - particularly the detective that comes from Aberdeen. Still, I want to read the others now  4/5

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Great review! I've got Too Good To Be True by Ann Cleeves as one of my read-a-thon reads this weekend. It's a QuickReads (a series of short novellas written for people who don't read much, with big font, they usually cost £1. A few new ones are made each year. This one's got a Galaxy logo thing on the front. They're British). I'm glad you enjoyed Raven Black :).

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Private Peaceful by Michael Murpurgo.

 

From the Children's Laureate of England, a stunning novel of the First World War, a boy who is on its front lines, and a childhood remembered.

"They've gone now, and I'm alone at last. I have the whole night ahead of me, and I won't waste a single moment of it . . . I want tonight to be long, as long as my life . . ." For young Private Peaceful, looking back over his childhood while he is on night watch in the battlefields of the First World War, his memories are full of family life deep in the countryside: his mother, Charlie, Big Joe, and Molly -- the love of his life. Too young to be enlisted, Thomas has followed his brother to war and now, every moment he spends thinking about his life, means another moment closer to danger.

 

My thoughts

 

I read this purely by chance. When I picked my next book from the book jar, it was one I had on my Kindle, but as I hadn't used that for a while, it needed charging. Saturday morning and allowed a lie-in for once, I didn't want to waste it, so I picked this up - a book my daughter had picked up from a charity shop.

Don't be fooled, as I was, that because this is a children's book, that this is a light, easy, insubstantial read.  The writing took me instantly back to days spent in the countryside as a boy. Rarely have I read a book that so simply and effectively lays out the utter horror and madness that world war 1 was. Be warned, the ending is heart-breaking, and had me in tears. 5/5

I'll have to give this a shot as I like to read books set in the WWI and II, I have wanted to read War Horse for a long while but I can't bring myself to read about the horses dying (strangely I can cope with the people dying just fine!), can I ask, are any animals involved in this one? :(

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I'll have to give this a shot as I like to read books set in the WWI and II, I have wanted to read War Horse for a long while but I can't bring myself to read about the horses dying (strangely I can cope with the people dying just fine!), can I ask, are any animals involved in this one? :(

 

There is a brief paragraph involving a horse stuck in the mud at the front - can't think of any other instances though. I do know what you mean though - there is something very disturbing about cruelty or violence towards animals that is somehow more shocking than with people.

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On Chesil Beach by Ian Mcewan

 

It is June 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come...(from Goodreads)

 

My Thoughts

 

For a short book, this took some reading. On the one hand, the writing is absolutely beautiful. The type of writing that makes this reader despair of ever being able to pen something myself. On the other hand, I found at times it very heavy going. The subject matter doesn't help of course; you can tell early on that this wedding night isn't going to have a happy ending. If I have written this review as soon as I finished it, very late last night, it would have got 3 stars. But, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to give both these newly weds a good slap around the head and tell them to sort themselves out. In the end, I don't think I'm going to able to shake this story out of my head for a long time, if ever. And that is the mark of a very good book, in my opinion.  4/5 (I still have to drop one star for being so heavy going).

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My Sh*t life so far by Frankie Boyle

 

Frankie's outrageous, laugh-out loud, cynical rant on life as he knows it is presented here in all its outrageous glory. From growing up in Pollockshaws, Glasgow – "it was an aching cement void, a slap in the face to childhood, and for the family it was a step up" – to his rampant teenage sex drive – "in those days if you glimpsed a nipple on T.V. it was like porn Christmas" – and first job working in a mental hospital, nothing is out of bounds. Outspoken, cynical, and always outrageous, Frankie Boyle, the dark heart of Mock the Week, says the unsayable as only he can. From the TV programs he would like to see made (“Celebrities On Acid On Ice – "just like Celebrities Dancing On Ice, but with an opening sequence where Graham Norton hoses the celebrities down with liquid LSD"), to his native Scotland and the Mayor of London, nothing and no one is safe from Frankie's fearless, sharp-tongued assault. Sharply observed and full of taboo-busting, we-really-shouldn't-be-laughing-at-this humor, My Sh*t Life So Far shows why Frankie Boyle really is the blackest man in show business. (taken from Goodreads)

 

My thoughts

 

I picked this up in an idle moment from the coffee room at work. Not the kind of book I would normally read, but the random paragraph I read that day both offended me and made me laugh out loud - quite a combination. And that pretty much sums the book up; some parts I read and thought "this is really offensive", but then the subject would move on and I found myself laughing out loud. I'm told that I was a picture reading this at work - laughing and shaking my head at the same time. This isn't for the faint-hearted or the easily offended  - he saves his most biting comments for the Scottish and Scotland, you have been warned - but I did find it very funny. 4/5.

