vodkafan

Stop the Press! There is another Jason Bourne film coming!

I agree with Madeleine. Keep it accurate !

Ooh that's a challenge. Do you like a lighter read? I would say Will Warburton. If you are interested in late Victorian manners and relationships I would say In The Year Of Jubilee or The Odd Women.

I did the same thing with George Gissing. I feel much better for it.

Am having a bit of a enthusiasm about Westerns at the moment. Saw Django Unchained , which was larger than life and fantastic, and Unforgiven. I considered Unforgiven to be really overrated. It was painfully slow and the dialogue was almost juvenile compared to the authentic period language used in True Grit and Open Range. Found the whole film boring. Why is this considered such a classic? I have another two modern Westerns from Amazon to watch : The Homesman and Meek's Cutoff.

I am going to watch Hardcore Henry at the cinema today!

Hmm yes Where has JK Rowling been hiding that story?

I am reading London The Biography again now. Started it a while back but laid it down for a bit. It will probably take me the rest of April. It's huge.

Interesting! I read WH a couple of months back and Nelly is still fresh in my mind. I might look this up. However, there cannot surely be too much of a plot in this book for Nelly? I am expecting maybe more of her descriptions and thoughts on Cathy and Heathcliffe and the other characters of WH.

Open Range. I had heard the gunfight scene was good and it didn't disappoint!

This one! And Miss Peregrines Home For Unusual Children

Dean Spanley. This wasn't what I expected at all , I thought it would be a "Freaky Friday" type body swap film but it was totally different and much better.

Had a sort through of books this morning and selected about a dozen that I haven't read but now can't remember why I wanted to read them in the first place. Sadly they didn't even ever get added on to my TBR pile so I won't be making that any shorter. I will take them to the charity shop.

I shall put Victorian Entertainment on my list! Haven't made it to the Black Country museum yet.

The Adjustment Bureau. Hmmm.

Kursk 4/5 Lloyd Clark Kursk. Biggest ever tank battle in history. I mean really really big. The Russians had over 5,000 tanks and about 2 million men in this one event. One of those pivotal moments that undoubtedly shaped the way history went. After it was over the German army's strength was sapped and it could never have won the war. The early chapters cover Stalingrad the previous year which was good to read too which explained how Kursk came to happen. With such a huge battle It has to take a fairly large overview so there is not too much from individual soldiers perspective, but snippets from memoirs skillfully mixed in keep it exciting and shows how awful it must have been.

Destined To Be Wives The Sisters of Beatrice Webb 2/5 Barbara Caine This book comes under the category of women's social history. The upper middle class Potter family had ten daughters. They were also spread over a period that covered a time of great change in society attitudes to women and what roles they were allowed. Beatrice Potter (not to be confused with Beatrix Potter who wrote the rabbit stories) was a bit of a rebel who became a social and political reformer after marrying Sidney Webb. She was the famous one. Because the younger sisters had quite different opportunities to the oldest sisters this family offers an almost unique opportunity for study. The author looks at every aspect of their lives from childhood, education, social life, marriage, old age and death and compares them to each other. It also looks at how they (sometimes) formed a female support and survival network for each other. It was interesting, (far more interesting than the book I read about the Mitford sisters) but because it is essentially a scholarly work could not help but be a bit dry in places.

The Selfish Gene 5/5 Richard Dawkins I should have written this review while it was still fresh in my mind, as some of the more detailed arguments are already fading from memory. This book is a keeper, though, so I will certainly read this again before too long. The basic premise is that evolution happens at the level of the gene rather than the individual organism, which was previously thought. His arguments are cogent and very persuasive. Genes are virtually indestructable (we have sequences of genes in us unchanged from when life had much simpler forms) but the individual person or animal is a shuffle of chromosones from two parents that is totally unique and lasts only one generation. That was the first and shocking revelation; how truly unique each person is. Your particular shuffle of genes has never existed before and will never be duplicated again. It is our genes that must survive; the organism is just a very complex survival machine, a biological robot that does it's job for a single generation and dies. In this sense we are expendable. I read on, now hooked. Dawkins pulls in lots of different arguments for and against to prove his points. I particularly enjoyed the chapters about Game Theory (something I had never heard of) and their relevance to gene survival. I will be reading much more of Dawkins.

The Keys Of Egypt 5/5 Lesley and Roy Adkins Because we have grown up in age of colourful books about Ancient Egypt, it's easy to assume that we have always known what we now know. But in fact almost nothing was known about the land or its long forgotten peoples until the very last years of the 1700s. It was good old Napoleon Bonaparte who sent a scientific team of "savants" (love that word!) and artists (it was before photography) to begin to prise open the secrets buried in the deserts. They were amazed by the pyramids and other artifacts, but nobody could read the hieroglyphs or other ancient writings. The Rosetta Stone was an early find which seemed to offer a key, as it was believed to show the same text in three different languages, one of which was Ancient Greek. The book details, in a very readable way, the life story of the man who would eventually decipher the hieroglyphs, Jean-Francois Champollion. The path was far from smooth, involving ill health, revolution and upheavals, political intrigue, scholarly jealousy and an English rival! This book was great fun and good history.

Capturing Jack The Ripper In the Boots of a Bobby in Victorian London 5/5 Neil R. A. Bell This was the excellent factual book from which I gleaned the information revealing The Yard such a risible effort of a novel. I don't have much interest in Jack The Ripper, it was originally the first half of the book that I wanted to read for research purposes. It is a mine of precious information that is not often covered in other books about Victorian London. To give just one example, I already suspected that 19th century Police stations were connected by electric telegraph; not only did this confirm it, but even told the method used, the way the networks was connected so that messages cascaded down, and even some of the callsigns used ! Indirectly just as important, It also confirmed that police stations did not have telephones, even as late as 1888! (the first London phone book was printed in 1880, with about 200 numbers). The only station with a telephone line was Scotland Yard, but this was later disconnected because the public kept phoning up! As one of the characters in my novel is a detective, I was particularly interested in the chapter covering the"tecs" , which showed most everything I needed to know. Because of this I have had to change the rank of my character, to make him more plausible he cannot be an inspector as I first made him. So that's all good. I carried on reading into the second half of the book, which covers the awful Ripper murders from a police point of view. It makes no sensational claims or theories about the identity of the killer. All the cases still remain open to this day. I cannot praise this book highly enough. It even had descriptions and diagrams of the insides of police stations.

Today is the day I must buckle down and catch up with some reviews. They will be of necessity fairly brief!

I looked and I have The Ocean At The End Of The Lane on my shelf. I will bump it up. Trigger Warning is now on my list too. Thanks!

Hayley, I didn't realise that you are another Victorianaphile! (If that's an actual word) I have Victorian Things although it doesn't appear on my list, and have been working through it slowly in between other reads. It is amazing how Victorians packed their houses with things . I have twice visited Linley Sambourne's house in 18 Stafford Terrace which has been preserved as it was, and you literally can't move for objects everywhere. Have you been to the back to backs in Birmingham? I intend to go there this year. In answer to your question, I am interested in everything about them.

Thanks Hayley, I will look out for that one! It's never too late to tell me about a book about Victoriana. Paxman actually had a little section about fairy painting in his book, but not in detail.

Welcome ! We can always do with more SF readers....