RCee

It's my favourite as well. I was about 10 when I read it and I remember wishing we had a big wardrobe that I could crawl into to try and find the entrance to Narnia.

I lov e the sound of this book and will definitely have to pick it up. As for Fernet Branca, I have not tried it before and I am not sure it would be quite my thing but I will have to try it at least once.

I haven't read his books for years but I think Stephen King would make it a surreal and entertaining experience. At the very least I am sure he would take my mind off the building panic as I begin to imagine the walls closing in and the oxygen slowly being depleted *shudders*. I would not do well stuck in a lift for very long!!!

Well, I never feel qualified to do a critique or review on a book, especially when I have loved it as much as I loved this one. What I will say is that it was a wonderful read, full of ups and downs and made the reader feel, see and smell 1870s London. The characters were real and alive in the story, characters you know - you care for them or loath them, but they are real. It is not often I finish a book and actually feel richer for the experience but this book has certainly had that effect on me. I laughed, I cried and when I finished it, I missed it.

Oh I started to watch the Japenese version but it was the middle of the night and I had to get up for work in the morning so couldn't finish it. I have been waiting for it to come back on Sky ever since. It was so creepy!! I never knew it was originally a book! I can't wait to hear what you think if it.

Welcome to the forum!!

Thanks everyone! I have been browsing the subjects and I have an enormous wish list now. I have also been trying to list all the books I have read so far this year and haven't posted them because I can't remember them all (I have loaned out so many books this year). But the forum is wonderful and I am having so much fun reading all your posts. And to be welcomed so warmly has made me feel at home so thanks everyone!

I am always amazed at what cats manage to do!

I am in two minds on this myself. I think in some instances it can be effective and necessary for the story but often it just seems gory and graphic for the sake of it. I think it depends on the story and the context. Like Chrissy I read a lot of crime and thriller. Some of these authors do use it just for shock value and usually does nothing for the story. The good ones, though, use it well and does it in a way that does enhance the story.

Welcome Martine!

Welcome to the forum! I love those types of crime novels too!

It was the eyes that got me. As though butter wouldn't melt

I did too. Animals never cease to amaze. Or amuse as in the case of Stealth Cat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvLEiWzEvQ

The first cat one was brilliant I couldn't see the second one though. And the dogs, how wonderful! I saw one a few weeks ago where a dog saved another dog that had been hit on an American freeway by dragging it to the side of the road. Here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2qSakxWt54

Hello Debs! Welcome!

My mother once made a chilli and confused 4 teaspoons with 4 tablespoons of chilli powder and she used cayenne instead of chilli powder. We all like spicy food, but this was way too hot! None of us could eat it and it had to thrown away.

Add me as well

Oh for me, any stationery department is to be avoided as I will have to buy a notebook, new pen, something for my desk.....

I am still reading The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber which is really wonderful but a long read. It is 835 pages and my wrists have been getting a work out for a couple of weeks now Amazon.co.uk Review Although it's billed as "the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century," The Crimson Petal and the White is anything but Victorian. It's the story of a well-read London prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours composing a violent, pornographic screed against men. Michel Faber's dazzling second novel dares to go where George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and the works of Charles Dickens could not. We learn about the positions and orifices that Sugar and her clients favour, about her lingering skin condition, and about the suspect ingredients of her prophylactic douches. Still, Sugar believes she can make a better life for herself. When she is taken up by a wealthy man, the perfumer William Rackham, her wings are clipped and she must balance financial security against the obvious servitude of her position. The physical risks and hardships of Sugar's life (and the even harder "honest" life she would have led as a factory worker) contrast--yet not entirely--with the medical mistreatment of her benefactor's wife, Agnes, and beautifully underscore Faber's emphasis on class and sexual politics. In theme and treatment, this is a novel that Virginia Woolf might have written, had she been born 70 years later. The language, however, is Faber's own--brisk and elastic--and, after an awkward opening, the plethora of detail he offers (costume, food, manners, cheap stage performances, the London streets) slides effortlessly into his forward-moving sentences. When Agnes goes mad, for instance, "she sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board." Despite its 800-plus pages, The Crimson Petal and the White turns out to be a quick read, since it is truly impossible to put down. --Regina Marler, Amazon.com

My OH just read that and he really enjoyed it.

I was thinking the same thing. I read this when it first came out and have loaned it to everyone I knew at one point or another. I think I will dig out of the bookcase and reread it next.

I don't read much non-fiction, but when I do it is usually travel biographies and annthing about dogs. I will very occasionally read a biography/autobiography of historical persons. And I read history now and again. I love anything about past kings and queens (loved Starkey's Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII).