Poppy's Paperbacks 2012

[Kidsmum]

I used to love these when I was little. I can't count how many times I must have read them, and I still have my old battered cardboard covered copies from back them. Aw, I feel all nostalgic for my little self now

 

My heart went out to poor Joan the little girl who never got a letter or birthday card from her mummy because she'd loved her brother who'd died more than Joan

[poppyshake]

I've never read any of her Naughtiest Girl books .. they seemed to pass me by. I was devoted to St Clares and Malory Towers .. also dipped into the Famous Five (but never could get on with the Secret Seven) and read all the Five Find Outers books and the Six Cousins but somehow I grew up before I'd exhausted her. She wrote so prolifically that it was impossible to fit them all in during childhood. I've only been back for re-reads since but I'm sure it's not too late for me to enjoy some Naughtiest Girl stories I hope she was well and truly naughty though.

[poppyshake]

For our 22nd wedding anniversary, amongst other things, Alan bought me Bright Star: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Keats

 

It was incredibly sweet of him and the reason he bought it was because he picked up my selected diaries of Virginia Woolf and read that she had just been given a copy of Keats' poems by her sister and was thrilled by them

[poppyshake]

 

The Child That Book's Built

 

Waterstones Synopsis: "Fairy Tales" and "Where the Wild Things Are", "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Narnia books", "Little House on the Prairie" and "The Earthsea Trilogy". What would you find if you went back and re-read your favourite books from childhood? Francis Spufford discovers both delight and sadness, in this widely celebrated memoir of a boy who retreats into books, faced with a tragedy in his family. "A beautifully composed and wholly original memoir, sounding the classics of children's literature." (David Sexton, "Evening Standard"). "Exuberant and serious, funny and sophisticated, this memoir of reading and childhood is a delight." (Andrea Ashworth).

 

Review: Hmmm .. this book had 'you will love it' written all over it, alas I didn't ... we never became friends The book was more about why children read the books they do and in places (more often than not in fact) it gets very bogged down in analysis and what the experts have to say. When he actually did talk about the books he read in childhood I enjoyed it more but too often, in order to get there, you had to wade through a boggy morass. I think it would definitely be of interest to those that like to delve into the psyche of why we do what we do and how it shapes us but .. being a bear of much smaller brain .. I just wanted to know what he thought about the merits of living in Middle Earth as opposed to Narnia It didn't help much that I wasn't at all familiar with Ursula le Guin's or Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories because it meant that the enjoyable bits got narrower. If truth be told .. and I always try to tell it unless it's to do with haircuts or shoes .. I didn't take to Francis much. He seemed a bit of a cold fish, his younger sister was terminally ill and to say that he resented the attention she required would be an understatement .. now I know that's not an unusual feeling for him to have .. especially as a child but somehow his attitude left me feeling at best ambivalent towards him .. I thought that might improve as he grew up but it didn't. It's what made him turn to books as a means of escape though so I can see why that particular part of his story needed telling.

 

Too many pages turned without pleasure.

 

I'm happy to read this ..

'Be a Roman soldier, said a book by Rosemary Sutcliffe. Be an urchin in Georgian London, said a Leon Garfield. Be Milo, 'who was bored, not some of the time but all of the time' and drives past the purple tollbooth to the Lands Beyond. Be where you can hear cats talking by tasting the red liquid in the big bottle in a chemist's shop window. Be where magic works easily. Be where magic works frighteningly. Be where you can work magic, but have to conceal being invisible or being able to fly from the eyes of the grown-ups. Be an Egyptian child beside the Nile, be a rabbit on Watership Down, be a foundling so lonely in a medieval castle that the physical ache of it reaches to you out of the book; be one of a gang of London kids playing on a bombsite amongst the willowherb and the loosestrife, only fifteen years or so before 1972 but already far, far into the past. Be a king. Be a slave. Be Biggles. All this was there in the library basement, if you picked up the books and coaxed them into activity.'

 

.. but not so happy with this ..

'As a set of metaphors, Piaget's sequence of stages is unquestionably valuable. That's how I use them throughout this book: his progression from pre-operative thought, to concrete operations, to abstract operations, gave me a loose conceptual map for my whole history as a reader. But for the last twenty or thirty years developmental psychologists have increasingly challenged Piaget on such crucial details as the class-inclusion problem, and their disagreement focuses on language.

 

..or this ..

