poppyshake

haha ... you're right Kylie, of course

Thanks Chesil ... that is brilliant news I don't mind now how long I have to wait, it will be worth it just to see them all gorgeously matching (and they are such great covers too and match the stories so well.) I may well read a borrowed copy before then though.

True, very true .. and I suppose I do rattle on about books so he's bound to pick up some key words every now and then but then he finds books I haven't even mentioned which is bordering on psychic .. if only he could 'know' what I want for my tea tomorrow night, and every subsequent night .. shop for it and cook it .. I could use the time to read more books hmmm, then my mirror is lying to me I hope your 'date' went well Frankie, it's so exciting. Did she like all the books you like?, did she have good recommendations? .. you didn't have to tell her any of her book choices were crap did you ? If she mentioned any of these words = Good ... Fforde, Safran Foer, Eggers, Ishiguro, Shaffer, Gaiman, Rhodes, Lee, Austen, Wilde If she mentioned any of these words = Bad ... Gustave or Flaubert

I think my font is corrupting everyone else's I'll give it a go, if it makes me too 'heavy boots' (I've picked this expression up from Oskar in 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close') then I'll have to give it the elbow (I picked that one up from my Dad )

Day 11 – A book you hated 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert. I read it a while ago but the sheer dullness of it left it's mark. I can't remember why I hated it so but the words tedious and boring come to mind. Plus I just didn't give a fig for anyone it it, I didn't like them, love them or hate them .. just nothing, no feelings whatsoever one way or another (except for a very slight irritation like an itch that can't be scratched away.) It's my own personal opinion that there are two versions of 'Madame Bovary', the one that nearly everyone else reads and enjoys and the bogus one that was foisted on me. All I thought at the end of it was .. 'I can never get that time back again' .. I could have read at least two far more interesting books, I could have learnt to play an instrument or done something worthwhile like sampled every ice cream that Ben & Jerry's make but no, it's too late, and there's a Madame Bovary shaped hole in my life, somewhen around 2003, where time stood still and the only sound heard was that of my brain crumbling. If you, or anyone you know has had an equally distressing experience whilst reading 'Madame Bovary', please get in touch with Frankie, Ooshie or myself .. we are living proof that you can recover and enjoy books again

Rest assured the second, third and fourth books are brilliant .. each book so far has exceeded my expectations which is why I'm nervous having read some slight criticisms of the next two (I haven't even got a copy of 'First Among Sequels' yet which is mostly because it is nigh on imposible to get a paperback copy with a cover that matches all the others grrrrrrrr unless you pay £20 plus) but I will probably borrow it from a library and then take my time finding my own copy. It's clear to me that the people of Finland have the best taste in books in the world (I am suspecting that the people of Australia will run you a very close second ) How clever of you to be born there Frankie Yes, there is hardly anything to choose for me between P&P, Northanger Abbey and S&S .. then would come Persuasion but the other two I can take or leave (having said that there are bits of both books that I love it's just that overall they are my least faves.)

Day 10 – Favourite classic book Hmmm .. I need to think about this one! Ok, well I could pick any of about twenty or thirty favourites, but if pushed I'd have to go for Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' even though that seems like the most predictable of answers, it's the first classic that I ever read for pleasure and it encouraged me to try other classic stories. Also, I love the humour in it, it's the sort of humour I love best .. observational and at times absurd. The list of those that I also love would be as long as your arm .. I'll just mention a few ... To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee Catch 22 - Joseph Heller Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier Great Expectations - Charles Dickens Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky The Diary of a Nobody - George & Weedon Grossmith The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford

