I’m still very much enjoying Jodi Taylor’s Time Police series. This time team weird (or at least some of them) are stuck on a crazy malevolent slightly sentient train hurtling through time and space with a bad guy from their past who has murderous intent. Meanwhile the rest of the time police try to free themselves (literally) from the results of some R and D that went wrong back at headquarters to be able to attempt a rescue.
More fun character developments, exciting plots and humour.
This book is verging more into the ‘chick lit’ or ‘rom com’ territory than I would usually like, and yet, I did, on the whole like it.
Set in the 1950s, a young English woman, living in London and making a living creating new perfumes is jolted by visit to a fortune teller that sets her life on a totally different path leading her from London to Istanbul.
There’s a will-they/won’t-they relationship with her initially grumpy but dashing neighbour, and their relationship reminded me of the old black and white movies in quite a fun way.
The thing that annoyed me most about the book was the glaring grating Americanisms. Apparently the original French novel was translated into English by an American, who presumably doesn’t understand how British English works. Grrrr.
That aside though, it was a nice (if a little predictable) nostalgic feeling novel.
Orfeo is one of those booker longlisted books that you have to read with a dictionary to hand, and in this case maybe an expert in classical and modern composing as well.
It follows an old man on the run from the authorities because of the biological lab they discovered in his home. He looks back on his life as a composer and teacher of composition who had spent years trying to push the boundaries of modern music and style. There is a lot of music theory type stuff, and history of music etc which is quite heavy going.
Also there is the age old story of someone obsessed with their creative zeal to the detriment of their relationship with friends, lovers and children, wondering which they regret more – not achieving the levels of greatness they aspired to, or losing the ones who they loved most along the way.
I did enjoy it (I think) in the way that you enjoy a slightly hard workout that you think is probably doing you good and you can feel smug when you have completed it(!).
I do love a good Stephen King novel, and lucky for me there are millions of them – I still have quite a few to get through!
Revival is a funny one (not funny ha ha, funny odd). A lot of the book reads like a straight coming of age, life story journey following Jamie, five years old at the start of the book, living in a quite religious family in middle America from the moment he meets the new Pastor of his church, Charles Jacobs, a young man with a lovely wife and baby son who has an interest verging on an obsession with electricity.
When Jamie’s big brother has an accident damaging his larynx which threatens to leave him mute Pastor Jacobs tries an experimental electric shock treatment on him which cures his affliction.
Throughout Jamie’s life he has interactions with Pastor Jacobs, who’s manipulation of electricity seems to have power for great good and great evil, and towards the end of his life (and the end of the book) things take a very weird turn.
The last act of the novel is suddenly full of supernatural, metaphysical, horror, which I wasn’t sure what to make of, but still, I did still really enjoy the book.
This was just a little present to myself to listen to an old favourite – like a comforting warm cardigan or a nice cup of tea. Great narration by Martin Freeman.
This is of course the sequel to The Hitchhiker’s guide to the Universe, where Arthur, Ford, Zaphod and Trillian have more adventures including meeting their meat – an animal bred to want to become food, and almost being captured by angry Vorgons because their ship’s computer is too busy trying to make Arthur the ‘perfect cup of tea’ to be able to escape. Lol.
This is like a modern day Agatha Christie crossed with a bog standard cabin in the woods horror where an extended family meet together in the matriarch’s secluded house that is cut off from the mainland at high tide and start to be murdered one by one.
I didn’t love it. I found it hard to like any of the characters and I was a bit annoyed by the repetition of the creepy poem outlining everyone’s faults in the order that they are turning up dead.
Still, it had one or two twists that I didn’t see coming and it wasn’t terrible.
It took me three attempts to finish this book! I bought it because I was going on my first ever cruise, a week in the med with my husband’s three siblings and their partners and I thought it would be fun. Also I was reading my way through Cixin’s Three Body Problem Trilogy and wanted something lighter. Well, lighter it definitely was.
