Search results for: “present tense book review”

(Part Two of this Present Tense Book Review.) Volumes 5 of Akira has already been thrown into the arena of one of my book battles, where I rather obliquely discussed its merits with rather tortuous metaphors. I finished Volume 6 some time ago, and then completely forgot that I needed to write up my thoughts.…

(Part One of this Present Tense Book Review.) This is a book that really makes you think about the universality of human nature. It sets before you a series of characters, male and female, from different generations, and different classes, and describes their interactions simply but effectively. And then throws in some musings on the…

(Part One of this Present Tense Book Review.) I’ve recently read volumes 3 and 4 of Akira, and the story has now diverged quite a lot from that of the film (I did wonder how the film plot was going to stretch to over 2000 pages). Much of the action of book 3 was rather…

(Part One of this Present Tense Book Review.) This was a fun book – lately I seem to be reading a lot of books that are written from multiple perspectives, and this was nicely done here. The characters are believable, and the plot is intricate and surprising. If you read enough thrillers and watch enough…

One Good Turn is the follow-up to Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson. I like it better than that book so far; the characterisation is great, and there’s plenty of action, again delivered with a real sense of place (Edinburgh, rather than the former book’s Cambridge). That is all, I have no grandiloquent insights to offer,…

(Part Two of this Present Tense Book Review.) In the last third of the book we hear from Ines, the young African whose story has been unravelling through the testimony of others. It’s interesting to have multiple points of view in the narrative, but they’re a bit too far apart for my (admittedly ropey) memory.…

(Part One of this Present Tense Book Review.) My initial concerns about the book remaining fragmented have mostly been allayed; the middle chunk of the book concentrates on a few central characters, and you can comfortably settle yourself behind their eyeballs. The literary device of the (partially) unreliable narrator comes to the fore here, with…

This is a book by Lloyd Jones, a Christmas present from Mrs. Monkeyshines, bought because Amazon recommended it after she bought me Nemesis, by Philip Roth for my birthday. I’m about a quarter of the way through, and it’s quite good rather than amazing. In terms of subject matter, it reminds me of a book…

(Part Three of this Present Tense Book Review.) Ok, so there is a bit of a twist at the end, and I didn’t see it coming; but still, as I whinged about in the last instalment, the end of this book sags badly. If the last 120 pages were condensed into 20 pages, it’d be…