vodkafan Posted April 27, 2019 Share Posted April 27, 2019 (edited) Better late than never! Welcome to my 2019 reading experience. (k) denotes kindle ebook® denotes book read primarily for research purposes keeping the same simple rating system this year:1/5: I didn't like it2/5: It was okay3/5: I liked it4/5: I really liked it5/5: It was amazing! Books read in 2019 February Two Eggs On My Plate Oluf Reed Olsen (re-read) 3/5 April The Shivering Sands Victoria Holt 3/5 May The Bloody Ground Bernard Cornwell 3/5 Just Six Numbers Martin Rees 3/5 The Dragon Jane Gaskell 3/5 Devoted Ladies Molley Keane 4/5 Atlan Jane Gaskell ABANDONED Holes Louis Sachar 4/5 June Hot Milk Deborah Levy 5/5 Her Fearful Symmetry Audrey Niffeneger 4/5 Truth Or Dare Celia Rees 2/5 Long Way To A Small Angry Planet Becky Chambers BOOK MYSTERIOUSLY LOST POSSIBLY STOLEN! July Great Expectations Charles Dickens 4/5 August Normal People Sally Rooney 2/5 September The Viral Storm-Dawn of A New Pandemic Age Nathan D. Wolfe 3/5 The Stationmaster's Farewell Edward Marsden 2/5 If I Stay Gayle Foreman 1/5 October His Other Lover Lucy Dawson 3/5 November The Rosie Project Graeme Simsion 4/5 The Hourglass Factory Lucy Ribchester 3/5 December English Passengers Matthew Kneale 4/5 Edited January 25, 2020 by vodkafan addition Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted April 27, 2019 Author Share Posted April 27, 2019 (edited) The TBR Pile organised! Victorian authors, obscure works and classics The Poor Gentleman Hendrick Conscience Two On A Tower The Return Of The Native A Laodician A Pair Of Blue Eyes Jude The Obscure The Woodlanders Far From The Madding Crowd all above by The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy Post Haste RM Ballantyne Autobiography Of Anthony Trollope Lady Anna Miss Mackenzie 4 above by The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope Twelve Years A Slave Solomon Northup Letters Of Two Brides Balzac Birds Of Prey Charlotte's Inheritance Run To Earth A Novel The Doctor's Wife Lady Audley's Secret Mary Elizabeth Braddon Little Dorrit Charles Dickens The Mill On The Floss Madame Bovary Tess of The d'urbervilles Lady Susan Thoughts On The Education Of Daughters The Last Man Maria, Or The Wrongs Of Woman Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman The Perpetual Curate Equality Looking Backward 2000-1887 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Picture Of Dorian Grey Oscar WildeNicholas Nickleby Charles DickensThe Legend Of Sleepy Hollow Washington Irvine Shirley Bleak House The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde The Moonstone The Woman In White Ruth The Importance Of Being Earnest Basil Les Miserables Mrs Oliphant Confessions Of An English Opium Eater Thomas De Quincey Testament Of Youth Vera Brittain Books set in Victorian times by modern authors Under A Cloud-Soft Sky The Singing Winds Shelter From The Storm Snow Angels The Road To Samarcand Patrick O'Brian Reference works and 18th-19th century history, social history London The Biography Peter Ackroyd The Dictionary Of London Raj Lawrence James The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 The Age Of Capital 1848-1875 The Age Of Empire 1875-1914 Slavery A New Global History Jeremy BlackBalti Britain - Ziauddin Sardar Asians In Britain 400 years of History Rozina Visram Random must reads Nice To See It To See It Nice Brian Viner It's A Small Medium And Outsize World John Taylor Connections Rules For Virgins The Life And Loves Of A She Devil The Passion Of New Eve The Haunted Hotel Ten Interesting Things About Human Behaviour Slave Girl Sarah Forsyth (autobiography) The Man Who Loved Only Numbers Paul Hoffman (biography of Paul Erdos) The White Mists Of Power Kristine Kathryn Rusch I Think I'm OK Undercover: The True Story Of Britain's Secret Police King Solomon's Carpet Barbara Vine Good Behaviour Molly Keane Oryx and Crake - Margaret AtwoodOne Day David Nichols Geisha Liza DalbyIn The Heart Of The Sea Nathanial PhilbrickSpycatcher Peter WrightThe Horse Whisperer Nicholas EvansThe German Invasion Of Norway Geirr H Haarr Accidents In The Home Tessa HadleyDevoted Ladies Molly KeaneA Fine Balance Rohinton MistryLord Of The Flies William GoldingRebecca Daphne Du MaurierUntying The Knot Linda Gillard One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, Thursday Next First Among Sequels, Something Rotten, The Well Of Lost Plots, Lost In A Good Book, The Eyre Affair Jasper Fforde Life Of Pi - Yann MartelThe Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared - Jonas Jonasson The Terror Round the Bend Infidel Ayaan Hirsi Ali Nerd Do Well Simon PeggThe Voyage Out Virginia Woolf The Dragon Atlan The City all by Jane Gaskell Renoir My Father Jean Renoir Shopping, Seduction And Mr Selfridge Lindy Woodhead 7 Trips Through Time And Space anthology Night Watch Andrew m Stephenson SF Out Of Time-Five tales of Time Travel Strange Loops The Time Travel Megapack The Martian Way Isaac Asimov The Green Brain Frank Herbert The Steampunk megapack (26 stories) Viridis Lady Of Devices A Steampunk Adventure Steampunk Erotica Best New SF 25 Meeting At Infinity John Brunner Edited May 19, 2019 by vodkafan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted April 27, 2019 Author Share Posted April 27, 2019 Open for business! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hayley Posted April 27, 2019 Share Posted April 27, 2019 Yay, new book blog! I want to read quite a lot of the books on your tbr list too, particularly from the Victorian list! I'll be interested in what you think of Jasper Fforde when you get round to those. I love them but they are really quirky. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted April 27, 2019 Author Share Posted April 27, 2019 Thanks Hayley. I need to get another kindle before I can read the Jasper Ffordes, and many of the more obscure Victorian ones on my TBR. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Athena Posted April 29, 2019 Share Posted April 29, 2019 I wish you happy reading in 2019, VF ! How are things in your life? I hope you are well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 1, 2019 Author Share Posted May 1, 2019 Hi Athena, thanks! I am just about to move in 3 days, but that's another story! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~Andrea~ Posted May 2, 2019 Share Posted May 2, 2019 Hi VF! Good luck with the move. Hopefully you're moving somewhere less eventful! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Athena Posted May 3, 2019 Share Posted May 3, 2019 On 5/1/2019 at 12:48 PM, vodkafan said: Hi Athena, thanks! I am just about to move in 3 days, but that's another story! Good luck with the move!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 9, 2019 Author Share Posted May 9, 2019 On 5/3/2019 at 8:35 AM, Athena said: Good luck with the move!! Thanks Athena. The move was a horrible long day but went as smooth as can be expected. My reading is creeping up again . Just finished a physics book Just Six Numbers which was quite interesting, although a bit out of date as some of the things the author discusses have now been proved, and some others disproved since it was written. I will try to catch up on reviews this weekend . On 5/2/2019 at 1:21 PM, ~Andrea~ said: Hi VF! Good luck with the move. Hopefully you're moving somewhere less eventful! Haha yes I won't miss the other occupants of that place. I didn't tell anybody I was leaving, which was perhaps a little mean, but The Murderer saw me loading the van up and said goodbye. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
poppy Posted May 10, 2019 Share Posted May 10, 2019 Life will be less dramatic, I'm sure, after leaving that lot behind. I hope your new place is much more peaceful and safe and that you're settling in nicely VF Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 11, 2019 Author Share Posted May 11, 2019 Just Six Numbers 3/5 Martin Rees I picked this up ages ago in a charity shop without really knowing what it was about. When I finally got to reading it and found it was about physics I found it informative and quite unusual in it's approach. Everybody is familiar with the concept by now that we live in a "Goldilocks zone" in the Solar System; our orbit is not too close to the sun or too far away, everything is just right. Well this book shows that we also live in a "Goldilocks universe" . If the values of any one of the physical forces (for instance, Gravity, or the Nuclear Strong Force that holds atoms together) were even the tiniest degree different then we would not be here. This leads to the conclusion that there are (or in some cases were, because their lifespans would be short) other universes alongside our own that developed differently. The book is quite a bit out of date, (late 1990s) as I knew when reading that some things the author had theories on had already been proven or disproved. But it was still a good read. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 11, 2019 Author Share Posted May 11, 2019 The Bloody Ground 3/5 Bernard Cornwell A friend passed me this paperback and said it was a good read. It is the fourth in a continuing series about a fictional character in the American Civil War, Nathanial Starbuck. He is very much like the Richard Sharpe character in the author's other more famous series of books; he is not a superman and has contradictory traits that make him interesting. I haven't read any of the previous books in the series but that didn't matter. In this novel Starbuck is taken away from the Southern Confederate Brigade he has been fighting with and placed in command of a Punishment battalion, the "Yellowlegs". This formation got it's unfortunate nickname because it ran away in it's first battle. This appointment is also a sort of punishment for Starbuck, who is not well liked by some senior officers (another parallel with the Sharpe books) . He finds the battalion depot is being run by officers that are corrupt, cowardly and in some cases criminal and the men's morale very low due to bullying and mistreatment. Even though this scenario is a familiar and well-trodden trope I didn't mind . It was a fun read. Later on The Yellowlegs get to fight in the Battle of Antietam (which I didn't know much about before) and the author skilfully blends the characters into the real events and brings it to life so that the reader really understands the sequence of the battle. The descriptions of the ground are a strong point; you can clearly see it in your mind's eye. The battle chapters are rip-roaring stuff and depict terrible slaughter. The author is not making anything up: 23,000 men killed on a single day within calling distance of each other and at times by desperate hand to hand fighting with bayonets. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 11, 2019 Author Share Posted May 11, 2019 The Shivering Sands 3/5 Victoria Holt Another charity shop find, an old Gothic Romance from 1969. I was attracted by the cover art and the fact that it was set in the Victorian period. A young widow takes a position as a music teacher to a disparate group of young girls at a grand house in Cornwall. She takes the position mainly to try to discover the reason for the disappearance of her sister, who had a connection with the same house. I enjoyed this story, it was well written and the plot was full of clues and red herrings ( a couple of which had me looking in the wrong direction right till the end). The romance is slow burning and a bit predictable, but the mystery had more than enough interest to keep me reading. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hayley Posted May 12, 2019 Share Posted May 12, 2019 Glad to see you've enjoyed your last few books! Fingers crossed you get some 4/5's or 5/5's soon too though Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 12, 2019 Author Share Posted May 12, 2019 2 hours ago, Hayley said: Glad to see you've enjoyed your last few books! Fingers crossed you get some 4/5's or 5/5's soon too though Thanks yes It's all been a bit middling so far in.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madeleine Posted May 13, 2019 Share Posted May 13, 2019 I've read a couple of Victoria Holt's books over the years and enjoyed them, they're good yarns and as you say quite well-written. I thought the writing style might have felt a bit dated but it didn't seem that way at all. I have this one still to read so was glad to see your good review. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 15, 2019 Author Share Posted May 15, 2019 On 5/13/2019 at 11:41 AM, Madeleine said: I've read a couple of Victoria Holt's books over the years and enjoyed them, they're good yarns and as you say quite well-written. I thought the writing style might have felt a bit dated but it didn't seem that way at all. I have this one still to read so was glad to see your good review. Nice! Hope you will get around to reading it soon and we can compare. What are the other Victoria Holt titles you have enjoyed? Are they set in Victorian times? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 15, 2019 Author Share Posted May 15, 2019 Just finished The Dragon by Jane Gaskell. Second part of her Atlan series. I read the first last year but have not reviewed it yet, I will wait until I have completed all four. The most remarkable thing is she was only 16 when she wrote them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hayley Posted May 15, 2019 Share Posted May 15, 2019 2 hours ago, vodkafan said: Just finished The Dragon by Jane Gaskell. Second part of her Atlan series. I read the first last year but have not reviewed it yet, I will wait until I have completed all four. The most remarkable thing is she was only 16 when she wrote them. Wow, 16!? I'm intrigued about this series now, I know you're waiting to review them but, have you enjoyed the first two overall? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madeleine Posted May 15, 2019 Share Posted May 15, 2019 5 hours ago, vodkafan said: Nice! Hope you will get around to reading it soon and we can compare. What are the other Victoria Holt titles you have enjoyed? Are they set in Victorian times? the others are Mistress of Mellyn (which reminded me a bit of a lighter version of Jane Eyre, similar sort of story) and Time of the Hunter's Moon, all set in Victorian times. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 15, 2019 Author Share Posted May 15, 2019 10 hours ago, Madeleine said: the others are Mistress of Mellyn (which reminded me a bit of a lighter version of Jane Eyre, similar sort of story) and Time of the Hunter's Moon, all set in Victorian times. Might look out for those, then. Thanks Madeleine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 15, 2019 Author Share Posted May 15, 2019 13 hours ago, Hayley said: Wow, 16!? I'm intrigued about this series now, I know you're waiting to review them but, have you enjoyed the first two overall? They are a weird blend. Both unexpectedly adult (the sexual content would not be allowed to be published now, I feel) and at the same time in some ways a childlike fantasy. Can't knock the writing, good descriptions of places and action. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vodkafan Posted May 19, 2019 Author Share Posted May 19, 2019 Devoted Ladies 4/5 Molly Keane My first 4/5 book this year! Molly Keane (a pseudonym) was a name I kept hearing as a good author so ages ago I picked up a couple of her books. In the move, when most of my books got packed away in boxes, this one and a couple of random others (Oryx and Crake, Just Six Numbers) somehow didn't get in with the rest. So I decided it was fate and took these three to work to put in my locker. But I couldn't get into Devoted Ladies immediately. I had to try three times. I didn't initially like any of the characters, who seemed small minded and deliberately nasty, jaded and decadent. Almost gave up but then hit a part where one of the characters is trying to write a novel and is using every excuse not to actually do any writing. It was hilarious. From then on I was hooked and devoured the rest of the book. It is wicked observational writing . The characters are often vicious to each other for their own amusement, but despite I started to warm to some of them and felt sympathy for their sad lives. The ending is brilliant and unexpected. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hayley Posted May 19, 2019 Share Posted May 19, 2019 Yay, at last! Glad you enjoyed it . Oryx and Crake is on my 'to-read' list so I'll be particularly interested to see what you think of that one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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