Archive for 'Book Review' Category
‘Willow’ by Wayland Drew
Do you enjoy watching film adaptations of books you’ve read, or do you regard them with some suspicion and decide that you’d rather not, thank you very much? Every time a book that I enjoy is turned into a film, I have to debate with myself whether I want to go to see it or [...]
‘Primeval: Extinction Event’ by Dan Abnett
Recently, I’ve been enjoying an excess of Victorianism. I read The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, a very unexpected Victorian novel, and then, purely by chance, I ended up simultaneously reading Lady’s Maid by Margaret Forster and The Crimson Petal and the Whiteby Michael Faber (which is still ongoing), both neo-Victorian novels. While these are [...]
‘The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy’ by Tim Burton
I’ve always been quite a fan of Tim Burton’s films: I enjoy the way that he combines the bizarre, the grotesque and the macabre with the sweet, the innocent and the childlike. His twisted, gothic sense of humour appeals to me immensley and so I was really pleased when I discovered that he had written a [...]
‘Lady’s Maid’ by Margaret Forster
When I came up with the idea of using a random number generator to select one book for me every month, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was letting myself in for. I needn’t have worried about January’s choice though, as it seems to have been remarkably kind to me in my first month. by [...]
‘The Prisoner of Zenda’ by Anthony Hope
Every so often I feel like reading something which doesn’t require me to think. I find it relaxing for my brain to read a book once in a while where I’m not constantly thinking about the beautiful, stylish writing, the complex subtexts and the hidden meanings. Sometimes it’s nice to gallop through a plot which is, [...]
‘South Riding’ by Winifred Holtby
My favourite place that I’ve ever lived is, without any hesitation, York. I lived in a cold, dingy cellar room where I used to become trapped in the house if it rained heavily because the area between my doorstep and the stairs up towards street level used to flood with almost a foot of water, but [...]
‘Sense and Sensibility’ by Jane Austen
There are some books which it’s impossible for me to review with anything even vaguely approaching objectivity, and the works of Jane Austen feature very high up that list. I love everything about all of them, even the aspects which, critically speaking, might be weaker or less good. I don’t often reread books (too many [...]
‘The Vet’s Daughter’ by Barbara Comyns
Every so often I am lulled into a false sense of security by a Virago; some of them are quite short books with rather large print and thus I am deceived into expecting them to be ‘easy’ books. That was certainly what went through my mind when I picked up by Barbara Comyns to read [...]
‘Flowers for Alys’ by Irene M. Redpath
So far, I haven’t had much luck with the books of which I’ve received free copies for review from Goodreads and LibraryThing. More often than not, I read the descriptions thinking “Oooh, what an interesting concept!” and eagerly click the request button but the books haven’t really lived up to my expectations when they’ve arrived. [...]
‘The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’ by N. K. Jemisin
There are numerous different reasons I’ve never joined a book club before: I’ve never found one that I could attend a train journey; the ones that I could get to are run by bookshops and so focus on new releases that they can sell rather than books that a particular group of people might find interesting; and I [...]