January 2009 Archives
A fascinating read about mountaineer turned philanthropist (not sure that's the right description - Greg Mortenson comes across as decidedly more DIY and hands on than that title suggests) Greg Mortenson who fails to summit K2 but discovers the beauty of the people and places of Northern Pakistan and devotes his life to building schools and bridges - real and metaphorical in this remote and ill-understood (by the West) part of the world.
A fantastic read if you've been or are going to the area (Wild Frontiers even offer a 'Three cups of tea' tour now - not that dissimilar to my Hindu Kush Adventure), and a humbling and enlightening one for all.
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Commissario Guido Brunetti is called upon to investigate a night time botched house arrest-cum-attack by three Carabinieri, which has left a local revered doctor in hospital, his 18 month old son is taken into care and his wife, daughter of a Venetian oligarch strangely unconcerned.
As events unfold we discover the despairing and desperate world of infertility clinics and illegal adoption, the lengths to which the rich and powerful will go to satisfy their own desires, and pharmacists playing god.
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Back to Thomas of Hookton, English archer living off his wits and talent with bow and arrow during the Hundred Years War....
Having survived the battle of Crécy, Harlequin Thomas turns Vagabond, returning to England under royal orders to track down more information about the Holy Grail from a Durham monk.... but the evil Dominican inquisitor Bernard de Taillebourg and Thomas's cousin and rival Guy de Vexille get there first. Thomas unwillingly exchanges lover Eleanor and down to earth monk Hobbe for bolshy Scottish prisoner of war, Robbie Douglas - who turns out to be an excellent sidekick as Thomas' adventures and the legend of the Grail take him back to France.
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Totally trashy honeymoon holiday reading (and none the worse for that), The Love Knot tells the story of the intertwining lives of our three heroines - illegitimate East End lovely Leonie, dissatisfied wife and mistress to the moneyed Dorinda, and upper class country gel, Mercy. With the main events taking place in Society, debutantes and the Season, the parallel theme of the book is the gentification and legitimisation of the nursing profession in the late 19th century.
Amazon.co.uk link: The Love Knot - Charlotte Bingham
A very misleading title.... and a chance find at Corner Cottage, our St Ives honeymoon hideaway. I'd seen this book countless times in the library and in bookshops, and always veered away from it as early chicklit-lite. I was wrong.... I don't think I should really classify The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing as chicklit; "modern fiction" is definitely more appropriate as the novel deals with emotional development, through a series of snapshot scenes in main character Jane Rosenthal's life.
Amazon.co.uk link: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank
John Rebus and sidekick Siobhan encounter all things 'body' and bloody - stolen medical skeletons, a murdered refugee journalist, a murdered rapist, lapdancing foreign students - with the themes of immigrants, incomers and outsiders, and villans, old and new.
Amazon.co.uk link: Fleshmarket Close - Ian Rankin
A bit too melodramatic for my tastes, with one dimensional characters and Victorian social cliches abounding, and it just peters out at the end. On the plus side, some good graphic descriptions of the wounds of war and the limited level of medical care available during the Crimean War.
Amazo.co.uk: The Water Horse - Julia Gregson
It took me a while to decide to borrow this book from Barbican library. I'm not sure why, but I thought that it would be either trite or relentlessly harrowing. It turned out to be neither. It's not all sunlight and roses, in fact there are a number of hard events to read about, but there's happiness in there too. Highly recommended, particularly if you want to know more about a woman's experience of life in Afghanistan in the 21st century.
Amazon.co.uk link: A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
The lovely people at the Barbican Library had to get this one on inter-library loan for me - the one copy the system claimed to be held on their shelves was last borrowed in 2004, and as the librarian astutely observed, "It looks like that copy's gone walkabout".
Now Captain, Richard Sharpe and the South Essex are in Portugal, as Wellington lures the French towards defeat and starvation along the defensive Lines of Torres-Vedras.
The battles take place on a personal level too, after Sharpe makes an enemy of a Portuguese nobleman on the make, whose past is less than whiter than white. Exciting action as Sharpe and Co are separated from the main British Army and have to take the river route from Coimbra to Lisbon, arriving just in time to save the day....And there's a nice bit of romance thrown in for good measure too.
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