'This is the layer of the mind which Chomskyans believe is our fundamental organ of linguistic ability, generated by the physical structure of our bodies. The assignment of a noun-like quality to one portion of the undivided flow, and a verb-like quality to another, is grammar in its primary form. (yes, alright but what did you make of Edmund selling his family down the river for some Turkish delight? )

 

This will soon be heading back to the charity shop from whence it came but if anyone thinks they might be interested to read it, let me know and I'll send it on.

 

6/10

[chesilbeach]

Hmmm .. this book had 'you will love it' written all over it, alas I didn't ... we never became friends

 

I tried this book a few years ago, and this sums up exactly what I thought! In fact, I gave up after about 50 pages.

[poppyshake]

I tried this book a few years ago, and this sums up exactly what I thought! In fact, I gave up after about 50 pages.

Haha .. I am made of stern stuff (or I am an idiot and don't know when to give in ) I truly meant to abandon more books this year .. I wasn't planning on being excessively pernickety just hoping to stop plodding on with books that I'm not enjoying. You gave him 50 pages .. that's fair .. it may well be my benchmark for the future (going on this rule I would already have given up on Margaret Atwood's Surfacing which is causing me to slip into an almost deadly ennui at the moment )

[poppyshake]

 

Waterstone's Synopsis: A young woman returns to northern Quebec to the remote island of her childhood, with her lover and two friends, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her father. Flooded with memories, she begins to realise that going home means entering not only another place but another time. As the wild island exerts its elemental hold and she is submerged in the language of the wilderness, she sees that what she is really looking for is her own past.

 

Review: Another one I struggled with. It's not the plot, that seemed interesting enough, it was the telling of it .. it gave me knots in my head. It's quite fragmented and stream of conciousness and I found I couldn't connect with it (how I get on with Virginia is still a mystery to me) I just found it dull and well, preposterous .. I couldn't believe in it .. not even for five mins. You know those books where you think 'all very well and good but I don't care three straws about any of you' .. well this was one of those (for me that is ... I can see from other reviews that a lot of people love it and think it quite poetic). It's like one of those films where nobody speaks much but when they do they say the most profound things .. or total twaddle .. depending on your viewpoint.

 

The narrator is anonymous .. we never do find out her name but I never felt like I had a handle on her anyway and the rest of the characters were even more shadowy. As the synopsis says it starts off being about the search to find her father but it ends up being about her finding herself (and Lord do I wish she'd found herself earlier!). There's hardly any dialogue, most of what we read is taken directly from her headspace.

 

'In the cool green among the trees, new trees and stumps, the stumps with charcoal crusts on them, scabby and crippled, survivors of an old disaster. Sight flowing ahead of me over the ground, eyes filtering the shapes, the names of things fading but their forms and uses remaining, the animals learned what to eat without nouns. Six leaves, three leaves, the root of this is crisp. White stems curved like question marks, fish-coloured in the dim light, corpse plants, inedible.'

 

Atwood does explore some very important issues, our narrator has been shaped by some traumatic experiences in her past which are slowly revealed but I ended up not caring much because she'd wearied me on the journey. It seemed to take leave of its senses near the end and go quite mad which was very nearly entertaining but all too soon that ended and we were back to the gloom. The absolute best bit about reading this is that I get to cross it off the 1001 It definitely would have been abandoned otherwise because, for me, it was an unenjoyable trudge.

 

I hope this is not indicative of her other work because I'm eyeing The Blind Assassin now with even more trepidation than before .. this book was a mere 186 pages long yet it seemed to take forever.

 

5/10

Edited August 18, 2012 by poppyshake

[julie]

Oh Boy, Poppy

Two Bummers right in a row. Sure hope your next one is a Gold Star one !

[poppyshake]

Thank you Julie I'm reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie now and so far, so good

[vodkafan]

Happy Anniversary Poppyshake...I am getting deja vu writing this have I said it already?

[poppyshake]

Happy Anniversary Poppyshake...I am getting deja vu writing this have I said it already?

Yes but don't worry James ... I'm still celebrating and Alan's still hearing all the 'you'd get less than that for murder' jokes

[Kidsmum]

What a shame Poppy both books sound so good as well i can see why you went for them.

[Inver]

Thank you Julie I'm reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie now and so far, so good

Now that is a good read...hope you really enjoy it. Have you seen the film with Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie...FAB stuff.

[poppyshake]

What a shame Poppy both books sound so good as well i can see why you went for them.

Yes, blurbs can be deceiving (they should put that as a warning on all books ) .. never mind .. it makes the good ones all the better

 

Now that is a good read...hope you really enjoy it. Have you seen the film with Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie...FAB stuff.

I am loving it Diane I have seen the film with Maggie though not for a while .. Geraldine McEwan also comes to mind .. was she in a film of it too?

[chesilbeach]

I am loving it Diane I have seen the film with Maggie though not for a while .. Geraldine McEwan also comes to mind .. was she in a film of it too?

There was a television series of it in the late 70s and she played Jean Brodie. I haven't seen it, but the Maggie Smith film is one of my favourites - it was on a few weeks ago and I caught the last hour. I love Maggie Smith. The book's good too!

[poppyshake]

There was a television series of it in the late 70s and she played Jean Brodie. I haven't seen it, but the Maggie Smith film is one of my favourites - it was on a few weeks ago and I caught the last hour. I love Maggie Smith. The book's good too!

Thanks Claire .. that would explain it. I love Maggie Smith too .. she's brilliant I thoroughly enjoyed the book .. it was a joy compared to the other two .. so readable which they sadly weren't.

[poppyshake]

I expect you already know this .. the first page of this blog is a bit of a giveaway .. but, I do love a list Anyway, there I was wandering around Waterstone's, daring them to tempt me when I spied a book called The Modern Library: 200 Best Novels in English since 1950. My reaction was oooohhhhhh! I picked it up and had a bit of a flick. Now, straight off, the fact that it had Colm Toibin as a co-author (the other being Carmen Calill) impressed me. I really loved The Master and so was more inclined to believe that Colm would know what I'd like or what would be worth my while reading anyway. I didn't buy it .. though I might .. I did what all naughty people do after having a browse in Waterstone's .. I looked it up on the net and sure enough someone had printed up the list. So, just because it gives me the greatest of pleasures to highlight things and turn them blue (though sadly ... in this instance ... the pleasure was over all too soon), here is the list

 

Progress 17/200

 

1. A Murder Is Announced - Agatha Christie

2. Nothing - Henry Green

3. Power Without Glory - Frank Hardy

4. The Grand Sophy - Georgette Heyer

5. December Bride - Sam Hanna Bell

6. My Cousin Rachel - Daphne Du Maurier

7. The West Pier - Patrick Hamilton

8. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe - Carson McCullers

9. A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell

10. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

11. Invisible Man: A Novel - Ralph Ellison

12. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

13. The Natural - Bernard Malamud

14. The Financial Expert - R.K. Narayan

15. Wise Blood: A Novel - Flannery O'Connor

16. East of Eden - John Steinbeck

17. The Sword of Honour Trilogy - Evelyn Waugh

18. Private Life of an Indian Prince - Mulk Raj Anand

19. Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin

20. The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow

21. The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler

22. The Go-Between - L.P. Hartley

23. The Echoing Grove - Rosamond Lehman

24. The Palm-Wine Drunkard - Amos Tutola

25. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

26. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

27. The Tortoise and the Hare - Elizabeth Jenkins

28. The Flint Anchor - Sylvia Townsend Warner

29. Molloy: Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett

30. Recognitions - William Gaddis

31. The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith

32. Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov

33. A Legacy - Sybille Bedford

34. Train to Pakistan - Khushwant Singh

35. Owls Do Cry - Janet Frame

36. On the Road - Jack Kerouac

37. Angel - Elizabeth Taylor

38. The Fountain Overflows - Rebecca West

39. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

40. Anecdotes of Destiny - Isak Dineson

41. From the Terrace - John O'Hara

42. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - Alan Sillitoe

43. Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs

44. A Heritage and its History - Ivy Compton-Burnett

45. The Little Disturbances of Man - Grace Paley

46. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

47. Balkan Trilogy - Olivia Manning

48. Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetrology: (Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) - John Updike