I sometimes like to dip my toes into ‘cosy mystery’ type books, and I sometimes really enjoy them. Not so much this time. There is a lot of over explaining.
The first half of the book I could only take in small doses, but to be fair, I did kind of get into it and the second half sort of held my interest. There’s not a lot of allegory or hidden meaning and more time describing people’s hair and make up than their inner monologue or motivations. Ah well, it wasn’t very expensive. (Unlike my cruise!)
Me and the Wray extended family enjoying formal night on our cruise!
Hmm, this book has thousands of glowing reviews on Amazon, but for me it was just a bit bleah. At best a three out of five (and I’m a very generous marker!). I’ve read many similar books, most of them better.
It’s a timeslip novel following women in one family from the 16 hundreds to the modern day. The thread between them was supposed to be a witchy nature – ie connection to animals and plants and skill with herb lore etc as well as powers to control nature to a degree. I like a bit of magical realism, and would have liked more of that (I’m thinking of the, in my mind, much better book The Change by Kirsten Miller, in which women come into their witchy powers after going through the menopause and use their powers to help other women (and deserving men).
All the men in this book were awful – I know, sadly, that men abusing women has been a theme all through history but all the men in this book were either bullies or ineffectual.
The writing was okay but not fabulous – I’m not sure why the book has been so well received. Ah well. I was glad when I got to the end of it and could move on with my life.
I read this immediately after Cixin Lui’s Three Body Problem Trilogy, and in my review of it I compared it to fine dining – to stretch the analogy, this book is like an ice-cream sundae – fun, enjoyable but not quite as satisfying. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like it – I liked it a lot, but The Three Body Problem was a hard sci-fi act to follow.
In Recursion, a scientist studying how the brain stores memories with a view to helping Alzheimer’s patients, stumbles across a world changing scientific discovery.
SPOILERS
A patient suffered a fatal heart attack while recalling a vivid memory in the sensory depravation chamber set up she used in her studies. Apparently, immediately after death, and before the brain completely shuts down, there’s a surge in the chemical that makes you see vivid images in your mind, like memories or dreams. Then the book gets a bit woolly about multi dimensions and time being a plane rather then a straight line and this super strong memory in the machine caused a warp in space time etc which basically sent the person’s awareness back in time to re-inhabit themselves from the past but with the memories of their whole as yet unlived life.
So lots of applications like saving loved ones from fatal accidents, or stopping wars or getting rich on the stock market etc, but things got weird with people getting ‘false’ memories, or double memories and then when all the world’s superpowers learned how to make their own time machines, the book’s hero had to find a way to prevent the whole world blowing itself up!
It was a fun sci-fi thriller with some nice love story elements and moral dilemmas and so forth. I enjoyed it.
Reading the Three-Body Problem trilogy was kind of like climbing a mountain for me – hard work, and I wondered if I’d make it to the top, but so rewarding when I did (plus I get bragging rights!). I even paused it because I went on a cruise with my husband’s three siblings and their partners and thought it would be fun to read something light and set on a cruise (I went for A Cruise to Murder by Dawn Brookes, and it was like pausing in the middle of a Michelin starred taster menu to have a bite of a big mac – don’t get me wrong, big macs can be yummy, but A Cruise to Murder was totally outclassed by Death’s End, and I dropped the burger and returned to the gastronomy).
The whole series is quite bleak and sweeps across eons (hibernation and the difference in relative time when travelling vast differences meant one of the main characters at least made it right to the end).
I did find some comfort in how the series ended – there was a small glimmer of light in the darkness and for that I’m grateful. Since finishing I’ve read a couple of books (I’m always late getting around to writing up my reviews!) including Blake Crouch’s Recursion, and while it was a much faster paced and easier read, several times I felt that the science wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny, whereas I never felt that reading Cixin’s books – given my albeit limited understanding of physics and science generally, the plot of The Three Body Problem books always seemed terrifyingly plausible if pessimistic.
Sarah Wray Writer 