The Good Fairies of New York - Martin Millar Waterstones Synopsis: Morag and Heather, two eighteen-inch fairies with swords, green kilts and badly dyed hair fly through the window of the worst violinist in New York, an overweight and antisocial type named Dinnie, and vomit on his carpet. Who they are, how they came to New York and what this has to do with the lovely Kerry - who lives across the street, and has Crohn's Disease, and is making a flower alphabet - and what this has to do with the other fairies (of all nationalities) of New York, not to mention the poor repressed fairies of Britain, is the subject of this book. It has a war in it, and a most unusual production of Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and Johnny Thunders' New York Dolls guitar solos. What more could anyone desire from a book? Review: If you like your fairies to be demure twinkling little things then you won't like this book, these fairies are whisky swilling, aggressive, potty mouthed and loose (in the moral sense of the world, it's perfectly ok for instance for brother and sister fairies to have 'relations' together .. in that way they're more akin to the animal kingdom than the human one,) and the style takes some getting used to, it's quite erratic, jumping from plotline to plotline, sometimes all on one page, in a jerky rather frenetic style. The fairies in New York are a bit of a mixed bunch, there is Morag and Heather (my personal favourites) a couple of Scottish fairies who are on the run (they are in disgrace after cutting up what they took to be an old sheet to make blankets, only it turned out to be 'The MacLeod Fairy Banner .. and to have the murderous MacLeod's after you is a fate worse than death.) They fall out very soon after arriving (which seems to be the story of their lives .. the MacPherson and MacKintosh clans being natural enemies) and take up residence with two humans .. the beautiful, flower loving, free spirited, Kerry who is suffering from Crohn's Disease and who just wants to be able to play all of the New York Dolls guitar solos and the obese, lazy and uncouth Dinnie who is obsessed by the TV sex channel and who plays the violin badly. Morag and Heather are very funny, making jokes at each others expense, getting into fights and scrapes and generally causing mayhem wherever they go. The book does focus on these two in particular and I'm glad it does because I found them to be the best and funniest characters. Also in New York, dazed and confused after consuming too much whisky, beer and magic mushrooms are five more fairies who have run away from their tyrant leader .. Tala fairy king of Cornwall .. including his rightful heirs Petal and Tulip. Back in Cornwall King Tala is furious and wants them found at all costs (fearing that the rebels he is already fighting will claim them as leaders and usurp him.) Add to that the Italian, Chinese and Ghanaian fairy communities already resident in New York, Magenta the bag lady who believes she is a legendary Greek general (too much sipping on a 'Fitzroy' cocktail .. a concoction consisting of shoe polish, meth's, fruit juice and herbs) and the ghost of Johnny Thunders looking for his beloved stolen Gibson guitar and you have well, at least some of the plot. It's great fun, but you do have to concentrate, it's all over the place and keeping track of all the threads takes effort. Also, whoever proofread it needs shooting because there are loads of mistakes (spelling mostly .. I wouldn't notice a punctuation mistake if it jumped up and bit me,) I gave up counting in the end. I think kids would enjoy it but the language and sexual references mean that it's entirely unsuitable which is a bit of a shame because, in a way, it falls between two stools. The book comes highly recommended by Neil Gaiman which is praise indeed (there's a great introduction from him saying that he didn't dare read it for five years because he was afraid it would be similar to the book he was writing 'The American Gods'.) Entertaining but weird. 7/10

Oh dear Oosh I'm a bit worried now, I'll make sure I'm in a good place before I attempt reading it and will mix it with something else more light hearted. If it's too dire then I'll abandon it and throw it back at the charity shop (would it be charitable to inflict such a book on anyone else? .. well, it came from there and I guess everyone is different, some people like gloomy books.) I think it says something on the back about it being life affirming so I thought it can't be all that bad (wrong obviously) ... and the other good thing about it is .. it's short

Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving 'A Catcher in the Rye' by J.D. Salinger. It's got a bit of a gloomy, if not to say sinister, reputation, there's all that stuff about it being the book that motivated Mark Chapman to shoot and kill John Lennon so I was expecting it to be pretty bleak and to have a subtext running through it that encouraged readers to go out on the rampage. It is said to be the book he had asked John to sign earlier in the day but then it could just as well of been 'The House at Pooh Corner' ... it's a bit unfair to blame a book because someone who's clearly unstable has gone out and committed a murder. Holden, the main character, is a depressive and he hates phonies but in no way is he violent, or an instigator of violence. I was quite touched by his narration, he's a young man trying to figure out the world and trying to come to terms with the death of his younger brother. He's angsty and troubled and doesn't always handle things in the best way but he recognises that eventually and seeks help. Its a book that makes the lists for 'most overrated book' regularly so obviously it's not for everyone, there's not much light in it and the plot is quite thin, nothing much happens, but I'm ok with those sort of intimate novels where you just spend time in the protagonists head, as long as that head has interesting thoughts. I guess I loved it more because I was expecting to hate it.

Great review of 'A Fine Balance' Ruth ..and it's on my shelf so I'm looking forward to reading it. Glad you've started on the list .. there's some tricky one's on there.