49. Jeeves in the Offing - P.G. Wodehouse

50. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

51. A House for Mr Biswas - V.S. Naipaul

52. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark

53. Riders in the Chariot - Patrick White

54. That's How it Was - Maureen Duffy

55. The Reivers - William Faulkner

56. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing

57. The Lonely Girl - Edna O'Brien

58. Ship of Fools - Katherine Anne Porter

59. The Little Girls - Elizabeth Bowen

60. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John le Carre

61. The Group - Mary McCarthy

62. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

63. Herzog - Saul Bellow

64. Heartland - Wilson Harris

65. Last Exit to Brooklyn - Hubert Selby

66. Memoirs of a Peon - Frank Sargeson

67. Interpreters - Wole Soyinka

68. A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence

69. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

70. The Jewel in the Crown - Paul Scott

71. Cotters England - Christina Stead

72. The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron

73. A Grain of Wheat - Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

74. In the Heart of the Country - William H. Gass

75. The Nice and the Good - Iris Murdoch

76. The Unfortunates - B.S. Johnson

77. Happiness and other Stories - Mary Lavin

78. The Godfather - Mario Puzo

79. Fifth Business - Robertson Davies

80. Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian

81. The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth

82. St. Urbain's Horseman - Mordecai Richler

83. Black List, section H - Francis Stuart

84. The Optomist's Daughter - Eudora Welty

85. The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell

86. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

87. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow

88. Heat and Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

89. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses - David Lodge

90. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood - Alistair Macleod

91. Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice

92. Saville - David Storey

93. Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge

94. Falconer - John Cheever

95. A Book of Common Prayer - Joan Didion

96. Ice Age - Margaret Drabble

97. Tirra Lirra by the River - Jessica Andersen

98. Plumb - Maurice Gee

99. The Human Factor - Graham Greene

100. Murderer - Roy Heath

101. The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan

102. The Year of the French - Thomas Flanagan

103. From the Fifteenth District - Mavis Gallant

104. Burger's Daughter - Nadine Gordimer

105. Sleepless Nights - Elizabeth Hardwick

106. The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer

107. A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul

108. Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess

109. The Transit of Venus - Shirley Hazzard

110. Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban

111. Lamb - Bernard MacLaverty

112. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

113. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

114. Puffball - Fay Weldon

115. Lanark - Alasdair Gray

116. Red Dragon - Thomas Harris

117. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

118. A Flag for Sunrise - Robert Stone

119. On the Black Hill - Bruce Chatwin

120 Schindler's Ark - Thomas Keneally

121. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

122. A Boys Own Story -

123. Money - Martin Amis

124. Empire of the Sun - J.G. Ballard

125. Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes

126. In Custody - Anita Desai

127. Nation of Fools - Balraj Khanna

128. Machine Dreams - Jayne Anne Phillips

129. Family and Friends - Anita Brookner

130. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

131. Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurty

132. Black Robe - Brian Moore

133. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson

134. The Sportswriter - Richard Ford

135. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro

136. A Summons to Memphis - Peter Taylor

137. Dark Adapted Eye - Barbara Vine

138. Ellen Foster - Kaye Gibbons

139. Double Whammy - Carl Hiaasen

140. Misery - Stephen King

141. Beloved - Toni Morrison

142. In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje

143. Other Garden - Francis Wyndham

144. Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey

145. Where I'm Calling From - Raymond Carver

146. Paris Trout - Pete Dexter

147. Sugar Mother - Elizabeth Jolley

148. Forty-seventeen - Frank Moorhouse

149. Ice Candy Man - Bapsi Sidhwa

150. Breathing Lessons - Anne Tyler

151. The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe

152. The Book of Evidence - John Banville

153. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love - Oscar Hijuelos

154. The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan

155. Possession - A.S. Byatt

156. Age of Iron - J.M. Coetzee

157. A Home at the End of the World - Michael Cunningham

158. The Snapper - Roddy Doyle

159. Get Shorty - Elmore Leonard

160. Amongst Women - John McGahern

161. The Great World - David Malouf

162. Friend of My Youth - Alice Munro

163. Regeneration Trilogy - Pat Barker

164. Wise Children - Angela Carter

165. A Strange and Sublime Address - Amit Chaudhuri

166. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

167. Redundancy of Courage - Timothy Mo

168. Mating - Norman Rush

169. Downriver - Iain Sinclair

170. A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley

171. Reading Turgenev - William Trevor

172. Cloudstreet - Tim Winton

173. Death and Nightingales - Eugene McCabe

174. The Butcher Boy - Patrick McCabe

175. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

176. The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides

177. River Sutra - Gita Mehta

178. My Idea of Fun - Will Self

179. The Shipping News - Annie Proulx

180. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

181. What a Carve Up - Jonathan Coe

182. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres

183. The Folding Star - Alan Hollinghurst

184. Original Sin - P.D. James

185. How Late it Was, How Late - James Kelman

186. The Tortilla Curtain - T. Coraghessan Boyle

187. The Blue Flower - Penelope Fitzgerald

188. A Fine Balance - Mistry Rohinton

189. Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood

190. Asylum - Patrick McGrath

191. Last Orders - Graham Swift

192. Night in Question - Tobias Wolff

193. Quarantine - Jim Crace

194. Underworld - Don Delillo

195. American Pastoral - Philip Roth

196. Lady from Guatemala - V.S. Pritchett

197. The Magus - John Fowles

198. So Long, See You Tomorrow - William Maxwell

199. Children's Bach - Helen Garner

200. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

 

There are some criticisms that because Colm is Irish there's too much Irish fiction in the list (though rather nobly but misguidedly he didn't put any of his own novels in). I must admit, I'm amazed there isn't any Murakami.

[vodkafan]

Wot no Jack Vance?

[chaliepud]

You've read far more than me Poppy, and there are lots I don't even recognise... I really should go through them with the help of Amazon but I'm scared how many I might add to my wish list!

Edited August 25, 2012 by chaliepud

[poppyshake]

Wot no Jack Vance?

I'm not an expert but I don't think there's much sciffy in general is there? Perhaps he's scared of it .. like me

 

You've read far more than me Poppy, and there are lots I don't even recognise... I really should go through them with the help of Amazon but I'm scared how many I might add to my wish list!

Yes, I thought that .. but I'll maybe pick out a few at random. The thing is .. those that I have read I've either loved or liked .. I haven't hated any of them (though he's pushing it a bit with Flaubert's Parrot tbh )

[bobblybear]

I've read 15 of them, but there's loads on that list that I've never even heard of!

[julie]

Thanks for the list, Miss Poppy

 

I have read 20 books on the list,some so long ago, I barely remember what they were about .. The few that really stick in my mind are :

 

A Fine Balance

The Shipping News

Lonesome Dove

East of Eden

The Go-Between

The Executioner's Song

 

The others were varied,some I liked ,others I have no clue what they were even about,it was so long ago since reading them.They must not have had as much an impact os the above books did . The books above, I'd give all if them a 5/5 .

[chesilbeach]

I've only read 12 of them, but I agree with Julie about A Fine Balance - one of the best books I've ever read, certainly in my all time top 20.

[poppyshake]

 

Book Blurb: 'The sea spreads leaden, listless; they drift over dreary mud-flats. Ahead appears a long black line which, as the barge draws near, breaks up into clots of men, moving slow as cold ants as they fit great stones together, they will arrive at any moment....

Barch, an Earther, and Komeitk Lelianar, the beautiful stranger from a far world, have together been captured and transported to Magarak by the Klau, great black creatures whose faces are stiff with black bristles and eyes gleam like polished jet. Somehow they escape to the wild mountains where trees clatter in the dank wood as it roars through the valley but soon they must form a daring plan for this inhospitable ground is where the Klau hunt escaped slaves, for sport...'

 

Review: Anyone who reads this blog will know that I'm terrified of sci-fi .. just the mere mention of it makes me start twitching. I'm ok with certain sorts, mostly the kind set in a world very much like this one, with people very much like me, doing things that I do .. but being menaced by some sort of plant, animal or zombiefied lifeform but anything beyond that terrifies me. It was something that I wanted to address in particular this year and, very kindly, several forum members took pity on me and sent books to help me shrug off the affliction.

 

One of these was James who sent me two Jack Vance novels the first of which was The Blue World which I enjoyed a lot. There was a reason for reading that one first though .. the title .. there are no disturbing words in it. I was worried about the word 'Klau' but then again I had no idea what 'Wuthering' was either and that turned out ok so there was no need to panic yet. Trying not to worry I turned to the first page and saw another one ... 'Lekthwan' .. what's that? .. I now needed a telescope to see my comfort zone. However, a very wise man (well actually it was Karsa on one of his good days .. I didn't even know he had any ) told me that when he comes across stuff he doesn't understand he marches on sure that it will all make sense eventually. This was a bit of a revelation to me .. my approach is to wrestle with the situation until either it or I submit (usually me ... whimpering in the corner with the bookmark remaining forever on page 12). Now all of this advice came in handy when I came across another of my pet fears ... unprounceable names. The heroine is called Komeitk Lelianr .. always said in full like a fine Russian novel but how do you say it? My mind kept tripping on it like someone had littered the bedroom floor with underpants. However, the author must have known about this because he decided that his hero .. Roy Barch (phew) .. couldn't pronounce it either and he gave her the nickname Ellen and so did I

