Category: Idle Thoughts
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Book Battle: Fathers and Sons vs Eve Green
I recently read Eve Green, by Susan Fletcher, on the strength of it garnering glowing reviews and having won a major award. I was utterly underwhelmed, and looked to Amazon to see what real people thought of it. Opinion is divided: it’s either a beautiful, mysterious evocation of Wales or a dull trudge through an…
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Present Tense Book Review – Fathers and Sons: Part 2
(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…
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Present Tense Book Review – Akira: Part 2
(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…
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Cats I Have Known – Baldrick and Nursie
Baldrick and Nursie were my neighbour’s cats, named after characters in Blackadder (actually, Baldrick was originally called ‘Black-and-white-adder’, due to his coat colour, but it hardly rolls off the tongue). They overlapped with our Fluff, and I remember Baldrick’s first encounter with her: he was still a wee kitten, and she was sleeping on what…
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Present Tense Book Review – Fathers and Sons
This week I’ve gone for a classic novel by Ivan Turgenev. I like a little bit of Russian literature every now and then, and this is a good ‘un. The title tells you the main theme of the book, and it thoughtfully explores the characters of men (and the odd lady, which the emphasis on…
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Present Tense Book Review – One Good Turn: Part 2
(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…
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Present Tense Book Review – One Good Turn
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,…
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Present Tense Book Review – Hand Me Down World: Part 3
(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.…
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Present Tense Book Review – Hand Me Down World: Part 2
(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…
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Present Tense Book Review – Hand Me Down World
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…