September 2004 Archives
Currently devouring this one, when I can drag myself away from OU revision....
A good range of characters, multiple storylines, and a couple of twists and turns en route.
My main tip is don't read the quotes at the front - there are a few spoilers in there which, I think, you're better off avoiding.
Buy it: Amazon link
I started, but couldn't finish - the first few pages just felt a little bit too much like hard work (OU coursework and looming exams, combined with flat buying, is making September a stressful month).... so I've put this to one side whilst I try out Salley Vickers' Mr Golightly's Holiday.
Buy it: Amazon link
An excellent historical novel, evoking the crazy days of Savonarola's reign in early renaissance Florence, subtly weaving together the early, less well known, years of well known historical figures with intruiging fictional characters.
As one of the Amazon reviewers puts it:
The beginning is extremely gripping - when I read it I thought 'wow - who is this nun who decided to fake a breast tumour, commit suicide and had an erotic silver serpent tattooed all over her body??' What on earth can she have gone through, what kind of person was she before she became a nun?'
I read this (morning, noon and night!) on the recommendation of Karen Grimshaw after I'd given her The Lady and the Unicorn for her birthday. We shared the delights of Lymond and Niccolo at St Andrews, and Karen reckons Sarah Dunant isn't far off Dorothy Dunnett status. Hurrah!
Such a shame that The Birth of Venus is a stand-alone novel, and Sarah Dunant's other books seem to be modern day detective fiction.... let's hope there are more where it came from.
Buy it: Amazon link
Another lovely collection of chick lit for the 21st century. Short stories, with the twist that this time half are written by The Boys. Oh and the book flips upsidedown halfway through so you know when you've reached the other's half.
Sometimes in life you do just need such easy reading fodder, and now's one of them for me.
Buy it: Amazon link
Stanley Stewart tells of his travels from London to Dadal in Outer Mongolia (and Ghengis Khan's birthplace) by way of Istanbul, Sevastapol, Volvograd, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Olgii, Qaraqorum and Ulan Batur. Starting off by boat, moving on to train and jeep, but predominantly on horseback, he travels in the footsteps of William of Rubruck, a 13th century franciscan friar who travelled west to the court of the emperor of the Mongol Horde, the infamous Genghis Khan.
But the book is much more than the journey of a 13th century friar told by a 21st century travel writer. As well as evocative descriptions of the steppe, Stanley Stewart provides insights and understanding of the worlds of Central Asia past and present, and the people, infamous and less well known, who populate(d) them.
Recommended.
Buy it: Amazon link
A slim novel, but it certainly packs a punch.
The last of my Hereford Holiday Reads (I've started but I've yet to finish Stanley Stewart's In the Empire of Genghis Khan), and the definitely better of the more worthy novels (The Reading Group is still chick lit in my book, albeit of a superior nature). That may be due to the fact that the private lives of comprehensive school teachers is a more familiar world than Donna Tartt's Deep South, or it might simply be because the telling of this dark story is more to my taste, based on the incerasingly sinister relationship between an aging blue stocking spinster and a bohemian 40-something whose private and professional life she envies.
Buy it: Amazon link
Now usually reading groups, book clubs, call them what you will, leave me cold - all a bit too earnest and I just like to enjoy my books, not spend time working out why (sorry to all those who thought my Reading was all about online lit crit....). But Elizabeth Noble's Reading Group was far better than expected.
I raced through this one, battling through the tears and the emotions as I followed an eventful year in the lives of a group of English women (metropolitan mothers in the main) who form a reading group. Reminded me of the cast/characters in Cold Feet - some you love, some you hate, others simply infuriate - but the themes of love and loss are universal.
Buy it: Amazon link