 

I wouldn't say I was entirely settled after a chapter but it only took about two and things started falling into place. What I like about Vance's novels is that he keeps it all quite sparse and concise. He tells me just as much as I need to know which I find helpful because too much detail would probably boggle me. I was relieved as anything to find that, at the beginning anyway, I was on Earth .. it wasn't an Earth I recognised much and I wouldn't be there for long but it did help settle me.

 

Barch is an Earther and he lives in a part of the world occupied by the Lekthwans (not from Earth) who are golden, glossy, beautiful people .. I had in mind the Beckhams actually but then it went on to say that they were extremely clever, advanced and inventive so obviously the comparison fell flat there Barch is not altogether sure that the advancements initiated by the Lekthwans are advantageous .. he's inclined to feel that in the long run it'll be detrimental ('it's not our science, nor our medicine ... it never grew on Earth') however he is more than a bit smitten with Ellen (the chief Lekthwan's daughter). Suprisingly (because, to be honest, if you think Victoria Beckham is stand offish .. you should meet Ellen) he manages to wangle a date with her (though Ellen is viewing it more as research than anything).

 

Events take a turn for the worse (poor Ellen .. even though I've had some terrible dates I've never come home to find my whole family wiped out) when they are captured by the wicked Klau and taken to Magarak (some sort of slave planet). Now the Klau are pretty evil .. their wish is to take over the Galaxy (isn't it always?). They're pretty frightening too .. I could actually visualise them and I didn't like it one bit (with their black bristly faces and gleamy little eyes with red four-pronged centres) .. my mind kept reminding me of the hideous Uruk-hai who kept me awake for weeks after seeing LOTR (RIP Boromir ). There's only one thing to do if you find yourself captured by them though and that's to use your superior brain power to plot your escape. Barch and Ellen manage to flee from the deadly Podruod (a sort of evil Klau sub species) and team up with the most motley crew of fellow escapees that you're ever likely to come across (including some Splangs, Calbyssinians and Modoks) .. and it's a testament to how far I'd come that I didn't bat an eyelid at any of them .. my favourite was the female Byathid who was described as a 'pink, raw boned woman with a voice like a sheep' .. she sounded a lot like my Auntie Rose Now getting all these different races to agree on anything, let alone on a decent escape plan, is pretty arduous and Barch has his work cut out. His attempts aren't all successful .. every time there's a step forward there's a huge step back and part of the interest is in seeing how he deals with it and moves on because it's not just about escape .. it's about destroying the Klau empire .. and then of course there's Ellen .. do they have a future together?.

 

Rather like The Blue World, the whole plot builds to a point where it becomes virtually unputdownable. It was a challenge to begin with and I can't say I fully understood everything but I overcame it so thank you James for believing I could I had far more trouble with the last two (reviewed) books and enjoyed them a lot less .. and they had fully pronounceable titles

 

8/10

Edited August 26, 2012 by poppyshake

[poppyshake]

I've read 15 of them, but there's loads on that list that I've never even heard of!

Me too .. the only consolation for me is that there's less unheard of books on it than there is on the 1001 I feel Colm's list is more manageable.

Thanks for the list, Miss Poppy

I have read 20 books on the list,some so long ago, I barely remember what they were about .. The few that really stick in my mind are :

A Fine Balance

The Shipping News

Lonesome Dove

East of Eden

The Go-Between

The Executioner's Song

The others were varied,some I liked ,others I have no clue what they were even about,it was so long ago since reading them.They must not have had as much an impact os the above books did . The books above, I'd give all if them a 5/5 .

The Shipping News would rank as one of my favouritest books ever Julie .. I read it just after Christmas one year with ice on the ground and it was the most perfect timing .. I loved every word of it. I am making a note of all your 5/5's .. they've got to be worth looking out for

I've only read 12 of them, but I agree with Julie about A Fine Balance - one of the best books I've ever read, certainly in my all time top 20.

So many people say it's a great book .. I've never heard or read a bad review of it and I have it on the shelf .. it's only the size of it that puts me off