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The ocean at the end of the lane - by Neil Gaiman

 

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

 

My Thoughts

 

At the beginning of the year, I found myself in Kidderminster, a small town not far for us. My wife knows a hairdresser there, so I drove her over and found myself with nothing to do for about 4 hours. Kidderminster is a town in decline - empty shops and charity shops mostly and a new shopping area attempting to delay the inevitiable.

 

But, there is a really good library. And after I had drunk enough coffee, I waited there and read the first couple of chapters of this(which almost had me in tears - a birthday party for a 7 year old to which no-one turns up will do that to me). Like all good books, it stayed with me, so I had to buy it. At the end of the book are some questions & answers from Neil. In it he says "My favourite response to it (this book) is...My childhood was nothing like it - and it was if I was reading about me".

 

That's how I felt. Somehow, he has taken the very essence of being seven years old and distilled it into what I can only describe as a fairy story for adults. As always when I read his books, I'm left at the end, slightly disappointed because I want more. That's also true here, as the book is pretty short, but it is a great read. 4/5

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My book jar - which I use to randomly pick the next book I read - also agrees, as it threw out "Anansi Boys" by him as my next book

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I'm not a Frankie Boyle fan so I think I'll avoid that one, but I'm glad you enjoyed it.   I, too, loved The Ocean at the End of the Lane - what a fab story.  :)  I have Anansi Boys on my 'to read' pile, I think (although I haven't read American Gods, so I'd better get hold of that one too. 

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Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

 

Fat Charlie Nancy's normal life ended the moment his father dropped dead on a Florida karaoke stage. Charlie didn't know his dad was a god. And he never knew he had a brother. 

Now brother Spider's on his doorstep -- about to make Fat Charlie's life more interesting... and a lot more dangerous

 

My thoughts

 

I picked this up in a charity shop, and brought it basically as it was written by Gaiman, and knew literally nothing else about it. I didn't even realise  it was a sequel to American Gods till I logged it into Goodreads as my current read.

To be honest, I was struggling with this for about the first quarter. I put that down to myself. A lot of other stuff going on in my life at the mo, so I wasn't really feeling it. Then something just clicked, and I raced through the rest of the book. Again, unusually for me, this book had me snorting with laughter. I wouldn't say that reading American Gods is essential before reading this, although it helped in terms of understanding the role of various Gods in this universe.  American Gods, although funny, is Gaiman funny. This book is Gaiman channeling Douglas Adams - and it's something he does very well! 

Yes, you could argue that you can see largely where the book is going to go and approximately how it's going to end almost from the start, but that wasn't the point, at least for me - it was the journey, not the destination.  5/5

 

Note: My copy had a Q&A section at the back that Neil had put in. It was interesting to note that about a third of the way in, he realised that he had to change a particular character's plotline, which changed the nature of the book and the ending. I wondered after reading that, if that was why I found the first part of the book a bit of a struggle compared with the rest. 

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I'm not a Frankie Boyle fan so I think I'll avoid that one, but I'm glad you enjoyed it.  

 

I can understand that - before reading this, I would have said he wouldn't have been a comedian I would go and see. However, I did find myself warming to him more as I read the book - perhaps because what you do find out about him, and the only real personal thing about him that he doesn't make a (rude) joke about is...he looks reading, and is particularly a fan of fantasy fiction. He recommends a number of authors (I really need to make a list of them before I pass the book on)

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Great review! I'm glad you liked Anansi Boys. I actually own Anansi Boys which I bought in Dutch at a library sale, but I don't own American Gods yet. It's good to know it is possible to read Anansi Boys on its own (though if I find American Gods for a nice price I'll probably get it).