Hopefully you can pick up a copy of Jonathan Stroud's 'Amulet of Samarkand' soon and then you'll have the set ... well except for the prequel that is which he's only just published (I'm waiting for the paperback to come out.) 'Ex Libris' was another book I liked ... books about books.. you can't beat them or books with literary anecdotes in .. I love all that stuff I've been meaning to get her 'At Large and at Small' as well but haven't seen it on my travels yet. I did know about 'The Winter Book' by Tove Jansson and want to get it at some point, but I think it'll be a very different animal to 'The Summer Book' .. it's not a follow on, it's a collection of short stories and I don't think they feature Sophia and grandmother .. which all of the stories in 'the Summer Book' do, I think it was a much later book too .. possibly put together after her death, all the same I expect it's great. I went out into town today to the charity shops and bought 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' by Dave Eggers and 'Veronika Decides to Die' by Paulo Coelho .. the latter doesn't sound like a laugh a minute but it's on the 1001 and after reading the back I thought it was worth a try, Alan will raise his eyebrows when he sees it because he doesn't like me reading, what he considers to be, miserable books. I'm thinking of poor 'Billy' and how his back and sides must ache after you've loaded all your books onto him I've run out of shelf space and am stacking books in all sorts of inconvenient places .. must get organised!

OMG yay, yay and thrice yay!! What a wonderful haul, well done Kylie and how clever of you to pick up the Jonathan Strouds, and just as we were speaking of them as well. I loved Tove Jansson's 'The Summer Book' hope you do too Kylie! and I love the sound of all the others, so many there that I want to read too. RIP Borders .. they went from here long ago and I didn't manage to get any last minute bargains ... it was just the tat left by the time I got there (you know, books on how to fix your plumbing etc )

Day 08 – Most overrated book Oh dear, this will put the cat amongt the pigeons, let me say at the outset I don't really believe in the term overrated (or underrated I guess) .. it's just a question of personal taste. If I don't like a book it doesn't mean it's overrated if a million other people love it, it just means it wasn't for me. So the book that wasn't for me but was for a lot of other people is Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy (which is often classed as one book on the lists) ... that's not to say that I hated all three of them, I just got steadily more disappointed and disillusioned with them. I thought they had some great ideas (loved the depiction of the dæmon's and the armoured polar bears) and I quite enjoyed the first book 'The Golden Compass' .. or 'Northern Lights' as we say this side of the pond. I didn't enjoy the second two much, I don't know what it was, some of the ideas seemed re-hashed and hackneyed. The main problem was that I didn't care enough about Lyra or Will ... I guess, having at the time lately read Harry Potter, I was comparing them to Harry, Ron and Hermione .. you feel you know their characters inside out but Lyra and especially Will felt too one-dimensional to me.

Burnt Shadows - Kamila Shamsie Waterstones Synopsis: In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders. August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, "Burnt Shadows" is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed. Review: This book was lent to me by a neighbour and from the cover I didn't think it would be my kind of thing (actually after I'd read the book the cover bugged me even more.) The book is extremely ambitious, spanning decades and taking as it's backdrop the Nagasaki atomic bombing, Partition in India, 9/11 and the Afghanistan war and that is one of it's problems it's a little too ambitious and busy. These events are for the most part just backgrounds, they have an impact on the characters emotionally and physically but they are not explored in any great detail. When Hiroko (the main character and the one that remains in the book throughout) moves from Nagasaki after that 'unspeakable day' to Delhi I found myself wanting to stay and see how the country coped in the aftermath of such horror but the purpose of this story is to write about how people cope when faced with tragedy and displacement, how some triumph (or at least find a way of surviving) and how others falter and how all of this that can filter down and affect future generations. If Hiroko was to turn up on your doorstep you might want to move out straight away as disaster seems to follow her around a bit but then, as we all know, man's appetite for war is unquenchable, and there's hardly a place she could go to on earth that hasn't had it's share of bloodshed. So back to the cover, Hiroko's father and fiancé are killed after the Nagasaki bomb falls and she herself is injured .. the kimono she is wearing melts into her back and she is left with burns shaped like birds from the pattern on her kimono ... lots of dead flesh and charred and puckered skin and this is what annoyed me about the winsome front cover .. I know it's only a representation and to realise it properly would have been gruesome but it cheapens her ordeal a bit and what's worse it's got a definite whiff of the Mills & Boon about it!! I've seen some beautiful covers for it since and wish that the story I'd read had been enclosed in one of them (because I'm ridiculously partial to nice covers.) Anyway, back to the book, I won't go into detail as Waterstone's have written such a good synopsis (hurray, at last a 'fairly' short review.) I thought it was well written and interesting, there were parts of the story that bored me slightly and parts that confused but all in all I was gripped and the pages flew by. The ending was unexpected, there's a twist to the story which I didn't see coming (yeah .. I know .. no-one's surprised) one to make you look for more pages in order to resolve it. It's half hinted at in the tiny prologue, there's a man taken to a cell and stripped naked, he suspects he will soon be wearing an orange jumpsuit, he wonders 'how did it come to this' but you don't know who he is or why he's in the cell .. you don't find out until the last few pages. 7/10 In true Nick Hornby 'books leading to books' style, when I mentioned this story to Frankie, she recommended to me 'A Pale View of Hills' by Kazuo Ishiguro and I'm delighted to say that I've since acquired it so that's one to look forward to. Thanks Frankie The cover I liked more

