Faking It? Absolutely!
Winning the holiday of a lifetime – stays in a dozen of the Leading Hotels of the World – with economy class airfare and enough spending money for a pizza now and then made for an entertaining trip. The holiday of a lifetime was certainly that, but perhaps not in the way originally envisaged!
A Limerick to sob for
Skeletons with ragged hair and rotting teeth, Frank and his surviving siblings somehow manage to survive on charity and rare employment in 1940s Limerick. This isn’t an action book, just a fairly straightforward coming of age memoir, but the honesty and immediacy sucks you right in. You are there, fainting with hunger and weak with cold, clinging to life in some pungent slum, where the sewage floods through the tumbledown hovel you call home, and the height of paradise is cold fish and chips scrounged from a drunken soldier.
Kickboxed set
I’ve given it five stars. Not for the great literary merit of the writing. Realistically, it’s what you’d expect from a journalist. But for the intricate plot, the complex characters – and their relationships – and the way it drags the reader along without resorting to too many simple tricks.
Matchless
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson My rating: 4 of 5 stars Following on from The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, this book increases the pace. By about half way through the book, you might as well give up, cancel everything, find a nook and a jug of strong coffee and finish [...]
Making Money by Writing Lots
As with most of Pratchett’s Discworld stories, this one is an episode in an ongoing saga. Many of the characters and settings are familiar, we meet a few new ones, we chuckle at a few old jokes, we enjoy old ones.
Deathless Prose
Not a great literary effort, to be sure, but what a story! The crafting of the narrative echoes the practical, level-headed qualities of the woman who tells it. This is deathless prose, in a different and more literal sense.
Panzerkrieg by Peter McCarthy and Mike Syron
Panzerkrieg: The Rise and Fall of Hitler’s Tank Divisions The development and employment of Panzers in the Second World War. Ironically, it was the Versailles-imposed prohibition on tanks that allowed the Third Reich to use them in new and effective ways, bypassing the rather pedestrian tank forces of the victors in the First World War. [...]
Before there were Pigs in Heaven
Set in the South and Southwest, the story follows Marietta Greer as she leaves her childhood home in Kentucky, seeking fresh worlds in a battered VW Bug. Changing her name in Taylorville, she encounters Turtle, an Indian infant, in a tavern carpark.
Old folks, old road
There’s the highway, sometimes loved, sometimes buried under their more modern four or six lane, sometimes ignored in favour of a convenient Interstate. The hokey diners, the tourist traps, the faded remnants. And here and there the narrow old road, weeds poking up through the gaps in the slabs, sometimes taking a second life as a service road, sometimes missing pieces like John’s memory.
Weekend delight
“Ooh, look at this!” Kerri laid a page of the Sunday paper before me. It had a picture of a tiny book. A book with a BookCrossing sticker. A book I recognised, because I had last seen it at an airline lounge in Japan, where I had tucked it away from the ever-tidying hands of the lounge attendants in a window niche. My jaw fell open.