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Dark Blood by Stuart McBride

 

Detective Sergeant Logan McRae isn't happy to be part of the team helping convicted rapist Martin Knox settle into his new home. He's even less thrilled to be stuck with DSI Danby from Northumbria Police - the man who put Knox behind bars - who is here to 'keep an eye on things'. Only things are about to go very, very wrong. (taken from Goodreads)

 

My Thoughts

 

​I only got about 100 pages into this. I'm afraid I just took a dislike to most of the characters. The protagonist seems to be a hard-drinking, anti-social Scottish policeman who unorthodox methods get the job done, but rub his superiors up the wrong way. Sound familiar? Yes, it did to me too, and frankly, Ian Rankin does it far, far better than this. Add in a superior who speaks only in foul-mouthed cliches, and is probably the worst imagined female character I've read in some time. After about 100 pages, I decided I just didn't care enough to find out any more, so I gave up and I've been up the library instead 1/5 

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The Bat by Jo Nesbo

 

Before Harry took on the neo-Nazi gangs of Oslo, before he met Rakel, before The Snowman tried to take everything he held dear, he went to Australia. Harry Hole is sent to Sydney to investigate the murder of Inger Holter, a young Norwegian girl, who was working in a bar. Initially sidelined as an outsider, Harry becomes central to the Australian police investigation when they start to notice a number of unsolved rape and murder cases around the country. The victims were usually young blondes. Inger had a number of admirers, each with his own share of secrets, but there is no obvious suspect, and the pattern of the other crimes seems impossible to crack. Then a circus performer is brutally murdered followed by yet another young woman. Harry is in a race against time to stop highly intelligent killer, who is bent on total destruction (from Goodreads)

 

My Thoughts

 

The first of the Harry Hole thrillers, but, thanks to the vagaries of translation, this book wasn't initially available in English for a a few years. As you can probably expect, as his first book, it isn't going to be the best in the series, but there is plenty to be pleased with. At last we see what happened to Harry in Australia - something that is mentioned in passing in nearly all the subsequent books. The ending is a little disappointing, and sometimes the crime itself seems to play second fiddle to observations about Australia. I still enjoyed it though, and I was glad I'd finally got to read it 3/5.

 

This makes the 38th book I've read this year - equaling the number I read in 2015.

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The Clown Service by Guy Adams

 

Toby Greene has been reassigned. 

The Department: Section 37 Station Office, Wood Green.

The Boss: August Shining, an ex-Cambridge, Cold War-era spy.

The Mission: Charged with protecting Great Britain and its interests from paranormal terrorism.

The Threat: An old enemy has returned, and with him Operation Black Earth, a Soviet plan to create the ultimate insurgents by re-animating the dead

 

My Thoughts

 

This book arrested my attention on my last visit to the library. My initial thought before I'd read any was  "harry potter with spys" , but I would say having finished it it reminded me quite a lot of Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch - but think spys instead of the police. That's not to say that this book is a rip-off ar anything.

While this isn't the most well written book I've read, it does zip along with the story for the most part, as Toby is thrown in at the deep end of spying against enemies using the supernatural. My negatives would be there is too much exposition (the story stops for whole chapters), but to be fair, some of the more arcane supernatural plotlines do need explaination. I also thought the ending was a little rushed. Still, I liked it enough to want to read the others in the series. 3/5

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Solar by Ian McEwan

 

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize–winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. While he coasts along in his professional life, Michael’s personal life is another matter entirely. His fifth marriage is crumbling under the weight of his infidelities. But this time the tables are turned: His wife is having an affair, and Michael realizes he is still in love with her. 

When Michael’s personal and professional lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, an opportunity presents itself in the guise of an invitation to travel to New Mexico. Here is a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster. Can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity? 

A complex novel that brilliantly traces the arc of one man’s ambitions and self-deceptions, Solar is a startling, witty, and stylish new work from one of the world’s great writers (from Goodreads)

 

My Thoughts

 

Oh boy, I struggled with this one. It's actually quite difficult to pinpoint why. It's certainly well written, and there were some chapters that I zipped through. Others just dragged for me. I think in part was that I really didn't like the protagonist, Michael Beard. I get that he's meant to be unlikable, but he really is irritating at times. There are some funny parts (there is an incident with a zip at the arctic circle that had me both laughing and cringing) but they don't come often enough for me. It's not a long book, but it sometimes felt that way. 3/5 

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