More reading time required

Fabulous! I can't remember ever being taught this but it just must be an inherently instinctive thing we all do based on how something sounds.

Thank you for all your good wishes. School is going well for James so far, although he's only in for 2 hours a day this week (which is causing a bit of havoc with work), so it's still early days yet.

I've been continually plowing through the Preacher graphic novels. Now up to volume 6: War in the Sun

Suffragette - Not as good as I thought it might be, but still a worthwhile watch The Martian - Not bad, but nothing spectacular.

I've sometimes thought about reading the two sequels seeing as I enjoyed Child 44 so much, but as it was not a book that was quite self contained without it being obvious that there must be a sequel, I haven't sought them out yet.

The coming of September means it's nearly time for my firstborn to start school. I can't believe it's come around so soon. He starts on Monday - very scary!

Cell, along with Lisey's story is one of my least favourite Stephen King's. Yet it starts off so well, iirc.

Onto book 4 : Preacher- ancient history.

Ahem, you mean Great Britain & NI

I haven't actually read that one, so I can't comment, sorry. I've not read loads of them myself, but I have read Sin City, Sandman, Watchmen, The Walking Dead (which is much much much better than the tv series), The Dark Tower prequels and the Buffy & Angel comics that came out soon after the series ended, before I had to abandon them as they got too plain weird! I finished book 2 and started book 3: Preacher: Proud Americans

The tv version I recently watched has inspired me to read the Preacher graphic novels again. I'm already through the first one, Gone to Texas and have started the 2nd one, Until the End of the World. My normal book reading was stalling again, so I figured I needed something easy to read & compulsive to get back into it.

To be fair, I'm not familiar with the comic book material, but I found the acting was cheesy & bad (apart from maybe Will Smith & Margot Robbie) and the storyline was pretty uninspiring. In fact, it was like a very bad version of the Buffy episode: Graduation Day part 2. The one plus point it had was that I didn't fall asleep in the cinema whilst watching it...and I do that a lot lately.

It may have just been one of those situations when sometimes you don't get on with books at certain times in your life, but revisiting them gets a better reaction. I probably will have a look at the Traitor Spy trilogy at some point if that is more like the BM trilogy.

Will probably give that a try too

Congrats on the job, Noll. Wow, good going on the recovery, QK. Hope things only improve for you. Over the weekend we were supposed to be going camping in Wales at a place called Shell Island in the Snowdonia National Park. The forecast didn't look good but we were committed to going as we were meeting 4 other groups of friends there, all with kids apart from one single friend in our group. We stopped off at Telford to convoy with one of them and after a rainy but lovely 3 hour scenic drive to the campsite, we eventually started to set up in a very windy spot. One friend's tent pole snapped as they tried to set up, but they reckoned they had a spare in the awning, and then as we tried to fit our second pole, the first pole shattered, so that was the end of that! We then had a mad rush to gather everything back up and get off the campsite before we were trapped by the tidal road, which we made it by 5 minutes! To add insult to injury, we followed the advice of our other friends that hadleft, to find a 'lovely restaurant they knew' only to drive an hour out of the way to a place that was closed, to end back on the road we would havd been on, only it was miles longer (I don't know what they were thinking! ) so we only got home at 1.15 in the morning after several layby stops of cramming in random food from the car and making cold coffee as a pick-me up. We had a fairly chilled weekend after that though. It was our daughter's first birthday on Sunday (where has the time gone) so we had a more relaxed day than we would have had at the campsite, so it wasn't all bad

I'm feeling somewhat bereft since the Olympics finished, but at least that gave me a chance to catch up with a load of iPlayer stuff whilst there was nothing much else on.

Luther is amazing. We're still waiting for the last 2 eps to be on some streaming service for free though. We hadn't yet watched it when it was on BBC at Christmas otherwise we would have taped it.

Really? I thought it was dreadful.

Aww bless, hope Xiao-Xiao is ok now!

Welcome to the board I am desperate to read more - I have a massive TBR list (though not as big as some members here ) - but rather than in the past when I would read during every spare minute I was stationary - cleaning my teeth, during my lunch break at work, whilst 'watching tv' in the evening and whilst laying in bed at night - I tend to find that now I get drawn into looking at my phone instead. It's either Facebook, news sites, sport sites or emails and before long, the time I would have read is taken up with reading pointless stuff. Even catching up with what I've missed on this forum takes time away from when I would have otherwise read a book. I think with me it's a bit about having young kids and not having much spare time (and the time I have spare, I'm either running around after them or doing chores) and a bit about it being 'too easy' to waste time on social media. Maybe I should do what I did with Pokemon Go after a week and just delete FB off my phone - now that was a real time suck. As I've spent the last year breastfeeding my daughter, you'd think with all the sitting down time, I would have have shed loads of time to read, but instead my phone or telly tended to win out. I have to properly force myself to get my book out first or else that 'quick look at my phone' turns into a whole session of phone time. I think iPhone has effectively killed my reading mojo!

Hi and welcome

I really liked the Black Magician Trilogy (though have not read the prequel yet), but I didn't really get on with the Age of Five trilogy, so I haven't read any of hers since.

I haven't heard of Fortunately, the Milk! I really enjoyed Ocean at the End of the Lane and The Graveyard Book. Good Omens is great because well, Terry, and Stardust is a really sweet story (plus an excellent film). I can't really remember too much of his other novels apart from that I liked them: Neverwhere, American Gods & Anansi Boys.

Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman I don't get on as well with short story collections as I do with proper novels (so I am not sure why I have read two of them in my last 6 books ) so it's not really a reflection on this book that I'm not marking it super highly, however I don't think it's quite as good as some of his other short story collections. There are some fairly good stories contained in here though and they generally have some kind of twist in the tail or dark undertones. 3/5

My Booky Wook 2 by Russell Brand This was a pretty amusing read that I managed to get through quite quickly. It follows on from Russell's exploits in My Booky Wook and covers his rise in popularity, his break in Hollywood and such events as the MTV video awards and the infamous Radio 2 phone calls to Andrew Sachs. Whether you enjoy this or not basically comes down whether you like Russell Brand. The book also has an unfortunate dedication: "To Katy. This is my past, you are my future." Errmmm, not for long. 3.5/5