Granted but you will develop a passion for long dangly 'Bet Lynch' earrings and small children will swing on them in the park. I wish, calorifically speaking, that lettuce would swap places with chocolate.

Thanks Brida I'll add 'A Wild Sheep Chase' to my wishlist. Doesn't he just pick the most fantastic names for his books

Day 07 – Most underrated book Probably a lot of people will think it's not underrated but I'm going to pick 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell' by Susanna Clarke which I thought was just genius. Apart from here on the forum I never hear about it, if I mention it to people they've never heard of it, it doesn't make any of the lists, you don't see it promoted in shops infact you're lucky to find a copy (and I know I've been looking) and, though I think it did win some awards it was not listed for the Orange prize and only longlisted by the Booker and yet I think it is one of the best books to have been written in the last ten years. It is a bit of a housebrick and that might put people off, it has endless footnotes and it does take a while to get going, you have to invest some time at the beginning but the payoff is that you get to read one of the most inventive, imaginative stories ever.

Thanks Kylie , I have to admit .. and it's something that I forgot to say in my review ... that I listened to an abridged version of the story last year so I had a handle on it already which probably helped. I love the cover too .. it's one of my favourite Vintage's, maybe you'll see it again soon

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky Waterstones Synopsis: A troubled young man commits the perfect crime - the murder of a vile pawnbroker whom no one will miss. Raskolnikov is desperate for money, but convinces himself that his motive for the murder is to benefit mankind. So begins one of the greatest novels ever written, a journey into the criminal mind, a police thriller, and a philosophical meditation on morality and redemption. Review: I'll start with a quote from Virginia Woolf about Dostoevsky because she puts it better than I ever could ... “The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled around, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Outside of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.” If he has written a better book than this then all I can say is wow! that book must be phenomenal because this one is just extraordinary. The book opens with a murder and that you continue, if not to have sympathy, then to have compassion for the murderer is quite an achievement. It's not as if the murder is an act of revenge or honour. It's a cruel and senseless act (which, through mischance, becomes even more so) and we're not told why Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov decides to commit it apart from that he feels in some way pre-destined to do it and also that he feels he could do some good with the wealth that will come from it and become an extraordinary man. Dostoevskys writing is quite reminiscent of Dickens (calling to mind 'Our Mutual Friend' in particular), perhaps even tipping into Dickensian sentimentality at times with his depiction of prostitute (not in the unwashed, syphilis ridden way or yet in the glamorous, good time girl sort of way but in the virtuous, chaste, sacrificing all for the family or they would starve type of way) Sonya, but he doesn't go overboard and get quite as maudlin as Dickens. Raskolnikov is drawn to Sonya and she may well prove to be his saving grace. There's a great mix of characters, the destitute Marmeladovs, the cunning and twisted Svidrigailov, the good humoured and amiable Razumhikin and Rodion's devoted and loyal mother and sister. It is dark, brooding and claustrophobic (for a lot of it you are festering inside Rodion's head), there is hardly any light, but for all that it's still hugely entertaining. There is plenty of absurdity and of course lots of suspense .. you get caught up very quickly in this immense battle of good and evil playing out in the heart of Raskolnikov. But the tension doesn't belong solely to him there is plenty to keep you on the edge of your seat in the scenes between the evil Svidrigailov and Rodion's sister Dunya. I'll end with another famous quote ... "All I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness." -- Robert Louis Stevenson on reading Crime and Punishment 10/10

Had to laugh at this even though I loved 'Vanity Fair' .. I've had so many similar experiences especially with great big housebrick books, you can end up hating the very sight of them. I don't mind the way Thackeray rattles on but if it's not your cup of tea then it would be pretty irritating. Celebrate your deliverance .. read something short

Ah bless ... you've tried and you've kept the receipt .. that's love in my book but my OH seems to think that I'd look good in those tiny cut off white denim shorts with frayed edging and trust me .. I wouldn't

Vodka Balloons or Kites?

My Oedipus Complex - Frank O'Connor

Kiss from a Rose - Seal